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Saudi Arabia’s Neom Will Become The World’s First Truly Smart City
Saudi Arabia’s Neom Will Become The World’s First Truly Smart City
JANUARY 17, 2018 BY MIKE WHEATLEY
Saudi Arabia is proposing to build what it claims will be the world’s first truly “smart city”. Called Neom, the developers envisage a 10,230 square mile city and economic zone located in Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk region, which is located along the north-west coast of the country, facing Egypt across the Red Sea.
The description of Neom is a Utopian one, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman saying at the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Riyadh last October that the city will “function independently from existing government framework” with its own taxes, a judicial system, and labor laws.
Development of the city will be led by former Alcoa chairman and CEO and Siemens AG former president and CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and international investors are committing a staggering $500 billion to fund its development, with a projected completion date of 2025.
The city will follow an earth-friendly, post-oil atmosphere, with robots performing functions such as security, logistics, home delivery, and caregiving; Neom will be generated solely by wind and solar power.
The name Neom comes from the first three letters from the Greek prefix “neo,” meaning “new.” The fourth letter is from the abbreviation of “Mostaqbal,” an Arabic word meaning “future.” The city will be located in the northwest corner of the Kingdom, and includes land within the Egyptian and Jordanian borders.
Its website proclaims it to be the “world’s most ambitious project.”
Here’s a deeper dive into what to expect:
- Energy and Water. Vast fields of solar panels partnered with wind turbines, which will light up large stretches of energy grids, storing power for this and future generations. Buildings will remain clean and the air will remain fresh and clear.
- Mobility. All-green transport systems, including a bridge that will link Asia with Africa. This will help Neom become known as a global hub of connectivity.
- Biotech. Neom is destined to become a nexus for healthcare research and innovation, including next-gen gene therapy, genomics, stem cell research, nanobiology, and bioengineering.
- Food. Neom will lead the way with arid and seawater farming, and solar-powered greenhouses. Also planned are vertical urban farms and locally grown produce.
- Advanced manufacturing. The systems making Neom move will include personalized, fully automated point-to-point transfers, passenger drones, self-learning traffic systems, and other innovations in research and development, supply, transport and infrastructure.
Mike Wheatley is the senior editor at Realty Biz News. Got a real estate related news article you wish to share, contact Mike at mike@realtybiznews.com.
New Brunswick, Canada Hydroponic Lettuce Farmer Thriving in Face of National E. coli Outbreak
New Brunswick, Canada Hydroponic Lettuce Farmer Thriving in Face of National E. coli Outbreak
Some chain restaurants pulling romaine lettuce from the menu, while others continue to serve it up
By Tori Weldon, CBC News Posted: Jan 05, 2018 6:00 AM AT Last Updated: Jan 05, 2018 10:54 AM AT
Julian Howatt weight romaine lettuce he grows hydroponically at his Moncton indoor farm, Local by Atta. He said he's been getting calls about romaine lettuce since Health Canada issued a warning in December. (Tori Weldon/CBC)
Tori Weldon | Reporter
Tori Weldon is a reporter based in Moncton. She's been working for the CBC since 2008.
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- Romaine lettuce temporarily pulled from major restaurant chains
Many restaurants across the province are choosing to pull salads with romaine lettuce from their menus, in light of a E. coli outbreak linked to the leafy greens, but one Moncton bistro isn't worried about its Caesar salad.
The Public Health Agency of Canada said there have been five cases of E. coli infections in New Brunswick when it announced a national outbreak in mid-December.
Health Canada has confirmed 41 E. coli infections across the country, and the agency has linked the illness to romaine lettuce, but it still hasn't found the specific supplier as the source of the outbreak.
At Tony's Bistro, head chef Jordan Holden said he's aware of the public health warning about romaine lettuce. While he said his bistro serves about 36 kilograms of lettuce a week, he isn't concerned.
Jordan Holden, the head chef at Tony's Bistro, said he's aware of the E. coli infections in Eastern Canada but isn't concerned. The lettuce he serves is grown nearby at Local by Atta. (Tori Weldon/CBC)
"Since we're getting it locally grown, it's not really a big deal for us," said Holden.
"I've been to the plant where it comes from … I was never worried about it."
Holden buys from Local by Atta, a hydroponic, indoor farm in the Moncton Industrial Park. He tried the greens at a local farmer's market about a year ago and liked them so much he decided to serve them at his restaurant.
On Thursday, with a winter storm raging outside, Julian Howatt was warm and basking in a pink light inside his hydroponic farm. "Farm hands" wearing hair and beard nets carried trays of leafy greens up and down the stairs of the multi-level operation.
"We grow leafy greens, primarily lettuce, but also kale, microgreens, basil — that kind of stuff," Howatt said.
Holden, putting the final touches on a caesar salad at Tony's Bistro, said he might not serve romaine lettuce if it wasn't coming from :down the street. (Pierre Fournier/CBC)
He's noticed an increased interest in his product since romaine lettuce and E. coli became synonymous in the news over the last few weeks.
"We have had people ask us about romaine lettuce … more traffic on our Facebook page, people asking us questions, either about that or where they can get our products."
According to Health Canada, a common source of E. coli illness are raw fruits and vegetables that have come in contact with the feces of infected animals.
And Howatt said at his plant, "growing indoors, hydroponically like this, the risks are very low."
Chain restaurants, including Swiss Chalet, Montana's Cookhouse, Kelsey's, East Side Mario's and Boston Pizza, are pulling romaine lettuce from their menus.
In Greater Moncton, locally owned restaurants such as Vito's and the Homestead continue to serve romaine lettuce, while others, including Hynes Restaurant, have opted to temporarily remove it from the menu.
Chef Holden said he would most likely opt out of serving the lettuce if he wasn't so confident in the greens he's getting.
"I think it's a little riskier if you get it from a big supplier."
And Julian Howatt said that's the kind of confidence that comes from being able to speak with a supplier directly.
How France Became A Global Leader In Curbing Food Waste
n February 2016, France became the first country in the world to prohibit supermarkets from throwing away unused food through unanimously passed legislation.
How France Became A Global Leader In Curbing Food Waste
PROGRESS WATCH
France isn't an obvious frontrunner in food recovery, but new legislation has helped catapult the nation to the top of the 2017 Food Sustainability Index.
Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
Story Hinckley | @storyhinckley
JANUARY 3, 2018 —France is a culinary leader – both at the table and, more recently, in the trash can.
In February 2016, France became the first country in the world to prohibit supermarkets from throwing away unused food through unanimously passed legislation. Now, supermarkets of a certain size must donate unused food or face a fine. Other policies require schools to teach students about food sustainability, companies to report food waste statistics in environmental reports, and restaurants to make take-out bags available.
These laws “make it the norm to reduce waste,” says Marie Mourad, a PhD student in sociology at Sciences Po in Paris who has authored several reports on French food waste. “France is not the country that wastes the least food, but they have become the most proactive because they want to be the exemplary country in Europe.”
France’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. The country earned top ranking in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index, a survey of 25 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas conducted by the Economist and Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation (BCFN).
The people of France wasted 234 pounds of food per person annually, according to the BCFN report, which is drastically better than France’s international counterparts, compared to about 430 pounds per capita thrown away year in the United States.
Small scraps make big impact
Food waste, or unused, edible food, is a global issue. Each year, some 1.3 billion metric tons, or one-third of all the food produced, is thrown away, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Recovering just 25 percent of that wasted food could feed 870 million hungry people – effectively ending world hunger.
Not only does food waste fritter away valuable resources like water, arable land, and money, but it also fills up landfills, which emit methane. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter behind the United States and China.
“Food waste is so urgent because where and how we produce food has the biggest impact on the planet of any human activity,” says Jason Clay, senior vice president of food and markets at the World Wildlife Fund.
“In the US, we don't have champions in government who are thinking much about food, nevertheless food waste,” says Mr. Clay. “That has separated us from France: they have people who took up this issue politically.”
French National Assembly member Guillaume Garot helped frame the legislation with his previous experience as the former junior minister for the food industry – a position that in and of itself proves France’s dedication to the issue, say experts.
However, France is not an obvious frontrunner in this field.
Over the past decade, Britain has demonstrated far more statistical success, says Craig Hanson, global director of food, forests, and water at the World Resources Institute, and Denmark has made news with new projects like ugly produce grocery stores. Comparatively, France’s law is new, and as the Guardian reported after it was passed, only 11 percent of France’s 7.1 million metric tons of wasted food comes from supermarkets.
But to Clay, Ms. Mourad, and other food recovery advocates, the law is important symbolically. Neither the United States, nor Britain or Denmark, have comparable government legislation.
“Making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away food is massive,” says Jonathan Bloom, author of the book “American Wasteland.” “That legislative step has impacted all levels of the French food chain.”
Before the 2016 law, French supermarkets typically donated 35,000 metric tons of food annually, roughly one-third of food banks’ total supply, Jacques Bailet, president of the food bank network Banques Alimentaires, told the Guardian in 2016. If supermarkets can increase their food bank donations by only 15 percent this could mean 10 million more meals for needy French each year.
This law improves not only the quantity of donated food, say experts, but also the quality. Food banks typically are supplied with canned goods, rather than nutritionally valuable foods like meat, vegetables, and fruit.
“The fight against food waste should become a major national cause, like road safety, that mobilizes everybody,” said Mr. Garot in a press release. “That implies that every authority, at every level, plays its part.”
The Great Nutrient Collapse
Geoff Johnson for POLITICO | The Agenda | AGENDA 2020
The Great Nutrient Collapse
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
09/13/2017
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.
“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.
In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2 levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
He published those findings just a few years ago, adding to the concerns of a small but increasingly worried group of researchers who are raising unsettling questions about the future of our food supply. Could carbon dioxide have an effect on human health we haven’t accounted for yet? The answer appears to be yes—and along the way, it has steered Loladze and other scientists, directly into some of the thorniest questions in their profession, including just how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.
IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, it’s been understood for some time that many of our most important foods have been getting less nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.
In 2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.
Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live like humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.
If you’re someone who thinks about plant growth, this seems like a good thing. It has also been useful ammunition for politicians looking for reasons to worry less about the implications of climate change. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, recently argued that people shouldn’t be so worried about rising CO2 levels because it’s good for plants, and what’s good for plants is good for us.
“A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would aid photosynthesis, which in turn contributes to increased plant growth,” the Texas Republican wrote. “This correlates to a greater volume of food production and better quality food.”
But as the zooplankton experiment showed, greater volume and better quality might not go hand-in-hand. In fact, they might be inversely linked. As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
In 2002, while a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Loladze published a seminal research paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal,arguing that rising CO2 and human nutrition were inextricably linked through a global shift in the quality of plants. In the paper, Loladze complained about the dearth of data: Among thousands of publications he had reviewed on plants and rising CO2, he found only one that looked specifically at how it affected the balance of nutrients in rice, a crop that billions of people rely on. (The paper, published in 1997, found a drop in zinc and iron.)
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley, and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Loladze’s paper was first to tie the impact of CO2 on plant quality to human nutrition. But he also raised more questions than he answered, arguing that there were fundamental holes in the research. If these nutritional shifts were happening up and down the food chain, the phenomenon needed to be measured and understood.
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math. He could do the math, but he was a young academic trying to establish himself, and math departments weren't especially interested in solving problems in farming and human health. Loladze struggled to get funding to generate new data and continued to obsessively collect published data from researchers across the globe. He headed to the heartland to take an assistant professor position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was a major agricultural school, which seemed like a good sign, but Loladze was still a math professor. He was told he could pursue his research interests as long as he brought in funding, but he struggled. Biology grant makers said his proposals were too math-heavy; math grant makers said his proposals contained too much biology.
“It was year after year, rejection after rejection,” he said. “It was so frustrating. I don’t think people grasp the scale of this.”
It’s not just in the fields of math and biology that this issue has fallen through the cracks. To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health or nutrition communities. At all.
When POLITICO contacted top nutrition experts about the growing body of research on the topic, they were almost universally perplexed and asked to see the research. One leading nutrition scientist at Johns Hopkins University said it was interesting, but admitted he didn’t know anything about it. He referred me to another expert. She said they didn’t know about the subject, either. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an association representing an army of nutrition experts across the country, connected me with Robin Foroutan, an integrative medicine nutritionist who was also not familiar with the research.
“It’s really interesting, and you’re right, it’s not on many people’s radar,” wrote Foroutan, in an email, after being sent some papers on the topic. Foroutan said she would like to see a whole lot more data, particularly on how a subtle shift toward more carbohydrates in plants could affect public health.
"We don't know what a minor shift in the carbohydrate ratio in the diet is ultimately going to do,” she said, noting that the overall trend toward more starch and carbohydrate consumption has been associated with an increase in diet-related disease like obesity and diabetes. "To what degree would a shift in the food system contribute to that? We can't really say.”
Asked to comment for this story, Marion Nestle, a nutrition policy professor at New York University who’s one of the best-known nutrition experts in the country, initially expressed skepticism about the whole concept but offered to dig into a file she keeps on climate issues.
After reviewing the evidence, she changed her tune. “I’m convinced,” she said, in an email, while also urging caution: It wasn’t clear whether CO2-driven nutrient depletion would have a meaningful impact on public health. We need to know a whole lot more, she said.
Kristie Ebi, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s studied the intersection of climate change and global health for two decades, is one of a handful of scientists in the U.S. who is keyed into the potentially sweeping consequences of the CO2-nutrition dynamic, and brings it up in every talk she gives.
"It's a hidden issue,” Ebi said. “The fact that my bread doesn't have the micronutrients it did 20 years ago―how would you know?"
As Ebi sees it, the CO2-nutrition link has been slow to break through, much as it took the academic community a long time to start seriously looking at the intersection of climate and human health in general. “This is before the change,” she said. “This is what it looks like before the change."
Soybeans growing in a field outside Lincoln, Nebraska, one of many crops whose nutrient content is shifting as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
LOLADZE'S EARLY PAPER raised some big questions that are difficult, but not impossible, to answer. How does rising atmospheric CO2 change how plants grow? How much of the long-term nutrient drop is caused by the atmosphere, and how much by other factors, like breeding?
It’s also difficult, but not impossible, to run farm-scale experiments on how CO2affects plants. Researchers use a technique that essentially turns an entire field into a lab. The current gold standard for this type of research is called a FACE experiment (for “free-air carbon dioxide enrichment”), in which researchers create large open-air structures that blow CO2 onto the plants in a given area. Small sensors keep track of the CO2 levels. When too much CO2 escapes the perimeter, the contraption puffs more into the air to keep the levels stable. Scientists can then compare those plants directly to others growing in normal air nearby.
These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Earlier this summer, a group of researchers published the first studies attempting to estimate what these shifts could mean for the global population. Plants are a crucial source of protein for people in the developing world, and by 2050, theyestimate, 150 million people could be put at risk of protein deficiency, particularly in countries like India and Bangladesh. Researchers found a loss of zinc, which is particularly essential for maternal and infant health, could put 138 million people at risk. They also estimated that more than 1 billion mothers and 354 million children live in countries where dietary iron is projected to drop significantly, which could exacerbate the already widespread public health problem of anemia.
There aren’t any projections for the United States, where we for the most part enjoy a diverse diet with no shortage of protein, but some researchers look at the growing proportion of sugars in plants and hypothesize that a systemic shift in plants could further contribute to our already alarming rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Another new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland, is drilling down on some of the questions that Loladze first raised 15 years ago with a number of new studies that focus on nutrition.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, examines rice growing in his laboratory in Beltsville, Md. Ziska and his colleagues are conducting experiments to find out how rising carbon dioxide levels affect the nutrient profile of plants. Plant physiologist Julie Wolf harvests peppers to study changes in vitamin C, lower right. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.
Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.
They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.
Ziska worries we’re not studying all the ways CO2 affects the plants we depend on with enough urgency, especially considering the fact that retooling crops takes a long time.
“We’re falling behind in our ability to intercede and begin to use the traditional agricultural tools, like breeding, to compensate,” he said. “Right now it can take 15 to 20 years before we get from the laboratory to the field.”
AS LOLADZE AND others have found, tackling globe-spanning new questions that cross the boundaries of scientific fields can be difficult. There are plenty of plant physiologists researching crops, but most are dedicated to studying factors like yield and pest resistance—qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition. Math departments, as Loladze discovered, don’t exactly prioritize food research. And studying living things can be costly and slow: It takes several years and huge sums of money to get a FACE experiment to generate enough data to draw any conclusions.
Despite these challenges, researchers are increasingly studying these questions, which means we may have more answers in the coming years. Ziska and Loladze, who now teaches math at Bryan College of Health Sciences in Lincoln, Nebraska, are collaborating with a coalition of researchers in China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere in the U.S. on a large study looking at rising CO2 and the nutritional profile of rice, one of humankind’s most important crops. Their study also includes vitamins, an important nutritional component, that to date has almost not been studied at all.
USDA researchers also recently dug up varieties of rice, wheat and soy that USDA had saved from the 1950s and 1960s and planted them in plots around the U.S. where previous researchers had grown the same cultivars decades ago, with the aim of better understanding how today’s higher levels of CO2 affect them.
Mathematician Irakli Loladze tosses sugar over vegetables outside his home in Lincoln Nebraska, to illustrate how the sugar content of the plants we eat is increasing as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. Loladze was the first scientist to publish research connecting rising CO2 and changes in plant quality to human nutrition. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
In a USDA research field in Maryland, researchers are running experiments on bell peppers to measure how vitamin C changes under elevated CO2. They’re also looking at coffee to see whether caffeine declines. “There are lots of questions,” Ziska said as he showed me around his research campus in Beltsville. “We’re just putting our toe in the water.”
Ziska is part of a small band of researchers now trying to measure these changes and figure out what it means for humans. Another key figure studying this nexus is Samuel Myers, a doctor turned climate researcher at Harvard University who leads the Planetary Health Alliance, a new global effort to connect the dots between climate science and human health.
Myers is also concerned that the research community is not more focused on understanding the CO2-nutrition dynamic, since it’s a crucial piece of a much larger picture of how such changes might ripple through ecosystems. "This is the tip of the iceberg," said Myers. "It's been hard for us to get people to understand how many questions they should have."
In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc. It was the first time the issue had attracted any real media attention.
“The public health implications of global climate change are difficult to predict, and we expect many surprises,” the researchers wrote. “The finding that raising atmospheric CO2 lowers the nutritional value of C3 crops is one such surprise that we can now better predict and prepare for.”
The same year―in fact, on the same day―Loladze, then teaching math at the The Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, published his own paper, the result of more than 15 years of gathering data on the same subject. It was the largest study in the world on rising CO2 and its impact on plant nutrients. Loladze likes to describe plant science as “noisy”―research-speak for cluttered with complicating data, through which it can be difficult to detect the signal you’re looking for. His new data set was finally big enough to see the signal through the noise, to detect the “hidden shift,” as he put it.
PHOTOS: How to measure a plant
What he found is that his 2002 theory—or, rather, the strong suspicion he had articulated back then—appeared to be borne out. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.
What that means for humans―whose main food intake is plants―is only just starting to be investigated. Researchers who dive into it will have to surmount obstacles like its low profile and slow pace and a political environment where the word “climate” is enough to derail a funding conversation. It will also require entirely new bridges to be built in the world of science―a problem that Loladze himself wryly acknowledges in his own research. When his paper was finally published in 2014, Loladze listed his grant rejections in the acknowledgements.
Author:
Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.
France Takes Top Spot in 2017 Food Sustainability Index
France ranks number one in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which grades 34 countries according to their food system sustainability.
France Takes Top Spot in 2017 Food Sustainability Index
France ranks number one in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which grades 34 countries according to their food system sustainability. Developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), the FSI evaluates food sustainability issues across three pillars—food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture, and nutritional challenges.
Other top-scoring countries include Japan, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, South Korea, and Hungary. These countries typically demonstrate strong and effectively implemented government policy that address the three main pillars. Scores on lifestyle, such as physical activity and diet composition, as well as social and climate-related indicators, such as the participation rate of women in farming and monthly freshwater scarcity, are also important factors in the overall ranking.
The top performer in the food loss and waste pillar is France, followed by Germany, Spain, and Italy. In 2016, the French government passed legislation that prohibits supermarkets from throwing away food approaching its sell-by-date, requiring them to donate it to charities or food banks. Other measures have reduced food wastage in schools and prompted companies to report on food waste data.
The top performer in the sustainable agriculture pillar is Italy, followed closely by South Korea, France, and Colombia. Italy has pioneered new techniques to reduce water loss in agriculture and has implemented sustainable agricultural techniques for climate change mitigation and adaptation nationwide.
Japan scores the highest in the nutritional challenges pillar, ranking first in the life expectancy at birth—84 years—and the healthy life expectancy indicators. South Korea, Hungary, France, and Portugal also scored highly.
According to the index, high-income countries tend to have a higher level of food sustainability, however, there are several outliers. The wealthiest nation in the index, the United Arab Emirates, ranks last, while the United States ranks twenty-first. Ethiopia, the poorest country FSI researchers evaluated, ranks twelfth. Other factors such as high levels of human development, smaller populations, and slower rates of urbanization also correlate with higher food sustainability.
An interactive online database providing country ranking and profiles, case studies, and infographics is available on the FSI website.
Mexico: Historic Frosts Destroy More Than 600 Hectares of Crops
More than 600 hectares of crops were totally lost last because of last weekend's frost, in which temperatures dropped down to -15 degrees Celsius, said Adolfo Bonilla Gomez, the head of the Secretariat of the Field (Secampo) of Zacatecas.
Mexico: Historic Frosts Destroy More Than 600 Hectares of Crops
More than 600 hectares of crops were totally lost last because of last weekend's frost, in which temperatures dropped down to -15 degrees Celsius, said Adolfo Bonilla Gomez, the head of the Secretariat of the Field (Secampo) of Zacatecas.
According to the first evaluations carried out by personnel from Secampo, the event affected fruit and vegetable crops in the south and southeast of the state.
The largest losses were recorded in the production of guava. More than 200 hectares of this crop in various municipalities were affected, as well as 100 hectares of lettuce and broccoli.
Bonilla Gomez said that they carried out evaluations to verify the damages and that they would monitor fruit trees, such as vine or peach, in the next few days to determine if they had also been affected.
He also said that the spring-summer vegetative cycle in the areas where it had rained had ended weeks ago, so they had not been affected. However, he added, there were minor effects on vegetables and fruit trees of the producers who work with irrigation, who had planted their crops late, or who work in protected agriculture.
Finally, Bonilla Gomez said they would continue to supervise the areas that are planted in the autumn-winter season, especially the garlic and onion seedlings, to determine the amount of damage there has been.
Source: elfinanciero.com.mx
Glyphosate Gets EU Greenlight for Five More Years
Glyphosate Gets EU Greenlight for Five More Years
NOVEMBER 28, 2017 EMMA COSGROVE
On Monday, the European Union voted to extend the license for glyphosate, the best-selling pesticide in the world, for use in the EU for another five years. Glyphosate is sold by most major agricultural input suppliers but is most associated with Monsanto, which markets it under the brand name Roundup.
The decision comes after weeks of votes and protests about the future of the controversial chemical in the EU, which has been far more skeptical than other parts of the world regarding glyphosate and the genetically-modified seeds created to resist it by Monsanto.
Glyphosate is controversial not only because of its link to genetically modified organisms, which have garnered intense public suspicion and also confusion but also because a 2015 study by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that deemed it “probably carcinogenic to humans”. However, an October Reuters report alleged that the World Health Organization edited “non-carcinogenic findings” out of its 2015 report.
Without this license extension, Roundup would have gone completely out of circulation within the EU in three weeks – which some warned could have caused a farmers revolt. The decision has been well-received by farmers’ groups, but falls far short of the 15-year license extension proponents were originally seeking.
Opposition to the extension has largely come from environmental groups including Greenpeace EU, The Green Party, and Friends of the Earth Europe, among others.
In favor of the decision was the UK National Farmers Union, EU farmers groups Copa, representing farmers from 56 countries, and Cogeca, representing 31 agricultural coops.
After the vote, Monsanto Europe tweeted, “Europe’s regulatory authorities completed a multi-year reassessment and found glyphosate is safe for use. Glyphosate has fulfilled all requirements for a fill 15-year renewal. There is no scientific basis for approving authorization for only five years.”
Ashley Fox, the European parliament’s conservative party leader, told the Guardian that the vote “simply prolongs the uncertainty for our farmers, who are being badly let down. They cannot plan for the future without long-term assurances about the availability of substances they rely on.” The process to renew the license yet again will restart in two years.
Adding further uncertainty, individual member states may still choose to ban glyphosate within their own borders. France plans to do this within three years according to President Emmanuel Macron. Belgium, Greece, France, Croatia, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, and Austria were all opposed to the extension.
Makers of biological ag inputs, which often offer a way to decrease or eliminate the use of chemical inputs, told AgFunderNewsthat they are unphased by the recent machinations.
“From our viewpoint, it’s not surprising that the glyphosate license has been extended in Europe for another five years. Whatever one thinks about glyphosate or the use of chemical pesticides in general, it’s clear that the transformation of large-scale farming practices has to be gradual,” said Tom Laurita, CEO of New Leaf Symbiotics, a biological crop input startup based in St. Louis with funding from Monsanto’s VC arm Monsanto Growth Ventures.
Laurita, who expressed his support for reducing overall synthetic chemicals in the environment, added that since his products are formulated to be compatible with existing chemical pesticides, the vote is neither good nor bad news for NewLeaf.
Donald R. Marvin, CEO of Inocucor, also a biological stimulants producer for agriculture, agreed that this decision will have little bearing on the Candian company’s expansion into Europe. “We don’t view the business and regulatory environment of countries comprising that region as uncertain when it comes to farming. We are certain that Europe’s farmers are in need of environmentally friendly crop inputs just like our grower partners here in the Americas.”
Valagro Showcases Innovation at Biostimulants Congress
Valagro Showcases Innovation at Biostimulants Congress
CINDY ZIMMERMAN NOVEMBER 28, 2017
One of the gold sponsors at the 3rd Biostimulants World Congress in Miami this week is industry pioneer Valagro.
“Valegro started in business in 1980…so for the past 30 and more years, we have been developing biostimulants,” said Mario Mastrangelo, Valagro USA country manager. The company is headquartered in Atessa, Italy with a product distribution network covering more than 80 countries. “Our main geography in the USA is California, Florida, and the Midwest.” Valagro is using virtual reality at the Congress to showcase the company’s strong commitment to research and development with a virtual tour through their facilities.
This is the first time the Congress has been hosted in the United States, which Mastrangelo says is significant because the use of biostimulants is growing significantly here. “We are seeing an increase in the adoption rate and U.S. farmers have started asking about biostimulants,” he added. “The North America market is projected to become the biggest market for biostimulants in the near future.”
Learn more about Valagro and the biostimulants congress in this interview. INTERVIEW WITH MARIO MASTRANGELO, VALGRO USA
The 3rd Biostimulants World Congress is being held through November 30th, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Miami with more than 1,200 delegates from around the world expected to participate.
AfDB President Lauds Agric Minister For Reviving Agricultural Sector In Ghana
The Agricultural sector in Ghana has over the past ten months been at the forefront of Ghana's economy after witnessing eight years of decline.
AfDB President Lauds Agric Minister For Reviving Agricultural Sector In Ghana
Ridwan Issah Alhassan | November 21, 2017
Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto
The Agricultural sector in Ghana has over the past ten months been at the forefront of Ghana's economy after witnessing eight years of decline.
After consistent decline, the agricultural sector recorded a massive growth of 4.3% this year, according to the 2018 Budget Statement presented to Parliament on Wednesday by the Finance Minister, Mr. Ken Ofori Atta.
This significant achievement of the sector has largely been attributed to the roll out of the Government's flagship Planting for Food and Jobs campaign.
The campaign was envisioned by the President, His Excellency, Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo and initiated by the Sector Minister, Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, to support smallholder farmers by providing them with subsidized inputs such as improved seeds, fertilizers, free extension services and ready markets for their produce.
Not only has the programme generated interest from domestic but it has also received international commendations from leading figures, with the latest coming from the President of the African Development Bank(AfDB) Dr. Akinwumi Adesina.
The President of the AfDB, who was delivering his first major public speech after receiving "The World Food Prize Award" in October this year, singled out the Minister of Food and Agriculture of Ghana, Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, for commendation.
Dr. Adesina was addressing participants including Food and Agriculture Ministers from selected countries during the 2017 edition of the SARA Exhibition held in the Ivorian, Abidjan.
The President of the AfDB whose speech highlighted the need for African to adopt technology and mechanization to ensure food security commended the Food and Agriculture Minister of Ghana for his commitment towards tackling food security and improving the socio-economic condition of farmers through the PFJ programme.
According to him, the commitment and dexterity exhibited by the Minister towards arresting the declining fortunes of agriculture in Ghana, deserves to be commended.
"We have gathered here today discussing how to improve the fortunes of agriculture in Ghana and I must commend the Food and Agriculture Minister of Ghana who is here with us," He noted, adding that Hon. Dr. Afriyie Akoto was doing wonderfully well to revive his country's Agriculture with the laudable Planting for Food and Jobs(PFJ) campaign.
As a brainchild of the Minister, the PFJ campaign hinges on five main pillars; provision of improved seeds, fertilizer, extension services, access to marketing and application of ICT in the implementation of the programme.
A successful implementation of the pilot phase of the programme saw a little over 200,000 farmers across the 216 districts benefiting from the huge subsidy offered by government.
Apart from the increase in food production which is likely to reduce the huge bills accrued every year as a result of the importation of basic food items, nearly 800,000 jobs have also been created through direct production and along the value chain
Meanwhile, adequate provision has been made in the 2018 budget to cover half a million as the Ministry seeks to expand the campaign in the coming crop season.
Amongst the strategy, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture is encouraging the participation of Chiefs (One Chief, One Farm), educational institutions (Food Farms for Schools), Corporate bodies and the general public through urban and peri-urban farming.
The expansion also forms part of moves by the Ministry to explore fertile and arable lands in the Afram Plains and Fufulso- Sawla Valleys.
Additionally, the Ministry is also set to implement the ambitious Marshall Plan, a comprehensive strategy that seeks address challenges confronting the agricultural sector such as infrastructure, agric financing, agro-processing, agribusiness amongst others.
The Farms of the Future Will Be Automated From Seed to Harvest
Image Credit: Valentin Valkov / Shutterstock.com
The Farms of the Future Will Be Automated From Seed to Harvest
By Peter Rejcek
Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land.
This isn’t some post-apocalyptic vision of the future à la The Terminator. This is a snapshot of the farm of the future. Every phase of the operation—from seed to harvest—may someday be automated, without the need to ever get one’s fingernails dirty.
In fact, it’s science fiction already being engineered into reality. Today, robots empowered with artificial intelligence can zap weeds with preternatural precision, while autonomous tractors move with tireless efficiency across the farmland. Satellites can assess crop health from outer space, providing gobs of data to help produce the sort of business intelligence once accessible only to Fortune 500 companies.
“Precision agriculture is on the brink of a new phase of development involving smart machines that can operate by themselves, which will allow production agriculture to become significantly more efficient. Precision agriculture is becoming robotic agriculture,” said professor Simon Blackmore last year during a conference in Asia on the latest developments in robotic agriculture. Blackmore is head of engineering at Harper Adams University and head of the National Centre for Precision Farming in the UK.
It’s Blackmore’s university that recently showcased what may someday be possible. The project, dubbed Hands Free Hectare and led by researchers from Harper Adams and private industry, farmed one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of spring barley without one person ever setting foot in the field.
The team re-purposed, re-wired and roboticized farm equipment ranging from a Japanese tractor to a 25-year-old combine. Drones served as scouts to survey the operation and collect samples to help the team monitor the progress of the barley. At the end of the season, the robo farmers harvested about 4.5 tons of barley at a price tag of £200,000.
“This project aimed to prove that there’s no technological reason why a field can’t be farmed without humans working the land directly now, and we’ve done that,” said Martin Abell, mechatronics researcher for Precision Decisions, which partnered with Harper Adams, in a press release.
I, Robot Farmer
The Harper Adams experiment is the latest example of how machines are disrupting the agricultural industry. Around the same time that the Hands Free Hectare combine was harvesting barley, Deere & Company announced it would acquire a startup called Blue River Technology for a reported $305 million.
Blue River has developed a “see-and-spray” system that combines computer vision and artificial intelligence to discriminate between crops and weeds. It hits the former with fertilizer and blasts the latter with herbicides with such precision that it can eliminate 90 percent of the chemicals used in conventional agriculture.
It’s not just farmland that’s getting a helping hand from robots. A California company called Abundant Robotics, spun out of the nonprofit research institute SRI International, is developing robots capable of picking apples with vacuum-like arms that suck the fruit straight off the trees in the orchards.
“Traditional robots were designed to perform very specific tasks over and over again. But the robots that will be used in food and agricultural applications will have to be much more flexible than what we’ve seen in automotive manufacturing plants in order to deal with natural variation in food products or the outdoor environment,” Dan Harburg, an associate at venture capital firm Anterra Capital who previously worked at a Massachusetts-based startup making a robotic arm capable of grabbing fruit, told AgFunder News.
“This means ag-focused robotics startups have to design systems from the ground up, which can take time and money, and their robots have to be able to complete multiple tasks to avoid sitting on the shelf for a significant portion of the year,” he noted.
Eyes in the Sky
It will take more than an army of robotic tractors to grow a successful crop. The farm of the future will rely on drones, satellites, and other airborne instruments to provide data about their crops on the ground.
Companies like Descartes Labs, for instance, employ machine learning to analyze satellite imagery to forecast soy and corn yields. The Los Alamos, New Mexico startup collects five terabytes of data every day from multiple satellite constellations, including NASA and the European Space Agency. Combined with weather readings and other real-time inputs, Descartes Labs can predict cornfield yields with 99 percent accuracy. Its AI platform can even assess crop health from infrared readings.
The US agency DARPA recently granted Descartes Labs $1.5 million to monitor and analyze wheat yields in the Middle East and Africa. The idea is that accurate forecasts may help identify regions at risk of crop failure, which could lead to famine and political unrest. Another company called TellusLabs out of Somerville, Massachusetts also employs machine learning algorithms to predict corn and soy yields with similar accuracy from satellite imagery.
Farmers don’t have to reach orbit to get insights on their cropland. A startup in Oakland, Ceres Imaging, produces high-resolution imagery from multispectral cameras flown across fields aboard small planes. The snapshots capture the landscape at different wavelengths, identifying insights into problems like water stress, as well as providing estimates of chlorophyll and nitrogen levels. The geo-tagged images mean farmers can easily locate areas that need to be addressed.
Growing From the Inside
Even the best intelligence—whether from drones, satellites, or machine learning algorithms—will be challenged to predict the unpredictable issues posed by climate change. That’s one reason more and more companies are betting the farm on what’s called controlled environment agriculture. Today, that doesn’t just mean fancy greenhouses, but everything from warehouse-sized, automated vertical farms to grow rooms run by robots, located not in the emptiness of Kansas or Nebraska but smack dab in the middle of the main streets of America.
Proponents of these new concepts argue these high-tech indoor farms can produce much higher yields while drastically reducing water usage and synthetic inputs like fertilizer and herbicides.
Iron Ox, out of San Francisco, is developing one-acre urban greenhouses that will be operated by robots and reportedly capable of producing the equivalent of 30 acres of farmland. Powered by artificial intelligence, a team of three robots will run the entire operation of planting, nurturing, and harvesting the crops.
Vertical farming startup Plenty, also based in San Francisco, uses AI to automate its operations, and got a $200 million vote of confidence from the SoftBank Vision Fund earlier this year. The company claims its system uses only 1 percent of the water consumed in conventional agriculture while producing 350 times as much produce. Plenty is part of a new crop of urban-oriented farms, including Bowery Farming and AeroFarms.
“What I can envision is locating a larger scale indoor farm in the economically disadvantaged food desert, in order to stimulate a broader economic impact that could create jobs and generate income for that area,” said Dr. Gary Stutte, an expert in space agriculture and controlled environment agriculture, in an interview with AgFunder News. “The indoor agriculture model is adaptable to becoming an engine for economic growth and food security in both rural and urban food deserts.”
Still, the model is not without its own challenges and criticisms. Most of what these farms can produce falls into the “leafy greens” category and often comes with a premium price, which seems antithetical to the proposed mission of creating oases in the food deserts of cities. While water usage may be minimized, the electricity required to power the operation, especially the LEDs (which played a huge part in revolutionizing indoor agriculture), are not cheap.
Still, all of these advances, from robo farmers to automated greenhouses, may need to be part of a future where nearly 10 billion people will inhabit the planet by 2050. An oft-quoted statistic from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says the world must boost food production by 70 percent to meet the needs of the population. Technology may not save the world, but it will help feed it.
Formerly the world’s only full-time journalist covering research in Antarctica, Peter became a freelance writer and digital nomad in 2015. Peter’s focus for the last decade has been on science journalism, but his interests and expertise include travel, outdoors, cycling, and Epicureanism (food and beer). Follow him at @poliepete.
Saudi Arabia Is Building a Futuristic Mega-City That Will Cost $500 Billion
Saudi Arabia Is Building a Futuristic Mega-city That Will Cost $500 Billion
It'll be 33 times the size of New York City.
TALIA AVAKIAN
OCTOBER 25, 2017
Saudi Arabia is building a mega-city that will span three different countries.
The country’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, announced the $500-billion plan, which will create a futuristic city in the northwestern region of the country.
Dubbed NEOM, the mega city will cover 26,500 square kilometers in total, spanning territory within Egypt and Jordan as well.
The city is set to be the world’s first independent economic zone, operating with its own laws, taxes, and regulations.
NEOM will be powered completely by renewable energy from solar and wind panels, with its transport system also running on 100 percent green energy.
Vertical urban farms, seawater farming, and solar-powered greenhouses will help provide residents with fresh food supplies, and the zone will also be a space to test out new technological advances like passenger drones and self-learning traffic systems.
Located next to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, the massive city will also provide a serene landscape composed of more than 290 miles of coastline and vast desert terrain.
The city's coastline includes a variety of untouched beaches and coastal reefs and its valleys are cradled by mountains, creating a more moderate climate than that of nearby areas.
Plans also include the creation of sports and visual arts venues, a variety of marinas and waterside restaurants, record-breaking theme parks, natural parklands, a water park with a wave pool where Olympians will practice, and what officials say will be the world’s largest garden.
The move comes as the world’s largest oil exporter looks to boost its economy after falling oil prices.
Construction is already set to begin, with the first phase planned for completion by 2025. You can follow the progress of NEOM’s development through an interactive map on the project’s website.
What Will it Really Take For Vertical Farms To Succeed?
What Will it Really Take For Vertical Farms To Succeed?
Funders and proponents say vertical farming is the future. But consumer demand may change the nature of what it means to "grow."
October 24, 2017
by Paul Adams
ENVIRONMENT FARM OUTLIERS PLATESCIENCE SHELF TECH
AeroFarms, the world’s largest industrial farm, is contained within a windowless, gray building in Newark, New Jersey. In its 70,000 square feet of floor space—not all of it yet in use—kale, arugula, baby salad greens, and herbs grow in trays without soil; their roots grow down through water-misted air. It’s a clean, painstakingly engineered facility, where outside visitors must go through the hygienic paces before entering, moving through a series of antiseptic footbaths; into a sanitary uniform complete with booties, shopcoat, and hairnet; and finally through a particle-removing blast of pressurized air. Only then can one take in the sight of thousands of plants growing under neon lights in 80-foot-long racks stacked 36 feet high, arranged in aisle after aisle.
Vertical farms like AeroFarms, of course, have their critics. But proponents say they are the future, and judging by the sheer volume of vertical farm-related headlines, you might conclude that those proponents are right—that all we need to do is sit back and watch while conventional agriculture withers away, farms revert to wildland, and sparkling, non-polluting growing facilities become a new part of our cityscapes.
AeroFarms,
It was this summer, after all, that the SoftBank Vision Fund, whose investors include the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Apple, Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Sharp, anted up $200 million—said to be the largest ag-tech investment ever—to help San Francisco-based company, Plenty, realize its vision of building vertical farms in every city with a population of greater than one million. Meanwhile, Global Market Insights, a research firm, recently predicted that the vertical farming market will be worth $13 billion dollars by 2024, with more than 70 percent of that value coming from indoor farming operations like AeroFarms and Plenty.
It’s easy to see the appeal. By isolating themselves from the outside environment, vertical farms can go pesticide-free. They use very little water; AeroFarms claims that it can grow its greens using only five percent as much water as a conventional farm. They can shorten food’s voyage from farm to plate from hundreds or thousands of miles to mere steps. On the downside: Facilities are expensive to build, and they mostly replace free sunlight with expensive electricity—so much electricity that it may well wipe out the carbon advantage of fewer food miles.
Something is going on here. The question is, what?
But they are fabulously productive. That’s partly because they operate year-round, explains Marc Oshima, chief marketing officer of AeroFarms, and partly because they stack growing plants ten or 20 deep. But it’s also that today’s high-tech vertical facilities can fine-tune variables such as airflow, humidity, and the intensity, wavelengths, and duration of light, as well as piping nutrient-enriched water directly to the roots. That allows each plant to “get what it needs, when it needs it. That lets us grow our greens in 12 to 16 days. It takes 30 to 45 days in a field,” Oshima says. “Annualized, we’re 390 times more productive than a field farm.”
Impressive, but not enough to trigger a collapse of conventional agriculture. To date, vertical farms have grown only a limited array of crops. They seem to be nowhere near to growing the corn and soybeans that make up more than half of American ag. And as for the idea of replacing the output of America’s roughly 400 million acres of cropland with indoor facilities, it’s not particularly credible. Let’s say we could reduce the necessary acreage by a factor of 400 because of the increased productivity of vertical farms. (We probably couldn’t, once we started moving into grains and beans and other vegetables.) We’d still need a million indoor acres, or roughly as much space as a thousand World Trade Centers.
So the death of outdoor agriculture isn’t going to happen. But there’s a lot of smart money behind vertical farming, and a lot of tech-trained guys, whose best skill is shifting gears as they learn the ins and outs of a market.
Low light, high density, short turnover
For Chris Higgins, the founder of indoor-farming industry publicationUrban Ag News, the current formula for vertical farming success includes “a low-light-intensity, high-plant-density, short-turnover crop.” That is, a crop that doesn’t use much electricity and produces a lot of pounds of product per unit of space and time. What that means is that, for the foreseeable future, the salad market, with its clamshell boxes of dollar-an-ounce greens harvested as young as possible, is the place to watch for vertical farm growth.
“We’re going to see a lot of failures before things take off.”
Baby greens, says Marc Oshima, “is an $8 billion market – and it’s considered one of the most dangerous to be in.” Leaf vegetables grown in fields, he points out, are highly dependent on vicissitudes of water availability and vulnerable to microbial contamination. Growing them in a controlled indoor environment has the potential to change that equation.
That makes differentiating one’s lettuce in the market more of a challenge, but, according to Robert Colangelo, CEO of Green Sense Farms, the way to succeed in a difficult market is to keep the quality of the end product in the foreground. And the vertical farms, with their tight environmental controls and local delivery, may well have an advantage there.
But is there life beyond greens? There are a handful of crops that may soon be added to the greens-and-herbs rotation, notably strawberries. But, as Higgins points out, the game could change as growers develop strains of plants adapted to indoor farming. “Right now,” he says, “we’re just using field varieties. We won’t see a ton of growth in our industry until we breed lower-light-requiring crops. And that’s very feasible, but people won’t start really developing them until the industry hits a certain critical mass, and it’s hard to say when that will happen. We’re going to see a lot of failures before things take off.”
Strawberries may be the next crop that vertical farm companies aim to grow northward
And Colangelo foresees development beyond the conventional food market in the near future: “The next areas are plant proteins and botanicals for biopharmaceuticals. And crops grown for home delivery, to completely go around brick-and-mortar stores. That will be a huge change over the next five years.”
In search of a business model
Part of that change will be in crops grown. But equally important will be the changes that come as vertical farmers discover business models that work.
At the moment, that is a crying need. Think of AeroFarms, the world’s largest vertical farm at 70,000 square feet. A year ago, the world’s largest vertical farm was even larger: a company called FarmedHere, which grew greens in a 90,000-square-foot warehouse space on the outskirts of Chicago. That farm shuttered in January. The ChicagoTribune wrote that, given the costs of energy and labor, the company’s bottom line “looked significantly better by giving up the farm.” Last year, Atlanta’s PodPonics, which both sold turnkey farm “pods” and grew its own produce, went bankrupt, unable to scale up fast enough to stay afloat.
“The large-scale, that’s where most of the investment is going,” says Henry Gordon-Smith, co-founder of the Association for Vertical Farming. “But in a lot of cases, they’re too new to make profit. You can have all the size and efficiency in the world, but you still have to sell millions of units of produce.”
Numerous containers can be networked together in a single warehouse, to benefit from the economies of scale of a larger installation.
And once you’ve landed a big investment, you’ve lost some freedom. Robert Colangelo’s Green Sense is about to build its fourth farm, in Las Vegas, at a cost under $5 million. “With big investments, you get big investors watching everything you do,” says Colangelo. “Just because you have money doesn’t mean you can expedite your way through the learning curve; you still have to go through the same trial and error, and that takes patience.”
Higgins concurs. “With a bigger farm, logistics becomes more important: distribution, trucks, inputs. If you streamline with automation, and put in the crop that works with your automation, now you need to get access to shelf-space at key grocery stores and focus on sales to turn around on the shelf very quickly.”
By Gordon-Smith’s estimate, there are about 25 vertical farming companies in the United States, with 5,000 or more square feet of growing space, and only about half a dozen, like AeroFarms, operating with 20,000 or more.
Of those 25 medium-scale farms, some are “very healthy,” says Higgins. “It helps that they can live on lower profit margins.”
In a more mature industry, says Colangelo, the larger farms will have some undeniable advantages, but today, with the technology evolving as rapidly as it is, “if you build smaller farms, you’re not as committed. If you bought two million dollars’ worth of lights two years ago, in a short time your big farm will be obsolete.”
A smaller operation is nimbler as well. Green Sense’s business model is to build each of its farms to supply a particular customer, growing the specific crops they want, in the required amount, in the right location. A customer might be a supermarket chain, a college campus, or a military base. “We find out the exact count and cultivar of greens that they use each day, and then we back-build the farm.”
Ideally, vertical farms will would move beyond the herbs-and-leafy-greens outputs
Gordon-Smith cites FarmOne, based in downtown New York City, as another operation that succeeds by focusing heavily on demand. FarmOne targets a specific, finicky niche: high-end restaurants. The farm’s web store lists such grow-to-order specialty crops as micro anise hyssop and over 20 varieties of basil.
FreshBox, near Boston, is proudly among the only commercial farms that are “gross margin positive” according to its CEO, Sonia Lo. Her farms are modular, built in 320-square-foot shipping containers, each with its own temperature, humidity, and airflow customized to the needs of a crop. Numerous containers can be networked together in a single warehouse, to benefit from the economies of scale of a larger installation, while maintaining the flexibility of smaller ones. “There’s a 20-degree difference between what romaine grows at and what basil grows at, so in a single space, you’re not optimized for any one plant. Containerization is our solution for that,” Says Lo. This approach allows crop yields per square foot as much as 2,000 times that of field farms, she says.
And, she adds: “We’re also fortunate to have very patient investors.”
Beyond greens
The next major shift might happen when major fresh produce brands start to move into vertical farming.
Vertical farms are still in their infancy. The presence of high-tech investors and the tech-oriented approach many of them have taken virtually guarantees that many will take the tech industry’s approach to finding their feet—shifting target markets, techniques, and business models fluidly as opportunities present themselves. Some, surely, will end up taking what they’ve learned about small-scale operations and use it to build high-output farm “machines” for restaurants and grocery stores. Some will gravitate to restaurants or growing specialty products. Others will wander further afield.
In the short run, though, to remain sustainable, they need to be good at their current business—growing greens. And that’s not easy.
Colangelo says, “People come in from a tech background and they understand it academically but not from a production standpoint; or they come from the business world, and they don’t understand science and growing.”
“These farms aren’t run by robots, despite what you may believe,” says Gordon-Smith. “Some people think they’re going into the farm business and they create a tech company. You need a grower with a personal touch, and you need that person to be treated with respect, and to stick around.”
Chris Higgins predicts that the industry will continue to grow with cautious investment, but that the next major shift might happen when major fresh produce brands start to move into vertical farming. “They’re paying very close attention. If a big traditional farming company gets in, that will really start to bring it mainstream.”
“Extremely smart people run all of these companies, and they know how to access financing, even based on the small amount of sales they have,” says Gordon-Smith. “Five years from now, if they’re not profitable, they can keep getting that money. Maybe not for 20 years, but for five years.”
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