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Different Type of Agriculture to Bring Better Quality Vegetables to Your Table
Different Type of Agriculture to Bring Better Quality Vegetables to Your Table
October 17, 2017 | Bryce Mansfield
Local family growing vegetables without soil
DRAFFENVILLE, KY- Better quality vegetables grown without soil —One family wants to bring that to west Kentucky by using a different type of agriculture. It’s called aquaponics.
Aquaponics is a combination of hydroponics and aquaculture. Hydroponics is the process of growing plants without soil and aquaculture is the process of raising fish specifically to grow plants.
How does it work? Fish — tilapia most commonly — are raised in a holding tank. Bacteria is filtered from their waste, and the bacteria is used to fertilize different vegetable plants. The water is then filtered and recycled back into the fish tank, and the whole process repeats itself in a cycle.
This process is going to be fundamental to one local family, who will bring this type of agriculture to west Kentucky for the very first time.
Leaving nursing after 26 years to pursue a lifelong dream isn’t easy. For Tammie McCullough, it’s worth taking that leap.
“I was nervous about leaving the corporate world, but I’m fortunate I get this opportunity. I always wanted to own my own business and work for myself, and now it’s coming true,” McCullough said.
She and her husband turned this journey into a family adventure.
“My son had just graduated college. He wasn’t sure exactly what direction he wanted to go in life, and my dad is retired so he’s always looking for something to do. So, it was a perfect family fit,” McCullough said.
Her son, Tyler McKenty, said he looks forward to getting everything in place so they can get started.
“It makes me feel good, kind of a sense of purpose. Like I’m not just out there working to be working. I actually want to do this. I can go to work every day, happy. Knowing what I have to do and get it done,” McKenty.
For McCullough, this business adventure is a start she dreamed of years ago and she has a message for those who have dreams of their own.
“Follow your dreams. Don’t give up, and just take that leap of faith. It can be a reality,” McCullough said.
The family hopes to have the greenhouse up and running by the start of the new year.
For more information on west Kentucky Aquaponics, click here.
For more information on this story and others, follow Bryce Mansfield on Facebook by clicking here.
AeroFarms Upcoming Events
AeroFarms Upcoming Events
On October 31st, AeroFarms Co-Founder & CMO, Marc Oshima, will be presenting at the London Food Tech Summit! He will be sharing the AeroFarms story on "The Future of Our Food Tech Reality" panel. For more information about this event, click here.
Are you in the NYC Area? Join us at Food Loves Tech! This two-day innovation expo will take place at Brooklyn's Industry City on November 3-4 and will feature the latest innovations happening in the food & drink industry. AeroFarms Co-Founder & CMO, Marc Oshima, will help kick off this event, speaking on the opening panel Friday morning. You don't want to miss this! Click here for tickets.
On November 6th, AeroFarms Co-Founder and CEO, David Rosenberg, will be the keynote speaker at the AT&T Mobile TUN Gala in Vienna, Austria. This event will highlight various projects that contribute to energy efficient, environmentally conscious use of telecommunications and the conservation and protection of the environment, nature and species.
On November 8th, AeroFarms will be participating in The Slow Down - Slow Food NYC's 6th Annual Party! This year's Slow Down will be a one-of-a-kind celebration hosted at Grow NYC's Project Farmhouse, with a delicious menu featuring AeroFarms greens throughout! Click here for tickets.
On November 13th, AeroFarms CTO, Roger Buelow, will be speaking at the FFAR Crops in Controlled Environments Convening Event in Yorktown Heights, New York. Click here for more event information.
On November 14th, AeroFarms CMO, Marc Oshima, will be speaking at the Forbes AgTech Launch Event in NYC. Register for the event here
On November 15-16th, David Rosenberg, will be traveling back to Saudi Arabia, to speak at the Misk Global Forum. This event is an ongoing platform that brings young leaders, creators and thinkers together with established global innovators to explore, experience and experiment with ways to meet the challenge of change.
AeroFarms Brings in IKEA and David Chang to Close $40m Series D
US indoor agriculture group AeroFarms has closed a $40 million Series D round, adding IKEA Group and David Chang, chef and founder of the Momofuku Group, and retired US Army General David Petraeus to a previously released list of international investors.
AeroFarms Brings in IKEA and David Chang to Close $40m Series D
OCTOBER 27, 2017 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
*First Published May 30, 2017. Updated October 27 to reflect final close on $40m.
US indoor agriculture group AeroFarms has closed a $40 million Series D round, adding IKEA Group and David Chang, chef and founder of the Momofuku Group, and retired US Army General David Petraeus to a previously released list of international investors.
A May Securities & Exchange Commission Filing indicated that AeroFarms had raised $34.3 million of a targeted $40 million.
AeroFarms grows leafy greens using aeroponics –- growing them in a misting environment without soil –- LED lights, and growth algorithms.
The round takes AeroFarms’ total fundraising efforts to over $130 million since 2014, including a $40 million debt facility from Goldman Sachs and Prudential.
AeroFarms attracted new, international investors in this latest round, including Meraas, the investment vehicle of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai.
The round marks the first investment for ADM Capital’s new growth stage agriculture-focused Cibus Fund, and global asset management firm Alliance Bernstein also invested. Existing investors Wheatsheaf Investments from the UK and GSR Venturesfrom China also joined the round.
The filing also revealed that AeroFarms had renamed its holding company to Dream Holdings, as part of its move from an LLC to a C-Corp, referencing its new retail brand Dream Greens. The Dream Greens brand hit the shelves of ShopRite, Whole Foods, FreshDirect, and Newark chain Seabras in February. Before that, the business was selling its greens into food service under the AeroFarms brand.
AeroFarms’ global list of investors is representative of its plans to expand globally, David Rosenberg, CEO, told AgFunderNews.
“We want to expand domestically and overseas, and we are excited about the potential for Meraas to help us expand into that region,” he said.
AeroFarms is not the only group to consider building indoor farms in the Middle East; Pegasus Agriculture Group, is a hydroponics-based indoor ag company that is based in Abu Dhabi, with facilities across the Middle East and North Africa.Egyptian Hydrofarms is another local example, and Indoor Farms of America recently made its first farm sale in the region.
AeroFarms also wants to add to its 120-strong team of plant biologists, pathologists, microbiologists, mechanical engineers, system engineers, data scientists and more. In particular, the company wants to add team members to its research & development department, with a view to improving the quality and operating costs of the business, according to Rosenberg. “This is where the data science and software platforms we’re using can really pull the business together.”
AeroFarms just completed construction of its ninth indoor farm, with four in New Jersey including its state-of-the-art 69,000 square foot flagship production facility in Newark. It also has plans to build in the Northeast of the US.
For more about AeroFarms, read our earlier interview with CEO David Rosenberg here.
Growing Urban Agriculture
Growing Urban Agriculture
To feed the world’s growing population, we must do more to promote the success of urban farms through better tracking, financial incentives, land use, and support systems.
By Esther Ngumbi Oct. 23, 2017
In Paris, post office workers have successfully raised chickens and grown vegetables on the rooftop of a mail-sorting center. In Chattanooga, the city council just loosened zoning rules to allow urban dwellers to keep livestock. And in Ekurhuleni, South Africa, an urban resident is successfully growing vegetables including chilies, spinach, and onions to supply restaurants.
These urban farmers are part of a global revival. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 800 million people around the globe grow their own fruits or vegetables, or raise animals in cities, accounting for 15-20 percent of world’s food production. And while people have grown food in cities for a long time, urban farming has recently gained renewed attention for its social, health, environmental, and economic benefits. It can help farmers and consumers save money, increase year-round fresh food access, and promote healthy lifestyles in urban settings. It also gives people more control over the production of the food they eat, which has benefits like reducing the use of harmful pesticides.
Onions and greens on the Siyakhana Urban Farm in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Esther Ngumbi)
Some urban farms and farmers are pushing the limits of innovation, using technology and controlled environments that allow them grow food all year-round while avoiding challenges like erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease. Some of these enterprises are sustainably meeting year-round food needs for people living in cities. In Detroit, for instance, urban farms have the potential to supply 31 percent of the fresh vegetables that Detroiters eat each year. Urban farming can be productive, sustainable, lucrative, and profitable.
So how do we tap into this renewed attention and help further expand the urban farming movement to feed our growing population? We can do more to promote its growth and success through better tracking, incentives, land use, and support systems.
Create inventory
To keep moving in the right direction, we must have firm grasp on the state of the current landscape. In Chicago, for example, a group of individuals, organizations, businesses, and educational institutions have collaborated to map urban agriculture initiatives across the metropolitan area. Their database identifies more than 890 farms. More areas need to create this kind of information, which can help connect urban farmers with each other and with other stakeholders including potential funders. Such databases can also be used to inform governments, urban city planners, and policy makers.
The United Nations has previously published reports detailing the state of urban and peri-urban farming across the African Continent and in Latin America and The Caribbean. These resources and broader global inventories are valuable and updating them would be useful to all stakeholders interested in seeing urban agriculture continue to scale in cities around the world.
Lobby for more land
Many cities have zoning regulations that exclude agriculture or related activities in urban areas. Until June 2010, the City of Los Angeles, for example, prohibited residents from growing crops in residential zoning districts. And until June 2012, Portland, Oregon, also banned agriculture as primary use in some zoning districts. Thus, to allow urban farming to happen in urban areas, we need more municipal governments to set aside land for urban agriculture. Depending on how cities prioritize land for food over other development initiatives, advocacy groups and local citizens can step in. Making the case to governments requires that these groups present compelling narratives that describe the benefits of supporting urban farming. Agriculture Advocates Work Group in Detroit and the Urban Agriculture Working group in Los Angeles are examples of coalitions that have successfully convinced city governments to pass ordinances allowing people living in urban areas to farm. In Motherwell, South Africa, farmers are lobbying their municipal officials to allocate more land to allow them to expand their urban pig farms.
Increase support systems
Urban farmers need up-to-date knowledge about growing methods, innovative business models, and indoor farming best practices to thrive and remain sustainable. As urban farming continues to grow around the world, universities, colleges, nonprofit organizations, and funding agencies need to step up to support urban farmers’ needs. For example, through its Purdue Extension urban agriculture programs, Purdue University provides technical expertise, education resources, networking, and business development programs for people wanting to venture into urban farming. In 2016, 35 urban agriculture entrepreneurs participated in their urban farm business planning course. Established and successful private urban farms can also serve as mentors, sharing best practices and business models with new farmers. Growing Power is a nonprofit that offers training, as well as educational and technical support to urban farmers. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has a website dedicated to urban farming, which offers several resources to support dedicated to urban farming, and in 2016, it supported and funded dozens of urban farms. These efforts should continue.
Create incentives for farming
Increasing financial incentives could encourage urban farming to grow. Some public schools, hospitals, and other public institutions like universities receive tax breaks for obtaining a certain percentage of their food from urban farms. Such arrangements can create guaranteed markets for produce from urban farms. Some states and municipalities have programs to help such institutions redesign their procurement policies to increase the percentage of locally grown produce. Food retailers could also get tax incentives from the government for carrying products from urban farms. In addition, urban farms could receive tax breaks for donating excess produce to food banks and pantries. Most importantly, government could provide tax incentives to urban farms that work with food pantries and food banks in an effort to ensure that people receiving public assistance can buy fresh food from urban farms using food stamps.
Efforts to promote urban farming around our world must be intensified. African Development Bank President and 2017 World Food Prize laureate Akinwumi Adesina has for years emphasized that making agriculture modern, profitable, and appealing to young Africans could be the key to lifting millions out of poverty. Other countries, including those in Africa, can learn from some of the incentives and advocacy efforts happening in the United States. With the right supports, urban farming offers a promising approach to help feed the world’s growing population.
Esther Ngumbi is a postdoctoral researcher at Auburn University’s College of Agriculture and a Food Security Fellow with Aspen Institute's New Voices Fellowship. She advocates for urban farming and food security and has published articles on those subjects for outlets including Reuters, The Conversation, Aljazeera, SciDev.Net, and Inter Press Service.
Local Entrepreneurs Bring Farming Indoors
Beanstalk Farms is a Charlottesville-based agricultural technology company that produces scalable, automated and sustainable vertical farms. Its innovative model grows greens such as spinach, kale, and arugula in a fog of oxygenated water and nutrients.
Local Entrepreneurs Bring Farming Indoors
Beanstalk Co-Founders Jack and Michael Ross | Credit: Jack Ross
Julie Zink | Thursday, October 19, 2017
Two local entrepreneurs are seeking to revolutionize farming, reduce energy expenditures and increase productivity by bringing their crop-growing indoors.
Beanstalk Farms is a Charlottesville-based agricultural technology company that produces scalable, automated and sustainable vertical farms. Its innovative model grows greens such as spinach, kale and arugula in a fog of oxygenated water and nutrients.
LEARN MORE:
With shipping container, Fidelis Greens fuses technology, farming
“If we can stack [our farms] and put them indoors, we can put them anywhere in the world,” said Jack Ross, co-founder of Beanstalk.
The goal, Ross said, is to re-create and control the natural environment in an indoor setting, eliminating the need for transportation and increasing efficiency of resources.
Ross, a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, co-founded Beanstalk with his brother Michael Ross, a graduate of Georgia Tech’s School of Aerospace Engineering. They wanted to apply their interest in energy and their skills as engineers to address problems they saw in the agriculture industry.
The idea was sparked in the spring of 2016 during a trip the brothers took down the Pacific Coast Highway. Driving past miles of California farmland, they began to debate how much energy was being used to grow the produce they were seeing.
After research and calculations, they saw room to innovate for more efficient use of agricultural resources.
The solution they came up with involves an indoor farming model that revolves around aeroponics.
Jack Ross
Plants grown through aeroponics “actually sit in air,” Jack Ross said. Throughout most of the growing process, the plants’ roots are suspended in highly oxygenated air, allowing them to grow more quickly, he said.
Water and nutrients are then delivered to the roots through fog. In traditional aeroponics, fog is delivered through nozzles. Beanstalk’s distinctive model generates nutrient- and oxygen-rich fog without the use of nozzles, which can become clogged.
Ross cites the unique fog mechanism as the company’s “competitive advantage.”
They create fog in a central location and then disperse it throughout their indoor facility through a series of ducts.
Their model also ensures that each part of the growing process, “all the way from planting the seed through the harvest,” is automated, eliminating a need for manual labor and ensuring consistency across crops.
By bringing their produce indoors, Beanstalk can “mitigate a lot of the risks that plague [the] current farming industry. We always know that we’re going to have the appropriate amount of water, we’re going to have the appropriate amount of sunlight,” Ross said.
Controlling an indoor farming environment allows Beanstalk to increase production and reduce costs. According to Ross, their indoor farming model uses 98 percent less water than traditional farming and allows plants to grow faster in ideal, year-round conditions.
While a head of lettuce can take between 70 and 80 days to grow in the ground, “in [a Beanstalk indoor farm], it will take about 30 days,” Ross said.
Growing mostly greens, Beanstalk hopes to get as many as 12 harvests a year, compared with only two or three harvests that would be possible from the ground.
“We are much more efficient per square foot while also conserving a lot of resources,” Ross said.
Beanstalk created its first vertical farm prototype earlier this year and is now on its fourth and largest prototype to date.
Their farm, located at the i.Lab at UVa, produces between 150 and 200 pounds of lettuce each month. It is about 7 feet tall and takes up 8 square feet of floor space.
Jason Brewster, director of the i.Lab, said the Rosses “spent a lot of time initially planning and thinking about their novel approach to scaled, indoor farming.”
“They’ve done a lot of prototype development. There’s a lot of electronics involved,” Brewster said. “It’s very exciting to see it coming together.”
The company’s biggest challenge right now is to perfect its mechanization and ensure that its technology can be easily manufactured.
Moving forward, Ross said they hope to begin development of Beanstalk’s first full-scale farm in January. They are in the process of looking for warehouse space in Charlottesville to house the farm.
“We’re hoping to be within the city limits,” Ross said.
Ross said mentors from the i.Lab and the Charlottesville community have provided valuable guidance and support in the company’s continued development.
Alexandre Novi of Exploitation NOVI About Water-Grown Lettuce
Alexandre Novi of Exploitation NOVI About Water-Grown Lettuce
“We are looking into this exciting technique”
Exploitation NOVI exports 95% of their winter lettuce. This family-run business specialises in varieties of lettuce. “We have, in addition to our open fields, almost 11 hectares of greenhouses on two farms”, says Alexandre Novi, sales manager at the company, which is based in Provence, France.
“We export mainly to Germany and Switzerland”, he says. “We also sell to the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and, sometimes Belgium. We would like to increase our presence in the Netherlands and Belgium.” Their clients include importers and supermarkets.
They start their season with a new concept: “mix box”. “This is a small box with four heads of four different varieties of lettuce”, explains Alexandre. Exploitation NOVI grows lollo rossa, lollo bionda, green and red oak leaf, green and red batavia, red lettuce and salanova, a very leafy lettuce variety. They also pack in poly bags and flowpacks.
The company starts with the French salads at the beginning of November. After the lettuce seeds are planted, it takes six to eight weeks before they can be harvested. “We cut the lettuce in the morning, then prepare the pallets”, says Alexandre. “We use a cooling system that incorporates total immersion. The lettuce is sent to our clients on that same day.”
Alexandre says they have had no rain since May. “The weather in the Provence is an advantage for our growing process. The dry environment and sunshine allows a nice and good development of roots and of the salads.” He added that like some other growers, Exploitation NOVI is also looking to develop stronger crops and stronger textures for their lettuce “This helps reduce pathogens as well as insect infestation. Insects don't like the stronger textures, so they go elsewhere.”
‘We are looking into the exciting technique of water-grown lettuce”, says Alexandre. “We have no experience in it yet, but we have seen other businesses in the sector build these kinds of greenhouses. It is very interesting because you can increase efficiency, while at the same time, reducing the number of phytosanitary products you need. It would be really nice to use this cultivation technique, here in Provence.” “Our priority is to provide fresh lettuce on a regular basis,” says the Sales Manager. “We are committed to customer trust and satisfaction. The best quality at the best price.”
For more information:
Alexandre NOVI
Exploitation Novi SAS
Mob: +33 6 12 93 25 02
Publication date: 10/20/2017
Author: Sander Bruins Slot
Copyright: www.freshplaza.com
New Urban Farm in D.C. Is About More Than a Food Desert
The lack of access to fresh food is a factor in great health disparities in D.C. Residents of Wards 7 and 8 are several times more likely to be obese, and have diabetes and other food-related illnesses than are residents of wealthier communities just across the Anacostia River.
New Urban Farm in D.C. Is About More Than a Food Desert
BY STEPHANIE CASTELLANO | OCTOBER 24, 2017
Kelly Miller Farm is scheduled to open in spring 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chris Bradshaw)
On Oct. 14, hundreds of people marched in Anacostia, in southeastern Washington, D.C., to a Giant supermarket. Some held carrots in the air; many carried shopping bags filled with groceries. They were marching to raise awareness of what it’s like to live in a food desert, an area where full-service grocery stores are scarce or nonexistent. In Ward 8, where the march took place, just one supermarket — the Giant — serves about 70,000 people. In Ward 7, directly north, two grocery stores serve another 70,000.
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The lack of access to fresh food is a factor in great health disparities in D.C. Residents of Wards 7 and 8 are several times more likely to be obese, and have diabetes and other food-related illnesses than are residents of wealthier communities just across the Anacostia River.
The problem — which some officials have deemed a public health crisis — is starting to galvanize people, and several nonprofits are working on creative solutions. Perhaps the most promising approach links many of those solutions together, and it’s currently unfolding on a stretch of vacant land behind a middle school in Ward 7. What’s destined to be the Kelly Miller Farm will not only grow food for the neighborhood, but will also boost its economic well-being through job training programs and a food business incubator.
A year ago, the lot was one of the city’s 300-some vacant plots of land on the government’s list of places with potential for urban agriculture. Chris Bradshaw, founder and executive director of Dreaming Out Loud, a nonprofit that runs community gardens and farmers markets in low-income D.C. communities, saw the potential in the Ward 7 property. While the Kelly Miller land is owned by D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation, the farm — which will be the District’s largest — is now managed by Dreaming Out Loud. With the help of a $250,000 federal grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, the group broke ground on the site in late September, and expects the farm to be fully operational come spring.
Josh Singer, who manages the Partner Urban Farm program for D.C. Parks and Recreation, says that Kelly Miller will be a model for future urban farms. Though he says he’s often skeptical of nonprofits that move into communities to implement urban agriculture projects, noting that they can be disconnected from the needs of the people living there, Singer is enthusiastic about Dreaming Out Loud’s efforts so far.
“Their partnerships are what’s most exciting,” he says. The group has joined together with other local food nonprofits, including DC Central Kitchen, City Blossoms, Compost Cab, Beet Street Gardens and FoodCorps, to engage the local community through free public programming that will cover everything from gardening, food preservation, and composting, to nutrition, cooking, carpentry, and entrepreneurship.
Possibly the most fruitful partnership Bradshaw has formed so far, however, is with two longtime residents of the neighborhood surrounding the farm, Boe Luther and Wallace Kirby. Bradshaw says that Luther and Kirby have been instrumental when it comes to community outreach.
“I’m an outsider, I’m not from the community,” he says. Luther, however, was born in Clay Terrace, a public housing project close to the farm site. He owns an ice cream truck that is parked in front of Clay Terrace most afternoons.
“Kids get out of school, they go to the ice cream truck, parents, everyone gathers there,” Bradshaw says. Being at the center of a community hub has helped Luther get the message out about the Kelly Miller Farm, and has drummed up more interest and enthusiasm among neighbors than Bradshaw could have managed.
Luther and Kirby connected with Dreaming Out Loud because of a shared interest in agriculture as a path to entrepreneurship and self-reliance. The two men make up Hustlerz 2 Harvesters, which aims to teach young African-Americans entrepreneurial skills. Luther was inspired to form Hustlerz after his experience attempting to return to the workforce after serving a 13-year prison sentence.
“I didn’t have no help when I got out, not even from my parole officer,” he says. With Kirby, at Kelly Miller Farm, he’ll be teaching workshops on gardening, composting and carpentry, skills he learned while incarcerated. Passing those skills on to others, Luther says, won’t just lead them to jobs, it will help them become entrepreneurs.
“We don’t just want jobs, we want careers,” he says. “The farm’s not just about growing, it’s about making money, and that’s something many people in this community don’t have.”
That entrepreneurial spirit is running largely untapped through D.C.’s low-income communities. Bradshaw says that, at farmers markets run by Dreaming Out Loud, people would often ask the staff how they might sell their own products there. Yet there are few commercial kitchens in the District and they are expensive to rent, which presents a barrier to low-income people looking to start a food business.
Bradshaw and his staff plan to raise awareness of the newly implemented Cottage Food Act, which allows D.C. residents to run food businesses out of their home kitchens, provided their annual revenue doesn’t exceed $25,000. Through outreach and classes at the Kelly Miller Farm, Dreaming Out Loud and its partners will educate residents about the act’s regulations and help them get their businesses off the ground. Bradshaw says this will be one of their most important metrics for success: how many cottage food businesses they can discover and nurture into profitability.
The team will also gather data around its programs — the number of participants, their satisfaction level, and even what they do with the skills they learn. Every year, the Department of Parks and Recreation will review feedback from the community to see if the farm is meeting its needs.
Bradshaw hopes the data will help build the case for more urban farms like this to be built on public lands. “There are more conversations now around protecting public lands for the public good, versus privatization,” he says.
Singer agrees, and though he says that urban agriculture is no “magic solution” to community development, it should play a role: “Urban farms won’t solve hunger in a community, but they can get people access to healthy food.”
Healthy food, and perhaps for a few enterprising individuals, a much-needed source of income.
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Stephanie Castellano is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C. She has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor, Civil Eats, Tallahassee magazine and other outlets.
Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Crops in Controlled Environments Convening Event
Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Crops in Controlled Environments Convening Event
MONDAY | November 13, 2017 | 8:30 AM
To advance crop development in controlled systems that will support economic viability, FFAR will host a convening event to help us determine the state of science and, most importantly, the areas where FFAR can catalyze research efforts to advance crop development for controlled environments. At this convening event, we will explore areas of research where joint efforts in research between the public and private sectors will advance the field, such as:
– Advances in the molecular understanding of traits required for controlled environments
– Breeding crops for controlled environments and increasing nutritional content
– Alternative methods for crop adaptation
– Environmental stressors to enhance qualities and nutritional content
FFAR believes that through increased investments from both the private and public sector, we can help put controlled environment agriculture at the forefront of providing food security and economic opportunities in urban centers.
Event Details
Date: November 13, 2017
Time: 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Location: IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York
Keynote Speaker
Caleb Harper
MIT Media Lab
Contact Details John Reich | FFAR | jreich@foundationfar.org
Melbourne Start-up Farmwall Lets Chefs Harvest Their Own Greens
Melbourne Start-up Farmwall Lets Chefs Harvest Their Own Greens
ROSLYN GRUNDY
October 10, 2017
An artist's impression of the Farmwall vertical farm. Photo: Supplied
It's a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a fox. Geert Hendrix, Serena Lee and Dr Wilson Lennard, from Alphington-based start-up Farmwall, have devised a small-scale indoor farm for restaurants and cafes that allows chefs to grow and harvest their own herbs and microgreens in a space the size of a bookcase.
Farmwall has crowdfunded its first three vertical farms, which will be custom-designed and installed in restaurant kitchens and dining rooms after consultations with chefs and restaurateurs.
Once chefs have selected the plants they want to serve, Farmwall will take care of the rest, making weekly visits with trays of germinated seeds.
Nathan Toleman is an early adopter of Farmwall's aquaponic vertical garden. Photo: Luis Enrique Ascui
The company's first customer is Nathan Toleman, who is installing vertical farms at his cafes Higher Ground and Top Paddock. Toleman says the cafes spend a fortune on herbs, which often come in individual plastic packets.
"There's so much waste product, and we thought we could firstly save money, and secondly save waste. There's nothing fresher than herbs you grow right there and we can harvest them as we need them."
The herbs grow under lights in trays lined with organic hemp fibre, a waste product. The water that wets the hemp mats and germinates the seeds cycles through a fishtank, with the filtered fish waste feeding the growing plants.
Roasted mushrooms and polenta with lemon balm at Higher Ground. Photo: Supplied
"It's 100 per cent natural," says Geert Hendrix. "It's an ecosystem so we never have to clean the water out, although we have to monitor it to keep the ecosystem in balance."
The company's next step is to build Melbourne's first commercial aquaponic farm at the rehabilitated former tip in Alphington.
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.”
ENVIRONMENT, FARM, OUTLIERS, PLATE, SCIENCE, SHELF, TECHVERTICAL FARMING
The Future of Farming May Be Below The Soil
By IRINA IVANOVA MONEYWATCH October 16, 2017, 5:15 AM
The Future of Farming May Be Below The Soil
Think of urban farming and the images that may come to mind are a community garden, vertical greenhouse or even a rooftop garden.
The farm Steven Dring operates in south London isn't like that. In fact, it's not even visible from street level. The operation is situated in an air raid shelter 100 feet underground that has been left vacant since World War II.
Dring, his co-founder, Richard Ballard, and a team of a dozen people grow lettuce and microgreens hydroponically, year-round, in the shelter, which includes two tunnels. The produce is then sold to restaurants and stores around London.
"It does seem completely counterintuitive to build a farm underneath the soil, but it's actually one of the best environments to do it," Dring said.
"You've got that duvet of 100 feet of soil, which insulates the tunnel—it's like someone's built a greenhouse for us. You have LED lights and hydroponics, which has been around forever. We just put it all together and re-purpose an unloved space."
The operation, called Growing Underground, is competitive with traditional farming because their model excludes many of the costs large agribusiness has to contend with, Dring said. The startup sells locally, meaning it doesn't have to ship produce long distances. Another advantage is they don't have to heat or cool the underground tunnel, which stays at steady temperature because it's so far under the earth.
"The one cost that we have consistently all year round is our energy cost, the cost for the LED lighting," Dring said. "Our seeds cost the same, our water costs the same, our nutrients cost the same."
Rows of microgreens at the Growing Underground facility in London | GROWING UNDERGROUND
Hydroponic agriculture grows food without soil, suspending plants in water filled with nutrients. Because the water can be captured and reused, hydroponics uses only about one-third of the water consumed in traditional farming. That's especially important these days because industrial-scale agriculture has severely depleted the soil in many places and caused other environmental harm.
Until recently, hydroponics usually came with high start-up costs, meaning a farmer could wait for years before seeing a profit. Dring, who recently reached a distribution deal with Marks and Spencer, one of the U.K.'s largest retailers, expects Growing Underground to break even later this year.
"I'm going to get drunk for a week when that happens," he joked. "I've already told my investors."
Beyond the novelty of growing food in the bowels of London, Growing Underground's approach shows that it's possible to feed a growing population without the carbon-intensive effects of conventional industrial agriculture, which is in many ways unsustainable.
"They can grow food under deserts, they can grow food in old salt mines, they can grow food in old World War II bunkers," said Daniel Epstein, CEO of the Unreasonable Group. "They can port this model to any town in the world."
The Unreasonable Group incubates and invests in companies tackling social issues, including Growing Underground and other startups growing food with hydroponic and aquaponic technology.
"Urbanization is the largest movement of humans in the history of humankind," Epstein said. "Urban environments are also food deserts, because all the food is grown on the outskirts. That has to stop."
Dring is already scoping out sites in other parts of England, and said he has his sights set on a number of U.S. locations. He doesn't see the group as competitors to traditional farming, but rather as a compliment.
"Farmers are looking at the future," he said, "and they start to look at us, and say, 'Well, if you can use agricultural technology and intensify the yields when you grow produce, can you start to grow in different spaces?'"
Urban Farming? It's Operations, Stupid
Everything in its right place
Urban Farming? It's Operations, Stupid
Published on October 12, 2017
Robert Laing
CEO & Founder at Farm.One
Contrary to most press, the challenges of urban farming are mostly not about high-tech LEDs and patent-pending hydroponics designs - they are about efficient operations.
When you see images of vertical farms, you shouldn't think "Woah, cool" - you should be asking "Does it actually work well?", and "Is it a sustainable operation?"
Vertical farming, and urban farming at small scales, are new practices. There is no rule book. There is no workforce of managers with prior experience to draw on. Everything is being rewritten from scratch.
In this new world, the farmers who will be successful are those who are obsessed with operational efficiency.
The McDonald's brothers established the first rulebook for an efficient, replicable fast-food operation by laying out their draft kitchen over several iterations with chalk on a tennis court (as immortalized recently in The Founder).
Urban farmers should be starting to think in similar terms, understanding how they can operate in new forms of physical space most efficiently, safely and easily.
In our Commercial Urban Farming class, this is one of the aspects we touch on, showing how important efficient operations can be in ensuring you have a profitable farm.
Farm Design
Designing the physical space of a farm is as important as specifying the right pumps and ventilation systems. While building vertically is incredibly space-efficient, it creates problems when it comes to worker access, safety and airflow. Overall, designing with humans in mind is vital. When looking at a farm design, some of the following questions are important:
- Is there wasted space?
- Are crops easily accessible for plant care and harvesting?
- Does equipment require especially tall or skinny staff? (Really!)
- Does everything have a clear place to go?
- Is everything that could be automated, that can be?
- Are spaces designed to facilitate quick movement?
- Are workers able to move items efficiently, without "dangerous carrying"?
- Is it always clear when something is wrong?
- Is it easy to check if equipment is working?
- Is the farm a pleasant place to be?
Managing the team
Managing the workforce is an important practice, both when it comes to tactical efficiency, but also safety, training and other considerations. A poorly-designed, low-tech, but well-managed farm may out-perform a sexy high-tech mess. Think about some of the following questions as you build your idea for farm:
- Is training standardized? How is training assessed?
- Are workers expected to be generalists, or specialized?
- Are there written instructions in relevant places?
- Are there visual or video guides for complex processes?
- Are workers empowered to ask questions?
- Are there clear safety protocols? How are they enforced?
- Is there a culture of safety that encourages honest, prompt feedback?
- Are workers taught how to move efficiently?
Task Management
On a working farm there are dozens or hundreds of specific tasks to perform, in terms of maintenance as well as normal daily operations like planting, transplanting, harvesting. Inexperienced teams may not treat these as carefully as they need. Questions such as the following can expose potential issues:
- Are processes clearly defined and understood?
- Is the state of the farm clear to all workers and management?
- Are problems fixed or escalated at the right levels?
- Are there metrics/SLAs in place for speed-of-answer for problems?
- Are checklists in place for complex tasks?
- Is record-keeping digital? If not, why not?
- Can tasks be tracked back to specific times and individuals?
Ensuring long-term staff retention
Farm work can be physically taxing, under difficult conditions such as elevated temperature, humidity and noise. If farm workers are not motivated sufficiently, this can become a short-term gig rather than a long-term career - which is bad for morale, bad for company training costs, and bad for keeping knowledge within the organization. So careful attention should be paid to questions like these:
- Do management understand the true nature of farm tasks?
- Do management regularly go 'back to the floor'?
- Is the hiring process effective at identifying the right personnel?
- Are farm workers listened to? Are there concerns acted on?
- Are farm workers given a clear career progression roadmap?
- Are farm workers paid an appropriate (not just minimum) wage?
- Are staff retention problems addressed tactically and strategically?
Of course, this is a general, non-exhaustive list. But these kinds of considerations should be on the mind of any team that wishes to build a successful urban farming business. Operations is key!
Find out more about our Commercial Urban Farming class. Next class October 28/29.
Is Indoor Farming The Future of Appalachia?
Is Indoor Farming The Future of Appalachia?
Courtesy of AppHarvest
On an abandoned mine near a small town in Kentucky, one company will soon be growing millions of pounds of tomatoes.
October 17, 2017
On an abandoned mountaintop mine in Kentucky, Jonathan Webb sees the future of Appalachia, and it tastes like tomatoes.
Webb is founder and CEO of AppHarvest, a company currently constructing a 1.8 million square-foot indoor farm near the town of Pikeville, in Kentucky's struggling Southeast. Mining jobs, once the lifeblood of the region, have been drying up for decades—could farming be the answer? And while 600 jobs—the number the company expects to create and sustain—pales in comparison to the more than 10,000 jobs lost in this rural, sparsely populated region over the past decade, it's certainly a start.
Tomatoes will be the stock in trade; AppHarvest will partner with the leading greenhouse grower in North America, SUNSET Produce, to get the job done in five, high-tech greenhouses which will amount to a total of 160 acres of indoor farm, all under glass.
While the project has the potential to do good things for the community (starting with increased access to fresh produce during the off-season), that's not the sole reason AppHarvest is here—Central Appalachia, while often perceived as an isolated place, is actually a relatively strategic location, located within a day's drive of a majority of the population (nearly 70 percent) in the United States. This makes growing produce here a smart and cost-effective alternative to importing from other places. (Labor in Mexico, for example, is cheaper, but the cost of getting the produce to market is lower, not to mention the fact that it won't take very long to get it there.)
If all goes to plan, Webb is optimistic that the Pikeville project could be the first of many operations within the region; it's certainly going to get a great deal of attention, once the first site is completed—in just this one location, AppHarvest estimates that they'll be able to produce so many tomatoes, it could actually put a dent (small, but not insignificant) in the import market.
First Indoor Vertical Farm in Slovenia
First Indoor Vertical Farm in Slovenia
Slovenia has amazing nature with mountains, lakes, woods, rivers, good fertile land and clean fresh water. Sounds like a fairy-tale, but it is true.
It is also true that we have lots of farms growing different crops and farmers raising livestock and all this you can see when you drive just a few miles from the city. You guessed it. Our country is small. So perhaps we have good soil, good weather conditions, clean fresh water, but the quantity of the fertile land is getting smaller. (And of course, we can't forget that people wants to eat quality and clean food all year.)
So that’s why, we decided to start exploring the idea of indoor vertical farming. We decided to start from scratch. Firstly, with books, YouTube, online courses and then we made a small room for growing microgreens, around 120cm long, 40cm high and 30cm deep with fluorescent lights, thermometer from an aquarium, and seeded our first seeds.
We were so proud!
We quickly found out, the importance of airflow, so we installed a PC fan, which was a simple and amazingly effective solution. In a few days we had our first microgreens crop.
And they were so tasty
So after some more trials and fine adjustments of the parameters, we decided that it is time to start developing larger and more advanced Indoor Vertical Farms and its components.
So in the past two years, we developed and constructed a controlled growing room with multi layers, providing perfect conditions for growing vegetables locally, without using any non natural enhancements.
Our automated control system keeps more than 10 parameters at optimal level all the time, for perfect growing conditions.
Our ventilation system is one of a kind. It solves the problem of even heat distribution between layers, better introduces CO2 to the plants, removes humidity from the leaves and keeps them dry and also keeps roots warm and cools the air, on top of the plants. Basically, it imitates the movement of the air in nature.
We also made our own recipes for optimal growing different plants and we constantly upgrade our software and hardware with better solutions. In the future, we are planning to develop our own fully automated Indoor Vertical Farm.
We presently offer complete construction of vertical farms to the potential buyer, with all our solutions. We are also already selling vegetables, produced in our farm, to local chefs and other markets.
FFAR Makes Grant to Vertical Farming Company
FFAR Makes Grant to Vertical Farming Company
The Hagstrom Report
September 11, 2017
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research announced a grant awarded to AeroFarms, an indoor vertical farming company based in Newark, N.J. to improve crop production.
FFAR, a nonprofit set up in the 2014 farm bill to combine public and private research dollars, gave AeroFarms $1 million, and the company will matched that with a $1 million commitment.
Roger Buelow, the company's chief technology officer, will use the grant to collaborate with scientists at Rutgers University and Cornell University to improve crop production by defining the relationships between stressed plants, the phytochemicals they produce and the taste and texture of the crops grown.
The work will result in commercial production of improved leafy green varieties and yield science-based best practices for farming, FFAR said.
The grant was announced at an event in the patio of the Agriculture Department's headquarters attended by FFAR Executive Director Sally Rockey; David Rosenberg, AeroFarms co-founder and CEO; Ann Bartuska, the acting undersecretary for research, education and economics; and Tom Stenzel, president and CEO of the United Fresh Produce Association.
Rockey said vertical farming allows scientists to take advantage of the precision that is possible in indoor systems, where "stressors" from light to humidity to temperature can be controlled consistently and precisely to improve specialty crop characteristics such as taste and nutritional quality.
Rosenberg said "This FFAR grant is a huge endorsement for our company and recognition of our history and differentiated approach to be able to optimize for taste, texture, color, nutrition, and yield and help lead the industry forward."
Stenzel said "Pioneering initiatives like the work by AeroFarms and FFAR will help lead the produce industry with a science-backed approach to understand how to grow great tasting and nutritionally dense products consistently all year. We believe that there is a need for even more public/private partnerships like this to spur breakthroughs."
Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., praised FFAR for making the grant.
"Urban agriculture has incredible potential to spur economic opportunity, increase access to healthy food, and inspire the next generation of farmers. I'm pleased that the foundation is committed to new techniques to grow food in innovative ways," said Stabenow, who has introduced a bill to establish an office of urban agriculture at USDA and to make urban farms more easily eligible for federal funding.
The grant to AeroFarms was made through FFAR's Seeding Solutions grant program, and is being funded within the Urban Food Systems Challenge Area, which aims to augmenting the capabilities of the current food system to feed urban populations by enhancing urban and peri-urban agriculture.
Are Vertical Farms The Way of The Future?
Are Vertical Farms The Way of The Future?
BY Avlya Jacob 12, OCT 2017
Leafy greens and herbs growing on stacked trays, in a highly-controlled environment like abandoned buildings or used warehouses, with absolutely no sunlight and soil - only LED lamps, a small amount of water, and a little bit of science.
We’re talking about vertical farming.
From a simple idea in Dr. Dickson Despommier’s medical ecology class back in 1999, this method of producing crops is now slowly transforming the way we grow food and is on track to becoming one of the answers to global food shortages. Vertical farming is far from the traditional approach where crops are being grown in huge fields or greenhouses. It's is all about taking advantage of vertical space and creating production efficiencies. Vertical farming uses 40% less power, 95% less water, and can produce crops as fast as 30 days
WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT VERTICAL FARMING?
Vertical farming comes with a long list of benefits, and they're beyond the typical “zero sunlight and soil.”
First up, no more seasonal crops. These modern farms are capable of producing traditionally seasonal fruit and vegetables all year-round. There will no longer be a “wrong season” as the crops will be grown inside a facility where environmental factors are completely controlled. Also, there will be less post-harvest spoilage and food waste since most of the produce can be sold in the same building where it is grown. According to estimates, about 30% of harvests are lost each year due to spoilage.
Second, vertical farms are weatherproof. Since the crops are safe and sound in a highly-controlled environment, the entire harvest won’t get affected by extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts or floods, unlike outdoor farming.
Third, they consume less water. Vertical farms use a minimal amount of water compared to normal farms. The methods used are either hydroponic, where plants are grown in a basin of water with nutrients, or aeroponics, where the roots of the crops are sprayed with nutrient-filled water or mist. These two methods use far less water, as all water is taken up directly by the plants - with no wastage as a result of water being spread out in soil. The exact amount of water needed by the plant is the exact amount used. Vertical farming even promotes water recycling. Urban waste, including black water, can be composted and used for farming inside the facility.
Lastly, vertical farms can grow produce twice as fast. This is the main reason it has been touted as the ideal solution to the food crisis some countries are facing. The world’s population is expected to balloon to 10.5 billion by 2050. Which means we have to increase our food supplies by at least 60% to be able to meet demand. To make this possible, a food production system that requires low water consumption, less resources, and less land space is critical. Vertical farming ticks these boxes. The method can yield more plants per square metre than outdoor farms or greenhouses simply because the crops can be stacked as high as the building or the facility.
On the whole, there’s no question to what vertical farms can do. A lot of advocates and agriculture analysts today are seeing the huge potential of this modern method and there are plenty of examples of it working really well.
VERTICAL FARMS AROUND THE GLOBE
The first low-carbon, hydraulic driven vertical farm in the world was Sky Greens.
Located in Singapore, a small island city with a population of more than 5 million that relies heavily on food imports from other countries, the farm grows veggies in A-shaped aluminum towers about nine meters tall each. Sky Greens calls its technology the “A-Go-Gro”. Each tower has 22-26 tiers, which are rotated at a rate of 1mm/second for an equal distribution of natural sunlight and airflow. Sky Greens is capable of growing 800 kilos of Chinese cabbage, kai lan, spinach, and other leafy greens every day. It has been producing these crops commercially since the year 2012.
Photo: Sky Greens vertical farm
In Japan lies one of the largest vertical indoor farms in the world, built by the Mirai Corporation, founded by plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura. With a 25,000 square feet bacteria-free and pesticide-free space equipped with 17,500 LED lights, the farm can grow up to 10,000 lettuce heads per day.
For other crops apart from lettuce, Shimamura explains: “I believe that, at least technically, we can produce almost any kind of plant in a factory. But what makes most economic sense is to produce fast-growing vegetables that can be sent to the market quickly. That means leaf vegetables for us now. In the future, though, we would like to expand to a wider variety of produce." Currently, Mirai has two additional factories located in Mongolia. It is also planning to expand in Russia and Hong Kong in the near future.
The U.S is home to several vertical farms as well. The biggest ones can be found in New Jersey, operated by the well-known firm, AeroFarms. Its global headquarters (and 9th farm) in Newark is a 69,000-square-foot indoor farm that can harvest up to 2 million pounds of leafy greens and herbs a year. It is currently the largest indoor vertical farm in the world.
By 2018, AeroFarms is expecting to have its 10th farm built in Camden. This will be a 78,000 square feet space and will supply produce to Philadelphia and South Jersey.
Meanwhile, a 900-square meter vertical farm is presently being constructed in Dronten, Netherlands. When finished later this year, it will be the largest commercial vertical farm in Europe. Fruit and vegetable supplier Staay Food Group was involved in the development of the Dronten facility along with Philips, the global leader in lighting who will be providing the facility’s GreenPower LED horticultural lighting.
VERTICAL FARMING IN AUSTRALIA
Unlike in Asia and the United States, Australia doesn’t have many commercial vertical farms. We have one private facility based in Queensland: Vertical Farm Systems. This firm produces commercial leafy greens like baby spinach and rocket, and has developed its own automated growing system, the XA series, which is being offered to buyers in Malaysia and Canada and to those wanting to grow vegetables and herbs commercially.
Photo: Vertical Farm Systems XA series automated growing system
Though it was able to successfully enter the commercial market, Vertical Farm Systems thinks it will be challenging for Australia to thrive on vertical farming on a commercial scale. This isn’t just because we’ve got plenty of land space available for farmers to grow what they need to grow (the problem countries like Singapore and Japan are facing), but largely because of our country’s expensive real estate. Our high property rates may result in high retail product prices.
"At the end of the day, the market will buy the cheapest food the market can get and you can't charge a premium for lettuce just because it was grown in a vertical farm,” Vertical Farm Systems’ managing director, Ashley Thomson, pointed out. “A lettuce is a lettuce and it sits on the table and people don't care if it is hydroponic, grown in a paddock or a vertical farm, they ask: 'How much is it?'"
Chris Wilkins of Sydney-based vertical growing systems company PodPlants, however, believes that vertical farming still has a place here in Australia because it can help produce best-quality vegetables.
“Consumers here share the same concerns about food safety and sustainability that have made the practice so popular in the US and parts of Asia," Wilkins said. "Australian cities are not so different – people simply care about where their food comes from and place a higher value on food they know was grown locally.”
PodPlants develops portable and lightweight vertical gardens. In 2014, the unique technology won the Australian Innovation Challenge.
As you can see, vertical farming has a plethora of potential benefits and a bright future ahead of it. But, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies when it comes to this trendy practice. This modern method of growing food still comes with some downsides.
WHAT’S NOT SO GOOD ABOUT VERTICAL FARMING?
One is it needs a lot of energy. Vertical farming doesn’t use natural sunlight to grow plants, it uses artificial lighting which requires high energy. According to a report, it would take about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity to run the LED lights needed to produce 2.25 pounds of crops.
Also, vertical farms cannot yield all types of vegetables. Usually, they can only produce leafy greens, herbs, and tomatoes because these grow quickly. Other crops like potatoes, wheat, and rice have no place in such farms because they weigh more and require a larger space for growing.
Another disadvantage is the greens produced in these vertical farms are (currently) far more expensive than those produced traditionally. This is because they require high setup costs - with all the lighting, technology, and experienced “growers” needed. Let’s take Sky Green’s produce as an example. A 200-gram pack of Sky Greens bok choy is worth $1.25, while a 250-gram bag of bok choy produced on a traditional farm in Singapore only costs 80 cents.
Given these factors, it's evident that vertical farming is still in its infancy and more research, development and market testing is needed to get a clear picture of how it can be commercially viable in other dense areas and how it can produce a variety of crops beyond the typical lettuce and tomatoes. We’ll also need to see first a lot more companies being successful before we can say it will completely change the way food gets to our table. Right now, vertical farming cannot feed the world YET; but with its long list of benefits and its huge potential, there’s no doubt it could be the future of agriculture.
Have thoughts about vertical farming you want to share? Leave a comment below.
In the meantime, if you want to read more industry insights from us, you can check out our blog.
AVLYA JACOB
Avlya Jacob is a content writer at Ordermentum. When not working, she enjoys writing online novels and spending time with her husband.
High-Tech Farm Spreads to Middle East
BY GABRIELLE EASTER | @gab_produceplus
Tuesday 17th October 2017, 12:12 Hong Kong
High-Tech Farm Spreads to Middle East
Japan’s Spread will launch its vertical farm business in the UAE with Madar Farms and Toyo
Kyoto-based vertical farm business Spread has partnered with UAE business Madar Farms and Japan’s Toyo Engineering to launch in the Middle East.
The Japanese high-tech farm business is constructing a Techno Farm in the arid, water-sparse region that relies heavily on imported vegetables. Spread’s systems are almost fully automated, use recycled water and save on energy costs, with the new partnership aiming to supply safe, high quality vegetables to the Middle East. Once the UAE Techno Farm is completed in 2019, it will be capable of producing up to 30,000 lettuce heads a day.
The UAE farm will be the first of around 20 Spread facilities in the works for the Middle East, according to Spread.
Spread operates high-tech farms in Japan, opening the world’s largest automated vertical farm in Kizugawa, Japan.
Bringing The Farm Right to The Table
Bringing The Farm Right to The Table
Designed and built by Smallhold, a Brooklyn-based, certified-organic, "distributed farming" startup, the "Minifarm" has been in the works for months
Smallhold co-founders Andrew Carter and Adam DeMartino
Bloomberg Last Updated at October 12, 2017
Diners flock to Mission Chinese Food in Manhattan’s Lower East Side for the ambience as much as the innovative twists on Sichuan food. Customers have been known to wait hours for the privilege of eating Kung Pao pastrami amid “Chinese banquet and surrealist” decor, as executive chef Angela Dimayuga describes it.
On Wednesday, the restaurant added its newest piece of kitsch. Nestled between the entrance and the bar, above an interior window, sits a rectangular box emanating blue light. It’s filled with extraterrestrial looking life forms: mushrooms.
Designed and built by Smallhold, a Brooklyn-based, certified-organic, “distributed farming” startup, the “Minifarm” has been in the works for months. If all goes according to plan, blue, yellow and pink oysters, king and pioppino mushrooms will replace varieties such as beech, button and enoki in Dimayuga’s beef jerky fried rice. Dimayuga beamed with excitement. “A just-picked mushroom tastes the best.”
The fungi begin their life in Smallhold’s Bushwick headquarters and partner farms outside New York, in bags filled with such waste products as sawdust and coffee grounds. After three to four weeks, they are then transferred to Minifarms like that of Mission Chinese to finish growing. Harvesting on-site gives the mushrooms a longer shelf life, in addition to what Smallhold said is competitive pricing. Unlike other experiments in urban agriculture, the Minifarm uses very little space. The system, according to the company, is simply a better way to grow and distribute food.
Like many entrepreneurs, Smallhold co-founders Andrew Carter and Adam DeMartino speak in superlatives.
“We think this is the future of food distribution,” Carter said. “We see this as a new way to get food to everyone.”
“We can ultimately compete with larger farms,” DeMartino added, “if we do this right.”
Could such methods actually replace traditional agriculture? “Of course not,” Carter said. His company offers “not a replacement, but an addition.”
A small Minifarm starts at $2,000, measures 4-feet wide by 2-feet deep, stands 6-feet tall and can produce up to 2,300 pounds of mushrooms a year. Inside, Wi-Fi and embedded sensors allow Smallhold to constantly monitor growth and adjust inputs such as lighting and temperature. Restaurant clients put a deposit on the machine and pay a monthly subscription fee, plus a price—from $5 to $12 per pound—for the produce.
Customers will not only have “constantly fruiting mushrooms all the time,” said Carter, but the company also has the potential to scale indefinitely through its network of remotely-controlled Minifarms.
Indoor farming has seen a recent surge in investments. Globally, these startups raised $285 million in 2017, according to AgFunder, a marketplace for agritech startups looking for capital. It’s a significant jump from the total $70 million raised for the sector in 2016 and $53 million the year before, even if it still only makes up about 6 percent of the funding in farmtech.
The industry is hardly a safe bet. PodPonics in Atlanta, FarmedHere in Chicago and Local Garden in Vancouver are just a few examples of recent failures cited by Henry Gordon-Smith, founder and managing director for Agritecture Consulting, an urban-farming consulting firm.
“A lot of people enter the space with excitement,” he said, rattling off familiar reasons: “We need more local food, cleaner food, produced with less water and closer to the consumer.” But these ventures face typical new-business problems as figuring out what customers want, what they’re willing to pay and the cost of labour.
“I think the idea of distributed farming is a challenging one,” said Gordon-Smith. “Restaurants have limited space, are difficult to work with and don’t always pay on time.”
Farming in Space
As NASA plans for its first manned mission to Mars in the mid-2030s, the humans who will inhabit the planet may not be considered astronauts but farmers.
“The round trip to Mars generally takes about four and one-half years if you add in six months on the surface,” says Bruce Bugbee, a botanist at Utah State University. “Theoretically, it’s possible to bring four years’ worth of bag lunches, but that would be super expensive.”
It’s also risky to rely on a lightweight resupply rocket, because it can take up to 210 days to arrive. “To be efficient, inhabitants need to eat local, which means we need to find a way to produce food on Mars from recycled wastes,” he explains. “If we can’t, we are not going to be able to live on the Red Planet.”
DEALING WITH A DIFFERENT ECOSYSTEM
For over 30 years, Bugbee has been collaborating with NASA to develop closed systems for growing plants aboard space shuttles and on the International Space Station. Today, there are small, engineered space greenhouses that can grow nutritious plants by rigorously controlling the plant environment.
“Taking this to scale to support humans is going to be the real challenge,” says Robert Heinse, a soil scientist at the University of Idaho. “Some of these challenges are simply a question of where to get enough water and nutrients. Other challenges are unique to the space environment like cosmic radiation, lack of atmosphere, and low levels of light.”
To create the technology necessary to make longer space missions possible, NASA has tapped Utah State, along with three other universities, to be a part of CUBES (Center for Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space). The initiative, a $15 million, five-year project funded by NASA, will be led by Adam Arkin, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Utah State University, the University of California at Davis, Stanford University, Autodesk, and Physical Sciences Inc. will be partner organizations.
Utah State professors Bruce Bugbee (left) and Lance Seefeldt.
RED PLANET SOIL
Earth’s soil is a mixture of minerals, organic matter, gases, liquids, and countless organisms. The Red Planet is covered with crushed volcanic rock containing nothing living. Mars does, however, have carbon dioxide, some nitrogen in the atmosphere, and frozen water. As a first step, Bugbee’s colleague and biochemist Lance Seefeldt will study ways to convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia using bacteria and solar energy.
“We will also look at inoculating plants with rhizobia like we do legumes to help them fix nitrogen,” says Bugbee.
Rhizobia is one of the groups of soil bacteria that infect the roots of legumes to form root nodules. After infection, it produces nodules on the roots where they fix nitrogen gas from the atmosphere and produce a more readily useful form of nitrogen.
In order to achieve this, light is needed. Although it is more dispersed on Mars than on Earth, some light is available.
“Mars has only 60% of our light intensity at the surface, which means reduced photosynthesis,” explains Bugbee. “There is still enough light to grow crops.”
Bugbee and his colleagues also plan to use biology to figure out how to transform the dust that covers the Martian landscape into fertile cropland. “Biology is more efficient than mechanical approaches like filtering water,” he says.
Initially, the CUBES group may have to deal with toxic chemicals. “There are perchlorates in the soil, which are quite toxic to humans. We hope to develop plants that can take up toxins and clean up the soil,” Bugbee explains. “We also want to understand which toxins get into the food chain through the plant. Maybe we can grow plants that don’t absorb the perchlorates.”
Another obstacle will be figuring out how to grow food from recycled wastes in a small, closed system. “Exploring Mars means nearly perfect recycling of water, nutrients, gases, and plant parts that aren’t consumed,” he says. “We’ll start with a recycling, hydroponic system and gradually expand to include Martian soil.”
One crop that shows great promise is soybeans. “Soybeans are an important crop for Mars because of the diversity of products that can be made from them,” says Bugbee.
STRICTLY VEGAN
Because of the many limitations on Mars, would-be space travelers will have to rethink their diets. “To keep the area small, an efficient Mars diet will not include fruits or nuts from trees,” says Bugbee. “In addition, animal products are too expensive to sustain. What that means is life on Mars will be supported by a strictly vegan diet.”
Some experts suggest that those who venture to Mars should live on vitamin pills, dried food, and water. However, Bugbee says there is still much we don’t know about the long-term complications of such a limited diet. “Every day we eat products from hundreds of plants,” he says. “Most dieticians recommend a diet based on at least 100 diverse plants. NASA would like to grow only about five. The answer is somewhere in between.”
BENEFITS FOR EARTH
While the CUBES initiative is focused on deep space exploration, it also lends itself to practical Earth-based applications.
“When you conduct research, you discover a lot of things you weren’t specifically looking for,” says Bugbee. “It was originally NASA technology that made people think of developing indoor agriculture and growing plants without sunlight. It’s also the case with the sensing technology being used in drones to monitor plant health.”
Heinse adds that new observations in a totally different environment have really improved their understanding of root zone processes in a low-gravity environment.
“Root densities are much higher in space greenhouses compared with field-grown crops, and we are learning a lot about how to better manage root zones under high crop demand both for water and nutrients,” he says.
Some of these lessons are being applied to irrigated field crops to improve nitrogen efficiency and timing of pesticide application. “Nurseries and greenhouses with similar high-demand root zones are using soil-free media for root zones, which relies on a detailed understanding of physical and hydraulic properties and how these change with time,” adds Heinse.
“The spin-offs from studying an extreme case like Mars could have great value for food production on Earth,” says Bugbee. “What if we discover a new bacteria that could help Iowa corn fix nitrogen? That would be huge for Earth.”
New Downtown Restaurant to Grow its Own Produce at Indoor Urban Farm
New Downtown Restaurant to Grow its Own Produce at Indoor Urban Farm
Friday, October 13th 2017, 7:37 pm CDT | By WTOL Staff
New location for Balance Pan-Asian Grill (Source: WTOL)
TOLEDO, OH (WTOL)
Business continues to boom in downtown Toledo, especially when it comes to food.
Balance Pan-Asian Grille began construction on Friday on its new downtown Toledo location.
The restaurant will be at the corner of Summit and Jefferson.
It's not only a restaurant though.
They are also building an indoor 8,000 square foot urban farm that will grow seventy percent of the produce for their restaurants.
"This is location number four for the restaurant and our very first attempt at urban farming,” said co-founder Prakash Karamchandani.
The restaurant wanted to find ways to bring locally grown produce to their diners year-round.
"In the midwest, living somewhere like we live here with the inconsistency of the weather, we couldn't find a better idea to continue to grow local, fresh produce and be able to utilize it in our own restaurant,” said co-founder Hochan Jang.
Owners said they've loved working with the city to get the project going.
They are so excited that they're working hard to open the new restaurant before the new year.
https://balancegrille.com/ | eat@balancegrille.com