Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
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.
The Chinese Houses With Rooftop FARMS
More than 22 cutting-edge properties have been erected in the afflicted area, which allow residents to grow their own food and rear animals for continuous, greener living in an environment where there is little space for house building.
The Chinese Houses With Rooftop FARMS: Residents Can Grow Their Own Food And Rear Animals on Eco Properties Erected in Aftermath of Devastating Earthquake
- Jintai Village is located near Guangyuan, Sichuan Province, and was badly affected by an earthquake in 2008
- The disaster left nearly five million people homeless and roughly 80% of local buildings were destroyed
- Rebuild efforts were then put back in 2011 when heavy rainfall and a landslide destroyed many new homes
- Now, the local government have built a total of 22 sustainable houses with farms on the rooftops
By Ted Thornhill and James Draper For Mailonline
PUBLISHED: 09:20 EDT, 31 October 2017
It was devastated by the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008.
But now China's Jintai Village, in the Sichuan Province, is rebuilding itself in an ingenious way - thanks to a new development of sustainable houses with roof farms.
More than 22 cutting-edge properties have been erected in the afflicted area, which allow residents to grow their own food and rear animals for continuous, greener living in an environment where there is little space for house building.
New vision: The collection of houses in China's Jintai Village, Sichuan Province, where sustainable houses have roof farms
Green fingers: More than 22 cutting-edge properties have recently been erected in the afflicted area
Do it yourself: Fruit and vegetables can be seen growing atop a roof farm, where the community can cultivate fresh food
Clever: The conception actively affords people the opportunity to grow food, while the design incorporates rainwater harvesting, natural light and ventilation for maximum productivity
New generation housing: Experts at the University of Hong Kong, led by design experts John Lin and Joshua Bolchove, devised a way for people to live in homes that had functionality as well as strength
Designed by the Rural Urban Framework, it's funded by both local government and NGOs in response to the natural disaster, which left nearly five million people homeless when it struck nine years ago.
It's estimated that 80 per cent of all buildings in the affected area were destroyed.
Then, in July 2011, heavy rainfall and landslides obliterated five years of reconstruction efforts.
So experts at the University of Hong Kong, led by design experts John Lin and Joshua Bolchove, conceived a way for people to live in homes that had functionality as well as strength.
Impressive: The village homes are flanked by a stunning mountain view, which is accentuated by the clouds
Rebuilt: Jintai Village was badly affected by the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, then again by landslides in 2011
This stunning aerial view shows how the village is eye-catchingly stacked in tiers
Struggle: The disaster left nearly five million people homeless and roughly 80 per cent of local buildings were destroyed
Connected: Each upper storey is cantilevered over a sheltered porch, which encourages people to sit outside and sell their products or interact with their neighbours
n addition to the green space on the top of building, which affords people the opportunity to grow food and rear animals such as pigs and chickens, it also incorporates rainwater harvesting, natural light and ventilation for maximum productivity.
Built along narrow streets, the design strategy provides four different types of houses, varying in size, function and roof sections.
Each upper storey is cantilevered over a sheltered porch, which encourages people to sit outside and sell their products or interact with their neighbours.
Meanwhile, open spaces on the ground level allow for individual family-owned workshops.
Rural Urban Framework said: 'This project demonstrates a socially and environmentally sustainable model for earthquake reconstruction while examining the many nuances of reconstructing a community.
'This is an investigation into modern rural livelihood. With tens of thousands of newly planned villages occurring in China today, the challenge is to plan villages as authentic places whereby the spatial organization and physical expression is derived directly from its relationship to its natural environment.'
San Francisco Startup Plenty Takes Vertical Farming to New Heights
San Francisco Startup Plenty Takes Vertical Farming to New Heights
Nov. 14, 2017
Plenty, an indoor agriculture company based in San Francisco, claims it has found a way to make vertical farming scalable and profitable, according to Vox.
The company uses ultra-efficient grow methods to produce 350 times as much produce per acre as conventional farming, and using just 1% of the amount of water. According to Vox, this is more than twice as much production as the next leading production level in the vertical farming industry.
Plenty operates a growing warehouse in San Francisco and plants to build one outside Seattle next year capable of producing 4.5 million pounds of greens per year. The company ultimately hopes to place grow facilities near every city in the world with one million or more residents.
For years, vertical farms have been touted as the future of agriculture — a way to grow food efficiently using a fraction of the space of conventional farmland. And for years, startup operations have hemorrhaged money before eventually going out of business.
Labor and energy are the two main costs that vertical farms struggle to overcome. Startups also pay high real estate costs, often fail to adequately use data, and frequently have a shaky go-to-market strategy. There are, in other words, numerous ways to fail in the promising but very low-margin field.
Plenty doesn’t offer a new approach to vertical farming but rather a more refined one. As an example, Vox writer David Roberts highlights Plenty’s grow walls. Rather than use stacks of horizontal planters, as many vertical farms do, Plenty employs 20-foot grow walls packed with greens. Water and nutrients pour down the walls, meaning the company is using gravity instead of expensive pumps to feed its greens and makes sure to trap any water and condensation that filters down and recycle it.
Plenty uses automation whenever possible, including tiny robots called “Schleppers” that move seedlings around. The company is also obsessive about tracking and maintaining optimal growing conditions. Its San Francisco warehouse has 7,500 cameras and 35,000 sensors to monitor temperature and numerous other metrics.
As it scales, Plenty claims it will be able to offer competitively priced produce to stores around the country. It will also have the selling point of being locally grown and very flavorful.
But will Plenty deliver, or is it just another company making big promises? Potential pitfalls abound, including high real estate costs and quality control. Plenty’s model is built around achieving massive scale, and getting there will require lots of money and minimal mistakes.
As Roberts points out, if Plenty doesn’t succeed, another company likely will. Bright Farms and Gotham Greens are two other outfits that are refining the model, and that have partnered with retailers to offer branded locally sourced greens. Vertical farming carries the promise of local, flavorful, efficiently produced fruits and vegetables, and a large payoff for whoever can make it efficient and scalable enough.
This $40 Million Robotic 'Plantscraper' Will Feed over 5,000 People Per Year
By 2050, the world's population is expected to swell to 9.6 billion, with around 66% living in urban areas. This projection is leaving many cities wondering how they will feed all those people.
This $40 Million Robotic 'Plantscraper' Will Feed over 5,000 People Per Year
- Leanna Garfield
- Nov. 18, 2017
Plantagon
By 2050, the world's population is expected to swell to 9.6 billion, with around 66% living in urban areas. This projection is leaving many cities wondering how they will feed all those people.
A Swedish food-tech company called Plantagon is proposing that cities consider building what it calls "plantscrapers" — office towers that contain giant indoor farms. Plantagon is constructing its first plantscraper in Linköping, Sweden.
Called The World Food Building, the tower will operate hydroponically, meaning vegetables (mostly greens) will grow without soil in a nutrient-rich, water-based solution. The farm will largely be automated, Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle told Business Insider.
Construction of the $40 million building began in 2012, and it's set to open by early 2020.
Check out the plans below.
The World Food Building will produce approximately 550 tons of vegetables annually — enough to feed around 5,500 people each year.
Plantagon
Source: Helgi Analytics
The front of the 16-story tower will include the farm, while the back will include the offices.
Plantagon
About two-thirds of the building will be devoted to offices, while the other third will include a huge indoor farm.
Plantagon
Companies are now signing leases to move in when it's complete.
The crops will grow using both natural sunlight and LEDs.
Plantagon
The LEDs will be calibrated to specific light frequencies to maximize production.
Plantagon
Robots will perform many of the farm's processes. This will keep operational costs down.
Plantagon
Compared to an outdoor farm of the same size, the plantscraper will generate more food while using less land and water, Hassle said. He estimates the tower will save 1,100 tons of CO2 emissions and 13 million gallons of water annually.
Plantagon
Some meeting rooms, like the one below, will have a view of the farm.
Plantagon
In other areas of the tower, there will be eateries for office employees and the public.
Plantagon
In addition, the building will include a market where people can purchase veggies. Local restaurants and other food retailers will be able to buy directly from Plantagon, which will operate the farm, Hassle said.
Plantagon
Plantagon has designed another similar indoor farm with offices, though it's in the shape of a globe. There are no plans to build it yet.
Plantagon
This plantscraper will include a spiraled food production line, which automatically moves the plants from the bottom to the top and back again while they grow. The length of the cycle would depend on the crop, but would normally take around 30 days, Hassle said.
Plantagon
The designers hope Linköping's plantscraper will encourage other cities around the world to build large-scale indoor farms that have multiple uses.
Plantagon
Plantagon is in conversations with other developers in Sweden, Singapore, the United States, Hong Kong, and Shanghai to build similar structures.
Hassle believes that more cities should grow food closer to urban centers. "This project demonstrates how to feed cities of the future when they lack land, water, and other resources," he said.
Former Tesla Executive to Lead Vertical Farming Effort at Plenty
Former Tesla Executive to Lead Vertical Farming Effort at Plenty
The aim of startup Plenty is to generate more produce with less water.
Bloomberg 1 | Oct 16, 2017 | by Selina Wang
Tesla Inc.’s former director of battery technology has joined Plenty Inc. to lead the vertical farming startup’s plan to build indoor growing rooms around the world.
FEB 03, 2017
Kurt Kelty, who joined Tesla in 2006 and left earlier this year, was one of the longest-serving executives at the carmaker led by Elon Musk. He joins SoftBank Group Corp.-backed Plenty as the senior vice president of operations and market development. Kelty had previously spent more than 14 years at Panasonic Corp.
"At Tesla I was employee number fifty or sixty,” Kelty said in an interview. “It’s a very different company from when I joined. I wanted to figure out where I would contribute to the next big wave. I see my next 10-year-run as growing Plenty."
Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank led a $200 million investment in Plenty in July. The startup is betting that with its technology and the backing of SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son, it has the connections and capital to accelerate international development. Plenty says it can yield up to 350 times more produce in a given area than conventional farms -- with 1% of the water.
At Tesla, Kelty said he spearheaded the battery gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, with Musk. Kelty had spent a significant amount of his time in Japan and had previously focused on selling Tesla vehicles in that country. At Plenty, Kelty’s first priority is getting a mass production facility running in the U.S. Kelty compares the experience to bringing the Roadster -- an early Tesla model -- to production the first time.
To contact the reporter on this story: Selina Wang in New York at swang533@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net
Molly Schuetz, Alistair Barr
© 2017 Bloomberg L.P
Urban Farming 2.0
Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally.
Urban Farming 2.0
Jade Perry, 20 November 2017
Supermarkets are finding new ways to show their commitment to locally-grown food.
Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally. Five kinds of lettuce are currently being grown and tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini will be added next year. The farm will also serve an educational purpose, offering workshops to schools in 2018.
While urban farming has been discussed in the past, major supermarkets are now making these conceptual ideas a reality. There is a range of benefits to these kinds of farms. Indoor farming can give consumers access to fresh produce year-round—even those who live in dense, urban areas. In addition to greatly reducing carbon emissions, indoor farming also uses less water than traditional farming and doesn’t require pesticides.
“Developing a healthy and high-quality nutritional pattern…is one of the challenges of the Brussels region,” Brussels Minster for Environment and Energy Céline Fremault stated in a release. “This first city farm of Delhaize is therefore an excellent initiative, which fully fits into one of Brussels’ ambitions: to increase local production.”
Shoppers at the Living Herb Garden. © studiomfd
Earlier this year, French retailer Carrefour revealed a similar rooftop initiative to Delhaize which is managed by students of a local agricultural school. Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, similarly launched a “Help-yourself Herb Garden” in one of its shops that allowed customers to pick fresh plants. Meanwhile in Canada, IGA became the first store to sell store-grown produce in Montreal, offering 30 varieties of vegetables. Even Target in the US is piloting vertical gardens in its stores.
Infarm, a Berlin-based start-up, is trying to make this a reality for every supermarket. The company created an indoor “herb garden” for supermarkets which houses plants in a protected, nutrient-rich environment. The customer-facing farm connects to an app that monitors important factors such as pH levels and temperature.
“Behind our farms is a robust hardware and software platform for precision farming,” Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli tells TechCrunch. “Each farming unit is its own individual ecosystem, creating the exact environment our plants need to flourish.” Los Angeles-based start-up Local Roots has taken a similar approach, using shipping containers to bring urban farms to grocers, universities, and community centres. Their goal is to create a network of community-based farms across the US.
Local Roots at SXSW.
Ethically-minded consumers are becoming more health conscious and starting to question where their food comes from and the effect it has on the environment. It’s imperative that brands respond to this concern and continue to implement initiatives that reduce emissions. Brands that are creative in reducing their carbon footprint will reduce costs, tackle climate change and ultimately attract more consumers looking for fresh, high-quality food.
Main image: © studiomfd
Pioneers of Organic Farming Are Threatening to Leave The Program They Helped Create
Pioneers of Organic Farming Are Threatening to Leave The Program They Helped Create
By Caitlin Dewey November 2 at 11:48 AM
(iStockPhoto)
The pioneers of the sustainable farming movement are mourning what they call the downfall of the organic program, following a Wednesday night vote by a group of government farming advisers that could determine the future of the $50 billion organic industry.
At issue was whether a booming generation of hydroponic, aquaponic and aeroponic farms — which grow plants in nutrients without using soil, frequently indoors — could continue to sell their produce under the “organic” label.
In a series of narrow votes, an advisory board to the U.S. Department of Agriculture voted to allow the majority of these operators to remain a part of the organic program, dealing a blow to the movement's early leaders.
[‘Uncertainty and dysfunction’ have overtaken USDA program for organic foods, key lawmaker says]
Organic pioneers have argued that including hydroponic produce under the label has undermined the integrity of the program they fought decades to establish, and at a time when it is already under intense scrutiny. Some have said they will consider leaving the USDA-regulated program entirely.
“This was the Hail Mary pass to save the National Organic Program, and they didn't catch it,” said Dave Chapman, a longtime organic tomato farmer who lobbied to have hydroponics banned from the organics label. “They did incalculable damage to the seal tonight. It's just going to take them a while to realize it.”
Wednesday's recommendation, issued by the National Organic Standards Board, came in four parts.
The board voted to keep out aeroponic farming, which grows plants — typically herbs and leafy greens — suspended in the air with their roots exposed. But it voted to allow hydroponics, which grow plants in water-based nutrient solutions, and aquaponics, which combine hydroponic systems with farmed fish operations.
The board also declined to tighten its restrictions on container growing, a variation on hydroponics that involves raising plants in containers filled with a mixture of organic matter, water and nutrients. That system has been adopted by a number of major organic berry growers, such as Driscoll’s and Wholesum Harvest.
Since 2000, the National Organic Program has strictly regulated which foods can be called organic, and how organic foods are grown and raised. Those standards are typically based on the recommendations of the NOSB, an advisory body composed of farmers, environmentalists and representatives from the organic industry.
In a 2010 vote, NOSB recommended a ban on virtually all types of soilless growing. But in an unusual departure, the USDA continued to certify hydroponic and aquaponic farms, claiming that NOSB had not adequately considered the breadth of the industry.
Now that the board and the department are in agreement, the future of hydroponics in the organic program is much more certain, said Marianne Cufone, the executive director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition, which represents hydroponic and aquaponic growers.
“I think this sends a powerful message that they're embracing change in agriculture,” Cufone said. “That the [organic program] wants to be inclusive, not exclusive.”
This approach has pained old-school organic farmers, who have spent the past seven years arguing that soilless systems undermine the main principles of that program. When that movement emerged in the first half of the 20th century, they argue, it promised a version of agriculture that not only reduced the use of certain fertilizers and pesticides, but that contributed to the health of the soil and the rest of the environment.
During NOSB testimony Tuesday, several organic farmers protested the certification of hydroponic farms, wearing T-shirts that said “Save the Organic Label.” At recent rallies in Hanover, N.H., and Burlington, Vt., protesters held signs with slogans such as “keep the soil in organic.”
“This notion that organic farmers are stuck in the past, or that they’re a bunch of Luddites hanging on to the way things used to be — that’s a misnomer,” said Cameron Harsh, the senior manager for organic and animal policy at the Center for Food Safety. “Soilless systems are just incompatible with the organic program and its regulations.”
But in a series of close 8-7 votes Wednesday, the NOSB appeared to disagree. Instead, it sided with hydroponic growers, many of whom have spent several years and several thousand dollars acquiring their organic certification.
Their advocates have argued that soilless farming is consistent with the goals of the organic program: It utilizes organic fertilizers and cuts down on pesticide and water use — often to levels much lower than those on land-based organic operations. Because hydroponic farms are frequently built indoors, they are said to provide opportunity to urban growers who could not otherwise access agricultural land.
“Don’t get me wrong — I love going to the farmers market,” said Matt Barnard, the chief executive of the indoor farming start-up. Plenty, which grows organically certified greens and herbs. “It’s just that the farmers market supplies something like half of one percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the U.S.”
“What we are doing,” Barnard added, “is just as organic as anyone else.”
The early leaders of the organic movement say they aren't sure what “organic” means anymore, however.
The hydroponics debate comes at a moment when the organics program has been rocked by high-profile scandals, from fraudulent imports to suspect dairy feedlots, and after a period of sustained growth.
Organic sales topped $47 billion in 2016, according to the Organic Trade Association, representing 5 percent of all U.S. food sales. That growth has not been driven by idyllic family farms, either. Increasingly, the organic market is dominated by industrial brands that look little different from their conventional counterparts.
Chapman likens his struggle now to that of a parent confronting a rowdy teenager. He spent years growing the movement, he said, and loves it despite its flaws. On Wednesday night, he left the NOSB meeting with a group of other old-school organic farmers, determined to discuss how, and if, they could still support their problem child.
“The question is, do we abandon the National Organic Program and find a new way to identify ourselves?” Chapman asked. “It’s a genuine question. I don’t know. We feel powerless.”
Read more:
How millions of cartons of 'organic' milk contain an oil brewed in industrial vats of algae
The labels said ‘organic.’ But these massive imports of corn and soybeans weren’t.
INFOGRAPHIC: How Vertical Farming Could Help Cities Feed Themselves
As arable land decreases and urban populations increase, planners and designers worldwide have begun looking at vertical farming as a way to boost urban food security. Dickson explores vertical farming’s many benefits in an infographic packed with interesting data, including the estimate that a 30-story farm could feed 50,000 people a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet for an entire year.
INFOGRAPHIC: How Vertical Farming Could Help Cities Feed Themselves
As arable land decreases and urban populations increase, planners and designers worldwide have begun looking at vertical farming as a way to boost urban food security. Dickson explores vertical farming’s many benefits in an infographic packed with interesting data, including the estimate that a 30-story farm could feed 50,000 people a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet for an entire year. Click through to learn more about the advantages of vertical farming and some of the obstacles that are holding the non-traditional farming system back.
It's Called Vertical Farming, And It Could Be The Future Of Agriculture
The concept sounds like science fiction: instead of spreading out across acres and acres, the farms of the future will grow lettuce and strawberries inside climate-controlled, light-controlled cylinders. Less land, less water, but year-round light and perfectly controlled moisture.
NOV 4, 2017
It's Called Vertical Farming, And It Could Be The Future Of Agriculture
Ronald Holden, CONTRIBUTOR
A 20-foot vertical farm inside a climate-controlled cylinder. Courtesy Plenty.ag
The concept sounds like science fiction: instead of spreading out across acres and acres, the farms of the future will grow lettuce and strawberries inside climate-controlled, light-controlled cylinders. Less land, less water, but year-round light and perfectly controlled moisture.
The California company behind this concept, Plenty, announced this week that it will open a 100,000 square-foot farm in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, where it intends to grow pesticide-free, “backyard quality” produce for regional consumers. It's the start-up's first full-scale farm.
The plants (fruit, vegetables) grow in 20-foot tall towers inside a climate-controlled facility with LED lights without using pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or GMOs. Instead, thousands of infrared cameras and sensors collect data that is analyzed to optimize how the plants grow.
"Plenty claims its technology can achieve yields of up to 350 times greater than traditional agriculture while using 1 percent of the water and barely any land compared to conventional methods," according to a company press release.
This would sound like pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, except that Plenty has the eye of some savvy investors, including Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, who just spent $14 billion to take over Whole Foods.
Hydroponic farming already exists, albeit not on a large commercial scale.
"Research shows that hydroponic farming could well be the future of global agriculture, combining the benefits of local outdoor organic farming with the high yields of large-scale agricultural production," the company believes.
Backers of Plenty’s $200 million round, in July, in addition to Bezos, included SoftBank (via its Vision Fund); Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt (through Innovation Endeavors); DCM Ventures; Data Collective; Finistere Ventures; and Louis Bacon.
In an interview with GeekWire, Plenty CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard said Seattle’s "relative lack of access to local produce" and the region’s emphasis on healthy food made it a perfect place to expand.
“As we looked at the West Coast, Seattle was the best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally,” he explained.
But Seattle's extensive community of food lovers scoffed at the notion that the region does not have access to fresh, local produce.
"The Yakima Valley was known as America's fruit basket," one food writer complained and Puget Sound, the region surrounding Seattle, is one of the most fertile in the nation.
"I will personally organize a round table for the company with local farmers," said Audra Gaines Mulken, a photographer who works extensively with local farms. Her most recent book is the Female Farmer Project.
(By coincidence, I wrote just yesterday about experiments in Finland to incubate seeds in counter-top bioreactors.)
Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based food writer. His latest book is Forking Seattle.
I've lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest as a reporter and editor for the past 40 years, in print, broadcast, and online media. I've been writing reviews since I tasted my first Little League hot dog with yellow mustard; since then I've published five books about wine, and two about local food & drink. I think most food writers do a pretty good job describing flavors, but they don't pay enough attention to the bigger economic picture. (For example, Why suddenly all this kale? Why cider? Who's going to pick all those grapes?) Food is a business, and a big, global business at that.
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
This Is Why Jeff Bezos Is Spending Millions on an Indoor Farming Startup
At just 100,000 square feet, Plenty’s new facility will be 99 percent smaller than a typical American farm. But Plenty’s goal is to optimize every inch of that available space for ideal cultivation. Fruits and vegetables grow on 20-foot-tall towers, bathed in LED lights and connected to a wealth of data-collecting microsensors.
This Is Why Jeff Bezos Is Spending Millions on an Indoor Farming Startup
The results could very well change the way you eat fruits and vegetables
TEXT BY TIM NELSON | Posted November 3, 2017
A look at one of the 20-foot-tall towers which, bathed in LED lights, have the ability to grow fruits and vegetables. | All images are courtesy of Plenty
With the amount of farmable acreage seemingly shrinking all the time, access to fresh fruits and vegetables can be hard to come by. Small-scale produce can be prohibitively expensive, and cheaper options from far-flung corners of the globe carry a hidden environmental cost. But one well-funded startup called Plenty believes that its technology harbors the secret to bringing “backyard quality” produce to the masses, and hopes that its newest indoor growing facility in Kent, Washington, will prove it.
At just 100,000 square feet, Plenty’s new facility will be 99 percent smaller than a typical American farm. But Plenty’s goal is to optimize every inch of that available space for ideal cultivation. Fruits and vegetables grow on 20-foot-tall towers, bathed in LED lights and connected to a wealth of data-collecting microsensors
In essence, Plenty applies the latest in machine learning technology and big data processing to the age-old wisdom of crop science, continually optimizing the climate to ensure ideal flavor and nutrition. The end result is a yield of up to 300 different variants of pesticide and GMO-free produce that far outpaces traditional agricultural methods, all while using a fraction of the water or energy.
CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard hopes the new facility serves as further proof that Plenty’s mission to sustainably feed a planet of 7.3 billion is viable: “Seattle will be home to our first full-scale farm and help set the standard by which our global farm network makes locally grown, backyard-quality produce accessible to everyone.” The facility will be staffed by a team of around 50 indoor farming engineers, organic growers, and operations experts to make certain that the technological and agricultural sides of the facility work in concert.
Plenty's CEO and cofounder, Matt Barnard. | Francis Baker
While the concept of eating produce grown inside on a tower might strike the farmer’s market crowd as puzzling, a recent $235 million funding round from Bezos Expeditions (whose founder is Jeff Bezos, current CEO of Amazon and among the richest people in the U.S.) and other VC firms suggests that there might just be a future in internet of things-driven agriculture. How ’bout them apples indeed.
Urban Farming 2.0
07-11-2017
Supermarkets are finding new ways to show their commitment to locally-grown food.
Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally. Five kinds of lettuce are currently being grown and tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini will be added next year. The farm will also serve an educational purpose, offering workshops to schools in 2018.
While urban farming has been discussed in the past, major supermarkets are now making these conceptual ideas a reality. There is a range of benefits to these kinds of farms. Indoor farming can give consumers access to fresh produce year-round—even those who live in dense, urban areas. In addition to greatly reducing carbon emissions, indoor farming also uses less water than traditional farming and doesn’t require pesticides.
“Developing a healthy and high-quality nutritional pattern…is one of the challenges of the Brussels region,” Brussels Minster for Environment and Energy Céline Fremault stated in a release. “This first city farm of Delhaize is therefore an excellent initiative, which fully fits into one of Brussels’ ambitions: to increase local production.”
Earlier this year, French retailer Carrefour revealed a similar rooftop initiative to Delhaize which is managed by students of a local agricultural school. Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, similarly launched a “Help-yourself Herb Garden” in one of its shops that allowed customers to pick fresh plants. Meanwhile in Canada, IGA became the first store to sell store-grown produce in Montreal, offering 30 varieties of vegetables. Even Target in the US is piloting vertical gardens in its stores.
Infarm, a Berlin-based start-up, is trying to make this a reality for every supermarket. The company created an indoor “herb garden” for supermarkets which houses plants in a protected, nutrient-rich environment. The customer-facing farm connects to an app that monitors important factors such as pH levels and temperature.
“Behind our farms is a robust hardware and software platform for precision farming,” Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli tells TechCrunch. “Each farming unit is its own individual ecosystem, creating the exact environment our plants need to flourish.” Los Angeles-based start-up Local Roots has taken a similar approach, using shipping containers to bring urban farms to grocers, universities, and community centres. Their goal is to create a network of community-based farms across the US.
Ethically-minded consumers are becoming more health conscious and starting to question where their food comes from and the effect it has on the environment. It’s imperative that brands respond to this concern and continue to implement initiatives that reduce emissions. Brands that are creative in reducing their carbon footprint will reduce costs, tackle climate change and ultimately attract more consumers looking for fresh, high-quality food.
Source: Jwt intelligence
Unique Indoor Farm In Manhattan Grows Over 150 Crop Varieties
‘Farm.One’ is a unique indoor farm in Manhattan using technology to bring flavor and rarity year round
Unique Indoor Farm In Manhattan Grows Over 150 Crop Varieties
Linked by ilovewushu | Excerpt:
Tour Manhattan’s only indoor hydroponic farm, growing more than 100 varieties of rare herbs, edible flowers and microgreens. Sip complementary sparking wine as you taste new and unique flavors from around the world. A unique, fun experience for any local foodie or tourist in New York.
Inside our new, secret, larger facility in Tribeca, our unique farm uses LED lighting and hydroponics to grow a huge variety of culinary plants, numbering over 200 to date. The indoor grow room uses no pesticides or herbicides, and uses around 95% less water than a traditional farm. The farm supplies Michelin-starred restaurants in the city, including Atera, Daniel, Jungsik, Chef’s Table and others.
In this one-hour tour, you will have the chance to taste dozens of rare plant varieties, most of which are never available fresh in New York City. With expert guidance from our team, you will uncover the science of how plants thrive in completely-controlled conditions, and experience new flavors and ways of thinking about culinary plants.
Organic Board Decides Hydroponic Can Be Certified Organic
Organic Board Decides Hydroponic Can Be Certified Organic
National Organic Standards Board votes on whether to change federal organic standards to allow for hydroponically produced products.
Jacqui Fatka 1 | Nov 03, 2017
At the semi-annual meeting of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), front and center was the debate about whether to change the federal organic standards to allow organic produce grown hydroponically.
In a series of 8-7 votes, the NOSB voted that hydroponic and aquaponic growers can continue to market certified organic products.
The action is a recommendation from the NOSB to USDA. The National Organic Standards Board voted on four separate proposals related to soil-less production in organic:
A motion to prohibit aeroponics in organic passed 14 yes, 1 abstention.
· A motion to prohibit aquaponics in organic did not pass, with a majority voting against the motion.
· A motion to restrict how and when nitrogen can be introduced to organic container production did not pass, with a majority voting against the motion.
· A motion to prohibit hydroponics, which was defined as any container system that didn't meet the proposed requirements for organic container system did not pass, with a majority voting against the motion. However the vote was 7 in favor and 8 against.
The practice of growing fruits and vegetables in inert mediums that depend on liquid fertilizers, rather than in rich organically managed soil, has been intensely controversial. The Organic Trade Assn. actually opposes aeroponics in organic, and supports the board recommendation to prohibit this in organic.
OTA does not support a system that is entirely water-based and believes it should be prohibited in organic, but OTA did not support the recommendation as written because the Crops Subcommittee had revised the definition for hydroponics by coupling it with proposed production standards for organic container production. OTA would have supported a motion to prohibit hydroponics had NOSB retained the previously accepted definition for hydroponics.
OTA said it supports container production in organic with clear, meaningful standards, but OTA did not support the recommendation as written before the board, because it did not meet the bar for a clear consensus-based recommendation for the Agriculture Secretary.
NewFoodEconomy said when the federal government first began to explore codifying organic standards into law, soil was an important focus of their efforts.
NewFoodEconomy reported that Fred Kirschenmann, a longtime leader in sustainable agriculture, distinguished fellow at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, said, “Several of us on the board felt that soil health should be part of the requirement for certification. We had a lot of debates about that, but finally the board became convinced that this was an important part of the future of organic certification, and we made that recommendation to the National Organic Standards Board.”
The news source said attorneys at USDA pushed back, according to Kirschenmann.
“They threw it out,” they reported Kirschenmann saying . “In the report they gave back to us, they said that regulations have to be answered with a yes or a no, and requiring soil health is too complex an issue.”
As such USDA insisted on an input-oriented system certification and requires that a farmer use only fertilizers on the approved list, and avoid completely any chemical on the banned list.
Vertical Farming: The Promise, Pitfalls And The Role of Pot
One opportunity will be the growing popularity of food delivery, said Sally Rockey, head of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, which recently awarded a $1 million grant to vertical farming company Aero Farms to improve the nutritional quality of leafy greens.
Vertical Farming: The Promise, Pitfalls And The Role of Pot
10/04/17 6:20 AM By Steve Davies
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4, 2017 - Vertical farming holds great promise, but it must overcome challenges – most notably the cost of energy – in order to feed the world’s growing population, attendees were told at the recent Association for Vertical Farming Summiton the campus of the University of the District of Columbia.
Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, said that when it comes to feeding the 9 billion-plus people estimated to occupy the earth in 2050, controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) “will be part of the toolkit,” including conventional, organic, livestock and urban agriculture systems.
Ramaswamy said that one of the chief advantages of CEA – broadly speaking, growing crops indoors, including using vertically stacked layers – is its potential to harvest crops more frequently than open-field agricultural systems. Research he cited from Purdue University shows that CEA systems can produce 15 lettuce crops and six spinach crops in the time it takes to produce two in the field, and five tomato crops and four potato crops compared to one.
Sonny Ramaswamy
But Ramaswamy also said CEA systems, which have become proficient at growing leafy greens such as lettuce, arugula and basil, cannot currently fulfill the entire range of humans’ nutritional requirements. He spoke about the problem of “nutritional security,” a term he began using a few years ago instead of “food security.”
“Globally tonight, 800 million people are going to go to bed hungry,” he said. In the United States, “we still have almost 16 percent of our households that are food-insecure at some time in the year. That is about 50 million people.”
At the same time, the United States and other countries that have significant percentages of food-insecure populations are dealing with an obesity epidemic, with 1.3 billion people taking medication daily for cholesterol, diabetes or some type of metabolic disorder.
“In the U.S., we know that one of five people has to take those drugs to have some semblance of normalcy in their lives,” he said.
It will take an “all of the above” approach to address the issue of nutritional security, Ramaswamy said, pointedly disagreeing with Dickson Despommier, a prominent vertical farming advocate (and honorary member of AVF’s board) who predicted in 2009 that “if climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist.”
“I have to disagree with Professor Despommier,” an emeritus professor of microbiology and Public Health at Columbia University, Ramaswamy said. “It’s not going to ‘not exist.’” The future of agriculture will continue to be mostly “horizontal,” he said.
The most basic goal CEA must meet is one common to all businesses: making a profit. “With apologies to Bill Clinton,” whose successful 1992 run for the presidency used the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” Ramaswamy said, “It’s the market, stupid.”
“It really is about connecting the producer broadly with the consumer,” he said.
One opportunity will be the growing popularity of food delivery, said Sally Rockey, head of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, which recently awarded a $1 million grant to vertical farming company Aero Farms to improve the nutritional quality of leafy greens.
“The estimates are that in the next 10 years, close to 30 percent (of food) will be purchased online,” Rockey said at the summit. “For controlled environments, this could be a real market opportunity because if you’re going to purchase vegetables, you want fresh vegetables and fresh fruits that are available quickly, this intersection between controlled environments production and online purchasing of food could be really, really vital. As this market grows, it’s a great opportunity for vertical farmers.”
Sally Rockey
While indoor growers, including vertical farming operations, have been the beneficiary of huge investments recently – Silicon Valley startup Plenty just got a $200 million boost – CEA still represents a drop in the bucket compared to conventional ag. Figures from the last Census of Agriculture in 2012 show greenhouse production at a little over $2 billion in sales annually, compared to the overall $400 billion in sales for agriculture.
One “big, big challenge” in CEA will be energy, Ramaswamy said. Presenting figures that showed even the best LED lighting systems are only 40-50 percent efficient, Ramaswamy said, “We’ve got to have significant innovations,” he said, citing promising research at Purdue in the area of targeted LED lighting.
CEA systems are becoming more efficient, thanks in part to the growth of the legal cannabis industry, Travis Williams, vice president of marketing at Austin, Texas, lighting company Fluence Bioengineering told attendees.
In fact, Williams said, if vertical farmers want to see technological advances in their sector, they should support reform of cannabis laws.
“We would not be able to give you the technology you need at the cost you need it if it was not for the cannabis industry fueling our growth,” he said.
Williams said the company’s work to help large-scale operations such as Shenandoah Growers in Virginia – which has increased production by 25 percent and efficiency by 50 percent – would not have been possible without the explosive growth of the cannabis industry.
Williams said cannabis legalization led to the collection of an estimated $559 million in state tax revenue this year, and the cannabis market as a whole is projected to be a $50 billion/year business in a decade.
Williams urged attendees to tell their state legislators to push for cannabis legalization. Twenty-nine states have legalized recreational or medical use – or both – which leaves 21 states without any cannabis legalization laws, though some are in the process of adopting them.
“When cannabis legislation comes to your state or your country, think about how it’s going to fuel the innovation you need to be successful,” Williams said. “Barriers in the way of cannabis will be barriers in the way for you.”
Another message: Make your voice heard in Congress. That came from Bob Van Heuvelen, founder of lobbying and consulting group VH Strategies in Washington, which runs the Agricultural Innovation Alliance and is pushing for the next farm bill to include language providing assistance to urban agriculture.
Both Van Heuvelen and Ramaswamy told the vertical farming advocates they need to engage on the issue of whether indoor growers can label their foods organic. At the next meeting of the National Organic Standards Board (Oct. 31-Nov. 2), that issue is expected to come up again.
“Some of your colleagues have applied for hydroponically produced foods to be designated as organic,” Ramaswamy said. “But the traditional organics community does not want to allow that,” arguing that only foods grown in soil can be designated organic.
Dell Takes a Fresh Look At IoT With Aerofarms
Dell Takes a Fresh Look At IoT With Aerofarms
Dell has joined forces with agtech start-up Aerofarms to propagate IoT and data science in the business of growing greens.
At Dell’s IQT event in New York this week, Andy Rhodes, vice president of IoT edge computing at Dell, was joined on stage by David Rosenberg, CEO and founder of AeroFarms, to discuss how a smart warehouse full of plants exemplifies a forward-thinking IoT strategy.
‘Disruptor’ is probably a term that’s thrown around too easily in the world of technology – but in the case of AeroFarms, it’s hard to argue with that description. The company is a specialist in what it calls ‘vertical farming‘, an emerging form of agriculture that combines data science with horticulture to grow crops indoors. The result is staggering: The warehouse is 130 to 390 times more productive than a conventional farm, while using 95 percent less water.
The Aerofarms system of vertical farming (Credit: Aerofarms)
AeroFarms’ IoT-enabled vision
AeroFarms CEO David Rosenberg is on a mission to disrupt traditional agriculture. But it’s not necessarily out of a love for innovation or a desire for profit. There are more important things at stake here. “We have big problems that, as a species, we have to solve,” he said.
“We’ve lost a third of our arable land in the past 40 years. Seventy percent of our fresh water goes into agriculture. Seventy percent of fresh water contamination comes from agriculture. If you want to address water security, you need to address agriculture. Technology and data science is a big way that we’re going to get there.”
Food waste is another issue that needs tackling. Rosenberg estimates that as much as 60 percent of greens in the US spoil before they are consumed. AeroFarms’s solution is to have vertical farms disrupting traditional supply chains around the world, providing fresh vegetables to major distribution routes and population centers.
Harvesting data is the perfect recipe
Instead of using soil, water and sunlight, AeroFarms’ vertical crops are exposed to the light spectrum through LEDs, to precise nutrients through a special kind of cloth, and to hydration through a closely monitored mist.
AeroFarms’ vertical farm in Newark, New Jersey, wouldn’t be anywhere near as efficient without help from Dell’s IoT team.
“If you think of the age-old question of nature vs nurture, the world of AgTech has focussed mostly on the genetics,” said Rosenberg. “Here, we don’t focus on the genetics as much as the environmental stresses. As funny as it sounds, we actually get a plant to eat differently, sleep differently and exercise differently to change their nutrient density and shelf life.”
“We’re a farming company, but we’re also a technology company. There are thousands of sensors in our warehouse, taking hundreds of thousands of data points. The details matter, the pennies matter, so we’re trying to understand how to optimize yield, and how we can stress a plant [in the right way].”
This notion of stressing plants to develop the perfect recipe wouldn’t be possible without Dell’s edge to core to cloud IoT architecture. “Stressing the plants drives tastes and textures, from temperature [changes] to humidity to PH,” said Rosenberg. “With the Dell team, we’re capturing this information. They asked us questions [that] we weren’t asking ourselves, such as what information needs to go to which people, at what time to be valuable?'”
“That information allows our R&D team to change our algorithm and the recipe of how we grow a plant. So what goes on the edge, what goes in the core, what goes in the cloud… going use case by use case to better develop our architecture and reduce costs.”
The system exemplifies Dell’s new distributed core IoT strategy, which seeks to move analytics closer to the ‘edge’, nearer to all of the various sensors in environments just like Aerofarms’ warehouse.
Antarctic Farm Could One Day Journey to Mars
Antarctic Farm Could One Day Journey to Mars
BY TRACY STAEDTER POSTED OCT 13, 2017
Illustration of the shipping-container greenhouse that'll be providing fresh produce to Antarctic residents from February 2018 to December 2018. LSG
Antarctica is no place for a tomato. But starting in January 2018, researchers at the German Antarctic research station, Neumayer III, will begin growing not only tomatoes but also lettuces, herbs, peppers, cucumbers, swiss chard, radishes and even strawberries inside a climate-controlled shipping container. Although other indoor gardens have existed in Antarctica, the EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility will be the most advanced indoor farm on the continent — an experiment meant to push the limits of indoor agriculture, so that the technology can hold up for a long mission to Mars.
"Some of my colleagues like to say, 'It's no longer your grandmother's garden anymore,'" says Matthew Bamsey, a research associate at DLR, also known as the German Aerospace Center, and a member of the EDEN ISS team, a multipartner project focused on developing plant cultivation technologies for future use in space.
Out on the Ekström Ice Shelf in the Atlantic sector, the greenhouse will stand against Antarctica's frigid temperatures, the long dark winter and extremely low humidity. From the outside it's a simple structure, just two 20-foot (6-meter) shipping containers placed end to end. But inside, it's a high-tech oasis capable of producing 661 pounds (300 kilograms) of produce annually. To give you an idea of how much that is, in 2013, the average U.S. person consumed 272 pounds (123 kilograms) of fruits and vegetables.
Fine-tuning the operation for space is one of the main goals of the project.
"We don't want an astronaut working 16 hours a day in the greenhouse," he says.
The experiment will allow them to figure out just how much time is needed to tend the garden. Over the next year, they'll get closer to that answer.
The indoor garden is based on a soil-free growing system called aeroponics. The system, first invented in the 1920s but advanced by NASA in the 1990s, is extremely water-efficient, using 98 percent less water than soil-based gardens. Plants grow in trays on racks, with their roots suspended within a protected chamber that prevents light from entering. At regular intervals, the hanging roots are spritzed with a fine water and nutrient-rich mist. Any water not taken in by the roots is captured and recirculated.
The Future Exploration Greenhouse pictured here (not in Antarctica) is the area where the plants grow in the EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility. The greenhouse has 135 square feet (12.5 square meters) available for cultivation | BRUNO STUBENRAUCH
Sensors monitor the nutrient levels and provide data to a computer that analyzes the mix and adjusts it according to the plants being grown and their stage of growth. Cameras monitor the plant's growth, while other sensors capture temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels, which are fed to a computer that keeps the ideal levels precisely tuned. Air filters keep the environment free of bacteria and fungus, while an ultraviolet light helps sterilize the air and kill any organism not caught in the filter. Because of the sterile environment, neither insecticides nor pesticides are required.
The plants grow beneath LED lights that illuminate the leaves in blue, red and white light, which when mixed together, bathe the room in pinkish-violet sci-fi glow, says Bamsey. The lights shine for 16 hours a day and then turn off for eight hours to simulate night.
As of this writing, the greenhouse, comprising two shipping containers, is making its way by ship to Cape Town, South Africa, where it will be transferred to another ship bound for Antarctica, and due to arrive on Dec. 24, 2017. Bamsey and several of his colleagues, including DLR scientist Paul Zabel, will be there to meet the shipment and oversee its transport by tracked vehicle approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) across the ice shelf. Bamsey says the shipping containers will be placed end to end atop an 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) tall platform that will prevent the greenhouse from becoming buried in snow. One shipping container, named the Future Exploration Greenhouse, houses the plants and the other, the Service Section, contains the control systems that keep them alive.
As this drawing shows, the greenhouse will be split into three separate sections: a cold porch/airlock, a service section and the actual greenhouse | LSG
All of the DLR scientists, including Bamsey, will return home after seven weeks, with the exception of Zabel, who will stay behind at Neumayer III, along with nine other researchers. There, Zabel will keep an eye on the greenhouse, which will sit about (1,312 feet) 400 meters away from the main station. Along with making sure all of the systems are running smoothly, he'll prune the plants, harvest them when they're ready and take samples that will be sent back to partner research labs. Having some interaction with the plants provides a psychological benefit, says Bamsey. And even though a fully autonomous system is possible, the engineers likely will not design one. Previous research has shown that for people stationed in remote areas like Antarctica, tending to plants, interacting with them and just observing them improves a person's state of mind.
Bamsey referred to a 2013 South Korean study, conducted after an indoor garden was installed at the King Sejong Station on Antarctica. It found that 83 percent of station crew members found the fresh produce to be "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful" to their mental health.
The psychological benefits of having greenery in Antarctica goes back to the 1902 Discovery Expedition of the continent, led by Robert Falcon Scott, where some of the crew members grew cress and mustard in the ship's ward under natural light, says Bamsey. In some of the crewmen's journal entries, they talk of the plants, the energy and time they took to care for them and the boost to morale they provided.
"Some of the crew members and explorers of that time talk about how this was the first green material they had eaten in two years," says Bamsey.
The greenhouse has funding until the end of 2018. Produce samples will be sent back to labs in Europe to test for their nutritional value and if all goes well, the researchers will be back again for another frigid growing season.
It’s The End of “Organic” As We Know It
It’s The End of “Organic” As We Know It
After a bitterly divisive battle, the USDA has ruled that hydroponic growers can continue to be certified organic. Some say it marks the end of a still-young movement. For others, it's a new beginning.
November 2nd, 2017
by Joe Fassler Kate Cox
In Jacksonville, Florida on Wednesday, a two-decade long controversy that has the potential to change organic food production hinged on a single vote: whether or not to keep the “soil” in certified “organic.” In a series of 8-7 votes, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted that hydroponic and aquaponic growers can continue to market certified organic products.
Most Americans probably don’t think about hydroponic farms (which grow plants inside soilless greenhouses in trays of nutrient solution), and aquaponic farms (which marry hydroponics and aquaculture—or farmed fish and other aquatic organisms—to produce plants and fish crops) when they envision an organic farm. That’s because we often associate the word “organic” with a more traditional, pastoral vision of crops grown under the open air, perhaps accompanied by a red farmhouse and some cows grazing in the background.
The vote was a clear signal that the “organic” label—one with a strong public reputation and powerful market clout—is going to continue to get more inclusive.
And while that vision is far from what organic—now a more than $50 billion industry in the United States alone—has become, many organic farmers, especially the older, more traditional sort, who pioneered and advocated for the certification in the first place, want to make sure that certification extends only to this more traditional interaction with a plot of land. They feel their business—and the very value of the word “organic” itself—depends on it.
For them, Wednesday’s decision was a deeply emotional blow.
“The vibe was not mellow,” says Phil LaRocca, an organic winemaker from Forest Ranch, California, who attended the proceedings in Jacksonville.
Meanwhile, outside, a coalition of traditional, soil-based organic farmers—including Eliot Coleman, founder of Four Season Farm, who many consider to be one of the fathers of the modern organic movement—protested, brandishing “Keep the Soil in Organic” signs. LaRocca says the atmosphere at times grew “hostile” as various organic stakeholders pressed their cases. And some of those stakeholders admitted that they themselves were deeply conflicted.
“It was actually—as a long-term, 45-year organic farmer—it was a little disturbing to see a bit of hostility in the room,” LaRocca says. “And I’m not putting a judgment on that. I understand the issue and I have friends with both sides of the argument and understood both sides of the argument. So it made it very difficult for me personally to have to go through it all.”
It’s not that this decision signals any kind of immediate change. Aquaponic and hydroponic growers were already selling certified organic products, and have been doing so for years. The vote was an attempt to stop them from doing just that. But it was also a clear signal that the “organic” label—one with a strong public reputation and powerful market clout—is going to continue to get more inclusive. For some, that’s a big step in the right direction. For others, it’s a betrayal of the very values that launched a movement.
Eliot Coleman, founder of Four Season Farm, who many consider to be one of the fathers of the modern organic movement
Nearly 80 years ago, a global movement coalesced in opposition to the rapid, post-war evolution of farming practices, from traditional methods used for millennia, to commercialized, industrial-scale manufacturing methods that required less manual and animal labor and more machinery, herbicides, and fertilizer.
That movement was termed “organic farming” and the basic concept was this: Nature does it better. The farmers like Coleman who helped launch organic farming into the mainstream drew on the writings of farmer-philosophers like Liberty Hyde Baily, Rudolph Steiner, John Muir, Sir Albert Howard, and Aldo Leopold, who felt that the small, diversified farm was a “closed loop”—a managed ecosystem, even a self-sustaining organism, that produced everything it needed to consume. Animals fertilized the plants with their manure, and the plants fed the animals, and the farmer reaped the excess. Nothing was brought in from outside. Nothing was wasted. The idea was that nature already provided farmers with everything they needed, if they were just willing to be resourceful and do a little extra work.
This ancient—but increasingly unfashionable—method was posited as an alternative to what organic-minded critics called “substitution agriculture”: namely, a system that brought in what it needed from outside the farm. Petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers nourished the plants. Chemical pesticides kept bugs away. Animals, if there were any, were fed with corn and soy grown elsewhere.
What happens when an organic grower uses all the right inputs, just without any soil?
For the organic-minded, soil quality—outside the quasi-religious belief in farming as a calling and the farm as a self-enclosed cosmos—was the chief argument against substitution agriculture. Rather than using chemicals to artificially nourish plants, and keep pests at bay, organic farmers focused first and foremost on building soil health. For them, the dirt was the beginning and the end: It was why they kept animals, why they cover-cropped, why they worked so hard to diversify crops that kept balanced nutrients in the soil.
Which is why, when the federal government first began to explore codifying organic standards into law, soil was an important focus of their efforts. Some would say it was the focus.
“Several of us on the board felt that soil health should be part of the requirement for certification,” says Fred Kirschenmann, a longtime leader in sustainable agriculture, distinguished fellow at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. “We had a lot of debates about that, but finally the board became convinced that this was an important part of the future of organic certification, and we made that recommendation to the National Organic Standards Board.”
But the attorneys at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) pushed back, according to Kirschenmann.
“They threw it out,” he says. “In the report they gave back to us, they said that regulations have to be answered with a yes or a no, and requiring soil health is too complex an issue.”
The soil-first ethos requires a leap of faith: to proponents, the benefits are tangible, but they’re in the eye of the beholder
Instead, USDA insisted on an input-oriented system: Regulation would be focused on what went into the soil or not, but not on the more nebulous idea of soil “health.” While the final organic standard does stipulate that “the producer must select and implement tillage and cultivation practices that maintain or improve the physical, chemical, and biological condition of soil,” certification requires that a farmer use only fertilizers on the approved list, and avoid completely any chemical on the banned list.
Which brings us to the confused system we have today, and the argument that finally came to a head this week: Organic is supposed to promote soil health, but the terms that the stipulation uses focus on the list of chemicals used (or not). What happens when an organic grower uses all the right inputs, just without any soil?
Karen Archipley thinks the suggestion that hydroponic farming is a newfangled interloper is just wrong. In an interview with New Food Economy on Thursday by phone, she cited some impressive—and ancient—precedents: the floating Aztec gardens and the hanging gardens of Babylon.
“Our methods are not new,” she says. “Our methods date back to 600 B.C.”
“It has outcompeted soil because it’s so cheap to do.”
Despite this distinguished ancestry, Archipley—who runs Archi’s Acreage, a small hydroponic farm in Escondido, California, with her husband Colin—says she’s long felt excluded from the organic movement’s soil-worshiping sector. In her view, the reason is simple: “This whole issue has been about market share,” she says.
It’s not hard to understand why the organic vanguard would feel threatened by hydroponics. According to organic winemaker Phil LaRocca, hydroponic operations are “quicker and easier” to set up than new soil-based operations; at the same time, they can skip the onerous three-year transition period required for soil-based conventional farmers who want to start selling organic.
Soil-based advocates don’t necessarily deny this. Organic tomato grower Dave Chapman of Long Wind Farm in Vermont notes that in Europe certain crops are virtually all grown hydroponically, a massive transformation that’s taken place over the last twenty years. “It has outcompeted soil because it’s so cheap to do,” he says. According to Chapman, the real eye-opening moment for many soil-based farmers was the fact that Driscoll’s, one of the country’s biggest producers of organic berries, had switched to hydroponic.
“That was a game-changer,” he says. “Before that we thought it was a relatively minor problem.”
But that “minor problem” is now a quickly growing industry—one that, according to critics, is antithetical to the very idea of organic.
According to California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a trade group representing organic growers within the state, “hydroponic systems are not inherently better or worse than in-ground systems”
“Organic has always been about the apparently magical things that happen as a result of building and maintaining the fertility of the soil. It’s not magic—it’s mother nature at her finest. But that is the belief of the organic movement: that you get plant health and animal health and human health that is unobtainable any other way if you can work with those ecosystems,” says Chapman. “Of course, hydroponic production is the opposite of this philosophy. Which is that you give the plant what it needs, and you get great plant growth. But the downside is that nutrition is inferior and the health is inferior, the system is more vulnerable to insects and diseases so you need more pesticides and fungicides. You end up in a downward spiral. It’s like eating a bad diet for a human, so you need more medicine, but the medicine is damaging to you so you get sicker. On and on it goes.”
Coleman puts it even more bluntly:
“They are growing in the spirit of greed,” he says. “The only reason these guys want organic certification is because these guys have known for a long time that hydroponic doesn’t make people’s mouths water and no one is lining up outside their grocery stores protesting for hydroponic vegetables. These guys know the organic label is the label people want. They want to illegally become part of it.”
For all its cultural success, the organic industry is still in its economic infancy.
It’s easy to see the reverence with which traditional organic farmers speak about the soil, and their way of thinking is powerful and compelling. The problem is that not everyone agrees they’re right. The soil-first ethos requires a leap of faith: to proponents, the benefits are tangible, but they’re in the eye of the beholder. The difference they describe can be observed, even tasted, in spite of the fact that it’s not necessarily measurable by the scientific methods currently in use.
The trouble is that not everyone agrees that this advantage exists. According to California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a trade group representing organic growers within the state, “hydroponic systems are not inherently better or worse than in-ground systems.” For CCOF, it’s the more, the merrier—each approach has its pros and cons, but they’re all essentially the same thing.
Coleman has a response to that: “The whole process of certifying organics is a scam to begin with,” he says, “because the certifiers only get paid if they certify something.” In other words, in his view, the certifiers themselves have an incentive to establish a big tent.
But hydroponic growers like Karen Archipley argue that attempts to keep the soil in “organic” are not an attempt to spread the wealth, but to hoard it. In her view, the old guard’s stance is inherently undemocratic, an attitude that confines organic—and the economic benefit it confers—to a group of people who have access to farmland (increasingly an expensive luxury) in the first place.
Hydroponics, according to Colin, make “it more financially feasible for small-scale growers to make a business…. [C]ommunities in the urban environment, who have been disenfranchised from the agriculture community, can now participate.”
For his part, Coleman says that’s a stretch.
For some, a multi-pronged, diversified approach to organic is the only feasible way forward
“How does a million dollar greenhouse allow people entry?” he says. “You can do what I do with a hoe, rake, seeds. All you need is a little piece of land. Talk about ‘allowing people entry’! Imagine all the peasant farmers being told ‘you’d have better access to food if only you built this million dollar greenhouse.’”
Part of what was surely painful about the vote in Jacksonville was the sense of how far the organic community—regardless of approach—still has to go to reach mainstream acceptance. Even as the word “organic” itself has proven to have demonstrable marketing power, the fact is thatonly 1 percent of U.S. farmland is certified organic. For all its cultural success, the organic industry is still in its economic infancy.
And for some, that means a multi-pronged, diversified approach to organic is the only feasible way forward. LaRocca says that one of CCOF’s slogans has been “Make Organics the Norm”—and he feels that the only way to do that is to proceed by any means necessary, as long as the essential spirit of the movement is kept intact.
For Karen Archipley, putting limits on organic amounts to a larger failure of imagination about what the label can do and be, a way of squelching upstarts who may actually have some pretty good ideas—if only the old guys would listen.
And there you have it, the two sides of this debate.
“Why wouldn’t we encourage innovation in farming, and especially as old as this innovation is?” says Karen. “Can you imagine if Timex tried to fight the Rolex coming out, or if Timex and Rolex could try to fight the iPhone or any smartphone from having time? That’s the difference. [They’re] really trying to stop the current and I don’t understand why anyone would do that. Why wouldn’t we try to encourage this next generation of growers and say, ‘let us show you good practices?’”
Last year, at the New York Times’ “Food for Tomorrow” conference, two unlikely antagonists sat beside each other on the stage. On one side was Dan Barber, the Blue Hill chef who, perhaps more than other modern culinary master, has promoted a vision for agriculture that mimics and mirrors nature. His book The Third Plate celebrates farmers who don’t merely grow food but “grow nature”—harnessing the power of dynamic, diversified ecosystems in the pursuit of maximum health, sustainability, and taste.
On the other side, you had Kimbal Musk, the cowboy-hatted, denim-clad brother of Elon, a venture capitalist with a sustainable food fetish—and a major investor in Square Roots, a vertical farm startup launching miniature vertical farms inside low-cost, portable shipping containers. After he finished enumerating the economic and sustainability benefits, Barber answered with a simple rejoinder:
Stories related to the National Organic Standards Board:
As no-soil systems take root, “organic” reckons with its earthbound past
Can soil-free farms ever be organic?
Organic industry watchdog calls for independent investigation of USDA organic program
Carrageenan: The missing ingredient
“It’s not making me hungry,” he said.
And there you have it, the two sides of this debate. One approach is rooted in place, and tradition, and terroir—in the belief that old-school farming, based in soil, not only tastes better but satisfies deeper human appetites, a form of stewardship that transcends the pursuit of profit. On the other hand are those who have tired of the old approaches to that, who feel that existing approaches to sustainable agriculture, for their virtues, have failed to become the norm. They’re united in a desire to bring better farming to as many people as possible, and make some money at it—even if it means fundamentally reorganizing our relationship with the land, and cloistering much of agricultural production behind closed doors.
This drama is going to continue to play out. But it’s a reminder that this argument—the fact that people care, and care so deeply—is a sign of organic’s ascent, one indication that the revolution started by what Coleman calls “a bunch of old hippies” has made a lasting impression on the culture. Maybe the current tangle, involving the pioneers who built the organic movement now threatening to abandon it, is a very natural—if also very painful—by-product of that. It’s the growing pains that inevitably come alongside success. The revolution after the revolution, perhaps.
On and on it goes, indeed.
FARMHYDROPONICSNATIONAL ORGANIC STANDARDS BOARDORGANICORGANIPONICUSDA
Joe Fassler is New Food Economy's senior editor. His food safety and public health reporting has been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. Follow him @joefassler.
Kate Cox is editor of the New Food Economy. In her former life, she was a freelance health policy reporter for radio and text. Follow her @thekatecox
FreshBox Farms’ CEO Welcomes Organic Ruling, but...
FreshBox Farms’ CEO Welcomes Organic Ruling, but...
Vertical farm innovator says that more consumers are looking “beyond organic” and choosing crops grown without soil
This week, the National Organic Standards Board finally made a decision on one of the most divisive issues in the organic world: should crops grown in water, containers, or otherwise not in the ground be allowed to call themselves organic?
The decision: hydroponic and container gardens will remain eligible for organic certification.
Sonia Lo, CEO of FreshBox Farms, the nation’s largest modular vertical farm, welcomes the new ruling, but notes that consumers already are moving “beyond organic.”
FreshBox Farms uses sustainable growing enclosures that use no soil, very little water, a rigorously-tested nutrient mix and LED lighting to produce the freshest, cleanest, tastiest produce possible. FreshBox Farms’ non-GMO certified products go from harvest to the grocer’s produce section in hours, rather than days.
Lo notes that FreshBox Farms yields are better without organic nutrient use, so the Millis-based farm is not impacted by the ruling. “As organic nutrients for hydroponics become more developed, we will, of course, consider using them.”
She points out, however, that consumers are quickly learning a distinction between organic field-grown greens and non-organic indoor-grown greens, what the industry calls Beyond Organic. “And we see that consumers ARE making the Beyond Organic choice.”
“We predict three categories will move forward - field grown organic, Beyond Organic hydroponic, and organic hydroponic."
Sonia can explain why consumers are choosing greens grown indoors, why this field is growing (*no pun intended) and how FreshBox Farms' template farm is among the nation's most efficient.
Freight Farms Expands Into International Markets and New Business Sectors
Freight Farms, manufacturer of commercial-grade hydroponic farms built inside of shipping containers, today reported company growth to accommodate the increasing demand from new business sectors, and international markets. As the company continues to thrive, Freight Farms also announced a corporate expansion to the South End Exchange neighborhood of Boston.
With the new office, comes a new company direction. Small business farmers have historically shown the most interest in the company's flagship product, the Leafy Green Machine™ (LGM™), to start or expand their business. However, over the past several months, Freight Farms has experienced widespread interest from larger entities. Restaurants, schools, universities, corporations, municipalities and non-profits are all buying LGMs™. In the past year, sixteen businesses and campuses launched Leafy Green Machines™. Additionally, Freight Farms has been working with major institutional food service providers Compass Group and Sodexo. By focusing on this channel, Freight Farms hopes to bring the LGM™ to many more communities, spreading sustainable farming methods to a broader audience.
"Local food is in high demand, and schools and businesses are prioritizing health, wellness and engagement now more than ever. The LGM™ fits seamlessly in with their goals, and we are re-focusing to meet the demands of a new market -- it's a very dynamic time to be in ag tech," said Brad McNamara, CEO and co-founder, Freight Farms.
"An important piece for Sodexo is our 'Better Tomorrow Plan,' which specifically focuses on individuals, our communities and our environment. Freight Farms has given us a great opportunity to have that engagement with students on a higher level, especially with sustainability," said Heather Vaillette, district manager of campus services and independent schools, Sodexo.
As Freight Farms continues to grow, it will not turn its back on the small business farmers who gave it its start. This channel is still growing as traditional farmers adopt Freight Farm's technology. With an LGM™, farmers can extend their business year-round and provide crop protection in the face of increasingly extreme weather patterns.
"There are significant environmental benefits to farming in a hydroponic system, which allows farms to use 90 percent less water than traditional methods," said Jon Freidman, President and co-founder, Freight Farms. "The contained environment also eliminates the need for herbicides or pesticides, and the ability to farm anywhere reduces the impact of food transportation. As our user base expands to larger organizations, we look forward to seeing sustainable produce spread to new markets."
For more information:
Brad McNamara
Freight Farms
Tel: 339-788-0128
Publication date: 10/31/2017
Making The Case for Hydroponics and Aquaponics as USDA Organic Certified
Making The Case for Hydroponics and Aquaponics as USDA Organic Certified
A look back at how the Coalition for Sustainable Organics has worked to keep hydroponics and aquaponics as USDA organic-certified production methods.
Originally published in Issue 14, July 2016
Organic hydroponic and aquaponic growers are waiting for the results of a National Organic Program task force report which is scheduled for release this month. Members of the NOP Organic Hydroponic and Aquaponic Task Force were appointed last fall to examine hydroponic and aquaponic production practices and their alignment with USDA organic regulations. The task force includes members who are USDA organically-certified hydroponic growers.
Hydroponic and aquaponic growers are concerned that the report may contribute to the overturning of the long-standing USDA policy to certify their operations. The reason for this concern is that there is an effort by some field growers to stop the organic certification of hydroponic and aquaponic growers by USDA.
Photos courtesy of Coalition for Sustainable Organics
Lee Frankel, executive director of Coalition for Sustainable Organics, said the organization was formed in March 2016 to give growers a platform to preserve their ability to choose the most appropriate growing method, including those where the plant is not grown in the outer crust of the Earth, to meet their site-specific conditions when producing organically.
“The coalition members believe that sustainability and using natural inputs are the pillars of the organic philosophy and movement,” he said. “For instance, some of the initial members are from Arizona and southern California, where water availability is a major issue. Being able to grow hydroponically helps these growers use up to 10 times less water to be more sustainable.”
The coalition currently has 35 members and includes growers from the United States, Mexico and Canada. Some of these organic growers produce in the field as well as hydroponically.
Frankel said the supply of organic products is becoming more international.
“Nearly one-third of all USDA-certified operations are now outside the United States,” he said. “USDA sets the standards and determines what inputs can and cannot be used, regardless of country or method of production. USDA then accredits certifiers to inspect operations around the world.
“Opponents have cited the fact that there are a number of other countries that have a ban on hydroponic organic products. But if you examine the matter more closely, the issue is often a question of semantics. For example, growers in Canada and even in some of the Nordic countries in the European Union can grow organically in containers despite a ban on hydroponics in their regulations.”
Opposition to hydroponic, aquaponic production
Frankel said one of the main opposition groups pushing for the changes in USDA organic rules is Keep the Soil in Organic. The spokesperson for the group is David Chapman, who operates Long Wind Farmin Vermont. Chapman is a member of the NOP Organic Hydroponic and Aquaponic Task Force.
“Other groups that have spoken out against hydroponic organic production include many of the organic trade associations and organic certifiers in the northeastern part of the United States,” said Frankel. “Some of the certifiers have been working with field growers for a long time so they feel it is in their best interest to support their current customers.”
Using hydroponic production methods has allowed some organic growers to use up to 10 times less water and to be more sustainable.
While there is a philosophical debate as to what organic growing does or does not mean, Frankel said there is also an economic component.
“Retailers and consumers are voting with their pocketbooks,” he said. “They appreciate a variety of flavorful and available hydroponic and aquaponic organic products on a consistent basis that meet their expectations for produce grown without synthetic pesticides.
“Sustainability and economics go hand in hand. As inputs are reduced, seasons are extended and yields are increased, enabling growers to reduce their costs.”
Frankel said another benefit to growing in containers is that it is really scale neutral.
“It allows for people who are just getting started, who were not fortunate enough to inherit a family farm or are in urban areas with high land costs, to be able to grow organically,” he said.
Changes to current standards
Frankel said USDA selected members for the NOP task force from a cross-section of people in the organic industry. They represent a broad range of technical expertise, knowledge and philosophies to examine the current regulations.
“These people were tasked with helping clarify the regulatory issues and to describe the current technologies in use,” he said. “I expect that the task force will describe how container, hydroponic and aquaponic production systems operate, how they meet the current standards and identify different interpretations of the regulations.
“The task force is not technically supposed to make recommendations. The task force is analyzing whether the production technologies used today meet current USDA regulations, standards and laws. The task force will also determine whether any areas within those regulations may need to be updated, revised or defined based on their findings.”
The Coalition for Sustainable Organics includes growers from the United States, Mexico and Canada. Some of these organic growers produce in the field as well as hydroponically in greenhouses.
Frankel said once the report is released, the National Organics Standards Board will study the document and determine if it would like to recommend changes to the current regulations. NOSB has traditionally sought input and testimony from the organic industry prior to making recommendations on any proposed changes or modifications.
“If NOSB votes to forward recommendations to USDA, USDA would then translate those recommendations into formal proposed regulations and open them up to public comment,” he said. “USDA would then respond and would incorporate meaningful comments into the final rule.”
Time for growers to respond
Frankel said release of the task force report will be another opportunity for hydroponic growers to tell their story to prevent NOSB from starting the process to push the growers out of the organic market.
“Organic-certified hydroponic and aquaponic growers need to make a case about the validity of what they are doing,” he said. “In addition to their production methods being thousands of years old, USDA has long recognized the legitimacy of these systems. The systems have helped to grow demand for organics while reducing inputs and opening the market for new growers.
“Most critically from a philosophical perspective, these production systems use the same biological processes as those of organic field growers.”
Frankel said growers have a number of ways of bringing attention to their rightful place in the organic industry.
“Growers need to participate in the all-important public comment periods in the rulemaking process,” he said. “Growers can have their retail customers share their stories through company newsletters. Highlighting growing operations with CSAs (community supported agriculture) or reaching out to the local press can help spread a common message while building a grower’s own business. Hosting farm visits is often the easiest way to directly show how a grower’s operation is following the organic principles of cycling nutrients, eliminating synthetic pesticides and conserving resources such as land and water.”
Frankel said these farm visits for fellow growers, certifiers, elected officials, trade association staff, USDA officials and even NOSB members have proven to be an effective method to dispel any misconceptions spread by opponents of these organic production systems.
“From the coalition’s point of view, everyone deserves organics,” he said. “Containers are an integral part of a more resilient production system that allows for growers of all sizes and economic backgrounds to produce organic products that an increasing number of consumers are demanding.”
For more: Coalition for Sustainable Organics,
(619) 587 45341
info@coalitionforsustainableorganics.org; http://coalitionforsustainableorganics.org.
David Kuack is a freelance technical writer in Fort Worth, Texas; dkuack@gmail.com.