Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
Futuristic Vertical Farming Helps Plants to 'Overcome Hostile Environments' in the Middle East
Futuristic Vertical Farming Helps Plants to 'Overcome Hostile Environments' in the Middle East
December 29, 2017
Source: Associated Press
A number of entrepreneurs in the Gulf are now banking on vertical indoor farming and other alternative ways to grow food in the Middle East, where traditional farming becomes a challenge due to harsh climatic conditions.
One such vertical indoor farm has just opened the business in Dubai and claims to be the first of its kind in the region.
"It's an excellent use of space, but more importantly you're overcoming that hostile environment of climate, weather and the heat as well. So you're giving the plant exactly what it needs so you can grow it 365 days per year," said Omar Al Jundi, founder, and CEO of Badia Farms.
Indoor farming isn't a new technology, but not many have been set up for commercial purposes in the Gulf.
The vertical indoor farm is just one of several private investment ventures focused on alternative agriculture in the UAE.
According to local government data, Dubai imported almost 34-million tonnes of food last year; and a figure like this is what projects like the vertical farm are trying to make a dent into.
Meanwhile, authorities have been investing in research for decades, and they're mindful of the challenges presented by vertical farming.
"This is a system which is very sensitive and needs a lot of maintenance. And needs also a lot of technical skills, so which make him a little bit, very difficult to implement.
"But actually if we have these capacities, if you have these facilities, this will be the best system and will be the technology of the future," said Dr. Abdelaziz Hirich, a horticulture scientist at the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture.
While the founders of Dubai's new vertical farm agree that setting up a business can be tricky, they're confident that the idea is scalable.
"The project is high-capex but then once you run it the operation costs are pretty minimal. So it's extremely exciting because this is the beginning of the farming revolution in this part of the world," concluded Al Jundi.
Growing The Farming Scene
Growing The Farming Scene
Mr Lionel Wong (left) and Mr Terence Tan. PHOTO: TEMASEK POLYTECHNIC
Duo improving local produce with problem-solving capacities learned in school
Jan Lee | Jan 02, 2018
Does lettuce grow from seeds?
This was one of the many questions Mr. Terence Tan and Mr. Lionel Wong, both 30, have received in the course of their work as co-founders of Upgrown Farming Company.
The answer is yes.
But the two Temasek Polytechnic (TP) alumni, who graduated in 2007, were shaken by the question.
Mr Tan said: "There is such a complacent attitude towards food here that some people do not even know how vegetables are grown."
The friends pursued their degrees at the University of Queensland in Australia, where they were made aware of food security issues and the relatively lower quality of produce here.
Mr Wong said: "During our time there, we were exposed to the local farming and fresh produce scene.
"When we returned to Singapore, we realised there was a significant disparity in the quality and value for money of vegetables here as compared with in Australia."
To improve local produce and counter Singapore's dependence on food imports - over 90 per cent of food consumed here is imported - the pair, who studied biotechnology in TP, co-founded Upgrown four years ago.
With two other co-founders, Upgrown consults on, designs and builds farms with technology that allows crops not naturally found here to thrive and be harvested.
Through mimicking natural conditions, such as sunlight via modified lights with adjusted wavelengths, the co-founders have seen non-native varieties of leafy greens and herbs introduced to local farming through their projects.
Superfood kale and more exotic species such as spicy mizuna, a Japanese vegetable with a wasabi aftertaste, are now available locally via their clients' farms.
PROBLEM-SOLVING
They credit their success to the unique problem-solving capacities cultivated at TP, where they had to approach their studies with a problem-based learning approach.
Mr Tan said: "We had to apply our skills to solve real-world problems with practical solutions."
While Upgrown has about seven projects locally, it is also active in the region, with projects in China, Japan and the Middle East.
As urban farming gains awareness in Singapore, the pair hope to inspire more people to join farming.
Upgrown has seen an increase in interest from polytechnic and university students for internship opportunities in the past two years. It has also hosted over 10 groups of secondary school and polytechnic students at its office to showcase modern farming.
Mr Tan said: "If you go out and ask around now, who actually wants to be a farmer? So, part of our job is to reinvent farming, make it cool and entice younger people to join us."
The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) Has Named The TotalGrow Pure Flowering 200 Lamp Winner of a 2018 AE50 Award.
St. Joseph, Michigan. – The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) Has Named The TotalGrow Pure Flowering 200 Lamp Winner of a 2018 AE50 Award.
AE50 awards honor the year’s most innovative designs in engineering products or systems for the food and agriculture industries. The Pure Flowering Lamp will be featured in the January/February 2018 special issue of ASABE’s magazine Resource: Engineering & Technology for a Sustainable World. For more details visit www.asabe.org/AE50
TotalGrow’s chief biologist, Jeff Mastin, shared, “We are pleased and honored to receive this award. The Pure Flowering Lamp capitalizes on the spectral precision, efficiency and longevity of LEDs and TotalGrow’s extensive experience in the horticultural industry to provide this industry-leading solution for photoperiodic lighting to control the timing of flowering of daylength-sensitive crops. Increasing the awareness of this opportunity to significantly reduce power consumption and improve growth is a very valuable opportunity for all involved.”
Companies from around the world submit entries to the annual AE50 competition and up to 50 of the best products are chosen by a panel of international engineering experts. The judges select innovative products that will best advance engineering for the food and agriculture industries.
The AE50 awards program emphasizes the role of new products and systems in bringing advanced technology to the marketplace. These engineering developments help farmers, food processors and equipment manufacturers increase efficiency, enhance quality, improve safety, and increase profits.
Resource, a magazine geared to agricultural, biological and food system engineers worldwide, is produced by ASABE. The magazine is read by thousands involved in the agricultural, food and biological industries. Read more at www.asabe.org/Resource.
ASABE is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to the advancement of engineering applicable to agricultural, food, and biological systems. Further information on the Society can be obtained by visiting www.asabe.org/.
For more information on TotalGrow horticultural lighting products visit totalgrowlight.com or contact jeffm@venntis.com.
Jacob Eisenberg Visits Japan Plant Factory Association (JPFA)
Jacob Eisenberg Visits Japan Plant Factory Association (JPFA)
DECEMBER 28, 2017 URBAN AG NEWS
By Jacob Eisenberg, Editor of Agri-Futures
View of JPFA and neighboring city skyline
The Mecca of all vertical farming can be found an hour outside Tokyo, a city often heralded as the world’s largest metropolitan area. The Japan Plant Factory Association (JPFA) sits on a quiet plot next to the Chiba University campus.
Across from three towering apartment buildings and a sprawling UNIQLO mall, the JPFA greenhouses sit translucently illuminated on the boundary of a dense city center and quiet suburb surrounding the agricultural campus. Large crows sit quietly in the branches of the beautifully pruned dwarf tree orchard of the university — and for a few moments, it becomes easy to forget the traumatic commute in a “sardine can” — referred to colloquially as the Tokyo subway system.
The notion of indoor agriculture often invokes feelings of food far removed from nature — confined to the inside of a dark urban building or warehouse. However, I found it fitting to see the center of indoor agriculture actually situated at the crossroads of these two natural and urban settings.
Chiba University growing facilities
From the outside, there is little to differentiate the transparent greenhouses and dark industrial sheds from any other small farm common around the periphery of Tokyo. And with the exception of a small sign, it’s easy to walk right by the entrance of the JPFA visitor center. It is truly a humble facility from the outside — but inside is a far different story.
A cornerstone of industry innovation
Since 2010 the JPFA has helped to test and research viable solutions to current problems related to food, the environment, energy, and resource use. Their work has helped to educate the development and dissemination of sustainable plant factory systems — that are both resource efficient and environmentally friendly.
With 6 different testing greenhouses and two fully enclosed plant factory facilities, the JPFA works closely as platform between the Japanese government and over 50 private companies to develop, manage and innovate the plant factory space. While their newest plant factory is under construction, their low cost, 10-layer cultivation facility produces 3000 heads of lettuce — every single day.
But what separates the JPFA from others in the plant factory space isn’t its technology per se, it is the platform it offers to help innovate the space.
The JPFA bridges the common innovation gap as an educational institution between private and public resources. In addition to working with dozens of commercial agricultural companies, the JPFA partners with the Japanese government to develop separate agricultural solutions for an aging Japanese farm workforce.
This has allowed the JPFA to become an aggregator in this highly fragmented and competitive industry. By collecting insights from technical consulting with private companies and receiving grants from the national government, the JPFA is perfectly situated to test, research and educate a market hungry for solutions. And interest is growing. The JPFA has a couple thousand visitors annually from many countries around the world — all eager to learn more for application in the public and private sectors.
Dr. Toyoki Kozai
After taking a brief tour of the facility and greenhouses, I had the pleasure to speak with arguably the father of the vertical farming industry, Dr. Toyoki Kozai.
“Plant Factories (at this point) will likely never be viable to grow large scale crops like wheat, corn and rice. But they could have a great impact on producing vegetables, medicinal herbs, cash crops and possibly fruits and nuts with dwarf tree varieties”.
Dr. Kozai was modest in our conversation, but his contributions to the industry have been immense. Since 1973, Dr. Kozai has helped pioneer the understanding of plant biology and physiology across different indoor growing systems. He has published dozens of academic studies documenting everything from the optimum light spectrum exposure to full automation with AI robotics.
While our conversation covered a dizzying array of industry topics, I wanted to briefly share his response to my question about the biggest continued issues in developing the industry. Since he is a premier thought leader, I was curious to know what challenges are anxiety provoking enough to keep him up at night and motivated to find solutions for.
- Keeping up with different farming systems. There is no definitive growing guide to using different systems with the same plants — and sensitive quality controls can change drastically with increased space/density affecting airflow and light.
- Scalability from an operations and business side is precarious since it is also based on the optimal size of a facility — and that is a factor that hasn’t been well defined either.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Dr. Kozai if he was optimistic about plant factories changing the food industry and he immediately prefaced his answer with a solemn “no”.
However he went on to explain that “Plant Factories (at this point) will never be viable to grow large scale crops like wheat, corn and rice. But they could have a great impact on producing vegetables, medicinal herbs, cash crops and possibly fruits and nuts with dwarf tree varieties”.
Test propagation of tomatoes in new harvesting system and soil medium
At the epicenter of indoor agriculture innovation, my visit to the JPFA highlighted the real shortcomings of a food industry often reimagined, rather than fully understood. Indoor agriculture faces many critical challenges before it can be truly revolutionary — let alone viable.
It is also much easier to understand why organizations like the JPFA are so critical for developing this early industry. With forefront concerns from industry leaders like Dr. Kozai on what cultivation practices even work, testing and collaboration are more necessary than ever.
By Jacob Eisenberg, Editor of Agri-Futures
New Jute Plug
New Jute Plug
These organic plugs are made of Jute.
It is a versatile material. The plants from which jute is obtained mainly occur in warm, humid areas such as Bangladesh, China, and India. In the Netherlands, we also used it within the industry, but the production of jute decreased in the early 1970s. Partly due to the emergence of the petrochemical industry. Due to the environmentally-friendly nature of jute, production has now become a little more attention.
Jute and Hydroponics
Within the hydroponics cultivation, it could be a new 100% sustainable and biodegradable plug. The latest jute products are characterized by the use of jute mixed with patented water storage flakes, which combination allows optimum moisture and air balance in the plug. If necessary, the carrier can easily be removed from the soil or plant and is fully compostable. It has long been known that the water absorption capacity of Sisal and Jute natural fiber composites is high.
The natural fibers are hydrophilic, allowing them to absorb moisture more quickly and turn it off. Various studies have been conducted into the water absorption capacity of these composites. But if you want to retain the moisture you need, for example, modern SAPs, polymers based on acrylic acid or methacrylic acid, which has been polymerized together with an "internal crosslinking agent". This is a substance that makes connections between the polymer molecules so that they form a three-dimensional network that can swell but not dissolve in water. The polymers are partially neutralized, for example with sodium or potassium hydroxide. The remaining acid groups and the sodium or potassium ions ensure the retention of products. But it does play a role in the possible interactions with nutrients.
What is clear is that this jute plug is characterized by the use of jute and patented water storage bio-flakes which combination allows an optimized moisture and air balance. So no doubt they have found an optimal solution for making the plug suitable for each breeding phase, and it is also available in different variations and sizes.
If you would like more information or a free sample go to our site Hydroponics-Nederland
Going Beyond Organic With Vertical Hydroponic Farming
Going Beyond Organic With Vertical Hydroponic Farming
Crop One Holdings (COH) farms, called FreshBox Farms, deliver fresh produce to stores within 24 hours of harvest. The company aims to address the need for a local, fresh, and sustainably produced food supply through vertical hydroponic farming in Millis, Massachusetts.
With 54 percent of the world’s population residing in urban areas—expected to increase to about 66 percent by 2050, according to the 2014 Revision of World Urbanization Prospect—vertical farming projects strive to expand production on and in buildings and vertical structures. In doing so, growers can reduce their agricultural footprint on the environment and address food security of the urban population.
COH vertical farming units grow modularly and use custom-engineered hydroponic systems to produce their leafy vegetables. They can substitute up to 19 acres of farmland with 29.72-square-meter (320-square-feet) growing units. The units use 1/2500th of the amount of water typically used by field-based growing, and due to their farms’ proximity to their urban consumers, they also have a reduced carbon footprint. The COH’s FreshBox Farms produce are available in 30 locations in the Greater Boston Area within the 100 miles radius from the farm.
Food Tank had the opportunity to speak with Crop One Holdings CEO Sonia Lo about the origins of the organization and how it hopes to solve current food system issues impacting the cities of the United States and go “Beyond Organic.”
Food Tank (FT): What was the inspiration behind establishing Crop One Holding (COH)?
Sonia Lo (SL): Crop One is the successor company to a concept stage venture founded by Jim Wilson, a great visionary who was among the first to propose that crops could be grown in modified shipping containers.
I was an early investor in the company. First, I was intrigued by the potential of using modified shipping structures—it was a ground-breaking idea, no pun intended. But not only was I drawn to Jim’s technological innovation, I had also spent some time as a personal chef, so the foodie in me was hooked as well. So, I stepped in to take the venture to the next level and we rebranded to Crop One. We’ve now built a scale-level farm and are one of only two vertical farmers in the industry running our farm at a profit.
FT: COH uses the hydroponics technology for its crop production. What are some of the advantages hydroponics has over aquaponics or aeroponics?
SL: Hydroponics is the most well proven of the three technologies and the least expensive.
FT: Could you explain the crop production procedure followed at COH?
SL: We are a seed-to-harvest company. Many hydroponic growers use third-party seedlings but we grow our own from seed because we want to be able to select the cultivars we produce for sale and because it means that we know our seedlings are free of pests/pathogens before we plant them to grow out to full height. Our production is entirely based in water, which we dose with micro-nutrient levels (the precise amount that each plant needs), and also plant our seeds in a soil-less growth medium, ensuring optimum cleanliness. We also use no pesticides, herbicides, fungicides—no ‘cides for that matter, at all. Finally, we grow in a ‘clean-room’ environment, mimicking high-tech operations. Our environment is so clean and precisely managed that our waste water comes out completely clean—cleaner than the local potable tap water!
FT: In one of your interviews, you have mentioned that COH products are “Beyond Organic.” Could you explain this label?
SL: Organic produce that is field-grown may not use pesticides but it is allowed to be grown with herbicides and can also be grown with fertilizer that is full of pathogens. Organic also generally uses soil—which may harbor pests and transmit pathogens. Our products are grown in the cleanest, most precise environment as possible and does not use soil. Many people prefer organic produce because of the perception that is clean and healthier but organic produce, for example, is often not recommended for people with compromised immune systems because it’s not as clean as conventionally grown. Our product is ‘Beyond Organic’ in that it is extremely fresh (and by implication, very healthy because phytonutrients in produce start to decay upon harvest—we offer our produce within 24 hours of harvest; most produce is served within 7 to 17 days of harvest across the U.S.) and clean, without the use of chemical controls. We are also unique in being kosher certified as a vertical farmer—this means that we are insect free—and very clean.
FT: Lack of access to food has become a central problem in some of the major cities and urban areas in the U.S. How does COH hope to address such food system problems?
SL: Our food is grown and served within what is known as a hyper-local radius (fewer than 100 miles). Food is considered local in the U.S. if it is produced (not necessarily grown, but perhaps processed), within 400 miles of the point of consumption. Our hyper-local growing allows for distribution, year-round, of produce for even the most inclement of climates. Our unit economics also allows us to be a low-cost provider of healthy greens, something most vertical farmers won’t be able to do.
FT: Vertical farming uses less land area and comparatively less water than conventional farming. What do you think are the major concern areas in this form of production (vertical hydroponic farming) that COH hopes to work on?
SL: Energy is our largest cost. Up to 70 percent of our production cost is energy and we focus on reducing our energy usage every day.
FT: How does COH hope to grow in terms of technology; variety, quantity, and quality of the product; and expansion, in future?
SL: Our scale farms will have a good deal of software and computer vision capability because what we manually inspect today will have to go over to machine based inspection. The quality of the product is always a concern and we will seek to continue to obtain kosher certification for all our farms. Our product offerings are expanding to include packaged products as well. Finally, our geographic expansion will be growing to 9 farms in our current pipeline and then ultimately to over 25 farms across the U.S. as a whole.
Ikea Creates Sustainable Indoor Garden To Help You Grow Veggies Triple Fast
Ikea Creates Sustainable Indoor Garden To Help You Grow Veggies Triple Fast
Posted by Jill Ettinger | Senior Editor, LIVEKINDLY | Featured in VegNews, The Huffington Post, MTV, Reality Sandwich, EcoSalon, and Organic Authority.
Los Angeles, CA | Contactable via jill@livekindly.co
Jan 2, 2018
Ikea may have just made your life easier. No, really. While you’ll still need to find your mini toolset and have some alcohol nearby to console you as you build away into the night, this one’s actually a game-changer, even if you never thought you could have an indoor garden.
Space10, the design lab for Swedish furniture giant Ikea, has just revolutionized the home garden. In particular, it’s targeting homes without a spoonful of soil anywhere on the property. And it’s just what you’d expect from the modern and DIY-focused home furnishings store and then some.
Earlier this year at the September London Design Festival, Ikea revealed a prototype for Lokal, its mini indoor garden that can grow herbs and fresh greens inside your home in Ikea’s uniquely compact and edgy style. No sunlight? No problem. It takes a futuristic slant on the kitchen garden–a bit of a science and a bit of sci-fi all wrapped in one delicious salad grower that can grow food pretty much anywhere there’s a power outlet.
The idea is to “explore how Ikea could develop a new, local supply chain for its own food,” Space10 spokesperson Simon Caspersen told Business Insider.
The indoor farming system relies on hydroponics (water) and LED lights in a climate-controlled box. The LED lights mimic natural sunlight but can actually increase production with crops growing three times as fast as they would outdoors, Ikea claims. And that speedy growth means the system requires 90 percent less water than required by outdoor (or soil-based indoor) gardens, making it super sustainable for growing greens and herbs.
And these gardens full of healthy food are sure to sell out, because, as anyone who’s ever put together Ikea furniture knows, you need to be healthy, strong, and energized to do it.
3D Printing Saves Time and Money in Urban Farming Product Design and Prototyping
3D printing technology has been used in the agriculture industry in various applications, to help create small-scale organic farms in developing countries, make cost-effective tools and plant crops, and set up urban gardens.
3D Printing Saves Time and Money in Urban Farming Product Design and Prototyping
by Sarah Saunders | 6 hours ago | 3D Printers, 3D Printing, Business |
3D printing technology has been used in the agriculture industry in various applications, to help create small-scale organic farms in developing countries, make cost-effective tools and plant crops, and set up urban gardens. Brooklyn-based Farmshelfwants to make it easy for anyone to grow their own food, and has developed an autonomous system, complete with custom 3D printed parts, that makes it possible for individuals, restaurants, and residential communities to do so on-site.
While the team at Farmshelf had its end goal in mind from the start, they knew it would be difficult to see it come to fruition. In order to set up autonomous processes involving growing organisms, they would need to quickly and cost-effectively manufacture, then test, plenty of customized tools, like mounting brackets and plant hangings, which would also meet the engineering requirements for the various components and subsystems.
Farmshelf plant pod designs loaded into Ultimaker Cura.
As more conventional methods of manufacturing would be too expensive, and could easily throw the whole project off schedule if there were any unforeseen issues, Farmshelf turned to 3D printing to get the job done.
Andrew Shearer, CEO and Co-Founder of Farmshelf, said, “As a company, you can now look at 3D printing as a way to involve more people in the building process, and involve more in the prototyping and dreaming process, thanks to how easy it is.”
A close-up of a Farmshelf plant pod.
In order to create custom parts for testing, as well as refine its hardware and software platform, Farmshelf integrated Ultimaker 2+ 3D printers into the design process. The 3D printers gave the team the freedom, and the budget, to develop and produce multiple design iterations for its large system, as well as the custom, modular parts that went into it.
Farmshelf was able to use Ultimaker’s 3D printing technology for every single project stage, from design and laboratory research to prototyping and production of its “functioning, plant-ready prototypes.”
“As we approached prototyping all of these parts, Ultimaker proved to be a great solution,” Shearer said. “For all the different needs we’ve had, from prototyping to small batch, short-run production parts, this technology enabled us to push forward our timelines, and keep this company on the fast track. It is always tough to build hardware, but Ultimaker makes it a lot easier.”
Andrew Shearer checking on plant pods.
If Farmshelf had been forced to outsource the work, they would have had to shell out a lot of money for supplies, services, and materials; but, since the team kept its Ultimaker 2+ 3D printers on-site, they only had to purchase filament for the prototypes. In addition, the design iteration process would have been much slower, since they would have had to wait weeks, and possibly even months, for new custom parts.
“Without access to the Ultimaker printers, we would have had to resort to using off the shelf components, and would have had to design our product around those off the shelf components. Or worse, we would have had to extensively machine parts using CNCs, which can be a time-consuming and expensive process,” said Farmshelf’s Product Designer Jaeseong Yi. “Having the Ultimaker machines really empowered us in our design process.”
Because Farmshelf used 3D printing technology to develop its autonomous system, it had the freedom to quickly, and inexpensively, customize parts. The team was also able to create 3D printed functional prototypes, in order to test their products through, as Ultimaker put it, “entire growth cycles of plant pods.”
“The Ultimaker 3D printers, in the simplest terms, made it even possible for us to build early Farmshelf prototypes. Without them, given the number of plastic parts that we use in the system that are custom, I cannot even imagine how many tens of thousands of dollars it would have cost us to make those sets of parts,” said Gabe Benton, Farmshelf’s botanist and the lead Ultimaker operator in the early stages of the business.
Custom parts printed on the Ultimaker 2+.
Thanks to 3D printing, the team had an efficient, cost-effective product expansion process as well, and was able to install, and exhibit, several beta models of its innovative product at various public sites, including a historical, iconic location in New York – Grand Central Station.
Claus Meyer, a renowned chef, and co-founder of Noma in Denmark, invited Farmshelf to install three of its functioning autonomous units as an experiment in the station, and because the team had saved time and money by 3D printing its plant pods and system parts, they were able to accept his invitation far before they had planned on introducing its system to the public. The experiment was a success, and Meyer’s Grand Central restaurant, the Great Northern Food Hall, was able to use Farmshelf’s prototypes to harvest several leafy greens and microgreens. Now, the team is working to expand beyond its initial concept, and continue harvesting a future for urban farming.
Let us know what you think about this, and other 3D printing topics, at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below.
Fastidious Farming
Fastidious Farming
Lee Pitts | December 29, 2017
Farm wives will like the bit of news that farming may soon go dirtless, at least according to a company called Indoor Farms of America. There will be no more dirty clothes to wash or messes to clean up when your hubby forgets to leave his mud in the mudroom. Indoor Farms of America has just built the first 100 percent solar-powered vertical aeroponic indoor farm in the world. Talk about "no-till" farming, this news should have John Deere shaking in its shorts.
The company announced this "major milestone for indoor farming" in Las Vegas, and that's fitting because it sounds like a BIG gamble. But Indoor Farms of America has sold their indoor farms all over the world, in places like the Yukon, Dubai and West Africa where they can "grow over double the yield of anything else in the world." Indoor Farms of America insists "containerized farming will allow local people to have access to daily fresh herbs and greens that they never experienced before, all year long, no matter the weather."
It does sound like an easier way to make a hard living but personally, I'll believe it when an indoor grown pumpkin wins the biggest pumpkin prize next Halloween, or a giant zucchini grows so large they have to remove the roof of the indoor farm to get the sizable squash out.
If this way of farming takes hold there will be no more clodhoppers, punkin' pilers, stubble jumpers, pea pickers, hoe men, plow chasers, cotton backs or dirt farmers. The price of farmland in Iowa will plummet and farm dogs, who before got to ride around in a pickup and explore the world, will now just mope under the porch all day.
I shouldn't be surprised, everything else is moving indoors. Chickens and hogs have been raised inside for decades and more "hoop-houses" are being used to raise cattle inside. The marijuana growers started all this by developing the technology to grow pot indoors to hide it from the cops. But indoor farming brings with it a whole new bunch of problems, like how do you know how good your crop is compared to your neighbors if you can't see it?
Indoor farming means no more ditch banks, tractor pulling contests or rubber irrigating boots that leak. Instead of rednecks and brown faces covered with skin cancer this new breed of farmer will be pasty white from being inside all day. If they want to fit in with the old traditional farmers who meet every morning at the coffee shop two hours before sun-up they'll have to spend some serious time in a tanning booth. The farm workers will be easy to distinguish from the old clodhoppers in bib overalls and steel-toed boots … they'll be the ones wearing shorts and flip-flops. The pickers will be able to harvest tomatoes and potatoes standing up. And what's the worst that can happen, a broken beaker might fall on their toes? It will be hard, however, to tell the indoor farm managers from the suited-up, soft shoe bankers who financed this fiasco.
Because there's no dirt, farm wives won't even have to change clothes when they come home from their day job to go to work on the farm. I suppose it's possible that a grocery store cashier might go to work in the hog house with her Piggly Wiggly badge still on.
Indoor farming will bring with it another upheaval in farming. Farm shows will be entirely indoors, of course, and this new breed of cell phone farmer won't have to pray for rain ever again. He'll just dial up an inch of rain from his cell phone.
There are some things that will stay the same, of course. The indoor farmers will overproduce and the government will come up with some sort of program to give the farmers something else to complain about other than the price. Farming used to be like throwing dice in the dirt but in the future, there may be no need for dirt. Just think, if things get too bad we may read about the occasional indoor farmer who commits suicide by jumping from the tenth floor of his farm.
I just have one thing to say to this new breed of indoor farmers: "Shame on you. Turn in your cap."
Helping Small-Scale Operations Develop A Recipe For Horticultural Lighting Success
Helping Small-Scale Operations Develop A Recipe For Horticultural Lighting Success
December 19, 2017
By Jeff Mastin
Venntis Technologies LLC
During the Emerging Applications track at Strategies in Light (SIL), co-located with The LED Show and Lightspace California in Long Beach, CA, Venntis Technologies biologist Jeff Mastin will explore the landscape of modern farming on the smaller scale, with a presentation on the economics of equipping a small indoor/vertical farm and how such operations can leverage the qualities of LED-based horticultural lighting. Mastin explains the appeal of close-to-consumer growing operations, but notes that a smaller operation will naturally need a different approach than a mass commercial grower. In the presentation “Small-scale vertical farming success recipes: Horticultural lighting reports from the field,” he will address a Michigan-based grower as a case study for analyzing the horticultural lighting needs of localized vertical farms with specific crop and usage objectives. Here Mastin looks at the prospects and exciting opportunities for both the grower community and the solid-state lighting (SSL) industry in expanding this horticultural niche. — Carrie Meadows
Where does our food come from? Three generations ago, this question had much simpler and well-known answers. Most food was derived from family gardens and family farms. Organic, local, sustainable, hydroponic, aeroponic, vertical-farming, container farming, etc. — these terms were not in our vocabulary with the absence of a dozen ways to buy lettuce at the local grocery store. After recent decades of urbanization, population growth, climate care (or lack thereof), and both geographic and relational disconnect from our food sources, vertical farms are an exciting new approach to shorten these distances in fascinating new ways with the help of recent technological advancements. Most foundational to the ability to move some types of farming indoors into dense, highly productive spaces is the advancement of LED-based horticultural lighting technology to make it possible to grow without the Sun and have a chance at economic viability.
Lighting as a Platform Part I: What It Is and Why You Should Care
In the world of the smart building, smart has real meaning. Creating buildings whose performance is optimised with respect to a variety of goals and which meet the increasingly challenging demands of building and energy efficiency regulations is a tough job these days. Energy use must be minimised and operating costs kept low.
Brought To You By LED - Bluetooth Feed
Related: 10 Things to Love about Strategies in Light 2018
LEDs Magazine will continue its countdown to Strategies in Light with more industry insights here at ledsmagazine.com. You can find details on the conference program, speakers, exhibitors, and more at strategiesinlight.com.
Within the realm of vertical farming, besides both strong proponents and objectors, there is also a wide spectrum of approaches. Vertical farmers can grow in soil, hydroponically, or aeroponically; use pallet rack shelving or vertical towers with plants growing horizontally; invest in various levels of control of humidity, CO2, isolation from potential pests; establish operations in abandoned warehouses or new facilities; and focus on “simpler” crops like leafy greens and herbs or break metaphorical ground on potentially higher value crops. For the Feb. 14 Strategies in Light session, we will of course focus on the various options and opportunities related to the critical lighting component of vertical farms, with an emphasis on how the scale of the vertical farm may impact horticultural lighting choices.
Garden manager Christy Kaledas has established indoor vertical farming operations that utilize LED horticultural lighting for the Black Pearl restaurant in Ann Arbor, MI.
Understandably, the most press is given to the largest vertical farming entities such as Plenty, which has raised at least $260 million to date with visions of large vertical farms on the outskirts of every major city. However, your local news might also have shared a story recently about a garage, basement, classroom, or industrial space that is now growing microgreens, leafy greens, or herbs for local restaurants, groceries, and farmers’ markets. In many cases, these are self-funded and driven by conversations with local chefs regarding exactly what they’d like to be adding to their menu next. The specifics of how these grow operations are set up are dictated by budget, physical space constraints, and information sources. Many of these growers are coming out of non-horticultural career paths and are learning from blogs, books, university extension offices, equipment suppliers, and other sources.
Related: Strategies in Light tracks send strong signals about lighting prospects
For the largest-scale vertical farmers, lighting technology is often developed in-house to lower costs. Facilities are large enough to justify multiple lighting approaches where experience, curiosity, or a physical constraint makes it worthwhile. These can include lights of various intensities and spectra. However, for smaller-scale vertical farmers, developing their own horticultural lighting is not an option. Furthermore, changes in their operation as they grow, changing customers, and the completely unforeseen places a premium on versatility within their lighting source. At any scale, upfront costs and operating costs are extremely important as lighting can represent a very large proportion of both costs. Furthermore, lighting performance will have a drastic impact on growth quality and quantity.
An example to be discussed in detail at Strategies in Light will be Black Pearl Gardens. The Black Pearl restaurant recruited its garden manager, Christy Kaledas, to begin growing microgreens and other crops for the restaurant in 2014. The small vertical farm began in Christy’s basement until the restaurant basement was ready, and has since expanded to include a warehouse facility for increased production space. The aforementioned need for versatility resulted in early setups using soil-filled trays, simple and adjustable wire shelving, and TotalGrow Broad Grow Spectrum LED lamps on flexible socketed cords, which could be configured to match the various setups that fit in the basements. The modular, individual lights with an all-purpose growing spectrum also allow the ability to adjust lighting concentrations as needed for different crops and production schedules. Most of this equipment is still used in the new spaces, though not necessarily in the same configuration. Besides multiplying shelving quantities, Black Pearl Gardens has experimented with varying degrees of success with hydroponic systems, higher-powered lighting over more spacious grow ponds, and other variations on its base system.
Black Pearl Gardens’ operations have since expanded into the restaurant basement (shown) and an additional warehouse facility equipped with TotalGrow Broad Grow Spectrum LED lamps with flexible configurations for various crops and growing schedules.
The combination of entrepreneurial aptitude, a great culture for selling high-quality and high-value crops in Ann Arbor, MI, successful horticultural lighting, and other growing techniques are consistent with the stories of other successful small-scale vertical farmers who seek to bring the farm closer to the consumer.
JEFF MASTIN is chief biologist for Venntis Technologies, a specialist in custom spectra, volumetric LED lighting, and custom output pattern lighting, and a finalist in the 2017 LEDs Magazine Sapphire Awards.
The Great Nutrient Collapse
Geoff Johnson for POLITICO | The Agenda | AGENDA 2020
The Great Nutrient Collapse
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
09/13/2017
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.
“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.
In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2 levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
He published those findings just a few years ago, adding to the concerns of a small but increasingly worried group of researchers who are raising unsettling questions about the future of our food supply. Could carbon dioxide have an effect on human health we haven’t accounted for yet? The answer appears to be yes—and along the way, it has steered Loladze and other scientists, directly into some of the thorniest questions in their profession, including just how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.
IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, it’s been understood for some time that many of our most important foods have been getting less nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.
In 2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.
Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live like humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.
If you’re someone who thinks about plant growth, this seems like a good thing. It has also been useful ammunition for politicians looking for reasons to worry less about the implications of climate change. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, recently argued that people shouldn’t be so worried about rising CO2 levels because it’s good for plants, and what’s good for plants is good for us.
“A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would aid photosynthesis, which in turn contributes to increased plant growth,” the Texas Republican wrote. “This correlates to a greater volume of food production and better quality food.”
But as the zooplankton experiment showed, greater volume and better quality might not go hand-in-hand. In fact, they might be inversely linked. As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
In 2002, while a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Loladze published a seminal research paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal,arguing that rising CO2 and human nutrition were inextricably linked through a global shift in the quality of plants. In the paper, Loladze complained about the dearth of data: Among thousands of publications he had reviewed on plants and rising CO2, he found only one that looked specifically at how it affected the balance of nutrients in rice, a crop that billions of people rely on. (The paper, published in 1997, found a drop in zinc and iron.)
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley, and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Loladze’s paper was first to tie the impact of CO2 on plant quality to human nutrition. But he also raised more questions than he answered, arguing that there were fundamental holes in the research. If these nutritional shifts were happening up and down the food chain, the phenomenon needed to be measured and understood.
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math. He could do the math, but he was a young academic trying to establish himself, and math departments weren't especially interested in solving problems in farming and human health. Loladze struggled to get funding to generate new data and continued to obsessively collect published data from researchers across the globe. He headed to the heartland to take an assistant professor position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was a major agricultural school, which seemed like a good sign, but Loladze was still a math professor. He was told he could pursue his research interests as long as he brought in funding, but he struggled. Biology grant makers said his proposals were too math-heavy; math grant makers said his proposals contained too much biology.
“It was year after year, rejection after rejection,” he said. “It was so frustrating. I don’t think people grasp the scale of this.”
It’s not just in the fields of math and biology that this issue has fallen through the cracks. To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health or nutrition communities. At all.
When POLITICO contacted top nutrition experts about the growing body of research on the topic, they were almost universally perplexed and asked to see the research. One leading nutrition scientist at Johns Hopkins University said it was interesting, but admitted he didn’t know anything about it. He referred me to another expert. She said they didn’t know about the subject, either. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an association representing an army of nutrition experts across the country, connected me with Robin Foroutan, an integrative medicine nutritionist who was also not familiar with the research.
“It’s really interesting, and you’re right, it’s not on many people’s radar,” wrote Foroutan, in an email, after being sent some papers on the topic. Foroutan said she would like to see a whole lot more data, particularly on how a subtle shift toward more carbohydrates in plants could affect public health.
"We don't know what a minor shift in the carbohydrate ratio in the diet is ultimately going to do,” she said, noting that the overall trend toward more starch and carbohydrate consumption has been associated with an increase in diet-related disease like obesity and diabetes. "To what degree would a shift in the food system contribute to that? We can't really say.”
Asked to comment for this story, Marion Nestle, a nutrition policy professor at New York University who’s one of the best-known nutrition experts in the country, initially expressed skepticism about the whole concept but offered to dig into a file she keeps on climate issues.
After reviewing the evidence, she changed her tune. “I’m convinced,” she said, in an email, while also urging caution: It wasn’t clear whether CO2-driven nutrient depletion would have a meaningful impact on public health. We need to know a whole lot more, she said.
Kristie Ebi, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s studied the intersection of climate change and global health for two decades, is one of a handful of scientists in the U.S. who is keyed into the potentially sweeping consequences of the CO2-nutrition dynamic, and brings it up in every talk she gives.
"It's a hidden issue,” Ebi said. “The fact that my bread doesn't have the micronutrients it did 20 years ago―how would you know?"
As Ebi sees it, the CO2-nutrition link has been slow to break through, much as it took the academic community a long time to start seriously looking at the intersection of climate and human health in general. “This is before the change,” she said. “This is what it looks like before the change."
Soybeans growing in a field outside Lincoln, Nebraska, one of many crops whose nutrient content is shifting as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
LOLADZE'S EARLY PAPER raised some big questions that are difficult, but not impossible, to answer. How does rising atmospheric CO2 change how plants grow? How much of the long-term nutrient drop is caused by the atmosphere, and how much by other factors, like breeding?
It’s also difficult, but not impossible, to run farm-scale experiments on how CO2affects plants. Researchers use a technique that essentially turns an entire field into a lab. The current gold standard for this type of research is called a FACE experiment (for “free-air carbon dioxide enrichment”), in which researchers create large open-air structures that blow CO2 onto the plants in a given area. Small sensors keep track of the CO2 levels. When too much CO2 escapes the perimeter, the contraption puffs more into the air to keep the levels stable. Scientists can then compare those plants directly to others growing in normal air nearby.
These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Earlier this summer, a group of researchers published the first studies attempting to estimate what these shifts could mean for the global population. Plants are a crucial source of protein for people in the developing world, and by 2050, theyestimate, 150 million people could be put at risk of protein deficiency, particularly in countries like India and Bangladesh. Researchers found a loss of zinc, which is particularly essential for maternal and infant health, could put 138 million people at risk. They also estimated that more than 1 billion mothers and 354 million children live in countries where dietary iron is projected to drop significantly, which could exacerbate the already widespread public health problem of anemia.
There aren’t any projections for the United States, where we for the most part enjoy a diverse diet with no shortage of protein, but some researchers look at the growing proportion of sugars in plants and hypothesize that a systemic shift in plants could further contribute to our already alarming rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Another new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland, is drilling down on some of the questions that Loladze first raised 15 years ago with a number of new studies that focus on nutrition.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, examines rice growing in his laboratory in Beltsville, Md. Ziska and his colleagues are conducting experiments to find out how rising carbon dioxide levels affect the nutrient profile of plants. Plant physiologist Julie Wolf harvests peppers to study changes in vitamin C, lower right. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.
Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.
They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.
Ziska worries we’re not studying all the ways CO2 affects the plants we depend on with enough urgency, especially considering the fact that retooling crops takes a long time.
“We’re falling behind in our ability to intercede and begin to use the traditional agricultural tools, like breeding, to compensate,” he said. “Right now it can take 15 to 20 years before we get from the laboratory to the field.”
AS LOLADZE AND others have found, tackling globe-spanning new questions that cross the boundaries of scientific fields can be difficult. There are plenty of plant physiologists researching crops, but most are dedicated to studying factors like yield and pest resistance—qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition. Math departments, as Loladze discovered, don’t exactly prioritize food research. And studying living things can be costly and slow: It takes several years and huge sums of money to get a FACE experiment to generate enough data to draw any conclusions.
Despite these challenges, researchers are increasingly studying these questions, which means we may have more answers in the coming years. Ziska and Loladze, who now teaches math at Bryan College of Health Sciences in Lincoln, Nebraska, are collaborating with a coalition of researchers in China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere in the U.S. on a large study looking at rising CO2 and the nutritional profile of rice, one of humankind’s most important crops. Their study also includes vitamins, an important nutritional component, that to date has almost not been studied at all.
USDA researchers also recently dug up varieties of rice, wheat and soy that USDA had saved from the 1950s and 1960s and planted them in plots around the U.S. where previous researchers had grown the same cultivars decades ago, with the aim of better understanding how today’s higher levels of CO2 affect them.
Mathematician Irakli Loladze tosses sugar over vegetables outside his home in Lincoln Nebraska, to illustrate how the sugar content of the plants we eat is increasing as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. Loladze was the first scientist to publish research connecting rising CO2 and changes in plant quality to human nutrition. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
In a USDA research field in Maryland, researchers are running experiments on bell peppers to measure how vitamin C changes under elevated CO2. They’re also looking at coffee to see whether caffeine declines. “There are lots of questions,” Ziska said as he showed me around his research campus in Beltsville. “We’re just putting our toe in the water.”
Ziska is part of a small band of researchers now trying to measure these changes and figure out what it means for humans. Another key figure studying this nexus is Samuel Myers, a doctor turned climate researcher at Harvard University who leads the Planetary Health Alliance, a new global effort to connect the dots between climate science and human health.
Myers is also concerned that the research community is not more focused on understanding the CO2-nutrition dynamic, since it’s a crucial piece of a much larger picture of how such changes might ripple through ecosystems. "This is the tip of the iceberg," said Myers. "It's been hard for us to get people to understand how many questions they should have."
In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc. It was the first time the issue had attracted any real media attention.
“The public health implications of global climate change are difficult to predict, and we expect many surprises,” the researchers wrote. “The finding that raising atmospheric CO2 lowers the nutritional value of C3 crops is one such surprise that we can now better predict and prepare for.”
The same year―in fact, on the same day―Loladze, then teaching math at the The Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, published his own paper, the result of more than 15 years of gathering data on the same subject. It was the largest study in the world on rising CO2 and its impact on plant nutrients. Loladze likes to describe plant science as “noisy”―research-speak for cluttered with complicating data, through which it can be difficult to detect the signal you’re looking for. His new data set was finally big enough to see the signal through the noise, to detect the “hidden shift,” as he put it.
PHOTOS: How to measure a plant
What he found is that his 2002 theory—or, rather, the strong suspicion he had articulated back then—appeared to be borne out. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.
What that means for humans―whose main food intake is plants―is only just starting to be investigated. Researchers who dive into it will have to surmount obstacles like its low profile and slow pace and a political environment where the word “climate” is enough to derail a funding conversation. It will also require entirely new bridges to be built in the world of science―a problem that Loladze himself wryly acknowledges in his own research. When his paper was finally published in 2014, Loladze listed his grant rejections in the acknowledgements.
Author:
Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.
This Underground Urban Farm Also Heats The Building Above It
Underneath a 26-floor office tower in Stockholm, an underground space once used as an archive for a newspaper will soon become a farm. And because of a unique business model, the urban farmers growing greens in the new farm won’t pay rent–their farm will pay for itself in heat.
12.06.17
This Underground Urban Farm Also Heats The Building Above It
Truly local food is when it’s grown in your basement. Plantagon CityFarm wants to create a network of underground urban farms–and whole skyscrapers filled with plants.
![1/5 The DN Skrapen building, planned site of the Plantagon CityFarm. [Photo: Flickr user Storkholm]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57c8695d5016e11e71be1d83/1513357515946-ABKITJPGPMDIPIE0JFTC/Screen+shot+2017-12-15+at+10.54.11+AM.png)
1/5 The DN Skrapen building, planned site of the Plantagon CityFarm. [Photo: Flickr user Storkholm]
Underneath a 26-floor office tower in Stockholm, an underground space once used as an archive for a newspaper will soon become a farm. And because of a unique business model, the urban farmers growing greens in the new farm won’t pay rent–their farm will pay for itself in heat.
Like some other indoor farms, the Plantagon CityFarm, set to begin production in early 2018, will grow greens in vertical towers under LED lights. But by capturing the heat from the lights–heat that would normally have to be vented out of the room and require air conditioning to keep the plants from overheating–the farm operators can send it into a heat storage system for the office building, and the heat can be used to help keep the offices warm through the winter.
[Photo: Refarmers]
The system will save the office building 700,000 kilowatt-hours of energy a year, worth roughly three times as much as the previous tenant of the basement was paying in rent.
“[The building owner] agreed to give us a free lease for three years, so we don’t pay one single Swedish kroner for the room,” says Plantagon cofounder Hans Hassle. “This is the challenge, very often, for urban farmers: If you really want to grow things in the city, you have to find new business models that actually make the food not too expensive in the end.”
The company plans to sell food directly to people working in the offices above, along with two restaurants that are located in the high-rise. Roughly a third of the produce will be sold to nearby grocery stores, all close enough that the greens can be delivered without fossil fuels. Another third of the produce will be sold in an on-site store in the skyscraper.
[Image: Plantagon, Sweco (Illustration)]
“In Sweden, we have a higher demand for locally grown food than we do for organic food,” Hassle says. “People tend to want to know where the production comes from.”
If organic kale or lettuce travels hundreds or thousands of miles to a store, Hassle says, the environmental footprint could be higher than the same greens, grown without pesticides or herbicides, inside the closed-loop system of the indoor farm. Like other indoor farming, the Plantagon system also uses a tiny fraction of the water used on outdoor farms. The heat is captured in water that travels in tubes over the LED lights, and then sent into a heat pump system. Carbon dioxide from the offices will also be sent to the farm, and fresh oxygen from the plants will be sent back to office workers.
The company plans to open 10 underground farms in Stockholm over the next three years, working in buildings that already have underground heat pump systems. The team is also talking to a local power company about whether its heat could be sold into the larger district heating system that connects to other buildings throughout the city.
A two-hour drive away, in the city of Linköping, the company is planning an indoor system on a much larger scale: a 16-story “plantscraper” that will produce food throughout the building. Two-thirds of the building will include office space that can be rented to make the system financially viable, and, as in the underground farm, heat from the greenhouse will help heat the rest of the building. Conference rooms at the end of each floor will have views of the farm. The company and partners are still finalizing leases with prospective tenants, but plan for the building to be open in 2020 or 2021.
[Image: Plantagon, Sweco (Illustration)]
A similar farm is planned for a building in Singapore, where the lack of land for farming means that most produce is imported from other countries such as Malaysia. As Malaysia and other countries run out of its own arable land and their populations continue to grow–a pattern happening around the world–Singapore is increasingly interested in Plantagon’s vision of high-rise buildings focused on growing food locally. Cities in China that are already struggling to source enough food are also in talks with the company.
While the large-scale farms take more time to construct, the underground farms can be constructed quickly. The company is currently crowdfunding investment in the first farm. Hassle hopes to involve as many people as possible–not for financial reasons, but because he argues that citizens need to be active stakeholders in the burgeoning field of urban farming.
“To us, food production is not like running any business–food is like water, it’s a human right,” he says. “So it’s not only business as usual. This has lots to do with social responsibility and of course with environmental responsibility. That’s why we’re inviting people to be part of owning these facilities because they should have input.”
The company is also structured to be controlled partly by a nonprofit founded at the same time, a business model chosen to keep the company committed to larger goals than just maximizing profit. It’s a somewhat similar approach to B Corporations in the United States.
“We tried to not only speak about this–because that could be lots of corporate bullshit when you say things like this,” Hassle says. “We actually try to institutionalize this in what we’re doing through the articles of incorporation and letting people be part and actually have influence over what we do.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world's largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.
Canon Electronics Plans Full Automation At Vegetable Factory
The Canon unit will convert empty space at a Gunma Prefecture facility into an indoor farm initially dedicated to growing lettuce and other green, leafy vegetables friendly to hydroponics.
December 28, 2017
Canon Electronics Plans Full Automation At Vegetable Factory
Robots may bring lower costs crucial to profit in growing but finicky sector
At this Gunma Prefecture plant, Canon aims to turn empty space into a roboticized indoor farm.
TOKYO -- Canon Electronics plans to open an entirely automated vegetable factory in 2019, seeking to lower costs by applying homegrown robotics technology to a burgeoning industry where stable profits remain tough to cultivate.
The Canon unit will convert empty space at a Gunma Prefecture facility into an indoor farm initially dedicated to growing lettuce and other green, leafy vegetables friendly to hydroponics. Robots will handle everything from planting seeds and transplanting seedlings to harvesting and packaging crops for shipment. Details such as annual production scale and sales targets will be settled later.
The company will partner with other businesses for know-how on managing the factory and building sales networks. Canon Electronics is also considering building a second such factory in western Japan.
The unit makes some of the manufacturing machinery on the automated production lines in Canon's domestic camera business. Its delicate automation technology from that precision machinery will be put to use developing green-thumbed robots for the company's new factory plan.
Japan had 197 plant factories using artificial light as of February, roughly triple the count in 2011, a survey by the Japan Greenhouse Horticulture Association shows. But production costs run high at such factories, driving up retail prices and making it hard to turn steady profits. In 2016, 37% of the factories operated in the red, the association reported.
Those losses recently led some companies to back out. At the end of 2016, Toshiba closed one such facility in Kanagawa Prefecture. And in 2015, an agricultural startup and plant factory manager based in Miyagi Prefecture went bankrupt under a debt burden of 1 billion yen ($8.81 million at present rates).
Canon Electronics intends to wield its automated production to make operations profitable. Some domestic plant factories automate seed-planting or other processes, but virtually none are automated start to finish. Agricultural startup Spread is building a fully automated plant factory in Kyoto Prefecture, set to begin operations in summer 2018.
(Nikkei)
Company That Led Failed Great Northern Paper Restart Pursues A New Venture In Maine
Company That Led Failed Great Northern Paper Restart Pursues A New Venture In Maine
By Darren Fishell, BDN Staff • December 29, 2017
Darren Fishell | BDN
The paper trail tells of Organic Nutrition's backstory, its key technology and more recent backing from the Portsmouth-based private equity firm Cate Street Capital, who led the failed restart of the Great Northern Paper mill in East Millinocket.
Cate Street Capital, the firm that leveraged $16 million in public money for its failed restart of East Millinocket’s Great Northern Paper Co. mill, has another project for Maine. This time, it is backing two entrepreneurs who want to grow farm-raised fish, fed with insects, and use the fish waste to grow produce in nutrient-rich water, a technique called hydroponics.
Their company, Organic Nutrition Inc., plans to do that with a headquarters in Florida and a hydroponics facility on the campus of St. Joseph’s College in Standish.
The Maine facility, planned for construction in 2018, is part of the college’s Institute for Local Food Systems Innovation. Organic Nutrition began construction on its Florida facility in October, according to property records.
angram 3DS
A computer rendering by the Kittery-based firm Tangram 3DS depicts a finished Florida facility of Organic Nutrition Inc., an agriculture and aquaculture business backed by the Portsmouth private equity firm Cate Street Capital. Cate Street also used the Kittery company to produce renderings of its scuttled Thermogen Industries projects in Millinocket and Eastport.
With Organic Nutrition, business partners Ernie Papadoyianis and Xavier “Sal” Cherch are seeking a comeback story after a dispute with their previous financiers ended in an adversarial 2009 bankruptcy.
Out of the bankruptcy, they retained their patented aquaculture system and other research. Now, with Cate Street’s backing, the duo wants to put their inventions to work. It could be Cate Street’s comeback in Maine, too.
The eventual bankruptcy of Great Northern Paper left behind a trail of debt that the attorney overseeing the case attributed in part to mismanagement, as managers at Cate Street inked unfavorable deals with related companies plunged the company into more debt and despite clear signs that it was out of cash.
An investigation by the Maine Sunday Telegram into Cate Street’s deal also prompted state and federal regulators to close loopholes in incentive programs that Cate Street used to deliver roughly $16 million in Maine tax dollars to out-of-state financiers, for investments that didn’t improve any part of the East Millinocket mill.
To get Organic Nutrition off the ground, Cate Street plans to use a combination of private financing, federal government support, its partnership with St. Joseph’s and a program that gives foreign investors a fast-track to citizenship.
Bill Diamond, a Democratic senator who represents Standish and who served on the Government Oversight Committee that reviewed the Great Northern deal, said he didn’t know Cate Street Capital was backing Organic Nutrition. But he toured St. Joseph’s in October to hear about its plans and sees no reason for concern.
“I think that’s a wonderful program and I think they are going to be one of the leaders in the east,” Diamond said.
The Maine plan
The facility in Maine will support a new certificate program at St. Joseph’s and provide support to other hydroponics businesses, according to the college. Organic Nutrition committed $750,000 to the effort, helping to match a $2 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration.
“The Organic Nutrition Hydroponic Farm will help entrepreneurs across the region scale up small greenhouse pilot programs into larger operations, preparing them for transition to stand-alone, for-profit businesses,” St. Joseph’s said in a news release.
The college anticipates the farm will sell about $120,000 worth of strawberries a year, by 2021, during a time when demand is highest for the fruit most often shipped from outside New England, according to an economic study the college commissioned.
The institute also will include the Hannaford Food Venture Center, focused on new food production technology, a commercial test kitchen where budding food manufacturers can use professional equipment and a livestock farm.
St. Joseph’s College
The site plan for the Institute for Local Food Systems Innovation at St. Joseph’s College in Standish shows three major components: at left, Organic Nutrition’s hydroponics greenhouse; at center, the Hannaford Food Venture Center; and, at right, a livestock barn.
As the hydroponic farm is just one part of St. Joseph’s plan, Organic Nutrition is just one of its founders’ ventures.
Cherch and Papadoyianis also lead North American Medical Holdings, a company that aims to build a network of health clinics providing controversial and unregulated hormone mixtures they tout as anti-aging treatments and possible treatments for conditions like erectile dysfunction.
The company wants to sell its so-called “bioidentical” hormone treatments at clinics across the country, under the name “Body & Life” and the slogan, “Your body. Your life!”
That company is still in the works. A website for the health clinic, registered to Cherch and a defunct aquaculture-related entity Closed Containment Systems Inc., asks visitors to “stay tuned while we finish preparing our interactive website to service you best.”
Organic Nutrition’s origins
Organic Nutrition emerged from Papadoyianis and Cherch’s aquaculture research started in 1996. By 2007, they had restarted an aquaculture facility in Florida City and had trademarked their circular, solid-walled fish farming pen as the “Aqua-Sphere.”
The vision, then, was largely the same: to build a better feedstock for fish farming and to use waste from the aquaculture process as fertilizer for hydroponic crops.
“We’re taking a liability of aquaculture, which is the waste, and creating an asset out of it,” Papdoyianis said in a 2007 interview with the Discovery Channel Canada show “What’s That About.”
The company’s first prototype of its circular tank cut about 30 days off the growth cycle for the fish, compared with rectangular “raceways” used at their Florida City operation.
Regulatory filings in 2008 tell of big ambitions for that year, with plans get more Aqua-Spheres into the water and to make moves on other research to breed insects to feed those fish. The planning began after a meeting on the topic in June 2006, with executives at their previous company, Neptune Industries Inc.
“In the weeks that followed, several suggestions arose as alternative sources for fish meal, including rats, insects, snails, worms and fish processing waste, and extensive research was conducted,” the filing states. “The team quickly concluded that insects appeared to offer the greatest commercial potential.”
Behind the scenes, trouble was brewing over ownership of Papadoyianis and Cherch’s aquaculture technology.
A deep recession complicated their effort to get additional loans as Neptune was staring down payments coming due, from roughly $2.5 million in debt instruments it issued to investors. On Feb. 13, 2009, three of those investors forced Neptune into bankruptcy. Papadoyianis, Cherch and various investors in Neptune fired back two weeks later, accusing financiers of foul play to enrich themselves by sabotaging Neptune.
They eventually settled the claims, the last of which they resolved in 2009 as part of the bankruptcy they left with their inventions and trademarks intact.
Enter Cate Street
By 2011, Papadoyianis and Cherch had caught the eye of Cate Street. The Portsmouth-based investment firm listed Organic Nutrition as one of its earliest portfolio companies, according to an archived webpage.
In May of 2012, as Cate Street CEO Halle told Maine officials that its East Millinocket mill restart would not go beyond making newsprint, Organic Nutrition had started the process of securing its trademark on “entoponics.”
With Cate Street’s backing, Papadoyianis and Cherch were back in business.
Last year, they won their trademark for the word “entoponics,” which they define as using insect components and waste to produce vegetables, fruits, plants and algae.
In August, the company announced it secured a $5 million loan guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to finance the first phase of its Florida operation, along with roughly $1.5 million from private investors, who received equity in the company.
In November, Cate Street CEO John Halle told the South Florida Business Journal that the company hopes to capture customers like Carnival Cruise Lines or supermarket chain Publix, which receive some greens shipped from California.
Eventually, the August statement said, Organic Nutrition plans to build that facility out to 500,000 square feet of hydroponics greenhouses and seven Aqua-Sphere fish farming systems.
That vision includes pairing its fish and hydroponics operations with breeding facilities for Black Soldier Flies, according to promotional company videos posted on YouTube. It plans to use food waste to grow the insects. The insects would provide protein meal to their tank-based fish farming systems, and it plans to use the fish waste as fertilizer for its hydroponic crops.
While the details of their plans have emerged in Florida and Maine, Organic Nutrition said in its August statement that it’s planning five facilities in four states. It has not disclosed details of those other plans.
It hopes to fuel some of its future projects with $50 million in foreign investment through the China-based Da Tang Investment Group and the EB-5 program. The EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program gives expedited green cards to investors who put more than $500,000 into a qualifying U.S. business.
Leaders of Cate Street, Organic Nutrition or the U.S. contact for Da Tang Investment Group did not respond to requests for comment left in mid-December and this week.
On Wednesday, a company website at organicnutritioninc.com disappeared at least two weeks after going live. Google saved portions of the page Dec. 25.
This Stylish Table Is the “Next Generation” of Automated Urban Farming
One of the more promising urban-farm concepts is not in New York, Los Angeles, or any other major city. It’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, courtesy of one University of Virginia alum and a very small team of employees.
This Stylish Table Is the “Next Generation” of Automated Urban Farming
By Jennifer Marston December 29, 2017
One of the more promising urban-farm concepts is not in New York, Los Angeles, or any other major city. It’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, courtesy of one University of Virginia alum and a very small team of employees.
Recent grad Alexander Olsen started Babylon Micro-Farms in 2016, as part of the UVA student entrepreneurial clubhouse, HackCville. An early prototype won $6,500 from Green Initiatives Funding Tomorrow, part of the UVA student council.
Now, Olsen and six other employees are working to get the hydroponic farms inside the homes of consumers, billing them as “the next generation home appliance.”
The concept is pretty straightforward. You start by selecting crops from Babylon’s online menu. Pre-seeded plant packs are then delivered to your door. Right now, pod pack choices include: wellness (kale), spicy peppers, pesto, a mini romaine crop, herbs, edible flowers, a cocktail mix, Asian greens, and arugula.
Once seed pods are set up, the farm regulates itself—you may occasionally have to top off the water or nutrients, but otherwise, the process is automated. A corresponding app provides live data about crop health, notifies users when water and nutrients are needed, and tells you when it’s time to harvest your crops. Once the latter is done, you can order another round of crops and start the process all over again. For the extra-ambitious (and restaurants), the app can control multiple farms at once.
One thing setting Babylon Mirco-Farms apart from other urban farming products is its emphasis on visual design. To that end, the system takes the form of a table with a UV light hanging overhead and is small compared to its industrial counterparts: 6 feet wide by 3 feet deep and 6 feet tall. And instead of seeing wires and buttons, everywhere, pinewood hides those operational things and makes the farm as much a stylish conversation piece as it is a food supply.
The company isn’t alone in their mission to marry urban farming with, uh, urban style. The Ava Byte also uses soil-less grow pods, which come in a slick, space-age-looking container that would blend into a lot of modern kitchen designs. Verdical calls itself “a living food appliance” and is also small enough to fit into most homes. Farmshelf is more geared at serving restaurants and retail spaces, but as of November, they were considering a move to more residential markets.
UVA has given Olsen and Co. considerable support for the project, from grants to advice about the next phase of business. Farms are also installed at university dining halls, where students are encouraged to harvest what they need. According to Olsen, the farms are “a massive hit” amongst the students.
Babylon is now focused on bringing the farms to consumers outside of universities. Currently, a the micro-farm farm goes for $1,799. Pre-order one here. East Coasters get free shipping.
The company also wants to eventually offer a smaller system for less than $1,000, which would be a hit for both cost-conscious consumers and those of us living in shoebox-sized apartments. Neither price tag is pocket change, but I suspect with the right amount of dedication, an investment in one of these would pay for itself pretty fast. Stay tuned.
Photo credit: Dan Addison, University Communications, UVA
These Farmers Are Doing The Impossible: Growing Fresh Veggies in The Coldest Parts of The Planet
These Farmers Are Doing The Impossible: Growing Fresh Veggies in The Coldest Parts of The Planet
A plant sprouts in arctic conditions Milosz_G/Shutterstock
Dec. 21, 2017
Halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the islands of Svalbard are a palette of blue, white and brown — from the Arctic Ocean to glaciers, frozen sea ice and permafrost mountains. Upon first glance, it’s not a destination that inspires much in the way of agriculture.
“This whole island is about extraction: whales, coal, animals, fish, gas, oil,” said Benjamin Vidmar, founder of Polar Permaculture Solutions, a small crew of people who produce locally grown food in Longyearbyen on the archipelago’s largest island of Spitsbergen.
(Editor’s note: The writer traveled to Svalbard with Visit Norway, who covered lodging and transportation.)
The challenge of growing food in a region where the average temperatures are subfreezing and where there are nearly four months of polar night is no simple task. Even during midsummer, when temperatures hover around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, mountaintops are still draped with snow and vast glaciers sweep across the islands.
But Vidmar, a chef who has lived in Longyearbyen since 2007, discovered that there is a history of growing food on the island, and started growing microgreens in an insulated room to use at home and in some local restaurants. He also researched what others in Arctic regions were doing and learned about using red worms to produce a natural fertilizer from food waste (vermicomposting).
An outdoor dome in the Arctic region surrounded by members of Polar Permaculture Solutions Polar Permaculture Solutions
Vidmar’s dream is to take it all outside and create a circular economy. “Everything here is based on taking things from the Earth. I feel like I have to do something for this town,” he said. He pressured the local government to let him start growing plants in an outside dome, necessary because there are many laws in the archipelago against agriculture and ranch animals, instituted in the late 20th century.
In 2015, more than 300 tons of household waste was registered in Longyearbyen, equal to approximately 331 pounds per person. This number is nearly one-third of the amount for the country of Norway as a whole. In Longyearbyen, food waste from households is ground up and washed out to sea, and it’s often not registered as waste.
Vidmar inside the dome Polar Permaculture Solutions
Vidmar’s microgreens are used in town on restaurant menus, and he composts unused produce with the worms, using their castings as a natural fertilizer that can help to grow more food. Vidmar has recently started to hatch quail from eggs, offering fresh, locally produced quail eggs to Longyearbyen restaurants. He’s also introduced a market within Galleri Svalbard, which includes handmade items from fish-skin leather. Vidmar wants to expand his growing space, continuing to show how the Longyearbyen community can be more sustainable than its old habits are.
Another community within the Arctic Circle is Inuvik, a town in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Converted from an old hockey arena 20 years ago, the Inuvik Community Greenhouse flourishes as a 16,000-square-foot garden that promotes community building through gardening, provides educational opportunities and reduces the cost of healthy food options.
Fish-skin leather products in Galleri Svalbard Polar Permaculture Solutions
While it began with 50 members, the greenhouse now has 250 members who use 149 community garden beds and 24 small beds. Members grow fruit, vegetables and even flowers. The community donates approximately 100 pounds of fresh vegetables to the local food bank each season, which runs from May through September, when the region gets 24 hours of sunlight.
The Inuvik Community Greenhouse also provides a convenient compost collection service in the greater community by charging a minimal fee ($5 CAD) to collect organic waste from homes on a regular basis. The effort helps reduce organic waste from the area, creates soil and supports the greenhouse projects.
Inuvik Community Greenhouse Inuvik Greenhouse
In Kotzebue, Alaska, just 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle, conventional farming isn’t possible. The Arctic Greens project, sponsored by the Alaska Native Kikiktagruk Inupiat Corporation (KIC), has been considered a game-changer for many of the communities in northern Alaska, where almost all produce originates from the Lower 48 by way of truck, barge or air cargo. By the time it’s available on grocery shelves, it’s already two to three weeks old.
The custom hydroponic farm containers allow remote communities to have a regular supply of fresh, affordable vegetables, grown without pesticides or other biological hazards.
The Arctic Greens project has been considered a game-changer for many of the communities in northern Alaska.
Arctic Greens plans to grow produce in 30 Alaska communities and sell the harvest in AC stores located in the same community, which will create jobs and ensure fresher and better-tasting produce no matter the season.
A Polar Permaculture Solutions dome captured at night under the Northern Lights Polar Permaculture Solutions
Back in Svalbard, Vidmar dreams of having more of his produce featured throughout Longyearbyen — in restaurants, hotels and even home kitchens. He’s stepped up his site tours for locals and visitors who are interested in what he’s doing, and he has also started to offer cooking classes. The next step on his list is to acquire a biodigester, which would be fed with the quail droppings as well as food waste in order to produce biogas, a mixture of different gases which are produced from raw materials like agricultural waste. That, in turn, would be used to heat the dome and produce electricity and fertilizer that would help grow more food. “We would like to connect people back to their food,” he said in an email. “And helping people to live here more sustainably.”
Greenhouse To Provide Fresh Vegetables At Bangor Restaurant, Regardless of the Weather
Greenhouse To Provide Fresh Vegetables At Bangor Restaurant, Regardless of the Weather
By Abigail Curtis, BDN Staff • December 19, 2017
Gabor Degre | BDN
Bob Cutler, the owner of Novios Bistro in Bangor stands at the restaurant’s new greenhouse in Hermon Monday. Cutler and head chef Dustin Cyr said they will run the greenhouse and will be able to plant and harvest vegetables based on the daily needs at the restaurant. The greenhouse will be operational in early January.
Gabor Degre | BDN
Dustin Cyr, the head chef at Novios Bistro in Bangor, stands in the laundry room of his home, where he has been testing various seeds and plants he intends to grow in the restaurant’s new greenhouse in Hermon. Cyr and owner said they will be able to plant and harvest vegetables based on the daily needs at the restaurant.
Everybody knows that Maine has a lot going for it, especially when it comes to what’s for dinner.
There’s the agricultural renaissance, the burgeoning farm-to-table movement and the willingness of farmers to grow all kinds of interesting produce.
One thing that Maine can’t boast about, though, is the length of its growing season.
With frosts possible even in the months of May and September, and basically guaranteed during our long, frigid winters, restaurateurs who want to serve locally-sourced produce all year long have a big challenge ahead of them.
But it’s a challenge that the team at the helm of Novio’s Bistro in Bangor believes they can handle, with a unique plan to make an end-run around the cold, hard reality of Maine weather.
This winter, Novio’s owner Bob Cutler, and Chef Dustin Cyr are busy constructing a 1,500-square-foot greenhouse near Cyr’s home in Hermon. In the greenhouse, which will be heated with an oil-burning furnace, they hope to grow 80 percent of the produce they serve at the restaurant within eight months. It’s an ambitious plan, but both achievable and worthwhile, they said.
“If you believe like I do, and like Dustin does, in cooking with the best possible ingredients, it’s a no-brainer,” Cutler said. “And if you believe the extreme weather patterns will continue, as Dustin and I both do, you want to have more control [over the produce supply.]”
Both Cutler and Cyr have a lot of experience in the restaurant industry. Prior to opening Novio’s in the fall of 2016, Cutler owned The Family Dog in Orono and two food trucks in the Bangor area (he has since sold those in order to concentrate on the Bangor bistro). And Cyr has plied his craft at many Bangor restaurants for more than a decade, including a long stint behind the stove at the acclaimed Fiddlehead Restaurant. Farming, though, is fairly new to both of them.
“I started last year,” Cyr said.
After a friend of his got him interested in growing super hot chili peppers, Cyr converted his laundry room into a grow room, and found success with his 100 or so plants.
“That was my crash course,” he said. “I don’t do anything small … and it got me thinking.”
He thought about ways to make sure that he could get the freshest, most delicious produce possible. And he thought about growing exactly what he wanted for his menus, researching how to use the greenhouse to make that happen. Although Novio’s has been transitioning to sourcing more produce locally, that has not always been easy, Cyr said. Growing his own just made sense to him, and he had an idea of how to scale up to grow enough to supply the small restaurant, which serves an average of 230 diners a week. To grow his super hot peppers, he dabbled in hydroponics, the technique of growing plants without soil. Instead of planting them in dirt, they grew in water with the help of mineral nutrient solutions. In the greenhouse, he plans to use a hydroponic system to grow vegetables including tomatoes and lettuces.
“Hydroponics is really interesting to me,” Cyr said. “Plants will be pest-free, disease-free. They’re clean [because they’re not grown in dirt] and you get more plants per square foot.”
He also is working on a design for a raised-bed system for plants such as beets and radishes that will be grown in soil.
Once the greenhouse is up, Cyr will get the chance to try out a much larger hydroponic system than the one in his laundry room and with special supplemental lighting that will let the plants thrive even in the short, dark days of December and January. He’s already started a batch of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and bell peppers in his house that he would like to move into more spacious quarters as soon as possible. He knows he is not as experienced as a farmer would be, but believes he can figure out the learning curve to make the project an eventual success.
“It’ll be a little experimental,” at first, he said.
That’s OK with Cutler, who is 100 percent in support of the venture.
“In my mind, I think we’re going to have some mistakes,” the Novios owner said. “We’ll probably grow too much of something and too little of something else. But if you don’t take risks, you’re never going to get better.”
Cutler said it’s likely the greenhouse will never be able to grow sufficient quantities of some vegetables such as garlic, potatoes, onions, and mushrooms. But it is exciting to him to think about having spinach, microgreens, unusual varieties of kale, eggplant and more, freshly picked at the height of ripeness, even in the wintertime.
“We want to be different, and we want to challenge ourselves,” he said.
Cyr is looking forward to having all that bounty close at hand, and turning it into delicious dishes to serve his customers.
“To me, it’s my ultimate opportunity as a chef,” he said.
How An Ecological Approach to Architecture Can Help Reinvent Urban Food Systems
Fish, plants, and water are combined in Aqualoop, a continuous loop of cleaning, growing and eating.
How An Ecological Approach to Architecture Can Help Reinvent Urban Food Systems
By weaving together infrastructure, urbanism, and ecology, architecture is a perfect medium to envision the sustainable food systems of the future.
By Amale Andraos, Dan Wood / The Monacelli Press
December 20, 2017
Fish, plants, and water are combined in Aqualoop, a continuous loop of cleaning, growing and eating.
Photo Credit: Monacellii Press
The following is an excerpt fromWORKac: We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, published by The Monacelli Press, 2017. WORKac (WORK Architecture Company) is a New York-based architecture firm founded by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, known for their re-inventions of the relationship between urban and natural environments.
Infoodstructure
Dan Wood (DX): PF1 [Public Farm 1, a completely off-grid, biodegradable, and recyclable cardboard-tube farm] started off as almost an academic exercise: let’s build Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and put a farm in it. At the beginning it was such an abstract idea. Farm was just a four-letter word on a page. It just meant green space, a pattern. . . .
Amale Andraos (AA): . . . and by the end it became a whole world. What 49 Citiesbrought forward was that while these visionary cities had been extensively analyzed from the perspective of politics, ideology, or their social context, no one had looked in detail at their shades of green: how they engaged with open space, with parks and forests but also with systems of farming and food economics.
DX:It’s not that the future of food is to grow it in cities, but that engaging food systems opened up a different and more holistic way to talk about infrastructure. Embracing systems and food was simply the catalyst that allowed us to open up our thinking.
AA: At the same time, you could say that our interests in these infrastructural systems—whether through urbanism or ecology—were increasingly woven together and brought into architecture. Architecture’s boundaries became porous, not by blurring the skin, but literally, by collecting water from the roof and drawing it into the building, for example. Architecture became a medium to organize all of these systems and ideas as part of a larger infrastructure and ecosystem, which connected it back to its context.
DX: At the time a lot of people were asking us if we were looking at the work of Dickson Despommier, who designs vertical farms that are completely interiorized in power-sucking, multistory buildings that are embedded in an urban landscape.
AA:Our network was farmers, eager to produce food in new ways. In contrast, Despommier’s propositions prioritized engineering over farming. And while our position is certainly guilty of being nostalgic for a more rustic era, reading Michael Pollan made us quite critical of that kind of technological superfluity.
DX: We made a counter-proposal, Locavore Fantasia. Going vertical can be about more than engineering food to grow indoors; you can design for in-soil growing, have every farming floor open to the sun, and rather than isolate the farm from the city, make the farm a part of it.
AA: It’s actually only doubling the ground once, that’s an achievable level of urban density. Think of community gardens or rooftops. Infoodstructure was a similar idea—what would happen if streets were turned into farms, assuming fewer driverless cars. It was about transforming what is already there rather than putting faith into a new kind of skyscraper.
DX: We were interested in how people were developing new ideas about farming, at a time when architecture seemed to have exhausted itself. That led to a fascination with aquaponics: a system where fish, plants, and water are combined in a continuous loop of cleaning, growing, and eating. You can use the same water over and over again. That loop for us had incredible formal possibilities. A lot of our inspiration was—
AA: —making the loop visible! That became our Aqualoop project—fish and plants combined with a sushi restaurant and a playground. The systems are generative of the architecture. You take the lines of the system and at some point you thicken them.
Fish, plants and water are combined in Aqualoop, a continuous loop of cleaning, growing and eating.
DX: I always say that one of the most exciting things about architecture is that someone’s floor is another person’s ceiling. There are these relationships that translate through the section, whether it’s transforming the Guggenheim into a lazy river and hydroponics tower for the Flow Show or enlarging a typical core to contain new ecological infrastructure and public spaces as we did for the Plug Out project. In embracing all of these systems it becomes so clear. A sloped roof collects water naturally, and it is collected in a cistern, which becomes a curved wall. The section becomes a system in itself.
Installed at New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2010, "Flow Show" was a water slide using rainwater filtered on the museum's roof.
AA: Soon after we won PS1 we had an interesting conversation with Winy Maas of MVRDV, who had also been looking at food systems and cities, especially with their—
DX:—Pig City—
AA: but the conversation made us feel somewhat more American, and less in tune with that kind of Dutch engineering, pragmatism, and the stacking of pigs. Maybe we’re more romantic or dangerously nostalgic.
DX: But our pigs would be much happier.
Amale Andraos is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has taught at numerous institutions including the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania Design School, and the American University in Beirut.
Dan Wood leads international projects for WORKac. He holds the 2013-14 Louis I. Kahn Chair at the Yale School of Architecture and has taught at the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture, and the UC Berkeley School of Environmental Design, where he was the Friedman Distinguished Chair.
Farmers of The Future at Urban Organics
Farmers of The Future at Urban Organics
December 26, 2017 by Morgan Mercer0 Comments
The interior fish incubation room of Urban Organics // Photo by Tj Turner
An inconspicuous white tube travels along the length of the ceiling, connecting two very different rooms. The first room is a cool 60 degrees and smells slightly fishy. Gray concrete floors and colorless walls make the space appear colder than it is. The neighboring room couldn’t be more different. The air smells sweet and vaguely earthy. When you open the door, it feels like stepping into the glow of a warm spring day.
This is a farm of the future.
In the middle of St. Paul, tucked inside a brewery that sat empty for years, life is thriving in the dead of winter. No soil. No natural light. Just a white pipe that carries the lifeblood of the entire operation from room to room: water. Kale, red romaine, and other leafy greens grow on racks stacked five planters high. In an adjacent room, tens of thousands of Arctic char swim in 26,000-gallon tanks. Thanks to the fish, the plants at Urban Organics grow all year long.
With a new 87,000-square-foot space at the Schmidt Brewery complex, Urban Organics is one of the largest commercial aquaponics facilities in the world. The company converts waste produced by fish to fertilize thousands of pounds of produce a month. The farm, which is certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is 10 times larger than Urban Organics’ first facility at the historic Hamm’s Brewery complex in St. Paul.
An Arctic Char pool, racks of leafy greens and an Arctic Char // Photos by Tj Turner
“When we would tell people our plan, we still joke about the number of people who thought we were nuts. They would say, ‘Don’t quit your day job,’” says Dave Haider, who did just that when he closed down his construction business to launch the original Hamm’s site with three other partners in 2012.
Since then, the team has built a worldwide reputation as a pioneer in year-round urban organic farming. In 2014, the Guardian dubbed Urban Organics one of the 10 most innovative farms in the world. The company sets itself apart with a state-of-the-art design, courtesy of an ongoing partnership with Pentair, a global leader in water technology. At a time when the agriculture industry faces increasing environmental challenges like climate change and water shortages, Urban Organics is out to prove there is a more sustainable way to produce fresh food—one that uses less water, and stays close to home.
“People want to know where their food is coming from and that it is being farmed in this safe, sustainable manner,” says Dave, who has seen aquaponics transition from a largely unknown concept to more of a mainstream idea in recent years. “We’re still trying to prove to people that we’re not nuts, but it’s not as many as it was.”
A game-changing partnership
Fred Haberman examines rows of Romaine Lettuce // Photo by Tj Turner
Limp. Tasteless. Old. Too many stores in the Twin Cities stocked bad lettuce, and Fred Haberman was fed up. The problem was shipping. By the time his salad greens arrived from California and hit local shelves, they were already days old. That’s when Fred remembered Will Allen, a former professional basketball player who started an urban farm in Milwaukee. That’s what the Twin Cities needs, Haberman thought—food grown where it’s consumed. Coincidentally, Dave had the same idea, too.
With two other partners, they formed Urban Organics. At the time, there were only a handful of companies testing hydroponic growing methods in urban areas, and even fewer trying aquaponics. A partnership with Pentair helped the company break into the fledgling industry.
“When they reached out to us it seemed too good to be true,” says Dave of the water tech company. “They saw it as a way to address some of these food concerns we’re facing now. This was their way of not only supporting a local company like ours, but catalyzing an industry as well.”
Pentair supplied all of the pumps, filters, and aerators needed to get the state-of-the-art aquaponics facility up and running. The system converts wastewater from the fish tanks into plant food. First, solid waste is filtered out. Then, bacteria convert the remaining ammonia into nitrates. This nitrate-rich water is what nourishes the 12 varieties of leafy greens Urban Organics grows.
Not only is the company’s organic produce free of pesticides and chemicals, but it also uses significantly less water than traditional soil-based farming practices. Nitrate-rich water is pumped underneath plant beds to minimize evaporation and deliver nutrients straight to the plant’s roots. All the water—except what evaporates on the plant side—is continually recycled and reused through the facility’s closed-loop system, too.
Last April, Co-op Partners Warehouse started selling the St. Paul-grown greens to stores and restaurants across the Midwest, including Wedge Commuity Co-op, Mississippi Market, and Seward Co-op. For a company that often buys and transports large volumes of California-grown salad mixes throughout the Midwest, Co-op Partners Warehouse was happy to finally have a local option.
“Urban Organics is using a sustainable system for production. Our customers want to support this type of innovation in the food industry,” says Lori Zuidema, the sales manager at Co-op Partners. “It reduces the need to transport food across the country [and] our year-round reliance on California produce.”
Packaged greens at Urban Organics ready to be shipped to stores // Photo by Tj Turner
By the time California lettuce makes it to stores, Lori says it’s already often six days away from expiring. Thanks to Urban Organics’ proximity, its products last seven to 10 days longer on the shelf. Plus, the St. Paul company offers unique salad mixes—like the rosé blend, a mix of red lettuces—that she can’t find anywhere else.
Right now Urban Organics harvests up to 15,000 pounds of produce a month. That’s enough to fill 45,000 pre-packed salad containers for stores like Lunds & Byerlys. Annually, the St. Paul farm will also harvest 275,000 pounds of fish—either Atlantic salmon or Arctic char—for restaurants like Birchwood Cafe that want a local and sustainable protein option. Beyond food, Urban Organics is an investment in a neighborhood. By rehabbing spaces at two defunct breweries, the St. Paul business leveraged urban farming to create jobs and spur economic development.
“We don’t want to replace traditional farming. It should be complementary,” says Dave, who sees smaller, local farms like Urban Organics as an opportunity to conserve water, save on distribution costs, and expand traditional growing areas. “I think we can do a lot better.”
High-tech food, designed by data
An Urban Organics seed planting machine // Photo Tj Turner
Aside from leafy greens and fish, Urban Organics is a data farm. Hidden throughout Urban Organics’ facility are more than 100 probes and sensors programmed to measure the slightest shifts in water temperature, pH levels, and dissolved oxygen. From seed to shelf, Urban Organics can track a single plant throughout its 35-day life cycle. Harvest logs allow the team to monitor growing trends and see how the fish influence the plants and vice versa. Every day, each probe in the facility shoots off a report to the company’s central computer. Those small slices of information help Dave and his team understand how to improve the farm’s design to raise fish and grow produce in the most sustainable and efficient way possible.
“We’re still in some ways pioneering an industry. There is no playbook for this. We learn something on a daily basis,” says Dave. “Everything we’re doing here is being recorded, which is going to help us design the next better facility.”
That’s in part what made the first site at Hamm’s Brewery so valuable. After farming that location for more than two years, Urban Organics knew how to upgrade the blueprint of the Schmidt Brewery site. First, Urban Organics scaled up in size—from 8,000 square feet to 87,000 square feet. Then, it switched out its grow lights from compact fluorescents to LEDs. That change alone helped the company cut down on its biggest cost, electricity, by 40 percent. Last, Urban Organics got smarter about its water. At the Hamm’s site, water flowed from the fish tanks, to the sump, to the plants, and then back to the fish again. But Dave found that wasn’t ideal. If the pH in the water from the fish tanks spiked, it could cause the plants’ leaves to yellow. So Urban Organics devised a solution that allowed him to separate the system into two continuously looping water cycles. Dave can pump nutrient-rich water from the fish to the plants as they need it, giving him greater control to create the best water conditions for both sides.
“This is a world that requires a lot of iteration because it’s new,” says Fred, who credits the engineering strength and aquaponics experts at Pentair for putting Urban Organics in a league of its own. “Even though this idea of leveraging the symbiotic relationship between fish and plants has been around for millennia, the idea of using technology to do it is new.”
Urban Organic’s seedlings // Photo by Tj Turner
By early 2018, Dave plans to have the Urban Organics farm in St. Paul running at its full potential. His team hopes to harvest the first of the Arctic char this spring, and more than triple the amount of greens it cranks out each month. But that’s just the beginning. Dave and Fred are already plotting the next city they want to expand to and brainstorming the next iteration of Urban Organics: a facility powered entirely by solar energy.
“I don’t think we can stay the course with traditional farming as our population grows in hopes that we’re going to have healthy food 50 years from now,” says Dave. “I’m not saying we’ve cracked the code and others haven’t. We’re just doing our part to come up with a perfect solution.”
Filed Under: Arts and Culture, Homepage Featured, MakersTagged With: Aquaponics, craft culture, Dave Haider, Fred Haberman, Schmidt Brewery, Urban Organics
Second Generation Growlink Environment Controllers Introduce New Remote Sensor Module with Additional Light and VPD Readings
Growlink, architect of Smart Farm technology, today announced the second generation Growlink Environment Controllers. In addition to the new remote sensor module, they introduced three new controllers to support any size grow operation.
Second Generation Growlink Environment Controllers Introduce New Remote Sensor Module with Additional Light and VPD Readings
Growlink Second Generation Controllers provide a complete hardware and software solution for monitoring and equipment automation.
DENVER (PRWEB) December 08, 2017
Environment Sensor Module
Our mission is to help growers reduce costs, maximize yields and eliminate crop loss while helping them save energy.
Growlink, architect of Smart Farm technology, today announced the second generation Growlink Environment Controllers. In addition to the new remote sensor module, they introduced three new controllers to support any size grow operation. New features include VPD and light readings, improved rules engine, rule groups, direct controller access, local data storage, expanded I/O options, improved Wi-Fi compatibility and proprietary mesh RF network.
“In the past year, we’ve accomplished many notable milestones, from having Growlink Controllers connected – and improving operations and yields – in licensed grows in every U.S. state and across Canada where cannabis production is legal, to supporting some of the largest food production vertical farms, to adding over 100 dealers and installers” said Ted Tanner, Growlink founder and chief executive officer.
“Our mission is to help growers reduce costs, maximize yields and eliminate crop loss while helping them save energy, and with the next-generation Growlink Environment Controllers, we’re able to spread that saving and predictability to even more farms of any size – and to help all the equipment in a farm perform the way they were meant to.”
All three models include the new Wireless ESM1 Environment Sensor Module, a shielded device designed to hang in the canopy that measures temperature, humidity, VPD, light and CO2.
The Growlink EC-1 Environment Controller is designed for small room operation. It includes a compact base controller, the Wireless Environment Sensor Module and two Remote Power Links that allow users to control any equipment. The system can be expanded by adding additional Remote Power Links.
The Growlink EC-3 Environment Controller is designed for commercial grow rooms and container farms. The base controller includes eight solid state relays with manual override switches for controlling external devices. Users can switch any low-voltage equipment or use UL listed contactors for line voltage interfacing equipment. It includes the ESM1 Wireless Sensor Module and supports the addition of a second ESM1 to monitor a second room. All components are matched to the controlled loads and panels arrive fully pre-wired and tested.
The Growlink EC-6 Environment Controller is designed to deliver the ultimate smart farm experience, featuring the highest-quality components and processing power to coordinate hundreds of smart devices throughout the entire farm. The EC-6 can automate sophisticated indoor farms and complex greenhouses with controls for climate, irrigation and nutrient systems. Each controller is custom programmed to manage the customer’s specific applications. They can also be easily networked together for seamless control of any sized facility. The base controller includes sixteen solid state relays with manual override switches for controlling external devices. Users can switch any low-voltage equipment or use UL listed contactors for line voltage interfacing equipment. It includes the ESM1 Wireless Sensor Module and supports the addition of a second ESM1 to monitor a second room. All components are matched to the controlled loads and panels arrive fully pre-wired and tested.
Growlink’s connected Environment, Nutrient and Irrigation Controllers allow users to see, monitor, and control a farm from anywhere using their smartphone or tablet. These Internet of Things devices are designed for indoor and greenhouse grow operations, and their modular design allows them to scale from single rooms to large greenhouses and everything in between. They are part of Growlink’s complete cloud-based platform and are capable of predictive analytics.
The Growlink App, available in the Apple App Store and Google Play, connects to the Growlink Controllers directly when onsite or through the cloud when away and allows users to monitor sensor data in real time, view real-time video, and control any connected devices. Users can set up rules including sensor triggers, timers, and schedules to automate the grow process.
The Growlink EC-1 Environment Controller retails for $1299. It is available now direct from Growlink at http://www.growlink.com and hydroponic stores everywhere starting January 2018. The EC-3 and EC-6 are available by custom quote only.
About Growlink
Growlink’s mission is to create smart farms that reduce costs, maximize yields and eliminate crop loss by leveraging the power of big data, the cloud and IoT devices. The company focuses on simple, beautiful hardware, software and services. The Growlink Platform controls and automates lighting, climate, fertigation and irrigation systems.
Visit http://www.growlink.com for more information and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
For media inquiries:
Please contact press@growlink.com