Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
Why Food Dominated 2017?
In 2017, we care, and we care a lot.
The world of food is changing in front of our eyes. Just 10 years ago, companies had total freedom from consumer oversight to create whatever would sell. Ingredients mattered only as a cost item. For many companies, cheaper meant better.
The results have been disastrous. More than 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Especially among our poor. Companies put artificial ingredients and preservatives in their products almost without any basis. No one cared.
Now that is no longer the case. In 2017, we care, and we care a lot.
Many people — especially our most underserved communities — are at the mercy of industrial food. The industrial food system ships in high-calorie, low-nutrient processed food from thousands of miles away. It leaves us disconnected from our food and the people who grow it. The results are awful, from obesity and diabetes to a total loss of community in our food system. And it tastes terrible! No wonder people are turning against this system en masse.
Food is a gift we give each other three times a day. Millions of Americans are starting to realize the need for real food. That also comes with the need for more real-food farmers. One is not possible without the other.
In 2017, we saw massive investments in food. Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods Market. Agtech investing literally tripled in 2017 over 2016. A $17 million investment round helped propel Memphis Meats, a clean-meat company that develops animal proteins that are delicious, harm no animals, and use no antibiotics or growth hormones. (I invested in this round.)
In 2017, our restaurant company, the Kitchen, purchased $7.4 million worth of real food from American farmers and served more than 1 million guests. Our affordable, urban casual concept, Next Door, opened locations in Colorado and Memphis, meeting the demand for real food. We kicked off season two of Square Roots, and, yes again, we received more than 500 applications from young entrepreneurs interested in becoming real-food farmers; we had just 10 spots to fill. Our learning gardens grew to 450 schools across America’s heartland, reaching 250,000 kids every school day.
Here are a few 2018 food predictions for fun:
Land prices farming corn for ethanol will take a nosedive. Ethanol from corn was never a good technology, but with electric cars coming online, we simply don’t need it anymore. Ethanol from sugar is eight times more efficient to produce and will replace any need in the short term for ethanol in cars.
Restaurants and food companies will move toward total transparency.(I like to think we are leading the way with our Next Door concept joining the Good Food 100). In today’s world, hiding what you do from consumers is a losing strategy. Trust is the currency of our generation. In the age of the internet, everything you do will eventually be public. Transparency from the beginning is the only path forward to building a great food company.
Thousands of millennials will quit their jobs in other sectors for jobs in food. Thousands more will become real-food farmers. The demand for farming among our youth is bright. As the real-food industry grows, the farms they’ll take on will be urban as well as soil based. No more corn and soybeans!
There will be an avalanche of supply of farmland in the heartland.More than 25 million acres of land is set aside for corn to produce ethanol. It takes a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of corn ethanol. Every acre loses money for the farmer. You couldn’t invent a worse technology or business if you tried. This combined with the age of the typical corn farmer will open up millions of acres to our youth across the heartland.
Restaurants will join the connected world. Automation in the back end connecting to chefs in the home office, digital front ends that connect a guest directly to the chef, and on-demand delivery of any food to your family within 20 minutes will change the way we think about restaurants today.
Large U.S. companies will focus their philanthropic support on getting real food to underserved Americans. Obesity and diabetes are the epidemics of our day. Companies will have an amazing and powerful impact on their communities by focusing their philanthropy on creating healthy, thriving communities through food.
Sales of processed, low-nutrient food will continue to crater. The business of real food—food you trust to nourish your body, your farmer, and the planet—will thrive in 2018.
Now That Hemp And CBD Are Legal, What Comes Next For Food And Beverage?
…they still face regulatory obstacles from the Food and Drug Administration,…
AUTHOR Cathy Siegner
Dec. 20, 2018
Dive Brief:
Now that the 2018 Farm Bill is signed into law, hemp and its derivatives are no longer classified as controlled substances by the Food and Drug Agency, and can legally be regulated by state and tribal governments and commercialized in foods and dietary supplements, New Hope Network reported.
U.S. hemp and CBD companies are expected to pursue listings on Nasdaq and other exchanges soon, according to Bloomberg. However, they still face regulatory obstacles from the Food and Drug Administration, the New Hope Network noted, because the agency's position has been that CBD can't be legally sold in conventional foods or dietary supplements.
While hemp and marijuana are both members of the cannabis family, hemp extracts contain CBD, a non-psychoactive compound that doesn't produce marijuana's trademark high from THC. Hemp does contain very low levels of THC, but hemp products legally sold in the U.S. must have no more than 0.3% of the chemical.
Dive Insight:
Besides removing hemp from the list of controlled substances, the new Farm Bill also expands research into commercial uses for the plant. Currently, hemp ingredients such as CBD oil, powders and seeds are being used to infuse beverages such as iced tea and are being added to a wide variety of other foods, including ice cream, salads, milk and even children's cereal.
The market for CBD and hemp products is already significant and likely to become more so. According to the Capital Press, a New Frontier Data report found that U.S. CBD sales jumped almost 40% in 2017, hitting $367 million. And, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, the total retail value of all U.S. hemp products last year was estimated at $820 million.
Major food and beverage makers are keeping an eye on the trend and considering how they might adapt forms of THC and CBD to their brands. Bloomberg recently reported that Coca-Cola has been talking with a Canadian cannabis company about marijuana-infused beverages following that country's recent nationwide legalization. A Coca-Cola spokesman told Bloomberg News the company has made no decision yet but is closely watching the growth of CBD as an ingredient in global functional wellness beverages.
THC, CBD and non-psychoactive terpenes from cannabis have appearing in beverages in states where such products are legal. Last year, Heineken-owned Lagunitas Brewing debuted a non-psychoactive, cannabis-flavored IPA brewed with terpenes — organic compounds that give plants their flavors — and the company introduced a THC-based sparkling water this year.
It's not a big stretch to combine cannabis and hops in beer brewing since they are genetically related. The key ingredient they share are terpenes. It's another question whether beer products containing both ingredients will spark a nationwide trend, although with hemp no longer a controlled substance, there could be many more drinks with some form of CBD or THC showing up on shelves and in coolers. Just this week, AB InBev and marijuana grower and distributor Tilray announced a joint $100 million investment to research cannabis-infused nonalcoholic beverages.
Other recent product introductions containing CBD are a nutrition bar from California-based SNAAK Bar that markets itself as optimizing sports performance — and is only available in California and online — and Spring's line of CBD-infused sodas sold in New York, Florida, Nevada, and Illinois.
One big unknown for this market is how the FDA will handle regulating hemp and CBD in products since the agency states that "it is a prohibited act to introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce any food (including any animal food or feed) to which THC or CBD has been added." But because of the new Farm Bill's action regarding hemp, it's possible the agency will institute a rulemaking process to realign its regulation and enforcement of the crop and its products. Dave Donnan, a senior partner in A.T. Kearney's food and beverage practice, told Food Dive the regulatory machine will probably be figuring out how to make CBD a safe and legal ingredient.
“There's all these tactical things that 2019 will be the year to work through,” Donnan said.
Some concerns stem from the cannabis industry's poor food safety record and a tendency to market some edible and supplement products as miracle cures. The FDA took action last year against four firms selling supplements based on marijuana that were advertised as curing cancer. Such claims may not be as likely with CBD products, although the oil is said to help with pain, inflammation, anxiety, depression, insomnia and seizures, among other conditions. Critics say these benefits aren't based on science, but advocates counter there has been plenty of recent research to bolster health claims.
Whether hemp and CBD will be appearing across the board in foods and beverages is unclear at this stage since the ink is barely dry on the new Farm Bill. But as research grows into more commercial applications and companies innovate with new products testing public interest — and FDA's tolerance under its current policies — there could be a newly crowded segment attracting investors, retailers and consumers.
A Peek At Your New Plate: How You’ll Be Eating in 2019
Here are some of the most intriguing guesses at what and how Americans will be eating in the new year.
Better lettuce? Cheese tea? Here are the most intriguing forecasts for the food world — best consumed with a grain or two of salt.
Get ready for more cheese tea — green or black tea sipped through a cap of cream cheese blended with cream or condensed milk. Credit Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
By Kim Severson
Dec. 21, 2018
More vegetables. Improved gut bacteria. Cocktails with less alcohol.
Many of the predictions about what we’ll eat and drink in 2019 point to a quiet, restorative and potentially grim time ahead. Then again, these forecasts always arrive carrying the clean, healthy pine scent of New Year’s resolutions.
The good news: There will be cheese tea. And salad robots, according to the prognosticators.
As we pored over dozens of lists handicapping the next big food trends, and interviewed the people who get paid to drill into consumer behavior, we kept in mind that everyone could be dead wrong. Food forecasting is not a science, or even an art. Still, the game is a fun one.
Here are some of the most intriguing guesses at what and how Americans will be eating in the new year.
Will celtuce, a Chinese lettuce bred to highlight its long, crunchy stem, be the year’s breakaway green? Credit Andrea Sperling/Getty Images
With health scares about romaine, and the popular Little Gem lettuce hitting a saturation point, the field is open for a new lettuce to catch on. Credit Axel Koester for The New York Times
The Next Lettuce
The great romaine scare of 2018 — a strain of E. coli that was eventually traced to a reservoir in California — has helped make lettuce ripe for a new star in 2019. The current darling of the restaurant salad, Little Gem lettuce, was denounced this month as overexposed by New York magazine’s restaurant critic, Adam Platt.
Expect to see little-known varieties showing up on menus, and an explosion in lettuces grown hydroponically, many of them in urban container farms. Some chefs are rallying around celtuce, a lettuce with a leafy, bitter top and a stalk that’s kind of a cross between celery and asparagus. Chinese cooks know it as wosun. Even wild weeds like dandelion greens or sorrel may get a shot. Whichever wins, kale is still over.
Food forecasters say dishes with fermented ingredients will grow in popularity, like this noorook, a grain porridge seasoned with koji, from the Los Angeles chefs Kwang Uh and Matthew Kim. Credit Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times
The New Flavor Profile
Sour and funky, with shades of heat. This is what happens when you mix the interest in fermenting with the millennial palate. Melina Romero, who has the title of trend insights manager at CCD Helmsman, a food research and product development firm in Emeryville, Calif., explained the generation that loves global mash-ups and bold flavors this way: “They grew up with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and while they still want spicy, I think, beyond that, they have grown to become interested in flavors that are acquired — sour flavors and even funky flavors like fermented foods.”
Tea of all kinds, but particularly the creamy, sometimes salty import from Taiwan called cheese tea, will appear on more menus. Credit Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
The Thing You Will Try Against Your Better Judgment
Cheese tea, an import from Taiwan, will hit the American mainstream this year. Green or black tea is sipped through a cap of cream cheese blended with cream or condensed milk, which can be either sweet or slightly salty. It’s already a hit in San Francisco, where they make it with Meyer lemon and mascarpone.
If it has to do with fermenting, probiotics or gut-friendly food like kimchi, you will likely be eating more if it. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The Big Health Fix
Anything to do with your gut flora. That means you can expect more ways to ingest probiotics and prebiotics and foods designed to improve the bacterial health of your intestinal tract, according to several grocery store chains and wellness market analysts. As the obsession with digestive health dovetails with the fascination for fermenting, kimchi, sauerkraut and pickled things will work their way into new territory. Smoothies with kefir will be popular, and kombucha will show up in unexpected places like salad dressings.
The Hot Diets
Diets that emphasize fat over carbohydrates will continue to dominate. Instagram says video posts using the hashtag “keto” — the name of a high-fat, low-carb diet — grew fivefold over the past six months. Hannah Spencer, a registered dietitian who tracks the food service industry for the market research company Mintel, said the keto diet might be losing its edge. Still, she added, restaurants will add more low-carb options. The term “pegan” — a cross between a paleo and a vegan diet — will take hold. Pinterest says the number of searches for the term rose 337 percent in the past six months.
Cooking in foil packets is a technique expected to gain popularity in the coming year. Credit Ilmoro 100/Getty images
The New Sheet-Pan Supper
With barely any cleanup and a deep whiff of nostalgia (remember your first Scout camping trip?), cooking dinner in foil packets is poised for popularity. Pinterest notes that searches for “foil-pack dinners” have jumped nearly eightfold in the past six months.
At the bar, expect more natural wines, lighter drinks and cocktails without any alcohol. Credit Lisa Corson for The New York Times
The Driest Drinks
At the bar, lighter wines, natural wines and drinks with less or no alcohol will be popular. Americans ages 18 to 34 are more interested in spirit-free cocktails than any other demographic group, according to Mintel. As a result, bartenders will replace high-alcohol liquors like gin with lower-alcohol wines like Prosecco in mixed drinks, and make more use of shrubs, craft vermouths, botanicals and distilled nonalcoholic spirits like Seedlip. This may force bars to try to come up with better names than the no-jito or the no-groni. Outlier prediction: Forbes magazine is betting that the breakfast cocktail will be big.
With food delivery growing and waste reduction a priority for many consumers, restaurants will feel pressure to cut back on packaging and the use of plastic. Credit Sunstock/Getty
The Case Against Waste
With the plastic straw and the plastic bag increasingly out of fashion, restaurants, food manufacturers and groceries will face new pressure to reduce other packaging waste. In a recent Mintel survey, 36 percent of diners said they wanted restaurants to cut back on packaging. (The number is even higher among baby boomers.) Restaurants that serve food on plastic with disposable cutlery will have an incentive to invest in reusable plates and forks. Cutting waste in the increasingly robust carryout and delivery markets will get new attention, too.
The Playlist Ploy
Restaurants will keep seeking ways to expand their brands beyond food; Dunkin’ Donuts has put its name on a Saucony running shoe, and KFC recently sold out of fire logs that smell like fried chicken. For higher-end restaurants, the vehicle of choice will be the customized Spotify playlist. David Chang has already issued one, as has Flour & Water in San Francisco.
Expect more vegetable entrees like this black-eyed pea salad at Teranga in New York. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times
The Plant-Based Main Course
Substantial vegetable entrees will become a fixture on restaurant menus, in the way that alternatives to dairy creamers became standard at coffee bars a few years ago. Many diners have started to eat less red meat or abandon animal protein altogether, whether for health, environmental or ethical reasons. A few corporations have banned meat consumption on their campuses. In Los Angeles, a member of the City Council this month proposed a law that would require a substantial vegan protein entree be available at movie theaters and other large entertainment centers.
The Motherless Meat
Laboratory-grown proteins will enter the mainstream. KFC, Tyson Foods and Cargill are investing heavily, and the products are catching on so fast that ranchers have started campaigns to stop the engineered proteins from being called “meat,” Forbes reports. Prepare for the next generation of plant-based alternatives to dairy products: substitutes for cheese, butter and ice cream made with nuts, soy or coconut.
Salads made by robots like this one from Chowbotics can assemble a customized bowl of fresh vegetables in about two minutes. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
The Tech Advancement You’ll Hate Until You Need It
Salad-making robots will show up in hospitals and airports, where freshly made food is not easy to find at all hours. The systems rely on chilled containers of fresh ingredients that are restocked during the course of the day. Push a few buttons on a keypad and the robot makes a custom salad topped with dressing.
Millions of investment dollars are pouring into companies trying to put marijuana byproducts into food and drink. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The Hope for Dope
Major food and beverage companies are researching ways to get THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana, and cannabidiol, a part of the plant that may have therapeutic properties, into more food and drinks. The authors of the federal farm bill have removed hemp from the list of controlled substances, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is pushing to legalize recreational use of marijuana in New York.
Fresh mushrooms may show up in a wide range of products, from burgers to teas.
Credit Aaron Borton for The New York Time
Sea vegetables like dulce, kelp, seaweed and spirulina are trending. Credit Daniel Krieger for The New York Times
The New ‘It’ Vegetable
It’s a tie between mushrooms — which have acquired what food marketers call a health halo and are expected to pop up in teas, desserts, jerky and cocktails — and sea vegetables, which most people just call seaweed. Consumption of seaweed is growing 7 percent annually in the United States, James Griffin, an associate professor at Johnson & Wales University, told Nation’s Restaurant News. It checks all the boxes: healthful, environmentally sound and full of umami.
Khachapuri, a traditional egg and bread staple of Georgia, is a ready-made Instagram star. Credit Morgan Ione Yeager for The New York Times
The New ‘It’ Cuisines
It’s a tossup. The market research firm Technomic says popular dishes will come from eastern Mediterranean nations like Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. Baum & Whiteman, a consulting firm based in New York, is betting on food from the “Stans” — Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The global buyers for Whole Foods Market have money on flavors from the Pacific Rim. The San Francisco food consultant Andrew Freedman is calling it for Georgia, with its Instagrammable star, khachapuri — the cheese-filled bread boat topped with a runny egg. The prognosticators at the Kind food company are pulling for the flavors of Africa, though they did not specify a country.
The chef José Andrés created a new model for providing direct relief through cooking, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico last year. Credit Eric Rojas for The New York Times
The Cause of the Year
How a restaurant or food company cares for its employees, its purveyors, its customers and its community will move up the priority list in 2019, Mr. Freedman said. More chefs will become first responders, providing food at disaster sites. Companies will fine-tune training for how employees should treat one another. Immigrants and their role in American food culture will be front and center.
Sara Brito, a founder and the president of the Good Food 100 list, said in her 2019 trend report that customers will demand that restaurants tend to more than just how food tastes.
“They need to demonstrate they care about the whole system and story of food,” she said, “including the environment, farmworkers, animal welfare and inclusion in the workplace.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Correction: December 21, 2018
An earlier version of this article misstated Melina Romero’s title and the name of the company where she works. She is the trend insights manager at CCD Helmsman, not the trend associate manager at CCD Innovation.
Kim Severson is a Southern-based correspondent who covers the nation's food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking. She has written four books and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. @kimseverson • Facebook
“Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.”
Report Points to 'Difficult and Worrying' 2019 for U.S. Agriculture
Market volatility caused by President Donald Trump's trade disputes, extreme weather and the potential spread of African Swine Fever could threaten the stability of global food commodity prices next year.
The downward trend of U.S. farmers' profitability will only get worse if China continues to ignore American agricultural imports, the report said. | Steve Helber/AP Photo
By SARAH ZIMMERMAN
11/15/2018 11:34 AM EST
Market volatility caused by President Donald Trump's trade disputes, extreme weather and the potential spread of African Swine Fever could threaten the stability of global food commodity prices next year, the agricultural banking company Rabobank warned Thursday in a new report.
“The agri-commodity price environment may be relatively stable currently, but it’s difficult to remember a time [when] there were so many threats to food commodity prices on so many fronts,” Stefan Vogel, Rabobank's head of agricultural commodity markets and a co-author of the report, said in a statement.
In Rabobank's annual Outlook report, the Holland-based company predicted that trade uncertainty remains the largest threat facing U.S. farmers next year. The downward trend of U.S. farmers' profitability will only get worse if China continues to ignore American agricultural imports, the report said. Fiscal 2018 marked the second-worst profitability year for American farmers in nearly the last decade, the report said, despite record-smashing corn and soybean yields and the fact that Chinese retaliatory tariffs only directly affected one-quarter of the 12-month period.
Rabobank anticipates that American soybean farmers will continue to take the biggest hit if Beijing keeps its tariffs in place — and that U.S. soybean stocks "will easily double" under that scenario. USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue has said that farmers will not receive additional trade aid for 2019 production, reasoning that Trump's tariff policies have already altered markets and that farmers must now react accordingly.
In many cases, that may be easier said than done. "These measures," the report said, referring to tit-for-tat tariffs, "change the structure of global trade and increase U.S. inventories to new all-time highs, while hurting U.S. farmer margins, and resulting in great uncertainty when it comes to prices and the upcoming 2019 planting season."
Agricultural producers should prepare for other factors beyond trade, according to the report. If African Swine Fever, which has cropped up in places in China's massive pork industry, spreads to become a full-on outbreak, consumer concern could lead to shifts in preferences, in turn affecting global trade flows.
In addition, the report noted that climate experts are forecasting an 80 percent chance of El Niño weather conditions being formally declared "by the end of the northern winter." El Niño-related weather patterns tend to make the U.S. Southern Plains wetter and can also lead to drier conditions in the northern part of the U.S. Midwest.
With El Niño-like effects already being experienced in parts of Australia, Brazil and India, the report said, further weather change holds the potential to hurt crop yields and production, and influence global trade in agricultural commodities.
“Food producers face a melting pot of risks,” Justin Sherrard, a global strategist for animal protein at Rabobank, said in a statement. “Although it’s possible that not all of them will come to pass, they need to be prepared for a difficult and worrying year in 2019.”
The report predicted a hefty surplus in U.S. soybeans next year and a global glut in coffee and, less significantly, in palm oil and sugar. It forecast global deficits in corn, wheat, cocoa and cotton, noting that hurricane-related damage affected the U.S. cotton crop this year.
With Trump expected to talk trade with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the end of the month, the report was not overly pessimistic about the possibility that the two economic superpowers could strike a deal to ease trade tension.
The report said it "may take very long negotiations" to address America's trade deficit with China "by any significant amount." However, Rabobank said it was "surprising" how quickly the new North American trade agreement came together and that "we can’t rule out a speedy resolution to the U.S.-China trade war."
"Once achieved," the report said of a U.S.-China trade deal, "it will likely result in China buying increasing quantities of American goods. Under a Chinese tariff regime, however, the U.S. will easily double its soybean stocks."
Introduction To Upside Down Gardening
Gardening, with the aim of providing your own food, has experienced a resurgence over the last few years.
More and more of us are looking for ways to reduce our food bills, decrease our carbon footprint, and eat healthier.
Those with gardens or access to an allotment find it easier to grow their own food, but what about those of us who live in apartments?
Apartment dwellers have much less space to work with and this obstacle stops many budding gardeners in their tracks.
That is why we were excited to learn about upside down gardening, it grants everyone the opportunity to grow their own vegetables regardless of available space.
Here’s what the experts at Fantastic Gardeners advise in order to get yourself up to speed with an upside-down garden.
Upside-down gardening - definition
Upside down gardening is growing plants in pots suspended from the ceiling.
This style of gardening started to gain popularity in 1998 when gardener Kathi Lael Morris showed that it is possible to grow tomatoes and peppers in hanging pots.
Many traditional gardeners viewed this style of gardening as a fad with little chance of being widely adopted.
Unsurprisingly, people with no garden space quickly realised the benefits of this method and how they were no longer excluded from being able to grow their own food.
What plants can you grow upside down?
Most plants can be grown upside down, but those which benefit the most include:
Tomatoes;
Peppers;
Eggplants;
Cucumbers;
Squash;
Beans;
Various herbs.
If you want to get the most out of your available space, you can consider planting herbs at the top of the hanging pots instead of planting them separately.
Benefits of upside down gardening
Upside down gardening presents benefits to those with gardens as well as those without, however, the advantages are more apparent in urban environments.
Pests – As the plants don’t come into contact with the ground there is a much, much smaller chance that they will be affected by pests such as aphids.
Space – This is the biggest benefit offered by upside down gardening, you don’t need a garden or a lot of space.
Rot/disease resistance – Another advantage of the plant not touching the ground is that the roots, stems, and fruit are less susceptible to rotting or contracting a disease.
Staking – Since the plants grow downwards you don’t need to stake them to optimise growth.
Weeding – Growing plants traditionally requires a lot of time and attention, most of which is taken up by the need to weed.
What you need to get started?
Upside-down gardening of tomato
Creating your personal hanging garden of Babylon does require some supplies and a little bit of work, but it will be worth it when you can eat hand grown produce.
What you need:
A strong hook
Strong string or metal wire
A 7.5cm (six inch) circle of foam or sponge
Lightweight soil or compost
A marker pen
A tray to catch water
A young plant
When you have collected your supplies simply follow the steps below:
1. Find the sunniest area of your home and mark the ceiling where the pots will be,
2. Install the hook,
3. Now turn your bucket upside down and draw a 5cm (2 inches) circle in the centre,
4. Using the knife, carefully cut around the circle to make a hole,
5. Turn the bucket back around and make three evenly spaced holes roughly 2.5cm (1 inch) down from the lip of the bucket,
6. Tie the string or metal wire through each hole to make three loops that are the same size,
7. Cut a 1.75cm (half an inch) hole in the middle of the sponge (or foam) then cut a line running from the hole to the outside,
8. Place the bucket on its side and carefully thread the roots through the hole in the bottom, make sure the plant is on the outside of the bucket,
9. Secure the plant by placing the sponge (or foam) around the base of the plant inside the bucket,
10. Have someone hold the bucket off of the ground and add soil until it is roughly half full,
11. Water until the soil is moist,
12. Add more soil until the bucket is roughly three quarters full,
13. Hang the bucket,
14. Place the water catcher beneath the bucket,
15. Water the plant again until the new soil is also moist.
The great thing about using buckets instead of large plant pots is that you can decorate the buckets.
Take this opportunity to release your inner artist and introduce some bright colours or funky designs to your home.
Decorating the buckets and creating a hanging kitchen garden is an enjoyable, learning activity for teaching children about where food comes from as well as how to care for plants.
Caring for an upside down garden
Looking after your new hanging garden is quite easy since you don’t have to worry about weeds or pests. All you need to do is:
Remove any dead or dying leaves;
Water the plants daily during hot, dry periods;
Water every other day during the rest of the year;
Harvest any ripe fruit and vegetables.
So there it is your guide on how to grow a hanging kitchen garden. With this style of urban gardening, you’ll be eating home-grown fruit and veg in no time, regardless of whether you have a garden or not.
This is a guest post provided by Fantastic Gardeners, a garden maintenance and landscaping company, based in London and Manchester, United Kingdom.
Grocers Are Failing to Meet $20bn Consumer Demand for Local Food
The local food market in the US grew from $5 billion in 2008 to $12BN in 2014, and is expected to rise to $20 billion by next year.
Forager, a local food digital procurement platform, recently conducted a survey of shoppers in New England and upstate New York. Results from the survey lent credence to their hypothesis: while the demand for local food has never been greater, many grocers are ill-equipped to serve customers who are willing to pay more for quality food that supports their local economy.
We asked David Stone, founder and CEO of the startup, to tell us more about the survey.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a very heavy and conventional rock for the last 10 years, it should come as no surprise that local food is on a meteoric rise. The local food market in the US grew from $5 billion in 2008 to $12BN in 2014, and is expected to rise to $20 billion by next year, according to Packaged Facts, the market research firm. The demand is as bright as a glistening fresh strawberry. Data from our survey supported this trend: when asked, 84% of survey respondents reported that they had locally-produced food on their shopping list.
What’s fueling this rise in demand? Some point to the environmental costs of large-scale, industrial farming and the toll of trucking produce thousands of miles across the country. Many believe that local produce tastes better, or has a longer shelf life, due in part to freshness. Yet the overwhelming reason that consumers said they were seeking out local food was to support their local farmers and economy, a rationale chosen by nearly nine out of every 10 survey respondents.
Clearly, consumers want to feel a connection to the land and those working the land to supply them food. Supporting this interest, small and independent farms are on the rise after several decades of decline. According to the USDA Census of Agriculture, in the last three decades the number of farms smaller than 49 acres has increased by 28%, fueled in part by youth and the organic movement, and further bolstered by a 25-year growth in farmland protection programs, which have risen from five in 1980 to 199 in 2015.
While small, independent farmers only supply a small portion of the US food market, this trend represents a significant amount of growth. Demographics are helping to fuel this shift as consumers, especially Millennials and Generation Z, are more interested than prior generations in where their food comes from. Yet most of the current demand cannot be met entirely through direct-to-consumer channels, even as the number of farmers markets in the US has surged to meet this demand, growing nearly 500% in the last decade, according to a 2015 report by American Farmland Trust. As exciting as this is, a 2015 study by the FDA found that only 36% of local food sales occurred through direct-to-consumer channels. Our data supports this: while farmers markets are certainly popular among consumers, 87% of survey respondents reported going to their local grocery store for local food purchases.
While the pressure from multiple directions for the grocer is approaching overwhelming– whether it’s the neighborhood independent, food co-op or the national chain supermarket — the grocer still remains the number one location for fresh and local food shopping needs.
Consumers clearly desire a selection of local products – with everything from veggies (70% of reported local purchases), to fruits (47%), or even flowers (22%), yet among conventional grocery shoppers, 55% of survey respondents reported barriers to buying local products because of limited offerings, versus 35% at independent and natural stores. And then there’s the huge delivery promise perception gap. While 81% of grocers believe they are delivering on the promise of fresh, 67% of consumers are completely dissatisfied with local fresh produce in their grocery store. Many consumers will abandon their carts and change stores if the grocer fails to deliver on the promise of fresh, according to a consumer survey by Blue Yonder.
So, what’s stopping grocers from delivering on this desire for local. With such a high and demonstrated demand for local food, shouldn’t grocers and other wholesalers be capitalizing on this trend?
Well, it turns out that it’s a lot simpler to source from one or two large distributors than from many local, small-scale producers. Furthermore, with an increasing number of local produce varieties, the complexity rises exponentially.
There is plenty of work to be done. Summer is here in the North East and many are reaping the benefits of this magnificent produce. Consumers are asking for it – whether it’s organic strawberries, purple kohlrabi, Skyphos Red Butterhead Lettuce, or Lacinato kale. And unless they’re near an especially robust grocer (such as Lucky’s Market), they’re going to score their seasonal bounty directly from their farmer. For conventional grocers, this is an opportunity that they cannot afford to miss. On average, consumers shop at six different grocery stores, and if these stores want to stay in business, they must be able to offer the fresh, local food that their customers are looking for.
The Artist Creating Urban Farms To Feed Philadelphia
With fresh fruit and vegetables hard to come by in some of the city’s soup kitchens, Meei Ling Ng plants gardens to provide hyper-local produce to the homeless.
2018
Not many churches can boast their own Garden of Eden, but South Philadelphia’s historic Union Baptist Church (UBC) can. When Loretta Lewis and other veteran congregants of UBC opened a soup kitchen 20 years ago, they made a solemn pledge: “We just vowed that we’re not going feed people anything that we wouldn’t eat or feed our families,” she says. “The people who come are used to eating substandard food, but here they have never had substandard food.”
The soup kitchen volunteers have always prepared for the weekly Friday luncheon by shopping for and cooking food in an industrial kitchen in the church’s basement, adjacent to a dining room with cloth-covered tables, where people from nearby shelters are welcome to enjoy a free, nutritious meal.
And for the past year, sourcing fresh vegetables—often a big challenge for the church—has been easy. The soup kitchen’s pantry is now supplemented by hyper-local produce, harvested the same day from a new garden in a previously underused plot next door to the church.
Meei Ling Ng, an artist and urban grower who lives nearby, began a collaboration with the church a year and a half ago to develop what they’ve jointly called the UBC Garden of Eden. “I want to promote ‘grow food where you live,’” Ng says. “That’s always my project title, everywhere. And ‘provide fresh, healthy food to the needy, to the homeless.’ It benefits the rest of the community, too, through educating how to grow.”
Meei Ling Ng visiting with Loretta Lewis at the UBC Garden of Eden. (Photo courtesy Karen Chernick)
In essence, Ng and UBC have cooperated on of a farm-to-table soup kitchen that supports the church’s need for (often costly) produce, while simultaneously involving the community by inviting them to help tend the garden two days a week. “We were pretty much supporting the soup kitchen on our own,” says Lewis, “but with Meei Ling, even early in the [garden’s first] year, we had salad.”
Ng planted an unusual variety of crops that include black heirloom tomatoes, rainbow chard, summer squash, purple cauliflower, Asian pears, and almonds, all cultivated in raised beds and in an orchard along the church’s perimeter. In a way, she has replicated the model of her childhood home on a five-acre orchid farm in Singapore, where her family self-sustained all of its produce needs.
“We had rows and rows of vegetables and fruit trees everywhere,” Ng recalls. “I grew up in that kind of environment. Everything we picked we ate fresh.” Having lived in Philadelphia for more than two decades, Ng is undeterred by her current home’s urban density in finding places to grow food.
As a working artist, Ng considers the UBC Garden of Eden to be an extension of her multimedia installation sculptures, many of which are food- and farm-themed. Some of her past works in Philadelphia include a musical garden at SpArc Services and the Deep Roots series of installations at two of the city’s urban farms.
The UBC Garden of Eden is the second of her spontaneously developed hunger-relief urban farms; the first such project was at Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, Philadelphia’s largest homeless emergency shelter. There, a string of raised beds along the edge of the mission’s parking lot have provided the high-volume kitchen with fresh vegetables (such as tomatoes, salad greens, and fresh herbs) since 2015, as well as farming instruction for those overcoming homelessness.
The Sunday Breakfast Mission garden. Photo © Sang Cun
“Fresh produce is extremely hard to come by,” says Rosalyn Forbes, the director of development at Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission. “We rely heavily on donated nonperishable food items, which means that much of the fruits and vegetables we serve are canned. The Sunday Breakfast Farm provides fresh produce that can then be served in our kitchen.”
Salads are composed of freshly harvested greens; the herb garden is thoughtfully situated outside the kitchen door so that it is easy to reach while cooking. “It has elevated the quality of the food being served at the Mission,” Forbes continues. “Too often, those experiencing homelessness also suffer from health problems related to a poor diet.”
Solving the Problem of Scale
Sourcing fresh produce—and staying within budget—is a challenge for many soup kitchens. Individual donations of perishable items are rare, so some organizations choose to work with hunger-relief nonprofits that have the logistical capability to glean fruit and vegetable gifts directly from local farmers. The Philadelphia Orchard Project, which contributed fig, almond, and Asian pear trees to the UBC Garden of Eden this year, has a fruit gleaning program. Philabundance, another local nonprofit, is known by Philadelphia-area farmers as a way to keep excess or less cosmetically attractive produce from going to waste.
Distribution of this donated produce requires complex transportation, however, and so soup kitchens must often meet certain volume criteria in order to receive deliveries. Philabundance, for example, requires that its soup-kitchen member agencies serve at least 500 monthly meals in order to qualify. For smaller-scale operations that don’t reach that number, such as UBC’s soup kitchen (which has fed around 70-80 people per week in previous years and feeds between 20-30 each week now), this usually means they have to purchase produce themselves or rely on non-perishable items.
“Produce is hard to come by [for] smaller operations, and [direct] donations of produce [by farmers] could have a major impact,” says Scott Smith, director of food acquisition at Philabundance.
By growing the produce themselves, Ng and the UBC soup kitchen volunteers are slowly sidestepping the need to seek produce donations or purchase fruits and vegetables for the program. Phil Forsyth, executive director of Philadelphia Orchard Project, praised this solution, saying, “Of course, another approach is for soup kitchens to plant their own gardens and orchards to supply themselves with the most fresh, local produce possible.”
Planter beds in the UBC Garden of Eden. (Photo courtesy Karen Chernick)
Even for larger organizations such as Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, which serves over 400 meals daily and qualifies for delivery from organizations such as Philabundance, the parking-lot farm developed by Ng serves an important function. “There never seems to be enough donated fresh produce to keep up with the demand,” notes Forbes, “which is why we decided to think outside the box and grow it ourselves.”
As an added benefit, Ng’s farms engage their surrounding urban communities and teach city dwellers that even figs can grow on a city block. An herb garden can flourish in a parking lot, and heirloom tomatoes can thrive in a raised bed built out of salvage materials from the demolition of a nearby growhouse.
The care Ng takes in nurturing the crops at UBC Garden of Eden matches the motivation that the church’s soup kitchen volunteers have for serving food they would feed their own families. The symbiosis has been apparent since Ng’s first harvest last summer. “I was so happy and delighted to see a green area of the plate,” Ng says. “I want to share that experience of fresh produce with people. It tastes different, because it’s so fresh.”
Top photo: Meei Ling Ng in the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission Farm. (Photo © Sang Cun)
Seeds&Chips
“We believe that technological innovation can create a better, safer, and more resilient food system to fight hunger for everyone”
ITALY
Marco Gualtieri is an Italian businessman who has used his entrepreneurial skills to put together a coalition of private-sector partners and others focused on innovation in the global food chain.
Gualtieri’s innovative company, Seeds&Chips, concerns itself with a wide variety of issues surrounding the challenges of sustainable food system. Seeds&Chips in fact works with people who are dedicated to transforming the food chain towards a more meaningful future in the belief that the key to sustainability lies in connecting the dots, creating partnerships and fostering collaborations that bring new ideas to life.
“But we can’t do it alone. Collaboration is at the heart of our mission,” Gualtieri says.
Through their Global Food Innovation Summit and other activities, participants look at new ways to improve their roles in food production, processing, distribution, communication and consumption.
In fact, Seeds&Chips has built one of the largest food and ag tech ecosystems in the world, and through this network they engage innovators, investors, companies, institutions and policy makers from every point of the global food chain, and provide a platform for them to connect and work together for a more sustainable future.
They are applying their expertise in agriculture, food distribution, technology, economics, socio-economic development, and other areas to address issues as varied as the promotion of local food crops for better nutrition, improving financing, training and markets for smallholder farmers, reducing the environmental footprint of irrigation, food transportation and packaging, and reducing food loss and waste along the entire supply chain.
Tesco’s CEO Calls On Food Industry To Tackle Food Waste
Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste.
Posted By: Martin White on: September 25, 2018
Tesco CEO Dave Lewis will today call on the global food industry to be more transparent and publish their food waste data, to ensure that no food goes to waste across the global food chain.
Lewis will announce his call for action at the Champions 12.3 conference in New York today, and a statement from the retailer said that 27 of Tesco’s major suppliers such as Müller Milk & Ingredients, Kerry and Arla will soon publish their food waste data for the first time.
The statement also claimed that major branded Tesco suppliers such as Mars, General Mills and Unilever will commit to measure and publish their food waste data within the next year.
Tesco published food waste figures for its Republic of Ireland and Central European operations for the first time last year, and the retailer claims that it is “70% of the way towards its target that no food, safe for human consumption, goes to waste.”
According to the statement, Lewis will say: “Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste. That’s the equivalent of 1.3 billion tonnes of food being thrown away and we think that’s simply not right.
“We hope every country, major city and company involved in the food supply chain publishes their own food waste data, so that together we can take targeted action to reduce waste.
“We believe that what gets measured gets managed. Ultimately, the only way to tackle food waste is to understand the challenge – to know where in the supply chain food is wasted.”
Champions 12.3 is a coalition of executives from governments, businesses and international organisations which aims to halve global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030.
China's Scientists Observe Plant Growth in its Space Lab
They are trying to accomplish full-cycle of plant growth under microgravity.
CGTN 2018-09-27 20:13
Astronauts need a lot of food during their space expedition that sometimes takes nearly two years. Carrying dried prepackaged food takes up space in their spacecraft.
One solution is to send seeds that occupy less volume to cultivate them in the space. Recently, scientists have successfully grown vegetables and plants in the space shuttles.
However, microgravity makes it difficult to water the plants as they clump together. Space scientists at NASA started using hydroponics and aeroponics to grow plants in space stations.
While hydroponics delivers water to plant roots, aeroponics ensures misty air conditions for plants' growth.
Chinese scientists have taken this experiment to the next level at Tiangong-2, a space laboratory.
They are trying to accomplish full-cycle of plant growth under microgravity. Boxes containing rice and Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant, are on board the space lab.
"After the seeds arrive in space, they will grow and mature there, and finally yield seeds. This kind of long-term experiment is quite rare in the international community," Zheng Huiqiong, director of Tiangong-2's space biotechnology and the plant cell engineering research team said.
"It is of great importance because it can help solve one of the key problems to providing necessary food, water, and oxygen to humans," Zheng explained.
The research found that under the conditions of microgravity, the flowering of Arabidopsis occurs 22 days later than on the ground.
"If we need to eat leaves in the future, it is better to have plants that flower late. But for rice, late flowering will influence the yields, so we have to adapt it to the environment," said Zheng.
The research also found that rice is more active in guttation under the conditions of microgravity, meaning it exudes more and more significant drops of sap on its leaves.
"This phenomenon has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, bigger sap drops will influence the growth of the plant because it will increase the humidity. On the other hand, it offers us clues to establish an effective life-support system in the future, so we could provide water to humans via plants," said Zheng.
What's The Future of Food?
Scientists And Entrepreneurs Have Been Cooking Up Innovative Ways To Put Food On Our Tables.
What Are They Serving Up Next?
CALEB HARPER This computer will grow your food in the future
What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world? Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper's "food computers" and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
SARA MENKERA global food crisis may be less than a decade away
Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: "We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system's structural capacity to produce food," she says. "People could starve and governments may fall." Menker's models predict that this scenario could happen in a decade — that the world could be short 214 trillion calories per year by 2027. She offers a vision of this impossible world as well as some steps we can take today to avoid it.
MATILDA HO The future of good food in China
Fresh food free of chemicals and pesticides is hard to come by in China: in 2016, the Chinese government revealed half a million food safety violations in just nine months. In the absence of safe, sustainable food sources, TED Fellow Matilda Ho launched China's first online farmers market, instituting a zero-tolerance test towards pesticides, antibiotics and hormones in food. She shares how she's growing her platform from the ground up and bringing local, organically grown food to the families that need it.
PIERRE THIAM A forgotten ancient grain that could help Africa prosper
Forget quinoa. Meet fonio, an ancient "miracle grain" native to Senegal that's versatile, nutritious and gluten-free. In this passionate talk, chef Pierre Thiam shares his obsession with the hardy crop and explains why he believes that its industrial-scale cultivation could transform societies in Africa.
PAMELA RONALD The case for engineering our food
Pamela Ronald studies the genes that make plants more resistant to disease and stress. In an eye-opening talk, she describes her decade-long quest to isolate a gene that allows rice to survive prolonged flooding. She shows how the genetic improvement of seeds saved the Hawaiian papaya crop in the 1990s — and makes the case that modern genetics is sometimes the most effective method to advance sustainable agriculture and enhance food security for our planet’s growing population.
People In Produce
Ranging from a biosystems engineer to a children's nutrition expert to a specialty crop container grower, meet seven people pushing the produce industry forward.
November 6, 2018
The produce industry relies on exceptional people to advance the processes of growing food, improving it and getting it to consumers' plates. In this month’s cover story, meet seven of the leading People in Produce.
Would you like to see someone recognized in a future issue? Drop us a line at pwilliams@gie.net
Dr. Amy Bowen
Director of consumer insights, Vineland Research and Innovation Centre
Bowen researches consumer sensory perceptions of produce.
Photo courtesy of Vineland
Research and Innovation Centre
Human perception of flavor involves the integration of taste and smell, and forms part of a discipline called sensory science. Researcher Dr. Amy Bowen has dedicated her career to advancing this field.
To further this work, Bowen joined the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in 2009. As director of Vineland’s consumer insights team, she harnesses sensory evaluation best practices to meet consumer expectations of fruits and vegetables grown in controlled environments. In practice, Bowen’s research focuses on understanding the intrinsic (appearance, aroma and taste) and extrinsic (price and packaging) drivers that impact consumer preference for horticultural products.
“Doing this type of work with fresh products is unique,” says Bowen, a Ph.D. in biological sciences with a specialization in plant science, oenology and viticulture. “It’s creating value for people growing in greenhouse environments.”
Bowen’s current activities at the Vineland facility in Canada’s Niagara region include deep-dive studies into tomatoes and edible flowers.
Edible flowers are surging in popularity as a garnish or to give dishes a signature flavor. Bowen’s team partnered with an Ontario-based grower of fresh herbs to gain insights into the booming market, splitting consumers into groups based on their preferences.
Results showed that edible flowers such as nasturtiums and candy pop mint are favored by fans of bold flavor, while impatiens and dianthus are approved for their smooth texture. The findings would help outline a business plan for Vineland’s herb-distributing partner, should it expand into the edible flowers market, Bowen says.
Meanwhile, Vineland scientists are busy developing two hybrid varieties of greenhouse tomatoes, creating two new flavor profiles that should be ready for distribution by 2020. Bowen’s group studied 56 varieties of tomato, digging into attributes including sweetness, bitterness, firmness and smokiness. A selection of fruits was passed onto a consumer panel, allowing researchers to compile a list of aroma-producing chemical compounds that the test group associated with liking or disliking a particular tomato.
Texture and consistency became additional important characteristics in how test consumers shaped their opinion, Bowen says.
“It’s a bit like Goldilocks,” she says. “People don’t want a tomato that’s too soft or too hard. They want it to be just right.”
Once texture is determined, tomatoes with the right consistency can be crossed with preferred chemical compounds to breed the “perfect” tomato, or at least its closest approximation. For Bowen, the pleasure is in researching a diversity of products derived directly from the greenhouse.
“I love the reactions we get from consumers, and the whole value chain in producing something people are excited to consume,” Bowen says. — Douglas J. Guth
Douglas is a Cleveland Heights, Ohio-based freelance writer and journalist. His work has been published by Midwest Energy News, Crain’s Cleveland Business and Fresh Water Cleveland.
Mollie Van Lieu
Senior director of nutrition policy, United Fresh Produce Association
Van Lieu promotes policies that are focused on increasing fruits and vegetable consumption.
Photo courtesy of United
Fresh Produce Association
Mollie Van Lieu has spent much of her career advancing school food policies, a commitment that continues today in her role as senior director of nutrition policy at the United Fresh Produce Association.
Van Lieu joined United Fresh last September, bolstering a Washington, D.C.-based policy team meeting national regulatory challenges in bringing healthy foods to kids. Among other duties, Van Lieu champions policies to ensure fruits, vegetables and other nutritious goodies are integrated into school meals daily. The United States Department of Agriculture’s Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, for example, introduces students at 7,600 schools nationwide to a variety of produce they otherwise may not have the opportunity to sample.
“Fruits and vegetables are served in the classroom, and the teacher eats with the children, too,” Van Lieu says. “There’s an educational component to the program.”
Van Lieu has worked closely on kid-centric nutritional issues for over a decade, including a stint on the staff of Rep. Todd Platts (R-Pa.), where she helped foster sponsorship of the House’s 2010 Child Nutrition Reauthorization program.
From 2011 to 2014, Van Lieu campaigned for healthy eating as a strategist for the National PTA, working with United Fresh to boost various nutritional programs. Her advocacy for youth food programming continued in 2014, when Pew Charitable Trusts named her a senior associate of government relations.
After years of cultivating relationships with stakeholders on Capitol Hill, Van Lieu is pushing improved health standards for efforts like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, which offers food assistance to millions of low-income citizens nationwide. She’s also advocating for a farm bill currently being considered by Congress.
“Having been on the Hill when changes were made to school meals, I see it as making sure these policies are implemented successfully,” Van Lieu says. “Policy is only as successful as folks working on it on the ground, and the industry stepping up to provide [nutritious] products.”
United Fresh represents growers and suppliers as well, introducing them to school service directors as a means of bringing new products into cafeterias. While most decisionmakers Van Lieu meets understand the benefits of produce, many don’t realize how heavily unconsumed fruits and vegetables still remain.
“We’re trying to find a tipping point in policy to include produce consumption,” Van Lieu says. “We need to make sure there are opportunities for people who are struggling.” — Douglas J. Guth
Ricardo Hernandez
Chief scientific officer and co-founder, Grafted Growers
The North Carolina State University professor will use his research expertise to grow grafted tomato and watermelon seedlings for wholesale, and possibly retail.
Dr. Ricardo Hernandez performs research and teaches as assistant professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University, and previously studied and conducted research at the University of Arizona. His research background points to plant grafting as a crucial tool contributing to agricultural production. Beginning this fall, Hernandez will be working within a high-tech toolbox to explore the commercial creation of specially grafted produce.
Photo courtesy of
Ricardo Hernandez
Grafting is a horticultural technique used to join parts from two or more plants so that they appear to flourish as a single plant. As chief scientific officer and co-founder of Grafted Growers, a vertical farm in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hernandez will harness years of horticultural experience to grow grafted tomato and watermelon seedlings in a precisely controlled environment.
Unlike working in a greenhouse where unpredictable natural light is a critical growth regulator, the vertical farm allows Hernandez to experiment with temperature, air velocity and various artificial light wavelengths, producing hardy plants that carry potentially higher drought tolerance and disease resistance than his nearest competitors.
“In a greenhouse, you’re depending on the outside weather, and you’re only getting high-quality plants during certain times of the year,” Hernandez says. “We have the same environmental conditions the entire year, so the quality of plants is always going to be consistent.”
Hernandez founded Grafted Growers alongside business partner John Jackson with help from a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) innovation grant. The pair is currently building out a 6,000-square-foot facility set to open later this fall.
Once up and running, the operation will sell to greenhouses and field growers. Hernandez also expects Grafted Growers to have a retail presence, both on site and through the company website, graftedgrowers.com
“Our end goal is to produce plants faster, and ensure they grow well and have good morphological characteristics,” Hernandez says. “This isn’t a smoking gun, as there’s still a need for field and greenhouse production. But using a controlled environment is one more tool we have to keep producing food.”
Additionally, Hernandez hopes to educate a new generation of farmers and scientists on what he deems an innovative means of plant production.
“Right now we have a need for talent in agriculture,” Hernandez says. “We’re not just showing acres of grain, but how plants can be grown through technology.” — Douglas J. Guth
Heather Szymura
Grower/owner, Twisted Infusions
By catering to a niche market, Twisted Infusions grower/owner Heather Szymura has built a thriving hydroponics business in Arizona.
Photo courtesy of
Heather Szymura
Heather Szymura, the grower and owner of Twisted Infusions in Glendale, Arizona, started growing produce professionally two years ago in a Freight Farms-brand container farm after a career in corporate America. Although she had been a gardener for more than a decade, it was her first experience with controlled environment agriculture (CEA).
“I started with kale and lettuce because that’s just what everyone starts out with,” she says. “It was really beautiful and it came out really well. And I took it to some chefs because I didn’t want to go to farmer’s markets — I have two kids and don’t want to give up my Saturdays. But the lettuce and kale wasn’t enough for them, so I started to grow some things that they couldn’t get good quality. And it led me down the path of research and finding things that don’t necessarily grow well outside in Arizona.”
Fast forward to today, and Szymura co-owns Twisted Infusions with her husband, Brian. In the vertical hydroponic system, Szymura primarily produces unique products such as oyster leaf, salad burnet and some greens for the same local restaurants she met when she was still exclusively growing greens.
“I try to look for things that people have never heard of,” Szymura says.
The key to Twisted Fusion’s business model is that Szymura understands her clientele — a group of 10 to 15 different restaurants in the Scottsdale and Phoenix areas. When looking for new clients, Szymura prefers to work with chef-owned establishments when possible, as well as taking custom orders from restaurants or other customers. Not only does it allow her to grow the type of plants that interest her the most, but it also makes business sense. Most households aren't shopping for unique garnishes; chefs are.
“The alternative is going to farmers markets or going to distributors,” Szymura says. “If I go to a distributor, I won’t be making enough money to make farming worth my time. It’s a commodity market and I’m not selling stuff that’s high commodity because nobody else has it.” — Chris Manning
Dr. Joel Cuello
Professor of biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona
Cuello designs controlled-environment technologies in an effort to feed a growing population.
The idea that originally drove Dr. Joel Cuello to pursue a career in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) keeps him going to this day — the concept that as the global population grows, so does the need to produce safe, nutritious and high-quality food.
Photo courtesy of
Joel Cuello
“The motivation behind my research is to be able to help meet the increased food demand by the planet and do so in a sustainable way — in a way that would not deplete the essential resources, which are vital for food production,” he says. “To me, that’s the grandest challenge [of] this century.”
The professor of biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona grew up in the Philippines. He acquired his bachelors degree from the University of the Philippines at Los Baños before moving to the United States and attending The Pennsylvania State University, where he earned two masters degrees and his Ph.D. in agricultural & biological engineering. Cuello then took his talents to NASA, where he worked on developing a hybrid lighting system for possible crop production on the moon, Mars or asteroids.
Since 1995, Cuello has worked at the University of Arizona, where he has designed new technologies, such as the Vertical Green Box Solution. Cuello’s prototype of a modular vertical farm consists of containers, which he says could make use of electric or natural light, or be constructed of solid walls and roofs or transparent ones. Because it is different than a warehouse or skyscraper farm, Cuello dubs it “Vertical Farming 3.0” (formerly “2.0”). “I’m championing that because it’s a competitive alternative to the warehouse, and it’s efficient; and it could be potentially lower-cost in terms of construction and operation,” he says. None have been built yet, though, so he is looking for partners.
Another one of Cuello’s inventions is the patented Accordion Photobioreactor. The zigzag-shaped device produces microalgae, which can then be used in pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and biomass. The invention comes in three types, he says — one that supports photoautotrophic (photosynthetic) production and recirculates liquid; another that enables photoautotrophic production and doesn’t recirculate; and a third that carries out heterotrophic production, meaning it doesn’t use light.
Cuello also has other projects in the works. He serves as a member of the Governing Board and will help with the technology at Cobre Valley Indoor Farm, a nonprofit community-based organization in Claypool, Arizona, that is opening up a vertical farm in an abandoned school. He has also started growing carrots through a process called cellular agriculture, which is comparable to when meat is grown in a lab.
During his global travels, Cuello says he has found public demand for controlled environment agriculture, and he believes that more companies will use renewable energy sources. He is committed to sustainability, introducing his own “Cuello’s Law.” “It’s an industry aspiration, or goal, that productivity per unit resource used will double every four to five years,” he says. — Patrick Williams
Kim Hookway
President, Buckeye Fresh
After a career in the manufacturing industry, Kim Hookway partnered with a former colleague to open a local vertical farm that now sells its product to major grocery chains in Ohio.
Photo: Chris Manning
When Kim Hookway, president of Medina, Ohio-based vertical farm Buckeye Fresh, sold the brand’s produce by going into different Northeast Ohio grocery stores — first Buehler’s Fresh Foods, then Giant Eagle and Heinen’s — she had to connect directly with each store’s produce managers. It took some work, but Hookway did what was necessary to help get the business going.
“Before we even went into business, we checked with Buehler’s to see if they would be interested in locally grown produce,” she says. “At the beginning, it was also talking to produce managers and getting them on board.”
Hookway’s background is not in horticulture; she spent 20 years at a manufacturing company alongside Buckeye Fresh principal investor Tim Remington before founding Buckeye Fresh in 2014. As the company’s president, she has utilized the skills she developed in her previous role to help Buckeye Fresh find success.
According to Remington, Hookway’s ability to accurately approximate order sizes has been essential to making the business successful. When Buckeye Fresh sells its greens and basil to its customers, it must do so based on estimates instead of fixed order amounts. In her previous job, Hookway managed multiple components of cushioning components for shoes and varying order sizes from different customers. Just like growing, it required understanding and organizing several factors all operating on different schedules. With growing, it took some trial and error, but Hookway can accurately estimate and book the farm’s towers for specific crops based on past order trends.
“Without her doing the scheduling, we couldn’t manage the harvesting and growing,” Remington says. “And this is more difficult [than what she used to do].”
As Buckeye Fresh continues to expand, its basil and greens are sold in stores as far south as Columbus (115 miles) and as far east as Pennsylvania (a minimum of 276 miles). Late in 2018, it will also debut greens with Giant Eagle’s Market District — the grocery chain’s branding for local suppliers — that will be sold in roughly 200 locations. Hookway says the business is already turning a profit. “It’s about understanding the business,” Hookway says.
And its success started with her. — Chris Manning
Ray Solotki
Executiv
Photo: Ray Solotkie director at Inuvik Community Greenhouse
The Vancouver Island native aspires to improve food access in the Arctic.
Located north of the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the Inuvik Community Greenhouse — a converted ice hockey arena — is one of the most remote greenhouses in the world. “Even though we’re in the Northwest Territories, the only road out goes into the Yukon, and we can’t even get to our capital city by road,” says Ray Solotki, executive director. Solotki originally came to this icy abode — where temperatures regularly dip to -20° F in the winter — to feed herself. Three years ago, she committed to helping feed the rest of the community.
Photo: Ray Solotki
Solotki is from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, (“the south,” according to her), but moved north near Inuvik in 2015, when she took a job at a hotel. She chose to live in Inuvik because of the greenhouse. “I knew I could grow my own food for at least part of the year and have some local food production of my own,” she says. Solotki became the first executive director at the greenhouse, which had previously been managed by a volunteer board of directors and summer employees since it first opened in 1998.
The nonprofit Community Garden Society of Inuvik runs the greenhouse; the government of the Northwest Territories funds the gardening society and others in seven surrounding communities: Aklavik, Fort McPherson, Paulatuk, Sachs Harbour, Tsiigehtchic, Tuktoyaktuk and Ulukhaktok.
Solotki’s job, which includes financing, human resources and public relations duties, was created to provide food access to all eight communities, which have limited access to fresh food due to the climate. This includes indigenous people, who make up roughly 64 percent of Inuvik’s population and approximately 50 percent of the population of the Northwest Territories, according to the 2016 Canadian Census.
Local indigenous populations have land to hunt and trap, but a lot of them don’t eat many vegetables, Solotki says, noting how the produce that is flown up from the south loses its freshness. “But when [vegetables are] fresh, you can barely get them from the greenhouse to the house because they’re eaten so quickly,” she says. “No one has ever put a pea on a plate in the Arctic because they were gobbled up in the greenhouse because it’s so exciting to have such fresh, local produce.”
Currently, the 16,000-square-foot, passive solar greenhouse is only open from April until September, and with high daylight and heat in the summer, its soil-grown lettuce and leafy greens can bolt if not harvested quickly. The greenhouse hires experienced growers from out of town every summer, but Solotki wants to change that. She aims to work with Modular Farms of Ontario to build a year-round facility, which will cost $350,000, and work with a partner in the community to find a location to install it and hook it up to that partner’s electricity. (Electricity costs are high at 79 cents per kilowatt-hour.) This approach would allow locals the opportunity to grow their own produce year-round.
In the same vein, Solotki hopes to grow a wider variety of crops to accommodate local diets and preferences. “We want to see some heavier items, so beans, peas, tomatoes.” She would also like to grow tomatoes, onions and carrots — ingredients in the popular Canadian dish, caribou stew. Adds Solotki: “These are the staples of an Arctic diet.” — Patrick Williams
Fostering Global Collaborations For Better Agriculture Food And Nutrition Supplies
Dr. Srinubabu Gedela, the CEO of Omics International, firmly believes that food and nutrition conferences are essential for a healthy future, and the form the bedrock of sustainable development
Conference Series Food and Nutrition Conferences 2019
Conference Series
Creating a world where science and innovation are universally viewed essential for a safe, nutritious, and sustainable food supply for everyone
SINGAPORE, AND LONDON (PRWEB) OCTOBER 30, 2018
Agriculture, food and nutrition form an indispensable part of any country’s economy. Therefore, focusing on the latest trends in the field is crucial for global strategic development. The Food, Nutrition and Agricultural conferences of the ConferenceSeries serve as a platform to bring together all the researchers working in the field, in order to develop novel ideas aimed at creating a future having sustainable agriculture and ushering in a new food world.
Dr. Srinubabu Gedela, the CEO of Omics International, firmly believes that food and nutrition conferences are essential for a healthy future, and the form the bedrock of sustainable development.
The 2019, Food and Nutrition Conferences are primarily focused on important topics such as, Food quality, Food regulatory affairs, Food processing, Food security, Nutrition & Dietetics, Plant biotechnology, Agronomy, Agriculture and Crop science, Food safety, Plant genomics research, Plant proteomics and Plant science.
The Global Food Industry Market is growing at unimaginable speed, with the US & Europe being the prominent investors. The demand for food is expected to increase by 59% to 98% by the year 2050. The Nutraceutical market is piloting by USD 336.1 billion by 2023 from USD 230.9 billion in 2018 at a CAGR of 7.8%, from 2018 to 2023. When it comes to food logistics, North America rules the food market, and Western Europe dominates with 27%. In Asia, Japan occupies 11% of the Asia pacific (6%) and other countries (3% from the Central & South America, 3% from the Eastern Europe and 1% from Africa/Mideast) comprise 7% of the global food market.
Our Food Conferences comprehend topics such as, Food technology which is getting transformed with newer innovations such as: Vertical Farms, 3D Printed food, Hydroculture, Genoponics, DNA Diets, Robotic Hamburger Machines, Technofoodology, and Artificial Intelligence. The rise of food delivery apps and home-based assistants such as: Alexa, Google Home, and Sonos, etc., has ushered in a new era in food. Food and Nutrition summits provide a means to keep abreast with these latest breakthroughs.
Each of our Food and Nutrition Conference pages draw the attention of around of 22000+ unique visitors which embraces research icons, business experts, and renowned thinkers who endeavour to stitch a transforming experience with ample research ideas. Over 80% of our online visitors and participants are from developed countries like USA, Canada, UK, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Australia & UAE etc. Backed up by 5000+ employees and 50,000+ editorial board members of its accompanying journals, Conference Series aspires to circulate the latest explorative trends associated with food and nutrition through its annual Global Scientific Events which take place across the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
Organic Food Consumption Lowers Cancer Risks
The conclusion of a recent population-based cohort study of 68,946 French adults brings promising, though perhaps predictable, news.
(Beyond Pesticides, October 30, 2018)
The conclusion of a recent population-based cohort study of 68,946 French adults brings promising, though perhaps predictable, news. Greater consumption of organic food — as opposed to food produced conventionally, with use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers — is associated with a reduction in overall cancer risk, and reduced risk of specific cancers, namely, postmenopausal breast cancer and lymphomas. The NutriNet-Santé Prospective Cohort Study was published on October 22 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. It is important to remember that correlation is not causation; but the findings were strong enough that researchers concluded that more research is not only warranted, but also, could “identify which specific factors are responsible for potential protective effects of organic food consumption on cancer risk.”
The project tracked subjects — who were 78% female and 44.2 years old, on average — for 4.5 years. Those subjects reported the frequency of their consumption of 16 organic food products as “never, occasionally, or most of the time.” Those included: fruits, vegetables, soy-based products, dairy products, meat and fish, eggs, grains, legumes, breads, cereals, flour, vegetable oils, condiments, ready-to-eat meals, cookies, chocolate, sugar, marmalade, dietary supplements, and some beverages (coffee, teas, and wine). An organic food score was then computed and assigned to each subject.
Annual follow-ups screened for first-incident cancer diagnoses in the study’s subjects. Results showed that a higher “organic” score was positively correlated with overall decreased cancer risk, and lower risk of developing those specific cancers previously mentioned; no association was detected for other types of cancer. The study controlled for multiple confounding factors, including sociodemographics, lifestyle, and dietary patterns.
The researchers note that environmental risks for cancer include pesticide exposure, whether direct (for pesticide applicators and handlers, e.g.) or through the other primary vector, which is diet. They go on to say, “Epidemiological research investigating the link between organic food consumption and cancer risk is scarce, and, to the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to evaluate frequency of organic food consumption associated with cancer risk using detailed information on exposure. . . . Among the environmental risk factors for cancer, there are concerns about exposure to different classes of pesticides. . . . The role of pesticides for the risk of cancer could not be doubted given the growing body of evidence linking cancer development to pesticide exposure. While dose responses of such molecules or possible cocktail effects are not well known, an increase in toxic effects has been suggested even at low concentrations of pesticide mixtures.”
The Los Angeles Times reports, “At least three [pesticides] — glyphosate,malathion and diazinon — probably cause cancer, and others may be carcinogenic as well, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.” Foods grown or produced organically are far less likely to harbor such pesticide residues (than is conventionally grown produce) because the National Organic Standards forbid use of virtually all synthetic pesticides, except the few that meet the standards of the Organic Foods Production Act. Unsurprisingly, people who consume a relatively “organic” diet have lower levels of pesticide residues in their urine. One of the key points made by the study authors is this: “If the findings are confirmed [by future research], promoting organic food consumption in the general population could be a promising preventive strategy against cancer.”
The health advantages of organic agricultural production for workers and consumers — compared with conventional agriculture, which uses toxic pesticides and synthetic, petrochemical inputs — are legion. There is a strong case that a switch to a generally organic diet confers not only some protection from development of any number of pesticide-induced diseases and other harmful impacts via, e.g., endocrine disruption and subsequent dysregulation and dysfunction, but also, other significant health benefits because it reduces the body burden of toxic chemicals.
One ready example is the evidence for pesticides’ impacts on sperm quality. The ongoing global drop in fertility is strongly associated with pesticide exposures. A 2015 study demonstrated that eating produce containing pesticide residues adversely affects men’s fertility, leading to fewer and poorer quality sperm — adding to a growing body of research showing impaired reproductive function. The results of that study also underscore the importance of an organic diet in reducing pesticide exposures. Interestingly, a fairly old Danish study (1994), published in The Lancet, showed “unexpectedly high sperm density in members of an association of organic farmers, who manufacture their products without use of pesticides or chemical fertilisers. This is of interest in the light of evidence that indicates a world-wide decrease trend of sperm density in the general population.”
The benefits of organic are perhaps most dramatic for children, whose pesticide exposures come largely through diet (unless they live on or near conventionally managed farms), although they may also be exposed via school or recreational properties. Children are particularly vulnerable to pesticide impacts because their brains, organs, and reproductive systems are still developing. One study showed near-immediate benefit when kids’ diets were switched to organic — their urine showed lowered-to-undetectable pesticide levels within hours of the switch. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report that said, “In terms of health advantages, organic diets have been convincingly demonstrated to expose consumers to fewer pesticides associated with human disease. Organic farming has been demonstrated to have less environmental impact than conventional approaches.”
Beyond Pesticides advocates choosing organic because of the health and environmental benefits to consumers, workers, and rural families. The Eating with a Conscience database, based on legal tolerances (or allowable residues on food commodities), provides a look at the toxic chemicals allowed in the production of the food we eat and the environmental and public health effects resulting from their use. See more on the benefits of organic agriculture, and an overview of organics.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Sources: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2707948and http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-organic-food-cancer-20181022-story.html
US (HI): Researchers Help Waimānalo Families Use Aquaponics, Improve Health
Three researchers at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa have won a national fellowship and will receive $350,000 funding over three years to assist Waimānalo families with backyard aquaponics to sustainably produce healthy food.
The project will connect the modern technology of aquaponics with Native Hawaiian food practices. Aquaponics taps into the power of the natural symbiotic relationship between fish and plants, and combines the raising of plants in water with raising fish in tanks to create a sustainable, contained food production system.
From left, Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, Ted Radovich and Jane Chung-Do
The fellowship was awarded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to promote health equity in the U.S.
The research team is comprised of Jane Chung-Do, an associate professor with the UH Mānoa Office of Public Health Studies in the Myron B. Thompson School of Social Work; Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, community coordinator at the Waimānalo Learning Center and an education specialist in the Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Science (TPSS) in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources; and Ted Radovich, a TPSS associate specialist.
They will expand their work with families in Waimānalo to develop an aquaponics program to grow fresh fruits and vegetables and raise fish that families can use to prepare meals and Hawaiian medicines. This builds on the decade-long work that Ho-Lastimosa has been promoting in her community of Waimānalo.
The researchers will recruit Native Hawaiian families in Waimānalo to participate in aquaponics lessons and will guide the families in building and maintaining backyard systems. The researchers will follow up to see whether the systems are successful in helping the participants increase their intake of and access to fresh fruits, vegetables and fish, as well as promote healthy eating habits. In addition, impacts on participants’ mental wellness, cultural identity, family strength and community connectedness will be measured.
Ilima Ho-Lastimosa feeds fish in an aquaponics set-up, while Jane Chung-Do looks on.
“Our goal is to restore Native Hawaiian practices related to food and community,” said Chung-Do. “The study embraces the perspective that health is holistic and interconnected with our culture, families, communities and the ʻāina.”
As a public health scientist, Chung-Do has worked to enhance the wellness of children and families in Hawaii, especially in rural and minority communities.
Radovich was born and raised in Waimānalo and holds a PhD in horticulture. His expertise is in sustainable and organic farming systems.
Ho-Lastimosa grew up on the Waimānalo Homestead and holds masters degrees in social work and acupuncture; she is also a master gardener. The community leader and cultural practitioner in Waimānalo founded God’s Country Waimānalo, a group that initiated a food sovereignty and sustainability movement in the community.
Source: University of Hawai'i (Theresa Kreif)
Publication date : 10/11/2018
Desktop NFT System
Grow fresh, high-quality leafy greens on your desktop or kitchen counter.
Our unique hydroponic desktop NFT system has all the capabilities of a traditional sized NFT system allowing you to grow fresh, high-quality leafy greens on your desktop or kitchen counter. Perfect for schools, hobby growers and anyone looking for fresh produce year-round!
This system features:
• A removable top cap (lid) makes the channels easy to use and easy to clean.
• End caps on both ends of the channel, keeping light out & preventing algae growth.
• Constructed of non-toxic, food grade, UV-stabilized plastic.
• A standard electric plug – no additional power source required.
• Square top cap holes that are made for 1" seedling cubes.
Specs:
• Measures 16'L x 11'W x 4'H
• Weighs 3.5 lbs when the tank is empty & 12 lbs when it’s full.
System Includes:
• (2) 1' x 4 ⅝' grow channels
• 6 plant sites
• Pump
• Feed line
• 1 ½ gal tank
• Fertilizer & Rockwool cubes
$49.95
Get yours today by calling 330-302-4203!
*volume and educational discounts available
CropKing.com
West Warwick, Rhode Island - High School, Sodexo Unveil New Hydroponic Farm
Kendra Port/klolio@ricentral.com
October 15, 2018
Photos by Kendra Port
WEST WARWICK –– West Warwick High School this week officially unveiled its new state of the art hydroponic farm and served up a number of delicious recipes using freshly harvested produce grown right on campus.
The Leafy Green Machine is a turnkey farming system located inside a shipping container that can grow the equivalent of 1.8 acres of farmland in only 320 square feet. West Warwick High School partnered with the district’s food service provider, Sodexo, and a small startup company out of Boston called Freight Farms, to purchase the unit, which now sits in the school’s courtyard.
On Thursday faculty and staff held a Hydroponics Harvest celebration event at the high school where kitchen staff used recently harvested lettuce to demonstrate some of the meals they will eventually be making for students once the machine is fully operational. Right now the school is only growing different types of lettuce as staff learn how to run the machine, but the Sodexo staff proved that you can make a lot of different meals with a simple head of lettuce.
Staff served up vegetable lettuce wraps, spiced lettuce cake bars, lemon pudding wraps, lettuce beef wraps, lettuce soup and leaf lettuce bread, all made with the fresh lettuce grown in The Leafy Green Machine over the last several weeks and harvested that morning.
Each table in the high school cafeteria was adorned with a colorful display of fresh lettuce from the farm for the celebration.
It’s only about 20 steps from the farm to the school kitchen, says Sodexo General Manager Donna Walker, and “you can’t get any fresher than that.”
Naturally the school plans to use the farm to produce food for all of its students, but eventually they would like to grow enough to feed the entire district. They also plan on using the farm as a teaching tool, and to start a Leafy Green Machine Club in the future to gather students to help run it on a regular basis.
The plants in the farm start out as seeds that are planted in a special seedling area in the pod for about three weeks. Afterward they are transplanted into vertical racks where they will grow for the next five weeks. In about eight weeks total the plants will go from seed to harvest and eventually onto the plates of students and teachers. They plan on growing things like basil, kale, Swiss chard, spinach, arugula, dill and parsley down the road.
Hydroponics is the practice of growing plants in water with a nutrient solution, according to Freight Farms Representative Dana Lucas, who attended the harvest celebration Thursday afternoon. There’s no dirt involved in the growing or planting process and the farm uses a number of LED lights to act as the sun. The nutrient solution feeds the plants and can adjust the farm’s pH as needed. The temperature levels can also be automatically adjusted based on a plants' needs. There’s even an app for the phone or computer where farmers can view or modify the farm’s settings 24 hours a day, meaning they can grow produce year round without having to worry about the growing season.
“It’s the coolest thing for me to see the farms in action,” said Lucas. “I love seeing them in high schools.”
Freight Farms now has over 200 farms throughout the country.
“This is an exciting joint venture,” said West Warwick Superintendent Karen Tarasevich. “We value our long standing partnership with Sodexo in so many ways.”
She said The Leafy Green Machine is just another way to give students and staff hands-on learning experiences, and she was excited when Sodexo brought the proposal forward to the West Warwick School Committee last year.
“This is one opportunity with one machine that has already served the purpose of expanding the mindset of what we can do,” she added. “This celebration of the first harvest is just the first steps towards feeding the world.”
Sodexo Regional Manager Mark Tucker said the company is always looking to create a partnership with local school departments to provide services beyond the lunchroom.
“We’re really looking to find a way to bring another avenue for students to learn, develop and have access to a machine like this you normally wouldn’t see,” he said. “This is helping us bring nutritional meals to students and redefine local. We all want to do our part and buy local and we’re happy to be able to do that here.”
“Hopefully this is bigger than just growing leafy greens,” he added. “Hopefully it will be an opportunity where we can continue to revitalize students’ minds.”
Lucas was one of the Freight Farms team members assigned to go out and train new users in how to operate the machine.
“Everything is regulated and it takes very little for a farmer to start up their farm,” said Lucas. “Anybody can be a farmer and be successful. It’s totally revolutionary for farming. You don’t need to check if your conditions are good or the nutrients in your soil. Data is being collected by computers and that data will allow us to feed the world. We take pride that students can learn not only about plants but about farming.”
Sodexo’s Hydroponic Consultant Amy Lynn Chauvin has been helping to maintain the farm over the last couple of months, working alongside teachers to get it up and running. Chauvin is a teacher with six years of hydroponic growing experience. Chauvin provided guests with tours of the farm Thursday, fielding question after question about how the whole thing works. Lucas said Chauvin is running the farm like a well-oiled machine and said its one of the most well maintained farms she’s seen in action.
West Warwick High School Science Teacher Haley Winsor has also been a major part of the program.
“Students have been talking a lot about this,” said Winsor. “There’s a lot of interest in getting in there. We’ve had a few students coming in and we need to continue to teach them how to maintain the cleanliness of it.”
Fellow West Warwick High School Science Teacher Gina Poulos said the school is already looking at ways to implement The Leafy Green Machine into the curriculum. The school will even be starting a Freight Farm Committee, which has its first meeting next Wednesday.
“Some faculty have already emailed me sharing ideas and we’ll discuss all this and how to incorporate it into all different parts of school,” she said.
Other administrators of the program include West Warwick Schools Finance Director Joseph Spagna and Director of Facilities Kenneth Townsend.
Follow Kendra Port on Twitter @kendrarport
Locally Grown Foods: Fresh, Delicious And Nutritious
04/04/2016 - Boston, Mass. - LinkedIn head shots for students attending Public Health and Nutrition Career Expo. (Matthew Healey for Tufts University) more >
By Courtney Millen - Wednesday, October 10, 2018
In 2007, the New Oxford American Dictionary dubbed “locavore” the “2007 Word of the Year,” adding the term to its pages and solidifying the local food movement as a piece of American culture. From a grassroots beginning to dictionary recognition to being spoofed on sketch comedies like “Portlandia” (“Ah [the chicken’s] name was Colin. Here are his papers.”), eating local is a trend that’s here to stay.
More than 10 years after the concept’s introduction, the emphasis on locally grown foods remains prominent. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2018 Culinary Forecast, a focus on local foods occupies two of the top 10 concept trends, with “hyperlocal” claiming the highest spot (think chefs using restaurant gardens) and locally sourced produce coming in at No. 8.
So what nutritional benefits does local food offer and how does Skyscraper Farm distinctively provide those benefits?
First, let’s look at the national and global landscape of healthy eating behaviors. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, fewer than 20 percent of Americans consume the daily recommended amount of vegetables (2.5 cup-equivalents for a 2000-calorie diet) and fewer than 30 percent of Americans consume the daily recommended amount of fruits (2 cup-equivalents for a 2000-calorie diet).
Yet research consistently shows that increased fruit and vegetable consumption is part of a healthy eating plan, influential in weight loss and in lowering the risk of a variety of chronic diseases (cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers).
Global intake of fruits and vegetables also falls short of recommendations, and in 2016, 3.88 million deaths were attributed to a diet low in fruits and vegetables according to an analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Additionally, even if the global population adhered completely to the Dietary Guidelines, growth to support such demand would require an additional 3.86 million square miles (roughly the size of Canada) of fertile land using current agricultural methods.
Enter Skyscraper Farm. With vertical farming practices utilizing sunlight instead of artificial light, Skyscraper Farm is uniquely positioned to sustainably combat the land-deficit problem while providing local, nutrient-rich produce.
With current consumption habits in mind, Skyscraper Farm provides two important shifts offering health benefits. The first relates to access. Skyscraper Farm increases access to healthy food, allowing consumers to make healthier choices. As explained in the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, environment strongly impacts people’s eating behaviors.
These behavior changes may require additional resources such as nutrition education, but increased access through sunlight-driven vertical farming provides the option to select healthier items, which is a necessity when implementing a healthy eating plan.
The second shift that Skyscraper Farm provides relates to diet quality. When a fruit or vegetable is harvested at peak ripeness, the nutrient content is at its highest. When grown and sold locally, farmers can pick fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness and quickly bring them to market.
Conversely, when fruits and vegetables are shipped a longer distance, harvesting occurs earlier than peak ripeness to reduce chances of bruising or overripening during storage and transportation. Those fruits and vegetables never reach their full potential for nutrient content. Additionally, fruits and vegetables are subject to nutrient degradation once harvested related to the effects of temperature, light, oxygen and water within storage and transport environments. The longer the timespan from harvest to table, the greater the vitamin, mineral and water content decreases.
As Skyscraper Farm increases accessibility to healthy food while improving the nutrient content of those foods, people within the community will be better equipped to increase fruit and vegetable intake, reaping the benefits of vitamins and minerals that aid in reducing the risk of chronic diseases.
As access to fruits and vegetables becomes as common and convenient as access to less healthy foods, the potential for positive nutrition behavior change increases. Local, sun-ripened fruits and vegetables picked at their peak, offering the highest quality in nutrition and taste, will land on plates shortly after harvest, providing the nutrient-dense options that fall within a healthy eating pattern. Locavores, rejoice.
• Courtney Millen, MNSP, RD, is chief operating officer at Skyscraper Farm LLC. She is founder and lead dietitian of Palate Theory (palatetheory.com) and has worked professionally in food-service management, provided evidence-based nutrition counseling and conducted nutrition workshops in academic and military settings. Follow her on Twitter @palatetheory.
“Farm.” Portlandia, season 1, episode 1, IFC, 2011. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70222162.
National Restaurant Association. (2018). What’s Hot - 2018 Culinary Forecast, 114. Retrieved from http://www.restaurant.org/Restaurant/media/Restaurant/SiteImages/News and Research/Whats Hot/Whats_Hot_Culinary_Forecast_2018.pdf
Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 84 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990 2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. (2017). Lancet, 390, 13451422. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32366-8.
Rizvi, S., Pagnutti, C., Fraser, E., Bauch, C. T., & Anand, M. (2018). Global land use implications of dietary trends. PLoS ONE, 13(8), 112. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200781.
Rickman, J. C., Barrett, D. M., Bruhn, & M, C. (4179). Nutritional comparison of fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables. Part 1. Vitamins C and B and phenolic compounds. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 87, 930944. https://doi.org/10.1
The Fifth Edition of The Global Summit Showcases International Expansion
From the left: Walid Haidar - Dean of the Consular Corps and Consul General of Lebanon in Milan, Alan Christian Rizzi - Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Lombardy Region, Marco Gualtieri - Founder and President of Seeds&Chips and Alessandro La Volpe - Vice President of IBM Cloud.
Seeds&Chips 2019
The Fifth Edition of The Global Summit Showcases International Expansion
Kicking off on May 6 at Rho FieraMilano, the next edition will welcome world renowned guests, hundreds of speakers, and conference sessions discussing food, innovation, and the planet’s most pressing challenges.
In 2019, Seeds&Chips will also be a part of the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco (January 2019) and New York (June 2019)
Global goals: in September 2019, the first Australian edition of the Summit will take place in Melbourne, and plans are in the works for Africa and China
Milan, 9 October 2018 - The fifth edition of Seeds&Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit, the most important international event dedicated to Food Innovation, was presented today, with the exceptional institutional support of the Lombardy Region.
From the 39th floor of Palazzo Lombardia, the announcement of latest edition of the Summit was welcomed by consulates representing countries from all corners of the world: Ecuador, Uruguay, Slovenia, Turkey, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Brazil, USA, Australia, Romania, Kuwait, Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Lithuania, Israel, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Argentina and Finland. The President of the Lombardy Region, Attilio Fontana, delivered a video message of greetings and thanks to the assembled audience, while onstage, speeches were delivered by Walid Haidar, Dean of the Consular Corps and Consul General of Lebanon in Milan; Marco Gualtieri, Founder and President of Seeds&Chips; Alessandro La Volpe, Vice President of IBM Cloud, and Alan Christian Rizzi, Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Lombardy Region responsible for relations with international delegations.
With this united front, the Region of Lombardy and Seeds&Chips demonstrated their unity to guiding the future of food system both in Italy and the world; indeed, with the city of Milan as the central point of the debate, this theme was the most important takeaway. Lombardy was the driving force behind Expo Milano 2015 and The Global Food Innovation Summit, born and bred in the region’s capital, is a testament to its legacy, its message and its global reach.
"It is a great privilege for us to receive the both support and concrete backing of the Region of Lombardy and to thus have a crucial partner to carry forward the legacy of Expo Milano 2015 - said Marco Gualtieri, Founder and Chairman of Seeds&Chips. For the first time, the world has placed a conversation about food at the center of an enormous matrix including the challenges linked to the growth of the world population, climate change, urbanization, and to a fundamental word for today and for the next decades: sustainability. I have always considered Expo to have been a huge success but, to be such, we must continue to carry forward those themes and all that they represent, never forgetting to keep both Milan and Italy in the center. In the same year that Expo took place, in New York the United Nations approved the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 and in Paris almost all the countries of the world signed the Cop21 agreement to combat climate change.
Together, these milestones generated an epoch-defining transformation that crossed every economic sector, each united by the concept of sustainability and with food as the transversal and dominant factor. We created the first edition of Seeds&Chips with the knowledge that it was essential to represent and enhance this transformation as well as establishing three fundamental pillars: the presence and the real and practical involvement of young people including both Millennials and teenagers, the continuous research and presentation of solutions and new models, and a strong international identity. This fifth edition of Seeds&Chips will be a new starting point: much has been done, but much remains to be done ".
"Seeds&Chips has helped to maintain a healthy and articulate debate on the issues that emerged during Expo Milano 2015, thus representing the natural evolution of that first step”, added Alan Christian Rizzi, Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Lombardy Region with responsibility for relations with international delegations. “Food security and food safety, the fight against food waste, agricultural sustainability: these are issues that our regional government is determined to tackle with the urgency they deserve. An event like Seeds&Chips stimulates this discourse through the involvement of experts and authorities from all over the world. Lombardy is the largest agricultural region of Italy, and an area with a storied culinary tradition of food and wine, with dozens of certified products.
The growth and prosperity of the agri-food sector cannot, however, ignore elements such as innovation and research, which are now essential for competing in an increasingly fierce market. The combination of agri-food, research and business in Lombardy is very strong. One example is the High Technology Agrifood Lombardy Cluster, which creates synergies between major universities, large companies, SMEs and regional research institutions to explore the new possibilities of agritech and industry 4.0. Milan, the capital of the region, also hosts 10% of startups in the Italian food sector, with 8.5% located in or around Bergamo. These are the elements we want to enhance and develop.”
A GLOBAL VISION
Seeds&Chips 2019 will take place from 6 to 9 May at FieraMilano Rho, running concurrently with TUTTOFOOD. Over four days, the Summit will host conference sessions and meetings on the major topics related to food and innovation around the globe, from climate change to robotics, from e-commerce to precision agriculture, and from food waste to the circular economy, among many other themes. An exhibition hall will allow start-ups, companies, accelerators and incubators to present and showcase their projects, while hundreds of international speakers, investors and policy makers from all over the world will discuss major global challenges.
Following the success of the last edition’s WaterFirst! Call for Ideas, which gathered more than 65 projects from countries on 4 continents, a special focus will once again be placed on the theme of water, one of the biggest global challenges in the coming years.
The Global Food Innovation Summit recently announced their partnership with the Government of the State of Victoria and Food + Wine Victoria to create Seeds&Chips Australia in the city of Melbourne in September 2019. It will be an international event focused on innovation in agrifood, with the goal of becoming the standard bearer for food innovation not only in Australia, but throughout Southeast Asia. The event will feature sessions, debates, forums, workshops, business meetings and awards, to give a 360 ° view of food and innovation.
Seeds&Chips has already signed a three-year joint venture agreement with the Specialty Food Association, the American organization behind the Fancy Food Show, the oldest and most well-known American event dedicated solely to food. Beginning in 2018, Seeds&Chips will have a significant presence at the both the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco and the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York. The next edition of the show takes place in San Francisco in January 2019, and in New York in June 2019.
The fifth edition of the Summit in Milan will welcome institutions, companies and startups from scores of countries around the world. Australia, Germany, Holland, Israel, San Marino and Slovenia are among the first confirmed for 2019.
In addition, several African countries as well as China will have an important part to play in the upcoming Summit. These regions are strategically vital in developing best practices related to environmental stability, innovation, and the global food chain. Seeds&Chips is also in talks with representatives of these regions to develop international agreements and working relationships.
MILLENNIALS AND GENERATION Z
As always, young people are the real heroes of Seeds&Chips. However, it is not only millennials but the emerging “Generation Z” of teenagers who have a vital role to play. The fifth edition of the Summit will provide even more opportunities for engagement for young people and teens with a range of innovative formats and programs. Each conference will have at least one speaker at the under the age of 30 and will be opened by a Teenovator, activists from 13 to 19 years old who are particularly active in food innovation and the food revolution. Young innovators will also have the chance to participate in the Give Me 5! program, where they will meet with global leaders one on one for 5 minutes and propose their projects, ask questions, and gain inspiration for the future.
INVITED GUESTS AND SPEAKERS
A number of international speakers are already confirmed to join the fifth edition of the Global Food Innovation Summit, with many more to follow. Among those scheduled to speak: Howard Yana Shapiro, Chief Agriculture Officer, Mars Incorporated; Giovanni Battistini, Senior Vice President, Open Innovation Science, Ferrero; Alexandre Bastos, Director of Global Innovation, Givaudan International; Danielle Nierenberg, President, Food Tank, Andrew Ive, Founder, Big Ideas Ventures; Victor E. Friedberg, Co-Founder, S2G Ventures and Founder and Chairman, FoodShot Global; Bernardo Hernández, Entrepreneur e Executive Chairman, Citibox; HRH Princess Viktoria de Bourbon de Parme and Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank until 2015 and current president of the Global Advisory Council, Africa Leadership University, and member of the Board of Trustees , Rockefeller Foundation.
In addition, representatives of the largest food innovation centers will participate at the Summit, such Natalie Shmulik, CEO The Hatchery Chicago and Angeline Achariya, CEO, Monash Food Innovation Centre.
Finally, Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria, will be among the global leaders present at the fifth edition of the Global Food Innovation Summit, along with representatives of the Forum of Kings, the organization that brings together Princes, Sheikhs and leaders of African countries around the themes of peace, economic development and sociocultural cooperation.
Seeds&Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit, founded by entrepreneur Marco Gualtieri, is the premier Food Innovation event in the world. An exceptional showcase entirely dedicated to the promotion of technology, solutions and talent from all over the world, the Summit features an exhibition hall and a complete conference schedule discussing the innovations that are changing the way food is produced, transformed, distributed, consumed and discussed. The third edition of Seeds & Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit, featured President Barack H. Obama as a keynote speaker in his first post presidency appearance. The 2017 event featured 300 global speakers, over 240 exhibitors, 15800 visitors and recorded 131 million social impressions over 4 days. The fourth edition of Seeds & Chips featured keynote addresses from John Kerry, 68th Secretary of the United States of America, and Howard Schultz, Executive Chairman of Starbucks. The 5th edition of Seeds & Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit will be held at FieraMilano Rho, from 6 to 9 May 2019.
Seeds&Chips Is Pleased To Announce The Australia Edition In Collaboration With The State of Victoria
Launching in Melbourne, September 2019 to lead the international discussion about the future of food
Milano/Melbourne, (September 14th, 2018) - Seeds&Chips,
The Global Food Innovation Summit the leading event on Ag and Food innovation worldwide partners with The Victorian Government and Food + Wine Victoria, the non-profit organisation whose mission is to promote the development of the Australian food & beverage sector also through their well-established event the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival (MFWF).
Global Table will be the new internationally-food and agriculture focused business event and part of the Taste Victoria strategy, launched by the Victorian Government to bolster the State’s presence in the food chain globally. The Summit will be hosted in Melbourne on September 2019.
The partnership between Seeds&Chips and Food + Wine Victoria aims to position Australia as the destination for investors and traders to connect with business leaders from across the Asia-Pacific by bringing the Global Food Innovation Summit to life with its signature content driven programming including its world-renowned speakers, the conference, exhibition, pitch competitions, Give Me 5 and much more.
Together with the Specialty Food Association and its Fancy Food Shows in New York and San Francisco, as well as the opening of their new San Francisco offices, Seeds&Chips will proudly represent Italy also in Australia and will continue to bring forth not only the humble experience gained within the past four years, but also the legacy of the Expo Milano 2015. Together with the United States, Australia represents a key partner for the continuous advancement of the global food system and a more sustainable future for all.
Possible other international communications will follow concerning strategic countries such as China and Africa.
Founder & Chairman of Seeds&Chips Marco Gualtieri said, “We are so pleased to announce our presence in Australia next year. Food, technology, innovation, young people, sustainability, food security: these are just some of the themes that we’ll be working on throughout the Summit. We hope to champion these issues on a continent full of opportunity with an acute awareness of environmental issues and a strong innovation infrastructure. As such, I am particularly grateful to the Victorian Government, Food + Wine Victoria, Melbourne and Australia for their foresight and willingness to gather all that we have learned over the years as well as their recognition of the importance of the themes that we are advancing and the enormous economic opportunity that they represent.
Over the years, Seeds&Chips has grown with the aim and the conviction to continue building upon the legacy of Expo 2015 by emphasizing both the importance of these subjects and the potential for economic development associated with them”.
Food + Wine Victoria Chairman, Radek Sali said, "We are thrilled to partner with Seeds&Chips as part of Global Table, Asia-Pacific's new agri-food and beverage business event to be launched in Melbourne in September 2019. Seeds&Chips has quickly built a reputation for leading the global discussion around the future of food and at Global Table, we will be harnessing that power across the full food supply chain. From Milan to Melbourne and the world over, we face many of the same challenges and it is only by bringing together entrepreneurs, farmers, investors, food scientists, government and so many more key players that we can create and share useful solutions”.
Minister for Agriculture, Jaala Pulford, concluded: “The Victorian Government is excited that Seeds&Chips will be joining us here in Melbourne in 2019 for Global Table. Their unique focus on themes like food, technology and innovation will be key in helping us achieve our ambitious target to grow our food and Fibre Exports to $20 billion by 2030”.
Seeds&Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit is the world's leading event in the field of Food Innovation. An exceptional showcase entirely dedicated to the promotion of technological solutions and talents from all over the world, the Summit brings an exhibition hall and conference sessions to Milan to present and discuss themes, models and innovations that are changing the way food is produced, transformed, distributed, consumed and experienced.
At the third edition of Seeds & Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit, President Barack H. Obama made his first post presidency appearance as a Keynote Speaker, and the event welcomed over 300 international speakers; over 240 exhibitors; 15,800 visitors and recorded 131 million social impressions in 4 days. The fourth edition of Seeds & Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit, was held at MiCo, Milano Congressi, from 7 to 10 May 2018 and included Keynote Addresses from John Kerry, former Secretary of the United States of America, and Howard Schultz, Executive Chairman of Starbucks. The 5th edition will take place in Milan, from 6 to 9 May 2019.