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Khetify's IoT Powered Rooftop Farm Has Caught The City Dwellers Fancy
Khetify's IoT Powered Rooftop Farm Has Caught The City Dwellers Fancy
Founded by IIT Kharagpur graduates, Kaustubh Khare and Saahil Parekh, Khetify is a startup promoting food sustainability to city dwellers.Chhavi Tyagi | ECONOMICTIMES.COM | May 01, 2017, 15:46 IST
Imagine having your own little farm that provides you organic vegetables devoid of harmful pesticides and even more dangerous spray painted produce.
This may sound fanciful to city dwellers that do not have the land to grow their own vegetables and are also short on time, but a startup is busy changing the definition of farming.
Founded by IIT Kharagpur graduates, Kaustubh Khare and Saahil Parekh, Khetify is a startup promoting food sustainability to city dwellers. Claiming that 16,000 sq km of rooftop space is being wasted in urban cities, Khetify aims to promote use of this unutilized space to develop small rooftop farms.
"If as a country we can turn just 10% of this into farms, we can produce fresh nutritious vegetables for around 200 million people," estimates Khare, 26.
Explaining the startup's motto 'Desh Ka Culture, Agriculture' Khare said, "We believe that urban India has been disconnected with farms, farmers, and their agrarian roots. Unless cities take control of their food systems, true sustainability could not be achieved".
Khetify develops compost-based modular 'khets' (farms) on vacant rooftops and enables individual households to grow 700 kgs of organic vegetables every year in as small a space as 200 sq ft. Understanding that scarcity of time is as big a constraint on city dwellers as is lack of space, Khetify uses IoT (Internet of Things) enabled drip irrigation system which can be controlled remotely and also helps in conserving water.
In nine months of its operations, Khetify claims to have transformed over 7,000 sq ft of vacant roofs and balconies in Delhi-NCR into small urban farms which has produced over 2,200 kgs of vegetables of 55 different varieties.
Chosen as one of the finalists in the AIM Smart City Accelerator Program (developed jointly by Ashoka University, Microsoft Ventures, and DLabs at the Indian School of Business), Khetify found support from plenty of sponsors.
"They are bridging the gap between the produce in the rural country to the consumers in urban areas. There are just too many steps involved in this process which eventually results in price escalation and crazy margins which are not even percolated down to the farmers. The team is readily available and employ farmers as part of their network," says Holostik Group, group director, Ankit Gupta. Holostik Group is one of the principal corporate supporting the accelerator program.
A team of six, Khetify employs two farmers who execute the function of maintenance for the clients.
The startup is now looking to grow its customer base by approaching schools, housing societies, universities, among others as well as expand its crop portfolio. The target is to make 50 schools and 150 households achieve food security by the end of 2017. This would mean the startup needs to employ an additional 10-15 farmers. However, hiring high quality talent from the domains of agriculture, botany and ecology has been a challenge.
"First of all, there are a very low number of students who take botany as their subject and even those who do, do not want to work in the industry. As for farmers, they also prefer working in factories over choosing farming as a source of livelihood," shares Khare.
Another challenge has been the easy procurement of compost, cow dung and other materials essential to farming. "Chemicals and fertilisers have so pervaded the system that it is extremely difficult to source natural, chemical-free compost. We spoke to several farmers and had to give them detailed instructions to get the right quality. This is going to be a challenge as we scale up," says Khare.
The statup has tuned its back-end operations interface with the informal economy such as daily wage labour, logistics and transport along with dealers of compost, cow dung and bringing standardisation to these has been a challenge.
Khetify charges a one-time fee for the installation of the 'khets', depending on the size of the 'khets' and a maintenance charge for the supply of high quality seeds, saplings, organic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides among others.
Claiming to have achieved a positive unit economics, the startup generates enough revenue to support its operations and has also received an undisclosed amount of seed funding as part of the AIM Smart City Accelerator Program.
"As part of the program, the startups are encouraged to solve problems with liberal arts perspective. The program advocates government's focus on developing smart cities and Khetify intends to make agriculture a vital part of smart cities," says Ashoka University, director, Priyank Narayan.
Disappointed that the narrative of sustainable cities is grabbed almost exclusively by renewable energy, Khare wants Indian cities to realise the importance of food security.
"If a city can produce as much as possible, as close to where it is consumed using as much renewable energy as possible, it is sustainable. This logic is applied selectively to electricity and fuel (solar, wind, biogas etc) which is the energy that powers a city. We want to apply the same logic to the energy that powers citizens, which is food. Khetify hopes to make cities more sustainable and give its citizens access to nutritious, organically grown food that citizens can trust and trace," says Khare.
Shanghai Is Building A Massive Agricultural District With A Vertical Farm
Shanghai Is Building A Massive Agricultural District With A Vertical Farm
The farms will primarily grow leafy greens, like kale, bok choi, and spinach.
May 6, 2017
Image: Sasaki
CHINESE CITY SHANGHAI is known for towering buildings, but now it wants towering farms.
The city is building a 250-acre agricultural district, which will function as a space to work, live, shop, and farm food. Called Sunqiao Shanghai, it will include new public plazas, parks, housing, stores, restaurants, greenhouses, and a science museum.
The masterplan was conceived by the design firm Sasaki and is part of a larger plan to turn a portion of the city into an ag-tech hub, Michael Grove, a principal at Sasaki, told Business Insider.
In the mid-1990s, Shanghai’s government designated a 3.6-square-mile area of the city for agricultural production, hoping that bioengineering and biopharmaceutical companies would set up research facilities working in tandem with city greenhouses.
Shanghai only constructed 3 single-storey greenhouses at the time. Sasaki was commissioned to expand the plan for Sunqiao, Grove says. There isn’t a construction timeline yet, but Grove estimates that a crew will break ground on the project by 2018.
Source: Sasaki
The farms will primarily grow leafy greens, like kale, bok choi, and spinach. Those will be sold to restaurants, grocers, or exported. In the future, Grove says the district may also raise fish in vertical aquaponic farms.
While cutting down on carbon footprints, the farms will have large energy demands, using LED lights to grow the food.
Read: This 40-storey skyscraper has trees climbing all the way to the top
Build Your Personalised Vertical Farm With Altifarm
Build Your Personalised Vertical Farm With Altifarm
Sindhu Kashyap 6 MAY 2017
Mumbai-based Altifarm gives you the delight of home farms and gardens in an easy modular and plug-and-play format.
In 2014, 31-year-old Arun Raj, who then ran a boutique industrial design studio, Primus Design, was working on a large granite-based modular garden design project for a Swiss client. After several iterations of the design, Arun realised that there were hardly any home-garden shops or brands. That’s when Arun says he felt the need for an all-season modular home farm. And this led to the genesis of Altifarm, a home garden platform.
With designs centred around tight and busy urban spaces, Alitfarm sells vertical structures that comprise special trays that one call fill with soil and sow herbs and vegetables for their daily use.
The team at Altifarm.
The Mechanisms
The idea was to make the process of gardening easier and also enjoy the benefits of a homegrown farm, without the need for routine watering, electricity, or recurring subscriptions.
The trays come with a watering sprout and a water level indicator. The water in the sprouts can be filled once a week, and the rest is taken care of by a pressure mechanism which ensures the plants are watered through the holes in the platform situated in the tray. Explains Arun,
“The self-watering system works with the help of capillary action (and gravity). There is no electricity or motor/pump involved. It also helps with oxygenation of roots leading to healthier plants.”
The trays also come with a Growlight expansion pack, which is used for indoor plants so that they can work on their processes away from the sunlight. Arun adds that LEDs are chosen to impart certain specific wavelengths, which promote vegetative growth, flowering, and germination.
By providing the exact wavelength to plants, the system is rendered highly power-efficient with minimal operating costs and the included timer takes care of auto-shutoff functions. It has an IP65 rating and is custom manufactured to specs for optimal performance. For colder climates, there is also the Greenhouse pack for outdoor use.
Working on a Three-Year Pipeline
Altifarm allows for both outdoor and indoor use. It provides one sq. metre of gardening space from no more than the footprint of a chair and makes an unused corner of the house into a mini-food farm.
“We are confident that Altifarm lets you grow almost anything, as long as plants are not too tall, that tiers are height adjustable and removable to facilitate this,” adds Arun.
The journey started in 2014 with paper sketches and a proof of concept with acrylic sheets that were held on frames made from hardware pipes. This meant close to three years of trial and error tests. After the basic mould, they followed it with a CAD-based design and 3D printing for trials and moved on to mould making.
While the first product was ready by late 2014, for the next three years, the team kept working and re-working on the product.
“The product you see is Altifarm 2.0 and we believe this is our best yet. All the learning we had over the years at the design studio has been invested into Altifarm and it has helped us meet amazing people and take some huge risks,” says Arun.
Setting The Team
Since Arun had already founded Primus Design, getting initial help wasn’t difficult. His mentor and neighbour David Ghosh joined in as the co-founder. With decades of experience in the manufacturing space, David was able to bring the needed manufacturing know-how and in-house production capability for the metal frame, while the plastic part of the business is handled by a captive vendor nearby.
The core team is a mix of designers, engineers, tinkerers, and production specialists. The 12-member team works out of Mumbai with a manufacturing facility in Pune. The first sale was made to Switzerland, where the team shipped 80 units to their friend and mentor Jean. Currently, the units are priced at $199.
Revenue and Numbers
The team is focused just on building and selling the units. Individuals will need to buy their own soil, seed, and all other farming tools.
Their revenue model is only through (online) sales of Altifarm and expansion packs, of which barring customised grow lights, everything is mostly done in-house or in close vicinity. While the concept of vertical gardens is relatively new in India, the idea is thriving in Mexico, Europe, US, and New Zealand.
Some of the companies in a similar space include Mexico’s Vertical Green, which was a part of a kickstarter programme. There also is Delhi-based Green Walls, US-based Green Sense Farms, and other US-based company City Farm.
“We plan to develop Altifarm further as a product platform and are already working on variants and expansion packs. We look forward to feedback from users to improvise the product and add more features and functionality. We also invite those who would like to join us in our journey towards Urban Farming Movement, by partnering us in sales and distribution,” says Arun.
This Mumbai Ecopreneur Has Been Turning City Dwellers Into Urban Farmers for Over Half a Decade
This Mumbai Ecopreneur Has Been Turning City Dwellers Into Urban Farmers for Over Half a Decade
During a college project, Priyanka Amar Shah combined her love for nature with business skills to start iKheti, an enteprise that facilitates urban farming
by Sohini Dey
Priyanka Amar Shah attributes her love for greenery to her “nature loving family.” The Mumbai resident grew up in a suburban home whose balconies were always adorned with plants. It was also her affinity for nature that made her notice how barren the other balconies of her neighbourhood seemed in comparison.
Around 2011, Priyanka and her brother began growing herbs at home, plucking chillies and lemons for family dinners. During this time, she was pursuing and MBA from Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research where she got an opportunity to present a business idea. Determined to use the opportunity fruitfully, she combined her love for nature with business skills to conceptualise iKheti, an urban farming enterprise.
Today, iKheti has become a full-fledged eco-friendly enterprise that facilitates farming among city dwellers with workshops, consultancy and gardening resources.
iKheti aims to create a sustainable environment
For this young ecopreneur, concern for environment goes hand-in-hand with a healthy food movement. Unlike other gardening ventures, iKheti emphasizes on growing edible vegetables, fruits and herbs. “Mumbai is great for growing edible plants. We have great sunshine and the weather is not as extreme as other cities,” Priyanka says.
Priyanka’s vision for iKheti’s vision is, “To create a platform for both, individuals & communities to grow healthy consumable crops within their premises & promote sustainable urban farming.”
Today, a number of organisations work in the same area and the number of people invested in urban farming is on the rise. Yet in 2011, when Priyanka got started, it was still unexplored territory and people had to be educated on the benefits and methods of farming in small spaces.
“We started with workshops,” says Priyanka on her early days with iKheti. “But we soon realised that holding workshops was not enough.” People needed to carry their learning back from home and apply it, and Priyanka took a more holistic approach to overcome the obstacle. From seeds and organic manure to consulting and maintenance, iKheti expanded their scope. “It was an unorganised sector and professional help was lacking,” she says. “Our main focus was to become a one-stop shop.”
Supported by a network of volunteers and trained malis, iKheti hopes to introduce everyone to the joy of organic farming.
Promoting organic farming among urban dwellers
Priyanka insists on taking the no-chemical approach to farming, in tandem with her emphasis on healthy eating. From offering seeds and DIY kits on sale to offering consulting services on composting and kitchen gardening, she wants to train people in the art of growing their own food.
For time-strapped clients, iKheti offers an on-call mali (gardener) service. Finding this taskforce was one of her biggest challenges, Priyanka admits, as they were unfamiliar with the extra maintenance and organic methods. “Over time, they have become very caring. I foster animals, and sometimes when I am not around the nursery, they do it for me.”
“Our malis are specially trained to look after edible plants, and they are the backbone of this business,” she adds.
For beginners, Priyanka recommends growing herbs, which are easier and faster to grow. Herbs like curry leaves, ajwain, tulsi and pudina are very popular. “These might sound common, but 90 percent people who come to us don’t grow any of those plants,” she says. Herbs like celery, basil and oregano are also popular and Priyanka recommends growing these before one moves on to vegetable farming.
iKheti’s success has prompted Priyanka to take up new challenges: community farming, vertical gardening & hydroponics.
iKheti’s diverse undertakings, from innovative planters to grand vertical gardens
Having reached out to over 4,000 people via personal services and workshops, Priyanka is now emphasizing on encouraging bigger groups. iKheti’s experience with a few corporate and religious institutions has also shown that farming is best effectively practised on rooftops or bigger spaces. She also works with schools, encouraging children to eat healthy and understand the value of food.
Another area in which iKheti is beginning to work is with farmers around Mumbai, teaching them the values of organic farming. Admittedly, it is not easy—farmers worry about diminishing produce and Priyanka thinks it is a valid concern driven by the market and low awareness. “Many farmers don’t know that organic produce fetches higher prices,” she says.
The iKheti team not only educates farmers, but also teaches them the value of land as legacy. After all, a fertile land is a boon for the next generation.
Keeping space considerations in mind, iKheti is also venturing into vegetable growing in vertical spaces and taking tiny steps towards hydroponic systems. Their ultimate endeavour is to combine the two in an effort to offer greater convenience for urban farmers.
Priyanka aims to acquaint people from all works of life to the importance of a green environment. Not just farming, even smaller plants can make a difference. At the iKheti nursery, plants are reared to contribute to their surroundings, from purifying the air to attracting butterflies and insects. “We want to create a sustainable environment,” she says, encapsulating her ecopreneurial vision.
Check out the iKheti’s products and services online or get in touch with Priyanka here.
China Focus: Factory Farms The Future For Chinese Scientists
Factory Farms The Future For Chinese Scientists
Source: Xinhua| 2017-04-30 09:06:29|Editor: Yamei
XIAMEN, Fujian Province, April 30 (Xinhua) -- In a factory in eastern China, farming is becoming like scientific endeavor, with leafy vegetables embedded neatly on stacked layers, and workers in laboratory suits tending the plants in cleanrooms.
The factory, with an area of 10,000 square meters, is in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. Built in June 2016, the land is designed to be a "plant factory," where all environmental factors, including light, humidity, temperature and gases, can be controlled to produce quality vegetables.
The method is pursued by Sananbio, a joint venture between the Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) and Sanan Group, a Chinese optoelectronics giant. The company is attempting to produce more crops in less space while minimizing environmental damage.
Sananbio said it would invest 7 billion yuan (about 1.02 billion U.S. dollars) to bring the new breed of agriculture to reality.
NEW FARMING
Plant factories, also known as a vertical farms, are part of a new global industry.
China now has about 80 plant factories, and Sananbio has touted its Quanzhou facility as the world's largest plant factory.
In the factory, leafy greens grow in six stacked layers with two lines of blue and red LED lights hung above each layer. The plants are grown using hydroponics, a method that uses mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent instead of soil.
"Unlike traditional farming, we can control the duration of lighting and the component of mineral solutions to bring a higher yield," said Pei Kequan, a researcher with IBCAS and director of R&D in Sanabio. "The new method yields ten-times more crops per square meter than traditional farming."
From seedling to harvesting, vegetables in the farm usually take 35 days, about 10 days shorter than greenhouse plants.
To achieve a higher yield, scientists have developed an algorithm which automates the color and duration of light best for plant growth, as well as different mineral solutions suitable for different growth stages.
The plant factory produces 1.5 tonnes of vegetables every day, most of which are sold to supermarkets and restaurants in Quanzhou and nearby cities.
The world's population will bloat to 9.7 billion by 2050, when 70 percent of people will reside in urban areas, according to the World Health Organization.
Pei said he believes the plant factory can be part of a solution for potential future food crises.
In the factory, he has even brought vertical farming into a deserted shipping container.
"Even if we had to move underground someday, the plant factory could help ensure a steady supply of vegetables," he said.
HEALTHIER FUTURE
Before entering the factory, Sananbio staff have to go through strict cleanroom procedures: putting on face masks, gloves, boots, and overalls, taking air showers, and putting personal belongings through an ultraviolet sterilizer.
The company aims to prevent any external hazards that could threaten the plants, which receive no fertilizers or pesticides.
By adjusting the mineral solution, scientists are able to produce vegetables rich or low in certain nutrients.
The factory has already been churning out low-potassium lettuces, which are good for people with kidney problems.
Adding to the 20 types of leafy greens already grown in the factory, the scientists are experimenting on growing herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine and other healthcare products.
Zheng Yanhai, a researcher at Sananbio, studies anoectohilus formosanus, a rare herb in eastern China with many health benefits.
"In the plant factory, we can produce the plants with almost the same nutrients as wild anoectohilus," Zheng said. "We tested different light, humidity, temperature, gases and mineral solutions to form a perfect recipe for the plant."
The factory will start with rare herbs first and then focus on other health care products, Zheng said.
GROWING PAINS
Currently, most of the products in the plant factory are short-stemmed leafy greens.
"Work is in progress to bring more varieties to the factory," said Li Dongfang, an IBCAS researcher and Sananbio employee.
Some are concerned about the energy consumed with LED lights and air-conditioning.
"Currently, it takes about 10 kwh of electricity to produce one kilogram of vegetables," said Pei, who added that the number is expected to drop in three to five years, with higher LED luminous efficiency.
In a Yonghui superstore in neighboring Xiamen city, the vegetables from the plant factory have a specially designated area, and are sold at about a 30 percent premium, slightly higher than organic and locally produced food.
"Lettuce from the plant factory is a bit expensive, at least for now, there are many other healthy options," said Wang Yuefeng, a consumer browsing through the products, which are next to the counter for locally produced food.
Sananbio said it plans to expand the factory further to drive down the cost in the next six months. "The price will not be a problem in the future, with people's improving living standards," Li said.
Carrefour Unveils Its Urban Agriculture Initiatives
04/27/2017
Carrefour Unveils Its Urban Agriculture Initiatives
For the official inauguration of the vegetable garden on the roof of the Villiers-en-Bière hypermarket in Seine-et-Marne, Carrefour is sharing its ideas for introducing short distribution channels at its stores.
Stores which are becoming production sites
Villiers-en-Bière vegetable garden: over a 1200 m² surface area, ornamental and aromatic fruit trees and fruit and vegetable plants are being grown, using methods inspired by agro-ecology. It is managed by students from the Bougainville de Brie-Comte-Robert agricultural and horticultural school. They also share information about the garden with neighbouring schools and customers at the store. The garden should begin to bear its first fruit in early May and its yield will be sold in the store.
Other vegetable gardens are set to be created all through France: in Mérignac, a 6000 m² in-ground garden is being created near the Carrefour store. In the Paris region, the Sainte-Geneviève des Bois hypermarket, the Charonne Carrefour Market and Carrefour’s Massy head office have all enlisted the services of start-up company Agripolis, which specialises in developing in situ gardens using the aeroponics process.
By signing the "Objectif 100 Hectares" charter, Carrefour is committing – alongside the Paris Town Hall – to planting throughout the capital, the aim being to convert 200 ha of Paris's built-up area into green spaces – a third of which will be for urban farming – between now and 2020.
Local supply contracts
Carrefour is also entering into local partnerships to sell products grown using agro-ecological farming techniques. In 2016, the retailer joined forces with the Ferme Akuo du Gâtinais located on a wind farm – the first farm to use permaculture in the Paris region – in order to supply local Carrefour Bio stores. Carrefour gives preference to short distribution channels by selling local products (some 60,000 products) and products made using agro-ecological methods – such as strawberries grown without synthetic pesticides.
With all of these varied projects in which it is involved, Carrefour is helping to ensure food of a high quality by selling ultra-fresh products from short distribution channels. By reducing the distances that these new products have to travel, the retailer is helping to preserve the planet's biodiversity and reducing CO2 emissions, while at the same time tackling food wastage.
The Startup That Will Change The Way China Feeds Its Cities
The Startup That Will Change The Way China Feeds Its Cities
Beijing-based startup Alesca Life is democratizing access to fresh food by creating solutions that enable anyone anywhere to grow the safest, healthiest, and freshest produce in the most efficient way possible. Their automated indoor food production system is currently growing nutrient-dense produce using no pesticides, no soil, no sunlight, 20-25 times less water, fertilizer, and land compared to traditional farming practices.
CEO Stuart Oda shares his thoughts on the necessity of evolving the modern agriculture framework to feed the globe’s ever-growing population.
What experiences inspired you to start this company?
I’ve traveled to over 40 countries and one of the most common challenges faced by emerging market countries was the access to highly nutritious, safe, fresh foods. The unpredictability of weather due to climate change and lack of access to critical resources and education makes food production and distribution and the stable supply of nutrition through fresh foods an enormous challenge.
Also, fresh food logistics is essentially the movement of water and nutrition in a perishable, damageable form: incredibly energy intense and wasteful with both food and packaging. Many of the problems of the agricultural supply chain can be overcome by removing the key variables of present day agriculture: weather, logistics, and land.
Finally, the environmental degradation associated with agriculture is quite alarming. When I was an investment banker in Tokyo, someone I greatly respected always reused printouts until the white on the paper was almost gone. Her explanation was simple, “I don’t want my grandchildren to have to visit a museum to see what a tree looks like.”
Agriculture must become a more environmentally friendly practice to ensure that future generations do not inherit a heavily polluted planet. Alesca Life was born out of the frustration of an archaic method of food production to create a more sustainable alternative to feed our current and future population.
Why solve the issues you’re trying to solve?
The world will face a number of significant challenges in the coming decades, including rapid population growth and urbanization, higher food distribution inequality and waste, environmental degradation, and natural resource depletion. In developing countries, there is the additional problem of poor food quality and safety.
Also, as the sharing economy and automation grows, the most basic of urban infrastructure and human capital will become idle or underutilized. A solution to these challenges will be critical for global social, economic, and environmental development.
Why is your solution unique?
Alesca Life designs and builds turn-key farming solutions that enable anyone in any environment to produce safe and healthy produce locally. We have several hardware form factors that enable pesticide-free food production at any scale, and we coupled it with a cloud-based operational management system that enables complete production data transparency and supply chain traceability.
The agricultural industry has traditionally been additive: more chemicals, more water, more logistics, more land. Alesca Life’s philosophy is the exact opposite: food production utilizing minimal inputs on virtually no land.
Also, our solution is looking to integrate an IT infrastructure that allows for supply chain transparency to end the production of “anonymous food” and by growing in a more consistent environment we want to end the concept of “ugly vegetables” which are some of the biggest contributors to poor food quality and high food waste.
What has been your company’s proudest moment been to date?
For the founders, completing our hand-built shipping container farm and commencing fresh vegetable production was a moment of incredible pride.
For the team, installing our first indoor food production system into Swire Hotels for the onsite production of fresh wheatgrass was one of our collective highlights.
My personal proudest moment was when, following a visit to our urban container farm, a young child told us that he wanted to be an urban farmer when he grew up.
What do you hope the world will look like as a result of your work?
Our team hopes that the integration of food production as one of the core functions of urban environments will help to create more resilient, sustainable, and beautiful cities for urban citizens. Also, if the extension of our technology can impact food production in space (outer space), it would be an incredibly exciting future.
Upping The Ante For Urban Growing
Upping The Ante For Urban Growing
4 May 2017, by Gavin McEwan, Be the first to comment
Europe is starting to catch up with the Far East and the USA with the opening of a major indoor lettuce-growing facility in the Netherlands, Gavin McEwan reports.
Lettuce: plants at Staay Food Group’s new facility in the Netherlands will be grown hydroponically in coir underneath LEDs - image: HW
With the imminent opening in the Netherlands of Staay Food Group’s €8m, 27,000sq m high-rise indoor lettuce-growing plant, Europe finally appears to be following the Far East and the United States down the route of large-scale commercial urban growing.
Located at its Fresh-Care Convenience processing plant in Dronten, central Netherlands, the facility will initially produce around 300,000kg of lettuce, a mixture of Lollo Biondo, Lollo Rosso, Rucola and Frisée forms, rising eventually to more than a one-million kilograms, for processing into salads.
The plants will be grown hydroponically on eight or nine levels in coir plugs underneath LEDs. "At this moment, we still source our lettuce in southern Europe during part of the year. The disadvantages are that the climate is erratic and the transport distances are great," says the company.
"Once the vertical farm supplies the lettuce, it will be fresher, there won’t be any pesticides involved, the quality will be stable, we will be able to plan production better and we will contribute to Staay Group’s sustainability goals."
Production times will also be considerably shorter than in conventional growing, it adds. Last year, in partnership with Philips Lighting and breeder Rijk Zwaan, it tested the format at Philips’ High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, with "positive results".
While the UK has yet to see anything on this scale, the wide exposure of a handful of pioneer projects on television and in national newspapers has brought the format to wider public attention. But suppliers tend not to think in purely national terms, according to Stephen Fry, senior business development executive at Midlands hydroponics equipment supplier HydroGarden.
"We have had a significant increase in business for our urban growing solutions," he says. "Most weeks I am drawing up plans for new systems, which could be in Lebanon, Kenya, New Zealand or the Far East as well as mainland Europe. People are looking at producing food where it’s required. For the UK, what is the carbon footprint of driving produce up from Spain?"
Responding to trends
"It’s still very niche," Fry admits. "We aren’t going to save the planet from starvation on our own, but a 50% increase in world food production has to come from somewhere. What we are doing is responding to trends in food. You only have to go to a half-decent restaurant or even pub to see the emphasis on freshness."
The VydroFarm tiered indoor growing system developed by HydroGarden took the innovation prize in the Future Manufacturing Awards presented by EEF, formerly the Engineering Employers Federation, earlier this year. Now rebranded as V-Farm, the system currently leads the company’s push into world markets.
It is also launching a new flood-and-drain vertical system at international trade events this month, says Fry.
On a smaller scale it has also developed a compact format for coffee shops, small supermarkets and high-end restaurants to grow their own micro-leaves and other crops. Its own range of LEDs "are giving very good results — they have needed to have a different spectrum for micro-greens, which are popular in the Far East", Fry explains.
"We also do a lot of work on the nutritional element. With our new product lines we can affect the nutritional content of things like micro-greens. Kale is hailed as a superfood but, if you compare the vitamin and mineral content, these are super-duper foods."
HydroGarden has also installed a trial 12-rack growing room at its Coventry headquarters, while a specially commissioned hybrid version of V-Farm combined with a FishPlant aquaponics system is also due to open at Pershore College in Worcestershire later this month.
This will be used to educate post-16 and degree-level students on a variety of courses including horticulture and animal care about hydroponics and aquaponics as sustainable alternatives to traditional farming methods.
HydroGarden’s V-Farm unit combined with FishPlant aquaponics system
Water quality and health
The college’s project manager John King explains: "In the first instance, our animal-care students will carry out testing to monitor and manage the water quality and subsequent health of the fish and plants.
These readings will be shared with our horticulture students whose focus will be the produce, grown from seed in separate propagators before being transplanted into the hydroponics part.
"If the plants are less than healthy, the students will have a real-life scenario to determine what is going wrong and what factors need to be altered such as lighting, nutrient flow and temperature." Animal-care students will then feed the finished produce to rabbits and other small herbivores in the department.
"We also plan to invest in a larger vertical-farming unit in the future so any students who are particularly interested in hydroponics will be able to take their knowledge and learning to the next level by working on a larger scale," says King.
Fry adds: "We are working with Pershore on growing protocols. Having a system without protocols on how to use it is like giving a car to someone who can’t drive."
The understanding of plants’ response to LEDs in controlled growing environments has so far been driven in the UK by AHDB Horticulture-funded work at Stockbridge Technology Centre’s LED4Crops facility. But while this three-year programme finishes at the end of this month, there is still much more in this area that the North Yorkshire research station is keen to investigate.
The facility’s manager, photobiologist Dr Phillip Davis, says: "We have a lot of data on the effect of different light on crops. We can control everything from how tall the plant grows to when it flowers. We have looked a lot of different crops — lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and many ornamentals — mainly from the point of view of propagation, but for lettuce and leafy herbs through to harvest. For
a crop like basil you can control the intensity of the flavour, for example, whether you want it mild for salads or stronger for sauces."
This response is already being harnessed by salad and herb grower Vitacress, which has recently installed Heliospectra programmable LED grow lights at its West Sussex site to increase shelf life and chill tolerance of basil plants during the final growth stage.
"There isn’t a vast acreage of indoor farming in the UK yet, though there are rumblings of big things taking off," Davis notes.
"And in research we are really just touching the surface. The more we look at it in total, the more we discover is possible in things like flavour and shelf life."
Urban growing economics
While the LED4Crops facility continues with research including private commissions, Stockbridge Technology Centre is now taking on a new project to look specifically at the economics of urban growing, and hence the barriers to commercial uptake, as part of the Innovate UK-funded Centre for Crop Health & Protection.
"There are a lot of questions in people’s minds as to whether it makes economic sense," says Davis. "It’s certainly not a low bar to start with." The new facility will have three growing areas, each producing "large volumes" of a single crop "and will be flexible enough to allow us to test what’s out there.".
He continues: "LED lighting is coming down in price — though not as quickly as some had hoped. But they are getting more efficient so you need fewer and your payback is quicker."
Viewpoint: Professor Tim Benton
"Urban agriculture, including vertical farming, is a potentially useful way to provide some high-value produce locally, and helps to connect people and food. However, it is unlikely it will underpin food security in the sense of access to a healthy diet as the amount of land necessary to provide nutritional needs is likely to be difficult to find within a purely urban setting.
"There is a clear role for it in some circumstances and for some markets, perhaps most obviously for things like lettuce, herbs and some fruit and veg. The degree to which it may emerge depends on a host of factors like access to food from other places, local access to land and water, infrastructure and so on.
"The space in most cities is very expensive relative to peri-urban and rural areas, so it might be more likely to emerge strongly in very large cities where ‘local fresh’ food might be highly valued, and where there is a market to support it, or in cities like Singapore, where access to land is absolutely difficult. Where land is cheap and available near cities, and it is easy for fresh produce to find its way into the centre, it may not play a huge role."
Former President Obama to Speak At The Seeds & Chips Global Food Innovation Summit
Former President Obama to Speak At The Seeds & Chips Global Food Innovation Summit
The 44th United States President Barack H. Obama will be the guest of honor at the 2017 Seeds&Chips Global Food Innovation Summit. Obama will be a keynote speaker on Tuesday, May 9, and will also discuss food and agriculture on a panel with Sam Kass, Senior Food Policy Advisor to President Obama and promoter of the White House’s health-conscious revolution.
This four-day Summit will bring together hundreds of business leaders, academics, investors, policymakers, and agricultural experts to discuss innovation from farm to table, where food and technology meet, in Milano, Italy, from May 8 to 11, 2017.
In-depth sessions will range from hi-tech topics, such as applications of 3D printing in food, to marketing, such as the impact of millennials on innovation. Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg will also be speaking at the Seeds&Chips Summit as a distinguished guest.
The Global Food Innovation Summit is presented in collaboration with TUTTOFOOD. Purchase tickets to attend Seed&Chips for 20 percent off, with the promo code FoodTankSAC17.
Vertical Farms to Shape Future Agriculture Supply Chains
Vertical Farms to Shape Future Agriculture Supply Chains
- New Straits Times
- 3 May 2017
- The writer is founder and CEO of LBB International, the logistics consulting and research firm that specialises in agri-food supply chains, industrial logistics and third-party logistics. LBB provides logistics diagnostics, supply chain design and solutio
BY 2040 the world will have nine billion inhabitants, of which the majority of which will live in cities. With a growing population and high urbanisation figures many countries, including Malaysia, have become highly dependent on imports for basic agriculture commodities.
This has created very long agriculture supply chains, with the agriculture produce section in our supermarkets today featuring food from all over the world!
As agriculture produce is living matter, the moment it is harvested or slaughtered it becomes a highly sensitive product that requires a specific environment, handling and has limited shelflife.
Long agriculture supply chains, therefore, means higher risks of diseases, reduction of quality, higher wastage, and high logistics costs.
Food miles, the distance food needs to travel to the point of consumer purchase, have exploded over the past 25 years.
Research shows that systematic long food miles are not sustainable.
High dependence on imports comes with high risks for countries, as food prices become highly dependent on the availability of excess of agriculture produce by agriculture exporters.
Is there a way back to where we have shorter supply chains for our basic fresh produce?
To significantly increase local production of basic agriculture commodities in Malaysia, there are two solutions: agriculture food parks and integrating farming in urban environments.
Agriculture food parks produce agriculture products in bulk and are located in rural areas.
These parks are also involved in processing, ranging from washing, cutting, packing up to advanced food processing into ready meals and ultra-processed foods.
These agriculture food parks then transport these products by truck to retail outlets and restaurants.
However, as land becomes more scarce, the necessary land is often not available for this kind of bulk agriculture production. Therefore, the integration of farming in urban environments becomes a necessity in order to feed our growing population in combination with high urbanisation.
The Netherlands has more than 100 years of experience in indoor farming, and is today the example of producing agriculture products in situations where land is scarce or not suitable for farming due to climate conditions.
All over the world, countries are looking at initiatives in vertical farming.
Vertical farms are high-rise multi-functional buildings producing food in a vertical system. This can be integrated in an office building, flat, or condominium.
These buildings need to plan the necessary water, energy, and nutrient requirements needed to farm. Water can come from rainfall.
Energy can be supplied from solar energy and by making use of specialised light-emitting diode lights, where vegetables, herbs and soft fruits can be produced in climate chambers, through environmentally friendly closed systems.
These farms can be even be integrated with fish farming.
Nutrients can be gathered from used coffee grounds from coffee shops and waste from restaurants, supermarkets, and households.
Vertical farming reduces the agriculture supply chain distances dramatically, bringing down transportation costs.
However, this requires food production to be integrated in city planning.
City planners will need to force real estate developers to integrate farming in buildings.
Food sovereignty, safety, security and sustainability can thus be solved by the introduction of vertical farming.
Vertical farms dramatically reduce agriculture supply chains, cutting transportation costs and enhancing freshness.
This allows countries to restore the ecological balance in the urban jungle.
Lufa Farms Rooftop Greenhouses Trending In Montreal
Lufa Farms Rooftop Greenhouses Trending In Montreal
Danny Kucharsky | Property Biz Canada | 2017-04-25
One of Lufa Farms’ three rooftop greenhouse facilities in Montreal. (Photo courtesy Lufa Farms)
When the founders of Montreal urban agricultural pioneer Lufa Farms first approached building owners about renting their roofs to help the company establish a rooftop farm, “everybody thought they were crazy,” recalls public relations and communications manager Simon Garneau.
Fortunately, one building owner said yes. So, in 2011 Lufa Farms opened in Montreal what the company says was the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse.
Lufa, which operates under the slogan “Our vision is a city of rooftop farms,” recently opened its third and largest hydroponic rooftop greenhouse in the city. The 63,000-square-foot facility on top of an empty warehouse in the borough of Anjou produces more than 40 varieties of vegetables.
“The business model is that we rent the roofs,” says Garneau.
The model benefits everyone because even though the roof is rented for less than interior space, building owners get money from a place they would normally not be able to generate revenue.
In addition, the rooftop greenhouse reduces owners’ heating and cooling costs because it acts as a pad between the heat and cold outside, he says.
Combined, the Lufa Farms facilities have 137,000 square feet of growing space and grow about 75 varieties of fresh vegetables.
10,000 Produce Baskets Per Week
Lufa delivers more than 10,000 baskets a week of produce to Montreal-area residents. The greenhouses give residents access to local produce that would otherwise need to be imported from thousands of miles, particularly outside the summer months.
The newest facility – the most automated yet – specializes in leafy greens and produces more than 40 varieties of lettuce, collard greens, kale, radish, broccoli, cauliflower and celery. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau toured the facility in late March.
It was developed with $3 million in debt financing from the union capital development fund Fonds de solidarité FTQ and $500,000 in support from La Financière agricole du Québec. The Quebec government fund supports sustainability in agriculture.
It was designed by Dutch greenhouse innovators Kubo and outfitted by Belgian greenhouse automation experts Hortiplan.
The Anjou “farm” is joined by the original 32,000-square-foot facility, in Montreal’s Ahuntsic neighbourhood, which specializes in cucumbers, bell peppers, hot peppers, herbs and micro-greens. A second 42,000-square-foot facility that opened in Laval in 2013 specializes in tomatoes and eggplants.
Searched Via Google Maps
When founders Mohamed Hage and Lauren Rathmell first set out to find space for a greenhouse, they used Google Maps to search for suitable Montreal buildings with flat surfaces and very little rooftop equipment, Garneau says.
At the time, Montreal had no rules for rooftop greenhouses. But after negotiations, the city decided to consider rooftop greenhouses as an extra floor on the building. Lufa now has to meet bylaws for everything from emergency escapes to fireproofing.
“The success of the first greenhouse made things simpler, because the city has now adjusted to the model. There are less hurdles when we want to build on the roof,” Garneau says.
Garneau says now that Lufa Farms is a proven and growing concern, it’s been easier to find space for rooftop rentals.
“It doesn’t sound as crazy to people; it actually makes sense to them now. Why go out of town to grow vegetables when you can use a wasted space that just creates extra heart islands in the city and why make your vegetables travel when they can be near you?”
Partnership With Farmers, Producers
Subscribers to Lufa pay a minimum weekly price of $15 for produce baskets, which can be customized to include products from more than 200 partner farmers, food artisans and local producers.
“Because we’re hydroponic, we can’t grow root vegetables like potatoes, beets and carrots, so we deal with local organic producers who are in most cases too small to sell to large-scale grocery stores,” he says.
The baskets are delivered to more than 350 pick-up points in the Montreal area, from yoga studios to libraries and daycare centres. For an extra $5 weekly, subscribers can have their baskets delivered to their homes by Lufa’s fleet of electric cars.
Lufa Farms plans to continue the expansion of its urban farm projects in Quebec and in New England.
Shanghai's 100-Hectare Vertical Farm to Feed 24 Million
Shanghai's 100-Hectare Vertical Farm to Feed 24 Million
More Urban dDevelopment Plans
By Flora Burles | Tue, May 2, 2017 02:47 PM
Plans have just been unveiled by international architecture firm Sasaaki for a spectacular 100-hectare urban farm growing fruit and vegetables in Shangahai.
News comes to us from Inhabitat that a new 250-acre farming district, “Sunqiao Shanghai”,set amidst the skyscrapers of the city, will meet the food needs of almost 24 million people using both hydroponic and aquaponics farming systems.
The farm also will also serve as a center for innovation, interaction and education within the world of urban agriculture, as visitors will be able to tour the interactive greenhouses, a science museum and an aquaponics system. There will even be family-friendly events to educate children about modern agricultural techniques and sustainability.
Given its urban setting, the Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District’s layout will have to utilise vertical space as efficiently as possible, so will include multiple growing platforms such as algae farms, floating greenhouses, vertical walls and seed libraries. Some of the crops will even be grown indoors, under LEDs and in nutrient-rich water. The farms will primarily grow leafy greens, like kale, bok choi, and spinach, which will be sold to restaurants, grocers, or be exported.
It is part of a larger plan to turn part of the city into an ag-tech hub, according to Michael Grove, a principal at Sasaki. Grove estimates that building work on the project will commence by 2018.
“As cities continue to expand, we must continue to challenge the dichotomy between what is urban and what is rural. Sunqiao seeks to prove that you can have your kale and eat it too.”
Vertical Farming in Amsterdam
Vertical Farming in Amsterdam
GROWx Labs Opens in April 2017
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Friday 24 March 2017 – GROWx is the leading innovator in vertical farming in the Netherlands will open GROWx Labs in Amsterdam Zuid Oost.
It is amazing that so much food arrives into cities every day, but it is not without problems. Farmers are far away from their market, there are negative ecological effects caused by modern farming, and collectively farms are the single largest users of land in the economy. Faced with limited fresh water resources and limited land to farm, we have to pioneer new ways to farm.
Today, local for local farming producing clean food is the new organic. People desire to know where their food is coming from and if it is clean of undesired chemicals. Urban farms are rising in cities around the world on roof tops and community space. Vertical farming, pioneered in the USA and Japan, is a new way to grow food year round for daily fresh products.
Jens Ruijg, engineer, and John Apesos, entrepreneur, founded GROWx in April of 2016 to build Netherland´s first production vertical farm. The project is focused on serving Amsterdam´s Chef community fresh greens. The GROWx Labs facilities opens in April for Amsterdam´s Chefs to taste interesting varieties of fresh greens and salads.
The Netherlands is a leader in horticulture technology. The GROWx Amsterdam project capitalizes on local expertise, suppliers and university eco-system to build next generation greenhouse technology in the form of vertical farming. Amsterdam has an opportunity to lead the revolution for a fresher urban food future.
GROWx:
GROWx BV is on a mission to accelerate the advent of sustainable urban agriculture. GROWx BV works in co-designing, implementing and operating sustainable vertical farming solutions for city scale food production. We are innovating in indoor food production technology involving multiple layers, controlled plant climates and LEDs.
See more on https://www.instagram.com/grow_x/
Press Contact:
Name: John Apesos
Mobile: +31 06 38 313 515
Email: john@growx.co
China Focus: Factory Farms The future For Chinese Scientists
China Focus: Factory Farms The future For Chinese Scientists
Source: Xinhua| 2017-04-30 09:06:29|Editor: Yamei
XIAMEN, Fujian Province, April 30 (Xinhua) -- In a factory in eastern China, farming is becoming like scientific endeavor, with leafy vegetables embedded neatly on stacked layers, and workers in laboratory suits tending the plants in cleanrooms.
The factory, with an area of 10,000 square meters, is in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. Built in June 2016, the land is designed to be a "plant factory," where all environmental factors, including light, humidity, temperature and gases, can be controlled to produce quality vegetables.
The method is pursued by Sananbio, a joint venture between the Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) and Sanan Group, a Chinese optoelectronics giant. The company is attempting to produce more crops in less space while minimizing environmental damage.
Sananbio said it would invest 7 billion yuan (about 1.02 billion U.S. dollars) to bring the new breed of agriculture to reality.
NEW FARMING
Plant factories, also known as a vertical farms, are part of a new global industry.
China now has about 80 plant factories, and Sananbio has touted its Quanzhou facility as the world's largest plant factory.
In the factory, leafy greens grow in six stacked layers with two lines of blue and red LED lights hung above each layer. The plants are grown using hydroponics, a method that uses mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent instead of soil.
"Unlike traditional farming, we can control the duration of lighting and the component of mineral solutions to bring a higher yield," said Pei Kequan, a researcher with IBCAS and director of R&D in Sanabio. "The new method yields ten-times more crops per square meter than traditional farming."
From seedling to harvesting, vegetables in the farm usually take 35 days, about 10 days shorter than greenhouse plants.
To achieve a higher yield, scientists have developed an algorithm which automates the color and duration of light best for plant growth, as well as different mineral solutions suitable for different growth stages.
The plant factory produces 1.5 tonnes of vegetables every day, most of which are sold to supermarkets and restaurants in Quanzhou and nearby cities.
The world's population will bloat to 9.7 billion by 2050, when 70 percent of people will reside in urban areas, according to the World Health Organization.
Pei said he believes the plant factory can be part of a solution for potential future food crises.
In the factory, he has even brought vertical farming into a deserted shipping container.
"Even if we had to move underground someday, the plant factory could help ensure a steady supply of vegetables," he said.
HEALTHIER FUTURE
Before entering the factory, Sananbio staff have to go through strict cleanroom procedures: putting on face masks, gloves, boots, and overalls, taking air showers, and putting personal belongings through an ultraviolet sterilizer.
The company aims to prevent any external hazards that could threaten the plants, which receive no fertilizers or pesticides.
By adjusting the mineral solution, scientists are able to produce vegetables rich or low in certain nutrients.
The factory has already been churning out low-potassium lettuces, which are good for people with kidney problems.
Adding to the 20 types of leafy greens already grown in the factory, the scientists are experimenting on growing herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine and other healthcare products.
Zheng Yanhai, a researcher at Sananbio, studies anoectohilus formosanus, a rare herb in eastern China with many health benefits.
"In the plant factory, we can produce the plants with almost the same nutrients as wild anoectohilus," Zheng said. "We tested different light, humidity, temperature, gases and mineral solutions to form a perfect recipe for the plant."
The factory will start with rare herbs first and then focus on other health care products, Zheng said.
GROWING PAINS
Currently, most of the products in the plant factory are short-stemmed leafy greens.
"Work is in progress to bring more varieties to the factory," said Li Dongfang, an IBCAS researcher and Sananbio employee.
Some are concerned about the energy consumed with LED lights and air-conditioning.
"Currently, it takes about 10 kwh of electricity to produce one kilogram of vegetables," said Pei, who added that the number is expected to drop in three to five years, with higher LED luminous efficiency.
In a Yonghui superstore in neighboring Xiamen city, the vegetables from the plant factory have a specially designated area, and are sold at about a 30 percent premium, slightly higher than organic and locally produced food.
"Lettuce from the plant factory is a bit expensive, at least for now, there are many other healthy options," said Wang Yuefeng, a consumer browsing through the products, which are next to the counter for locally produced food.
Sananbio said it plans to expand the factory further to drive down the cost in the next six months. "The price will not be a problem in the future, with people's improving living standards," Li said
San'an Opto headquarters in Xiamen, China. (Photo courtesy of San'an Opto)
Autogrow Announces Its Support Of A Global Indoor Agriculture Hub In Kennett Township, Pennsylvania
Autogrow Announces Its Support Of A Global Indoor Agriculture Hub In Kennett Township, Pennsylvania
AUCKLAND, NZ – Today Autogrow, a major supplier of automated control systems for indoor agriculture facilities, announced its support for a major public-private initiative to develop a global indoor agriculture production, research, training, and service hub on the US East Coast, to be located in Kennett Township, Pennsylvania.
According to Darryn Keiller, CEO of Autogrow, “Kennett is already the center of the US mushroom industry, producing about 1.5M lbs. of fresh product every day, all grown indoors and delivered within 48 hours of picking to markets across North America via Kennett’s extensive ‘cold-chain’ infrastructure of refrigerated packing, storage, and shipping facilities. Over the coming years, that unique infrastructure is likely to attract many new facilities growing other indoor crops, such as leafy greens. This alone makes Kennett a huge potential market for our control systems.”
“But that’s just the beginning of our interest in Kennett’s very innovative initiative,” continued Keiller. “Kennett is also working with a several of the region’s world-class agriculture, engineering and business schools to develop a joint indoor agriculture research, training, and innovation incubator center in Kennett, the first of its kind in a major indoor ag production area. This center will be a major asset to our rapidly evolving industry, and Autogrow very much wants to be a part of its development.”
Michael Guttman, who directs the initiative for Kennett Township, explained that “it is very important to our initiative to attract innovative ag tech companies like Autogrow to help us grow and diversify our regional indoor ag industry. But Autogrow offers a lot more than just its state-of-the-art control systems. Autogrow also has a very forward-thinking strategy that can help us adapt our extensive infrastructure to incorporate emerging trends like the Internet of Things (IOT) and ‘big data,’ which will have a huge impact on how indoor agriculture is done in the future. Working together with Autogrow and our other partners, we hope to develop a blueprint not only for Kennett, but also for a network of similar indoor agriculture hubs around the world.”
About Autogrow
Autogrow (www.autogrow.com) is a leading supplier of climate and automation control systems for indoor agriculture, building systems for everything from single compartment environments through to large-scale, fully-automated greenhouses. In the last few years, Autogrow, based in Auckland, NZ, has been at the forefront of new emerging developments from the US, Canada, UK and Asia in vertical growing, building conversion and shipping container based systems.
About Kennett Township, Pennsylvania
Kennett Township (www.kennett.pa.us) is a municipality in SE Pennsylvania, and historically the center of the 100+ year old US mushroom industry, with grows 500M pounds of fresh produce year-round exclusively in climate-controlled indoor facilities. Kennett Township is currently involved in a major initiative to diversify its economy by leveraging its already-extensive indoor agriculture infrastructure to create a world-class research, training and production hub for the whole indoor agriculture industry.
Water-Smart Farming: How Hydroponics And Drip Irrigation Are Feeding Australia
Water-Smart Farming: How Hydroponics And Drip Irrigation Are Feeding Australia
How energy-smart technology is allowing fresh vegetables to be grown in arid, isolated communities. Our Future of farming series is looking at the people, places and innovations in sustainable agribusiness in Australia
Is hydroponic farming the way forward for arid Australia? Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP
Wednesday, 26 April 2017 20.01 EDT
Sydney Fresh, Organic Angels, Freshline, Box Fresh. It’s a wonder Australian supermarkets still stock vegetables, such is the explosion of veg-box delivery services. OK, they may be a bit on the pricey side, but the food is out-of-the-ground fresh, typically free of chemicals and refreshingly wonky.
But for a veg-box scheme to work, the vegetables have to be grown locally. That effectively ruled out the arid wheatbelt towns of Western Australia. Or, it did, before Wide Open Agriculture opened a huge greenhouse-like facility to grow fresh vegetables. Boxes destined for domestic doorsteps have been leaving the Wagin-based site loaded with cucumbers, capsicums, tomatoes and the like.
Because we don’t rely on soil, we can osition our farm closer to centres of population
Philipp Saumweber, Sundrop
“We’ve had a lot of anecdotal feedback that we have brought the taste back to vegetables, particularly our tomatoes,” says Ben Cole, executive director at Wide Open Agriculture, the startup behind the initiative. “But our key is selling fresh vegetables in a region that doesn’t have many other local growers.”
The venture is tapping into growing consumer demand for food that is fresh and that doesn’t (environmentally speaking) cost the earth. It uses drip-irrigation technology, for instance, that requires only 10% of the water needed for open-field agriculture. In addition, the 5,400 square metre facility is equipped with a retractable roof and walls that open and close automatically, thus reducing water loss to evaporation.
The water used at the high-tech farm is sourced from natural surface water runoff that is directed into a series of dams before being pumped via a solar-powered system for use in irrigation. By capturing water high in the landscape, Cole argues, the wheatbelt’s first major vegetable producer is able to make use of it before it becomes saline.
“The wheatbelt has seen reductions in rainfall up to 20% over the last 20 years, so water scarcity is an issue for traditional wheat and sheep farmers,” says Cole, who holds a doctorate in environmental engineering and recently exited a successful social enterprise in Vietnam.
Wide Open Agriculture believes its agroecological approach to farming could usher in a new age of vegetable production in the wheatbelt. With its first harvest only just completed, it is already looking to list on the Australian Securities Exchange to raise finance for a second large-scale unit.
Another new player in Australia driving supply of water-smart food is Sundrop Farms. The Adelaide-based firm is the first company in Australia to develop a commercial-scale operation using hydroponic technology.
Sundrop Farms’ 65-hectare facility near Port Augusta in South Australia. Photograph: Sundrop
Pioneered by companies such as BrightFarms and AeroFarms in the US, hydroponic farming requires no soil or natural sunlight. Instead, plants are grown in trays containing nutrient-rich water and encouraged to photosynthesise by low-energy LEDs.
“Hydroponics is a thriving industry right across the globe, with produce being grown in a huge variety of environments” says Philipp Saumweber, a former investment banker who heads up the company. As if to prove the point, Sundrop has located its 65-hectare facility in an area of virtual desert near Port Augusta in South Australia.
One of the criticisms of the technology is that it is energy-intensive, what with all those indoor lights and automated heating and cooling systems. Sundrop has successfully ducked that charge by installing a concentrated solar power plant with 23,000 flat mirrors to meet most of its energy needs.
Saumweber is quick to push the water-efficiency credentials of the indoor farm too. With precious little rain or subterranean water to draw on, Sundrop has opted to pump seawater from the ocean and desalinate it. Its renewably powered desalination plant generates around 1 million litres of fresh water every day. The company also uses the seawater as a natural disinfectant, reducing the need for pesticides.
None of this comes cheap, mind. Sundrop’s Port Augusta farm cost a reported A$200m. Yet Saumweber insists this high upfront investment will be offset in the long run by lower operational costs, thanks to the use of cheaper renewable energy.
What can’t be argued with is the net result: 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year from a patch of land that is barely habitable, let alone productive. The prospect of siting such facilities inside cities is also a very real possibility, Saumweber adds. “Because we don’t rely on soil, we can position our farms closer to centres of population to greatly increase the efficiency of our supply chain.”
For the most part, however, water-smart technologies such as hydroponics and aquaponics (a related system that uses fish waste as an organic food source for plants) remain the preserve of hobby producers in their backyards.
For Murray Hallam, a Queensland-based expert and lecturer on aquaponics, the sector struggles with being seen as “just for hippies and way-out vegans” – an image he insists is false. A cultural propensity to think “it’ll be all right, mate” also holds back people from taking the risk of water scarcity and climate change seriously with respect to future food production, he argues.
The country is missing a trick, he continues: “In a regular farm, it doesn’t matter how well you organise it, when you irrigate, about 70% of the water evaporates straight away. Then the water that does get into the soil usually ends up going down to the subsoil and leaking away … taking with it the nutrients and fertiliser.”
Two of Hallam’s students have gone on to create multimillion dollar aquaponic businesses: Mecca in South Korea, and WaterFarmers, which has farms in India, Canada and the Middle East. He fears it will take a food crisis for Australian consumers to step up en masse and demand similar innovative solutions from the country’s agricultural industry.
Back amid the wheat fields of Wagin, Cole is more optimistic. Wide Open Agriculture is now looking to break into the local hospitality and retail market. It has opted for the brand name, Food for Reasons. For once a product that says what it is on the tin – or box.
Teacher In Remote Inuit Community Teaches Students To Garden
Teacher In Remote Inuit Community Teaches Students To Garden
Adam Malcolm hopes to eventually raise the funds for a greenhouse.
Adam Malcolm, a high school teacher in Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, is trying to raise funds to build a greenhouse for his students to use to grow fruits and vegetables. (PROVIDED BY ADAM MALCOLM)
By ELLEN BRAIT Staff Reporter
Wed., April 26, 2017
Adam Malcolm, a high school teacher in the remote Inuit community of Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, has a simple plan: teach his students to garden.
“But nobody around here is a natural gardener,” Malcolm said. “There’s nothing to garden and there never was.”
Malcolm, who teaches at the Inuksuit School, is trying to help combat food insecurity for his students by teaching them to grow their own fruits and vegetables. He has about eight Grade 10 - 12 students in his class on a “good day,” and 16 students during the two periods he spends teaching eighth and ninth grade. And they’ve already started growing some plants inside the school.
“I was trying to look at ways that I can be a positive influence on the community outside of the school,” Malcolm said. “I feel like starting off with just the young people first and giving them some skills to be able to do some gardening might be a good first step.”
The goal is to move the student’s gardening outside and into a greenhouse before summer vacation starts. In order to do that, he has to raise the funds to buy a greenhouse.
He has started a crowdfunding campaign, looking to raise roughly $4,350 dollars in order to purchase a greenhouse and ship it up from Ottawa.
Food insecurity is a major issue in Nunavut. According to a report released in 2016 by University of Toronto researchers, nearly 47 per cent of households in Nunavut experienced some level of food insecurity in 2014. This included 19.3 per cent of households experiencing severe food insecurity. The second highest prevalence of food insecurity was in the Northwest Territories at 24.1 per cent.
Malcolm said with the installation of a greenhouse, he’s hoping they can start to “bypass the crazy prices at the grocery store.”
The Nunavut Bureau of Statistics' 2016 food price survey which compares Nunavut communities food prices with average Canadian prices, compiled by Statistics Canada, showed a large gap in prices between Nunavut and the rest of Canada. Shoppers in Nunavut paid $5.32 for canned tomatoes while the average Canadian was paying $1.60. Carrots cost about three times more at $6.90 in Nunavut compared to $2.25 in other parts of Canada, and oranges were approximately two times as expensive at $7.10, compared to $3.47.
Malcolm said he plans to offer gardening as a weekly science project or after school extra-curricular, only for students who are interested.
“There is a lot of interest among students,” he said. “They love planting stuff and growing in class too. It’s a novelty for them to see plants bearing fruit because you just don’t see it in the wild here.”
He’s already ordered seeds for a variety of fruits and vegetables including tomatoes, beans, melons, and carrots, and he has several litres of soil ready to use. He’s also hoping to obtain a small heater as “it’s cool at night.”
Eventually Malcolm is hoping gardening their own food is “something that the community will embrace too.”
“I’m starting small, having the greenhouse here,” he said. “And starting with the students will be the introduction in the community.”
The municipality of Qikiqtarjuaqhas also taken steps to help end food insecurity in their community. Memorial University’s branch of Enactus, a not-for-profit organization, will be sending three hydroponic systems to the municipality, as part of Project Sucseed, an initiative to address the need for fresh affordable produce in Northern Canada. The hydroponic systems can grow anything that’s not a root vegetable, according to Kate Fradsham, a volunteer with the organization who runs the Nunavut expansion of Project Sucseed.
“This is just a way to create community interest for the very art of growing which is not that common up here,” said David Grant, economic development officer for the municipality of Qikiqtarjuaq.
In five weeks, a system can yield 12 heads of lettuce. And in one harvest, 122 tomatoes or 360 strawberries can be grown, according to Fradsham.
“Food is a basic right and as Canadians, we’re here to be able to provide food to other Canadians,” Fradsham said. “We can’t forget that northern Canadians are part of Canada and they deserve the same access to food that we do.”
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Will Vertical Farming Continue To Grow, Or Has It Hit The Greenhouse Ceiling?
Will Vertical Farming Continue To Grow, Or Has It Hit The Greenhouse Ceiling?
Agriculture has come a long way in the past century. We produce more food than ever before — but our current model is unsustainable, and as the world’s population rapidly approaches the 8 billion mark, modern food production methods will need a radical transformation if they’re going to keep up. But luckily, there’s a range of new technologies that might make it possible. In this series, we’ll explore some of the innovative new solutions that farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs are working on to make sure that nobody goes hungry in our increasingly crowded world.
A pair of lab workers, dressed head to toe in bright white biohazard suits, patrol rows of LED-lit shelves of lettuce, quietly jotting down a series of numbers and readings. Stacked some 15 to 20 feet high, the shelves cover nearly every inch of a massive 25,000-square-foot facility. As the lab hands pass by each row of lettuce, some in the germination phase, some ripe for picking, a psychedelic pink glow wraps around them, painting an almost extraterrestrial setting.
This isn’t a scene plucked from Alfonso Cuarón’s latest blockbuster; it’s an everyday occurrence at a vertical farm in eastern Japan.
The farm was built in the wake of a devastating magnitude 9.1 earthquake that rocked Japan in 2011 and led to a temporary food crisis in the affected area. After seeing the chaos, Japanese plant physiologist Shigerharu Shimamura decided to develop a more consistent, reliable model for manufacturing lettuce. He ended up turning an old Sony-backed semiconductor facility into the planet’s largest vertical farm – a huge operation that now churns out an astounding 10,000 heads of lettuce per day.
“We’re talking coming in and supplying 10, 20, 30 percent of the food supply of an entire city.”
Recently, the facility (and others like it) has become a poster child for indoor farming. There’s now a rapidly expanding movement to bring this type of food production to urban centers all over the globe.
It’s easy to see the appeal. In theory, indoor farms could allow us to grow food 24 hours a day, protect crops from unpredictable weather, and even eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides. If these farms were built in cities, we could potentially mitigate crop loss due to shipping and storage, and cut down on fossil fuel usage because food wouldn’t need to be transported very far after harvest.
But of course, the idea of indoor farming isn’t without its detractors. Critics are quick to point out the method’s shortcomings when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and cost. In their eyes, vertical farming simply isn’t something that can be deployed on a large enough scale, and therefore isn’t a viable solution to our problems.
So, who’s right? Should we start building giant, garden-stuffed skyscrapers in our cities, or abandon the idea and devote our efforts to improving existing (horizontal) farms? Could vertical farming legitimately help us meet the world’s growing demand for food, or are we chasing the proverbial pie in the sky?
Upward trajectory: the benefits of growing vertically
In his seminal book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, Dr. Dickson Despommier puts forth the theory that vertical farming is a prime candidate to help solve the growing food, water, and energy crisis in the United States.
As populations continue to rise in urban centers around the globe, Despommier sees no other solution.
“As of this moment, the WHO (World Health Organization) and the Population Council estimate that about 50 percent of us live in cities and the other half, of course, live somewhere else,” Despommier said in a video. “Another thing we can learn, from NASA of all places, is how much land those 7 billion people — half urban, half rural — actually need to produce their food every year. It turns out to be the size of South America. So, the size of South America, in land mass, is used just to grow our crops that we plant and harvest. I’m not even talking about herbivores like cows, goats, or sheep.”
When the book was first published in 2011, the indoor farming industry essentially stood as a barren landscape, with few companies setting out to literally put vertical farms on the map. Now, with Despommier’s written blueprint in the wild, the concept has recently gained a good deal of popularity.
“It’s estimated that by around 2050, roughly 80 percent of the world’s population will reside in urban city centers.”
Aside from Despommier, a growing number of people strongly believe in a prominent future for vertical farms. Today, there exist throngs of vertical farming companies all geared toward making this innovative technology a reality. Unsurprisingly, it’s with Despommier and these upstart companies that the industry’s appeal rings the loudest.
Companies such as Bright AgroTech and AeroFarms have set out to educate and inform small farmers to grow locally in urban areas, while other firms like Freight Farms and Edenworks lean on unique and innovative growing concepts — such as shipping containers or rooftop aquaponics — to bring the idea to life. Thus far, there’s no real right or wrong way to go about it, and the recent influx of startups should only prove advantageous to the industry in the long run.
“I do believe there are a few players coming to the table that look poised to supplement local food supplies to a really significant degree,” aquaponics expert Dr. Nate Storey told Digital Trends. “We’re talking coming in and supplying 10, 20, 30 percent of the food supply of an entire city. So, you have this future where you have indoor growers taking on that task, and you have small guys that are kind of collaborating and cooperating to sell to niche markets, really high-value products. Then you have the big boys who are really kind of going head-to-head with some of your field producers, who are growing at much larger scales and interested in replacing that wholesale product.”
As Despommier states on his website, it’s estimated that by around 2050, roughly 80 percent of the world’s population will reside in urban city centers, with the population of the world ballooning by an additional 3 billion people over that time. To Storey’s point, the diversity of vertical farms should allow these urban areas to continue to function as they do today. That is, access to food should remain a basic function of society, as opposed to it serving as a luxury should food production dwindle in the future.
Like the Green Revolution from the 1930s to the 1960s, Storey believes the world sits poised for yet another research and development breakthrough regarding vertical farming.
“When you step back a bit, you begin to realize that we’re kind of on the verge of another Green Revolution,” he added. “I think that indoor agriculture plays a huge role in that. So, the 40,000 feet in the air perspective is it’s not just about supporting local demand for food, it’s about controlling the environment completely. This means eventually taking things out of the field entirely and putting them indoors.”
Bringing a high-flying idea back down to Earth
While the upstart vertical farming community largely agrees with Storey’s stance, there also exists a wing of detractors who point to indoor farming’s inefficiencies.
The loudest voice among these critics is former United States Department of Agriculture biologist Stan Cox. After serving for the USDA for 13 years as a wheat geneticist, Cox joined the Land Institute as a senior scientist in 2000, specifically focusing on plant breeding in greenhouses and fields. An author of several books looking at the past, present, and future of all things agriculture and food, Cox is an expert in the field — which is why his view of vertical farming as a scam is a perspective that should give anyone pause.
“This will never be able to supply any significant percentage of our food needs.”
Vertical farming’s largest hurdle — a concept Cox thinks should’ve “collapsed under its own weight of illogic” and that he says remains incredibly difficult to overcome — concerns its scale. Cox posits that to be truly effective, vertical farms would require an incredible amount of floorspace. Despommier envisions indoor farming as a means to avoid the degradation of soil, but turning currently cultivated land into soil-preserving indoor farms would require an almost unfathomable amount of space.
To get a true picture of this, Cox breaks down the floorspace requirement for growing just vegetables — which clocks in at roughly 1.6 percent of cultivated land in the U.S.
While that number may not sound like much, turning that 1.6 percent of cultivated land into a functioning indoor or vertical farming operation demands the relative floorspace of around 105,000 Empire State Buildings. As Cox also points out, even with that much dedicated space, 98 percent of U.S. crops would continue to grow at outdoor farms.
“A colleague and I originally did some back of the envelope calculations that show if we grew grain- or fruit-producing crops [in vertical farms], it would take half of the country’s electricity supply or tens of thousands of Empire State Buildings,” Cox told Digital Trends. “These huge numbers would show that this may be fine for growing, on the small side, fairly expensive leafy greens to be used in restaurants or local areas. But the two things we have to always keep in mind is the amount of energy and resources being put into each unit of food, and the second is the scale. This will never be able to supply any significant percentage of our food needs.”
Despite Cox’s calculations painting a grim picture for large-scale urban production of grain or vegetables, he did emphasize that he’s “all for” urban gardening, or growing food as close to a population center as possible. To Cox, it just “makes sense.” Unfortunately, small urban gardening operations won’t likely have any shot at replacing the more than 350 million acres of rural U.S. cropland that consistently churn out America’s food supply.
“We can only grow enough crops within cities to substitute for a very tiny portion of [our food supply],” Cox added. “We’re still going to depend on rural America for growing the bulk of our food. There’s no big problem with that, really. We certainly want for perishable food, like fresh produce, to grow as much as we can close to where we live. But for grains, dry beans, food legumes, oil seeds, quinoa, all of these dry, nutrient-dense foods with a lower moisture content that can be shipped with very little energy or cost (by rail), that’s still going to be grown around our rural areas.”
Plain and simple, Cox doesn’t see a way around the issue of energy as it pertains to vertical farms — at least for the sustained growth of something like grains or fruit. Because leafy greens require less light to grow sufficiently, it makes much more sense to operate vertical farms geared solely around these foods. Conversely, growing something like corn or wheat — which produce much more dry matter — just doesn’t seem like a feasible option if there’s an intention to keep energy, production, and food costs down.
Growing up: The future of vertical farming
With the vertical farming industry still very much in its infancy, its future remains somewhat murky. Despite the growing number of startups committed to nurturing the idea, its hindrances and drawbacks pointed out by critics like Stan Cox carry just as much clout. Because of this, it’s hard to confidently put stock in either its failure or success.
“The Achilles’ heel of vertical farming or gardening is that it just does not work out energetically.”
Vertical farming’s best shot at a lasting legacy may be to simply pump the brakes on continued advancement. As it stands today, the startups that currently run operations geared toward producing heaps of leafy greens might want to think long and hard about introducing anything capable of completely shutting down momentum — i.e., fruits, grains, etc. In this case, energy usage is the bane of vertical farming’s existence.
“The Achilles’ heel of vertical farming or gardening is that it just does not work out energetically,” Cox points out. “The amount of energy put into [vertical farming] per unit of food you get out of it is very tiny. That’s why almost everything you see being grown this way is some type of leafy green that doesn’t require as much light to produce.”
Now, this isn’t to say vertical farming won’t continue to exist, or even that any of the startups dedicated to its advancement won’t try to introduce fruit or grain to their production. Perhaps there comes a time when someone finds a solution to the energy dependence issue, but for now, leafy greens are the vertical farming industry’s ceiling.
Dr. Nate Storey is the founder of BrightAgrotech — a company that designs and develops vertical farming technologies, such as the ZipGrow hydroponic system pictured above. (Credit: Bright Agrotech)
Apply To The Food Sustainability Media Award
Apply To The Food Sustainability Media Award
Applications are now open for the Food Sustainability Media Award, which aims increase the public’s awareness of food sustainability issues worldwide, find solutions, and encourage action. Launched by the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition (BCFN) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the award will recognize excellent professional and up-and-coming journalists from around the world who have focused their reporting on topics relating to food security, sustainable agriculture, and nutrition.
“With this award, we want to connect the everyday person with issues that are ultimately affecting all of us, and we believe media is the best route to make [this] happen,” says Monique Villa, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in a BCFN press release.
BCFN and Thomson Reuters Foundation believe that the media can play an influential role in the way consumers think about and interact with food, helping to create a more sustainable and just global food system. With the Food Sustainability Media Award, they aim to highlight some of the major paradoxes that are impacting the global food system—such as hunger and obesity, food and fuel, and waste and starvation—as well as propose solutions and engage the public.
Entries to the Food Sustainability Media Award will be judged in three categories: written journalism, photography, and video. One published and one unpublished piece of work will be awarded in each category. Published work will receive a €10,000 (US$10,862) cash prize, while unpublished work will receive an all-expenses paid trip to attend a Thomson Reuters Foundation media training course on food sustainability. Unpublished entries will be distributed via the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the BCFN websites, and unpublished written work will also be distributed to the Reuters wire’s 1 billion readers.
Cassandra Waldron of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Ronaldo Ribeiro of National Geographic Brazil, Laurie Goering of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Olly Buston of the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation are among the panel of nine experts and professionals in food and agriculture policy and research, journalism, and photography that will judge the shortlisted entries.
Applications are now open and entries can be submitted on the Sustainability Media Award’s website until May 31, 2017, at midnight (London time). Winners will be announced at the 2017 BCFN Food Forum.
For more information on the entry guidelines for each category, click here.