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High CO2 Makes Crops Less Nutritious
Scientists generally predict that crop yields could fall in a warmer world—though higher atmospheric CO2 by itself should raise yields, as plants find it easier to extract CO2 from the air to make carbohydrates.
High CO2 Makes Crops Less Nutritious
Climate change could increase deficiencies in zinc and iron, new study suggests.
By Eli Kintisch, for National Geographic
PUBLISHED MAY 9, 2014
Higher atmospheric CO2 levels may reduce nutrients in crops such as wheat (seen here growing in Drummond, Idaho).
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICH REID, NATIONAL GEOGAPHIC CREATIVE
This story is part of National Geographic's special eight-monthFuture of Food series.
Crops grown in the high-CO2 atmosphere of the future could be significantly less nutritious, a new study published today inNature suggests. Based on hundreds of experiments in the field, the work reveals a new challenge as society reckons with both rising carbon emissions and malnutrition in the future.
Scientists generally predict that crop yields could fall in a warmer world—though higher atmospheric CO2 by itself should raise yields, as plants find it easier to extract CO2 from the air to make carbohydrates. (Related: "Cornfields Could Yield Less by Midcentury.")
The effect climate change might have on the nutritional value of crops, as opposed to their yield, has been even murkier. Previous studies have given conflicting results.
In the largest study yet, Samuel Myers of Harvard University and colleagues report that the CO2 levels expected in the second half of this century will likely reduce the levels of zinc, iron, and protein in wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans. Some two billion people, the researchers note, live in countries where citizens receive more than 60 percent of their zinc or iron from these types of crops. Deficiencies of these nutrients already cause an estimated loss of 63 million life-years annually.
C3 Crops Hit Hardest
Conducted over six growth years on field sites in Japan, Australia, and the United States, the study compared crops grown in normal conditions with ones grown in nearby experimental plots where the air is enriched with CO2 via open-air sprayers. The current atmospheric CO2 level is 400 parts per million; in the enriched plots, it was between 546 and 586 parts per million, a level scientists expect the atmosphere to reach in four to six decades.
In addition to wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans, which all use a form of photosynthesis known as C3, Myers and his colleagues studied corn and sorghum, which use C4 photosynthesis, a faster kind. They found relatively little effect of CO2 enrichment on the nutritional value of the C4 crops.
In the C3 crops, however, they found significant declines in zinc and iron. The largest was a 9.3 percent drop in the zinc level in wheat. They also found reduced levels of protein in wheat, rice, and peas, but not in soybeans.
Myers says the "enormous number of observations" in the study, which involved multiple cultivars, or varieties, of each of the six crops, allowed a total of 143 comparisons between cultivars fed enhanced CO2 and cultivars that grew in normal air. "That gave us the statistical power to resolve a question which has been open in the literature," he says. "Crops are losing nutrients as CO2is going up."
Unfortunately, the new study sheds little light on why more CO2 in the atmosphere should mean less nutritious plants. One hypothesis has been that plants in an enriched atmosphere produce so much carbohydrate that it dilutes the other nutrients.
The new study seems to rule out that hypothesis: Instead of a uniform dilution of all other nutrients in the crops, it found that nutrients changed unevenly when CO2 was higher.
Quality and Quantity
The need to balance changes in yield against changes in the nutritional value of crops makes predicting the future of agriculture an even more complicated task, says Stephen Long, an agronomist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who did not participate in the study.
"Rising global CO2 increases yield and decreases water use by crops, and this is often presented as one positive of atmospheric change," Long says. But the Nature study's "significant" finding suggests that higher-CO2 environments will mean less nutritional crops, so that "increased quantity is at the expense of quality."
CO2 enrichment experiments at Long's university have also shown thatrising CO2 levels lower crops' resistance to pests. By exposing the plants to levels of CO2 similar to those used in the Harvard-led study, says Long, crop damage from three major crop pests doubled.
Myers and his colleagues suggest there should be a global effort to develop new breeds of wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans that show resistance to higher CO2 levels. While the various cultivars of wheat, peas, and soybeans in their study all suffered similar nutrient losses in response to higher CO2, rice offered a ray of hope: Its cultivars varied wildly in their response. "So there may be some basis for breeding rice and potentially other strains that are less sensitive to this effect," says Myers.
Recent efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to breed rice and other crops with enhanced nutrition under current atmospheric CO2 levels have shown some success, he notes. But those efforts haven't been without setbacks. "There's been some indications that when you do that, you often suffer yield declines," Myers says. "So it's not entirely clear that you can have your cake and eat it too."
The Great Nutrient Collapse
Geoff Johnson for POLITICO | The Agenda | AGENDA 2020
The Great Nutrient Collapse
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
09/13/2017
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.
“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.
In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2 levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
He published those findings just a few years ago, adding to the concerns of a small but increasingly worried group of researchers who are raising unsettling questions about the future of our food supply. Could carbon dioxide have an effect on human health we haven’t accounted for yet? The answer appears to be yes—and along the way, it has steered Loladze and other scientists, directly into some of the thorniest questions in their profession, including just how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.
IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, it’s been understood for some time that many of our most important foods have been getting less nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.
In 2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.
Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live like humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.
If you’re someone who thinks about plant growth, this seems like a good thing. It has also been useful ammunition for politicians looking for reasons to worry less about the implications of climate change. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, recently argued that people shouldn’t be so worried about rising CO2 levels because it’s good for plants, and what’s good for plants is good for us.
“A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would aid photosynthesis, which in turn contributes to increased plant growth,” the Texas Republican wrote. “This correlates to a greater volume of food production and better quality food.”
But as the zooplankton experiment showed, greater volume and better quality might not go hand-in-hand. In fact, they might be inversely linked. As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
In 2002, while a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Loladze published a seminal research paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal,arguing that rising CO2 and human nutrition were inextricably linked through a global shift in the quality of plants. In the paper, Loladze complained about the dearth of data: Among thousands of publications he had reviewed on plants and rising CO2, he found only one that looked specifically at how it affected the balance of nutrients in rice, a crop that billions of people rely on. (The paper, published in 1997, found a drop in zinc and iron.)
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley, and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Loladze’s paper was first to tie the impact of CO2 on plant quality to human nutrition. But he also raised more questions than he answered, arguing that there were fundamental holes in the research. If these nutritional shifts were happening up and down the food chain, the phenomenon needed to be measured and understood.
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math. He could do the math, but he was a young academic trying to establish himself, and math departments weren't especially interested in solving problems in farming and human health. Loladze struggled to get funding to generate new data and continued to obsessively collect published data from researchers across the globe. He headed to the heartland to take an assistant professor position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was a major agricultural school, which seemed like a good sign, but Loladze was still a math professor. He was told he could pursue his research interests as long as he brought in funding, but he struggled. Biology grant makers said his proposals were too math-heavy; math grant makers said his proposals contained too much biology.
“It was year after year, rejection after rejection,” he said. “It was so frustrating. I don’t think people grasp the scale of this.”
It’s not just in the fields of math and biology that this issue has fallen through the cracks. To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health or nutrition communities. At all.
When POLITICO contacted top nutrition experts about the growing body of research on the topic, they were almost universally perplexed and asked to see the research. One leading nutrition scientist at Johns Hopkins University said it was interesting, but admitted he didn’t know anything about it. He referred me to another expert. She said they didn’t know about the subject, either. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an association representing an army of nutrition experts across the country, connected me with Robin Foroutan, an integrative medicine nutritionist who was also not familiar with the research.
“It’s really interesting, and you’re right, it’s not on many people’s radar,” wrote Foroutan, in an email, after being sent some papers on the topic. Foroutan said she would like to see a whole lot more data, particularly on how a subtle shift toward more carbohydrates in plants could affect public health.
"We don't know what a minor shift in the carbohydrate ratio in the diet is ultimately going to do,” she said, noting that the overall trend toward more starch and carbohydrate consumption has been associated with an increase in diet-related disease like obesity and diabetes. "To what degree would a shift in the food system contribute to that? We can't really say.”
Asked to comment for this story, Marion Nestle, a nutrition policy professor at New York University who’s one of the best-known nutrition experts in the country, initially expressed skepticism about the whole concept but offered to dig into a file she keeps on climate issues.
After reviewing the evidence, she changed her tune. “I’m convinced,” she said, in an email, while also urging caution: It wasn’t clear whether CO2-driven nutrient depletion would have a meaningful impact on public health. We need to know a whole lot more, she said.
Kristie Ebi, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s studied the intersection of climate change and global health for two decades, is one of a handful of scientists in the U.S. who is keyed into the potentially sweeping consequences of the CO2-nutrition dynamic, and brings it up in every talk she gives.
"It's a hidden issue,” Ebi said. “The fact that my bread doesn't have the micronutrients it did 20 years ago―how would you know?"
As Ebi sees it, the CO2-nutrition link has been slow to break through, much as it took the academic community a long time to start seriously looking at the intersection of climate and human health in general. “This is before the change,” she said. “This is what it looks like before the change."
Soybeans growing in a field outside Lincoln, Nebraska, one of many crops whose nutrient content is shifting as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
LOLADZE'S EARLY PAPER raised some big questions that are difficult, but not impossible, to answer. How does rising atmospheric CO2 change how plants grow? How much of the long-term nutrient drop is caused by the atmosphere, and how much by other factors, like breeding?
It’s also difficult, but not impossible, to run farm-scale experiments on how CO2affects plants. Researchers use a technique that essentially turns an entire field into a lab. The current gold standard for this type of research is called a FACE experiment (for “free-air carbon dioxide enrichment”), in which researchers create large open-air structures that blow CO2 onto the plants in a given area. Small sensors keep track of the CO2 levels. When too much CO2 escapes the perimeter, the contraption puffs more into the air to keep the levels stable. Scientists can then compare those plants directly to others growing in normal air nearby.
These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Earlier this summer, a group of researchers published the first studies attempting to estimate what these shifts could mean for the global population. Plants are a crucial source of protein for people in the developing world, and by 2050, theyestimate, 150 million people could be put at risk of protein deficiency, particularly in countries like India and Bangladesh. Researchers found a loss of zinc, which is particularly essential for maternal and infant health, could put 138 million people at risk. They also estimated that more than 1 billion mothers and 354 million children live in countries where dietary iron is projected to drop significantly, which could exacerbate the already widespread public health problem of anemia.
There aren’t any projections for the United States, where we for the most part enjoy a diverse diet with no shortage of protein, but some researchers look at the growing proportion of sugars in plants and hypothesize that a systemic shift in plants could further contribute to our already alarming rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Another new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland, is drilling down on some of the questions that Loladze first raised 15 years ago with a number of new studies that focus on nutrition.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, examines rice growing in his laboratory in Beltsville, Md. Ziska and his colleagues are conducting experiments to find out how rising carbon dioxide levels affect the nutrient profile of plants. Plant physiologist Julie Wolf harvests peppers to study changes in vitamin C, lower right. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.
Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.
They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.
Ziska worries we’re not studying all the ways CO2 affects the plants we depend on with enough urgency, especially considering the fact that retooling crops takes a long time.
“We’re falling behind in our ability to intercede and begin to use the traditional agricultural tools, like breeding, to compensate,” he said. “Right now it can take 15 to 20 years before we get from the laboratory to the field.”
AS LOLADZE AND others have found, tackling globe-spanning new questions that cross the boundaries of scientific fields can be difficult. There are plenty of plant physiologists researching crops, but most are dedicated to studying factors like yield and pest resistance—qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition. Math departments, as Loladze discovered, don’t exactly prioritize food research. And studying living things can be costly and slow: It takes several years and huge sums of money to get a FACE experiment to generate enough data to draw any conclusions.
Despite these challenges, researchers are increasingly studying these questions, which means we may have more answers in the coming years. Ziska and Loladze, who now teaches math at Bryan College of Health Sciences in Lincoln, Nebraska, are collaborating with a coalition of researchers in China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere in the U.S. on a large study looking at rising CO2 and the nutritional profile of rice, one of humankind’s most important crops. Their study also includes vitamins, an important nutritional component, that to date has almost not been studied at all.
USDA researchers also recently dug up varieties of rice, wheat and soy that USDA had saved from the 1950s and 1960s and planted them in plots around the U.S. where previous researchers had grown the same cultivars decades ago, with the aim of better understanding how today’s higher levels of CO2 affect them.
Mathematician Irakli Loladze tosses sugar over vegetables outside his home in Lincoln Nebraska, to illustrate how the sugar content of the plants we eat is increasing as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. Loladze was the first scientist to publish research connecting rising CO2 and changes in plant quality to human nutrition. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
In a USDA research field in Maryland, researchers are running experiments on bell peppers to measure how vitamin C changes under elevated CO2. They’re also looking at coffee to see whether caffeine declines. “There are lots of questions,” Ziska said as he showed me around his research campus in Beltsville. “We’re just putting our toe in the water.”
Ziska is part of a small band of researchers now trying to measure these changes and figure out what it means for humans. Another key figure studying this nexus is Samuel Myers, a doctor turned climate researcher at Harvard University who leads the Planetary Health Alliance, a new global effort to connect the dots between climate science and human health.
Myers is also concerned that the research community is not more focused on understanding the CO2-nutrition dynamic, since it’s a crucial piece of a much larger picture of how such changes might ripple through ecosystems. "This is the tip of the iceberg," said Myers. "It's been hard for us to get people to understand how many questions they should have."
In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc. It was the first time the issue had attracted any real media attention.
“The public health implications of global climate change are difficult to predict, and we expect many surprises,” the researchers wrote. “The finding that raising atmospheric CO2 lowers the nutritional value of C3 crops is one such surprise that we can now better predict and prepare for.”
The same year―in fact, on the same day―Loladze, then teaching math at the The Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, published his own paper, the result of more than 15 years of gathering data on the same subject. It was the largest study in the world on rising CO2 and its impact on plant nutrients. Loladze likes to describe plant science as “noisy”―research-speak for cluttered with complicating data, through which it can be difficult to detect the signal you’re looking for. His new data set was finally big enough to see the signal through the noise, to detect the “hidden shift,” as he put it.
PHOTOS: How to measure a plant
What he found is that his 2002 theory—or, rather, the strong suspicion he had articulated back then—appeared to be borne out. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.
What that means for humans―whose main food intake is plants―is only just starting to be investigated. Researchers who dive into it will have to surmount obstacles like its low profile and slow pace and a political environment where the word “climate” is enough to derail a funding conversation. It will also require entirely new bridges to be built in the world of science―a problem that Loladze himself wryly acknowledges in his own research. When his paper was finally published in 2014, Loladze listed his grant rejections in the acknowledgements.
Author:
Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.
Pure Harvest Rakes In $4.5 Million
Pure Harvest Rakes In $4.5 Million
- November 16, 2017 | ABU DHABI
- By Iris Dorbian
Abu Dhabi-based Pure Harvest Smart Farms, an arid climate agribusiness, has raised $4.5 million in funding. Shorooq Investments was the lead investor.
Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Pure Harvest or the Company), a tech-enabled arid climate agribusiness based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, announced today a historic Seed investment of USD $4.5 million in a financing round that was significantly oversubscribed. This follows an earlier USD $1.1 million pre-Seed round led by Abu Dhabi-based Shorooq Investments. Venture financing was provided by a leading federal government-backed fund, the Company’s technology partners, and a consortium of angel investors from around the world, all of whom were strongly aligned with the Company’s mission—to offer a true & tangible food security solution to the region by deploying advanced and sustainable controlled-environment agriculture technologies in order to grow premium quality local fresh fruits & vegetables year-round; overcoming the region’s harsh, arid climate and increasingly scarce freshwater resources.
Proceeds from the financing will be used to fund the construction of Pure Harvest’s inaugural high-tech, fully climate controlled greenhouse facility in Nahel, United Arab Emirates. The Company expects to complete the facility by mid-year and to begin selling its products in the second half of 2018. Following the demonstration of its technology and its ability to serve the fast-growing demand for fresh local produce, Pure Harvest intends to quickly expand in the region, recognizing that other GCC countries are facing the same challenges that the UAE faces with regards to import-dependence, water shortages, and climate-driven production constraints.
Pure Harvest also announced the appointment of a new Advisor and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) Local Partner, Sultan bin Khalid Al Saud. “Sultan is a fellow Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus and is a trusted advisor who brings a wealth of experience to the Company, having worked for Saudi Aramco, McKinsey, and Passport Capital. He will be working closely with the Company to enable near-term expansion into the attractive Saudi market,” said Sky Kurtz, Co-Founder & CEO of Pure Harvest. “We are extremely pleased to welcome Sultan to our family.”
A member of the Pure Harvest board and a participant in both the pre-Seed and Seed rounds, David Scott, who is also a well-known economic and strategy advisor to regional governments and state-owned enterprises, emphasized the impact that Pure Harvest could have on several pressing regional challenges. “Pure Harvest’s tech-enabled approach to arid climate agriculture and its strong project team offer a realistic and much-needed solution for improving food security across the Gulf, as well as a means not just to maintain domestic agriculture, but to profitably expand it – all while preserving the region’s precious remaining fresh water aquifers. Ultimately, I see this kind of sustainable domestic agriculture as a critical component of any successful post-oil diversification strategy and I’m excited to be a part of this effort,” said Mr. Scott.
Commenting on the successful conclusion of the Seed round, Mr. Kurtz said: “This financing is an important milestone for the Company. We now have sufficient capital to deploy our solution on a commercial scale and to demonstrate to our many stakeholders a future where high quality, sustainably grown, fresh local produce can be abundantly available every single day… and at a lower cost & environmental impact than current imports. We are humbled that such an esteemed group of investors, advisors & partners share our vision and are willing to back us to transform food production in the Middle East.”
“Shorooq Investments is thrilled to see Pure Harvest closing the largest Seed financing to-date in the MENA region. When evaluating investment opportunities, we try to think from a broader regional & macro perspective and to create a positive social impact,” said Mahmoud Adi, Co-Founder at Pure Harvest and the Founding Partner of Shorooq Investments. “With Pure Harvest, we hope to address food security concerns and to take a giant step forward to be less dependent on international imports for fresh produce, which will directly contribute to the UAE’s long-term sustainability. We are proud to have backed this important venture since its inception and to support the strong founding team whom we believe has the right capabilities and core values to succeed”.
In addition to receiving investment from Shorooq Investments, Mr. Scott and Sultan bin Khalid, Pure Harvest is backed by the following (non-exhaustive) list of visionary Angel investors: Magnus Olsson, Founder and Managing Director of Careem; Hazem Abu Khalaf, CFA, Director at The Abraaj Group; Jim Finnigan, Co-Founder of SoFi; Peter Satow, Founder & CEO of PESA Advanced Hydroponics; Abdulrahman Kaki; Anmol Budhraja, Founder and CEO and Arnab Chatterjee, Managing Director of Three Comma Financial Consultancy; Charles Anderson, Founder & CEO of Currency; Florian Weidinger, Fund Manager at NESTOR Far East Fund; Douglas Kelbaugh FAIA, Professor and former dean at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Mohammed Khudairi, Managing Partner of Khudairi Group; Troels Andersen, CEO of Mondo Ride; Husam and Muhammed Al Zubair of The Zubair Corporation; Bina Khan and James Joy, Co-Founders and Managing Partners of Summit Venture Partners; Edmund Ang, CFA, Vice President at First Energy Bank; and Theodore Cleary, Director at Crito Capital, among others.
About Pure Harvest
Pure Harvest Smart Farms (“Pure Harvest” or the “Company”) is a regional innovator in sustainable agriculture focused on the production of premium quality fruits & vegetables in the extreme climates of the Arab Gulf region, using world-leading high-tech, climate controlled greenhouse production technology to deliver vine crops (tomatoes, capsicum, strawberries, cucumbers, eggplants, etc.). The Company will soon deploy a wider portfolio of best-in-class controlled-environment agriculture technologies (e.g. vertical farms, container-based growing solutions) to deliver a wide variety of fresh produce. Pure Harvest seeks to leverage innovative technology solutions to pioneer year-round production of affordable, premium quality fresh produce. In recognition of regional vulnerabilities associated with water scarcity, food import dependence, and sustainability, Pure Harvest is committed to resource efficiency and overcoming climate challenges to deliver European standards to customers with always-available, high quality, farm-to-fork products.
TruLeaf Planning Next Growth Stage
TruLeaf Planning Next Growth Stage
PETER MOREIRA
Published November 15, 2017
With its indoor farm in Guelph, Ont., nearing completion, TruLeaf Sustainable Agriculture is plotting its next phase of growth with more farms, a licensing model for its technology and new round of funding.
Gregg Curwin, founder, and CEO of the Halifax vertical farming company, also says the company is focused ever more on machine learning and data analytics to help it produce the most nutritious local food possible.
Halifax-based TruLeaf aims to be a leader in sustainable agriculture through the use of vertical farming — which combines proven hydroponic technology with advancements in LED lighting and reclaimed rainwater to allow year-round production of plants indoors.
Vertical farming is nearly 30 times more efficient than traditional agriculture, uses as much as 95 percent less water, and takes up less land.
Curwin told a panel discussion at the Big Data Congress last week that the company is now focusing on applying advanced technology to the process of growing plants indoors.
The Guelph plant — which is due to be completed in June, will be fully automated and TruLeaf is looking into using data to improve the process of growing nutritious food.
“The light bulb that’s going off for us is all about machine learning and data,” said Curwin.
Curwin said that in the controlled environment of its growing facilities, the company can monitor data produced over time from the creation of the seed to shipping grown food to the supermarket. Outdoors, a farmer can get 40 points of data in his or her career; TruLeaf can get 10,000 data points in 10 days at its indoor farms.
One example of TruLeaf’s experimentation is the work it has doing with LED lighting.
The company is experimenting with how different plants grow under different light spectrums, and what lighting is best at specific phases of the growing process. It is even examining whether special lighting in a supermarket shelf can prolong the freshness of produce.
Curwin added that the company is investigating whether there is a direct link between adding certain greens to your diet and improving cognitive health.
It is interested in producing in Nova Scotia a vegetable prominent in West Africa, where dementia rates are really low.
“Can we make a defensible claim about the prevention of cognitive diseases?” he asked. “Making accurate claims is a significant goal of ours.”
The last 18 months have been busy ones for TruLeaf. It closed an $8.5-million financing round last December and has been working with Loblaw Companies, the parent company of Atlantic Superstores, on the development of its farms.
Appearing under the company’s GoodLeaf Farms brand, products grown in the company’s farm in Bible Hill are now available in a dozen Superstores spanning the three Maritime provinces.
According to the TruLeaf website, the products include broccoli shoots, kale shoots, daikon radish shoots, pea shoots, baby arugula and baby kale.
The company now has 38 employees in Nova Scotia.
“We’re eliminating low-level jobs and most of the jobs we are creating now are . . . in computer science, engineering and plant science,” said Curwin.
The Next Great Plague Could Destroy Humanity | Hint: It Starts With The Food
The Next Great Plague Could Destroy Humanity | Hint: It Starts With The Food
2017-11-17 | Jack Griffin and CJ Friedman
In 1347, the plague known as The Black Death began and killed 50% of Europe's population.
1665, the Great Plague of London killed 25% of the city's population.
The 1918 Flu Pandemic broke out and killed more people than WW1, affecting populations in every corner of the world. Estimates range from 50-100 million deaths.
1956, the Asian Flu broke out and killed over 2 million people.
The HIV/AIDs pandemic began in 1960 and has killed over 35 million people.
Now, we face an even greater threat.
Many scientists believe the next plague that could kill billions of people will find roots in the current food system. This is a largely unrecognized risk to the general population. Consider the scenario from this angle: with a human plague, a person could escape the infected area and remain relatively safe. But with a plague that affects the food supply, there is no place to hide. Every person on the planet and all of the animals we eat will be affected by starvation.
Think about the ramifications: What would happen if 50-75% of the global food supply died? By the time we replant everything, the damage will already be done.
That is the risk the current agricultural system is running with how things operate today.
In the past 100 years, 94% of the world's edible seed varieties have vanished.
We are not fear mongering here. What would happen if 94% of the fish varieties humans eat went extinct? There would be panic all over the world. That has happened to the world's seed varieties. This post is an attempt to educate the public regarding the dangers of the global agricultural system.
Simply stated, a lack of biodiversity in any living system increases the system's risk of spreading a deadly pathogen.
Currently, 75% of the world's food comes from only 12 plants and 5 animal species. This lack of biodiversity dramatically increases the susceptibility to widespread disease, and could result in colossal famine that affects billions of people, and would put companies like Monsanto in control of the fate of human existence.
To help combat this growing issue, Metropolis Farms is planning a robust seed bank propagated by our indoor farming systems to grow, save, store, and distribute diverse seeds to local farmers.
In our continuing exploration of the failing food system, this post will discuss the most important resource available to humans (besides water): SEEDS.
Across all species, especially plant-life, genetic diversity is the safeguard against evolving forms of viruses, bugs, and disease. Low levels of biodiversity are dangerous because as pathogens are introduced to the system, the pathogens encounter less resistance to spreading than they do in diverse systems. As we will explore, outbreaks of disease, invasions of insects, and climatic anomalies have caused many wholesale crop failures in the past, and are causing massive crop failures today.
To begin, looking at history can give us an understanding of this risk the agricultural system is running.
The Irish Potato Famine
Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland's population fell by ~25% due to the poverty-stricken population being heavily dependent on one crop for sustenance.
The Great Famine, more commonly known as the Irish Potato Famine, occurred because a significant amount of Ireland's population lived on one variety of one crop: the lumper potato. Due to the lack of crop diversity, entire fields of potatoes were susceptible to a disease called Phytophthora Infestens, aka potato blight. This disease soon spread across most of the potato crops not only in Ireland, but all over Europe.
Ireland experienced widespread famine because their diet was reliant on the one crop that was susceptible to this disease. The rest of Europe was okay, despite losing massive amounts of potato crops, because their diet was more diversified. Due to Ireland's situation, 1 in 8 Irishmen and women totaling 1,000,000 people died of starvation or starvation related diseases. Another 1 in 8 emigrated to escape the famine. In total, Ireland's population fell by roughly 25%.
A large portion of Ireland's population were reliant on one crop for many economic and political reasons which are similar to the diet trends here in the United States and elsewhere in the world. The moral of the story, however, is that being dependent on a small variety of crops increases the risk of one disease wiping out a population's food source.
Implication's today's food system
Today, the world is vulnerable to experiencing the potato famine on a planetary scale due to a reduction in agricultural biodiversity.
The global dependence on so few crops for a majority of the population's sustenance is replicating the same system that led to the Irish Potato Famine. Only this time, rather than affecting 1 country, due to globalized specialization, a disease can wipe out crops that affect everyone on earth.
The current food system has valued short-sighted mass production of low quality crops at the expense of long-term survivability, biodiversity, and soil quality. In addition to rapidly destroying the topsoil and causing desertification, the proliferation of massive monocultures poses a serious threat to long-term food security.
Considering 70% of agricultural crops are grown for livestock and not for humans, this potential problem will not only affect the vegetables we eat, but also the meat, dairy, eggs, and other products that are staples in today's average diet.
Farmers are the backbone of this country.
"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds."
- Thomas Jefferson
And for a long time, this sentiment held true throughout government. In 1862, the USDA was established and at the start, it devoted at least one-third of its budget to collecting and distributing seeds to farmers across the country. By 1900, over 1 billion seed packages had been sent out to this country's farmers. Furthermore, farmers were encouraged to breed, propagate, and strengthen their own plants and seed banks, resulting in strong localized seed banks in which farmers could depend on themselves or their neighbors for next year's plantings.
However, in 1883, the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) was founded, recognizing the potential profits that could be made off seeds instead of a free program for all farmers. After 40 years of lobbying by ASTA, Congress eliminated the USDA seed distribution program in 1924 and paved the way for the seed industry as we know it today.
At the time, there were thousands of seed companies and farmers were able to save seeds from their existing crops to establish their own sustainability.
Today, 10 companies control 73% of the global seed market. The top 6 control 68% of the market and new mergers could lower that number down to 4 companies. Think about that. 4 companies could control the world's food supply.
Henry Kissinger once said: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people." Research has shown that US strategy has deliberately destroyed local family farming in the US and abroad and led to 95% of all grain reserves in the world being controlled by 6 multinational agribusiness chemical corporations.
How did we get here?
To keep this post from becoming a book, this is a quick synopsis:
After the USDA seed distribution program ended in 1924, seed companies began to emerge and create hybrid seeds that promised more crop yields.
These hybrid seeds had recessive gene characteristics that disabled farmers from saving the crop's seeds for the next year's plantings. This made farmers more dependent on purchasing seeds annually.
In 1930, the Plant Patent Act (PPA) was signed, thus allowing patents for unique plant varieties. For the first time in human-history, companies could legally own the rights to plants. Although, it's important to note the original PPA did not allow a patent right to plants propagated by seeds, so farmers could still attempt to save seeds for future harvests without violating patents. This would eventually change.
Over the next decades, seed companies focused on selling a smaller subset of seeds.
In 1980, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, a landmark Supreme Court case granted the first patent on life. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that living organisms could be patented. This opened the floodgates for companies like Monsanto, and soon over 1,800 patents for genetic material and plants were submitted to the US Patent & Trademark Office.
Seed companies slowly became biochemical companies and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, commonly known as GMOs, started to emerge.
Now, seeds have been engineered to withstand the effects of herbicides so farmers can simply spray their fields with chemical poisons to kill weeds and not their crops. One of the problems is the same company that sells the seeds is also selling the chemicals. This is giving unprecedented amounts of power to companies like Monsanto.
Under this seed industry consolidation, big farmers are now more dependent than ever on these companies, and are forced to purchase seeds and the chemicals annually. Additionally, this consolidation has led to the massive reduction in crop biodiversity on commercial farms.
This short-sighted approach to agriculture - focusing on massive yields with the least amount of work - has led to specialization rather than diversification. Another consequence of this system is food is no longer grown for people.Food is grown for trucks. In fact, 30-45% of the cost of food is tied to trucking and distributing food over a 3,000+ mile supply chain.
In review: crop specialization leads to monocultures. Monocultures lead to susceptibility of disease.
For example, rather than soil regenerative farming practices seen onpermaculture farms, one mega farm will solely focus on growing one crop of corn or wheat or cotton, etc, over acres and acres of land, to maximize planting, maintenance, and harvesting production. Farmers are doing this because the current economics of outdoor farming are not in favor of a diversified field. This agricultural practice is already leading to the collapse of major crops.
In 2016, an article in The Guardian reported that Florida grown oranges
are already experiencing unfixable collapse. Per the article, "The orange crop devastation began in 2005 when a bacterium that causes huanglongbing - better known as citrus greening or HLB disease - was found in southern Florida. Since then, the Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny flying insect which transmits the disease, has been blown across Florida by various hurricanes... Farmers have spent more than $100m on research into ways to combat the disease, but so far scientists are stumped. 'Farmers are giving up on oranges altogether,' said Judith Ganes, president of the commodities research firm J Ganes Consulting. 'Normally after a freeze or hurricane [which both kill lots of trees], the growers would replant 100% of their plants. But the disease has been spread all over... and made it totally uncontrollable. Farmers are giving up and turning to other crops or turning land over to housing.'" (As a sidenote: this is happening all over the country. Farmers are giving up on agriculture and are becoming land developers for urban sprawl.)
A quick google search will show that coffee beans, bananas, and coconuts are expected to experience some form of collapse within this century due to the monocropping practices.
Imagine what will happen if a superbug wipes out wheat or corn. These major crops, who's source is likely 1 of 6 companies, are a major factor in the global economy and extend well beyond the food they provide for people. 70% of the crops are actually designated to feed livestock. So additionally, meat, energy sources, and other industries will be vastly affected by such an event. And we the people will suffer as a result.
What's the solution?
As is often the solution when facing problems created by the current food system: the world needs more local farms and local farmers that grow diverse crops. People everywhere need to be more conscious of where their food is coming from, how it is grown, and the practices that are being utilized to ensure long-term food security.
In that light, Metropolis Farms is working with the City of Philadelphia to start an educational farming institute in Fairmount Park, the largest landscaped urban park in the world. In addition to providing training and educational opportunities related to farming, we are planning the creation of a seed bank to help preserve precious varieties of fruits and vegetables that face extinction.
A seed bank stores seeds to preserve genetic diversity. There are seed banks all over the world, but not nearly enough to combat the problem outlined above. In addition to storing seeds, anyone involved with a seed bank needs to continuously germinate seeds, grow crops, and produce more seeds. A current limitation most seed bankers face is a limited growing season in which to propagate their seed collection.
By developing a robust seed bank in conjunction with indoor farming, we can save more seeds annually due to our capability of year-round indoor vertical farming. After creating a seed bank, we will be a point for seed access to local farmers and gardeners who want a diversified farm. Part of Metropolis Farms' mission is to democratize our technology to make local farming accessible to anyone. With the plans of creating this seed bank, we plan to democratize the ability to grow a diverse set of crops for local farmers everywhere. We hope others join this mission and start seed banks as well.
A rise in seed banks will hopefully correspond with a rise in local farming, in turn creating a new food economy in which fruits and vegetables will be grown for people, and not trucks.
To learn more about this topic, we recommend viewing the powerful documentary Seed: The Untold Story.
Urban Crop Solutions Was Awarded The Public Choice Award on The European Finals of The FoodNexus Challenge
Urban Crop Solutions Was Awarded The Public Choice Award on The European Finals of The FoodNexus Challenge
Urban Crop Solutions was awarded the Public Choice Award on the European finals of the FoodNexus Challenge on Wednesday evening December 13th. Fifteen companies from 8 different EU countries were competing during a three-day event in Wageningen (NL) for the European FoodNexus Challenge Award. The expert audience consisting of academic, corporate and venture capital people selected Urban Crop Solutions during a live closing event.
FoodNexus is a European consortium of international food companies and leading knowledge institutions that strives to create a robust and sustainable European Food System.
Fifteen finalists were selected for the European final in Wageningen (NL) out of over 470 applications from European companies. During the past three day event, a boot camp was organized for the European Finalists so that they could work together with R&D and Innovation Managers from corporate partners in facilitated workshops. The goal was to prepare all parties for collaboration projects on e.g. co-development of the startup or scale up’s technology or international marketing and sales. More than 300 people attended the closing night on Wednesday and were able to vote at the end of the event for the Public Choice Award. Representatives of the corporate partners (Unilever, Nutreco, FrieslandCampina, and Ahold), as well as other managers from international corporations, the academic community, and private equity investors, were present during this final session. Prince Constantijn of The Netherlands joined a panel on Corporate-Startup engagement during this event.
“This award is a very important international recognition for our team and for our realizations in the last year. During the past three days, we felt great support for our business model. The feedback that we received from corporate experts makes us believe even more that indoor vertical farming solutions have a great potential worldwide to optimize supply chains and plant production in many industries”, says Maarten Vandecruys, CEO of Urban Crop Solutions. Brecht Stubbe, Global Sales Director of Urban Crop Solutions adds “Our global approach and our focus on automated and robotized systems were very much liked by the European audience during the event. We should leverage this Award and increase our presence in the world even faster. The last weeks we have felt a lot of international traction for our systems”
Urban Crop Solutions develops tailor-made plant growth installations for its clients. These systems are turnkey, robotized and able to be integrated into existing production facilities or food processing units. Urban Crop Solutions also has its own range of standard growth container products. Being a total solution provider, Urban Crop Solutions can also supply seeds, substrates, and nutrients for clients that have limited or no knowledge or experience with farming. Currently, the company has developed plant growing recipes for more than 200 varieties of crops that can be grown in closed environment vertical farms. These recipes (ranging from leafy greens, vegetables, medicinal plants to flowers) are developed specifically for indoor farming applications and sometimes exclusively for clients by its team of plant scientists. Urban Crop Solutions has started activities in Miami (Florida, US) in 2016 and is soon to open a division in Japan.
France Takes Top Spot in 2017 Food Sustainability Index
France ranks number one in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which grades 34 countries according to their food system sustainability.
France Takes Top Spot in 2017 Food Sustainability Index
France ranks number one in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which grades 34 countries according to their food system sustainability. Developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), the FSI evaluates food sustainability issues across three pillars—food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture, and nutritional challenges.
Other top-scoring countries include Japan, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, South Korea, and Hungary. These countries typically demonstrate strong and effectively implemented government policy that address the three main pillars. Scores on lifestyle, such as physical activity and diet composition, as well as social and climate-related indicators, such as the participation rate of women in farming and monthly freshwater scarcity, are also important factors in the overall ranking.
The top performer in the food loss and waste pillar is France, followed by Germany, Spain, and Italy. In 2016, the French government passed legislation that prohibits supermarkets from throwing away food approaching its sell-by-date, requiring them to donate it to charities or food banks. Other measures have reduced food wastage in schools and prompted companies to report on food waste data.
The top performer in the sustainable agriculture pillar is Italy, followed closely by South Korea, France, and Colombia. Italy has pioneered new techniques to reduce water loss in agriculture and has implemented sustainable agricultural techniques for climate change mitigation and adaptation nationwide.
Japan scores the highest in the nutritional challenges pillar, ranking first in the life expectancy at birth—84 years—and the healthy life expectancy indicators. South Korea, Hungary, France, and Portugal also scored highly.
According to the index, high-income countries tend to have a higher level of food sustainability, however, there are several outliers. The wealthiest nation in the index, the United Arab Emirates, ranks last, while the United States ranks twenty-first. Ethiopia, the poorest country FSI researchers evaluated, ranks twelfth. Other factors such as high levels of human development, smaller populations, and slower rates of urbanization also correlate with higher food sustainability.
An interactive online database providing country ranking and profiles, case studies, and infographics is available on the FSI website.
Electrical Conductivity: The Pulse of the Soil
Electrical Conductivity: The Pulse of the Soil
November 30, 2017 in Crops, Disease, Eco-Farming, Soil Fertility, Soil Life, Soils
Traditionally soil consultants have used electrical conductivity to measure salinity, however conductivity can tell us much more about the physical structure and health of the soil. Based on these direct measurements, electrical conductivity can also indirectly measure crop productivity.
When we walk into our home on a dark night, the first thing we usually do is turn on the lights. With the flip of a switch, we complete the electrical circuit initiating the flow of electricity to the light bulb, illuminating our home.
In the human body, electricity controls the flow of blood from the heart to all organs. In the same way we flip a switch turning on the lights, electrical signaling in the body tells the heart when and how often to contract and relax. These electrical signals can be altered by the intake of nutrients. Case in point, the intake of high-salt foods can lead to a higher pulse rate. With a higher pulse rate, your heart and other organs must work harder in order to function properly. Certainly this extra work puts added stress on the body. In contrast, consuming a balanced form of energy can reduce the stress put upon the body.
Waking up in the morning and only consuming caffeine does not give you the same energy as waking up and eating a balanced breakfast. While both inputs may increase your readiness in the morning, physiologically they affect the human body in different ways. Inputs into any biological system whether human, animal, plant or soil consequently will affect the system in different ways.
In 1946, Albert Einstein theorized that all matter is energy. His theory, which gave us the formula E=mc2, laid the foundation for future generations to begin using energy theories in daily problem-solving. If all matter is equal, simply a form of energy, then conceptually the human system is no different than the soil/plant system. Furthermore, the same concepts which we apply to our own physical health can be applied to soil and plant health.
Quantifying the human body’s energy level is done by monitoring pulse rate. In the soil, the current energy level in the field or in the lab can be achieved by measuring the electrical conductivity of the soil. Electrical conductivity is a direct measure of the energy flow in the soil system. Energy, measured in ergs (energy released per gram per second), is a function of the soil’s ion concentration, clay type, moisture content, porosity, salinity and temperature.
As consultants and growers we are focused on crop productivity. We often aim to maintain the nutrient or ion concentration in the soil solution best suited for the highest crop production.
This ion concentration is expressed by the quantity of ions surrounding the diffuse layer of the soil colloid and also by the soil’s moisture content. Electrical conductivity is a direct measurement of these factors and can be used in the field to tell us how much energy is available for plant growth.
It is important to note that natural fluctuations in electrical conductivity can occur. In the soil, the conductor of electrical current is water. As soil moisture changes due to dry periods and/or rainfall events, electrical conductivity can vary. Abiotic factors are variables in the accurate representation of the ion concentration in the soil solution.
However, overall, if the electrical conductivity (concentration of ions in the soil solution) is either too high or too low it will be reflected in decreased crop productivity. From our experience, the majority of problems facing growers and consultants can be related to abnormal electrical conductivities.
Crop productivity is governed by three disciplines of science: physics, chemistry and biology. Explaining electrical conductivity on a chemical or biological level requires a much more lengthy and detailed explanation. By focusing on the physics of electrical conductivity, referring to it as energy, simplicity can be brought to such a complex topic.
Einstein taught us that an object’s mass is a function of energy. If you apply this concept to crop production, crops (mass) are simply an expression of energy. In order to produce mass (yield), energy is needed. For a plant to perform photosynthesis and produce mass; an initial energy requirement must be met. This energy requirement comes largely from the electrical current in the soil. Thus, soil electrical conductivity can be utilized as a direct measurement of energy and an indirect measurement of crop productivity.
Crop Productivity
Crop productivity can be simplified into two stages: growth and decomposition. We can discern that the growth stage of the plant life cycle has different energy requirements than the decomposition stage. The energy needed to produce mass in the form of plant growth varies between 200 and 800 ergs. When the energy in the soil falls below or above these values for a prolonged period of time, the plant can no longer produce mass (growth) and decomposition will set in. With the onset of decomposition in the plant tissue, disease and decay will follow. During the growth life cycle of the plant, energy must be present to produce mass (growth).
In order to produce mass in the form of a nutrient-dense, healthy plant, the energy coming from the electrical conductivity of the soil must come from “good” sources. Electrical conductivity coming from biological activity, flocculation, soil moisture and clean balanced nutrients (ions) can be considered “good” sources of energy. Electrical conductivity coming from salinity in the soil solution can be defined as a “bad” source of energy. “Bad” sources of energy will produce nutrient-poor, unhealthy, low-energy and quickly decomposable mass.
Nutrient-dense, healthy, high-energy plant mass is what we as consultants and growers should be trying to achieve. Yes, by using these “bad” sources of energy you can produce high quantities of mass (high yields). We see this year in, year out with the use of synthetic fertilizers.
However, if your goal is to produce high-quality, nutrient-dense, healthy plant mass, your energy source must come from “good” sources. Low salt fertilizers, organic matter, biological amendments, cover cropping and proper soil stewardship can provide your soil with “good” sources of energy. All of which indirectly restores your soils’ fertility and sustainability for future generations.
If all matter is energy and all energy is matter, we as consultants and growers must begin to think in terms of energy.
In order for seeds to germinate, an energy requirement must be met. In order for plants to grow, an energy requirement must be met. In order for plants to reproduce, an energy requirement must be met. In order for plants to dry out and be harvested, an energy requirement must be met. In order for your soil to repair itself over winter, an energy requirement must be met. And in order for you to have read this article, an energy requirement was met.
By Glen Rabenberg & Christopher Kniffen. This article appeared in the April 2014 issue ofAcres U.S.A.
Glen Rabenberg is the CEO and owner of Soil Works LLC. Soil Works LLC is home to Genesis Soil Rite Calcium, PhosRite, TestRite Labs and GrowRite Greenhouse. Glen Rabenberg extensively travels the world solving soil problems with a little bit of simplicity and the “rite” tools.
Christopher Kniffen is writer, public speaker and manager of the research and development department of Soil Works LLC. For more information Rabenberg and Kniffen can be reached at Soil Works LLC. 4200 W. 8th St., Yankton, SD 57078, 605-260-0784.
Resources:
Eigenberg, R.A., J.W. Doran, J.A. Nienaber, R.B. Ferguson, and B.L. Woodbury. “Electrical conductivity monitoring of soil condition and available N with animal manure and a cover crop.” Special issue on soil health as an indicator of sustainable management. Agric. Ecosyst. Environ.
Johnson, C.K., J.W. Doran, H.R. Duke, B.J. Wienhold, K. Eskridge, and J.F. Shanahan. 2001. “Field-scale electrical conductivity mapping for delineating soil condition.” Faculty Publications, Department of Statistics. Paper 9, digitalcommons.unl.edu/statisticsfacpub/9.
McBride, R.A., A.M. Gordon, and S.C. Shrive. 1990. “Estimating forest soil quality from terrain measurements of apparent electrical conductivity.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 54:290-293.
McNeill, J.D. 1980. “Electrical conductivity of soils and rocks.” Tech. note TN-5. Geonics Ltd., Mississauga, ON, Canada.
Rhoades, J.D., N.A. Manteghi, P.J. Shouse, and W.J. Alves. 1989. “Soil electrical conductivity and soil salinity: new formulations and calibrations.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 53:433-439.
Planned Community On Boston South Shore Will Be Laboratory For Sustainable Cities
Planned Community On Boston South Shore Will Be Laboratory For Sustainable Cities
November 12th, 2017 by Steve Hanley
Sustainable cities are a hot topic among government leaders and policymakers worldwide. Cities everywhere are struggling with exploding populations as more and more people move to urban settings. The United States has 10 cities with populations of more than one million. China has 116 and that number is growing fast. Many world cities were built long before the automobile and the computer and are woefully unprepared for the challenge of supporting more people.
Graphic credit: LStar Ventures
Urban planners are faced with a welter of challenges from traffic management to air pollution. Where will the water come from for all those people? How will their waste products be disposed of? What about quality of life considerations and healthy living standards? Somewhere on that list, urban planners have to consider the impact their cities will have on the environment, as nations strive to meet the carbon reduction goals agreed to at the Paris climate accords in 2015.
What Makes Sustainable Cities?
Part of creating sustainable cities involves using the internet of things to help smooth the flow of people, goods, and services. Sensors embedded into water distribution systems can help manage how water is used, minimize the energy needed to run pumping stations, and detect where leaks are occurring. Other sensors inside trash containers can notify managers which need emptying and which do not, making trash collection more efficient. Traffic flow monitors can help manage traffic lights to keep cars and trucks flowing smoothly. Computers could reroute traffic around obstructions automatically.
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google/Alphabet, is working with 16 cities in North America to help them integrate computer technology into their infrastructure. The idea is to promote efficiency and thus lower the total amount of power needed to keep the cities humming. It also will prepare the way for the autonomous taxis and ride-hailing services that will be arriving shortly.
From Abandoned Navy Base To Sustainability Laboratory
An abandoned naval air station south of Boston, Massachusetts, is the site of an experiment in how to build the sustainable cities of the future. Known as Union Point, it is a 1,400 acre parcel of land that overlaps three nearby towns. LStar Ventures is the developer, creating a new city from the ground up with help from global engineering and design firm Arup.
“While cities are having to retrofit themselves to accommodate things like electric vehicles, the cool thing about building a city from the ground up is that we can think about this stuff now,” says Cameron Thompson of Arup, which is focusing on sustainability issues.
Energy efficiency is baked into all new buildings planned for Union Point. All commercial structures will meet LEED Gold or Platinum standards. Internet of things technology will be included to monitor and control all mechanical and electrical systems for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment. LED lighting will be used exclusively inside and out. The buildings themselves will be networked together to minimize the total electrical needs of the commercial part of the city.
By focusing on sustainability, Union Point hopes to become a magnet for businesses looking for new home for new corporate homes — a place where their employees can live and work in a healthy environment. LStar also hopes to draw high-tech companies whose leaders are enticed by its focus on sustainable living. For those who need to commute to Boston, a rail line is already in place that provide access to the city in as little as 20 minutes.
A Focus On Renewable Energy
Renewable energy will play a big role in providing electrical energy to the new city. Rooftop solar will be installed on most of Union Point’s downtown buildings and a solar farm will be constructed nearby. Grid-scale battery storage technology will be utilized as the costs decrease over time. “The project has come at a perfect time because a lot of the necessary technologies are becoming affordable and readily available,” Thomson says. The goal is to make Union Point a zero-emissions city by 2050, with solar and wind power being predominant in the energy mix.
Meanwhile, LStar Ventures is working with National Grid to make the electricity available from the local grid cleaner. Massachusetts, like many other jurisdictions, is looking at transitioning to 100% renewable energy by mid-century, something researchers told the COP 23 climate summit in Bonn this week is achievable worldwide.
Plans call for 4,000 residential units and 10 million square feet of commercial space. Rooftop farms will provide local restaurants with some of their produce. Beside green public spaces within the community, Union Point will be surrounded by 1,000 acres of green habitat with 50 miles of hiking and bike trails. Although the first commercial buildings will be finished by the end of 2018, the entire project is expected to cost $5 billion and take 15 years to complete. There are already 500 homes in the Union Point community that were built by the prior developer, which exited the project in 2015 and sold its holdings to LStar.
Sustainable Cities Are Coming, But Slowly
Sustainable cities are a work in progress. The lessons learned from the Union Point project will help other communities meet their sustainable cities goals faster and more economically. Ngai Yin Yip, assistant professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, tells The Huffington Post that weaning ourselves from fossil fuels will be a long and often painful process. “It’s a huge gap we’re probably not going to be able to close in one leap,” he says.
He adds that Union Point’s gradual approach makes the most sense. “We still have a lot of lessons to learn about how we build our cities so that they are truly sustainable, so that they can achieve a near zero carbon footprint. And these lessons a lot of times might need to be learned the hard way.”
Political considerations can help or hinder that effort. In the three towns surrounding Union Point — Weymouth, Abington, and Rockland — local officials have agreed to work cooperatively with LStar Ventures to accomplish the goals it has set. All three have agreed to expedite the approval process for new buildings within the planned community, in part because of the promise of new jobs in the area. Amazon is considering Union Point for its new US headquarters as is Dutch robotics manufacturer ProDrive. “We all know this could be an economic dynamo for the region,” said Allan Chiocca, the town administrator for Rockland.
Urban Agriculture Just Got Serious! Plantagon Is Building 10 Underground City Farms In Stockholm – And Locals Are Invited To Join In…
Plantagon CityFarm® is a new concept for using empty premises for resource efficient and sustainable food production in cities. The first plant is located under Stockholm’s iconic “DN Skrapan” in Kungsholmen, and the goal is to have ten production facilities for indoor production in the Stockholm area by 2020.
Urban Agriculture Just Got Serious! Plantagon Is Building 10 Underground City Farms In Stockholm – And Locals Are Invited To Join In…
Press Release • Dec 01, 2017
Plantagon is building 10 underground city farms in Stockholm – and locals are invited to join in…
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (December 1, 2017) – We hear a lot about smart sustainable innovations coming from Sweden, from turning rubbish into fuel, recycling excess heat from data centres, geothermals etc… Swedish pioneers Plantagon, are now taking on sustainable city farming on an industrial scale.
Plantagon CityFarm® is a new concept for using empty premises for resource efficient and sustainable food production in cities. The first plant is located under Stockholm’s iconic “DN Skrapan” in Kungsholmen, and the goal is to have ten production facilities for indoor production in the Stockholm area by 2020. Now the public is invited to a crowdfunding campaign on the Fundedbyme Investor Platform to support the expansion.
"The reason for a crowdfunding campaign is that we believe that people that care about the future of cities, food production and the health of our planet should be given the opportunity to be a part of the solution. To us, it is important to create and expand together, showing that we are a movement for healthy sustainable food. Together, we can make a difference for safe food production in cities - now and in the future", says Owe Pettersson, CEO of Plantagon International.
The goal of the campaign is to reach between 3.5 and 7.5 million kronor. The minimum amount to participate is set at SEK 1,000. All who participate will get a blueprint for a home-growing system if they would like to start cultivating at home. For all who participate at the level of SEK 10,000 or more, a private guided tour and your own harvest of vegetables and herbs inside the facility are included. Read more about the campaign here: www.fundedbyme.com/plantagon
Collaborators in the project include Samhall (a state-owned company with a mandate to create work that furthers the development of people with functional impairment causing reduced working capacity), ICA Maxi Lindhagen (a very local supermarket store), and world-renowned chef Pontus Frithiof with the restaurant, Pontus Tidningspressen, in the same building.
Ten units by 2020
"The first unit in the DN house is already fully funded and under construction. We aim to sign contracts on plant number two and three in March 2018 to start these in December 2018. Then we continue with plant four and five. The goal is that we have ten facilities running in Stockholm by 2020", says Owe Pettersson.
Plantagon CityFarm Stockholm is part of Plantagon Production Sweden AB, a subsidiary of Plantagon International AB. CEO of the new production company is Owe Pettersson, who is also CEO of Plantagon International AB.
Plantagon's technology for industrial indoor and urban cultivation is a response to the need for new solutions for sustainable food production that can provide for the growing urban population around the world while maximizing the use of unused urban spaces. Cultivation takes place in a controlled environment without any forms of chemical pesticides. Plantagon CityFarm® saves 99 percent of water consumption compared with traditional agriculture and carbon dioxide emissions are reduced to almost zero, while 70 percent of the energy used is reused to heat the offices in the DN House. By saving and reusing resources, production costs are significantly reduced.
What does Urban Agriculture really mean?
For Plantagon, it means that it must be sustainable environmentally, sustainable for society and also economically sustainable. Many players in food tech talk about urban agriculture or city farming, but no one has managed to cover all three goals. Delivering locally and using smart energy systems minimizes costs as well as emissions. Large-scale production using efficient cultivation systems while training the future farmers through Samhall, Plantagon plans on taking urban agriculture to the next level and developing the industry globally.
Please go to investment page for more information
Contacts
Carin Balfe Arbman, Communications Manager, Plantagon, tel. +46-70-633 35 08, carin.balfe-arbman@plantagon.com
Anna Karlsson, Press Contact, Manifest Stockholm, +46-735-20 28 80,anna@manifeststockholm.se
Plantagon International is a world-leading pioneer within the field food security and CSR – combining urban agriculture, innovative technical solutions and architecture – to meet the demand for efficient food production within cities; adding a more democratic and inclusive governance model.
www.plantagon.com www.plantagon.org
New Start-Ups Aiming to Make Singapore As The First Food Sustainable City
Another Makanpreneur start-up, E-Farmer Market, is building an online platform to connect hobby farmers with the local community. Farmers can trade their home grown foods with their neighbours, giving visibility to Singapore’s underground homegrown farmers, and reduce food wastage by redistributing food surpluses.
New Start-Ups Aiming to Make Singapore As The First Food Sustainable City
By Laxmi Iyer
December 4, 2017
PC: Unsplash/Carissa Gan
9 in 10 Singaporeans are concerned with food waste, yet hardly any one is doing anything about it. A survey from the National Environment Agency showed that an average Singaporean generates 140kg of food waste a year, an equivalent of throwing two bowls of rice in the trash every day.
Is this because Singaporeans deem food sustainability as something far-fetched and unattainable?
Food waste has risen by an appalling 50% from 2005 to 2014, mounting to a gruesome 788,600 tonnes of food waste per year in the little red dot. While this figure has since dropped by 0.39% in 2016, a mere 0.39% drop belies a fact that there is still much room for improvement.
Just last month, Channel News Asia announced Singapore Airline’s effort to incorporate more sustainable ingredients in its in-flight meals to promoting environmental sustainability and support for local farmers.
While corporate businesses are inching to be more environmentally conscious, Singapore start-ups are taking it up a notch, with many championing food sustainability at the forefront of their businesses, tackling the problem of national food waste on a much larger scale.
Makanpreneur- Southeast Asia’s first Food Sustainability Accelerator was launched on the 18 November 2017. Four innovative food start-ups were selected, out of sixteen applications, for a four-month training programme by UNFRAMED in partnership with Croeni Foundation, National Youth Council, and FoodXervices. The accelerator program aims to help tech start-ups addressing food sustainability challenges to scale their impact, by offering comprehensive support including rigorous training, coaching programs, funding and the largest impact-network in Singapore.
So what are these start-ups looking at, to improve food sustainability in Singapore?
Some Makanpreneur start-ups are fostering local food production looking to make Singapore -the first food-resilient country, a real challenge, given its land scarcity. Ecolution looks at the next-generation of polyculture farms, where smart precision agriculture technologies are implemented in farming multiple crops in the same space. FarmX has developed a full Internet-of-Things (IOT) system including sensors and automated smart-irrigation, so that urban farming can be made cost-effective, with minimal manpower involvement. Both are currently piloting their solutions with local farms.
In contrast, some start-ups turn online to reduce food waste. Another Makanpreneur start-up, E-Farmer Market, is building an online platform to connect hobby farmers with the local community. Farmers can trade their homegrown foods with their neighbours, giving visibility to Singapore’s underground homegrown farmers, and reduce food wastage by redistributing food surpluses. Similarly, Lasmin has launched an online marketplace with both an Android and an iPhone app, bringing buyers and sellers of perishable food items together, thus reducing information asymmetry and food waste.
Makanpreneur ends on the 28 March next year with a presentation to an audience composed of invited guests from the food industry and impact investment space. The most promising teams will receive a funding of up to $10,000 from Croeni Foundation. Through UNFRAMED’s rigorous training & coaching sessions covering pitching, branding and digital marketing, impact assessment and more, the start-ups will see their businesses scale up to bring even more impact into Singapore’s food sustainability.
Long Beach, California: Urban-Agriculture Program Accepting Applications From Local Residents
Long Beach, California: Urban-Agriculture Program Accepting Applications From Local Residents
City of Long Beach / December 1, 2017
Long Beach residents can now submit their applications for the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone (UAIZ) Program, which would allow vacant-lot owners in the city to be eligible for a property-tax reduction by committing their lot to urban agriculture for five years.
Urban-agriculture projects include many types of farming activities, including community and educational gardens, as well as commercial farms with farm stands, which provide economic and educational opportunities to the community, according to the City of Long Beach.
“As a leading city for sustainability, this program is a testament to Long Beach’s commitment to expanding access to green space,” Mayor Robert Garcia said. “This program will activate vacant lots and provide new sources of healthy produce to the community.”
To qualify for the program, vacant lots must:
Be between 0.10 to three acres in size.
Have no habitable structures; all on-site structures must be accessory to agricultural use.
Not have any part of the lot listed on the Department of Toxic Substance Control’s EnviroStor Database.
Be within Long Beach City limits and comply with City zoning codes.
“I encourage all vacant lot owners to take advantage of this rare opportunity,” Vice Mayor Rex Richardson said. “This UAIZ program creates a win-win situation, fostering economic growth in Long Beach while paving way for more locally grown produce.”
On May 10, 2016, the Long Beach City Council requested City staff to explore the feasibility of implementing the UAIZ Program, an item sponsored by Richardson, 1st District Councilmember Lena Gonzalez, 7th District Councilmember Roberto Uranga and former vice mayor Suja Lowenthal.
“This initiative supports sustainability within our community by helping to increase access to healthy foods for residents and reducing emissions from food transportation,” Gonzalez said.
“I am in full support of the UAIZ ordinance, because I want to see a cleaner, healthier Long Beach and this program helps prevent vacant lots becoming eyesores due to issues like illegal dumping,” Uranga said.
The city council passed the UAIZ ordinance last month, creating the program and updating the City zoning code to adopt urban-agriculture uses.
“The program is now open, and we are looking forward to possibly getting our first contract through this year,” said Larry Rich, the City’s sustainability coordinator. “These vacant lots have the potential to provide great community benefits, and we hope to help realize them through urban agriculture.”
Local farmers and gardeners interested in the program can visit longbeach.gov/sustainability/programs/uaiz-program/ or contact the City’s Office of Sustainability at sustainability@longbeach.gov or (562) 570-6396.
Nexloop
Nexloop is a hyper-local, biomimetic strategy to visibly network rainwater into closed-loop urban food production. Our mission is to increase hyper-local urban food production, decouple localized irrigation from the city grid, and increase visibility of food system processes.
Project Overview
Nexloop is a hyper-local, biomimetic strategy to visibly network rainwater into closed-loop urban food production. Our mission is to increase hyper-local urban food production, decouple localized irrigation from the city grid, and increase visibility of food system processes.
Nexloop retrofits multistory residential building facades to promote small-scale, personalized food production. The design functions at the scale of the window to harness rainwater and provide in situ irrigation for sustainable hydroponic food production in individual urban homes. We aim to shift the paradigm of how urban populations relate to food consumption and access by bringing visibility and human-centered design to the food system. Nexloop addresses scale and the underlying system function with a bottom-up approach. The process of using rainwater to grow food inside requires the integration of multiple functions and a symbiotic relationship between system components. Looking at a variety of biomimetic strategies allows us to design a system that efficiently captures, stores, and distributes water for indoor growing.
The principal system components are a horizontal module and vertical membrane that utilize superhydrophobic and superhydrophilic surfaces and capillary action to channel water to indoor spaces. A unique, rhizomatic system within the module passively delivers water to the organic roots of edible plants. The vertical membrane provides additional surface area for water collection and integrates water storage for additional uptake to prevent the system from flooding. Our vision is a food-water nexus capable of sustainable, closed-loop urban living.
We intend to scale-up to facilitate building-wide adoption and citywide integration of the system to offset the needs of imported water from local water districts and regional sources, reduce the amount of water entering sewage systems, and decrease street runoff into the rivers and NY Harbor. A modular, scalable, systems approach is the foundation for a sustainable urban food system.
Jacob Russo, Stephanie Newcomb, Alexa Nicolas, Anamarija Frankic, Dale Clifford,
Project Overview
Nexloop is a hyper-local, biomimetic strategy to visibly network rainwater into closed-loop urban food production. Our mission is to increase hyper-local urban food production, decouple localized irrigation from the city grid, and increase visibility of food system processes.
Nexloop retrofits multistory residential building facades to promote small-scale, personalized food production. The design functions at the scale of the window to harness rainwater and provide in situ irrigation for sustainable hydroponic food production in individual urban homes. We aim to shift the paradigm of how urban populations relate to food consumption and access by bringing visibility and human-centered design to the food system. Nexloop addresses scale and the underlying system function with a bottom-up approach. The process of using rainwater to grow food inside requires the integration of multiple functions and a symbiotic relationship between system components. Looking at a variety of biomimetic strategies allows us to design a system that efficiently captures, stores, and distributes water for indoor growing.
The principal system components are a horizontal module and vertical membrane that utilize superhydrophobic and superhydrophilic surfaces and capillary action to channel water to indoor spaces. A unique, rhizomatic system within the module passively delivers water to the organic roots of edible plants. The vertical membrane provides additional surface area for water collection and integrates water storage for additional uptake to prevent the system from flooding. Our vision is a food-water nexus capable of sustainable, closed-loop urban living.
We intend to scale-up to facilitate building-wide adoption and citywide integration of the system to offset the needs of imported water from local water districts and regional sources, reduce the amount of water entering sewage systems, and decrease street runoff into the rivers and NY Harbor. A modular, scalable, systems approach is the foundation for a sustainable urban food system.
DP World Supports Saudi Vision for New Mega-City
DP World Supports Saudi Vision for New Mega-City
By MarEx 2017-10-26 21:57:15
Under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is beginning a new push to diversify its economy. The nation’s government has long pursued the expansion of economic activity into new arenas beyond oil and gas, notably through the creation of greenfield industrial sites and cities, with separate, business-friendly regulatory environments. The most prominent of these projects to date, the industry- and logistics-focused King Abdullah Economic City, is about 70 nm north of the Red Sea port of Jeddah. It has its own seaport, King Abdullah Port, with a current volume of 1.4 million TEU and aspirations to exceed the 10 million TEU mark.
On Tuesday, Prince bin Salman announced a $500 billion plan to create another new city – a sprawling metropolis in a mountainous area of the nation's northwest corner, "an entire new land, purpose-built for a new way of living" with its "own laws, taxes and regulations." The high-tech plan calls for vertical farms, a bridge to Egypt, a strong logistics sector and 100 percent renewable electrical power. bin Salman also called for a return to a cultural environment grounded in "a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions."
NEOM’s Red Sea coastline, pre-development (NEOM)
On Thursday, UAE-based port operator DP World, which runs the South Container Terminal (SCT) at Jeddah Islamic Port, announced plans to invest at its existing facility to support the prince's vision. At present, Jeddah handles about 60 percent of Saudi Arabia's imports.
"Our plans involve increasing efficiencies using innovative tech solutions and making it a semi-automated facility to create skilled jobs for Saudi nationals," said DP World group chairman and CEO Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem. He suggested that investment in Jeddah could make Saudi "ports and logistics services a necessity and not a choice for global trade markets, particularly the Red Sea, which is the blood line of global trade." Bin Sulayem also highlighted the "strong historic relations" between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which are underpinned by “the clear vision of its great leaders who have planned a bright future for their people based on solid economic foundations.”
Development on multiple fronts
NEOM will proceed in parallel with other Saudi projects, like King Abdullah Financial District north of Riyadh, which is under construction; a new 13,000 square mile luxury tourism region on the Red Sea, located 80 nm south of NEOM; and a new 125 square mile "entertainment city" south of Riyadh. But the original set of "economic cities" founded by King Abdullah have not proceeded as rapidly as expected, analysts caution. "The overall progress with the economic cities has been very slow, even before the collapse of the oil price,” said Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank PJSC, speaking to Gulf News.
Transparent Solar Technology Represent's "Wave of the Future"
Environment + Science & Technology
Published: Oct. 23, 2017
TRANSPARENT SOLAR TECHNOLOGY REPRESENTS 'WAVE OF THE FUTURE'
Contact(s): Richard Lunt, Andy Henion
See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report today in Nature Energy.
Led by engineering researchers at Michigan State University, the authors argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet U.S. electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels.
“Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” said Richard Lunt, the Johansen Crosby Endowed Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at MSU. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics.”
Lunt and colleagues at MSU pioneered the development of a transparent luminescent solar concentrator that when placed on a window creates solar energy without disrupting the view. The thin, plastic-like material can be used on buildings, car windows, cell phones or other devices with a clear surface.
The solar-harvesting system uses organic molecules developed by Lunt and his team to absorb invisible wavelengths of sunlight. The researchers can “tune” these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near-infrared wavelengths that then convert this energy into electricity (watch a demonstration of the process here).
Moving global energy consumption away from fossil fuels will require such innovative and cost-effective renewable energy technologies. Only about 1.5 percent of electricity demand in the United States and globally is produced by solar power.
But in terms of overall electricity potential, the authors note that there is an estimated 5 billion to 7 billion square meters of glass surface in the United States. And with that much glass to cover, transparent solar technologies have the potential of supplying some 40 percent of energy demand in the U.S. – about the same potential as rooftop solar units. “The complimentary deployment of both technologies,” Lunt said, “could get us close to 100 percent of our demand if we also improve energy storage.”
Lunt said highly transparent solar applications are recording efficiencies above 5 percent, while traditional solar panels typically are about 15 percent to 18 percent efficient. Although transparent solar technologies will never be more efficient at converting solar energy to electricity than their opaque counterparts, they can get close and offer the potential to be applied to a lot more additional surface area, he said.
Right now, transparent solar technologies are only at about a third of their realistic overall potential, Lunt added.
“That is what we are working towards,” he said. “Traditional solar applications have been actively researched for over five decades, yet we have only been working on these highly transparent solar cells for about five years. Ultimately, this technology offers a promising route to inexpensive, widespread solar adoption on small and large surfaces that were previously inaccessible.”
The work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
Lunt’s coauthors are Christopher Traverse, a doctoral student in engineering at MSU, and Richa Pandey and Miles Barr with Ubiquitous Energy Inc., a company Lunt cofounded with Barr to commercialize transparent solar technologies.
Vertical Farming: Key to Meeting Princeton University Sustainability Plan
Dr. Paul Gauthier, a postdoctoral research associate in the geosciences department, created the Princeton Vertical Farming Project (PVFP) this past April. The project is situated in Moffett Laboratory, which adjoins Guyot Hall, and was funded by the University’s Office of Sustainability and is directly related to the University’s SustainabilityPlan.
In 2008, as part of the a larger plan to promote sustainability, the University committed to reduce its overall carbon dioxide emission levels to those of 1990 by 2020. The University's plan also set several more goals in the area of environmentalism and sustainable energy meant to address pressing environmental issues such as climate change, water scarcity, and air pollution.
According to Gauthier, the PFVP is a present-day attempt to expand upon these goals from almost a decade ago. Indeed, Gauthier identified the project as a key addition to the University’s larger sustainability plan.
“The goal of the project [PFVP] is to help students familiarize themselves with vertical farming here [at the University] and eventually create start-ups that employ the technique outside of the University,” explained Gauthier, adding that another goal of the project is to eventually provide produce to the dining halls as a step towards the University becoming completely self-sustaining.
Gauthier explained that, globally, the majority of start-ups utilizing vertical farming shut down after only a couple of years. This short life, he said, stems from the startups' inability to generate enough profit to meet the costs of applying vertical farming to produce farming. PFVP, he hopes, will help advance vertical farming technology from a scientific standpoint to remedy this problem. This kind of technological advancement, he added, will encourage students to build their own start-ups utilizing vertical farming technology.
Gauthier noted that the issues with popular use of vertical farms include a shortage of adequate technology as well as a lack of proper experimental data on the optimization of vertical farming efficiency. To study these problems, Gauthier's team is currently measuring the effectiveness of different vertical farming settings by testing how different lighting and water environments impact plant growth.
As a result of months of experiments and research, Gauthier and his team have enhanced the efficiency of vertical farms in a number of ways, such as reducing water usage and utilizing LED lights instead of sunlight to provide photosynthetic catalyst.
“We are using approximately 0.5 gallons of water for every kale plant,” noted Gauthier. “This is considered very efficient, and will save a significant amount of water when applied to large-scale fields.”
Gauthier added that vertical farming can be utilized not only as a reliable source of food in the future, but also as a means for capturing carbon dioxide emissions.
According to Gauthier, vertically farmed produce is not only sustainable and efficient, but grows rather quickly and is comparable in taste to commercial produce. Gauthier explained that basil plants in the vertical farm take approximately a month to grow, and with the use of special LED lights, are almost indistinguishable from basil sold in markets. According to Gauthier, this is attributable to his focus on the taste and quality of the vertical farm products rather than the quantity.
Kyra Gregory ‘19, a communications assistant for the Office of Sustainability and PVFP website manager, has been working with Gauthier from the start of the project and believes it will contribute to the University’s larger sustainability initiatives.
“Overall, seeing the vertical farm progress from its initial stage to where it is now is very inspiring for me. The amount of growth and student interest gives me hope for sustainability efforts at Princeton and in our generation in general,” said Gregory. She also explained that the PVFP team, which includes other students, hopes to make a meaningful impact on sustainability at Princeton and to highlight the benefits of vertical farming.
In addition to being a great chance to improve sustainability on campus, PFVP has left a mark on the team members for other reasons. “It's wonderful being involved with a team where people from different academic and social backgrounds can come together to work on this project that we all care deeply about,” Gregory said.
Reached out to Dr. Shana S. Weber, Director of Sustainability Office, and Ms. Kristi Wiedemann, Assistant Director of Sustainability Office, were unable to be reached for comment before publication.
Future of the Prairie
FUTURE OF THE PRAIRIE
October 11, 2017 at 5:00 am | By DEVIN HEILMAN Staff Writer
LOREN BENOIT/Press From left, Coeur CEO Tom McNabb, Coeur Greens operations manager Kelly Lattin and Innovation Collective founder Nick Smoot pose for a photo in front of house at 1915 E. Mullan Ave in Coeur d’Alene. The house is a prototype for a future sustainable living community in Hayden.
A mixed-use sustainable village destined for Hayden is starting with a little old house in downtown Coeur d'Alene.
Coeur, a company that focuses on sustainable resources including power and food, recently purchased the house at 1915 E. Mullan Ave. to serve as a prototype for a sustainable living community and industrial campus in Hayden. Coeur purchased the 35 acres at the southeast corner of Hayden Avenue and Huetter Road in early 2016 and plans to start construction in the spring.
Coeur CEO Tom McNabb and Innovation Collective founder Nick Smoot, a partner in the project, are using the Mullan house as a demo site for the village.
"It's a simple model to see what we can do for starters," McNabb said Tuesday. "The word ‘sustainability,’ you never really know what it is, but we figure we’d try and figure it out."
Smoot said the community will be built on three core principles: outbound, sustainable and intellectual.
"Most people of this next generation want to live an outbound life in nature and having experiences in their community," Smoot said. "The idea of creating a whole village of people who have that mentality is something that's interesting as a housing development."
The "sustainable" principle is built upon dedication to low-cost, low-impact living where power sources such as wind and solar are maximized, gray water (mostly clean waste water from sinks, baths and kitchen appliances) is recycled, and native landscaping is used. Those involved in the project are researching and working on ways to expand even further into the sustainability aspect.
The third principle is "intellectual," meaning home owner associations and covenants, conditions and restrictions would encourage residents to read books, watch documentaries, help pay for educational guest speakers and otherwise maintain an intellectually stimulated community.
Smoot said he can imagine riding his bike into such a community, parking it at the community bike corral and walking to his house through a neighborhood where community fire pits generate conversation and serve as social gathering places. The houses are small (500 to 1,200 square feet), but provide enough space for their residents, and the community dining hall provides even more opportunities for people to meet and get to know each other.
"It makes me very happy," Smoot said. "That's the kind of place you want to live."
The solar-powered Coeur Technology Campus will be located just west of the village. It will house a solar farm to generate power for schools and public buildings, vertical farms to grow local produce, and a bottling plant to bottle local water at the source. It will also serve as a space where entrepreneurs and forward-thinkers can share ideas and put them into action.
"A lot of people don’t know it, but we have more sun hours per year than Florida,” McNabb said, “Solar, about five years ago, was 2 cents off because the rates for hydropower were cheap, but in the last five years the rates (for hydropower) are going up and the rates of hardware have gone down about 40 percent, so all of a sudden it makes sense.”
The 630-square-foot house on Mullan, built in 1930, would probably have been torn down if it had not been selected for this project. McNabb explained that the original structure will be kept as the inside is remodeled to be a studio-type dwelling that can be rented out on a short-term basis to give people an experience in sustainable living.
Tanks will be installed to recycle the gray water and help with temperature. The roof will be lined with solar panels, and energy-efficient appliances and products will be used, among other forward-thinking alterations that will boost the home's sustainability.
McNabb said a more precise estimate could be given near the house's completion date in the spring, but he believes the cost of giving the house a sustainable makeover will be somewhere around $50,000 or $60,000. About 20 people representing a wide variety of talent and expertise have already expressed interest in contributing to the project, he said.
The community is welcome to attend an open house from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday to check it out prior to its sustainable makeover and exchange ideas with those leading the project.
Info: www.coeurllc.com
Viability of Indoor Urban Agriculture is Focus of Research Grant
Viability of Indoor Urban Agriculture is Focus of Research Grant
By Krishna Ramanujan | October 12, 2017
A commercial CEA greenhouse operation producing leafy greens in eastern New York. Chris Kitchen/University Photography
Neil Mattson, associate professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science.
Growing crops in controlled environments – in greenhouses, plant factories and in vertical farms – provides alternatives to conventional farming by producing food year-round near metropolitan areas, reducing transportation costs and water use, and improving land-use efficiency. Such local systems also offer valuable educational and psychological benefits by connecting urban people to the food they consume.
At the same time, there is little concrete evidence to show how so-called controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) compares to conventional field agriculture in terms of energy, carbon and water footprints, profitability, workforce development and scalability.
Cornell will lead a project to answer these questions, thanks to a three-year, $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, through its new funding initiative called Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems.
“By putting all these pieces together – including energy, water, workforce development and economic viability – we hope to discover if CEAs make sense for producing food for the masses,” said Neil Mattson, the grant’s principal investigator and associate professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science.
Six projects included in the grant will look at:
Case studies: Food system analysis of case studies in metropolitan areas will examine where vegetables are currently sourced and the market channels they go through to reach consumers, such as supermarkets, retailers or restaurants. Researchers will model whether urban CEAs could replace a large fraction of this produce, and whether it makes sense for CEA produce to go through the same market channels or other ones that may suit them better. This project is led by Miguel Gómez, associate professor, and Charles Nicholson, adjunct associate professor, both in Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Computer modeling of energy and water use: Computer models of energy and water use for different crops in greenhouses, vertical farms and plant factories (indoor environments with artificial lighting and racks of plants) will be developed. The models will be calibrated with real-world data from greenhouse growth trials at Cornell and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). A 2008 study by Lou Albright at Cornell found that based on that year’s technologies, the carbon footprint to produce lettuce in a greenhouse in New York state was twice that of growing it in a field in Arizona or California. Other researchers have reported that CEAs use 20 times less water than field agriculture, since water can be recycled indoors. Mattson leads this effort with research associate Kale Harbick, also in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science.
Networking: The project will foster industry-to-research networks for facilitating the acceptance, adoption and improvement of metropolitan CEA systems. Anusuya Rangarajan, senior extension associate, will lead this project.
Nutritional value: Researchers will examine the nutritional value of produce from greenhouses and plant factories and comparing those values with CEA systems where lighting might be optimized for more healthful produce. Project leaders include Marianne Nyman, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Tessa Pocock, a senior research scientist, both at RPI.
Workforce needs: Cornell researchers are collaborating with the Association for Vertical Farming to assess the workforce needs of the urban CEA industry and develop programs to meet those needs and test if requirements are being met. Researchers will examine if, for example, all the tomatoes consumed in New York City were to be grown indoors, how many jobs at what education levels and training would be needed. Rangarajan leads this effort.
Training opportunities: Rangarajan and the Association for Vertical Farming will also create workforce training opportunities. They will spearhead outreach through conferences and events to share information. A forthcoming website will house a toolkit to assess the viability and resource availability of proposed urban agriculture projects.
“Urban agriculture is an increasingly touted way to connect producers with consumers, and this grant will help guide full development of this industry and do better to figure out where the best opportunities might be, as well as cases where it doesn’t make sense,” Mattson said.
STORY CONTACTS
Krishna Ramanujan
MPA ESP Student to Transform Urban Farming
MPA ESP Student to Transform Urban Farming
BY LAURA PIRAINO | October 6, 2017
MPA-ESP student Alexander Rudnicki is a civil engineer (Columbia University ’10), who comes to SIPA from AeroFarms, an urban farming pioneer. Rudnicki speaks to MPA ESP intern Shagorika Ghosh about the urban farming industry, the enriching experiences of the ESP program, and his plans for the future.
How did your background working with innovative and transformative urban farms lead you to pursuing theMPA-ESP program?
I was the first engineer working at AeroFarms, where being the plant manager for over three years allowed me to experience the entire spectrum of working in the industry. For example, there was a day in particular that I remember, when I spent all day working in the plant training people, supervising operations, as well as having to present our work to the Duke of Westminster, who is one of our largest funders. Working at AeroFarms allowed me to experience the reality of working in the sector–how slowly things can move in real life, how implementation of projects needs teamwork and lots of capital.
AeroFarms was a vehicle for agricultural companies to engage in urban farming. People are excited and enthusiastic about urban farming, but it is a nascent industry with respect to policy and technology, so it’s kind of like the Wild West right now. There isn’t much incentive for farming companies to move into urban areas at this point. I wanted to explore the confluence of urban farming technology and traditional farming techniques, and studying environmental policy seemed to be the way forward.
What specifically motivated you to choose the MPA-ESP program at Columbia University?
I want to shape what the future industry looks like, and how the industry can be developed. The MPA-ESP program really equips me to do that. There is a focus on the environment, but it also takes into account social perspectives. The length of the program and its rigor is definitely another factor. It is a shorter, more intensive program, and the course structure and hands-on experience is great for mid-career professionals because it doesn’t feel like a full step back into school, but more like a half step back. At the same time, it’s great to be at SIPA, which allows you to be flexible, branch out and take different electives. Being at Columbia has also broadened my horizons, and it’s possible to keep abreast of everything that is happening in the industry. A lot of avenues then open up–working in policy or with companies in different areas of the urban farming industry.
What are your favorite classes and why?
One of my favorite classes has been Leadership and Urban Transformation, taught by Professor Michael Nutter, the former mayor of Philadelphia. He brings his long time public service perspective, and incredible insights into the actual implementation of policies, and the challenges of politics involved in policy implementation. I am also enjoying Sustainable Finance with Professor Bruce Kahn, which covers components of corporate finance, sustainability accounting, and sustainability metrics.
How has living and studying in NYC contributed to your experience in this program?
New York City is taking efforts to be at the forefront of sustainability, and this is being supported through high level executive action as well. OneNYC (formerly the Bloomberg Administration’s PlanNYC) is the sustainability plan for the City of New York. I am very interested in their Zero Waste initiative, and I intend to volunteer for the city in the future.
What has been your experience with your Environmental Science and Policy cohort been like?
In the MPA-ESP cohort, we work collaboratively for workshop presentations and other group projects. After multiple projects, we all have worked and interacted with at least half of the entire class. Our cohort is a very close-knit one, and I make it a point to interact with my fellow classmates. It has been very interesting to know their backgrounds, their interests and what they want to pursue. In my role as the ESP Treasurer, I also work to understand what the needs of the cohort are, what events and speakers they would be interested in.
What are your plans once you graduate? What are some skills and tools you have developed over the last year that you can use?
I would love to work with city planning offices to integrate urban farming into city planning and layouts. It’s encouraging to see cities like Detroit that have outlined an urban farming policy. It’s a great start and I want to be involved in such urban initiatives after I graduate.
I came to SIPA to learn how to create policy that would shape the future of urban farming. Through my classes, I am developing skills to be able to do that. I am learning to adopt a systems thinking approach towards earth systems through classes such as Climatology and Hydrology, that allows for a broader perspective when looking at the sustainability industry as a whole. Through my Sustainable Finance class, I am learning not just how to evaluate sustainability quantitatively, but also learn and analyze trends in the industry that are attractive to investors. All of these will equip me to further develop the urban farming industry and integrate traditional techniques and new technologies.
'An Overwhelming Case For Action' - Expert Panel Identifies Unacceptable Toll of Food and Farming Systems On Human Health
09.10.2017
NEW REPORT: 'An overwhelming case for action' - expert panel identifies unacceptable toll of food and farming systems on human health
(9th October - Rome) Industrial food and farming systems are making people sick in a variety of ways, and are generating staggering human and economic costs - according to a major new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
Decisive action can be taken on the basis of what we know, the Panel found, but is held back by the unequal power of food system actors to set the terms of debate and to influence policy.
Lead author Cecilia Rocha said: “Food systems are making us sick. Unhealthy diets are the most obvious link, but are only one of many pathways through which food and farming systems affect human health.”
“This means that there are multiple entry points for building healthier food systems. We must urgently address these impacts wherever they occur, and in parallel we must address the root causes of inequitable, unsustainable and unhealthy practices in food systems.”
Launched today at the UN Committee on World Food Security in Rome, the report places the debilitating health impacts of inadequate diets side by side with environmental health risks (e.g. nitrate-contaminated drinking water and the spread antimicrobial resistance) and the endemic occupational hazards facing food and farmworkers.
IPES-Food found that many of the severest health conditions afflicting populations around the world - from respiratory diseases to a range of cancers and systematic livelihood stresses- are linked to industrial food and farming practices, i.e. chemical-intensive agriculture, concentrated livestock production, the mass production and marketing of ultra-processed foods, and deregulated global supply chains.
The economic costs of these impacts are huge and likely to grow. Malnutrition costs the world $3.5 trillion per year, while obesity alone is estimated to cost $760 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, combined EU and US losses from exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals amount to $557 billion per year, while anti-microbrial resistant infections are already thought to be incurring $20-34 billion of annual costs in the US.
IPES-Food co-chair Olivia Yambi said: “What is troubling is how systematically these risks are generated - at different nodes of the chain and in different parts of the world.”
Fellow co-chair Olivier De Schutter, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, added: “When all of these health impacts are considered collectively, the grounds for reform are compelling. And when health impacts are placed alongside social and environmental impacts, and the mounting costs they generate, the case for action is overwhelming. It is now clearer than ever that healthy people and a healthy planet are co-dependent.”
The report found that those without power or voice are often exposed to the greatest health risks in food systems, meaning that these impacts often go unseen, undocumented and unaddressed. "Here as elsewhere," De Schutter said, "political disempowerment and marginalization goes hand in hand with risks to lives and livelihoods."
Furthermore, the health impacts of food systems are interconnected, self-reinforcing, and complex. They are caused by many agents, and exacerbated by climate change, unsanitary conditions, and poverty – factors which are shaped by food and farming systems.
Rocha said: “The industrial food and farming model that systematically generates negative health impacts also generates highly unequal power relations. Powerful actors are therefore able to shape our understanding of food-health linkages, promoting solutions that leave the root causes of ill health unaddressed.”
“The complexity of health impacts in food systems is real and challenging, but should not be an excuse for inaction. Urgent steps can and must be taken to reform food system practices, and to transform the ways in which knowledge is gathered and transmitted, understandings are forged, and priorities are set.”
IPES-Food identified five key leverage points for building healthier food systems: i) promoting food systems thinking at all levels; ii) reasserting scientific integrity and research as a public good; iii) bringing the positive impacts of alternative food systems to light; iv) adopting the precautionary principle; and, v) building integrated food policies under participatory governance.
The report, commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, builds on IPES-Food’s first thematic report, ‘From Uniformity to Diversity’ (2016), which identified factors locking in the industrial food and farming model, and called for a paradigm shift towards diversified agroecological systems.
Read the Full Report: Unravelling the Food–Health Nexus: Addressing practices, political economy, and power relations to build healthier food systems
Read the Executive Summary.