Cooked Up For Climate, UAE's High-Tech Food Plan Pays Off in Pandemic

MAY 27, 2020

Rabiya Jaffery

ABU DHABI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In the past four years, the United Arab Emirates has grown a small but rising share of its own organic tomatoes, aiming to shore up food security in an import-dependent desert country.

The effort - part of a broader push to produce more home-grown food amid fears climate change could trigger instability in the global food trade - started after the country was hit by food export bans during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Today, the move to build up food resilience is paying off early in the face of another crisis: the coronavirus pandemic.

When the United Arab Emirates (UAE) went into lockdown in April to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, residents had the same reaction as millions of others around the world - they started panic-buying.

The instinct to stock up made sense in a country where more than 80% of food is imported, said Ismahane Elouafi, director-general of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA).

Nonetheless supermarket shelves have remained fully stocked, partly because the UAE has long had policies in place to ensure an uninterrupted supply of food from abroad, she noted.

But in the face of the pandemic, the UAE’s confidence that it will continue to have enough food is bolstered by its success in growing its own, using innovations like vertical farming and climate-resilient crops, she added.

“Thanks to the work being done to harness the benefits of innovation, agriculture is becoming possible and profitable in a country with harsh climatic conditions,” Elouafi said.

According to data from the World Bank, the contribution of agriculture to the country’s gross domestic product rose from $2.39 billion in 2012 to $3.06 billion in 2018.

The UAE’s Ministry of Food Security declined to respond to a request for comment.

FARMING WITH FEWER RESOURCES

Currently ranked 21 out of 113 countries on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Food Security Index, the UAE aims to be in the top 10 by 2021 and number one by mid-century.

By then, the federal government hopes half the food Emiratis consume will be produced locally, compared to 20% today.

Under the UAE’s National Food Security Strategy - which was officially launched in 2018, but had already been woven into government policy for several years before - the country has worked to boost domestic food production.

It has built infrastructure, including complexes for cattle-breeding - and introduced financial measures, from exempting value-added tax on food produced on local farms to paying subsidies on fodder.

But traditional farming methods can only go so far in a country with limited supplies of freshwater and arable land.

Last year, the World Resources Institute classified the UAE as under “extremely high water stress”, meaning more than 80% of the available surface and groundwater supply is withdrawn on average every year.

The bulk of that water is used by the agricultural sector. Combined with a warming climate and a growing population, this is causing available groundwater levels to drop by 0.5 cm (0.2 inches) per year.

To meet the country’s freshwater needs, the government is increasingly turning to energy-intensive desalination methods.

Another challenge is that less than 1% of the UAE’s land is arable, according to the World Bank.

The focus is on finding ways to farm with fewer resources - which is where technology and experimenting with new crops can help, said Sajid Maqsood, associate professor in the College of Food and Agriculture at United Arab Emirates University.

“Urban and vertical farming has to be an important part of the strategy,” he said by phone.

YEAR-ROUND FRUIT & VEG

Farming in the UAE has been moving in a high-tech direction over the past decade.

In 2009, for example, the Middle Eastern country had 50 hydroponic farms, where plants are grown without soil using nutrient-infused water. Today, it has more than 1,000, according to the ICBA.

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UAE Based Company ‘Smart Acres’ to Launch Hydroponic Vertical Farming in 2020

Nikita Arya 7 June 2020

United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been putting countless efforts in boosting agriculture in the country. The country is creating its presence in the global market with its outstanding marketing of fresh local produce. In the efforts to push the country’s agriculture to new heights, a company named ‘Smart Acres’ will be launching a new Hydroponic Vertical Farm, which is anticipated to come in the third quarter of 2020. This new hydroponic plant will be set up in Abu Dhabi and the company aims to expand it all over the country in the following years.

Smart Acres has designed the system using IoT-based technology, which will help the growers in monitoring and growing produce with the consumption of fewer resources. The hydroponics usually generate high quality of crops, and with IoT based technology, the growers could easily grow their produce.

Another unique differentiating thing about the farm is that all the plants are going to be stacked vertically. In vertical farms, the crops are stacked into one another, which creates room for more saplings. The environment needs to be controlled with no natural sunlight or soil. The nutrients are dissolved in the water-based solvent and reach the plants through roots. Roots are generally kept in the water-based system but can also be kept in other solids, which again will contain the necessary nutrients to help the plants grow.

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The Sickness In Our Food Supply

By Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books | June 11, 2020 Issue

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.

On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry.3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection.

When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations.

Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive.

The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded.

Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6

Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7 Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.

Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line.

Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable. It is the men and women who debone chicken carcasses flying down a line at 175 birds a minute, or pick salad greens under the desert sun, or drive refrigerated produce trucks across the country who are keeping us fed and keeping the wheels of our society from flying off. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. This should give food and agricultural workers a rare degree of political leverage at the very moment they are being disproportionately infected. Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle.8 This is probably just the beginning. Perhaps their new leverage will allow them to win the kinds of wages, protections, and benefits that would more accurately reflect their importance to society.

So far, the produce sections of our supermarkets remain comparatively well stocked, but what happens this summer and next fall, if the outbreaks that have crippled the meat industry hit the farm fields? Farmworkers, too, live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. Many growers depend on guest workers from Mexico to pick their crops; what happens if the pandemic—or the Trump administration, which is using the pandemic to justify even more restrictions on immigration—prevents them from coming north this year?

The food chain is buckling. But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets; the popularity of community-supported agriculture (CSA) is taking off, as people who are cooking at home sign up for weekly boxes of produce from regional growers. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting social-distancing rules and touchless payment systems. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.

The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.

It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.

Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9

Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10

A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant.

But to be comprehensive, this post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.

—May 12, 2020

An earlier version of this article included an incomplete credit for “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” which was a collaboration between FERN and Mother Jones. The footnote has been amended.

1. This history is recounted in Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2011), pp. 135–138. ↩

2. See Claire Kelloway, “Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?,” Washington Monthly, April 28, 2020. ↩

3. See “In America, the Virus Threatens a Meat Industry That Is Too Concentrated,” The Economist, April 30, 2020. ↩

4. See Leah Douglas, “Mapping Covid-19 in Meat and Food Processing Plants,” Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN), April 22, 2020. FERN has covered this story extensively and compiled statistics. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN and Mother Jones, May 1, 2020. Civil Eats, FERN, and Mother Jones have done an excellent job of covering the outbreaks in the meat industry. ↩

5. See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩

6. See Tyler Whitley, “Don’t Blame Farmers Who Have to Euthanize Their Animals. Blame the Companies They Work For,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩

7. It’s worth remembering that the federal government actively promotes meat consumption in myriad ways, from USDA advertising campaigns—“Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner”—to exempting feedlots from provisions of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, to the dietary guidelines it issues and the heavy subsidies it gives for animal feed. ↩

8. See, for example, Daniel A. Medina, “As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike,” The Intercept, April 28, 2020. ↩

9. See Shikha Garg et al., “Hospitalization Rates and Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Laboratory-Confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1–30, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 69, No. 15 (April 17, 2020). ↩

10. See Xiaomin Luo et al., “Prognostic Value of C-Reactive Protein in Patients with COVID-19,” medRxiv, March 23, 2020. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Are Vertical Farms Even Remotely Efficient? Putting A Figure On Plant Factories

Researchers in the Netherlands are calculating the feasibility of vertical farming in urban areas.

“The main goal is to put a figure on vertical farming,” Wageningen Universit & Research’s Luuk Graamans tells FoodNavigator.

https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2019/05/15/Are-vertical-farms-even-remotely-efficient-Putting-a-figure-on-plant-factories?utm_source=copyright&utm_medium=OnSite&utm_campaign=copyright

By Flora Southey | Food Navigator | May 15, 2019

USDA Announces $3 Million in Urban Agriculture Grants

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the availability of $3 million for grants through its new Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production. The competitive grants will support the development of urban agriculture and innovative production projects through two categories, Planning Projects and Implementation Projects. USDA will accept applications on Grants.gov until midnight July 6, 2020.

“These grant opportunities underscore USDA’s commitment to all segments of agriculture, including swiftly expanding areas of urban agriculture,” Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation Bill Northey said. “Such projects have the potential to address important issues such as food access and education and to support innovative ways to increase local food production in urban environments.”

“We are proud to be able to offer support through this cross-agency effort,” said Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Greg Ibach. “In creating this grant opportunity, USDA will build upon its years of experience providing technical support, grant funding and research to help farmers and local and urban food businesses grow.”

Planning ProjectsUSDA is making available $1 million for Planning Projects that initiate or expand efforts of farmers, gardeners, citizens, government officials, schools and other stakeholders in urban areas and suburbs. Projects may target areas of food access, education, business and start-up costs for new farmers and development of policies related to zoning and other needs of urban production.

Implementation ProjectsUSDA is making available $2 million for Implementation Projects that accelerate existing and emerging models of urban, indoor and other agricultural practices that serve multiple farmers. Projects will improve local food access and collaborate with partner organizations and may support infrastructure needs, emerging technologies, educational endeavors and urban farming policy implementation. 

Webinar A webinar, which will be held on June 3, 2020, from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, will provide an overview of the grants’ purpose, project types, eligibility and basic requirements for submitting an application. Information on how to register for and participate in the webinar, or listen to the recording, will be posted at farmers.gov/urban.

More information The Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production was established through the 2018 Farm Bill. It includes representatives from many USDA agencies, including Farm Service Agency and Agricultural Marketing Service, and is led by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. More information is available at farmers.gov/urban.

Additional resources that may be of interest to urban agriculture entities include AMS grants to improve domestic and international opportunities for U.S. growers and producers and FSA loans.

Horti Daily | Monday, May 11, 2020

The Case Against More Ethanol - It's Simply Bad for Environment

Ethanol, which seemed like a good idea when huge federal subsidies and mandates were put in place a decade ago, now seems like a very poor idea indeed. Yet despite years of bad ethanol reviews, some prominent figures (including former Senator Tim Wirth and attorney C. Boyden Gray in the accompanying article) offer a revanchist argument: Ethanol is not really so bad after all, and we should significantly increase its blending with gasoline from 10 to 30 percent. As Samuel Johnson remarked of a second marriage, this narrative reads like a triumph of hope over experience.

The essence of the argument that we need more, not less, ethanol in our gas tanks is linked to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s upcoming mid-term review of President Obama’s fuel economy standards, established in 2012. Ethanol boosters say now is the time to ramp up the ethanol/gasoline blend to 30 percent because it will reduce harmful particulate pollution, improve gas mileage, and lower gas prices. As for the environmental costs of increased corn production, they contend that vastly improved agricultural methods are steadily reducing the use of chemicals and fertilizers on cornfields.

The truth is, however, that growing corn in the U.S. heartland still has a major environmental impact — one that will only increase if we add even more ethanol to our gasoline. Higher-ethanol blends still produce significant levels of air pollution, reduce fuel efficiency, jack up corn and other food prices, and have been treated with skepticism by some car manufacturers for the damage they do to engines. Growing corn to run our cars was a bad idea 10 years ago. Increasing our reliance on corn ethanol in the coming decades is doubling down on a poor bet.

The effort to rehabilitate corn ethanol is linked to the perceived insufficiency of federal mandates — known as the Renewable Fuel Standard — requiring an escalating quantity of ethanol from corn and cellulosic sources to be blended with gasoline annually until 2022. Cellulosic ethanol, which was supposed to supplant that made from corn in meeting the mandate, has proven a monumental disappointment, and the EPA has taken a big step back from requiring its use.

To continue to meet the renewable fuel mandate will require further use of corn-based ethanol, which is constrained by the so-called “blend wall” — a limit related to current engine design — because most of the ethanol now available is only blended with gasoline at a level of 10 percent. The ethanol industry and others are proposing raising the blend level to 30 percent. Without such a break in the blend wall, the renewable fuel standards mandates are in trouble. At present, though, fewer than 2 percent of filling stations in the U.S. sell higher than 10 percent ethanol blends.

Shrouded in the political fumes and corrosive influence of special interests, the economic fundamentals of ethanol are clear in the light of day. Two prices determine its profitability: the price of corn and the price of oil. The higher the price of corn, the more expensive it is to divert from feeding animals or making high-fructose corn syrup and instead distill it as alcohol fuel for cars and trucks. Second, the higher the price of oil, the more economically ethanol can be blended with gasoline. When corn is cheap and oil prices are high, ethanol margins are fat. But when corn prices rise and oil prices fall, ethanol margins are flat.

As ethanol production took off in the mid-2000s, aided and abetted by a panoply of federal and state subsidies, it chewed up so much corn so fast that it was hoisted on its own petard as corn prices rose to record highs in 2007 while oil prices weakened. Corn prices then fell back as farmers responded to high prices with record plantings. Today, oil prices remain low and corn prices are strengthening again. Despite recent weakness, corn prices remain nearly double their level of 2005 when the major elements of ethanol subsidies and mandates began to be put in place.

The predictable weakness in ethanol margins resulting from low oil prices has led even Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of ethanol’s major advocates, to reconsider its stake in its ethanol investment after years of aggressive subsidy-seeking. Reuters and Bloomberg both reported that against a backdrop of lower crude oil prices, ADM is looking at “strategic options” in its ethanol business after spending $1.3 billion since 2006 to build two new ethanol plants and seeing its fourth-quarter 2015 profits fall.

In the face of these tribulations, the revisionist ethanol narrative makes a number of shaky assumptions. First is that a reevaluation of a 30-percent ethanol blend, or E30, is timely in light of the EPA’s current fuel economy standards review, because its efficiency in high-performance engines may be an improvement over the losses in miles per gallon with a 10-percent ethanol blend, or E10.

E85 fuel in “flex-fuel” vehicles may increase ozone-related mortality, asthma, and hospitalizations.

To date, ethanol has been antithetical to fuel economy. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, vehicles typically go 3 to 4 percent fewer miles per gallon on E10 and 4 to 5 percent fewer miles per gallon on E15, because ethanol packs only about two-thirds the BTU’s of gasoline. Advocates of E30 argue that such inefficiencies can be overcome if high-compression engines are tuned to use the fuel and are certified under EPA rules, making such engines more akin to racecars. But this would mean further EPA regulatory backing for E30 to assure its availability.

A key argument of E30 proponents is that higher-ethanol blends would reduce the need for alternative fuel additives that may have negative health effects. In support, they cite studies related to the impacts of aromatic hydrocarbons from gasoline additives used to boost octane, which lead in turn to secondary particulates with impacts on human health. Without question, hydrocarbon fuels have negative health impacts. But ethanol is no exception. Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson estimates that E85 fuel in “flex-fuel” vehicles may increase ozone-related mortality, asthma, and hospitalizations by 4 percent compared to gasoline by 2020 for the U.S. as a whole and 9 percent in Los Angeles alone.

Apart from the scientific evidence that ethanol-based particles in air can kill people and make them sick, more recent scientific analysis links corn for ethanol to declining bee populations, with potentially catastrophic implications for many other high-value agricultural crops (almonds, apples) that depend on these insects for pollination. A recent study found that declines in bee populations are greatest in areas of intense agriculture in the Midwest corn belt and California’s Central Valley, both of which have few of the flowering species, such as goldenrod, that are so important to bee survival. “These results,” the study noted, “reinforce recent evidence that increased demand for corn in biofuel production has intensified threats to natural habitats in corn-growing regions.”

The Environmental Working Group’s Emily Cassidy has written that moving from E10 to E30 would mean “more carbon emissions, more toxic pollutants into drinking water, more toxic algae blooms, and higher water bills for Midwestern residents.” A preview of the role of ethanol in the climate debate occurred during the California Air Resources Board’s 2009 assessment of the full climate impact of ethanol, one of the first assessments to consider the indirect land-use effects of expanded crops and deforestation to meet biofuel demand.

That ethanol demand has no effect on corn prices would come as news to economists documenting its continuing pivotal role.

While the overall impacts on climate remain uncertain, there is no clear evidence that ethanol is part of the solution rather than the problem. If anything, a ranking of nine energy sources in relation to global climate found that cellulosic and corn-based ethanol (E85) were ranked last of nine technologies with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste.

Third, proponents of E30 blends submit that corn used for ethanol — now about 30 to 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop — is no longer a threat to food prices due to increases in agricultural productivity and that, anyway, U.S. corn is fed mainly to livestock. The part about livestock is absolutely true. Yet even though a portion of the corn product distilled into ethanol can be recovered for animal feed, this does not mean that corn directly available for feed has not been reduced by allocating close to 30 to 40 percent to ethanol. Meat-producing animals consumed an average of 38 percent of the U.S. corn crop from 2012 to 2016, about the same as used for ethanol. If ethanol blends were raised to 30 percent, does anyone really think that there would be no impact on the prices paid by consumers for corn-fed chicken, eggs, pork, beef, and milk?

The idea that ethanol demand has no effect on corn prices would come as news to economists documenting its continuing pivotal role. Brian Wright, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley has noted that real corn prices have nearly doubled since the ethanol mandates of 2005-2007. “By the standards of agricultural policy changes, the introduction of grain and oilseeds biofuels for use in transport fuels was abrupt, and the effects on the balance of supply and demand was dramatic,” he has written.

E30 advocates seem to have recently made a novel discovery: Conservation tillage is turning corn growing into a “carbon sink” and is now practiced on nearly two-thirds of all U.S. cropland. Reality check from the Corn Belt: Conservation tillage has been practiced intensively for more than 40 years and has shown real environmental improvements over the erosive open plowing of the past. But as to the extent of its use on cornfields, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in 2015 that such tillage practices were used on a little more than 30 percent of all U.S. corn acres in 2010-11, mostly outside the Corn Belt This is a lower percentage than on soybeans, wheat, or even highly erosive cotton.

Ethanol sales are actually projected to decline, from 135 billion gallons to 125 billion gallons in 2022.

Ethanol demand for corn has also contributed to major withdrawals of acres from the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which were taken out of production precisely because they were highly vulnerable to erosion.

Then there is the issue of vehicle engine efficiency. Here, the argument for E30 is supported by recent experimental work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which shows that E30’s increased torque delivers more power to smaller, specialized engines so as to achieve rough miles-per-gallon parity with current E10 fuels. Assuming engine designs can be innovated and E30 can be made widely available, it may be possible to overcome the concentrated resistance to ethanol among consumer groups and the auto industry — in the words of a Mercedes-Benz engineer, to make “the dog like the dog food.” To date, however, the dogs’ appetite for ethanol has been weak.

Ethanol sales are actually projected to decline, according to a 2014 Congressional Budget Office report, from 135 billion gallons to 125 billion gallons in 2022, which is one reason behind the urgency of the ethanol industry to adopt higher blend levels. The American Automobile Association (AAA) has objected to ethanol blend increases even to 15 percent, noting that it could cause accelerated engine wear and failure, as well as fuel-system damage.

For this and a host of other reasons, the push to substantially boost the use of corn-based ethanol to power our cars is extremely ill advised. As the American Interest noted of the Renewable Fuel Standard and the drive for E30, “It’s rare that a policy comes along that offers so little to so many distinct groups of shareholders. In that respect, perhaps there is something impressive about the Renewable Fuels Standard: It’s found that elusive policy sour spot.”

By C. Ford Runge | Yale Environment 360 | May 25, 2016

C. Ford Runge is the McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota, where he also holds appointments in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Department of Forest Resources. He is former director of the university's Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy and has written for Foreign Affairs

Lead Photograph: Corn fields in the United States heartland. DAN THORNBERG/SHUTTERSTOCK

Eating Away At Earth: How Agriculture And Consumption of Animals Shapes The Planet

Agricultural villages surround the Euphrates River in the Abu Kamal district of Syria.

This area is part of the “Fertile Crescent” — a large region spanning parts of present-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt — where settled farming first emerged more than 10,000 years ago.

In addition to plants like figs, peas, lentils, and chickpeas, this region also domesticated animals including cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, cats, and geese.

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Apr 19, 2020

Source imagery: Maxar

Our latest story on plant and animal agriculture

Elon Musk’s Brother Wants to Pioneer The Future of Agriculture

Vertical agriculture internal farming method where crops are grown in layers, often without soil. This practice is becoming more popular and important as urban populations grow enormously and the available plots decrease.

While vertical farming is not a new concept, These eco-friendly farms are expanding rapidly.

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Little brother Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Named the 2017 Global Economic Entrepreneur of the Year, the “Global Social Entrepreneur,” Square Roots started an in-house urban agriculture company based in Brooklyn. The mission of Square Roots is to bring fresh local produce to nearby cities. making the world young generation involved in urban agriculture.

“When I was a kid, the only way I could sit down and connect with the family was cooking a meal,” Musk, founder and chief executive of Square Roots, told CNN Business in an email.

“Getting involved on the internet, especially in the late 90s, was very exciting and I wouldn’t change anything about those experiences, but my passion has always been food,” Musk said. “The time Elon and I were selling Zip2, our first internet company, we knew I wanted to get food and become a trained chef.” He moved to New York and enrolled at the International Cooking Center.

Musk said the company plans to open Square Super Promotional “Super Farm” (25 climate-controlled containers, cold storage, biosecurity infrastructure, and everything else to scale a vertical farm) in at least three months.

Since its inception, Square Roots has grown more than 120 crops, including greens, vegetables, and strawberries.

The company is not the first of its kind. Startups like Silicon Valley’s Plenty, founded in 2013 and sponsored by Jeff Bezos, the space is also beginning to dominate.

“Environmentalists, urban farmers, architects, agronomists, and public health experts have joined forces with this revolution to save the scarce future of ultra-urbanized food,” Kheir Al-Kodmany, professor of sustainable urban design at the University of Illinois at Chicago said in a report.

It involves a variety of techniques, such as hydroponics, which uses solutions containing mineral nutrients in a water solvent; aquaponics, which uses aquatic creatures (such as fish and snails) and plants in water; and aeroponics, which grow plants in the air.

In terms of job creation, rapid climate change will keep millions of traditional farmers out of business, but vertical farmers will not be affected, according to the microbiologist Dickson Despommier, emeritus professor of public health and environmental health at Columbia University.

Although vertical farming originated in the early 1900s, Despommier has recently become popular. More than 20 years ago, she began teaching in the Columbia class called Medical Ecology.

Despommier spent a decade with his students growing indoor cultivation. “Ten years ago, there was no vertical farm,” said LED grow lights, which have dramatically improved the efficiency of agriculture over the past five years, making indoor growing cheaper and more reliable.

“People want local food because they have lost confidence in the industrial food system, providing thousands of miles of high-calorie, low-nutrient foods for whom with little transparency and how,” said Peggs Square Roots director. .

At the same time, the world’s population is growing rapidly and urbanizing. Peggs said it threatens climate change-related food supplies as it forces the industry to find new ways to grow food quickly.

Peggs is optimistic about raising money for vertical farming. “A lot of smart money and capital comes into the space,” he said. “The quality of food that can be produced in these indoor systems is at least the same as the best food you can buy.”

Despommier said cities will eventually be able to grow “everything they eat” from farms within city limits. “If an outside farm fails, the farmer will have to wait until next year to start again,” he said. “Domestic farms also fail, but indoor farmers can start again within a week.”

Is Vertical Farming The Future of Agriculture?

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ANNA DOMANSKA, 

MARCH 14, 2020

To address these issues of resource scarcity and loss, many scientists and innovators have been hard at work to come up with a solution. A viable option that has come up is controlled environment agriculture, or weather or climate-proof farming, or vertical farming. This is increasingly being utilized in urban centers, arid zones, and some populous Asian countries.

This kind of farming is done in vertical rack systems as opposed to conventional farming. Oda has successfully experimented with this technology in arid zones and urban centers in Beijing.

His company has successfully used an abandoned shipment container to grow vegetables in the dry climate of Dubai.

Vertical farming is finding more acceptance commercially with innovations in efficiency and affordability, says Oda.

So how does this vertical farming work?

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A lot of artificial elements are introduced to take the place of sunlight, water, etc. LEDs are used to provide energy in place of sunlight. Nutrients are pumped directly into the root zones of the vegetables, which are recyclable, for plant growth. Hydroponics and aeroponics systems are used for efficiency. Soil substitutes like polyurethane sponges, biodegradable peat moss, and even inorganic materials like perlite and clay pellets are used.

Racking systems can be16 to 14 stories high. A sophisticated automation and monitoring system is used to increase productivity, efficiency, and consistency of the food.

The benefits of indoor vertical farming are many. There is year-round production, which is of consistent quality, and one can be assured of a certain quantifiable output. It is great in terms of resource efficiency. Water, fertilizers and land use goes down by almost 99 percent in this type of farming. Moreover, as the system is weatherproof, the need for fertilizers is nil.

The produce can be made totally chemical-free. It gives 350 times more food per square meter than conventional farming. It will shorten the supply chain and maintain the nutritional content as the growth centers will be near urban and city centers. Also, such type of farming can be seamlessly integrated into the urban landscape with the utilization of underused civic structures, office corners, etc.

Considering the advantages, you may wonder why there is no widespread adoption of the method. The reason being it is a very energy-intensive program. Also, the variety of vegetables produced like this is limited. The cost of production is still very high for it to be widely adopted. For a better energy solution, higher efficient LED lights are being developed. Another option is to use laser lights for plant growth. Fiber optics cables to channelize sunlight to the facility in daylight hours is also another option.

Vertical farming may be the solution to an imminent water and food crisis that the world is facing. The biggest advantage is it will give equitable access to nutritional food to the most underprivileged, too once it becomes a common practice and is widely accepted. Still, a lot needs to be done before it becomes a shared reality.

Stuart Oda has floated his own vertical farming company called Alesca Life.

TAGS: AGRICULTURE, INDOOR VERTICAL FARMING, VERTICAL FARMING

UK’s Urban Agritech Sector Welcomes Announcement of Official Representative Collective

UKUAT Formalized As A Membership

Organization For Urban Agriculture

06 February 2020

The UK’s evolving agritech sector today welcomes the formation of a new membership group – the UK Urban AgriTech Collective (UKUAT).

UKUAT brings together the UK’s key players in modern agricultural technologies. It is a cross-industry group devoted to promoting the application of high-tech food production in urban areas to improve both local and wider food security by relieving dependence on resource-intensive supply chains. It will also be exploring the social, operational and metabolic synergies urban agritech can exploit through its integrations with the built environment which are conducive to more dynamic local economies and richer placemaking.

UKUAT’s 25-strong membership includes commercial urban farmers, multinational technology companies, renewable energy companies, architects, built environment professionals, academics, research-based organizations and more. It hopes to grow this number to 75 over the next two years and operates with a common representative voice to share information, educate and advocate for further adoption of urban agriculture in the UK. It will influence policy and help shape the debate around how high-tech food production in urban and peri-urban areas addresses increasing demands for a more transparent, sustainable and resilient UK food system.

Founder and Director Mark Horler commented: "We founded UKUAT to amplify the collective voice and activities of the agritech industry in the UK. As it continues to grow rapidly, and with that rate of expansion accelerating, the UK is positioned to be an international leader, both in the development of agricultural technology and its implications for more sustainable and resilient food systems"

Oscar Rodriguez, Director of design consultancy Architecture & food and UKUAT member said: “The UKUAT community is coming together at a very interesting time. Concerns over UK food security have emerged following Brexit and UKUAT believes leveraging agricultural technology and expanding our indigenous food production capacity while engaging urbanites to be more conscientious about their eating patterns are crucial ends of a worthy proposition.”

UKUAT was founded in 2017 by Mark Horler and formalized in January 2020. It continues to grow its presence in the UK and is collaborating with numerous international organizations to advance agritech solutions in urban and peri-urban environments across the world.

 -          ENDS -

Sent on behalf of UKUAT. For more information please contact: Mark Horler, UKUAT - email:  info@ukuat.org

As Close To A Crystal Ball On Brexit As You’re Going To Get

Next month the UK will formally begin withdrawing from the European Union. How will that affect your market and your supply chain? What are the implications and are you prepared?

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Agricultural Trade After Brexit
Caroline Heil
Associate M&A Corporate
Ernst & Young

Agriculture has a prominent role in the European Union (EU) and agricultural trade is one of the most important parts of the Community’s Common Market. The development of a customs union and free movement of agricultural products was - from its beginning in the 1950s - always framed by the idea of a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to be established among the Member States. With the United Kingdom (UK) as a strong player on the ag market leaving the EU, an influential voice in CAP will be gone. But the relationship between the UK and EU after the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020 that was agreed upon in the Withdrawal Agreement, is still unclear and subject to negotiations.

In the session Agricultural Trade after Brexit, we will focus on the influence Brexit will most likely have on agricultural trade and the ag market in Europe and what trade between EU and UK might be like as of 1st January 2021. We will build and face different scenarios likely to happen and outline potential threats, but also opportunities that may come with Brexit.

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Women in Agribusiness Summit Europe.

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Minette Batters To Deliver The Keynote Address

Minette Batters is the first female president in the 112-year history of the National Farmers' Union. She has been called the most powerful farmer in the UK. Join us as she shares her insights into one of today's most pressing agricultural issues.

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"How Farming Can Help Mitigate Climate Change"
Minette Batters
President
National Farmers' Union

Farming and food are much maligned as a problem of the modern age, but it’s rarely recognized for its adaptability and phenomenal successes. For too long, farming has been on the wrong end of the climate debate, rarely recognized for its role in the carbon cycle and even more rarely recognized for the enormous potential of agriculture to deliver a range of solutions for mitigating anthropogenic carbon emissions.

The NFU has a vision for UK agriculture to have a Net Zero contribution to climate change by 2040. The NFU is optimistic about the future role of farming in producing climate-friendly food, protecting the environment and fulfilling our moral imperative to produce safe, sustainable and affordable food at home and for our customers overseas. Ms. Batters will present the NFU vision, industry action and the critical need for the government to get agricultural policy and trade policy aligned.

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How Vertical Farming is Part of a "Multi-Agriculturalism" Food System

The climate crisis is happening (as for some time already), and agriculture is a key protagonist. As elegantly explained by Nazim Gruda, professor at the Department of Horticultural Science of Bonn University: “Agriculture/horticulture and climate change have a dual interaction. On the one hand, the environment is affected by activities associated with agricultural food production, which contributes to climate change; on the other, the impacts arising from such activities backfire by changing the environmental conditions, thus affecting agriculture and horticulture.”

by Michele Butturini

Vertical farming is often presented as a revolutionary agricultural system of manifold qualities. It sometimes happens to hear stories of vertical farming vaguely reminiscent of the mythical land of Cockaigne – where no effort was needed to get food since it was falling from the sky. 

Will vertical farming break the curse, releasing agriculture from its unsustainable environmental burden?
To be sustainable, vertical farming has to prove itself capable of minimizing the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4), per kg of food produced. However, a sustainable food system is more than just low emissions of greenhouse gases.

As reported by Tessa Naus, the HLPE definition of a sustainable food system is: “a food system that delivers food security and nutrition for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised”. Therefore, the challenge is far more complex than merely reducing greenhouse gases.

In an interview from the book “Urban Greenhouses and the future of food”, Leo Marcelis, head of Horticulture and Product Physiology Chair Group at Wageningen University, suggests that vertical farming can address some of the urgent challenges posed by the climate crisis, “there’s the problem of growing enough fresh, high quality, sustainable food and making it available to the rapidly growing urban populations in our rapidly expanding cities. To answer this, we need ever-higher production rates, and our production has to be highly controlled. […] They (n.d.r. vertical farms) don’t need much space and are indoors, they are not dependent on solar lighting, they’re independent of outdoor conditions, and can produce 365 days a year.”

Meeting the growing demand for fresh produce from the city is an essential challenge for the sustainable food system we are looking for. As observed by Nona Yehia, CEO at Vertical Harvest “by 2050, 80% of the world’s population will live in cities”. According to Leo Marcelis, vertical farms “can be placed in or near-by urban areas anywhere in the world. [..] you can pick the produce when needed and thereby improve shelf-life: at this moment many vegetables are simply thrown away because they have too short shelf-life”.

Indeed, even if just a fraction of this food loss along the supply chain is due to its distribution, ultra-short supply chains could significantly reduce the global fruits and vegetable loss, currently at 42% of kcal wasted. Furthermore, there is evidence that indoor-grown leafy vegetables can have a longer shelf life thanks to a higher antioxidant level.

However, even if ultra-short supply chains have very little food-miles, they aren’t always necessarily the most sustainable choice. As reported by Nazim Gruda: “Tomatoes imported from Spain can have two to four times lower global warming potential than those produced locally under intense heating in Austria and in the UK”. Being part of a sustainable food system also implies making efficient use of water and land, and that’s what vertical farming does better than both greenhouse and conventional agriculture.

Thanks to the optimized growing condition and the recirculation of the nutrient solution, not just water, but also fertilizers have the highest use efficiency currently possible for an agricultural system. More in general, the overall use of agrochemicals could be minimized since pesticides and herbicides are theoretically unnecessary.

Lead Photo: Figure 2. (Photo Credit: PlantLab, source “Is vertical farming really sustainable?”)

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29 Jan 2020

US: Washington, DC - A Sommelier's Foray Into Urban Agriculture Starts With Mushrooms In Shipping Containers

Barry Farm resident Calvin Hines Jr. launched EightFold Farms to address food deserts and underemployment.

LAURA HAYES

JAN 29, 2020

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COURTESY OF CALVIN HINES JR.

“This started out with me being pissed off that I had to go to the grocery store far away,” says Calvin Hines Jr. The D.C. sommelier and bartender, who has been mixing drinks most recently at Hank’s Oyster Bar in Dupont Circle, grew up in Hillcrest in Ward 7. Later in life, he lived off the U Street Corridor as the neighborhood rapidly developed. Recently, he moved back east of the river and settled in Barry Farm in Ward 8.

“I forgot that you used to have to travel to go get food,” Hines says. “There’s no place we can walk.” He drives to the Harris Teeter on M Street SE for groceries. “The Safeways that are closer to me don’t have great food.” There are only three full-service grocery stores for the more than 150,000 people living in Wards 7 and 8, though others broke ground in 2019. 

This got Hines thinking about food deserts and socioeconomics. “What can I do that would be most effective in solving the problem or multiple problems?” he asked himself before diving into urban agriculture research. 

Havana, Cuba emerged as a source of inspiration. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba entered a phase known as the “Special Period” in the early 1990s, residents had to work quickly to find new and sustainable ways to feed themselves. “They were able to build urban agriculture in Cuba to help them with their food shortage and also increase employment,” Hines says. 

The Cubans did so with great success. As of 2014, Havana, a city of two million people, had dedicated more than 87,000 acres to urban agriculture. “If they’ve been doing it for this long, why can’t we do it in D.C.?” Hines asks. “I live here.”

Hines is launching a for-profit urban agriculture company of his own—EightFold Farms. The name is a nod to Hines' Buddhism practice. The Eightfold Path consists of eight directions, including mindfulness and effort, that are supposed to lead to liberation.

“We can build these small sustainable intensive farms through the city and throughout Wards 7 and 8,” Hines says. “Through these farms, we can sell to restaurants, which I’m linked into. We can start farmers’ markets in Ward 7 or 8 or any other area that lacks food in D.C.”

He’s starting small with one or two shipping containers that he will convert into mobile mushroom farms in partnership with the Phillips Collection, Non-Stop Art, and developer MidCity. The containers will be temporarily housed at 1325 Rhode Island Ave. NE "just until we find space on the other side of town,” Hines says. He went to high school with Non-Stop Art founder Nehemiah Dixon. 

“We’re starting with oyster mushrooms and maybe some lion’s mane and shiitake,” Hines says. “Oyster [mushrooms] will be the bulk of it. They’re easy to grow and there’s more of a demand.” 

EightFold Farms aims to have an educational component Hines calls “From Farm to Table” that will teach young Washingtonians both practical urban agriculture skills and the business side of restaurants. He hopes to accept them into the program as early as elementary or middle school and keep them through high school when they would potentially be ready to attend the University of the District of Columbia’s College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences. 

“There are not enough people that are into urban ag,” Hines says, noting this is particularly true for people of color. “We’re creating a workforce that can bridge that gap. They’ll already have a good foundation, a practical education.” 

Hines has even bigger goals down the line, including launching an all-encompassing space that would have indoor and outdoor farming areas, a market, and food vendors. For now, he’s just hoping to have a quarter to a half-acre of space planted the first year EightFold Farms gets off the ground.

He estimates he’ll need about $125,000 to buy and refurbish the shipping containers and purchase equipment. Omar Hakeem from buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a Texas-based nonprofit community design center, is helping with the design of the containers. Hines launched a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe today.

“We’re trying to attack the problem through food,” Hines says. He hopes EightFold Farms grows healthy food that can lead to better health outcomes while also creating pathways to employment for his neighbors. 

US: Atlanta - 4th International Conference And Expo On Agriculture And Horticulture

 4th International Conference And Expo On Agriculture And Horticulture“Accelerate Scientific Discoveries and Major Milestones in the Current Situation and Innovations Relating to Agriculture Sciences”

August 10 – 11, 2020, Atlanta, USA 

The Scientific Federation and Eureka Science are pleased to invite you to attend the “4th International Conference and Expo On Agriculture and Horticulture” scheduled from August 10 to 11, 2020 in Atlanta, USA. The key objective of Agriculture-Horticulture-2020 is to provide an opportunity for scientists, practitioners, engineers, industrial participants, academicians and students, representing research and professional backgrounds, to share their findings with the global experts.

The conference aims to disseminate the ideas and skills on Organic Farming, Sustainable Agriculture and other modern technologies in the field.
Conference Tracks:

This Agriculture-Horticulture-2020 will host lectures and presentations on the following sessions:

·        Agriculture Engineering

·        Agriculture Biotechnology

·        Agriculture Environment

·        Agriculture & Food Security

·        Plant Sciences

·        Soil Sciences & Water Management

·        Crop Protection & Entomology

·        Fertilizer & Pesticide

·        Food Science

·        Horticulture & Greenhouse

·        Livestock/Animal Farming

·        Agricultural Production Systems & Agribusiness

·        Fisheries & Aquaculture

·        Beekeeping

·        Organic Agriculture

For more information:

Please visit the Agriculture-Horticulture-2020  website

and book your place at the event.

Alternatively, you can email us (beena@eureka-science.com)

your details and register for the event.

Looking forward to seeing you at

 Agriculture Horticulture 2020 in Atlanta, USA

21 Reasons To Start Container Farming In 2020

Pure Greens Arizona LLC

January 3, 2020

The beginning of a new year is a great time to pick up new hobbies, interests and maybe even start a new career!

If you’ve been thinking about getting into container farming, there has never been a better time.

In this article, you’re going to learn 21 reasons why you should start container farming in 2020.

Let’s get started!

1. Be your own boss! One of the main benefits of container farming is that you make the rules. You decide what you grow, and how you grow it. Starting a container farm can be a side hustle to make a little more money or it can become a new career! It’s really all up to you.

2. Create your perfect lifestyle. Are you struggling with finding the right work/life balance? Starting a new career in container farming could be the perfect solution. You’ve probably heard the saying “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” With container farming, you can turn your passion into a real, sustainable business.

3. Stop sitting all day. It’s been said that “sitting is the new smoking.” Starting a container farm business will get you out from behind a desk. With container farming, you will be working in your container every day! Planting, harvesting, and monitoring your crops. Starting a container business is a great way to move away from a sedentary lifestyle towards a more active one!

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4. Support your local community. Starting a container farm business is really starting a local food business. As a container farmer, you will be selling mostly to your local community at farmer’s markets, local restaurants, and even local grocery stores that want to add fresh local produce to their selections. Through this process, you will get to know your local community as you provide them with fresh, delicious nutritious food!

5. Help people eat healthier! Locally grown food is fresher, more nutritious, and safer! When you sell local produce, you grow in your container farm, you are improving the health of your community. Especially if you live in what’s known as a food desert. A food desert is an urban area where it can be difficult to buy affordable or good quality food. Food deserts happen for a variety of reasons from harsh climates that make it difficult to grow produce to communities not having good quality roads to allow in food trucks. With a container farm business, you can set up shop in a food desert and be the only supplier of quality affordable produce.

6. Save water. Container farms use less water than traditional farming techniques. Traditional farming is responsible for 80% of the entire US’s water usage! What you might not know is that growing a normal head of lettuce using traditional farming, uses a whopping 3.5 gallons of water! Now contrast that with a head of lettuce grown on a container farm which only uses about 1/10th of a gallon of water total! Every head of lettuce grown with a container farm saves more than 3 gallons of water! And as we all know water is a consumable resource, not a renewable one, so every gallon of water saved helps the planet in a big way!

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7. Give people safer food. Remember when Chipotle had that E-coli outbreak in 2016? How about in November of 2019, when an E-coli outbreak got so bad that it lead to the recalling of Romaine lettuce in California? Just because the food comes from a supermarket or a fast-food chain doesn’t make it safe. In fact, a quick google search for “produce recalls” will show you exactly how unsafe some of the food you are being sold truly is. When you start container farming, you can be sure that you are providing safe food that won’t make people sick.

8. Save money on taxes. Starting a business is tax-deductible. That means that you can write off or depreciate a portion of all the money you spend on your container farm business.

9. Fill a missing niche in the market. Most produce is grown and sold seasonally, which is why cherries, for example, are only available for a very short time period. But when you use a container farm, you don’t have to worry about seasons or weather. That means that you can harvest crops that would normally be out of season, filling a niche in the existing food marketplace in your city.

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10. Join the local food movement. According to Wikipedia “Local food movements aim to connect food producers and consumers in the same geographic region, to develop more self-reliant and resilient food networks; improve local economies; or to affect the health, environment, community, or society of a particular place. The term has also been extended to include not only the geographic location of supplier and consumer but can also be “defined in terms of social and supply chain characteristics.” For example, local food initiatives often promote sustainable and organic farming practices, although these are not explicitly related to the geographic proximity of producer and consumer.” By starting a container farm, you join with the local food movement in your city.

11. Provide jobs to your local community. When you start a container farm business, you’re going to need some help. Which means you will be providing jobs to your community. But more than that you will be creating a sustainable, beneficial job that helps bring safe, nutritious, healthy food to your community. That’s what we call paying it forward.

12. There are therapeutic benefits to farming! Gardening has long been renowned for its relaxing qualities but there are tangible therapeutic benefits to farming as well. “A ten percent increase in nearby green space was found to decrease a person’s health complaints in an amount equivalent to a five-year reduction in that person’s age” according to the Gardening Matters nonprofit of Minneapolis’ page, “Multiple Benefits of Community Gardens.” Farming also reduces stress! An experiment published in the Journal of Health Psychology compared the relaxation benefits of reading and gardening and found that farming subjects experienced more relaxation than those that read.

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13. Grow food across generations. With a container farm, you can spread your love for farming to your parents, kids, and even grandkids. A container farm business is perfect for anyone of any age who wants to learn more about growing food. Some container farm owners we know even set up camps to teach kids how to farm and earn a nice profit in the process! Plus, you can pass down your container farm to your kids just like any other business.

14. Container Farms can be set up and ready to go in a few hours. With most business opportunities you must wait a long time to get started. For example, if you were to buy a McDonald’s franchise, you would need to wait for the permits, construction, hiring, and delivery of equipment like fryers and soda machines. But with a container farm, you can have everything set up and ready to deploy in just a few hours. No muss, no fuss.

15. Manage your crops from your smartphone. With regular farming you need to get out there and see what’s going on with things like pests, watering and monitoring ph. levels. With a container farm, you can monitor everything from your smartphone with the growlink app.

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16. Grow more food in less space. Another reason to start container farming in 2020 is that you can grow a lot of food in a little space. With an 8 X 40 container farm you can harvest up to 400lbs of herbs or leafy greens per month!

17. Save on water and energy. Container farming is WAY more energy efficient than traditional farming! A report by Urban Agnews showed a Swedish based company Spisa Smaker saved 48% more electricity than when compared with traditional farming! Additionally, using a closed-loop irrigation system like those found in most container farms saves around 50% more water than traditional farming as well. Container farming helps you save money and consume fewer resources while producing high-quality food.

18. Reduce your footprint by planting without soil. One of the main reasons traditional farming uses so much space, energy and water is because it requires soil. Every crop planted using traditional farming monopolizes the land that they are planted on at least for the growing season if not forever. Soil can also affect where and when you can and cannot plant crops. For instance, areas with limited soil, icy or snow-covered soil or even soil that has become contaminated can be difficult for crops to grow in. But with a container farm, you don’t have to worry about the soil at all! With a hydroponic system like the ones, we use here at Pure Greens AZ plants absorb nutrients directly from a water-based nutrient delivery system.

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19. Grow pesticide and herbicide-free crops! With traditional farming, you’ll need to use pesticides or herbicides to protect your crops from a variety of pests. Most farmers do this with pesticides or herbicides. Now some of these pesticides are natural and not that harmful, while others like Roundup have been linked to cancer. With container farming, you can use all-natural pesticides like Neem leaves, salt sprays, and Eucalyptus oil. Growing crops without harsh pesticides and herbicides is a great way to produce safer food for your community.

20. You can grow a wide variety of crops. With container farming, you are not limited to the crops that grow naturally in a location or crops that are seasonal. Container farming allows you to grow a wide variety of crops based on what you want to grow, not other factors like soil conditions or weather patterns.

21. Experience fast and consistent growth. Container farms can grow crops incredibly quickly as you can see in this video of the Pure Greens team harvesting 14 lbs. of Kale in an hr.! But it’s not just speed, container farming also allows you to grow crops consistently in areas where otherwise you would not be able to like areas with heavy winters or food deserts!

There you have it 20 great reasons why you should start container farming in 2020!

And if you need some help or want to learn more about the state-of-the-art turnkey container farms, we build here at Pure Greens head over to our website or give us a call at 602–753–3469.

Containers Container Farming Indoor Farming Agriculture

Can New Agriculture Technology Grow Food That is Better Than Organic?

January 28, 2020

Written by: Randy Huft

New technologies are changing the landscape of food in America. Now, there is the ability to grow food that may be better than organic. How is this possible?

It helps to understand that there are some huge misconceptions about organic food.For starters, despite popular belief, organic farms can use pesticides. The difference is that they only use naturally-derived pesticides, rather than the synthetic pesticides used on conventional farms. Natural pesticides are believed to be less toxic, however, some have been found to have significant health risks

Some studies have indicated that the use of pesticides—even at low doses— can increase the risk of certain cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Children and fetuses are most vulnerable to pesticide exposure because their immune systems, bodies, and brains are still developing. Exposure at an early age may cause developmental delays, behavioral disorders, autism, immune system harm, and motor dysfunction.

Pregnant women are more vulnerable due to the added stress pesticides put on their already taxed organs. Plus, pesticides can be passed from mother to child in the womb, as well as through breast milk.

The widespread use of pesticides has also led to the emergence of “superweeds” and “superbugs,” which can only be killed with extremely toxic poisons like 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (a major ingredient in Agent Orange).

Rinsing reduces but does not eliminate pesticides. It is important to wash your fruits and vegetables, but in most cases, this will not eliminate all traces of pesticides. Even organic foods can use certain pesticides, and outdoor-grown organic food can pick up pesticide residue from nearby farms.

According to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization that analyzes the results of government pesticide testing in the U.S., the following fruits and vegetables have the highest pesticide levels:

• Apples

• Sweet Bell Peppers

• Cucumbers

• Celery

• Potatoes

• Grapes

• Cherry Tomatoes

• Kale/Collard Greens

• Summer Squash

• Nectarines (imported)

• Peaches

• Spinach

• Strawberries

• Hot Peppers

There is also confusion about organic food labels:

Organic foods are described on product labels in a variety of ways, but they mean different things:

• 100 percent organic. This description is used on certified organic fruits, vegetables, eggs, meat or other single-ingredient foods. It may also be used on multi-ingredient foods if all of the ingredients are certified organic, excluding salt and water. These may have a USDA seal.

• Organic. If a multi-ingredient food is labeled organic, at least 95 percent of the ingredients are certified organic, excluding salt and water. The nonorganic items must be from a USDA list of approved additional ingredients. These also may have a USDA seal.

• Made with organic. If a multi-ingredient product has at least 70 percent certified organic ingredients, it may have a "made with organic" ingredients label. For example, a breakfast cereal might be labeled "made with organic oats." The ingredient list must identify what ingredients are organic. These products may not carry a USDA seal.

• Organic ingredients. If less than 70 percent of a multi-ingredient product is certified organic, it may not be labeled as organic or carry a USDA seal. The ingredient list can indicate which ingredients are organic.

Is there something better than organic?

 Yes. Recent developments in agtech provides the ability to grow food without any pesticides or harmful ingredients. Controlled Environment Micro-Farms allow growers to cultivate fruits, herbs, and vegetables in a sealed environment that virtually eliminates the need for pesticides and harmful chemicals.

These tightly managed ecosystems use much less water and fertilizer than on conventional farms and allow growers to cultivate throughout the year, regardless of the season or weather.

A 40-foot Controlled Environment Farm can yield about 3,500-4,000 heads of lettuce every ten days. The greens are priced competitively with traditional produce, yet the process uses 97 percent less water than a conventional farm and no pesticides or herbicides since bugs and weeds are much less likely to get in. In fact, some say that produce grown in a Controlled Environment Farm is actually “better than organic,” noting that organic growers can still use certain pesticides.

Closer to Consumption

The Controlled Environment Farm (CEF) provides higher quality food that’s grown closer to where it will be consumed, which means food arrives ripe and ready to eat, with less cost and environmental impact. CEFs are also resource-friendly and use less water, energy, space, labor, and capital than other methods of farming.

Shipping containers are ideally suited to be repurposed into Controlled Environment Farms. There are millions of shipping containers in the world, but only a fraction of them are in service and used actively.  Many of the remaining containers are wasting away in ports and storage yards across the world.

Repurposing these gentle giants into robust farms is not only good for producing clean, healthy food, but it is also good for the environment.

Real-World Uses

When Michael Bissanti opened Four Burgers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he knew he wanted to create a restaurant with a strong sense of sustainability. Initially, that meant procuring only ingredients deemed natural, as well as sourcing from organic and local farms. But Bissanti quickly realized that the “natural” label wasn’t a panacea for a sustainable food system — and so he went looking for a way to bring sustainable, local ingredients even closer to his kitchen.

Today, those ingredients could hardly be closer — Bissanti only needs to walk out the back door of his restaurant to pick all the fresh lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, and herbs he needs. Even in the cold Boston winters, Bissanti is merely feet away from fresh produce, in spite of the fact that his restaurant is located right in the middle of an urban thoroughfare between Harvard and MIT.

That’s because Bissanti is one of the hundreds of farmers across the country growing produce in Controlled Environment Farms built into repurposed shipping containers.

Companies that manufacture these farms, such as GP Solutions and Freight Farms, say that even traditional greenhouses and rooftop gardens require the expertise of an engineer, a plumber, an electrician, and a horticulturist.  And, rooftop greenhouses are also expensive, costing between $1 million to $2 million to get started. A “GrowPod” from GP Solutions or a Freight Farms unit, by comparison, costs only around $48,000-$100,000.

One of the key differences in these Controlled Environment Farms is that everything is included. Everything from water to the LED lights in the units are digitally controlled, and each unit is also connected to the internet so that it can be monitored and managed from anywhere in the world.

“Everything is fully contained within the GrowPod so that it arrives as a turnkey product, ready to grow,” said George Natzic, President of GP Solutions.

These containers allow growers to generate local food production in any location. And manufacturers point out that unlike other indoor growing operations, the shipping container farms are scalable. You can locate the system in a parking lot or the corner of a warehouse and expand incrementally.

Meeting the needs of a changing world

With 54 percent of the world’s population residing in urban areas—expected to increase to about 66 percent by 2050, Controlled Environment Farms allow growers to reduce their agricultural footprint on the environment and address food security of the urban population.

Kimbal Musk (brother of Elon) says that these high-tech shipping container farms are creating “a real food revolution.”

What do you get by growing hyper-local to the end consumer? The answer is that the food you are eating right now at the restaurant was grown right outside and picked minutes ago. This is in stark contrast to traditional agriculture that often supplies produce that was picked when still hard, could sit in a warehouse for weeks, and has chemicals applied that allow ripening just prior to distribution to stores and restaurants.

In summary, there is a great need for controlled-environment agriculture as it allows produce to be grown locally and delivered to the final consumer very shortly post-harvest.

Consumers have a desire for locally-grown clean produce during all periods of the year which they can buy at a competitive price. Controlled Environment Farms are a solution that are sustainable, easy to implement, affordable to acquire, simple to operate, and produce high-quality food that can be considered better than organic.

How 16 Initiatives Are Changing Urban Agriculture Through Tech And Innovation

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Andrea Oyuela

Thursday, January 2, 2020

The United Nations estimates (PDF) that nearly 10 billion people will live in cities by 2050. According to a recent publication by the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition, urban eaters consume most of the food produced globally and maintain more resource-intensive diets including increased animal-source and processed foods — rich in salt, sugar and fats. At the same time, many urban populations — particularly in low-income areas and informal communities — endure acute hunger and malnutrition as well as limited access to affordable, healthy food.

But there are countless ways that cities can feed themselves and create better linkages between rural and urban food systems. In Mexico City, the organization CultiCiudad built the Huerto Tlatelolco, an edible forest with 45 tree varieties, a seed bank and plots for biointensive gardening. In the United States, City Growers uses New York City’s urban farms as a learning laboratory for children to reconnect with nature. And in the Kalobeyei Settlement in northern Kenya, urban agriculture represents a tool for empowerment by improving food security, nutrition, and self-sufficiency among refugees.

"Agriculture and forestry in the city… answer to a variety of urban development goals beyond the provision of green infrastructure and food, such as social inclusion, adaptation to climate change, poverty alleviation, urban water management and opportunities for the productive reuse of urban waste," says Henk de Zeeuw, senior adviser at the RUAF Foundation.

And thankfully, hundreds of entrepreneurs and organizations are using this opportunity to improve urban agriculture and satisfy the demands of an increasingly urban population. From high-tech indoor farms in France and Singapore to mobile apps connecting urban growers and eaters in India and the United States, Food Tank highlights 16 initiatives using tech, entrepreneurship and social innovation to change urban agriculture.

There are countless ways that cities can feed themselves and create better linkages between rural and urban food systems.

1. AeroFarms, Newark (United States)

AeroFarms builds and operates vertical indoor farms to enable local production at scale and increase the availability of safe and nutritious food. The company uses aeroponics to grow leafy greens without sun or soil in a fully controlled environment. The technology enables year-round production while, they say, using 95 percent less water than field farming, resulting in yields 400 times higher per square foot annually. Since its foundation in 2004, AeroFarms aims to disrupt conventional food supply chains by building farms along major distribution routes and in urban areas. The company also won multiple awards, including the 2018 Global SDG Award, for its environmentally responsible practices and leadership in agriculture.

2. Agricool, Paris (France)

Agricool is a start-up that grows strawberries in containers spread throughout urban areas. The company retrofits old, unused containers to accommodate both an LED-lights and aeroponics system making it possible to grow strawberries year-round. The Cooltainers are powered by clean energy and use 90 percent less water than conventional farming. Agricool also works on building a network of urban farmers through the Cooltivators training program, aiming to open up job opportunities for city residents to work in the agricultural sector. The start-up works on expanding operations to other cities, an effort made possible by the replicability of the container’s design.

3. BIGH Farms, Brussels (Belgium)

BIGH (Building Integrated Greenhouses) Farms, a start-up based in Brussels, works on building a network of urban farms in Europe to promote the role urban agriculture can play in the circular economy. BIGH’s designs integrate aquaponics with existing buildings to reduce a site’s environmental impact. The first pilot — above the historic Abattoir in Brussel’s city center — includes a fish farm, a greenhouse and over 2,000 square meters of outdoor vegetable gardens. It started in 2018 producing microgreens, herbs, tomatoes and striped bass. BIGH Farms also partners with local businesses and growers to make sure the farm’s production is complementary to the existing food community.

4. Bites, Phoenix (United States)

Bites is a mobile platform working to help connect urban farmers, chefs and eaters in Phoenix through farm-to-table dining experiences. Eaters and chefs sign up and meet through the app to organize an in-home dining event. Chefs gather the ingredients from urban growers registered on the platform in an effort to promote local, small businesses. Bites was launched in 2017 by Roza Derfowsmakan, founder of Warehouse Apps, to improve accessibility to farm-to-table experiences and support urban farmers. By using technology to build culinary communities, Bites aims to change consumer choices from shipped-in, trucked-in produce to locally sourced food — involving people in the solution itself.

5. BitGrange, Multiple Locations (North America)

BitGrange is an urban farming tool and learning platform working to help educate children on food and agriculture. The BitGrange device, a hydroponics and internet of things-based system, produces edible plants with little water and energy. BitGrange’s software evaluates environmental variables in real-time and notifies growers through a smartphone app to take necessary actions, such as adding more water or plant food. Founded in 2015 according to its philosophy, Plant-Connect-Sync-Play, BitGrange aims to inspire youth to engage in farming by gamifying agriculture. The nano-farm’s design is available for download at BitGrange’s website for potential growers to 3D print the device in their own location.

Chefs gather the ingredients from urban growers registered on the platform in an effort to promote local, small businesses.

6. Bowery Farming, New York Metro Area (United States)

Bowery Farming, an indoor farming start-up, uses software and robotics to grow produce inside warehouses in and around cities. By controlling every aspect of the growing process, the start-up is able to produce leafy greens and herbs using a minimal amount of water and energy per square foot. The technology also makes it possible to grow customized products for chefs and restaurants, such as softer kale and more peppery arugula. Since its establishment in 2017, Bowery Farming is expanding operations beyond its New Jersey warehouse to build vertical farms in other cities and, ultimately, bring efficient food production closer to consumers.

7. Farmizen, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Surat (India)

Farmizen is a mobile-based platform renting farmland to city residents to grow locally grown, organic produce. The app allocates its users a 600 square foot mini-farm in a community nearby. Users can visit the farm anytime to grow and harvest chemical-free produce. Farmworkers look after the plots when the users return to the city, making a fixed and stable income — up to three times more than that of conventional farming. The app is live in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Surat with 1,500 subscribers and 40 acres of land under cultivation. Farmizen was founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Gitanjali Rajamani, driven by the need to create stable livelihoods for farmers and reconnect city-dwellers to agriculture and nature.

8. Fresh Direct, Abuja (Nigeria)

Fresh Direct is an impact-driven start-up using vertical farming and hydroponics to promote locally grown produce and the involvement of youth in agriculture. When young entrepreneur Angel Adelaja started engaging in eco-friendly farming, she faced multiple challenges with conventional farming practices, including access to land, water and technology. As a response, Adelaja founded Fresh Direct in 2014 to make urban agriculture more accessible to everyone, especially youth. Fresh Direct installs stackable container farms in the city, growing organic produce closer to the market. In the future, Adelaja aims to eradicate the notion among young professionals that agriculture is a line of work for the older generations.

9. Gotham Greens, multiple locations (United States)

Gotham Greens builds and operates data-driven, climate-controlled greenhouses in cities across the United States. The greenhouses, powered by wind and solar energy, use hydroponics to grow salad greens and herbs year-round using fewer resources than conventional farming. In addition to its goal of sustainable food production, Gotham Greens also partners with local organizations, schools, community gardens and businesses to support urban renewal and community development projects. Gotham Greens is also the company behind the country’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse, a partnership with Whole Foods Market to operate the greenhouse above its flagship store in Brooklyn, New York.

10. GrowUp Urban Farms, London (United Kingdom)

GrowUp Urban Farms works on developing commercial scale, Controlled Environment Production (CEP) solutions to grow fresh food in communities across London. The CEP farms use aquaponics to farm fish and grow leafy greens in a soil-less system, turning previously unused brownfield sites into productive areas. The GrowUp Box — a community farm developed together with sister organization GrowUp Community Farms — produces over 400kg of salads and 150kg of fish each year. Over the long run, the company aims to replicate the aquaponics system to build urban farms in other cities, opening employment opportunities for youth and using agriculture as a means to make communities more self-sustaining.

11. InFarm, multiple locations (Europe)

InFarm, a Berlin-based start-up, develops modular indoor farming systems to bring agriculture into cities. Designed to combat the long distances food travels, the InFarms produce leafy greens and herbs using 95 percent less water than traditional farms and no pesticides. The technology, the company claims, can reduce food transportation up to 90 percent. In 2013, the company pioneered the modular system in restaurants, schools, hospitals and shopping centers. Operations have expanded to distribute portable farms in neighborhoods and supermarkets across Germany, Denmark, France and Switzerland. The expansion, AgFunder reports, can be attributed to InFarm’s decentralized, data-driven model.

The farm’s closed-loop system works with used coffee grounds — collected from local businesses — to turn residual flows into food.

12. Liv Up, São Paulo (Brazil)

Liv Up works to deliver healthy meals and snack kits prepared with locally grown food to residents of the Greater São Paulo region. The start-up sources organic ingredients from family farmers in peri-urban areas, in an effort to shorten value chains and better connect small producers to the urban market. A team of chefs and nutritionists prepares the meals, which are later deep frozen to maintain the food’s integrity and extend its shelf life. Liv Up was founded in 2016 by a trio of young entrepreneurs driven by the lack of access to healthy foods in São Paulo. The start-up operates in seven municipalities of the metropolitan area, rotating its menu every two weeks.

13. Pasona Urban Ranch, Tokyo (Japan)

Pasona Urban Ranch, an initiative of the Pasona Group, is a mix of office space and animal farm in the heart of Tokyo’s busy Ōtemachi district. The initiative aims to raise interest in agriculture and dairy farming among city residents by bringing them in close contact with farm animals. The ranch houses eight animal species, including cattle, goats and an alpaca, which are cared for by specialized staff. Visitors and employees of the building can attend seminars on dietary education and dairy farming. Previously, the Pasona Group gained worldwide acknowledgment for Pasona O2 — an underground office farm built by Kono Designs in 2010 growing 100 regional crops in downtown Tokyo.

14. RotterZwam, Rotterdam (The Netherlands)

RotterZwam, an urban mushroom farm, raises awareness on the potential of the circular economy for addressing environmental issues. The farm’s closed-loop system works with used coffee grounds — collected from local businesses — to turn residual flows into food. The mushroom nursery, built out of old containers, uses solar paneling to power the farm’s operations and the e-vehicles used for product delivery. The farm’s team offers tours to educate citizens on circular systems and trains entrepreneurs wishing to start a mushroom farm. RotterZwam’s second location in the Schiehaven area opened in mid-2019 thanks to a crowdfunding campaign to bring back the farm after a devastating fire in 2017.

15. Sustenir Agriculture (Singapore)

Sustenir Agriculture is a vertical farm working to promote high quality, locally grown and safe food with the lowest possible footprint. The farm — in the heart of Singapore — uses the latest technology in hydroponics and smart indoor farming to produce leafy greens, tomatoes, strawberries and fresh herbs. Starting as a basement project in 2012, Sustenir produces 1 ton of kale and 3.2 tons of lettuce per month in an area of 54 square meters.

16. Urban Bees, London (United Kingdom)

Urban Bees is a social enterprise working with communities and businesses in London to help bees thrive in the city. Through education and training, the initiative raises awareness on how to create bee-friendly communities and on how to become responsible beekeepers. The first training apiary was established together with the Co-op Plan Bee in Battersea, South London. The enterprise also advises urban gardening initiatives, including Lush’s rooftop garden, to ensure that green areas install the right forage and create healthy bee habitats. Co-founder Alison Benjamin says that city residents often suffer from nature-deficit disorder and urban beekeeping is one path to reconnect with nature in the city.

This story first appeared on:  Food Tank

Lead Photo: Shutterstock Jose L VilchezView of an urban garden in the Panyu District in Guangzhou, China

Tags:  Food & Agriculture urban agriculture Technology Innovation

CALIFORNIA: Proposed Ordinance Would Promote And Protect Agriculture

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admin | on January 01, 2020

A proposed county ordinance that would implement California’s AB 551 is seen as benefiting local agriculture by recognizing its benefits, according to the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

The County of San Diego recently made the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones (UAIZ) Draft Ordinance available for public review. That period will end January 31, 2020.

The draft ordinance can be found at:  www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/pds/advance/UAIZ/UAIZ%20Draft%20Ordinance.pdf

In 2018, the Board of Supervisors directed staff to establish an Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone ordinance within the unincorporated areas of the County. It implements California Assembly Bill No. 551 (AB 551), the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act (UAIZ,) authorizes counties and/or cities to establish Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones whereby the county or city and a landowner can enter into a contract for small-scale production of agricultural crops in exchange for a potential property tax benefit.

UAIZ is intended to promote small-scale urban agriculture by providing a financial incentive for property owners of unimproved, underutilized, and vacant properties in census-designated urban areas to use their properties for agricultural uses.

Hannah Gbeh, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau, told The Roadrunner,  “I am encouraged to see the County implementing AB 551, which intends to promote and protect agricultural uses while recognizing the public benefit of agriculture. The County’s proposed Urban Agricultural Incentive Zones Ordinance aims to promote small-scale urban agriculture by providing a financial incentive for eligible property owners. For agriculture in San Diego County, where 69% of our farms are 1 to 9 acres in size, this ordinance has the potential to significantly benefit agriculture.”

Gbeh added, “The Draft Ordinance is available for public review until January 31st and I would encourage anyone interested in urban agriculture to review and provide comments to the County. The San Diego County Farm Bureau stands ready to assist all local growers in starting or expanding agriculture operations within our County lines. We encourage all growers to be active and engaged in activities affecting the regulatory environment of agriculture and are available to assist any members experiencing issues.”

Under this ordinance, a property owner voluntarily enters into a contract with the county for a minimum of five years. While under contract, the property owner pays property taxes based on the assessed agricultural value of the property, which can offer substantial savings. 

To be eligible for the program, the property must be located within an urbanized census area; be between 0.1 and 3.0 acres in size; vacant, unimproved, or have only non-residential structures; and be fully dedicated to agriculture.

Lands that are not eligible include (1) property that is currently subject to, or has been subject to within the previous three years, a Williamson Act Contract (current Government Code section 51200 et seq.); or (2) property in the unincorporated County, within the sphere of influence of a city, unless the legislative body of the city consents to inclusion of the property within the County UAIZ Establishment Area.

For more information contact: Project Contact: Timothy Vertino at timothy.vertino@sdcounty.ca.gov or call 858-495-5468

From 10 To 20 To 40 Acres

Twin Creeks Greenhouse Continues To Expand

Mike Cornelissen, owner, and operator of Twin Creeks Greenhouse has been very busy. Mike and his wife Danielle just welcomed their first baby boy and have started construction on their third expansion at Twin Creeks Greenhouse.

Growing up in Watford Ontario, Canada with deep family roots in the agricultural sector, George Cornelissen, Mike's father, has built a thriving and well-respected business. Cornelissen Farms is diversified in field crops, chicken barns, and even grain elevators, but with an eye to the future, George and Mike wanted to expand into the greenhouse sector too.

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Mike grew up around his uncle’s greenhouse and learned about the industry from a young age. While in college, Mike took interest in building his own greenhouse and decided to work for his uncle as part of his degree. In the fall of 2015, the Cornelissen family purchased a large plot of land next to a landfill and began working with Havecon to develop their new greenhouse project.

In the spring of 2016, Mike was able to secure a bio-gas agreement with his landfill neighbor and together with Havecon, started construction on their first 10-acre greenhouse block.

In 2018 after a successful first year, they decided it was time to expand again with another 10-acre greenhouse block. Then in 2019, they decided it was time to again grow the business. Havecon and its partners were again invited to start on Twin Creeks largest expansion to date. This time building a 20-acre block, bringing the total greenhouse growing area to 40 acres.

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With this additional acreage Twin Creeks Greenhouse will become one of the largest pepper growers in Ontario, Canada, and with plenty of land left, the sky is the limit!

When we asked Mike about why he has chosen Havecon from the beginning and all expansions after, he answers: “From the start the feeling we had with Havecon was good. The same goes for Voorwinden, by the way. In practice the high quality of their workmanship confirmed this feeling. Next to that the speediness of their work throughout the whole process is a big plus. And finally, I would mention the overall support. People at Havecon are always willing to help and think along with you. Therefore, we are looking forward to working with Havecon again for our latest and largest project.”

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For more information:
Twin Creeks and Cornelissen Farms
www.cornelissenfarms.com

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Havecon Kassenbouw B.V.
Lorentzstraat 8
2665 JH Bleiswijk
Postbus 25
2665 ZG Bleiswijk
Tel. +31(0)10 266 32 70
info@havecon.com
www.havecon.com