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Giant Vertical Farm Opens in Denmark
The produce grown here will be harvested 15 times a year, despite never seeing soil or daylight. It is lit up around the clock by 20,000 specialized LED lightbulbs
DECEMBER 7, 2020
by Camille Bas-Wohlert
First developed around a decade ago, vertical farms have taken off in Asia and the United States
A purple glow illuminates stacked boxes where lettuce, herbs and kale will soon be sprouting at one of Europe's biggest "vertical farms" which has just opened in a warehouse in an industrial zone in Copenhagen.
Fourteen layers of racks soar from floor to ceiling in this massive, 7,000-square-metre (75,350-square-foot) hangar used by Danish start-up Nordic Harvest.
The produce grown here will be harvested 15 times a year, despite never seeing soil or daylight. It is lit up around the clock by 20,000 specialized LED lightbulbs.
Danish Nordic Harvest raises DKK 62 million. DKK to one of Europe's largest vertical farms
In this futuristic farm, little robots deliver trays of seeds from aisle to aisle.
The large aluminum boxes are mostly empty for now, but lettuce and other leafy greens will soon be growing.
Some 200 tonnes of produce are due to be harvested in the first quarter of 2021, and almost 1,000 tonnes annually when the farm is running at full capacity by the end of 2021, explains Anders Riemann, founder and chief executive of Nordic Harvest.
That would make the Taastrup warehouse one of Europe's biggest vertical farms.
These urban facilities have unsurprisingly received a cool welcome from rural farmers, who have questioned their ability to feed the planet and criticised their electricity consumption.
But Riemann stresses the environmental benefits of his farm, with produce grown close to consumers and its use of green electricity.
A robot, used to plant seeds and check the plants while growing, moves past vertical racks at 'Nordic Harvest' in Taastrup, a suburb west of Copenhagen
"A vertical farm is characterized by not harming the environment by recycling all the water and nutrition or fertilizer," says Riemann, who uses no pesticides.
In Denmark, a world leader in wind farms, about 40 percent of electricity consumption is wind-based.
"In our case, we use 100 percent energy from windmills which makes us CO2-neutral," he adds.
While he wouldn't disclose how much Nordic Harvest's electricity bill comes to, he said the power came with "wind certificates" registered on the Danish commodities exchange.
These legal documents guarantee that "the amount of electricity you consume in one year is equivalent to the electricity produced by numbered windmills offshore".
Slow start in Europe
First developed around a decade ago, vertical farms have taken off in Asia and the United States, which is home to the world's biggest.
The idea has slowly started to catch on in Europe.
Urban farming could even allow land exploited by single-culture farming to be reforested, Riemann said.
Shelves of the vertical plant farm 'Nordic Harvest' where lettuce, herbs and kale will soon be growing
"We moved the forests in order to have fields," he laments, noting that now farmers like him can bring "some of the food production back into the cities where you can grow on much smaller land and space-optimized in height".
His farm uses one liter of water per kilogram of produce, or 40 times less than underground farms and 250 times less than in fields, he says.
The names of his clients remain confidential, but they include caterers, restaurants, and even supermarkets.
According to a poll conducted by the Danish Farmers Union, 95 percent of Danes are ready to change their consumer behavior to protect the environment.
Nordic Harvest's products are however not labeled as organic.
"The EU regulation dictates that the word organic is linked to the word 'soil' so if you take soil out of the equation you can't name it organic anymore," he says.
But "we grow on the same terms as organic: we don't use pesticides or insecticides".
Meanwhile, Aarhus University agriculture professor Carl-Otto Ottosen notes that Denmark "doesn't have a space problem" and companies like Riemann's are largely a novelty that won't threaten Danish farming traditions.
"It works in Japan or Shanghai, where there's no space to farm and where they want quality products," he says.
But despite what polls suggest, Ottosen insists Danes are still more inclined to buy products based on "price, not taste".
Vertical Hydroponics
Hydroponic systems can be grown in a greenhouse using natural light, or more commonly in a vertical system using LED lights, to save space
October 13, 2020
What happens if you love gardening and growing various kinds of plants, but do not have enough ground surface or horizontal floor area? The concept of vertical farming was developed as a solution to this problem. Imagine the way that tall skyscrapers can be built so sturdily, yet are able to reach up towards the sky while containing so many different rooms across multiple levels, and that will provide you with the basic working principle behind vertical farming. In other words, it is all about cultivating more by stacking multiple layers of planting surfaces.
What Is Vertical Hydroponics?
This basic concept of vertical farming can be easily applied towards what’s known as hydroponics—a way to grow plants without the use of any soil, wherein minerals and other nutrients are provided directly to the roots only via water in a systematic manner and in calculated quantities.
Hydroponic systems can be grown in a greenhouse using natural light, or more commonly in a vertical system using LED lights, to save space. The latter system is what’s known as Vertical Hydroponics—the setting up of a hydroponic farm, except in a vertical manner. Gravity plays a major role, since the nutrient-rich water is fed from the top of the system and flows down to the bottom, where it is collected.
This practice of soil-free vertical gardening traces its roots all the way back to Ancient history. The Babylonians had a similar idea when they built the Hanging Gardens along the Euphrates River in Babylonia around 600 BC—an Ancient Wonder which had flowers, shrubs, and even trees growing in massive tiered gardens. Other records of hydroponics in ancient times include the floating farms created by the Aztecs around Tenochtitlan in Mexico in the 10th-11th century, as well as the explorer Marco Polo’s writings of the late 13th century, describing similar floating gardens during his travels to China.
Scientific experiments were done to test plant growth using various cultures from water, soil and air were recorded from the year 1600 onwards by various chemists. The long search for the macro-nutrients essential for plant growth without soil culminated around 1860, when two German botanists, Julius von Sachs, and Wilhelm Knop, were able to grow plants by totally immersing their roots in a water solution containing minerals of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, sulfur, and calcium, and delivered the first standard formula for the specific nutrient solutions dissolved in water to allow the growth of plants in it. This was the origin of “nutriculture”, a word that was changed in 1937 to “hydroponics”—combining two Greek words “Hydro” (water) and “Ponos” (labor).
Studies have shown that vertical hydroponics systems can aid in efficient water savings, up to 90 percent. The closed-loop system prevents runoff into waterways while growing indoors can reduce pests, diseases, and issues related to fickle weather. A vertical hydroponics system is efficient in multiple ways, has various advantages, and can be built, operated, and maintained even at your home.
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How Does a Vertical Hydroponic System Work?
There are two main vertical hydroponic system designs—Vertical Hydroponic Tower and Zig-Zag Vertical Hydroponic System. Due to their unique dynamics, both of these vertical designs use a closed, constant flow system called the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT), which involves having a constant thin stream of water flowing over the root system of the plants.
Vertical Hydroponic Tower
In a typical vertical hydroponic tower, a tube is connected to a small water reservoir at the bottom, wherein a hydroponic pump will assist in pumping the water to the top. From there, the natural assistance of gravity is used to bring water down in a controlled manner back to the reservoir, the process of which delivers the nutrients to the plant.
You can either use a single tube to deliver water to the top level or connect multiple channels to different layers for optimal delivery of water and nutrients. The plants are placed in net cups, typically angled at 45 degrees, to easily allow the water to flow through the roots.
Zig-Zag Vertical Hydroponic System
Some designs use multiple PVC pipes arranged on a trellis frame at diagonal angles (known as the zig-zag vertical system) instead of creating a vertical tower. The pipes are usually in a compact zig-zag pattern going up. The plants are housed in net cups, placed at regular 90-degree angles.
These systems also use NFT techniques to grow the plants. The water containing essential nutrients is pumped to the top pipe, from where it flows down in a constant stream.
Advantages of Vertical Hydroponics
Space Savings
One huge consideration with vertical hydroponics is optimizing the limited space that you might have. Most gardeners nowadays—professionals or enthusiasts—often suffer from lack of floor space, and so vertical hydroponics has become the preferred choice for urban gardening. Vertical systems are excellent for fitting into corners of rooms or any other small indoor or outdoor spaces where they can be less intrusive while not using up valuable square footage. This has allowed maximum usage of small spaces and made it a viable option for growing crops in city homes, whether against an outdoor patio wall or inside a spare room. Vertical hVertical hydroponics is a godsend for people who don’t have access to much soil or ground space to grow things.
In addition, plant roots in hydroponic systems don’t spread out as much in their search for nutrients compared to growing them in soil, since the roots are suspended directly in nutrient-rich solution. As a result, it is possible to grow crops much closer together, saving space.
Lack of Soil
Hydroponics is being considered as an innovative alternative approach to the future of agriculture, since by using no soil, you can grow many varieties of produce in most places with very little arable land, dry/arid climates, or where climate change and destructive farming practices are causing soil erosion. Similarly, distant cities, islands or hotels can also grow their own fresh food hydroponically instead of resorting to costly imports. As for coastal places with a scarcity of fresh water, desalination technology is in progress so that people will be able to extract fresh water from the ocean for supplying hydroponic gardens as well as for agriculture in general.
Due to the controlled and soil-free environment, weeds, pests and plant diseases are minimized. As a result, the use of chemical fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides are drastically reduced—a big bonus for health and food safety—while the harvested crops may not even need to be washed in most cases.
Efficiency & Productivity
Hydroponic nutrients are derived from mineral salts, essentially the same as those found in soil, but more readily available. The difference is that the nature of soil-based minerals is slow release, whereas hydroponic minerals are fast release with fast uptake, and therefore result in optimal results & faster growth.
As mentioned earlier, when planted in soil, a plant’s roots spread out in search of nutrients, leading to a much larger root system than a hydroponic setup—wherein the nutrients are delivered directly to the root system in almost surgical quantities. This method ensures that plants receive exactly the right quantity of nutrition at the right times, allowing the plant to spend its energy-producing useful foliage, stems, leaves, and fruit (instead of large root systems).
Vertical hydroponics, especially indoors, allows for better control of temperature, light, air composition, and pests. This results in maximized crop growth rates, quality and yield, in addition to being able to grow most crops year-round. Indoor vertical hydroponics farms can play an important role in filling the market gap, providing fresh produce in all seasons.
In addition, vertical hydroponics can reduce the overall weight of the upper layers by at least 30% compared to using soil as the growing medium for a vertical system—meaning that you can stack more layers on top of each other than you normally could.
Fresh produce can be made available locally with maximum ease and sold in restaurants and farmers’ markets with minimal transport. This helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also reducing nutrient loss and produce damage.
Low Maintenance
In a properly constructed vertical hydroponics system, the water and nutrients inside the tube stay inside it without any spillage or leakage. Moreover, the water keeps getting recycled (in a closed-loop system) until it reaches the point of no use. This ensures optimal usage and minimal wastage. Hydroponic systems are therefore good for the environment since the water is not being evaporated as readily or absorbed into the ground quickly while being recirculated, compared to a soil-based system. In fact, a recirculating hydroponic system can conserve up to 80% water and use up to 10 times less water compared to a standard garden bed. This offers a huge—and sustainable—advantage when water shortage is of great concern, especially since field-based agriculture is one of the greatest consumers of freshwater sources (up to 80% of ground and surface water in the U.S. itself).
Disadvantages of Vertical Hydroponics
Water Flow
The main challenge in a vertical hydroponics system is to deliver adequate water, nutrients, and light to plants on all the levels. Since the plants are placed one above the other, water needs to be delivered in a vertical form, and in order to send the water all the way to the top against the force of gravity, pumps with higher power are required. And if the water is not constantly being sent up, it will pool at the bottom and too much of it will pose a danger of drowning the lower plants.
Lighting
Lighting in a vertical hydroponic system is extremely important. For outdoor systems, the issue of lighting is not as complicated, as it can be tackled by strategically arranging the net cups containing the plants so that they get better access to sunlight as needed. But if the vertical hydroponic garden is indoors, the plants will have reduced or no access to the sun. You’ll therefore need to invest in electric grow lights to allow the system to flourish. For large scale hydroponic farms especially, the lights used to grow plants constitute a big part of the cost. However, with the advent of new LED lighting technology, growing hydroponic plants indoors is becoming much more economically viable.
All the levels with plants will typically require equal amounts of light at an equal distance, and this can only be achieved by placing separate light panels that cater to the plants equally. For example, peppers require plenty of light for up to 18 hours per day, while also requiring close proximity to light—otherwise they won’t thrive. It’s therefore essential to ensure you’re spending money on high-quality and energy-efficient bulbs for your hydroponic light panels.
In some cases, growers actually train plants to grow horizontally because they want optimal light from above to reach all parts of the plant. Since the plants in a vertical tower system are placed at an angle, the best option might be to use multiple vertically mounted lights to cover all the growing surfaces uniformly.
In the case of an indoor zig-zag vertical hydroponic system also, lighting may be a concern. Panels hanging from the ceiling may not be ideal since all the plants are at different heights. Multiple light panels need to be typically arranged on top of each of the pipes to provide light equally and equidistantly.
The BIOS Solution to Lighting
BIOS® Icarus® Li LED Grow Light bars are a cost-effective solution for vertical farming racking systems (such as vertical hydroponic systems), where multiple bars can be daisy-chained and easily arranged according to desired light bar spacing. BIOS Icarus Li LED is the controlled environment agricultural industry’s choice for a durable, light-weight, and vertical grow light bar. It is a cost-effective solution for a variety of grow light applications where multiple bars can be daisy-chained and easily moved according to desired light bar spacing.
The Icarus Li LED Grow Light has an optimized broad spectrum that maximizes photosynthesis and plant growth, while also providing the ideal conditions for a comfortable visual experience, superior PAR efficacy, and accurate crop assessment.
The slim, lightweight design optimizes space and allows repositioning over the plant canopy in a variety of applications.
Clip or end-cap L brackets allow easy installation into any racking system.
Bars can be daisy-chained by quick-release connectors toa single power supply.
LED bars can be installed at various densities to provide PPFD levels up to 1500 μmol/m2-s.
Resource Demand
The production in a vertical hydroponic system is high, but so will be the resources that you utilize for this cultivation. The light panels, the water system, monitoring the water reservoir, etc. will result in increases in invested cost and time. Although setting up a hydroponic system can be done on a budget with minimal costs, the specialist equipment required can be expensive for a commercial scale system.
An understanding of both the technical set-up of the hydroponics system and various plant growth requirements is essential for preventing system failures. Leakages can occur, while different crop types may require vastly different nutrient, temperature and lighting conditions. In addition, the close proximity of water and electric systems poses risk, and therefore careful and regular monitoring of the system is required.
Despite the few challenges and limitations associated with vertical farming with hydroponic systems, it still offers great potential to contribute to a more sustainable future of farming. After the initial setup, the expenses should be limited mainly to electricity and nutrient costs, while the increased plant growth rates and yield often outweigh these added costs.
Light is the single most important variable with respect to plant growth and development and is often the most limiting factor. Therefore, the use of visually comfortable and optimized broad-spectrum LED grow lights such as the BIOS Icarus Li—maximizing photosynthesis and plant growth— is extremely beneficial for plants and growers alike for vertical hydroponic applications
Smart Acres CEO on The launch of The UAE’s Latest Vertical Smart Farm
The launch of Smart Acres, the UAE’s latest addition to the hydroponic vertical farming industry, this week means that a line of the freshest, most nutrient-dense greens for UAE residents and businesses alike is now being produced in containers on the Armed Forces Officers Club in Abu Dhabi, with the aim to expand across the UAE
Smart Acres Is Here With Lettuce At The Helm. In An Exclusive Interview With Abu Dhabi World, Smart Acres CEO Abdulla al Kaabi Reveals What This Means To Abu Dhabi And The Farming Community On The Whole.
words Derek Issacs
If you love healthy produce, and who doesn’t, then this news is going to please you and your tastebuds no end. The only draw back at the moment is they’re not for sale in supermarkets just yet, but it won’t be long before they are.
The launch of Smart Acres, the UAE’s latest addition to the hydroponic vertical farming industry, this week means that a line of the freshest, most nutrient-dense greens for UAE residents and businesses alike is now being produced in containers on the Armed Forces Officers Club in Abu Dhabi, with the aim to expand across the UAE.
So we headed over to the St. Regis Abu Dhabi to meet Smart Acres CEO Abdulla al Kaabi to find out more.
Tell us about your background?
I am from tech and farm background. My father has a passion for farming and gardening; he’s very strict about anybody who messes around with his garden or farm. My father has a few farms across the UAE, where he grows crops and dates. When he heard that I was pursuing a project in the agriculture sector he got excited and actually gifted me a farm, which I am grateful for and will keep. However, Smart Acres, rather than the farm my father gifted me, is an urban farm.
How was Smart Acres first developed?
CEO Abdulla al Kaabi (centre)
Smart Acres was founded in 2017 and local testing began in July 2019. Smart Acres was developed by a team of experts, including myself, Director Sean Lee and Lead Project Manager, Aphisith Phongsavanh with the aim of improving food security within the United Arab Emirates and developing the country’s farming capabilities, providing a solution to potential socioeconomic threats such as pandemics and climate limitations the Middle East currently endures.
Tell us more
We planted lettuce and after a few harvests, we decided to expand from two containers to eight containers. From the two insulated containers the yield was 3.5 tons annually, which was our proof of concept. For the proof of concept, our target weight for each lettuce head was 140g. However, we have reached an average of 200g per head. I don’t think any other vertical farm here reached that quality or weight in terms of vegetables at this size.
How would you describe Smart Acres?
It is a one-of-a-kind agriculture system that is designed to produce some of the highest yields of crops within the UAE’s vertical farming industry, while introducing a new future for clean foods and allowing both business to business (B2B) and business to consymer (B2C ) sectors to locally source produce.
Tell us about the containers
We invested heavily in the containers, not just financially, and it took us a while to partner up with n.thing, a South Korean vertical farming technology company, to bring the best vertical farm here in the UAE. We had talks with other companies before and we decided to go with this one, in terms of risk, in terms of technology they are using. And the system we are using in the containers is hydroponics (growing plants without soil) which has been used by growers for hundreds of years. Techno advancements means we were able to implement the Internet of Things for operations, which helps us to monitor the entire farm in terms of humidity, temperature, and even the nutrients that goes inside the plants. Now we have our expansion plan from eight to 78 containers, which eventually will produce more than 140 tons of produce annually. We are currently in talks with private and public entities in terms of the expansion. We are also planning to have a research and development centre in order to start growing our own potato seeds in a controlled environment.
Will Smart Acres just be growing lettuce?
In our current eight containers, we grow four types of lettuce; Lolo rosso , green glace, oakleaf Batavia, but we are able to grow 30 types of lettuce. Currently we are testing new methods to improve quality and weight of the existing lettuce. The results of last month’s test resulted in lettuce whose individual heads weighed more than 200 grams on average. However, we aim to grow more than just lettuce. We have plans to eventually grow baby spinach, mature spinach, and baby arugula. Smart Acres’ vision is to expand to meet the demand of popular produce in the region such as strawberries, and, as I previously mentioned, a shift and emphasis on cultivating potato seeds.
Where can we buy your smart lettuces?
We are now supplying restaurants and hotels for free to get ourselves known, and we have had great feedback from them. We have also partnered with several restaurants and cafes around the country including Inked and Fae Cafe, and have plans to have our produce in the kitchen of dozens of other F&B outlets. The recent initiative by HH Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Presidential Affairs, and Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA), stating that all major grocery stores in the capital must allocate space for local produce means we are perfectly poised to enter local supermarkets. We have had lots of offers from Abu Dhabi Holding and other government entities that are members in the food security committee to buy our whole produce. Currently we are focused on our actual produce itself, in terms of quality, weight.
Posted in Features, Food, Life, News
Tagged agriculture system Abu Dhabi, CEO Abdulla al Kaabi, Clean foods UAE, food security UAE, SMART ACRES Abu Dhabi, st regis abu dhabi, UAE Climate Change Risks and Resilience, UAE farms, UAE’s vertical farming industry, vertical farming Abu Dhabi