WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Finally researchers have been able to grow a global staple “Tier 1” crop in vertical farms and it opens the door for more and a GENUINE food revolution.

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Growing rice the traditional paddy field way requires a lot of water and land, and is dependent on weather conditions. So, it comes as a pleasant surprise to many to find out that rice can actually be grown in Singapore – in vertical farms no less. And if you think that growing crops like rice inside in a vertical farm isn’t news worthy then it’s the first Tier 1 crop – a global staple – that’s been grown in a vertical farm ever. And that’s huge because up until now it’s all been lettuce and salads.

Grown on a wall at Block 146 Tampines Avenue 5 last week Tampines GRC Members of Parliament attended the rice harvesting ceremony at the block. The MPs threshed the rice to loosen out the rice grains from the stalks at the ceremony to signify a bountiful Year of the Tiger.

The Future of Food, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

The variant of rice grown at the vertical high-tech farm at Block 146 is the Temasek Rice.

They were created in the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory green house before being transplanted to the vertical farm in October 2021. Prior to growing rice at the block, the laboratory conducted trials and optimised technologies to grow the rice at an experimental vertical farming structure in Lim Chu Kang.

The six-storey vertical farm at Block 146 is managed by local company Netatech, which specialises in using micro-drip technology and rainwater harvesting to reduce the resources needed to grow food crops. The farm grows rice at the top floor, while the other floors are occupied by vegetables, such as naibai and Hong Kong kai lan.

Netatech uses precision drip irrigation to water the rice and this method reduces the amount of water needed to grow rice significantly. Growing 1kg of rice in a paddy field requires 2,500 litres of water, as compared to 750 litres of water for the same amount of rice using the precision drip irrigation method, Daniel Wong, the director of technology at Netatech said.

It also takes about four months to grow each batch of Temasek rice at the Block 146 vertical farm in Tampines with the crop typically taking an additional two to four weeks to be ready for harvest.

While the rice is used for research and development purposes only for now, the vegetables grown at Block 146 are distributed to residents who gain credits to redeem these free and fresh vegetables after contributing their food waste to the black soldier fly facility at Tampines Park. A total of 165kg of vegetables are produced each month, and this can feed around 100 families of four.

The initiative at Tampines Block 146 contributes to national efforts of achieving the “30 by 30 Goal,” which is to meet 30 per cent of nutritional needs of the population by 2030 through local food production.

The vertical farm

Masagos Zulkifli, the Minister for Social and Family Development, told the media that the success of this farm has garnered interest from residents in other areas. To replicate such an infrastructure at other HDB blocks, the town council will have to ensure there is sufficient space to house such infrastructure and it will not become a form of disamentiy to the residents, such as blocking the view that they enjoy or intruding into their privacy, Masagos added.

Rice Harvest Ceremony, Singapore

Temasek rice is a semi-dwarf variety that can tolerate drought better than other rice variants. It can thrive for two weeks without water. It is also disease resistant and relatively high yield.

While Temasek rice does not taste like Thailand fragrant rice, the texture was described to be in between typical white rice and brown rice, according to Lim Hock Chuan, the Chief Executive of Temasek Foundation Liveability.

Temasek rice was grown in Indonesia and has been on sale via online supermarkets, such as Redmart and Amazon.sg, since 2016.

The post Vertically farmed rice opens the door to guaranteed food security in Singapore appeared first on 311 Institute.

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If you can grow plants without the need for light then it means you can grow plants anywhere and that they can keep on growing 24/7 which will increase crop yields.

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How can we grow more food using fewer resources? Scientists have been focused on this question for decades if not centuries, as an ever-growing global population necessitates constantly seeking new ways to produce food in sustainable and affordable ways. Some of the solutions so far include boosting plant’s photosynthesis potential so crops produce 40% greater yields, and growing plants in vertical farms using 100 percent less chemicals and herbicides, and over 95 percent less water while producing a staggering 800 percent increase in yields.

The latest breakthrough in plant biology though is a really odd one that goes against almost everything we know of plants and photosynthesis because it seems so improbable: what if crops could grow without sunlight – not vertical farm – style, where LED lights replace the sun, but in literal total darkness?

A paper published last week in Nature Food details a method for doing just that.

Photosynthesis uses a series of chemical reactions to convert carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight into glucose and oxygen. The light dependent stage comes first and relies on sunlight to transfer energy to plants, which convert it to chemical energy. The light independent stage, which is also called the Calvin Cycle, follows when this chemical energy and carbon dioxide are used to form carbohydrate molecules such as glucose.

Now a team of researchs at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to leapfrog over the light dependent stage entirely, providing plants with the chemical energy they need to complete the Calvin Cycle in total darkness.

To do it they used an electrolysis to convert carbon dioxide and water into acetate, a salt or ester form of acetic acid and a common building block for biosynthesis – it’s also the main component of vinegar. The team fed the acetate to plants in the dark, finding they were able to use it as they would have used the chemical energy they’d get from sunlight.

They then tried their method on several varieties of plants and measured the differences in growth efficiency as compared to regular photosynthesis. Green algae grew four times more efficiently, while yeast saw a massive 18 fold improvement.

The problem with photosynthesis though, even though it’s been around since the beginning of life on Earth, is that it’s only able to convert about one percent of the energy it gets from sunlight into “food” for the plant. The team also had success feeding acetate to cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea plants.

“Typically, these organisms are cultivated on sugars derived from plants or inputs derived from petroleum – which is a product of biological photosynthesis that took place millions of years ago,” said Elizabeth Hann, co-lead author of the study. “This technology is a more efficient method of turning solar energy into food, as compared to food production that relies on biological photosynthesis.”

Decoupling plant growth from sunlight, as bizarre as it sounds, would have huge potential benefits for food production. As climate change makes weather and thus crop yields increasingly unpredictable, it’s becoming more appealing, and necessary, to grow food in controlled environments, like those of vertical farms. Being able to grow more crops indoors would also bring produce to a whole new level of “local,” as crops that used artificial photosynthesis to replace sunlight could theoretically be grown just about anywhere in any hemisphere, in any kind of ecosystem, even in dark tunnels under cities, and unlike today obviously crops would keep on growing at night 24/7/365 which would be yet another massive bonus.

“Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people,” said the study’s corresponding author, Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. “By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment.”

There are some key details that would need to be worked out before this methodology could be seriously considered for large-scale food production. How much energy, water, and other resources would it use relative to traditional farming or other technology-enhanced food growth techniques? Is the texture, flavour, and nutritional content of plants fed with acetate identical to those grown in sunlight? And so on.

Tinkering with nature always seems like a murky undertaking, but from the Green Revolution to the advent of modern day GMOs humans have been doing so for centuries; to some degree our survival has been dependent on our ability to manipulate nature. We’re seeing the fallout from that manipulation now, but techniques like artificial photosynthesis could end up being part of the toolbox we’ll need to repair the damage we’ve done while continuing to feed a hungry growing global population.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

You can grow crops sustainably in a vertical farm, or you can grow really expensive perfume ingredients with higher profit margins …

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We used to grow crops in fields, then greenhouses, then warehouses. Then we renamed those warehouses “Vertical Farms” and today after billions of dollars of global investment those robot tended farms are producing eight times the crops, using 100% less chemicals and pesticides, 99% less water, and in just 1/250^th of the space of those fields.

It is indeed a farming revolution. But now it’s not just traditional farming that’s benefitting, the perfume industry is set to benefit too. Patchouli from Indonesia, neroli from Tunisia, jasmine from India. These precious ingredients are what European perfume brands have relied on for centuries to make their signature scents.

But rising temperatures and droughts are affecting crops across the world, including those used by the perfume industry, putting its future at risk. Enter vertical farms.

French vertical farming company Jungle has paired up with Swiss fragrance house Firmenich — the world’s largest privately owned fragrance company — to grow some of the plants it uses in vertical farms. It’s the first collaboration between a perfume house and a vertical farm.

Firmenich has mixed scents for 125 years, including creating scents like Jean Paul Gaultier Scandal and Calvin Klein’s CK Everyone. Its famed “noses” are some of the best in the business.

Firmenich uses over 1,000 plants across its recipes, and Jungle founder Gilles Dreyfus estimates that 20% of them can be grown in a vertical farm. Firmenich invested in Jungle a few years ago, but is now also a client, purchasing vertical farm-grown flowers.

The unusual collaboration is notable for vertical farm watchers. With profitability an issue for many vertical farming companies, working with the luxury sector could be another lucrative business line.

Other farms are branching into medicinal plants to improve profits, while others are rumoured to be eyeing a change to cannabis farming once regulations ease.

Despite tracing its origins back to the 19th century, Firmenich has a history of embracing technological change. Last year, it announced it was starting to use AI to devise scents.

Using vertical farms means the conditions a plant is grown in can be controlled, mimicking the conditions typically found in hotter climates outside Europe.

“When you have the controlled environment of the vertical farm, you can impact how plants are going to express themselves,” explains Dreyfus. “Through controlling the environment, we’re going to be able to express the smell in a stronger way.”

Vertical farms will also allow companies to include natural ingredients in perfumes which they couldn’t before. Jungle has just managed to grow lily of the valley in its vertical farm to the north of Paris.

“It’s a flower that flourishes for seven to ten days a year, once a year. But to extract from it takes two to three months, so you don’t have enough biomass to make the essential oil to create a natural compound of lily of the valley to use in perfume,” says Dreyfus.

Perfumes have, therefore, only ever contained synthetic reconstructions of lily of the valley. In its vertical farm, Jungle can stagger the flourishing period of different plants, providing a flowering crop for a sustained period of time.

“The extracts have already been sold and they’re being tested as we speak in a perfume recipe,” Dreyfus says.

Jungle is aiming for profitability next year, and says perfume will help. Europe’s biggest vertical farm, German company Infarm, is aiming at profitability by 2023.

“Food is a lot of large-volume, low-margin produce. These plants have less volume, but much higher margins,” he says — particularly for plants that can’t be grown outside of the farms, like the lily.

Jungle used to get 10% of its income from perfume and 90% from food products, but that balance is shifting fast: it’s now at 40% perfume, 60% food. The first perfumes containing real lily of the valley will hit the shelves in the next year or so — the toxicology and testing process for perfumes is pretty long.

The brand it’ll be sold under can’t be disclosed but, once it arrives, it’ll be a lot of people’s first sniff of a real lily of the valley flower.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Growing cotton is environmentally intensive and has a large environmental footprint – algae doesn’t and it’s just as good.

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The global fashion industry employs millions of people and is worth trillions of dollars.

It also accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions, creates pollution and waste which in India is so bad that it turns the rivers multi-coloured as all the various dyes from the clothing factories runs into rivers, and has all manner of other negative environmental impacts. Meanwhile, in the US, just 15% of textiles are recycled, while the rest are incinerated or sent to landfill.

That’s why one Israeli startup is creating a biodegradable, non-toxic, and low energy textile — a biomaterial made from algae. Its algae formula can be used to create natural fibers and dyes using less water than conventional products, and producing zero waste and pollution, said Renana Krebs, CEO and co-founder of Algaeing.

The company hopes to “harness the power of renewable algae to create a real, genuine impact against climate change,” she said.

Courtesy: Algaeing

Algae, which includes seaweed, is already being used in other industries including food, pharmaceuticals, and even biofuel sectors are all looking to this group of aquatic organisms as a sustainable material, and Krebs saw an opportunity to apply algae to textiles, too. Working in the fashion industry for 15 years, she saw first hand the industry’s pollution and waste. So, after quitting her job in 2014, she launched Algaeing in 2016.

The algae is supplied by another Israeli company, Algatech, grown in seawater in indoor “vertical farms” that run on solar energy. This means that unlike cotton, it doesn’t take up agricultural land, and it doesn’t have the carbon emissions associated with using fertilizer.

Algaeing converts the algae into a liquid formula that can then be used as a dye or turned into a textile when combined with cellulose, a plant fiber, which clothing manufacturers can do themselves using Algaeing’s proprietary recipe.

Other companies are seeing the potential of algae in textiles, too. Men’s apparel brand Vollebak has a biodegradable T-Shirt made from eucalyptus and beech pulp, and algae, that can be buried in the garden and breaks down to “worm food” in 12 weeks, and startup AlgiKnit is developing a wool-like yarn from seaweed.

Krebs said Algaeing’s focus is on changing the supply chain, and the company is preparing for the commercial launch of its patented technology in 2022.

Staggeringly, up to 2,700 liters of freshwater is required to produce the cotton for a regular T-Shirt, according to one WWF estimate — which is equivalent to one person’s drinking water for two years, said Krebs. But she said Algaeing’s fibers cut water use by 80%.

There’s a human impact too: those working in textile manufacturing are often exposed to dangerous chemicals and heavy metals. But the algae-based dye is non-toxic and allergen-free — which is also a plus for consumers.

“Algaeing are addressing three key pain points of the fashion industry: the reliance on freshwater to grow fibers; the use of chemicals, both in pesticides for growing fibers and also dyeing textiles; and thirdly, energy use,” said Erik Bang, innovation lead, H&M Foundation.

Currently, algae-based fibers are more expensive than conventional fibers like cotton, but Krebs said that as a sustainable and ethical product, it adds value to the brand.

The fashion industry is entrenched in tradition — but it’s also ripe for disruption, according to Erik Bang, innovation lead for the H&M Foundation, a non-profit that is privately funded by the founders and main owners of the H&M Group, and supports young fashion startups.

Bang said that in the past five years, awareness about sustainability in fashion has increased steadily, and that’s attracting “new types of investors” with diverse backgrounds in technology, material sciences, and biochemistry.

Algaeing received the H&M Foundation Global Change Award in 2018, and the company’s work with algae highlights a “brilliant potential source” of future textile fibers, said Bang, adding that while consumer behaviour is changing it’s still expensive for the industry to invest in sustainable technologies and scale them up.

“We need legislators to change the playing field, and tilt it so much more in the favour of the circular economy and sustainable practices, and punish the old habits,” said Bangs.

“We are creating a new generation, a new category of products,” said Krebs.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The way we grow crops today is inefficient, and vertical farms offer companies a new way to grow organic crops en masse without ruining the planet.

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I’ve been talking about new ways to produce our food for years now, from growing enough chicken nuggets to feed the world by using just a single cell from a single chicken feather, through to 3D printing beef in space, and, back down to Earth again, by growing copious amounts of fresh, organic veg using up to 99 percent less water and 100 percent less chemicals and herbicides by growing crops in vertical farms that could be anywhere, whether it’s the middle of a desert, in a city, or in some company’s warehouse.

Now, Ocado the British online food retailer looks like it’s following in Jeff Bezos’ footsteps after he invested over $200 million in a vertical farm company called Plenty, by investing £17m of their own hard earned cash in another high tech vertical farming company as they rachet up their ambitions to grow their own herbs and veg right alongside their robot-run distribution centres.

The online grocery specialist has bought a 58% stake in Jones Food, a vertical farm company that grows 420 tonnes of basil, parsley and coriander a year in stacked trays under 12km (7.5 miles) of LED lights in a warehouse in Scunthorpe, UK. The grower currently supplies businesses such as sandwich maker Greencore.

Duncan Tatton-Brown, finance director of Ocado, said the group could open at least 10 more similar vertical farms within five years. He said it could take less than a year to build a Jones Food facility and the two companies were now considering how Ocado’s expertise in robotics and AI could be used to make Jones Food more efficient.

James Lloyd-Jones, chief executive of Jones Food, said the group’s Scunthorpe farm recycled all its water, did not use pesticides and was powered by renewable energy, such as wind turbines and solar panels.

Ocado’s £17m investment also includes the formation of a new joint venture – Infinite Acres – with US based vertical farming business 80 Acres Farms and Priva, a Netherlands-based horticultural technology provider, on a four-year project to develop off-the-shelf vertical farming systems that can be sold to retail and other businesses worldwide. The 80 Acres farms, which are based in Ohio, Arkansas, North Carolina and Alabama, are able to grow tomatoes and courgettes as well as leafy salads and herbs, without using pesticides – or fields for that matter.

Tim Steiner, Ocado’s chief executive, said: “We believe that our investments today in vertical farming will allow us to address fundamental consumer concerns on freshness and [sustainable farming] and build on new technologies that will revolutionise the way customers access fresh produce.”

“Our hope ultimately is to co-locate vertical farms within or next to our [distribution centres] and Ocado Zoom’s micro-fulfilment centres so that we can offer the very freshest and most sustainable produce that could be delivered to a customer’s kitchen within an hour of it being picked.”

Ocado Zoom is a new one-hour delivery service offering a more limited range of goods, launched earlier this year and being trialled in west London.

Only eight people work at the Jones Food facility, where the herbs are grown hydroponically – getting all the nutrients they need without soil. The plants, the first of which were only grown last year, are not touched by humans from seed to bagging ready for stores. A robot farmer called Frank stacks trays of plants on to towers of shelving while machinery automatically harvests them when ready.

Every element inside is monitored to ensure it is clean and primed for growing the herbs quickly. Anyone entering must wear protective clothing including overalls, wellies and hairnets and step through an air shower that blows off any dust. Air is filtered to ensure insects cannot enter.

Ocado currently sells Waitrose groceries via its website in the UK and provides distribution for Morrisons’ website. Next year it will swap Waitrose for Marks & Spencer under a £750m joint venture, raising the prospect of specialist robot farms serving the 134-year-old high street retailer.

Ocado has sold its hi-tech robot grocery picking and packing technology around the world to retailers wanting to develop online businesses. In one blockbuster deal it is to build 20 warehouses for US supermarket giant Kroger. It has also struck grocery delivery technology partnerships with Groupe Casino in France, Sobeys in Canada and ICA Group in Sweden, creating a ready-made potential market for its robot farms.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

As global population grows we need new ways to produce affordable quality food, and vertical farms are increasingly the answer.

Vertical farms that can grow eight times the crops using no chemicals, herbicides or pesticides, and with 99 percent less water than traditional farms have been hitting the news now for some years now, and their popularity is growing with even Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, throwing over $200million at the technology. But now, following on from the unveiling of the world’s first fully automated traditional farm, US agri-tech start up Iron Ox have announced they’ve created one of the world’s first fully autonomous vertical farms in California, something Japanese company Spread promised to deliver at a larger scale a while ago, and the development will help bring the cost of manufacturing food in this way to below that of food produced using traditional farming methods, with the additional benefit of improved sustainability.

For now the test is small scale, and at the moment the hydroponic indoor farm relies on two robots to plant, care for and harvest produce. One of the robots is 1,000 pounds and about the size of a car. It picks up the trays of plants and transports them around the greenhouse. A second machine, a robotic arm, is responsible for all the fine manipulation tasks, like seeding and transplanting.

See the technology in action

As a tray of plants matures, the mobile robot carries it to the processing area. Here, the robotic arm moves baby plants in densely packed trays to containers with more space. This optimizes space efficiency, because throughout their life cycle, plants are only given the room they need.

Co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander claimed that Iron Ox is able to do the equivalent of 30 acres of outdoor farming in just a single acre on its robotic farm, and the company wants to build more small farms near urban centers so produce is fresher upon arrival.

“Right now fresh produce really isn’t all that fresh. It’s traveling on average 2,000 miles from farm to grocery store, which means a lot of people are eating week-old lettuce or strawberries, ” Alexander explained.

The robots at Iron Ox also use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine vision to detect pests and diseases, and they can remove infected plants before the problem spreads.

“So it’s not just that the robots can move plants around and very efficiently, it’s also that they can help you avoid ever having a plant go bad,” co-founder and CTO Jon Binney explained.

Iron Ox is not the only venture-backed indoor farm. Others, like Bowery and Plenty, who I’ve discussed before, also aim to use the latest technology to sustainably produce crops near cities. However, Iron Ox is the first to fully automate the growing process and completely design its system around the robot’s capabilities.

“So one of the great things about the robots is that they don’t really get tired and they don’t really care what hours they work. And so as long as they’ve got juice in the batteries, they can keep going,” Binney said.

Though Iron Ox grows its produce using LED lights, in the future it hopes to build natural-light greenhouses to take advantage of the sun’s free energy. Eventually, the company aims to make its non-GMO and pesticide-free produce as cheap as traditional agriculture.

Initially, Iron Ox is only growing leafy greens and herbs, though it plans to expand into other crops, like tomatoes, in the coming years. The company plans to begin selling its produce later this year.

To date, Iron Ox has raised $6 million in seed funding, led by Eniac Ventures.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

A lot has changed in the last ten years, and even more will change in the next ten. Are you ready?

Firstly, a big thank you to Kathrin and the team for inviting me to be the keynote at this years RWE Leadership meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany to present on “Life in 2030” to over 300 of RWE’s leadership team, including their CEO Martin Schmitz, and host the dozen or so open innovation workshops where we discussed what the changes we see today and on the horizon will mean for the energy sector, the company and their future strategy.

During the keynote I shone a light on the underlying trends accelerating the pace of change and disruption at a global scale, which today is fast, but that will be even faster tomorrow, and which are helping revolutionise every industry in the world, from entertainment and retail, to energy and transportation, and beyond. I also discussed the often hidden impacts these trends are having on industry at large, such as the decentralisation and democratisation of services, and how, when combined, they can change the economics of an entire industry within a relatively short timeframe.

Watch the keynote

I broke the keynote essentially into four parts – the future of life from a personal, professional and domestic perspective, and then the way in which all industries, not just the energy sector, are being transformed and up ended.

While you can watch the video for yourself, from a personal perspective technology is not just democratising access to information, it’s also democratising access to creativity and expertise in the form of new Creative Machine and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based services, such as Robo-Doctors, Robo-Innovators, and Robo-Lawyers to name but three. But as technology becomes more pervasive within society there will also be a privacy cost, so I discussed the nascent rise of new Self-Soverign Identity programs, like those from IBM and the Sovrin Foundation, whose objectives are, in short, to help us reclaim reclaim control of our information and our online identities from the large platforms we all use today.

Moving across then into the professional world where we’re seeing AI increasingly take on and take over more cognitive roles, across a variety of industries, and the gradual rise of fully distributed autonomous organisations, I discussed how organisations and governments can tackle the challenges these present head on. And then crossing over to the home I touched on Connected Home, behavioural computing, and the rise of urban farming and the reality of an increasingly decentralised energy generation and supply system, based on renewable energy technologies, that’s helping push the cost of electricity at the point of consumption to zero.

All of which was just for starters, so if you’d like to know more about Life in 2030 then grab a coffee, and hit the play button above. I hope you enjoy the experience, and maybe next time I’ll see you at one of the events…

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Today’s modern agricultural practises favour countries with fertile land and the food they produce has a dramatic impact on the environment, but tomorrows farms could be stationed in deserts, or at sea, right next to their consumers, producing high quality, organic food at knock down prices.

Before stepping into Plenty’s indoor vertical farm on the banks of the San Francisco Bay, make sure you’re wearing pants and closed toe shoes. Your first stop is the cleaning room. Open the door and air will whoosh behind you, removing stray dust and contaminants as the door slams shut. Slide into a white bodysuit, pull on disposable shoe covers, and don a pair of glasses with coloured lenses. Wash your hands in the sink before slipping on food safety gloves. Step into a shallow pool of clear, sterilised liquid, then open the door to what the company calls its indoor growing room, where another air bath eliminates any stray particles that collected in the cleaning room. By modern standards this is about as far as you can get from traditional farming.

The growing room looks like a strange forest, with pink and purple LEDs illuminating 20-foot-tall towers of leafy vegetables that stretch as far as you can see. It smells like a forest, too, but there’s no damp earth or moss. The plants are growing sideways out of the columns, which bloom with Celtic crunch lettuce, red oak kale, sweet summer basil, and 15 other heirloom munchables. The 50,000-square-foot room, a little more than an acre, can produce some 2 million pounds of lettuce a year.

Step closer to the columns of veg, and you’ll spot one of the roughly 7,500 infrared cameras or 35,000 sensors hidden among the leaves. The sensors monitor the room’s temperature, humidity, and level of carbon dioxide, while the cameras record the plants’ growing phases. The data stream to Plenty’s botanists and artificial intelligence experts, who regularly tweak the environment to increase the farm’s productivity and enhance the food’s taste. Step even closer to the produce, and you may see a ladybug or two. They’re there to eat any pests that somehow make it past the cleaning room.

“They work for free so we don’t have to eat pesticides,” says Matt Barnard, Plenty’s chief executive officer.

Barnard, 44, grew up on a 160-acre apple and cherry orchard in bucolic Door County, Wis., a place that attracts a steady stream of fruit-picking tourists. Now he and his four-year-old startup aim to radically change how we grow and eat produce. The world’s supply of fruits and vegetables falls 22 percent short of global nutritional needs, according to public health researchers at Emory University, and that shortfall is expected to worsen. While the field is littered with the remains of companies that tried to narrow the gap over the past few years, Plenty seems the most promising of any so far, for two reasons. First is its technology, which vastly increases its farming efficiency, and, early tasters say, the quality of its food, relative to traditional farms and its venture-backed rivals. Second, but not least, is the $200 million it collected in July from Japanese telecom giant SoftBank Group, the largest agriculture technology investment in history.

With the backing of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Plenty has the capital and connections to accelerate its endgame, namely building massive indoor farms on the outskirts of every major city on Earth, some 500 in all. In that world, food could go from farm to table in hours rather than days or weeks. Barnard says he’s been meeting with officials from some 15 governments on four continents, as well as executives from Walmart and Amazon, while he plans his expansion, and it’s highly likely that both companies, in this case, will be building vertical farms in their own cavernous warehouses in order to provide fresh food to their online customers, and disintermediate farmers and the supply chain in the process.

He intends to open farms abroad next year, this first one, in the Bay Area, is on track to begin making deliveries to San Francisco grocers by the end of 2017.

“We’re giving people food that tastes better and is better for them,” Barnard says. He says that a lot.

Plenty acknowledges that its model is only part of the solution to the global nutrition gap, that other novel methods and conventional farming will still be needed. Barnard is careful not to frame his crusade in opposition to anyone, including the industrial farms and complex supply chain he’s trying to circumvent. He’s focused on proving that growing rooms such as the one in South San Francisco can reliably deliver Whole Foods quality at Walmart prices. Even with $200 million in hand, it won’t be easy.

“You’re talking about seriously scaling,” says Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the investment arm of the US Department of Agriculture, “the question then becomes, are things going to fall apart? Are you going to be able to maintain quality control?”

The idea of growing food indoors in unlikely places such as warehouses and rooftops has been hyped for decades. It presents a compelling solution to a series of intractable problems, including water shortages, the scarcity of arable land, and a farming population that’s graying as young people eschew the agriculture industry in greater numbers. It also promises to reduce the absurd waste built into international grocery routes. The US, for example, imports some 35 percent of fruits and vegetables, according to Bain & Co., and even leafy greens, most of which are produced in California or Arizona, travel an average of 2,000 miles before reaching a retailer. In other words, vegetables that are going to be appealing and edible for two weeks or less spend an awful lot of that time in transit.

So far, though, vertical farms haven’t been able to break through. Over the past few years, early leaders in the field, including PodPonics in Atlanta, FarmedHere in Chicago, and Local Garden in Vancouver have shut down. Some had design issues, while others started too early, when hardware costs were much higher. Gotham Greens in Brooklyn, N.Y., and AeroFarms in Newark, N.J., look promising, but they haven’t raised comparable cash hoards or outlined similarly ambitious plans.

While more than one of these companies was felled by a lack of expertise in either farming or finance, Barnard’s unusual path to his Bay Area warehouse makes him especially suited for the project. He chose a different life than the orchard, frustrated with the degree to which his life could be upended by an unexpected freeze or a broken-down tractor-trailer. Eventually he became a telecommunications executive, then a partner at a private equity firm. In 2007, two decades into his white-collar life, he started his own company, one that concentrated on investing in technologies to treat and conserve water. After an investor suggested he consider putting money into vertical farming, Barnard began to research the subject and quickly found himself obsessed with shortages of food and arable land.

“The length of the supply chain, the time and distance it takes,” he says, meant “we were throwing away half of the calories we grow.”

He spent months chatting with farmers, distributors, grocers, and, eventually, Nate Storey.

The grandson of Montana ranchers, 36-year-old Storey spent much of his childhood planting and tending gardens with his six siblings. Their Air Force dad, who eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel, moved them to another base every few years, and the family gardened to save money on groceries.

“I was always interested in ranching and family legacy but frustrated on how to do it,” Storey says, “if you’re an 18-year-old kid and you want to farm or ranch, most can’t raise $3 million to buy a farm or a ranch.”

A decade ago, as a student at the University of Wyoming, he learned about the same industry level inefficiencies Barnard observed. He began experimenting with vertical farming for his doctoral dissertation in agronomy and crop science, and in 2009 patented a growing tower that would pack the plants more densely than other designs. He spent $13,000, then a sizable chunk of his life savings, to buy materials for the towers and started building them in a nearby garage. By the time he met Barnard in 2013, he’d sold a few thousand to hobbyist farmers and the odd commercial grower.

Storey became Barnard’s co-founder and Plenty’s Chief Science Officer, splitting his time between Wyoming and San Francisco. Together they made Storey’s designs bigger, more efficient, and more readily automated. By 2014 they were ready to start building the farm.

Most vertical farms grow plants on horizontal shelves stacked like a tall dresser. Plenty uses tall poles from which the plants jut out horizontally. The poles are lined up about 4 inches from one another, allowing crops to grow so densely they look like a solid wall. Plenty’s setups don’t use any soil.

Instead, nutrients and water are fed into the top of the poles, and gravity does much of the rest of the work. Without horizontal shelves, excess heat from the grow lights rises naturally to vents in the ceiling.

“Because we work with physics, not against it, we save a lot of money,” Barnard says.

Water, too. Excess drips to the bottom of the plant towers and collects in a recyclable indoor stream, and a dehumidifier system captures the condensation produced from the cooling hardware, along with moisture released into the air by plants as they grow. All that accumulated water is then filtered and fed back into the farm. All told, Plenty says, its technology can yield as much as 350 times more produce in a given area as conventional farms, with 1 percent of the water. The next-highest claim, from AeroFarms, is as much as 130 times the land efficiency of traditional models.

Based on readings from the tens of thousands of wireless cameras and sensors, and depending on which crop it’s dealing with, Plenty’s system adjusts the LED lights, air composition, humidity, and nutrition. Along with that hardware, the company is using software to predict when plants should get certain resources. If a plant is wilting or dehydrated, for example, the software should be able to alter its lighting or water regimen to help.

Barnard, tall and lanky with a smile that crinkles his entire face, becomes giddy when he recounts the first time Plenty built an entire growing room.

“It had gone from pretty sparse to a forest in about a week,” he says, “I had never seen anything like that before.”

When he and Storey started collaborating, their plan was to sell their equipment to small growers across the country. But to make a dent in the produce gap, they realised they’d need to reproduce their model farm with consistency and speed.

“If it takes you two or three years to build a facility, forget about it,” Storey says, “that’s just not a pace that’s going to have any impact.”

That meant they’d have to engineer the farms themselves, and that meant two things – they’d need more than their 40 staffers, and they’d need way more money.

It wasn’t easy for Barnard to get his first meeting with Son, in March. One of Plenty’s early investors had to beg the SoftBank CEO, who allotted Barnard 15 minutes. He and the investor, David Chao of DCM Ventures, jammed one of the 20-foot grow towers into Chao’s Mercedes sedan and took off for Son’s mansion in Woodside, Calif., some 30 miles from San Francisco. Son looked bewildered as they unloaded the tower, but the meeting stretched to 45 minutes, and two weeks later they flew to Tokyo for a more official discussion in SoftBank’s boardroom. The $200 million investment, announced in late last year, will help Plenty put a farm in every major metro area with more than 1 million residents, according to Barnard. He says each will have a grow room of about 100,000 square feet, twice the size of the Bay Area model, and can be constructed in under 30 days.

Chao says SoftBank wants “to help Plenty expand very quickly, particularly in China, Japan, and the Middle East,” which all struggle with a lack of arable land. Other places on the near-term list include Canada, Denmark, and Ireland. Plenty is also in talks with insurers and institutional investors such as pension funds to bankroll its farm building with debt. Barnard says the farms would be able to pay off investors in three to five years, versus 20 to 40 years for traditional farms. Think of it more like a utility, he says.

Plenty, of course, isn’t as sure a bet as Consolidated Edison Inc. or Italy’s Enel SpA. The higher costs of urban real estate, and the electricity needed to run all of the company’s equipment, cut into its efficiency gains. While it’s adapting its technology for foods including strawberries and cucumbers, the complications of tree borne fruits and rooting crops likewise neutralise the value of its technology. And Plenty has to contend with commercial farms that have spent decades building their relationships with grocers and suppliers and a system that already offers many people extremely low prices for a much wider variety of goods.

“What I haven’t seen so far in vertical farm technologies is these entities getting very far beyond greens,” says Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University, “people only eat so many greens.”

Barnard says he’s saving way more on truck fuel and other logistical costs, which account for more than one third of the retail price of produce, than he’s spending on warehousing or power. He’s also promising that the company’s farms will require long term labour from skilled, full time workers with benefits. About 30 people can run the South San Francisco warehouse, future models, which will be about two to five times its size, may require several hundred apiece, he says. While robots can handle some of the harvesting, planting, and logistics, experts will oversee the crop development and grocer relationships on-site.

Meanwhile retailers shouldn’t need much convincing, says Mikey Vu, a partner at Bain who studies the grocery business.

“Grocers would love to get another four to five days of shelf life for leafy greens,” he says, “I think it’s an attractive proposition.”

Gourmets like Plenty’s results, too. Anthony Secviar, a former sous-chef at French Laundry, a Michelin starred restaurant in the Napa town of Yountville, says he wasn’t expecting much when he received a box of Plenty’s produce at his home in Mountain View, Calif. The deep green of the basil and chives hit him first. Each was equally lush, crisp, flavorful, and blemish-free.

“I’ve never had anything of this quality,” says Secviar, who while at French Laundry cooked with vegetables grown across the street from the restaurant. He’s now on Plenty’s culinary council and is basing his next restaurant’s menu around the startup’s heirloom vegetables, “it checks every box from a chef’s perspective: quality, appearance, texture, flavor, sustainability, price.”

At the South San Francisco farm, which was recently certified organic, the greens are fragrant and sweet, the kale is free of store-bought bitterness, and the purple rose lettuce carries a strong kick. There’s enough spice and crunch that the veggies won’t need a ton of dressing. Although Plenty bears little resemblance to a quaint family farm, the tastes seem to bring people back to the tiny vegetable patch in their grandparents gardens. It’s tough to believe these spicy mustard greens and fragrant chives have been re-created in a sterile room, without soil or sun, but they have, and here we are, a revolution in the making.

The post Vertical farms edge closer to disrupting traditional agriculture appeared first on 311 Institute.

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The world’s population will grow by another 2 billion by 2050 and many think today’s agricultural systems won’t cope, as a consequence we need to embrace new forms of sustainable, high yield agriculture.

The agricultural industry is going through a revolution, everything from robotic automation to gene editing, and recently I spoke about a new LED lighting system that can triple crop yields, a technology that’s ideal for today’s modern vertical farms, but now a Silicon Valley agriculture start up is preparing to build more than 300 vertical farms across China thanks to a significant multi-million dollar investments from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Softbank Group, and in time Amazon, who are on track to become the world’s first autonomous retailer, could use the same technology to disrupt agriculture and grocery retailers, like Walmart, in the US.

By entering the Chinese market, the startup, Plenty, hopes to tap into the country’s growing demand for organic foods, something that has recently been kicked into the limelight by a number of Chinese food safety scandals, the most tragic of which was in 2008 when six babies died and at least another 54,000 were made sick when tainted baby formula created a kidney disease outbreak. Now, propelled by a growing Chinese middle class with more buying power who are more willing to pay for “wholesome” foods, Plenty feels the time is right to venture into the Chinese market at scale.

The company plans to build its vertical farms in warehouses on the edges of major cities, at first growing plants such as herbs, kale and mustard greens, and much more, under LED lights using gravity fed water and, more importantly without the need for any chemicals such as herbicides or pesticides. However, while they can’t yet grow root vegetables in this way, because their first crops are going to be using “soil-free” agriculture techniques they’re hoping their next crops will include cucumbers and strawberries and that the range of fruits and vegetables they can produce will grow from there.

The company recently benefited from a massive $200 million investment round led by the Japanese telecom company SoftBank Group, which included money from Bezos Expeditions and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, and the company’s value proposition is based on the fact that these new agricultural models can help feed growing populations using less water, less resources and no chemicals while increasing yields, of organic certified foods no less, by at least eight fold, and because vertical farms can be built in cities, they can at worst reduce, and at best completely eliminate, having to transport food over long distances.

Plenty is building one such farm in spring this year just outside Seattle, Washington, and it’s expected to produce about 4.5 million pounds of greens per year, enough to feed more than 183,000 people using 80 percent less resources than a traditional farm.

The type of operation Plenty wants to bring to China could also fit in well with the Chinese government’s plans to revamp how it feeds its people, for example, earlier this month at a meeting about creating “Green zones” for growing food in major cities, Chinese agricultural minister Han Changfu said that he wants to change the way China approaches agriculture in the future.

“It is necessary to speed up the transformation of agriculture from yield-oriented to quality-oriented, raise the overall quality of agricultural products, promote the transformation and upgrading of agriculture,” he said in the statement.

The post US startup secures $200m in funding to build 300 vertical farms across China appeared first on 311 Institute.

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

As Earth’s population grows by another 2 billion in the next few decades scientists are coming up with new ways to feed them and produce food in previously unimaginable ways.

Over the next few decades it’s estimated that the Earth’s population will grow by a couple more billion people, but as anyone will tell you, especially vertical farm enthusiasts, the available arable land on Earth isn’t growing.

As a consequence there are, inevitably, lots of people asking the question how we feed all these extra hungry mouths, and while there are an increasing number, and range, of technologies that help provide at least part of an answer, that range from 3D printed “food on demand,” bioreactor and lab grown “Clean Meat,” gene editing that boosts photosynthesis and even brings crops back from the dead, precision robotic agriculture, and autonomous vertical farms, to name but a few, many of these still aren’t operating at the scale they need to to turn the tide. But one day that will change… but it’s not necessarily going to be in the short term and that’s another problem.

Now though researchers from the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland and the UK’s John Innes Center have announced they’ve managed to develop and use a NASA inspired LED light technology called “Accelerated Cultivation,” that was originally designed to help astronauts grow crops in space, to dramatically accelerate crop growth, and increase yields.

More than a decade ago, NASA used the technology, known as Far-Infrared Spectroscopy, in some of their space missions to produce food. Crops that were originally planted on Earth were moved into glass houses aboard their spacecraft and the photosynthesis of the crops was enhanced using low cost LED’s and special wavelengths of light.

Lee Hickey, a researcher at the University of Queensland and co-author of the study, said that “Far-Infrared Spectroscopy is extremely important for enhancing the reproductive growth of crops and the intensity of light is also important for the robust growth of plants.”

Using their new carefully crafted LED lighting system the teams harvested six generations of barley, chickpea and wheat, and four generations of rapeseed in just one year, in sharp contrast to the two or three generations they grew in their state of the art greenhouses in the field. The teams also managed to show their new technique could be applied to amaranth, lentils, peppers, peanuts, radishes and sunflowers.

“At the moment, we are using high-pressure sodium vapour lamps in our greenhouses, which cost a lot of electricity, and in the research we showed that wheat and barley can be planted at a density of about 900 per square meter,” said Hickey.

Hickey also added that this accelerated cultivation technique not only increased crop yields but also resulted in higher quality plants. The team compared the characteristics of their plants with those grown in the greenhouses, such as the number of new shoots and grains per panicle, and found that the plants that grew the most rapidly were always better. In the past, he said, it was already possible to speed up the cultivation of plants, but it wasn’t easy to produce genuine, healthy samples.

“People say that it’s possible to cycle quickly, but plants grown in this way are normally weak and produce only a small amount of seeds, but plants produced by the new technology were more spiritual and healthier. One of our colleagues was amazed when they first saw the results. ”

“Accelerating the growth of plants over several generations may have implications for the next test and development of more climate resilient and more resilient genetic combinations,” he added, “and even though the accelerated technology does not currently include GM technology there’s huge potential for combining the two.”

“Accelerated cultivation is a ‘non-GMO’ technology used to accelerate the development of crops, which is good news for crops that are not GMO-friendly, but we showed in our research that GM and the new lighting system could be combined to speed up the cultivation process even more. I believe that the greatest achievement of accelerated cultivation techniques will be the successful integration with other plant breeding technologies such as genomics and gene editing technology, like CRISPR. ”

At the same time as the extensive testing in the laboratory, the technology has drawn the interest of the business. For example, Dow AgroSciences, an Australian company, has used similar accelerated growth techniques to develop new wheat varieties to enhance their resistance to spike germination.

“I believe you will be able to walk into the field ten years from now and point out the different types and attributes of plants that have been developed using the technology,” said Wulff.

The teams research has been published in the journal Nature Plant.

The post NASA inspired tech designed for outer space triples crop yields on Earth appeared first on 311 Institute.