Could vertical farms feed the world?

Two leading approaches to enriching and enlarging the world’s food supply are genetic engineering and industrial processing with additives and chemicals. Now, a third solution is emerging: vertical farming, says Esther Dyson.

Eco-Business

The challenge of ensuring adequate, nutrient-rich food for an expanding global population is a daunting one, especially given constraints on key resources like water and agricultural land. As it stands, the two leading approaches to enriching and enlarging the world’s food supply are genetic engineering and industrial processing with additives and chemicals. Now, a third solution is emerging: vertical farming.

Academic studies have found that locally-cultivated vertical farms – stacked greenhouses that use artificial light to grow crops – can provide considerable savings, which could then be passed along to consumers. But questions about such farms’ fundamental economics, especially for commodity crops, have persisted.

That may be about to change. About a decade ago, four Dutch engineers – three of whom were also horticultural experts – initiated the “plant paradise” project to learn how high-value herbs, vegetables, and berries (not grains or tree fruits) grow best.

They studied how much light green beans need to thrive; which wavelengths produce the most delicious tomatoes; what temperatures cause basil to flourish; and which combination of nutrients creates the healthiest cauliflower. Through persistent experimentation, they began developing recipes for each kind of plant, along with a blueprint for “plant production units” (PPUs) that can provide these ideal growing conditions wherever they are installed.

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If, for example, the world’s vegetable supply more than doubled, fresh, healthy food would become more affordable and accessible. Perhaps demand for corn syrup and processed foods would even decline

The project’s potential as a scalable business was enticing, spurring the four researchers to found PlantLab in 2010. Four years later, the company employs 35 people, including a chief partnership officer who previously managed supply-chain logistics for Flora Holland, the world’s largest flower market. The founders remain the company’s only shareholders; they want to retain control of the technology, while working with partners and investors to build the operating units.

Last year, PlantLab began the construction – set to be completed next month – of a $22-million, 200,000-square-foot (18,600 square meters) headquarters, including multiple PPUs and research units, inside the shell of a retail food-distribution warehouse 60 miles south of Amsterdam.

PlantLab’s pitch is that a PPU the size of a city block and just a few stories high could produce the same volume of high-quality crops as a large farm, while consuming fewer resources. The only water that leaves a PPU does so in fruits and vegetables; there is no evaporation into the air, no runoff into the ground, and no pesticides or weeds. As a result, the PPUs consume only about 10 per cent as much water as traditional farms.

Moreover, like 3D printing, PPUs allow production to occur locally (thereby reducing transport costs and wastage) and on demand, under controllable conditions. In other words, any kind of fruit or vegetable can be grown anywhere, year-round (with a lead time of a few weeks). PlantLab proudly shows digitally enhanced photos of the same facility in a city, on a wintry tundra, in a desert, and – highlighting the PPUs’ ostensibly vast long-term potential – on Mars.