We’ve gone vegetarian and even vegan but soon we could be going
Indoor farmers reveal crop-shelf revolution
The world is heading for a food crisis. The global population is set to grow by two billion within the next 20 years, and demand for food is predicted to be 60% higher.
At the same time climate change, the spread of cities and soil degradation will have shrunk the amount of land to grow what we eat.
The solution to global starvation, however, might be found in a shed in Invergowrie.
At the James Hutton Institute in Perth, a company is developing a system of vertical farming.
This is where food is grown in stacks in environmentallyfriendly towers.
The revolutionary idea has been hailed as the future of food and is predicted to be one of the early steps on a journey which could end with our crops being grown in city-centre skyscrapers.
That’s the view of David Farquhar, the CEO of Intelligent Growth Solutions, the company developing the new farming technique.
“At the moment we’re growing
broccoli seedlings, potato seedlings and strawberry seedlings for local farmers,” he explained.
“We’ve got all the way to growing actual strawberries. We’re growing things like pea shoots, baby kale, baby celery, fennel, coriander, parsley, basil, and every herb you can possibly imagine.
“These are things which would normally be grown in a Mediterranean climate.
“Imagine you’ve taken a field and cut it up into snooker table-size rectangles. You put the rectangles in a box, stack them 10 metres high and put the weather in.
“Then you control that weather via your mobile phone.”
It sounds simple but at Intelligent Growth Solutions the vertical farms, which are around 10 metres high, see cutting-edge techniques being used to grow a variety of crops.
The system attracted
£5.4 million worth of investment last month, with one American agri-tech investment company enthusing “nothing else can touch” the Perth initiative.
David hopes to develop pre-packaged farming “towers” which can be installed almost anywhere – from existing farms to modern city centres.
Now everyone from governments to businesses to local farmers is keen to employ his services.
“In Singapore there’s very little arable land,” added David. “In Saudi Arabia, all you’ve got is desert. In the Cayman Islands, it costs £70 for a kilo of basil because it has to be flown in,” added David.
“The amount of miles food has to travel is expensive and bad for the environment.
“Vertical farms could solve these problems.
“Farmers want to grow seedlings for things like potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower more efficiently and cleanly. A lot of seedlings we import are diseased or have pests – we have to throw it away. With our system, we can provide seeds without diseases or pests.”
Food producers are keen to reap the benefits of vertical farming, too. And retailers love the system because it produces fruit and vegetables which have a longer life.
“Because we don’t use chemicals, retailers have suddenly realised that we could salad for them that doesn’t require to be washed,” David explained.
“And what that will do is it will cook between five and seven days extra on to the shelf life.
“We are using no chemicals anywhere in the vertical farm. Everything is grown on an organic basis — although we can’t actually we can’t actually claim it’s organic, because we’re not growing the crops in soil.
“There are no pesticides, no chemicals, nothing. It just grows in peat or it grows in coconut matting.
“That’s the same stuff used if you have a hanging basket in your garden.”
Farming in towers rather than fields may not seem natural but neither is the current state of how we grow the food we eat, according to David.
And he branded those who would rather stick to traditional farming as being stuck in the
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Normally you’d grow this stuff in the Mediterranean