Going underground
Mehr als 30 Meter unter einer Londoner Geschäftsstraße werden in einer unterirdischen Farm das ganze Jahr über Radieschen, Koriander, Rucola, Knoblauch und Schnittlauch angebaut. JULIAN EARWAKER begibt sich auf Entdeckungsreise in den Untergrund.
By 2050, nearly three quarters of the world’s population will be living in cities. How we feed them may decide the survival of the human race. Growing food without natural sunlight, rain or soil doesn’t sound very green or efficient. However, as I discovered, an innovative business deep below the streets of south-west London is demonstrating the future of urban farming.
What does the future of farming look like? Probably not, you might think, like a flat-roofed, yellow-brick building close to the busy high street in Clapham, southwest London. But the secret is in what lies beneath, because this is home to Growing Underground — an innovative urban farm run by entrepreneurs Steven Dring and Richard Ballard.
I meet Ballard in their office and follow him into a small lift that goes down 33 metres into an old tunnel system under the streets of Clapham. Here, everything changes, including us: we need to put on protective clothing — rubber boots, white coats, hairnets — to minimize the risk of contamination.
Ballard leads me along a tunnel that looks like something out of a sciencefiction film: rows of identical metal trays, four shelves high, either side of a central walkway. Everything is bathed in an unnatural pink of low-energy LED lighting. I half expect to see alien eggs on the large trays, but instead find thousands of tiny salad plants at various stages of growth.
“We use hydroponics and LEDS to produce microgreens and baby leaf,” Ballard explains. “We have a consistent temperature year-round down here, whether it’s minus five degrees outside or 35 degrees.” There are no pests to worry about either, and controlling the light, heat, humidity and ventilation “enables us to grow in the same conditions, 365 days a year”.
The hydroponic system means there is no soil as such — the plants grow on material made from recycled carpet and are fed a nutrient and mineral-rich solution. It uses 70 per cent less water than conventional open-field agriculture, with a closed-loop system to remove any risk of run-off.
The science shows that in order to grow, plants don’t use the whole spectrum of colours that makes up white light. A mix of red and blue wavelengths
“The feedback is very positive”
(combining to produce a magenta range from bright purple to red-pink) is enough. Light influences flavour: changing the spectrum changes the shape of the plants and their leaves, and the amount of sugars and starches they contain. The taste test, says Ballard, is what finally decides the spectrum of lighting they use here.
Research by the UN suggests that there will be an additional 2.2 billion people on Earth in the next 30 years, and that by 2050, almost 70 per cent of them will be living in cities. The challenge, Ballard tells me, will be how to provide food, water and power for everyone — and to do it sustainably. “We started this business because we wanted to reduce our impact on the environment and look at reducing our CO2 emissions,” says Ballard. “And the three biggest CO2 contributors are buildings and the energy required to power them, agriculture and transport.”
One key influencer was the economist Jeremy Rifkin, who writes about a concept called the Third Industrial Revolution, focusing on buildings that produce their own energy, which is fed into smart grids and used efficiently. “It’s about using an abundance of renewable energy and feeding that into cities and powering them,” explains Ballard. “His idea has been adopted by heads of state, people like Angela Merkel, who are putting them into practice in cities around Europe.” And not just Europe, either — Chinese Premier Li Keqiang placed the Third Industrial Revolution at the centre of his country’s most recent five-year plan.
Ballard and Dring also studied the concept of “vertical farming”, pioneered by Dickson Despommier from Columbia University. This involves growing crops in beds in a controlled environment, without natural light or soil. With agricultural production responsible for almost a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, radical changes need to be made. “Despommier and his team looked at ways of bringing food production closer to the point of consumption,” says Ballard, “as well as using waste streams in cities — such as excess CO2 and heat from industry — to power potential growing plants.”
Dring and Ballard started Growing Underground in 2012. The tunnels they use, close to Clapham South Tube station, were built in the early 1940s as air-raid shelters and have room for up to 8,000 people. Right now, Growing Underground is using about 20 per cent of the 6,000 square metres of space, but is slowly expanding into the empty tunnels.
Not starting out as farmers was actually an advantage, says Ballard. “If we were from that background, we probably wouldn’t have done this in the first place.” Instead of trial and error, they brought in Chris Nelson as head of horticulture. With some 35 years’ experience growing in hydroponics around the world, his skills ideally complement the business. “Every day, we’re learning something new,” says Ballard. “Biology, physics, agriculture… all these different disciplines that come together to create this controlled environment.”
What do farmers think of this business model, I wonder? Farming has a reputation for being conservative by nature, but the reaction from visiting agricultural organizations and researchers suggests otherwise. “The feedback’s very positive,” says Ballard. “A lot of people who have spaces on their land, maybe disused barns or buildings, are now thinking about doing something like this in the future.”
Farming in controlled urban environments can hugely reduce energy and distribution costs. “We power our site entirely by renewable energy, we prioritize sustainable growing practices and we’re working towards carbon neutral certification,” Ballard tells me. “Since we’re keeping our produce local and closer to the point of consumption, we reduce food miles, and pollution from deliveries. Our leaves can be in your kitchen within four hours of being picked and packed. That means a longer shelf life, which in the long term reduces food waste.”
Growing Underground ships its products less than a mile down the road to New Covent Garden Market. From there, it is distributed across London to hotels, restaurants and shops. The business supplies outlets such as Ocado, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose.
Ballard accepts that their system of farming is not suitable for some crops — potatoes and root vegetables, for example. “Theoretically, with hydroponics, you can grow anything,” he explains. “But time and light dictate the price.” This means choosing fast-growing crops, like radish, coriander, rocket, pea shoots, garlic and chives. Growing a crop like pea shoots, for example, in a controlled environment means up to 60 harvests per year — compared with just three or four if grown outdoors in soil. “We’ve grown about 40 or 50 products,” Ballard says as we leave the growing tunnel and walk towards a storeroom filled with salad boxes ready for distribution, “but we’re concentrating at the moment on about 15 products that sell very well and taste very good.”
Tour over, we return to the small lift, which, like a time machine, brings us back to the 21st-century office. It seems the right place to ask Ballard about finances. Clearly, Growing Underground is environmentally sustainable, but is it financially sustainable, too? “Margins are very tight within the UK food industry,” says Ballard. “We’re almost breaking even, but we’re not quite there yet.”
Nevertheless, with more than four years’ worth of production data, Growing Underground is now perfectly placed to use its expertise to add value to other projects and to expand its model across the UK and even globally. “Being that data-driven, controlled-environment, ag-tech business is what we’d like to be remembered for,” says Ballard.