THE FUTURE OF FOOD
In the final column in her series on fruit and vegetables, Louise Gray visits the world’s most technically advanced vertical farm, which is in Dundee, and asks if this is the future of food
Louise Gray visits a hi-tech vertical farm near Dundee
It is blowing a hoolie outside and usually I would be knee-deep in mud on a farm visit, but this is not just any farm, this is the farm of the future. I am warm and dry, in a relatively sterile atmosphere and all I can hear is the gentle whir of computers. There are plants all around me but not a lump of soil. Trays of micro-herbs are stacked three stories high and bathed in a spectrum of red, blue, purple and pink LED lights. It feels like I have stepped into a sci-fi movie, not a warehouse just outside a suburb of Dundee.
The James Hutton Institute, a world-leading crop research facility, has teamed up with agri-tech entrepreneurs Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), to create this £5m ‘vertical farm’. The idea is to combine the best scientific thinking with engineering skills to develop indoor farming that could produce food in places lacking enough land or a sufficiently temperate climate (for example, inner cities, deserts or even the Outer Hebrides).
At the moment the IGS farm is purely a research facility, proving what can be done with indoor farming, but there have already been orders from Asia, Africa and the Middle East for the new technology.
Standing in one of the best tattie-producing areas in the country, I wonder if it is really necessary to squeeze plants into a warehouse when we have plenty of mud in Scotland and an increasingly temperate climate (even if it didn’t feel it during my trip to the Hutton Institute).
David Farquhar, the chief executive of IGS, explains why growing food in the future may have to rely as much on technology as soil and the weather. ‘The simple fact is the weather is not reliable – it is unpredictable, look at the summer we just had and the winter before, never mind today,’ he laughs.
‘What we are doing with vertical farming is taking the field, stacking it up in a warehouse and giving the farmer control over the weather. It means a more efficient way of farming using less land, energy and water.’
Dave Scott, chief technical officer at IGS, says the combination of engineers and scientists mean that Scotland is at the forefront of world research on vertical farms. He presses a button and one of the trays slides out for closer inspection. The tiny coriander plants are uniformly perfect. Each is grown from a seedling on peat modules. Water and fertiliser is drip fed through a series of pipes.
As the ‘farmer’, Scott does little other than check in with a computer that records the amount of water and fertiliser being used, according to pre-programmed algorithms. This tight control of the growing mediums, including levels of CO2, humidity and even the ‘breeze’ blowing through the warehouse, means that the growth of the plants can be
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It feels like I have stepped into a sci-fi movie, not a warehouse just outside Dundee
closely monitored to allow experimentation, including changing the patterns and colours of light. The ‘internet of things’ approach, where the objects are essentially talking to each other to create the perfect growing environment, could cut labour and energy use. ‘Essentially artificial intelligence based on stored and ongoing data input is the farmer looking after the crop,’ says Scott.
Dr Robert Hancock, senior research scientist at the Hutton Institute, says there has already been a lot of interest from farmers around Scotland. ‘Farming is bloody difficult,’ he says. ‘This is using the latest technology to make it easier.’
Seedlings for strawberry and brassica farms could be grown indoors, rather than importing from the Netherlands. It also allows a consistent crop all-year-round, which is exactly what the supermarket is demanding.
Dr Hancock suggested that the technology could be used on a small scale in remote communities, like the Highlands of Scotland, to produce fresh greens during the winter using renewable energy. It could also be used in inner cities to supply supermarkets direct, again reducing food miles. By allowing food to be produced locally and on-demand, IGS claims it could cut fresh food waste by 90%.
Vertical farms in the future may be able to produce salad crops and perhaps smaller crops such as strawberries. They will also be used to grow crops for research purposes and horticulture, medicinal uses and even algae – although conventional agriculture will be used for our staple crops such as wheat, barley and potatoes.
Dr Hancock says that to be sustainable while at the same time making money, Scotland and farmers generally need ‘a mixture of solutions’. As he says, ‘there are many different ways of farming sustainably. It has to be economic and it has to be able to feed the number of people that need feeding without damaging the environment. This is not the only answer to food security, it is one of the answers. We are going to need a mixture of solutions.’
After spending a year touring fruit and vegetable farms around Scotland, I can certainly agree. Soil is always the first thing that farmers mention and looking after the land is something that we need to get better at. Organic farming is impressive and certainly many of the methods of organic farmers are being taken up by conventional farmers as we learn to become less reliant on chemicals.
Technology such as glass houses and vertical farms will have to be part of the picture as well as advanced plantbreeding, if not GM. The way we eat – cutting down on meat and boosting our vegetable intake – is essential, as is the need to cut down on waste.
But as I step back out into the Scottish weather, which has deteriorated further and is now gale-force, I decide I would not want my food to be entirely disconnected from the seasons or the weather either, uncomfortable though it often is to work outside in such conditions. Grow-yourown and foraging for our own fruit and veg is the best way to truly connect to your food.
If we want to feed the world without further causing climate change and damaging the countryside, then Dr Hancock is right when he says that we will need a mixture of solutions. In Scotland, where I have seen so much hard work going into the production of our fruit and vegetables, I believe we can all be part of a better future.
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By producing food locally and on-demand, it could cut fresh food waste by 90%