Sowing Innovation
Mairi Hughes on the cutting edge London farmers
WHILE farming conjures up images of rows of neatly sown crops and tractors roaming through the landscape, new developments in the industry are now shifting agriculture away from the country’s most rural areas and into the heart of the busiest city centres.
Indoor vertical farming, whereby crops are grown in stacked layers under artificial lighting, has been slowly increasing since the early 20th century. Initially consisting of simple greenhouses which protected plants from the elements, these greenhouses introduced the idea of growing crops in a controlled environment. In 1999, Dickson Despommier, a lecturer at New York’s Columbia University, asked students to determine how to feed the whole of Manhattan’s population – then roughly two million – using only five hectares of rooftop gardens. When they failed to do so, he found a solution himself, and by 2001 he had developed the world’s first official outline for a commercial vertical farm.
In 2021, plans were drawn up for the world’s largest indoor farm in Abu Dhabi, which will span 160,000 square metres. Closer to home, vertical farming has become increasingly popular, with various warehouses, rooftops, underground spaces and shipping containers being transformed into indoor farms. A record amount of funding is now being pumped into the industry in England and across the UK, with British online grocery company
Ocado recently investing £17m. Lincolnshire based Jones Food Group currently runs Europe’s largest high-care vertical farm, which equates to 26 tennis courts worth of growing space, stacked over 17 layers. In 2019 M&S retailers in London became one of the first British supermarkets to grow and sell vertically farmed produce in store.
Among these promising vertical farming businesses is Harvest London, based in the capital, which has been growing crops in a warehouse since 2018. Now nurturing a variety of over 100 plants, they currently generate around six tonnes of produce annually. Using hydroponic methods, which forgo soil, they provide plants with nutrients directly through a reservoir.
“We focus on the crops that this country has to import. We’ve grown a lot of weird and wonderful Southeast Asian herbs, and Mexican herbs.
“We want the Mexican burrito, we want the Thai curry, but none of the ingredients that go into those dishes grow in this country,” said Chris Davies, CEO and founder of Harvest London.
The company is passionate about localising food supply, and grows produce for English restaurants and food groups, helping them to cut down their food miles. Not only does this offer environmental benefits, but also fresher produce, with their indoor farm having the capability to go from harvest to delivery in just four hours.
With indoor farms able to control precisely the environment in which their produce is grown, they strive to create the best product possible. A major client of Chris’s vertical farm is restaurant chain Pizza Pilgrims, who now have basil supplied exclusively from their warehouse.
“They used to buy all of their basil flown in from the beautiful hills of Italy, special DOP designation basil, the best basil you could get. We made them do a blind taste test of the best Italian basil versus basil that we grow in a warehouse in East London,” Chris said.
The verdict of the test was unanimous, with the incomparably fresh vertically grown produce winning the supply contract, and saving Pizza Pilgrims 250,000 food miles every year.
“It’s particularly striking with things like basil, in particular. The moment you pick basil, it starts to degrade very quickly. The farther it travels, the less fresh it is; you end up losing a lot of pungency and flavour,” Chris said.
Many feel the industry is now more important than ever. When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the country last year, we were met with the unfamiliar sight of supermarket shelves stripped bare, and a realisation dawned of just how delicate our food supply chain is. In a 2020 report, the British Medical Journal pointed out that the UK’s just-in-time food supply chain is not durable enough to withstand crises such as the pandemic. Meanwhile, the World Bank estimates that the disruption in global food supply caused by COVID-19 will continue well into 2022.
The complexity of the UK’s global food supply chain is what initially inspired Chris and co-founder Matt Chlebek to establish Harvest London. Both Chris, who runs the business side of things, and Matt, a plant biologist, had a long-standing interest in food sustainability which drove them to assemble their current team of plant scientists and engineers to build the “farm” they run together today.
“We were deep in Brexit at that point, and 50-85 per cent of all the food in this country comes from outside this country, particularly the EU. I couldn’t see why we were choosing to do something like Brexit and yet not putting the effort into securing our own food supply,” Chris said.
Chris and Matt are proving there is a demand for a more localised food supply chain. The company established a second, larger farm in 2020. The ultimate goal for them is to create a network of farms around the UK to serve people across the country. And there is certainly a need for this now more than ever. With the United Nations predicting the global population is set to be nearly 10 billion by 2050, we need to find sustainable ways to increase our food production significantly.
“If you compare vertical farms to traditional agriculture in the same amount of space, vertical farms can grow 350 times the amount of produce. And it does that with 95 per cent less water, 95 per cent less fertiliser and
100 per cent pesticide free,” Chris said.
This is certainly something Sir David Attenborough can vouch for. In his latest book, A Life on Our Planet ,he advocated for vertical farming as essential to the future of our food supply.
However, as vertical farming is growing, it is also gaining criticism. The Financial Times recently asked if this new method of agriculture was “hope or hype”, warning against ditching traditional agriculture in favour of vertical methods. Chris states that the rise of vertical farming does not mark the end of traditional agriculture. There are many crops which simply need to be grown using traditional methods in order to thrive.
“It doesn’t make sense, for example, to grow hops in a vertical farm, or potatoes.
“It’s a way of localising an internationally globalised food system. The stuff we have to import, let’s grow it locally using vertical farming techniques,” he said.
While vertical farming is finding its way into the mainstream, it doesn’t seem we’ve seen the last of tractors and rolling green fields.