Is vertical farming the future of food production?
Vertical farms allow for production to be geographically close to the point of consumption and create the opportunity to produce crops year-round. But the industry faces a number of challenges.
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ome farmers today can control how much light, water and nutrients are given to crops at the optimal temperature and humidity. Because of this level of precision, the farmers can grow more crops faster and with less water. These farmers are vertical farmers. They tend to vertically stacked produce indoors, and they’re a part of a global market that’s forecasted to reach $6.4 billion by 2023, according to a report by Market Allied Research.
In addition to water efficiency and being able to go pesticide-free, thanks to being done indoors, vertical farms have reduced input costs, allow for production to be geographically close to the point of consumption, and create the opportunity to produce crops year-round.
Stuart Oda, co-founder and CEO of Alesca Life, an agricultural technology company developing solutions to improve food security, food safety, supply chain transparency and farming efficiency, says that with regard to climate adaptation, vertical farming correlates more to creating different and controlled environments for growing produce than preventing or minimizing the damage caused by the climate in traditional farming locations.
“If you imagine building colonies on Mars, this is how you would farm,” says Oda. “There are places where it makes sense to localize and where it doesn’t. The places we do business are high import countries, so they’re relatively decent candidates to get food locally. But it’s not just isolated places that are candidates. It can be done in LA or any metropolitan city with a population of 10 million all over the world.”
Alesca Life currently deploys vertical farming services for five star hotels in Beijing, and is deploying for real estate development projects in Capetown, Dubai and Singapore. Loaded with advanced monitoring, automation and climate control capabilities, the company’s Alesca Container Farm is a farming solution for commercial scale food production.
As Alesca Life expands its vertical farming services gradually in geographies that “make sense,” Oda says the method will become more mass market. He attributes this to human diets changing and becoming more demanding. “In the winter people want to eat things that are more seasonal,” he says.
Higher energy demand
Kate Mulder, director of strategic development at Neusis Global, sees the positive aspects of vertical farming, but also sees a number of challenges.
“In regard to controlled environment and regard to land degradation and all the things that are happening in our ecosystem, there are some definite benefits to going indoors, but the method can and must improve. Plus, it’s not scaling well,” she says. “At the end of the day, the benefit from a business perspective is that you can get more plants per sq foot, but the plants are limited types.”
So why aren’t vertical farms scaling well? They have a high energy demand, as the combination of high-density crop production and closed, confined areas calls for more cooling and dehumidification.
“A lot of vertical farms now are good at producing high-quality nutrition [leafy greens] produced closer to place of consumption,” says Oda. “But until energy efficiency increase significantly it’s very challenging to produce everything that we eat today.”
He added that because staple crops are highly subsidized by the government, it’s possible that the world’s most efficient vertical farm could end up being more costly than a high-calorie farm.
Nutrition
Speaking of nutrition, Michael Klein, chief scientific officer at Neusis Global, says the nutritional value of crops from vertical farms is a concern of his.
“The industry really needs to be real about what materials are being used,” shares Klein. “The inputs of vertical farming are considered water soluble chemicals. Indoor farming, the way it is designed, cannot use whole food nutrition. They are using this ‘kool aid scenario.’ That is not how nature does it, and it is just completely eliminating natural inputs. They are forcing synthetic chemical nutrients, and are not getting the deep ecological or biological experience of a plant.”
Meanwhile, Oda shares that because Alesca Life’s vertical farms are deployed close to the point of consumption, their products reach their customers quickly, and therefore more nutrients of the crops are preserved. before small heading
Leading to adaptation
As it stands, Oda sees the application of vertical farming being a means of allowing traditional farmers to be more productive.
“Because locals need to adapt to new realities, indoor vertical farms could be used as research facilities to propagate plants that are more climate resilient,” he says. “Then it would be more about adapting, or growing lettuce in the desert, as opposed to just creating a new environment. Taking the tech that exists to run high-tech farms and then applying them in a more localized context can allow farmers to make better decisions.”
The ideas presented in this article aim to inspire adaptation action – they are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Global Center on Adaptation.
