Introduction
“我们的西瓜爆炸了.”
“Our watermelons exploded.”
Seven years ago, that phrase started my journey into the world of modern agriculture.
Late one evening, toward the end of my time living as a student in Beijing, I was eating dinner, quietly listening to the national updates on China’s CCTV station. I wasn’t paying particularly close attention, until I heard the phrase “Wǒmen de xīguā bàozhàle,” meaning “Our watermelons exploded.”
As it turns out, they did.
The Chinese farmers in Jiangsu Province had experimented with a new crop enhancing hormone — marketed as growing melons, specifically watermelons, larger and tastier. Instead of its proposed effect, this growth accelerating agent, called forchlorfenuron (sounds natural, doesn’t it?), bound to the the plant’s rind, and caused every single melon exposed to the substance to rupture. While this disaster luckily prevented most human exposure to this apparently widely used chemical, it also jeopardized the livelihoods for dozens of rural Chinese farmers that year.
This was in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring and worldwide regime changes — a global political shift attributed in part to rising global food prices. World leaders were on high alert, especially in China. And if these stories of food insecurity were making it to the Chinese national press and government news networks, it meant that something was already very very wrong with our food, and more importantly, the system racing to produce enough of it.
We are pushing our environmental systems to a limit. And nowhere is that clearer than in both our farms and our cities. And in a twist of environmental irony, it seems that just as we are beginning to control every aspect of the plants and food we eat, we have begun to lose control of the environmental systems critical to support and sustain them. So, if industrialized agriculture can’t cut it, what are our options?
More questions than answers
For the last 7 years, I have been fascinated by the rapid innovation of agricultural technologies and their implications, specifically regarding indoor agriculture (aka Vertical Farming). In 2014, I had the opportunity to interview over sixty small-scale urban farmers in Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam to learn more about the continued challenges of growing food in small spaces, while also making a livable wage in a rapidly urbanizing world.
Now, I will be traveling throughout three distinguished Asian countries to meet the people and organizations responsible for the emerging food options that you may soon experience on your very own plates. I hope to find more questions than insights by meeting the innovators, misunderstood dreamers and the quirky farmers at the forefront of our food system.
I believe sustainably and reliably feeding an urbanizing world is one of humanity’s greatest challenges in the 21st century. Indoor agriculture is by no means the silver bullet here, but it does offer a revolutionary opportunity to re-envision our food system — combining six thousand years of agricultural knowledge with precision technologies of today and tomorrow.
This combination of inherited agricultural knowledge and modern technology has the potential to not only reduce ecological burdens for urban regions, but also to reduce costs and increase accessibility for consumers. Understanding all of our agricultural options, along with the continued challenges to produce the food consumed throughout the world — everything from rice to avocado toast — is paramount to our collective future.
So what would it take, economically, socially and technologically to provide mega-cities and urban regions with a surplus of produce that is grown indoors? If it is even possible to use vertical farms at scale, what are the steps, models and collaboration needed to get us there? And most importantly, if and when we get there, what are the implications for a society that control every aspect of the food we put in our bodies?
This agricultural, gastronomical and environmental journey will be filled with more buzzwords than you can count. But I assure you that this journey will dive beyond the hype and into the murky, uncharted territories of our food system.
What is indoor agriculture and why use plant factories or vertical farms?
Dim purple lighting, soft running water and a light breeze. Trays of fresh growing fruit float down the stacked canals, yet to be picked, while selected species of bees hover and buzz around the small delicate flowers. This is no spa, but I believe these will be common sights and sounds in one of the many new types of indoor farms to be built in the next 10 years.
Growing plants indoors is nothing new, but cultivating food inside at a commercial scale for large food vendors certainly is. And I believe it has the potential to change everything — from the way we buy food to the logistical systems we base our cities around.
Indoor agriculture offers unique benefits to the agricultural sector. Growing inside allows growers to control almost every input, often letting them grow year round, at optimal rates while protecting crops from damaging weather and pests. However, what separates Controlled Indoor Agriculture from traditional greenhouse cultivation is the scope and heterogeneity of technologies now available.
In general, indoor agriculture can be thought of as an umbrella term — since there is no single method to these indoor systems. I’ll likely switch my terminology interchangeably unless specifically defined otherwise.
These systems utilize a combination of dirt farming, hydroponic systems and even aquaponic management. Some more sophisticated indoor farms also use substantial robotics and automation to control operations. These are generally referred to as plant factories, but are sometimes called plant factories with artificial light (PFAL), vertical farms, or controlled environment agriculture (CEA).
But as many social critics are quick to point out, like any technology, “It’s neither radical nor revolutionary if the poor cannot access it”. So before looking critically at the options and challenges to scale these technologies to the world, I think it’s important to take a step back and recognize the idealized value of these systems to both farmers and consumers.
Benefits of a plant factory
There are plenty of hopeful benefits to indoor farming, and some are more validated than others. In a broader context, many of these benefits could drastically transform the way we grow, transport and consume food anywhere in the world. They are:
Controlled Inputs
These highly controlled conditions shield the plants from the outside world, allowing better control over plant growth and help prevent contamination from pests, pathogens and pollution.
Adaptable Locations
Controlled Indoor Agriculture can be placed almost anywhere, allowing crop cultivation much closer to consumers — reducing spoilage and need for storage and transport.
Year-round Cultivation
Being able to grow inside allows multiple harvest seasons for fresh produce.
Artificial Light
Plant factories mostly rely on artificial light for plant growth, and this typically takes the form of either sodium or increasingly, LED lights.
Resource Usage
Plant factories use a fraction of the water required in the open field, in some cases as little as 1% of that used outdoors.
Automation & Robotics
With sophisticated data and associated analytics becoming increasingly available, plant factories can minimize resource (energy, water and labor) usage and optimize crop yields varieties and tastes.
Cheaper
This is currently unvalidated, but with better understanding of these systems in the next decade, indoor agriculture has great potential to make food production and consumption cheaper.
Types of plant factory systems
There are also many different types of these systems, and it important to make these distinctions since comparison is often apples to oranges — so to speak.
These differences also become critically important when talking about what can grow in which type of system. A potato won’t grow well vertically, at least, not yet. Moreover, the economics of certain systems are currently unviable, or at least unsubstantiated.
So what’s so special about Asia?
With over half of the world’s population, Asian countries consume roughly 75% of all vegetables globally, and in extraordinary varieties across countries and regions. With rapid increases to quality of life over the past twenty years, consumers are quickly changing their food preferences, forcing supply chains to adjust to meet the demands of wealthier and hungrier consumers. As a result, the agricultural landscape is quickly shifting, if not transforming, opportunities to utilize technology-based farming approaches, such as indoor agriculture.
Asia also has longstanding greenhouse and field agriculture industries, so it is not surprising that it also has some of the most highly developed indoor agricultural industries in the world. Yet, even among regional leaders like Japan, with a long held majority of 40% of plant factories in Asia, the industry provides less than 0.6% of total vegetable production. Moreover, only 18% of consumers even know what a plant factory is and only a fraction of those consumers have ever purchased vegetables from them.
The changing expectations of Asia’s consumers are also a primary driver for Asia’s indoor agriculture industry. Rising pollution, media coverage of food scandals involving adulterated or mislabeled products and increased sensitivities to pesticide use have led many of Asia’s consumers to demand “clean” and “organic” food, typically defined as being pesticide free and from reputable sources and well defined standards. These trends favor indoor growers whose vegetables are typically grown without pesticides and in semi-clean room conditions.
Yeah okay, but why Japan, Singapore and Taiwan?
Of all of the countries in Asia, these three are some of the smallest, densest and wealthiest. These are islands of agricultural innovation, and as I will share in an upcoming feature, each of these countries has made great strides in indoor agricultural development, often driven by necessity. Over the past 30 years, the shared knowledge network between these countries has fostered continued collaboration and innovation in this sector, especially in just the past 10 years.
However, it is important to clarify that none of these countries has even come close to producing even a fraction of their agricultural output through indoor agriculture. In fact, the Netherlands is already the globe’s number two exporter of food as measured by value using many indoor agricultural systems, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass.
While this exploration is about agriculturally efficient technologies it is not necessarily about efficiency. It is about the grittier stories of innovation — and a deeper understanding to the continued challenges, triumphs and even failures that remain critical to moving this industry forward. While these three Asian islands are the tip of the iceberg, they offer incredible insight as to what is next.
