This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Even amid the creative genius and goofy playfulness of MIT's Media Lab near Boston -- where giant inflatable sharks dangle from ceilings, workbenches are populated by unblinking robot heads and skinny scientists with mutton chops and Hawaiian shirts pay rapt attention to indecipherable whiteboard scribbles -- Caleb Harper is an oddball. While his coworkers develop artificial --intelligence, smart prosthetics, folding cars and 3D neural-imaging systems, Harper is growing lettuce. In the past year, he has transformed a small lounge outside his fifth-floor lab into a high-tech garden worthy of a sci-fi film. Species of lettuce -- as well as broccoli, tomatoes and basil -- grow in mid-air, bathed in blue and red LED lights, their ghostly white roots dangling like jellyfish. They are stacked in shelves on an exterior glass wall, seven metres long and 2.5 metres high, meant to resemble the exterior of an office building. If Harper and his team get their way, entire city districts will one day look like this, a living and edible garden. "I believe there's the possibility that we can change the world and change the food system," says Harper, a tall and stocky 34-year-old in a blue shirt and cowboy boots. "The potential for urban farming is huge. And it's not all bullshit." Urban farming has begun to shift from its look-what-we-can-do phase of growing salads and vegetables on industrial rooftops and in empty city spaces, to a new wave of innovation that is being led by thinkers -- and makers -- like Harper. As founder of the year-old CityFARM project at MIT, Harper is figuring out how to use data science to optimise crop yields, deploy networked sensors to "listen" to a plant's water, nutrient and carbon needs, and deliver optimal light wavelengths -- not just for photosynthesis but to change the flavour of foods. And he hopes to bolt his towering plantations on to the buildings in which we live and work.
His system promises to change the economics of industrial agriculture and to lessen its burden on the environment. By measuring and controlling light, moisture and nutrients, Harper says he can cut water consumption by 98 per cent compared to conventional agriculture; quadruple the growth speed of vegetables; completely eliminate chemical fertilisers and -pesticides; and double the nutrient density and flavour of his crops.
Consider the problem of food. By the time it reaches our tables, it has often travelled thousands of kilometres. Kevin Frediani, the head of sustainable land use at Bicton College, an agricultural teaching centre in Devon, has noted that 24 countries supply 90 per cent of the fruit and vegetables to the UK (British farmers provide 23 per cent of that figure). He has estimated that a head of lettuce grown in Spain and trucked to the UK roughly has a 1.5kg carbon footprint. But if grown in the UK in a greenhouse, its footprint is around 1.8kg: "We just don't have the light, and glass is extremely inefficient at keeping the heat in," Frediani says.
But, he adds, that lettuce grown in an insulated building, and using the heat from lights, can trim that carbon load down to 0.25kg. (Frediani knows his stuff: as the former head of plants and gardens at Paignton Zoo, he instituted a vertical growing facility in 2008 to help feed the animals.) If the new agtech farmers can make their methods scalable, they will produce cheaper, fresher and more nutritious food, cut the hundreds of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted through transportation (packing, moving, storing and sorting produce uses four times as much energy as growing it does) and offset a food crisis.
The UN predicts the world's population will grow by 2.5 billion by 2050 and 80 per cent will live in cities. Today, 80 per cent of the land suitable for growing food is already in use, and heatwaves and floods have laid waste to crops and driven food prices higher.
Innovative entrepreneurs and green-minded technologists have turned to the cities themselves as a solution. Food can be raised everywhere, from skyscrapers to old bomb shelters.
The fast-growing agtech movement encompasses greenhouse growers and LED-light developers such as the giant Philips Electronics, which has its own horticultural lighting unit. Its enthusiasts specialise in shipping-container farms, systems management, microclimates, aeroponics, aquaponics, hydroponics, rainwater capture and micro-turbines that harness storm run-off for energy production. But indoor farming has not yet proved scalable. Energy use has been the biggest challenge. The wildly touted VertiCrop rooftop hydroponic system in Vancouver (named a best invention of 2012 byTime) went belly-up because it used too much energy. "There is a lot of lying and smoke and mirrors and over-claiming in the field," says Harper, who grew up on a Texas ranch and whose father was a grocer. "That has led to venture-capital misuse and big and small companies going bankrupt."
Harper believes his system can cut energy consumption by 80 per cent. And unlike industrial agriculture, which fiercely guards its seed patents and farming techniques, it will be open-source. He plans to give it to whoever wants it, much as MIT's Fab Labs did with fabrication laser cutters and 3D printers, building them and gifting them to labs around the world. "They created a network of makers and I see this as a potential maker movement for growers," says Harper.
One day in June, Harper is holding a small cardboard cloud, the kind of thing you might find in a children's toy box. He's standing in front of a tray of buttercrunch lettuce lit by a networked red and blue LED. He has rigged a PlayStation camera that tracks body movement. When he passes the cloud in front of the camera, it reads as a cloudy day and the lights brighten. "I could take weather data and write up some kind of algorithm to control the lights," he says. "But it would never predict when a cloud will come or a rainy day. So we're aiming for an environment that's a bit more responsive."
Against the glass wall, Harper has created what resembles a surgical clean room, using an erector set of AD20 aluminium beams and Plexiglas. Inside, he is growing about 50 plants in rows stacked as high as a metre above his head. Some are growing in shallow water; some have their roots exposed and are regularly misted with nutrients.
By themselves, these methods are not unique: small greenhouses have used them for years. What's innovative is the use of LED lighting -- meaning the specific red and blue parts of the spectrum that produce photosynthesis -- and the level of control Harper has.
The room is filled with sensors to monitor the atmosphere and temperature and feed back the data. "Over time the room will become more and more intelligent," he says.
He has also tagged each plant in order to track its growth. "Right now, there is no solid reporting on any of this, only a lot of false claims, or no reporting at all," Harper says. "There are a lot of black-box concepts out there and no one knows how they
work or if they really do this."
His goal is to produce on-demand food in much the same way that Amazon offers goods for same-day delivery. Instead of someone picking a green tomato in Holland in the summer, or Spain in winter, with immature nutrients and a lack of flavour, and shipping it hundreds of kilometres, then gassing it with carbon dioxide so it turns red, you order your tomato and it's picked a few streets away and delivered to you fresh. "It's immediate," Harper says, "No nutrient density or flavour loss in the food chain."
His biggest problem at the moment is light. He uses both the Sun through the window and web-enabled LED lights, made by a Swedish startup, Heliospectra. If he's to scale his farm on to the skin of office buildings, it would be efficient for the Sun to do its part. "Plants only use ten per cent of the light spectrum and the rest of it is just heating up this room, just like in a greenhouse," Harper says. "So now I have to cool the room with more energy and that's screwing up my energy equation. So there's a real open question: is sunlight valuable?"
In traditional greenhouses, the doors are opened to cool things down and release built-up humidity -- ut this also lets in unwanted insects and fungus. The teams at Heliospectra and Philips think the Sun is old school. In fact, most of the technological disruption in agtech is coming from lighting companies. Heliospectra supplies its lights to greenhouses as well as academics studying plant-biomass increase, flowering time and flavour density. Nasa uses its lights to grow food at its simulated Mars mission in Hawaii. The light is an LED board with an inbuilt computer. "You can send a signal from the plant on how it's doing and the plant sends back what wavelength and colour it's using and how it's being saturated," says Heliospectra COO Christopher Steele from his office in Gothenburg. For instance, blue light on basil is not ideal for its growth or flavour, Steele says. Applying a uniform mixture of light is also something the Sun doesn't do, thanks to clouds and the Earth's rotation. "We can prevent leaves from being spotted and create a great-looking and great-tasting plant," adds the company's CEO, Staffan Hillberg.
At £4,400 apiece, the systems aren't cheap, but there's enormous market opportunity. Today there are an estimated 55 million lights in use in greenhouses. "They replace bulbs or lumineers every one to five years," says Hillberg. "So it's a big deal."
Plants prefer LED lights to sunlight. Because LEDs can be placed overhead, plants don't expend energy growing upwards and developing stalks, and can grow outwards into leafier material. At Green Sense Farms, the largest indoor vertical farm in the world, based 50km outside Chicago, the company uses 7,000 LEDs in two grow rooms. "The lettuces are more intensely flavoured and crisp," says CEO Robert Colangelo. "We use ten lights per tub and we have 840 tubs.
We can generate 150 head per tub every 30 days."
With grow racks rising 7.6 metres, Green Sense uses so-called hydro-nutrient film technology, allowing nutrient-rich water to trickle through pulverised coconut husk, rather than peat, because it's renewable. And as they are stacked vertically, not grown horizontally, Colangelo says the plants are at least ten times denser and can have 25 to 30 times more yield. "That's good for the Earth because there's no pesticide run-off and we have recycled water and recycled nutrients," says Colangelo, whose company has partnered with Philips to create what amounts to the biggest plant factory on the planet. "It uses a lot less energy."
Colangelo believes that farming will soon split between field-grown commodity crops, such as soy, wheat and corn -- produce that needs wide, open space far from the city and can be stored for months and shipped around the world -- and vertical farms such as his that grow high-margin, perishable produce such as tomatoes, cucumbers and micro-greens. His farm, which opened in April and expects to have sales of $2m to $3m (£1m to £1.75m) a year, already sells its branded produce to restaurants and to Whole Food's distribution centre just 30 minutes away, which then sends it to its 48 stores across eight states in the US. "The next step is automation," Colangelo says. Because the racks are linear, he envisages robotic arms and sensing equipment that can move along the aisles to pick what's ripe and replace it with seedlings. "It's like Detroit and an auto-facility parts picker.
Cars and trucks are put together based on orders from dealers, not just churned out. We call it 'just in time' farming. We pick it when the store wants it."
Among the odder technical innovations in agtech is the shipping-container farm. Typically the boxes are fitted out with vertical grow racks for hydroponics and self-contained heating, water and LED-lighting systems. The mobile, modular containers can be stacked four high and stationed outside grocery shops and restaurants to provide fresh produce.
Several companies have started up to fill this niche. The Florida-based Growtainer wants to build farms for communities, or provide standalone units for chefs and for schools as teaching environments. "I've got $1 million invested in this," says CEO Glenn Behrman, who has spent 40 years operating plant and orchid nurseries in Florida, Thailand and Vietnam, and is a major live-plant distributor to the US and Europe. "We've perfected this indoor environment of irrigation and lighting. We're going to do nature better than nature."
There are dozens of shipping-container-farm outfits, some built on the owner/operator model: they sell you the container, you do the growing. (Behrman's website boasts that the containers can also serve as "a mobile billboard, promoting its supporters with highly visible logos and graphics".) Other companies are using the franchise model: they sell you the container with their name on it, you buy all the materials from them.But the inherent problem with both models is that neither is economically scalable for the growers. "Small units like that have the opposite of economy of scale: negative economy of scale," says Paul Lightfoot, CEO of Bright Farms, a company that designs, builds and operates football-pitch-sized greenhouses alongside, above or near supermarkets, cutting out time, distance and cost from the produce supply chain. "If you are going to warm up a space, it's easier to warm 100,000 square feet than just 1,000 square feet."
Some of the disruption to traditional agriculture comes not from technology, but from business innovators such as Bright Farms. The group grew out of the non-profit Science Barge project, a prototype sustainable urban farm anchored in New York's Hudson River, in 2007. By then, supermarkets around the world had begun to request fresh, locally grown produce to meet booming consumer demand.
Because 98 per cent of supermarket lettuces in the US come from California in the summer and Arizona in the winter, their costs -- in water, which is increasingly scarce in the west, and in transport -- are relatively high. In Pennsylvania, Bright Farms partnered with a local supermarket, received tax breaks from the town for bringing jobs to the area, and took over a 120-hectare farm. That facility, which uses rainwater capture on
the roof for watering and employs a floating-raft growing configuration like Caleb Harper's, annually sells about
$2 million worth of microgreens -- baby kale, rocket, spring-mix lettuces, Asian-mix lettuces and watercress -- under its own brand to supermarkets in New York and nearby Philadelphia. "We are displacing higher-priced and less-fresh produce from the West Coast," Lightfoot says. "Perishable lettuces are tremendously expensive to move across country. That is our arbitrage opportunity, coming in with a better, fresher product. We don't have the expense of a long supply chain. Our core values are not technologies. Our innovation is our business model. We will adapt any technologies that enable us to achieve our vision."
Lightfoot thinks that container farmers will never get a foothold in major supermarkets because of their lack of scalability. "There are certain niches they can do, like high-end microgreens for a specific restaurant," Lightfoot says. "But it can't work on the scale that I'm working on. Or if you were in the marines, say, you might want a few of those units at your forward operating bases in Afghanistan."
Yet innovation and novelty in agtech is what captures attention and money. Nowhere is that more clear than 33 metres under the streets of north Clapham, in London. There, in a former world war two air-raid shelter, entrepreneur Steven Dring is part of a movement to grow food in overlooked urban settings. Dring and his partners have raised £1 million to convert the space into an eco-friendly, sustainable grow-room for salads and greens.
Their company, Zero Carbon Food (ZCF), will grow produce in vertical shelves, using an ebb-and-flood system: they will flood "benches" where the produce grows and let the nutrient-rich water ebb away. Plants will grow in a substrate of pulverised carpet, recycled from the Olympic Village in Stratford. To save energy and reduce the number of LED grow lights needed, ZCF will rotate them around the crops. And they will use electricity -- generated by small and portable micro-hydroelectric turbines -- to run the lights. "We have a lot of rain in London," says Dring. "You put these turbines in water drains and they feed into the energy grid." Dring will also harness one of the most pernicious problems of Tube travel: heat that collects in stations. "We are looking at pulling the heat out of the Tube stations and converting it into energy, as well as transferring the heat and the carbon dioxide into our grow rooms," Dring says, "which is like steroids for plants."
In eastern Japan, hit hard by the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami, a renowned plant physiologist has turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world's second-largest indoor farm. With 2,300m<sup>2</sup> of growing space and using 17,500 low-energy LED lights from GE, it turns out 10,000 heads of lettuce a day. The company, Mirai, meaning "future" in Japanese, is already working with GE engineers to build "plant factories" in Hong Kong and Russia. Shigeharu Shimamura, the brains behind the concept, envisages the ideas spreading: "Finally, we are about to start the real agricultural industrialisation," he says.
There's no shortage of money being thrown at the plant-making sector -- from home-growing appliances for the urban apartment dweller (there are countless startups on Kickstarter, including the Niwa, which lets you grow your hydroponic tomatoes via smartphone app) to venture-capital giants such as SVG Partners in Silicon Valley, which has teamed up with Forbes to run the first agtech conference next year. Yet the truth is it would take revolution -- a slow-moving one over a decade or more -- for agtech to take even a modest bite out of the global food industry. "What's disruptive about what we're doing is that we don't have transportation and we don't have spoilage and we don't waste resources," Harper says.
The remarkable thing, says Harper, is that he can see a day when regional differences -- between, say, green beans grown in Kenya and Lincolnshire -- are replaced by niche growing techniques. Chefs will have container farms outside their restaurants and -- by changing LED lights, mineral composition, pH balance, or simulating drought -- can make buttercrunch lettuce sweeter. In time, they might create their own proprietary recipes and branded produce. "It won't be like 'the best grapes come from X region or country,'"
Harper says. "It will be 'the best grapes come from this warehouse in Brooklyn. And the best chard comes from this other warehouse in Brooklyn.' That's an amazing thing."
Google is looking to incorporate Harper's design and techniques into its cafeteria at their headquarters in Mountain View to feed its employees fresh, nutrient-dense foods. Even textile outfits, such as cotton growers, have contacted Harper to find out if he thinks cotton can be grown in a plant factory. (He's not sure, but maybe.) His Open Ag Project has drawn academic and government partners in China, India, Central America and the United Arab Emirates. Closer to home, he has partnered with Michigan State University to turn a former auto-parts warehouse in blighted downtown Detroit into what will become -- at 4,600m2 -- the world's biggest vertical plant factory. And what better place, he reasons. "They know more about automation than any place in the world," Harper says. "And they're asking 'What's the new industrial revolution?' And it's this."
Kevin Gray wrote about civilian space travel and health in 08.14
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
