The other day, I read an article about the rise of vertical farms, indoor multi-level farms where people grow herbs, certain vegetables, even certain fruits. The article went far, indicating these setups could be the future of farming, for herbs and vegetables anyway.
In case you are not familiar with vertical farming, it is basically setting up a greenhouse agriculture inside a building, where everything is artificially managed and controlled (light, water, day/night cycle, etc). Reading it reminded me of a news report I watched years ago about the rise of growing your own vegetables in big cities such as New York. Those were amateur individual efforts, typically for self-feeding. Now we are talking about professional indoor farming for herbs and vegetables.
Among these professionals, I read about a UK-based startup, Jones Food Company, in Gloucestershire, which announced that it will build the largest vertical farm in the world, to grow chive, coriander, and a slew of other, promising herbs and vegetables. The technology dimension of these setups are impressive with systems monitoring and adjusting every parameter, from the temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide content of the room, to the color spectrum, intensity and pattern of the light-dark cycle, and the nutrients the seedlings are exposed to. By testing different plants and experimenting with the parameters in their innovation lab, Jones Food hopes to hit the jackpot in figuring out the most promising species for its vertical farm. The big issue at this time is that many of these herbs and plants cannot be grown indoor economically. Nevertheless, such farming has apparently a number of environmental benefits, such as freeing up the land for other usages, being weather-independent, and certainly enabling farming 24/7, 365 days a year. The major issue, however, is the need for energy to feed all these things. In a certain way, in these vertical farms, electricity replaced the sun, the wind, and the clouds and rain. This is ironic because the article mentions that the solution for energy mitigation is using renewable energy such as sun and wind. The closing of the virtuous circle.
So are we adding yet another discipline to the ‘e-’ market, after e-mail, e-sport, we are seeing the dawn of e-vegetable, or even e-farming? Ah! Long live WALL-E.
Paris, September 22, 2022
Zeejay