How to grow food in a concrete jungle

Image sourced from BBC

Guillaume Fourdinier has lived in Paris for six years, but he still misses the taste of the fresh cereal grains, beets, carrots and more that grow on his family's farm in Verton. There, in northern France's countryside, eating locally is a way of life - not simply a trend or a sticker on an apple at the grocery store.

"Local food is everywhere when you are in the countryside. You get fruits and vegetables with better taste, more nutritional value," he says. "When you are in Paris, what is local food? There is nothing coming from a local farm. I think for quality of life for people living in big cities this is a big problem."

In 2015, Fourdinier co-founded Agricool, an urban farm that's now comprised of 11 recycled shipping containers on the north side of the city. Eight farmers plant, harvest, pack, and deliver the pesticide-free lettuces, herbs, and strawberries to 60 supermarkets (though Fourdinier expects that number to grow to at least 200 retailers by the end of 2021).

Urban farms like Agricool are part of a broad collection of metropolitan agricultural efforts including everything from vertical farms to greenhouses to aquaponics to community gardens. The idea of cultivating food in or near cities is not new (see the victory gardens of both world wars, for example), but these ventures have become increasingly popular in recent years as the local food movement strengthens. After the rise of the supermarkets led many people to feel disconnected from food production, consumers are again paying more attention to how and where their food is grown, along with how far ingredients must travel between field and plate.

From Brussels to Nigeria, entrepreneurs and farmers are reimagining what farms are and conceiving innovative technology to help grow food in smaller spaces and in more sustainable ways. They're attempting to fix existing food supply chain concerns, which we've all became intimately familiar with in the past year. Images of picked-over grocery shelves and farmers tossing out produce early in the Covid-19 pandemic broadcast the failures and fragility of our current systems.

By 2050, it's estimated that the global population will balloon to almost 10 billion, and 68% of those people will live in cities. That means we'll have to produce more food than ever before, to feed people who live farther from the rural areas where most crops and animals are cultivated. Bringing production closer to where consumption happens could increase food security, improve our health and lessen the industry's considerable impacts on the planet - if we're able to grow enough nutrient-rich grub, that is.

In the United States, it's estimated that urban and peri-urban farms account for almost 15% of the country's farms. Among them is 80 Acres Farms, a vertical farming operation based in Ohio but which has eight locations in four states, all of which use zero pesticides and require 97% less water consumption compared to traditional farms. (Vertical farming refers to growing crops in vertically stacked layers in a controlled environment, often incorporating soilless techniques.)

Co-founders Mike Zelkind and Tisha Livingston are trying to push the potential of this multi-billion-dollar industry further. To date, enterprises like theirs have primarily focused on easy-to-grow leafy greens - which won't sustain civilisation on their own - but with advancements in technology Zelkind and Livingston have been able to add more substantial crops like peppers, tomatoes and baby cucumbers. They explain how their farms have incorporated sophisticated technologies in the video below.

80 Acres is a year-round operation that optimises its growing environments based on the plants' genetics, harvests at the peak of ripeness, and relies on a smaller delivery radius to get food to customers within a day of its picking. It's "democratising high-quality food".

"You can enable people, no matter where they live, to reconnect to the food supply," Zelkind says.

Technology has made the duo's goals increasingly achievable - and made indoor farming both more efficient and more affordable. 80 Acres' farms are, on average, 300 to 400 times more productive than field farming, Zelkind says, because the vertical structure creates room for more crops in less space and because the produce grows faster.

At Agricool, which also relies on a tiered growing system, Fourdinier says his containers produce 120 times more sustenance per square metre than in traditional field growing and 15 times more than most greenhouses.

"Ten years ago, this was science fiction," Zelkind says. "Tomorrow it's going to be so ubiquitous that everybody's going to be doing it and we will think, 'Oh my God, did we really ship our berries 2,000 miles a few years ago?'"

To that end, 80 Acres is commercialising what it's learned through Infinite Acres - a partnership with Netherlands-based horticulture technology firm Priva Holding BV and the UK's online grocery giant Ocado. The project provides the technology, operations help and necessary infrastructure to help budding farmers and interested municipalities launch their own indoor farms. 80 Acres operates a reference design and demonstration farm in Hamilton, Ohio, that's capable of robotically planting, harvesting, and packaging around 1.5 million pounds (681 tonnes) of leafy greens annually. It proves the "economic feasibility of vertical farming indoors", Livingston says. "We intend to build a farm like this farm all over the world."

Which gets to the big question: Can a patchwork of metro area farms actually grow enough to feed future populations?

"To say that it is a solution to all of the ails? No, it's never going to be to me because we don't grow calorie crops in controlled spaces. I think it's a complement. It can provide resilience on a very local level in that you have multiple [food] sources and you're not relying on just one supply chain," says Anu Rangarajan, director of the Cornell Small Farms Program, which works to advance the viability of small farms. "It becomes part of a whole platform of food supply."

In Paris, Agripolis recently opened Nature Urbain Farm on the seventh story of the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Five gardeners currently tend to the tomatoes, strawberries, eggplant and even butternut squash growing on the world's largest rooftop farm using a closed-circuit, aeroponics system. The facility is only one-third complete, but there will be room for 20 gardeners to harvest up to 1.1 tons (1,000kg) of 35 varieties of fruit and vegetables every day. This surprising farm on a central Paris rooftop is already bearing fruits.

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Photo Courtesy of BBC

Source: BBC