Could this be the future of agriculture? Inside Europe’s Largest Vertical Farm | Money News Aitrend

Outside, it’s the dark middle of winter. We are right in the middle of some of the best farmland in the country.

But inside the cavernous warehouse we arrived at, you would have no idea of ​​any of this: there is no daylight; it feels like it could be any time of day, any season of the year.

We are at Fischer Farms – the largest vertical farm in Europe.

All the interest of a vertical farm is to create an environment in which you can grow plants stacked on top of each other (hence: vertical) in high density. The idea being that you can grow your lettuce or peas somewhere close to the towns where they are eaten rather than hundreds of miles away. Location is not supposed to matter.

The fact that it is in the middle of the fields a few kilometers from Norwich therefore has no importance. It could be anywhere. Indeed, unlike most farms, which sometimes bear the name of the family that owns them or of a local monument, this one is simply called “Farm 2”. “Farm 1” is in Staffordshire, in case you were wondering.

The dizzying ambition of the farm boss

These futuristic agricultural units are the brainchild of Tristan Fischer, a serial entrepreneur who has spent much of his career working on renewable energy in all its forms. His ambition is now dizzying: to be able to grow not only basil and chives on a farm like this, but also other, more delicate and competitive crops – from strawberries to wheat and rice.

Only then, he says, can vertical farming have a chance to truly change the world.

The idea behind vertical farming itself is over a century old. In 1915, the American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey described how this could be achieved in theory. In theory, one should be able to grow plants hydroponically – that is, with a mineral substrate instead of soil – in a controlled environment and thus considerably increase the yield.

In some ways, this is already being done in greenhouses across much of northern Europe and the United States, where tomatoes and other warm-temperature-loving vegetables are grown in climate-friendly environments. at controlled temperature. However, even though most of these greenhouses still rely on natural light (even if sometimes enhanced by electric bulbs), the goal of vertical farming was that by controlling the amount of light, one could grow more or least everything, at any time of the year. And by stacking crops, even more crops could be produced for each acre of land used.

Look at a long-term graph of agricultural yields in this country and you begin to understand why this may be important. The amount of crops we grow on each acre of land increased dramatically in the second half of the 20th century – a consequence partly of the liberal use of artificial fertilizers and partly of new technologies and systems. But this productivity rate began to decline towards the end of the century.

“Change the equation”

Vertical farming promises, if it can match the numbers, to be a game changer, dramatically increasing agricultural productivity in the decades to come. The question is whether the technology already exists.

And when it comes to technology, one thing has certainly changed. These first vertical farms (the first attempts actually date back to the 1950s) all had one big problem: bulbs. Incandescent bulbs were both too hot and too power-hungry to operate in these environments. But the latest generation of LED bulbs is both cool and cheap, and these are the bulbs you need (in large numbers) if you want to make vertical farming work.

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Here at Farm 2, you encounter row after row of trays, each stacked on top of each other, each bearing increasingly leafy basil plants. They sit under thousands of small LED bulbs tuned to precisely the right spectral frequency to encourage the plant to grow quickly.

Mr Fischer says: “We are on a downward cost curve for LEDs. And then, if you think about the other major inputs, energy – renewable energy – is also steadily declining.

“So you think about all the big drivers of vertical farming, they’re going down, whereas relative to full-growth crops, everything is going up – fertilizer, rents, water are getting more expensive as well.”

This farm – which currently sells to restaurant chains rather than directly to consumers – is now cost competitive with basil shipped (or more often flown) from the Mediterranean and North Africa. The carbon footprint is also significantly reduced.

“And our long-term goal is to achieve much cheaper prices,” says Fischer. “If you look at Farm 1, we spent around £2.5 million on lighting in 2018. Fast forward to Farm 2; it’s seven and a half times bigger and over those three years the lights were effectively half the price. We also probably use 60-70% less energy.

It may seem strange to hear a farmer talk so much about energy and comparatively less about the kinds of things we associate with farmers – soil, tractors or the weather – but vertical farming is largely an energy business . If energy prices are low enough, crops here will be considerably cheaper.

But here in the UK, where electricity costs are higher than anywhere else in the developed world, the prospects for this business are tougher than elsewhere. Mr. Fischer’s goal, however, is to prove profitability here before building larger units elsewhere, in countries where electricity is much cheaper.

In the same way that Dutch growers have come to dominate these greenhouses, he believes the UK has a chance to dominate this new agricultural sector.