Future farm
Hydroponics is the answer
Vegetarians and arable farmers have good reason to feel smug at the moment. To these two groups, the current outbreak of foot and mouth disease affords a terrific opportunity for self-congratulation. How right we were, they might say to each other, to steer clear of livestock.
But only the vegetarians will continue to gloat for long. The farmers will soon be too busy fighting off something much more awesome than mere disease. They’ll be battling against an entirely new form of arable cultivation: farms run by robots, producing vegetables at a rate beyond the dreams of conventional farmers (or, indeed, vegetarians).
At any rate, that’s how the future is envisaged at an Israeli company called Organitech. Founded just two years ago, Organitech has developed a self-contained, “intelligent” farm that automates the entire process, from planting seeds to harvesting ripe food and packaging it. The GrowTech2000 is housed in 40ft-long metal shipping containers: whatever the weather outside, conditions inside – including atmosphere, humidity, light, heat and water – remain constantly suitable to the crops being cultivated. With access to power, and a minimal supply of water, each container can produce approximately 1,000 times the annual yield of a similar area using conventional open-field farming.
Organitech’s system is based on hydroponics, which means that it uses water instead of soil to deliver nourishment to plants. Why would anybody do that? There are several reasons. In space missions, for instance, the bulk and weight of soil cannot be justified, so astronauts use hydroponics to grow fresh food. Another disadvantage of soil is that it tends to bring with it a requirement for costly human labour; whereas in soil-free cultivation, as Organitech has recognised, plants can be moved with ease along the “production line” by robots. (The plants are grown in plastic foam trays that float in water on shelves that are themselves stackable to save space.)
The inventor of the system, Lior Hessel, is an agricultural engineer who set up the 25-strong company with backing from Haifa Technion and sold it in January this year to a Colorado-based company, Organitech USA. To begin, Hessel grew green-leafed crops: lettuce, broccoli, spinach, cabbage, cauliflower, onions and garlic; the company has subsequently started trials on herbs, spices, fruits and flowers. “The possibilities are endless,” says Hessel. “Once the system is operating, you programme how much you want and when you want it, and then open a small door in the machine and out come 350 lettuce heads a day, at whatever time you asked for.”
Ever since Israel was established, its agricultural techniques have led the world. In the Negev desert, previously considered barren, Israeli technicians have grown citrus fruit and bananas; and Israeli hydroponic techniques have been used to grow strawberries, among other fruit. But Organitech’s system is the first to produce high yields using robots – and in an easily transportable system. “Shipping containers are cheap, can be moved around easily, and can be stacked on top of each other to create a farm yielding high amounts using only a little labour.”
And that’s not all. The containers, which are sealed, protect the plants against pests, so pesticides – and the toxic gases they generate – are unnecessary. The main by-product of is oxygen; and depending on the type of fertiliser used, the crops can qualify as organic.
Demand for food is growing, Hessel argues, whereas the land available for cultivating it is shrinking. “I expect traditional agriculture to disappear from industrialised countries within the next ten years. There isn’t enough water, or land.” In Israel, certainly, these resources have become scarily precious. The territory is only marginally bigger than Wales, while its population is more than twice as large. As for water: the level of the Sea of Galilee is falling steadily. (In a few years, it may not seem especially remarkable to walk on water there.) “What will be left is farms made up of systems like ours.”
In the UK, stacking Organitech’s containers in urban areas would allow supermarkets to eliminate the cost and pollution associated with delivery from farms. Clad in solar panels, these high-rise farms could generate a good portion of their own power requirements; and to passers-by, they’d resemble nothing more sinister than offices with tinted windows. Supermarkets, if they take up the opportunity presented by Organitech’s product, could effect a transformation of the British countryside far more profound than the Israelis’ conversion of desert to fertile plains. Farmers, finding themselves redundant, would be obliged to sell their land for conversion to some other use: wildernesses for wildlife, parks, housing estates, golf courses, motorways – whatever.
And supermarkets are not the only organisations that could benefit from Organitech’s system. Hydroponic technology has long been favoured by growers of cannabis, because it allows them to grow substantial crops indoors, out of sight of the law. Until now, the usual locations have been basements, attics or garages. A few bold entrepreneurs have been known to establish “farms” on an industrial scale. Only recently, police discovered a hydroponic plantation occupying virtually every part of a terraced house in Uxbridge. Officers, raiding the house in Chiltern View Road on the afternoon of April 4, found that seven of its nine rooms were devoted entirely to growing and drying out a type of cannabis known as skunk. (One of the other rooms was full of canisters of CO2, for pumping round the farm through massive overhead ducts.) Forty lamps moved automatically on runners mounted above the plants, producing an even distribution of light and ensuring that none of the plants should burn; and additional cooling effect was produced by more than 30 fans). A police spokeswoman, unable to characterise with precision the elaborate watering system, declares instead with some understatement that it was “not exactly a watering can”. The equipment, which consumed around £4,000 worth of electricity each month, has an estimated value of £10,000. Some has been destroyed; the rest will be sold at auction.
The street value of skunk currently stands at around £120 an ounce. This particular establishment, believed to have been operating for nine months, was producing something like 36lbs a year – in quarterly yields of around 9lbs each. Man, as a user might put it, that’s a lot of, er, lettuce.
28 April 01