Red is the colour of socialism representing the blood of the
proletariat in their struggle against capitalism. Blue is the colour of
conservatism after the concept of the blue ribbon, which signified high
quality. When the ecological movement started as a political group in Germany
in the late sixties, the obvious colour was green – the green of nature’s plains,
forests and pastures. The reality is that plants are green because that is the
fraction of white light (sunlight) that plants don’t want. They reflect back
this unwanted light and that is the green of natural vegetation. In fact,
plants only use the red and blue fractions of sunlight and thus are politically
fully balanced! So, what would happen if instead of offering sunlight with an
option to reflect green light, plants were given what they want, red and blue
light? That is one of the pillars upon which a Dutch biotech company, Plantlab[1],
is built. A second is their vision for plant agriculture in the future based on
how global cities will dominate our planet.
According to a new report by the global consultancy company,
McKinsey[2],
The growth of the world’s population from its present level of 6-7 billion to 9
billion by 2050 will be dominated by urban growth. Every year, the world’s
population expands by 65 million people, equivalent to 10 cities of Chicago or
5 Londons. At present, the top 600 cities in the world account for 65% of GDP
growth and while that will remain so in 2025, the membership of this elite 600
cities will change, bringing in cities, which today are simply not household
names and which will include over 130 completely new cities, 100 from China
alone.
Traditionally, cities were fed from farms in their
hinterland. Today, that hinterland stretches across continents. For example, Spanish
tomatoes are major supplier of that food for Muscovites such that they are
picked in Spain 5 days before they are shipped and sold in Moscow. The dream of
Plant Labs is that the cities of the future will meet their vegetable and fruit
needs through high throughput indoor farming. This will involve exposing plants
to only red and green light in highly controlled climatic environments that can
be managed on a minute-by-minute basis and which can be adjusted remotely, with
one control center managing dozens of these plant production units. In addition
to light efficiency, water efficiency is utmost in priority in this new vision
of plant production. Traditional agriculture is a great waster of water and all
the predictions of the future fragility of the food chain point to water as the
weakest link. Irrigation of agricultural
crops has laid waste the great subterranean aquifers such as the Ogallala in
the US or the above-ground water lakes such as the Aral sea in Central Asia,
magnificently portrayed on Google Earth Time-lapse maps[3].
In the vegetable farm of the future, water efficiency is almost 100% with the
only water loss being the water that exits the production unit inside the cells
of the lettuce or tomato or whatever crop is grown.
From a consumer point of view, this system might have the
added bonus that neither weed killers nor pesticides are needed, simply because
the plants are incredibly healthy in this “plant-centric” environment. Plants
grown in sunlight are weaker and need the use of the farmer by tillage or
chemistry to protect the crops from weeds and pests. But not so for the plants
that thrive on red and blue light and just-in-time technology to deliver the
right nutrients for growth at the right temperature for every second of the day.
From a nutritional point of view, we need to look both at the
potential of these new farms and backwards to the McKinsey Global Institute
reports on cities. As regards the latter, the average value for any statistic
hides some crucial data. For example, they point out that nationally, the
number of children in China will fall over the next few decades. But in the new
cities, there will be a growth of some 7 million new infants. Equally, the
number of households will grow but the number of persons per household will
fall. These demographic profiles will drive the nutritional needs of the cities
of the future and by definition, the future world population. Returning to the
plant production facilities, a daily supply of 200 grams of fruit and vegetable
per head requires 1 square meter per person. Thus for 100,000 persons, we need
ten floors of factory farming with 100 square meters of growing area per floor,
a total of 100,000 square meters. By my calculations, the two main sports
stadia in Dublin (The Aviva stadium and Croke Park) together could cover these
daily needs of half the population of the city. In this vision, we could return
to the era of agriculture in our hinterland and as Gertjan Meeuws CEO of
Plantlab argues in his TEDx talk (available on their website), we could move
from food miles to food steps. Of course any new technology poses new
challenges and who is to say that a new plant virus could not enter such a
system. But such biological disasters also happen in field agriculture such as
that presently faced by the Californian citrus industry[4].
At least, in the indoor plant system, any infection in one unit can be
destroyed without ant risk to another unit.
Feeding the world is a truly absorbing technological
challenge and all technologies will be needed. Plant Labs look not only at mega
multi-story production facilities. They are also thinking of this technology in
supermarkets, in restaurants and even your own kitchen version growing crops
such as herbs and condiments. The Dutch are ideally suited to lead man’s struggle
with nature and water. Holland lies below sea level and the country relies
totally on the strength of the Dutch dykes to keep it viable.
