The Future Of Farming
12,000 years ago, humans were hunter-gatherers. Hunting meant moving from one place to another, to find animals. During this time our ancestors discovered a plant-based diet. They discovered that if a seed was to put back in the ground, it would grow to be a plant. And so farming was discovered. Growing on soil meant they could support themselves using the land they were living on. Land farming allowed humans to build societies around them, empires, trading, the sense of owning property was developed.
A study from Croplife shows that farming provides 1.3 billion jobs in the world, valuing the industry at $2.4 trillion. The current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. As people move to densely populated areas, conventional land farming will no longer supply enough food.
Farming has always been cultivating plants on land, horizontally. Many companies across the globe are changing their farming techniques, so what are these companies doing differently? Instead of farming horizontally, they are farming, vertically. Using high-tech they may change the way we farm forever. And with lenders investing money in this technique, this industry is worth looking at.
Plenty offers leafy greens produce, they successfully raised $200 million from SoftBank Vision Fund for their 100,000-square-foot indoor farm that promises to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually. Then there is AeroFarms, they have raised more than $238 million from investors such as Ingka Group, ADM Capital, GSR Ventures for their 69,000-square foot indoor facility, they can produce 2 million pounds of greens annually. They claim that their farms save 95% water as compared to land farming techniques. Then there is Bowery Farming, they raised $172.5 million in 2015. Bright Farms were able to raise $113 million. With the water scarcity in the Middle East, United Arab Emirates build a 130,000 square foot facility, costing them $40 million. This will help produce 6,000 lbs of leafy greens, daily.
An important factor of vertical farms is that they are not fully automated, they do require a constant human eye. Estimates are that a 30,000 SQFT vertical farm has an annual expense of $216,000, not counting salaries. If these farms continue to grow at the rate they are, they will have to hire 100,000 workers over the next decade. Cost this high has its effects on the consumer. By the time a product gets to the consumer, the price tag goes from $0.65/lbs to $2.33/lb. That price difference is due to millions of dollars needed to build and maintain a farm, the price tag may drop in the coming future if verticals farms were to scales up and find efficient systems.
Scaling up and finding more effective systems may be the only option for densely populated areas. As seen in the US, farms within families were given to generations to come, but recently this trend has been changed. As baby boomers postponed retirement, the age bracket for new farmers changes. The National Climate Assessment published a report saying “Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States”. Because of these changes, going vertical may be the only option.
Once a vertical farm is in place it has its own advantages, the indoor allows farmers to control the environment best suited for the plants. Farmers don’t have to deal with wildlife or domestic animals. They can operate all year round regardless of the climate conditions; the water usage is minimized. The days are not far when a restaurant will have freshly plucked produce from a farm nearby.
Indoor farming is more than just another way to grow plants; the technology has the potential to change how we engage with food cultivation. For the first time, since humans planted the first seed in the ground, we could use modern technology and free ourselves from the soil and the unknowns of the outdoor, by farming indoors anywhere around the world.
