By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Arthur Max, Associated Press Mon Apr 11, 9:05
am ET
DEN BOSCH, Netherlands Farming is moving indoors, where the sun never shines,
where rainfall is irrelevant and where the climate is always right.
The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously
controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be
in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi
desert.
Advocates say this, or something like it, may be an answer to the world's food
problems.
"In order to keep a planet that's worth living on, we have to change our
methods," says Gertjan Meeuws, of PlantLab, a private research company.
The world already is having trouble feeding itself. Half the people on Earth
live in cities, and nearly half of those about 3 billion are hungry or
malnourished. Food prices, currently soaring, are buffeted by droughts, floods
and the cost of energy required to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport it.
And prices will only get more unstable. Climate change makes long-term crop
planning uncertain. Farmers in many parts of the world already are draining
available water resources to the last drop. And the world is getting more
crowded: by mid-century, the global population will grow from 6.8 billion to 9
billion, the U.N. predicts.
To feed so many people may require expanding farmland at the expense of forests
and wilderness, or finding ways to radically increase crop yields.
Meeuws and three other Dutch bioengineers have taken the concept of a
greenhouse a step further, growing vegetables, herbs and house plants in
enclosed and regulated environments where even natural light is excluded.
In their research station, strawberries, yellow peppers, basil and banana
plants take on an eerie pink glow under red and blue bulbs of Light-Emitting
Diodes, or LEDs. Water trickles into the pans when needed and all excess is
recycled, and the temperature is kept constant. Lights go on and off,
simulating day and night, but according to the rhythm of the plant which may
be better at shorter cycles than 24 hours rather than the rotation of the
Earth.
In a larger "climate chamber" a few miles away, a nursery is nurturing cuttings
of fittonia, a colorful house plant, in two layers of 70 square meters (750 sq.
feet) each. Blasts of mist keep the room humid, and the temperature is similar
to the plants' native South America. After the cuttings take root the most
sensitive stage in the growing process they are wheeled into a greenhouse and
the chamber is again used for rooting. The process cuts the required time to
grow a mature plant to six weeks from 12 or more.
The Dutch researchers say they plan to build a commercial-sized building in the
Netherlands of 1,300 square meters (14,000 sq. feet), with four separate levels
of vegetation by the end of this year. After that, they envision growing
vegetables next to shopping malls, supermarkets or other food retailers.
Meeuws says a building of 100 sq meters (1,075 sq. feet) and 14 layers of
plants could provide a daily diet of 200 grams (7 ounces) of fresh fruit and
vegetables to the entire population of Den Bosch, about 140,000 people. Their
idea is not to grow foods that require much space, like corn or potatoes. "We
are looking at the top of the pyramid where we have high value and low volume,"
he said.
Sunlight is not only unnecessary but can be harmful, says Meeuws. Plants need
only specific wavelengths of light to grow, but in nature they must adapt to
the full range of light as a matter of survival. When light and other natural
elements are manipulated, the plants become more efficient, using less energy
to grow.
"Nature is good, but too much nature is killing," said Meeuws, standing in a
steaming cubicle amid racks of what he called "happy plants."
For more than a decade the four researchers have been tinkering with
combinations of light, soil and temperature on a variety of plants, and now say
their growth rate is three times faster than under greenhouse conditions. They
use no pesticides, and about 90 percent less water than outdoors agriculture.
While LED bulbs are expensive, the cost is steadily dropping.
Olaf van Kooten, a professor of horticulture at Wageningen University who has
observed the project but has no stake in it, says a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of
tomatoes grown in Israeli fields needs 60 liters (16 gallons) of water, while
those grown in a Dutch greenhouse require one-quarter of that. "With this
system it is possible in principle to produce a kilo of tomatoes with a little
over one liter of water," he said.
The notion of multistory greenhouses has been around for a while. Dickson
Despommier, a retired Columbia University professor of environmental health and
author of the 2010 book "The Vertical Farm," began working on indoor farming as
a classroom project in 1999, and the idea has spread to several startup
projects across the U.S.
"Over the last five year urban farming has really gained traction," Despommier
said in a telephone interview.
Despommier argues that city farming means producing food near the consumer,
eliminating the need to transport it long distances at great costs of fuel and
spoilage and with little dependency on the immediate climate.
The science behind LED lighting in agriculture "is quite rigorous and well
known," he said, and the costs are dropping dramatically. The next development,
organic light-emitting diodes or OLEDs, which can be packed onto thin film and
wrapped around a plant, will be even more efficiently tuned to its needs.
One of the more dramatic applications of plant-growing chambers under LED
lights was by NASA, which installed them in the space Shuttle and the space
station Mir in the 1990s as part of its experiment with microgravity.
"This system is a first clear step that has to grow," Van Kooten says, but more
research is needed and people need to get used to the idea of sunless, landless
agriculture.
"But it's clear to me a system like this is necessary."