Indoor farms bloom despite challenges

印刷用画面を開く

Posted

Category: (Self-Study) Technology/Innovations

Switch to Watch View >

Storyline

Hide Storyline

Eden Green Technology is one of the latest crop of indoor farming companies seeking their fortunes with green factories meant to pump out harvests of fresh produce all year long. The company operates two greenhouses and has broken ground on two more at its Cleburne, Texas campus, where the indoor facilities are meant to shelter their portion of the food supply from climate change while using less water and land.

But that’s if the concept works. And players in the industry are betting big right alongside failing or uncertain ventures. California-based Plenty this summer broke ground on a $300 million facility, while Kroger announced that it will be expanding its availability of vertically farmed produce. Meanwhile, two indoor farming companies that attracted strong startup money — New Jersey’s AeroFarms and Kentucky’s AppHarvest — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And a five-year-old company in Detroit, Planted Detroit, shut its doors this summer, with the CEO citing financial problems just months after touting plans to open a second farm.

The industry churn doesn’t bother Jacob Portillo, a grower with Eden Green who directs a plant health team and monitors irrigation, nutrients and other factors related to crop needs.

Indoor farming, as the name implies, is the process of growing food inside in what experts sometimes refer to as “controlled environment agriculture.” There are different methods under that umbrella — one popular technique called vertical farming involves stacking produce from floor to ceiling, often under artificial lights and with the plants growing in nutrient-enriched water. Other growers are trying industrial-scale greenhouses, indoor beds of soil in massive warehouses and special robots to mechanize parts of the farming process.

Advocates say growing food indoors uses less water and land, and allows for food to grow closer to consumers, saving “food miles” (the distance required to transport food). It’s also a way to protect crops from increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change.

But skeptics question the sustainability of operations that can require intensive, and expensive, artificial light. And they say paying for that energy can make profitability impossible.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Script

Hide Script

[Lettuce in an indoor farm]

[Worker placing plants in hydroponic system]

Aaron Fields (interview): “We try to use every part of nature and the environment outside that we can to our benefit, but by also giving these plants the optimal grow environment 24/7, 365 days a year. We do that at Eden Green by controlling the actual climate around the plant and focusing on what the plant needs all the time, during day, during night, how we can supplement that in the summer and the winter. We’re actually trying to be seasonally agnostic, and give this plant the best growing conditions year-round.”

[Eden Green greenhouses]

[Eden Green sign]

Jacob Portillo (interview): “The fact that other people are failing and other people are succeeding, that’s going to happen in any industry you go to, but specifically for us I think that, especially as sustainable as we’re trying to be, the sustainable competitors are going to start winning.”

[Worker in field at Elmwood Stock Farm]

[Worker weighing down a hoop house]

[Tom Kimmerer inside an outdoor greenhouse]

Tom Kimmerer (interview): “This farm is supporting those trees, and those patches of forest, and these weeds and all the plants and animals that are in – sorry, I shouldn’t have called them weeds – these meadows. And you know, these hawks and other birds flying overhead. And you’re not going to find that in an indoor farm. An indoor farm doesn’t have any of those benefits.”

[Native plants on farm]

Tom Kimmerer (interview): “We are missing out on enough investment money going to more traditional farming. There’s a huge opportunity to invest in traditional farming to increase productivity, reduce the carbon footprint of farming and increase the nutritional quality.”

[Tomato plants inside greenhouse]

[Bugs on a tomato plant]

[Lettuce growing outdoors]

Tom Kimmerer (interview): “That’s the kind of investment that we should be looking to, is practical solutions to the problems of real farming, not sort of making up some new kind of farming.”

[Lettuce in hydroponic system]

[Worker harvesting lettuce from indoor farm]

Jacob Portillo (interview): “Controlled environment agriculture is coming into a space that’s this is necessary now. We’ve come to a point of necessity that traditional ag is not the most convenient or environmentally-friendly way to grow things on a large scale and produce them as quickly as we need them.”

[Worker harvesting lettuce at an indoor farm]

Jacob Portillo (interview): “We are just trying to supplement something that we recognize is already an issue. So I think, that moving forward that sustainability has to be a conversation regardless of where we’re growing our food.”

[Lettuce growing in indoor farm]

[Workers walking through indoor farm]

This script was provided by The Associated Press.

Related Lesson: Indoor farms bloom despite challenges