The farm of the future?

In Japan, the world’s largest indoor farm produces 10,000 heads of lettuce each day with 99 percent less water than outdoor fields. This incredible indoor “food factory” in Japan is claiming that it can produce 100 times more heads of lettuce per day than an outdoor counterpart of the same area, and also produces 80 percent less food waste.

 The farm is contained in a building measuring around 2,500 square metres (25,000 square feet). The building is an old, abandoned Sony factory, but the farm has now given it new life, as well as providing a local and sustainable supply of fresh food. The entire thing is powered by 17,500 LED lights, specially designed for the project, which run at a wavelength that increases photosynthesis and cell division in the lettuce crops. And the scientists have also shortened the day and night length, as well as carefully controlled the humidity and temperature of the factory, in order to speed up the growth of the plants an unheard of two and a half times.

In outdoor farms, a lot of water is lost as it seeps through the soil and evaporates into the atmosphere. But the enclosed factory allows the water to be collected and recycled from the environment. And the lettuce crop itself is also more efficient - the plants don't have a core, which greatly reduces food waste. Half of the planting and harvesting process is regulated by manual workers, while half is done by robots - but in the future the company plans to automate the whole thing to make it even more efficient.

“I believe that, at least technically, we can produce almost any kind of plant in a factory,” plant physiologist, Shigeharu Shimamura, told NationalGeographic. “But what makes most economic sense is to produce fast-growing vegetables that can be sent to the market quickly. That means leaf vegetables for us now. In the future, though, we would like to expand to a wider variety of produce,” he added. “Using this method, if we can build plant factories all over the world, we can support the food production to feed the entire world's population. This is what we are really aiming for.”

The PodPonics plant Factory in Atlanta, Georgia is currently using cost-saving technology, smartphone-based software controls, and food safety regimes that are replicable throughout the world. Both approaches will conserve resources such as arable land and water for staple crops such as soy, wheat, corn and rice while expanding into root crops and vine crops.

But not all experts are convinced. It seems a sensible solution to urban space constraints and a desire for increased local food production: transform abandoned warehouses into indoor farms, or construct purpose-built vertical food factories. But Louis Albright, an emeritus professor of biological and environmental engineering who helped pioneer controlled-environment agriculture, warns that these “high in the sky” proposals intended to reduce food miles and rejuvenate communities may prove to be “pie in the sky” with detrimental impacts on the environment. 

Albright argues that closed-system urban farming based on electrically generated photosynthetic light would result in food production with high cost, large energy use, a giant carbon footprint and incompatibility with some forms of renewable energy. A better solution would be installing more traditional horizontal greenhouses around the perimeter of urban areas, he suggested. These “peri-urban” greenhouses would still reap many of the benefits of urban infrastructure – such as water, power, high-speed roads and other transportation options – while avoiding the phytotoxic effects of urban air pollution, and they would capture the most effective, cost-efficient source of energy for plants: the sun.

Nor is local food production always the most sustainable option, especially when growing crops out of season, Albright added.  “There’s a lot of sentimental attachment to local food production, and the quality is likely to be better, but the phrase ‘food miles’ shouldn’t scare people because the alternative isn’t always better. A system viewpoint is critical,” Albright said.