Is the way forward for farming transferring indoors?

Brandon Alexander spent many summers of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm picking cotton, potatoes, and peanuts under the hot Texas sun. It is safe to say that agriculture was not his calling. In fact, he was afraid of it.

As soon as he could, Alexander swapped his family’s farmland for the greener pastures of Silicon Valley, where he specialized in robotics for companies like Google and worked on the tech giant’s drone delivery service.

But after a few years in the Bay Area, I began to feel uncomfortable. He stepped into engineering to solve some of the world’s most persistent problems, and yet a big problem stared at him: agriculture didn’t work. It was slow, wasteful, and inefficient. It also killed the planet.

“Here I am at Google X, one of the best funded companies of our time, and I’ve seen the advances in robotics and AI and machine learning and all those technologies and it just felt like we weren’t aiming big . “Enough,” he said.

Instead of returning to the farm, Alexander brought it into the house. In 2015, he founded Iron Ox, a San Carlos-based robotic farming company that produces food with what he believes is more efficient and has a smaller environmental footprint. The company combines a hydroponic growing system – a method in which plants are grown in nutrient-rich water instead of soil – and robots that autonomously monitor and move plants around its greenhouses.

Grover, one of the autonomous robots used in Iron Ox’s greenhouse automation system. (Courtesy Iron Ox)

As farmers in the west face historic droughts and raging forest fires, made even more extreme by a changing climate, several startups in the Bay Area have started moving farms indoors, betting on the future of agriculture will take place in smaller, ground-free and sometimes sunless rooms.

The term “controlled environment farming” refers to a variety of farming practices carried out indoors, whether it be in tire houses, greenhouses, or full vertical farms where plants grow in stacked layers under strictly monitored conditions.

While some are skeptical that the bulk of agricultural production – namely wheat, corn, and soy – can be mass-produced this way, vertical farming and hydroponic systems that grow vegetables and leafy greens have recently gained popularity. They appear in technically operated greenhouses, shipping containers and spacious warehouses – even in tiny apartments and backyards.

Proponents say this way agriculture can maximize yields by growing food year round, with less land use, greenhouse gas emissions, water and waste.

“I think most people don’t realize that food production is currently a major contributor to climate change,” said Alexander. “We’re just stuck in a process that has inefficiencies at every step.”

Iron Ox is working to solve the system. By using robotics and AI to monitor the health of each plant, the company eliminates waste by reducing the number of inputs, such as: B. the need to spray pesticides indiscriminately. It also reduces water usage by 90% compared to a traditional field by recirculating the water throughout the system, Alexander said.

“Our goal is zero waste farming,” said Alexander. “This means that every liter of water, every gram of nitrogen, every joule of energy required to produce calories must create nutritional value.”

Such farms can often be placed very close to urban centers, said Dr. Paul Zankowski, Agricultural Advisor to the US Department of Agriculture. “So you can essentially grow something in one day and eat it the next day or even the same day,” he said.

Iron Ox is just one of a growing number of players entering this area. This spring, Gotham Greens, a New York-based hydroponic greenhouse company, announced plans to expand to Northern California and partner with UC Davis to collaborate on research and innovation in indoor farming.

Plenty, a vertical farm in South San Francisco, has also messed up the Bay Area lettuce market, flooding local grocery stores and delivery services like Good Eggs and Instacart with their vertically grown baby cabbage, arugula, and mizuna leaves.

Workers process the various vertically grown products at Plenty. (Courtesy of Much)

Vertical farming systems like Plenty’s grow leafy greens and vegetables on huge shelves in huge warehouses and monitor plants for nutrient temperature, oxygen levels and pH. Unlike Iron Ox, which uses greenhouses to harness the sun’s energy, Plenty employs a series of LEDs that increase the plant’s ability to grow regardless of time and season.

Vertical agriculture critics, such as Stan Cox of the Land Institute, a nonprofit research organization committed to sustainable agriculture, say the method is both costly and energy-intensive. “The whole purpose of farming is to harvest sunlight,” said Cox. “So when we take away the sunlight, we’re basically using fossil sunlight because we’re burning fuels and power plants to power the lamps.”

While Cox agrees that growing leafy greens and other vegetables closer to cities can make sense to improve access to food, vegetables make up only a small percentage of total agricultural production in the United States. Instead, the lion’s share of the crops produced is wheat, corn and soy, which would require enormous amounts of energy in such a system, he said.

That argument didn’t shake Plenty’s co-founder, Nate Storey. “We have eaten too much of the wrong things for too long,” said Storey. “It’s not a calorie thing – it’s a nutritional thing. Would you like your children to eat Twinkies or salads? “

However, Storey acknowledged that growing food this way is more expensive, at least for now. “The job that we are on as a company is basically just cutting costs,” he said. “Bringing indoor farming on a technology-cost curve and reducing costs as close as possible to zero.”

But, he asked, expensive compared to what? We often think of the field as an open space for farming, “but when you rewind in time and say, what did this field begin as? What was the carbon storage capacity? … How many tens of thousands or millions of years of solar energy was invested in this morning before we implemented it? You are beginning to see that the field is actually a very expensive place to grow food. “

At a moment when America’s farmland is being lost to erosion, nutrient imbalances, and pollution from decades of farming practices that have depleted America’s topsoil, these engineered farms are creating new food systems, or, as Storey puts it, producing land in unlikely locations.

“The ingredients of traditional Ag – they practically all go away,” said Storey. “Work is scarce … water is going away … Even the energy itself, the energy input in the form of the sun, is becoming less and less efficient because we have more climatic fluctuations, we have less predictability and all of this is counterproductive to the yield of production.”

In other words, traditional agriculture and global supply chains are in a race against a rapidly changing climate, and the prospects are not good.

“We’re trying to build a lifeboat for humanity,” said Storey. “That sounds really dramatic, but that means we don’t know what the future holds and we don’t know what it is like to live in a world with insecure food supplies. It should be our job to build something that ensures that we have the means of production. “

jwolfrom@sfexaminer.com