Partner: Intelligent Growth Solutions

The world is on the brink of a climate related disaster and the solution requires a combination of engineering disciplines that do not come together very often. But they must, because the challenge is so enormous that the future of the human race quite literally depends on it. It concerns the food that sustains us. In the face of rising global temperatures, crop yields are expected to fall. With each additional degree of warming, the National Academy of Sciences in the US wheat production alone will fall by 6%. But we are not on track for just one degree of warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth assessment report in August of this year, which it described as a ‘code red’ for humanity.

Food emergency

The report says we will see somewhere between 1.5 degrees Celsius and 5.5 degrees Celsius warming by the year 2100. Whether we will find ourselves at the low end and the high end of the range depends largely on the actions taken by governments in the coming decades to limit greenhouse gas emissions. But if yields of staple crops are falling by an average of 5% per degree. A five degree warmer world is a frightening prospect. Especially with a global population in 2050 of close to 10 billion, up from less than 8 billion today. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN projects will require 70% more food production than we currently achieve.

With international political will to fight this future still very much in doubt, we will need to use every tool at our disposal to give us a fighting chance and this means a new kind of farming, which applies a range of engineering and scientific disciplines. Mechanical engineering, robotics, software engineering, thermodynamics, lighting, microbiology, and hydroponics. It also takes advantage of the latest agricultural science from the James Hutton Institute in Dundee.

Vertical farming

Farming in climate-controlled towers, with plants in their own tray is. It sounds like something from a far-off future, but it is already a technical and commercial reality. “It is transformative. Because you’re, you are suddenly the controller of weather. And if you’re a farmer weather is the bane of your life, you never get you never get a rain when you need it, or it comes in when you don’t want to it,” says Derek Stewart, he is the Director of the Advanced Plant Growth Centre at the James Hutton Institute. Rain when you don’t want it for farmers, can be devastating. But there is an alternative. If you’re controlling the box in which you grow things, you can be growing 24/7, 365. This is controlled environment farming: “You don’t have any disease, you don’t have to then worry about pesticides, you can control the fertiliser and water use. So on an average water use is down by 90% in vertical farming.”

What can be grown in controlled environment farming is limited, although this is expanding beyond herbs such as smaller protein crops, or smaller fruits. “Actually at my institute we’re trying to we’re thinking about redesigning the crop to fit the box. Because we’ve designed the box now you’ve got vertical farming companies and Intelligent Growth Solutions. How can we redesign the crop to fit?”

New feedstocks

This means maximise the parts of the plant that you want, minimise the parts that you don’t want. Or perhaps shrink an entire bush down to half a metre and have it produce fruit all year round. Derek says that agriculture is a naturally conservative industry, but it is broadening its horizons. He looks a lot at the circular economy around agriculture, using the waste products of one process to fuel another. He has just completed a report for zero waste Scotland. “So if you say, for example, you’re harvesting wheat for bread. So you harvest the wheat, you’ve got the grain, you mill the grain and you get the starchy flour out.”

That starchy flour can then be converted through milling and other cutting edge engineering processes to create up to 30 other products, which can be more valuable than the flower itself.

“Scotland produces 2 million tonnes of barley, so you’ve probably got 2 or 3 million tonnes of straw… the straw is used as animal feed and burning, but you convert that into feedstock chemicals to allow you to make PET, or other sustainable plastics. So we have to start thinking differently and how we use resources and recycle. And how many times can you go around the use loop before something’s redundant? And if we were getting rid of fossil fuels, agriculture is going to be the new feedstock for chemicals.”

Derek adds that he is also particularly interested in ‘plantlets’. Growing plants in vertical farm towers which you then transport outside before they are mature. This is often the most dangerous phase of development for plant life. Even trees can be grown in vertical farms. “When you create plantlets, for trees, your attrition rate or creating these climates is quite high. But if you did it in a vertical farm, you should have no waste, they’ll all survive to a certain size, take them out, put them outside. And so that will be particularly useful in ecological projects where you want to rewild with native species, not just for production, but for putting nature back the way it was,’ says Derek.

Creating new populations of staple crops like wheat, maize, corn, rice, and potato indoors would mean four cycles per year for most of these plants and enable a more selective growing process to ensure the best quality products. As a rough calculation, Derek thinks that there are about 6,000 condition settings that can be achieved in a modern vertical farm. This allows for incredible research and development.

Cooperative vertical farming

“It is a massive vending machine, the size of a black of flats that grows fruit, veg and trees,” says Dave Scott explaining that the roller door acts as an environmental isolator meaning that the interior could replicate the climate of anywhere in the world.Dave is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Intelligent Growth Solutions.He is an electrician and mechanical engineer, and although he himself had no background in agriculture, he looks set to revolutionise it. “I flew around the world building kind of automated warehouses. And it was in one of these warehouses that I met a rather eccentric farmer called Henry, who had some fantastic visions,” says Dave.

Fortunately for the future of farming, Dave leads a diverse team of experts and there are plenty of people who understand plants better than him. He is the mechanical engineer, and understands the physical systems of the ‘box’ as Derek calls it better than anyone. Dave was working on an automated warehouse major retailer when a colleague approached him about her neighbour. That neighbour was Henry Aykroyd – the farmer who would go on to found Intelligent Growth Solutions with Dave. “He’s two steps ahead of everything you think, he is really incredible. And what he wanted was to grow things all year round. So he wanted speed, efficiency, no pest and disease, repeatability, scalability, and at no extra cost. So the to do list was quite extreme and quite daunting,” says Dave.

Dave and Henry looked at what was needed from an engineering perspective, from the bottom to the top. The critical systems in a vertical farm are everything you would expect to do with environmental control. The watering, the lights, the ventilation and temperature. “What we bring to the party, which is unique is how we power the LEDs. We power our little tiny one watt LED the same way we recover a 30 tonne crane. And what that gives us is scale efficiency, safety and flexibility and optical stability, as well. So our lights don’t pulse and flicker and all these kind of things unless you want them to. And again that goes back to the science.”

Let there be light

Most small electrical items have single phase power delivered to them. Think of a bedside lamp, it will receive a 240-volt single phase supply. This behaves as a single sine wave, which as it passes through one wavelength has two points without any energy being delivered, so your lamp will flicker ever so slightly. Heavy machinery such as a crane is usually fed three-phase power. This means there are three sine waves overlapping, and constant power is delivered. Three phase power in the UK is 400 volts, which is lethal, so IGS had to convert it down to 50 volts, so it can be touched without risk. And so the lights are completely flicker free and their intensity can be changed to suit the growth of the plants. “How they react in these different situations is really quite incredible. So you can stretch them to offer them change the colour, taste, waiver, nutrition, all these kinds of things, just with the light alone,” says Dave.

Then comes the environment and the watering systems which also allow unprecedented control of plant development. The combinations here are literally endless, which means that the machines can be improved over time. “In two years’ time, you’ll be getting more yield more flavour, more nutrients out of crops that you want to grow and more crops as well,” says Dave.

Farming is very regional, and different regions have their own market demands, their own traditions and crops but ultimately, farmers all want risk taken out of their operations. “So we can help with the weather and we can help with how they sell it to put the power back in their hands if you like. The second stream of parameters people really want is things like taste flavour nutrition,” says Dave pointing to basil as a really good example. “If you’re selling bows in the supermarket, you want the kind of length to stay in wreath ratio that the that looks healthy and people expect to see. But if you work in the food processing industry, you want the plants the leaves to be the size of your hand, and you want the most intense brutal flavour that we can possibly give you. We can give two very different outputs for those two different customers.”

Scaling up

The interest from farmers so far has come from the extreme ends of the production scale. The smaller niche farmers, and the ones who demand scale. “There’s nothing in the middle,” says Dave who is of the opinion that vertical farming only works at scale. “So a big facility so you can have 10 towers or more. And that’s to do with the economics of being able to flex and how you trade with the retailers. However, for other crops very niche crops you can have one tower which can produce incredible unique things,” he says.

In a sense, the engineering part of the journey IGS is on has now been completed. They can still finesse the design and the physical structure, but really the work now is to understand how to use it to grow plants in the optimum way. They have made a lot of advances already, designing thousands of what they call ‘recipes’ – configurations of all of the environmental factors. But this is an entirely new field of science and there is a lot of work to do.

To work on this, IGS has expanded rapidly in recent years. One of their recruits is Elliot Erskine, a microbiologist who works in a knowledge transfer capacity between IGS and the James Hutton Institute. In previous years, Elliot was the only biologist, let alone microbiologist working on the project. But the scientific side of the company has been expanding rapidly. “We have control over the substrate, we have control over the water. And basically a lot of my work day to day is the monitoring of that of those inputs. So I do a lot of sampling. And I do a lot of investigative, microbiology,” which means identifying different species that are there, “I’ve done some microbiome analysis, which is, you know, very buzzword very, very modern, now. Everyone wants to know, their own microbiome. So looking at, basically, who’s there who is present at the sort of bacterial level, in the soil, on the plants in the water.”

Because although these are controlled environments they are still biological systems. Living things live there and plants don’t thrive in sterile environments. “So some of my work has been looking at the pros and cons of lowering the microbial load in the system,” says Elliot.

Multidisciplinary team

Dave is a mechanical engineer who has had to learn about plants, and Elliot is a biologist who has had to learn to appreciate engineering and modelling. It is an interesting team that has had to adopt other disciplines. But for some of the team, joining a vertical farm feels like it has a touch of destiny.

“I’ve always had a connection to farming in one way or the other,” says Fara Kahir, Senior Software Developer at IGS. Growing up her aunts lived in communist Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic. So there wasn’t much in the way of food in the shops, but because they had like small holdings, they were able to grow all their food on their own land, so they had to kind of subsistence existence. “It was always fun for me to go in holiday there, because I’d come from the city, and my aunties had everything growing on their own land. And then a few years ago, and when I moved to Edinburgh, I became involved in this organisation, which is now called Earth in Common, which basically encourages people to not have their own allotment, but a shared allotment space. And recently, I’ve moved to a home where I can now grow my own potatoes in my own backyard.”

Fara’s job as a software developer is primarily to work on what is known as scheduling. The set of instructions telling the system what to do to the plants, and when based on the “recipes” developed by the plant scientists. On the other side, you have the hardware which is Dave’s domain. “We’re the bit that sort of pulls those two pieces together. So we upload a recipe to the system. And the system then sends commands to the hardware, to tell us when to execute those instructions in the recipe. So a lot of the work that we do revolves around scheduling. So we need to make sure that that you know, the water commands are getting executed every two hours, the lights are coming on, the lights are switching off.”

Fara also had to record error responses and make them visible to the end user. The lift is a bottleneck, as it can only perform a certain number of operations per minute, and the critical path needs to be optimised. The next challenge is scaling this across hundreds, if not 1,000s of towers.

“We’ve already started on it. So it’s already got a level of scaling built in. And we already know kind of what we want to do to increase that scaling. So it’s just really a matter of implementing it now. We should be able to scale up to a couple of hundred towers very shortly.”

The future of food production will have to be diverse and flexible to meet the problems that lie ahead of us, but engineering solutions and agricultural science are combining to help give us a fighting chance. We started this episode with some scary statistics from the UN’s Food and Agricultural organisation, but its motto can at least give us a positive ending… ‘Fiat Panis’ – let there be bread.