Food insecurity tied to climate change is a fast-growing area of concern. The UN have said that global food production must increase by 70% from current levels by 2050 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a 2019 report on climate change and land that rising temperatures are reducing crop yield and areas ideal for agriculture are being moved away from the equator to regions that lack the agriculture infrastructure required all while soil fertility is worsening.

It is clear that new innovative forms of agriculture are required to meet a growing population’s food demands. One area of agriculture that has been growing in popularity and funding is vertical farming, which is exactly what it sounds like, farming in vertical towers, in an indoor controlled environment.

However, creating a total control environment isn’t without its difficulties. Controlling the environment of a large indoor space comes with high energy costs and it can be difficult to scale up.

One project that is trying to demonstrate the economic viability of urban vertical farming in a totally controlled environment is Potager Farm, a farming company based in Berlin. With the help of Intelligent Growth Solutions’ (IGS) Total Controlled Environment Agriculture technology

Potager Farm

Potager Farm is trying to implement vertical farming across Germany. Potager Farm is part of the Greenman Group, the groups fund, Greenman Open, invests in grocery related real estate and are responsible for €1 billion in grocery sales every year

To start Potager Farm plans to plant herbs and leafy greens in their towers before trying edible flowers and fruits.

Potager Farm hopes this partnership will allow them to put vertical farms across Germany providing healthy and locally sourced food for people in urban areas. They have plans to build their first pilot farms that have been designed and will be built by IGS.

Potager Farms founder and CEO Mario Gatineau describes the plans for those first vertical farms, “So, the first pilot farms will be two towers, it will have more than 300 square metres of growing area. So we have a total of 600 square metres. And we are able to grow something like 50,000 plants monthly.”

The giant towers will be split into lots of growth chambers, with individually controlled environments. Douglas Elder, the head of vertical farming solutions at IGS who are designing Potager Farm explains how the chambers work, “Growth chambers, effectively, that give us, on a 40 square metre footprint, we can get up to about 440 square metres of growing area just by stacking up snooker table sized benches. So it’s just like warehouse racking, same as you’ll see in any sort of large DIY store and things like that with all the goods on them, so there’s a central lift moves up and down between these static racks moving these snooker table size benches in and out of the system.”

IGS designs are modular making it easier for new farms to put into already existing infrastructure. “So there’s specific conditions in terms I have to maintain an environment and there’s a certain internal height that we need to maintain for us just to deploy that system. And so by having different height systems, we’re able to adapt to that so we’ve got three sort of core offerings of a six, nine and 12 metre growth tower. But ultimately, we can rearrange these like building blocks as to what’s required to fit in a complex space,” says Doug Elder.

With a layout designed to maximise the space for plants, the other issue is creating the most ideal environment for growth, and this can be achieved using IGS’s Total Controlled Environment Agriculture platform.

Total Controlled Environment Agriculture

Creating a totally controlled environment sounds like taking the natural process of plant growth and putting it into an unnatural indoor environment, but that is not how Mario Gatineau views it, “We want to control environments in order to let the plants express its genetics to its maximum.”

In fact, creating a natural and environmentally friendly agriculture system is something that Mario has a personal passion about. His father was a beekeeper in Northwest France, “I’ve seen how older farming practices have affected the bee industry. Because I have been able to attest and observe this with my eyes. You know, literally seeing all those bees dying one after the other.”

With IGS’s controlled environment system the biosecurity of all plants in the vertical farm can be maintained without any need for pesticides, fungicides or biocides. The fertigation system as well as the air and water that’s circulating are put through a UV treatment to stop anything from spreading. Furthermore, the ventilation system is designed so that air is blown in and extracted from each chamber individually. These systems mean that the plants are protected and even if something does go wrong the issue will be contained to just one chamber and not spread through the entire tower. 

One of the most fundamental elements of plant growth is light, but the lighting system is also the biggest source of energy use for vertical farms. Using IGS’ system light can be used as efficiently as possible.

As Doug Elder explains, “what people don’t appreciate is it also instructing how those plants grow. So the different wavelengths of light are ultimately controlling photosynthesis, but also what’s called secondary metabolites, and things like that. They’re giving you the nutrition elements, the flavour components, all of those sorts of things going on inside the plant, are largely driven by light. And so this has been proven through numerous scientific trials, that and ultimately, when you’re just using sunlight, you’re getting what that plant’s response to that sunlight is. But if we can take individual elements of those, we can start changing how that plant grows to control those elements.”

The IGS system allows farms like Potager to use the exact wavelengths of light required for optimal plant growth, while also reducing the overall energy consumption and cost.

Potager Farm, on top of the lighting efficiency gained from the IGS system, will also source their energy as sustainably as possible. “In addition to the lighting, Greenman have invested in solar panels company called Greenman Energy, we will install a solar panel rooftop bigger more, and we will supply a vertical farm with it and drastically reduce the cost of the energy for us,” explains Mario.

The IGS lighting system gives the farm a lot of control. Lighting frequencies, the combination of frequency, even if the lights flicker or not can impact on plant growth, and the IGS system allows for control over these elements.

Another big advantage that vertical farming holds over other forms of agriculture is the huge water savings that can be made.

Mario says, “Through our system, we’re able to save 95% of water. As we have a closed irrigation loop in which we constantly recycling the water to just clean it and filter it with UV.”

Data Collection

In a vertical farm, not only can the environmental elements, like air quality, temperature, humidity, lighting, water, be completely controlled, the impact of each element on plants growth can be measured. At IGS all their towers come with an integrated software to measure and manage the tower.

Emily Seward is the head of data for IGS, and she says there is a lot of different data that the IGS system can measure. “So for example, we measure the temperature that the crops are growing at, we measure the humidity of the environment. So the percentage relative humidity, we also know things like the light intensity. So what is the equivalent of the sunshine that’s hitting the crops? And we also measure things like how frequently we’re irrigating the crops, so how frequently we’re adding water and effectively rain to the system.”

All this data can then be used to inform decisions on any environmental changes that could be made to improve plant growth for the next round of that crop.

The feedback loop this data provides is on a much faster timescale than that of traditional agriculture. Emily Seward is the head of data for IGS and she explains why this feedback loop is so beneficial for farms. “So for example, if you were growing basil outside, you can grow it in certain times of the month, and maybe you’ll get one cycle per year. So you get one set of data per year, the real benefit of vertical farming is that you’re season agnostic, so you can grow 10/20/30 cycles of Basil a year. And it means that the amount of data you get about the conditions that that Basil enjoys growing in is much more than in a in a field or outdoor setting. And the benefit of that is that it allows us to much more quickly optimise the recipes that we use for growing the different crops. So if you put Basil in, and a couple of weeks later, you’re taking it out, you can use the information you gather from that growth cycle to inform your next growth cycle so we’re continuously improving the recipes that we grow and improving that feedback loop between the recipe and the yield and then the next recipe that we grow.”

Vertical farms are not tied to weather or seasons or even the damage brought along by climate change. Their potential locations are also far less restricted than typical farms and can exist right next to human population centres. Perhaps most importantly they can be run incredibly efficiently and use the huge amount of data they collect to iterate their own process and improve on their efficiency.

Vertical farms are not the only solution to a world that is facing many agricultural challenges while needing to increase agricultural production fast, but it will play a role in that change. As Mario puts it “We are going to face food security crisis in the world such as Middle East in Africa, where it’s actually ongoing for a very long time. We have to come up with tangible in applicable solution for this country as well. Which is why vertical farming can bring a very good solution to that. I do believe vertical farming is part of this solution that we’re going to have to apply but it’s not the only one. You know, if we want to make system resilient we need to diversify the solution in the future.”