This is the first farm on Mars.
Okay, technically, it's not on Mars.
It's Wyoming,
so close enough.
Anyway, it could be on Mars,
because this is one
of the world's most advanced indoor farms,
and it could be the future of farming right here on Earth.
With vertical farming,
you can start with a building roughly the size of a Costco,
grow your crops up and down,
instead of around you on the floor,
ditch the pesticides,
recycle the water,
and you can grow pretty much anywhere, anytime.
Why do this?
Well, look at this.
It's all of the farmland in the world.
All of that used to be nature.
- It is probably one
of the most defining acts of humanity.
We literally changed the ecosystem of the entire planet
in order to meet our dietary needs.
Plants today produce roughly what they produced 10,
20 years ago.
We've just managed to pack more of them into a field,
and there is a limit to that type of yield gain.
Our job is to build the farms that unlock nutrition
for everyone on a scale that no one's ever seen,
and the only way we can do that now is by growing indoors.
- Indoors?
Don't you need sunlight and rain to grow the world's food?
Maybe not.
This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
- So pods are where we do almost all
of our environmental research.
This is where we understand what drives flavor,
what drives appearance, what drives yield,
in all of the different crops that we grow.
- Why would we want to farm vertically?
Well, there's a reason
that libraries don't spread their books all over the floor.
They stack them up on shelves,
so that they can stack a lot of books in a small footprint.
Vertical farms do the same thing for agriculture,
and while vertical farms are not new,
companies like Plenty are leading the charge
and making them mainstream.
- Okay, this is Nate's story. Plenty.
- So going vertical allows us to put a lot more product
in a single spot.
It allows us to circulate air easier,
administer light easier,
allows us to have massive growing plants.
- We can condense about 700 acres of farm land
into the size of a big box retail store.
And we harvest 365 days a year.
We were able to condense the growth cycle
to about 10 days for a lot of our products,
which is about a 700% increase in yield.
We are doing that all while saving
about a million gallons of water per week,
and using about 1% of the land compared
to traditional farming.
- In an indoor farm, we put water in the roots,
so they take the water up and they transpire that water,
and then that water gets sucked into our air handling units.
We condense it all and put it right back in the system.
So 99% of the water that's transpired in the field
and lost, is captured and recirculated in our farms.
We have strawberries in another space,
we've got an upstairs space devoted to tomatoes.
Overall, we've got over 50 different discreet spaces
that we use to do these tests.
- Historically,
vertical farming has been too expensive and too inefficient
to make it a better option than traditional farming,
but that's all changing now
as these technologies drop in price.
- Humanity is on that cost curve right now,
we just don't realize it, right?
We're riding this cost curve down to a future
where almost anything is possible
in an extremely controlled environment.
- That's not to say that one
of these vertical farms is cheap.
A new facility can cost a hundred million dollars
to install,
but the cost of each component is plummeting
as industries like solar and robotics are flourishing.
But the surprising technology
that's helped make this possible is LEDs,
what vertical farms use to replicate the sun.
Let's break that down.
- Our system is just a system of energy transfers
and our ability to manage the efficiency
of those energy transfers in some way
or another is what makes us economical
or non-economical as a business.
It sounds crazy,
but like most everything in the world, right,
we can only save our species if it makes economic sense.
(laughter)
You know, life and death,
let's make sure that we can afford it, right?
- Right.
Nate gets it.
Basically, an LED's efficiency comes down
to how little loss there is between the grid's electricity
and the amount of light it puts out,
then how much light is actually absorbed
and used by the plant.
- We think about LEDs as the point
of major energy loss in the system.
We're taking electrons and converting them into photons.
- And thanks to all your TV and cell phone
and light bulb buying,
LED technology has gotten really, really efficient.
And Plenty is getting really good
at putting out the kind of light
that actually results in plant growth and plant flavor.
- LEDs has just been going
down, down, down in price and up, up, up in efficiency,
and our understanding of what makes a good photon
versus a bad photon at the plant level has been going
up, up, up as we've been researching and working.
We're really kind of transitioning into a world
where humans and machines are partnering together
in better and better ways to make farming awesome.
- Plenty is not vaporware,
it's already on the market.
Their first farm
in the San Francisco Bay Area has produce available
at local stores today.
It's premium price, but it's not unaffordable.
Plenty is banking on their produce being better
and more flavorful than produce from traditional farms.
- What we can do with nutrients and lights
is we can change the flavor profile of our plants.
So things like a blue light can make a more crispy crunch
on a plant like kale.
The kale is nothing like a kale you would think of.
It's soft, it's kind of sweet, it's crunchy.
So I make a pesto out of it that I really love.
- I sampled Plenty's products
and they're not wrong.
The baby arugula, baby kale,
and mizuna mixes all have a ton of flavor.
And that kale pesto that Shireen mentioned?
So good.
And because farms
like Plenty use a tremendous amount of automation,
these plants have actually never even been touched
by human hands.
- When you grow things outside,
the elements are much more unpredictable.
If you grow indoors,
you can control a lot of those factors
in ways that aren't accessible to outdoor growers,
and the result is that our produce can be hundreds
of times cleaner.
- Plenty doesn't need to use pesticides
'cause there are no bugs.
Its produce doesn't have bird poop on it
because why would you put birds inside a warehouse?
- That results in a product that's so clean,
you don't need to wash it,
and that's a huge step forward for human health and safety.
- Hey there!
This is your colonel talking.
- Faster, unhealthy food dominates people's diets,
but that's partially because alternative produce
for most is kind of gross.
- It could be the best tasting lettuce
and tomato hamburger ever!
- So globally,
we eat about 1/3 of the fresh fruits
and vegetables that we should be consuming.
That's a huge problem;
that's why we see the rise of heart disease and diabetes
and all of these different things in places
where people used to just struggle
to get enough calories, right?
And what we've done in the last 50 years is we figured out
how to trick our bodies into wanting
to eat the wrong things.
Humanity is trapped in our addiction to those calories,
and we don't have the land or the resources
or the ability to compensate with high-nutrition food.
- Most produce has been packed up and shipped off
to another country or transported across state lines
via trucks and trains.
That's not great for the environment
and it also sucks for the flavor of your produce.
- Many products like tomatoes are designed
for durability, 'cause they gotta be shipped
across the country in these massive trucks,
and not for flavor.
So our products can last longer on shelves
because they're not spending three or four days on a truck.
- We're able to concentrate on quality
over the ability to ship.
And so this is, in a lot of ways,
the democratization of flavor.
- Right now, we are really focused
on building our facility in Compton.
We're in the middle of construction
and hoping to open that facility in the next year or so.
Compton is a food desert.
So we're bringing jobs to communities
that really are looking for investment in people.
These aren't seasonal jobs, they're full-time jobs,
365 days a year, living wages.
Being able to grow in communities anywhere means
that we will be able to offer that produce
to places that traditionally haven't had access.
I mean, that's what we can do,
is we can create local farms everywhere.
- With their San Francisco
and Compton facilities,
Plenty will only be growing leafy greens
and shorter plants.
Tall crops like wheat or corn don't make much sense
to farm vertically,
but that may all change in the decades to come.
So picture a scenario where we got rid
of all the traditional farms
and replaced them with just vertical farms.
Fresh produce could be grown in arid places
like Cairo and Phoenix
or frigid places like Helsinki and Calgary.
Every place in the world would be able
to grow the same crops grown in California and Tuscany.
How would that change diets and cuisines
and our impact on the environment?
The businesses and lives of people associated
with traditional farming would be severely disrupted,
farming communities would lose their identities,
but does that outweigh the potential benefits?
- That hard reset is one where the vast majority
of our food is grown indoors.
It's grown in a completely protected environment
under artificial light.
You know, given exactly the nutrients it needs,
it's hyper productive,
it's in the cities or in the regions where the people live,
and humanity is fully untethered from the environment
in terms of how our population grows.
We can go anywhere and grow these crops
in almost any conditions.
Now we can expand kind of this human consciousness
of flavor in ways that were never possible
when we were seasonally locked into production cycles.
- This is the kind of technology
and efficiency we'll need with the Artemis base on the moon,
and eventually on Mars.
But it's also kind of what we need here on Earth.
- We can give the world back a lot.
We can give the world back land,
we can give back the jungles of Borneo to the orangutans,
we can give back the Amazon to the planet,
we can give back the Midwest the buffalo,
we can give back the things that we've taken,
and we can be a lot less extractive.
- Come back next time for another
episode of
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