- We have absolutely murdered
our fields and our agriculture.
We're sleepwalking into a huge agricultural issue
with the soil quality around the world.
- Our global population is expected to reach
We need to figure out how to supply enough food
in a way that's sustainable for the planet.
The answer may lie in vertical farming,
stacking crops indoors
and growing them with LED lights
rather than planting them across fields.
Vertical farming doesn't require us to take more land,
like rainforests
or wetlands,
and convert them into farmland.
But this isn't just to conserve land.
It requires less water and creates less pollution.
- Farming's actually one of the biggest CO2 producers.
- There's a problem though.
Vertical farms are expensive,
currently three to five times pricier
than traditional farms.
The question is,
can they ever be cheaper
than farming the old-fashioned way?
- We work on, can we grow something
at a price for all to eat?
And then if we crack that,
we roll the technology around the world.
- This is Make It Count,
a series on environmental innovations
and the math it takes to bring them to the masses.
This is James Lloyd Jones,
the CEO and founder of Jones Food Company.
- You can sort of see the size of the site.
- He runs the largest vertical farm in Europe.
He has 26 tennis courts of growing space,
7.5 miles of LED lights, and grows fresh produce
365 days a year.
- It was a overnight success story in 14 years
of lessons learned up to this point.
- When you take a farm indoors,
you're giving up free access
to one of your biggest inputs—
light.
Sunlight fuels traditional farming,
and while its availability is seasonal,
it's totally free.
That's hard to beat.
For vertical farming, lighting can account
for up to 30% of the operational costs.
- The first thing that's got more people involved
is the price of LEDs
because LEDs were hugely expensive,
so people didn't want to build big farms
because of the high CapEx cost.
- But as LED prices
and efficiency continue to improve,
vertical farming is getting more appealing
from a cost perspective.
Vertical farms also compete with free sunshine
by using light recipes,
unique combinations
of spectrum intensity and duration.
- It doesn't mimic sunlight,
because sunlight has a lot of light
that they don't actually need.
They're optimized specifically for our basil,
and it just happens to be pink.
- Plants benefit disproportionately
from different wavelengths of light.
Vertical farms use their electricity
to generate only the specific wavelengths
that are best for the plants.
Saving space and water,
automating repetitive tasks,
and reducing the supply chain
also help cut the costs of operation.
- We're cutting down the supply chain
from lots of people handling crop
over many countries,
many borders to get to your plate.
- New technologies also play an important role,
not only in sustainability
but in developing an overall system
that can compete with traditional farming.
Currently at Jones Food Company,
solar panels installed on the roof
supply around 10%
of the site's total electricity requirements annually.
- It's got solar panels on top
to give power to auxiliary systems,
and it's being plugged into a large-scale
solar site across the road.
So the whole site will constantly be
powered by the sun
with battery backup.
That's good for business.
With rain water, capture your rain water,
and you capture your large-scale humidity
out of the main grow room,
then you save buying water,
you know, so it's good for business again.
Economics of vertical farming is still a challenge.
Everything comes down to price,
we're working in a commoditized market.
We're trying to get the most yield out of the most space,
sell it for the fairest price,
and make our technology work and pay for itself.
But for the economics to work,
the technology needs to still come lower than it is now.
- What will it take for vertical farming
to compete on price with traditional farming?
Something known as "price parity."
- My first site I built is
55,000 square feet of growing space.
We're now seeing that we have to scale up
with the number of farms.
- Currently, it costs around $10 million
to build a vertical farm.
But what happens when you expand the number of farms?
- With scale,
you get economies of scale.
So you get your per square meter
of growing space cheaper.
You're able to get closer to the goal of price parity.
- But when it comes to competing
with imported food,
that price parity is right around the corner.
- We're already selling product
into two major retailers,
the same price that it would be imported.
So we're already there on that.
- Although vertical farming is getting closer
to competing with traditional farming,
it may still be hard to adopt
due to consumer hesitancy.
- "It's not natural," argument is quite hard to get over.
If it's not grown in soil,
they don't recognize it as organic,
but large-scale greenhouses have been
commercially providing
peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes
hydroponically for many years.
It's very natural and it's better for you.
- There's a level of education
that is going to need to be done
to overcome the skepticism
of eating plants that are grown in buildings.
- But when people taste the product,
they have a more fulfilling punch of flavor,
a higher nutritional value,
and a longer shelf-life.
Cost of land, electricity, water, and robotics
all play a big factor
in slowing the proliferation of vertical farming.
- We don't sit and just build the technology and think,
"Hey, we're amazing, this is working."
No that should be iterated.
How can we make it cheaper to build?
How can we make it cheaper to operate?
How can we make it better
10 times over?
- These challenges can be overcome with time,
and soon enough,
we should be able to sustainably grow food
at an affordable cost, in any environment.