Outside it’s a dreary midwinter. We live in the middle of some of the best farmland in the country.
But inside the cavernous warehouse we’ve come into, you’ll have no idea about any of that: there’s no daylight; It feels like it could be any time of the day and any season of the year.
We are at Fisher Farms – the largest vertical farm in Europe.
The whole point of verticality farm It is to create an environment where you can grow plants, stacked on top of each other (hence: vertically) in a high density. The idea is that you can grow salads or peas close to the cities where they are consumed rather than hundreds of miles away. Location isn’t supposed to matter.
Farm 2 from Fisher Farms
So the fact that this particular place exists in the middle of fields a few miles outside Norwich is somewhat irrelevant. It could be anywhere. In fact, unlike most farms, which are sometimes named after the family that owns them or a local landmark, this one is simply called “Farm 2.” You can find ‘Farm 1’ in Staffordshire, if you were wondering.
The amazing ambition of the farm boss
These futuristic agricultural units are the brilliant idea of Tristan Fisher, a serial entrepreneur who has spent most of his career working on renewable energy in its various forms. His ambition now is astonishing: to be able to grow not only basil and chives on a farm like this, but also grow other, more difficult and more competitive crops – from strawberries to wheat and rice.
Only then, he says, can vertical farming stand a chance of truly changing the world.
The idea behind vertical farming itself is more than a century old. Back in 1915, American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey described how this could be done theoretically. In theory, one should be able to grow plants hydroponically – in other words with a mineral substrate rather than soil – in a controlled environment and thus dramatically increase the yield.
This is what is already being done in greenhouses across much of northern Europe and the United States, where tomatoes and other warm-weather vegetables are grown in temperature-controlled environments. However, while most of these greenhouses still rely on natural light (if sometimes supplemented by electric lights), the point behind vertical farming is that by controlling the amount of light, one can grow almost anything, at any given time. Sunnah. By grouping crops together, one can produce more crops per acre of land one uses.
The tunnels are 12 levels high and flooded with bright LED lights
Look at a long-term graph of agricultural production in this country and you’ll begin to see why this is important. The amount of crops we grow per acre of land jumped dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century – partly the result of liberal use of synthetic fertilizers and partly of new technologies and systems. But the productivity rate began to decline at the end of the century.
“Change the equation”
Vertical farming, if it can scale up the numbers, promises to change the equation and dramatically increase agricultural productivity in the coming decades. The question is whether the technology exists yet.
When it comes to technology, one thing has definitely changed. Those early vertical farms (the first attempts actually date back to the 1950s) had a big problem: LEDs. Incandescent lamps were too hot and consumed too much energy to operate in these environments. But the latest generation of LEDs are both cool and cheap, and these are the ones you need (in large numbers) if you want to do vertical farming.
Read more from Sky News:
In a time of change Sky News has spent a crucial year on the farm
How climate change could jeopardize the UK’s access to affordable food
The farm grows basil but the ambition is to grow more than just simple herbs
Here at Farm 2, you find row after row of trays, each stacked on top of each other, each holding increasingly lush basil plants. They are placed under thousands of tiny LED lights that are precisely tuned to the correct spectral frequency to encourage the plant to grow quickly.
“We’re on a downward cost curve for LEDs,” Fisher says. “And when you think about the other major input, energy — renewable energy — is constantly going down, too.”
“So, when you think about all the big drivers of vertical farming, it’s going down, while everything is going up compared to fully grown crops – fertilizer, rents and water are getting more expensive as well.”
Just over a month after sowing the basil seeds, it is now fully grown and the crop trays are being transferred to the harvesting machine.
This farm—which currently sells to restaurant chains rather than directly to consumers—is now able to cost-competitive with basil shipped (or, more often, flown) from the Mediterranean and North Africa. The carbon footprint is much lower too.
“Our long-term goal is to be able to get much cheaper prices,” Fisher says. “If you look at Farm 1, we spent about £2.5 million on lights in 2018. We quickly moved to Farm 2; it’s seven and a half times bigger, and in those three years the lights were literally half the price. We’re also probably using 100% less energy.” 60 to 70 percent.”
Farm boss Tristan Fisher speaks to Sky’s Ed Conway
It may seem strange to hear a farmer talk so much about energy and relatively less about the kinds of things one associates with farmers — soil, tractors, or weather — but vertical farming is in large part an energy business. If energy prices are low enough, that makes crops here much cheaper.
But here in the UK, where energy costs are higher than anywhere else in the developed world, the prospects for this business face greater challenges than elsewhere. However, Fisher’s goal is to make the business case here before building larger units elsewhere, in countries with much cheaper power.
In the same way that Dutch farmers dominated those greenhouses, he believes the UK has a chance to dominate this new agricultural sector.