The Fascinating New Developments in Urban Farming

Getting farm fresh food into dense cities has always been a serious of trade offs between things that help food quality and things that help food durability.  This is really the essence of getting foods produced and shipped anywhere and I suppose has always been the essence, but a couple of articles I've stumbled upon lately really have a couple of eye-opening facts.

To begin with, in The Attack of the Tomato Engineers, talks about a team of process engineers from Analog Devices and some of the tremendous economic advantages they can take advantage of,

For years, farmers and restaurateurs in New England knew that their tomatoes didn’t stand up to those grown in other states, such as Florida and California. “It’s a known fact that a lot of the local farmers sell zero percent of their tomatoes to local restaurants and supermarkets,” O’Reilly said. “The majority of it becomes ketchup.”

Indeed, it becomes ketchup, which means that New England farmers make about $0.40 a pound for their tomatoes, as opposed to the $4 per pound they’d get by selling them into restaurants and supermarkets.

With a 10x increase in sales price if they can produce a better tomato, it's a really a tremendous opportunity.  So Analog engineers attacked like any other process optimization. How do we optimize what he spend to earn 10x as much on a batch of tomatoes? 

“When the ADI guys came into the kitchen, it was like the Rolling Stones had arrived,” recalled Francis Gouillart, author of the blog, The Co-Creation Effect and founder of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership. “The tattooed chefs, looking at the engineers in their ADI outfits, were saying, ‘Who are these guys with their instruments?’”

The “guys with the instruments,” however, left their mark. In part thanks to their work, a growing number of chefs and farmers in Massachusetts now talk about the “scientification of taste” as if it were an established branch of engineering. And as a result of ADI’s destructive analysis and its subsequent role in Massachusetts’ 31st Annual Tomato Contest in 2015, a select group of chefs and farmers now have a better understanding of the role chemistry plays in producing a tasty tomato. Moreover, ADI’s engineering team has since topped off its analysis with the creation of an electronic reference design aimed at helping farmers grow the kinds of tomatoes that end up on dinner tables.

But farming isn't all about producing trendy tomatoes for urban hipster restaurants filled with austere young men in beards and flannel.  It's also about using a very valuable resource (real estate) to produce locally-grown vegetables and fruits, too.  In the last couple of months I've seen articles like this one on new indoor farming techniques that use "spare" building space inside big cities.  It doesn't seem feasible right of top of my head that they could pay to run indoor lights that grow the food and still sell for a profit. 

If you're going to grow food indoors—especially in a windowless warehouse like the 30,000-square foot Green Sense Farms, one of Philips' customers—you'll need light. The LEDs provide a substitute for the sun, but they also go further; Philips designs "light recipes" that can make particular crops grow faster or produce more nutrients.

"We can tailor these recipes to the photosynthesis response of the plant," says van der Feltz. "By being able to tweak the spectrum—the color the plants see—and put the lights exactly where they need it, we can dramatically increase yields and improve fruit density and quality."

Quartz reports this month the cost of quality LED lighting has fallen low enough to make it profitable to farm in a New Jersey night club! 

LED Lighting doesn't have to be white or red anything else.  Let's say their study on ideal taste shows the leaves get their best texture on one color while the tasters love the "nutty overtones" they get with another color.  Not having production workers to worry about it makes it that much easier.  Just setup the colors to provide the hours at each color.