A baking machine for vegetables: How vertical farming could turn our agriculture upside down

• ofValerie Eiseler

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Salads, vegetables and spices could grow right in the city in the future. Thanks to vertical farming. The pioneers of the technology expect more sustainability and better taste from it.

If you want to round off a vegetable pan with a bunch of Thai basil, you usually get a greenhouse product today. The plant stretched its roots in the ground and was warmed and nourished by the sun shining through the plastic ceiling amid thousands of other herbs. Meanwhile, a second basil plant grew in a sterile-looking white room, devoid of soil, fed with added minerals and illuminated by LED light.

Which of the two tastes better? For Henner Schwarz, the answer to this question is the motivation for his work. “It was so intense and so much better than anything I had previously eaten on Thai basil,” the current CEO of & ever remembers the first time he tried an indoor farming product.

The plants do not grow in the ground, but in a nutrient solution

Schwarz works for the “Vertical Farming” Start-up & ever (formerly Farmer’s Cut) established by Vapiano founder Mark Korzilius. With “vertical farming”, lettuce, herbs or mushrooms do not grow on arable land under the open sky, but stacked on top of each other in factories that are sealed off from the outside world. Usually the plants are grown in so-called “hydroponics” systems directly in enriched water, which saves cleaning and soil. & ever relies on a specially developed “Dryponics” system in which the lettuce grows on a membrane, producing fewer roots and more leaves. “You can think of it as an automatic baking machine in which the plants are sown on one side and finally come out on the other side as ready-to-harvest vegetables,” says Schwarz about the & ever farming model.

What admittedly doesn’t sound like the idyll of a small vegetable farm is a response to the increasingly urgent needs of a growing world population. Around 7.8 billion people currently live on earth. By 2050, the United Nations estimates that there will be 9.7 billion – and they all need to be fed. But the more people there are, the less space there is for arable land. Climate change and its extreme weather conditions make the conventional cultivation of food difficult.

Kristin Jürkenbeck, who researches the sustainability of food and agricultural products at the University of Göttingen, denies that “vertical farming” could be the solution to this global hunger. “As far as I know, filling, high-calorie foods like corn or wheat cannot be grown in vertical farming these days. As a result, it is currently not possible to reduce world hunger. ”But she also sees many advantages in the new technology.

With vertical farming, salads and spices can be grown directly in cities

“In our latitudes, vertical agriculture offers the advantage of being close to the end consumer,” says scientist Jürkenbeck. It should be remembered, however, that the investment costs for “vertical farming” are high. In climatically disadvantaged regions of the world, as Jürkenbeck cites the United Arab Emirates as an example, such an investment could be worthwhile. So plants thrived there that would otherwise perish in fields under the open sky.

That is not the only reason why & ever built its first indoor farm in Kuwait. As a joint venture with a local chain, they now supply hotels and restaurants there with 250 different types of leafy vegetables and herbs. Demand is high, because Kuwait is one of many countries that rely on imports and long transport routes for fresh food supplies – with a loss in quality of the goods. Vertical agriculture is now set to change that.

The donors obviously also believe in the future concept. In the fall, the Berlin competitor Infarm announced that it had raised 170 million US dollars in a financing round. LGT Lightstone is one of the largest investors. The investor from Liechtenstein specializes in sustainable investments.

Infarm sets up its devices directly in the supermarket

Infarm has already raised more than 300 million US dollars in capital. The company currently estimates that its indoor farms cover a total of 50,000 square meters. In five years, Infarm wants to have increased this area tenfold and built up “the largest urban vertical farming network in the world”. A special business model for Berliners: indoor: indoor greenhouses, with which herbs thrive directly in the supermarket or restaurant. The start-up is already cooperating with some well-known supermarket chains around the world, including Edeka and Aldi Süd in Germany.

In contrast, & ever initially relies on farms abroad. After Kuwait, the group won a tender from the Singpore Food Agency to build a new mega farm there. Lettuce is to be grown there at a height of up to 15 meters. Conventional agriculture in fields or in large greenhouses is hardly an option for the country’s densely populated metropolises. According to CEO Henner Schwarz, efforts to promote local food supplies have not just been there since the pandemic.

What also makes the vertical farming model attractive: efficiency. The optimized conditions of the indoor farms save resources. Infarm, for example, claims 99.5 percent less space and 95 percent less water than conventional agriculture to produce its food. & ever states that it uses around 90 percent less water and 60 percent less fertilizer for cultivation.