The Future of Farming
The following information made me think of a childhood friend who always wanted to be a farmer, out in the middle of nowhere, far from the ‘rat race’. He is a farmer of sorts with a 100 acre tree farm. He has lot’s of equipment—half of it dissembled to be fixed at an undetermined future date—woodpiles all over the place to heat the house in the winter, and paths through the house which separate the path walker from all these ‘valuable’ nostalgic items from which he just can’t be parted.
It seems farming for the future will look nothing like he envisions farming. Indoor farms are the wave of the future and some already exist. The goal is to get food from the farm to the table in hours rather than days or weeks. Huh? “Stop the world I want to get off’. All this rampant technology bearing down from every direction is making me dizzy. Maybe I better start looking at caskets—if they are still being used. I guess it is more like “What to do with the ashes?”. Before long I reckon they will be put into recycled DNA machines and an hour after death will be the new model of the deceased, an improved advanced model making the recycled baby more like everything we want someone to be.
At any rate there is an indoor farm that already exists in the S.F. Bay area. “The growing room looks like a strange forest, with pink and purple LEDs illuminating 20 ft foot tall towers of leafy vegetables that stretch as far as you can see. It smells like a forest, too, but there’s no damp earth or moss. The plants are growing sideways out of the columns, which bloom with Celtic crunch lettuce, red oak kale, sweet summer basil, and 15 other heirloom munchables. The 50,000 square foot room, a little more than an acre, can produce some 2 million pounds of lettuce a year.
Step closer to the veggie columns, and you’ll spot one of the roughly 7,5000 inflated cameras or 35,000 sensors hidden among the leaves. The sensors monitor the room’s temperature, humidity, and level of carbon dioxide, while the cameras record the plants’ growing phases. The data streams to botanists and artificial intelligence experts, who regularly tweak the environment to increase the farm’s productivity and enhance the food’s taste. Step even closer to the produce, and you may see a ladybug or two. They’re there to eat any pests that somehow make it past the cleaning room. ‘They work for free so we don’t have to eat pesticides” says Matt Barnard, chief executive officer. “
The world’s supply of fruits and vegetables falls 22% short of global nutritional needs so this indoor farming can help out although if the world’s population doubles as it has in my lifetime, maybe humans will be next door hanging on a coat rack waiting for their infusion of all these good nutrients from the growing room.
This setup doesn’t use any soil. Instead nutrients and water are fed into the top of the poles and gravity does much of the rest of the work. Any excess water gets recycled back, so things are very efficient. The LED lights, air composition, humidity, and nutrition are regulated by all the sensors and cameras. The owners of this indoor farm have just received a $200 million dollar investment from a Japanese firm and this will help put one of their indoor farms in every major metro area with more than 1 million residents. Each facility will be the twice the size of the facility in the Bay area. And can be constructed in under 30 days.
Humans certainly have evolved into technical geniuses. The problem is that while we have made progress with our social recognition of diversity and human rights, we have an inability to comprehend the bigger picture. We know overpopulation is disastrous from Biology 101, but we cannot bring ourselves to enforce responsible reproduction. We can force ourselves to be responsible drivers, but not reproduce responsibly. We allow world religious sects to continue to promote endless wars (massacres a more descriptive term), yet we still use inherited or adopted marriage religions instead of the Golden Rule as our ethical mantra; we still tolerate 2-5% of a population to own 90% of the wealth; we still have many people who detest diversity instead of embracing it as one of the key factors in the evolutionary process; we let feeling instead of science dictate whether we make every effort to prevent climate change, and we still have no clinics available to those who suffer from varied addictions and compulsive behaviors, even though we know addictive/compulsive behaviors can never lead to contentment, and the list goes on. Our species has enough brilliance, but way too little ability to see the big pictures of life.
So I will tell my friend to go ahead and be a farmer—sell your land, walk away from all that equipment dealing with soil, move to a major city, sit your ass at a nice computer desk and stare at the monitor all day in case you need to deal with a computer glitch, or man the phone in case someone in the middle of the city needs fresh produce for dinner that night. Besides, if all the farmers move into the city for their indoor farms, that leaves more natural landscape for someone like me who likes to wander in nature as a hobby. Leave an old couch out in the yard since for sure at my age now, I need to rest a lot during my wanderings. He no doubt is still filled with inner rage since as a child I ran over his play fencing and John Deere tractor with my Bell Telephone truck. I still have that toy truck sitting on a shelf in my living room. Nostalgia is a necessary component of being older. Gratitude and the good ole days help the terminational days to be contented. Personally, I don’t particularly want to see this indoor farm. If it has a sledge hammer I might put the sledge hammer to good use.
