Futuristic farming tech to solve food crisis

Added on 04 April 2023

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Futuristic farming tech to solve food crisis

It’s a farm, but not as you know it. There is no soil. There are no tractors, silos or rolling fields. Instead, on a former brownfield site near Sandwich, Kent, there is a warehouse, signposted GrowUp. Step inside, and you’ll find 12 layers of carefully temperature-controlled crops bathed in bright pink LED light – the equivalent of 1,000 acres of farmland, stacked floor to ceiling.

And Kate Hofman, GrowUp’s co-founder, isn’t actually a farmer. She’s a former management consultant who left a “comfortable, corporate” job at IBM in 2013 to invest her time in a burgeoning industry: vertical farming.

The pressure to feed a growing population has never been greater. The invasion of Ukraine and cost of living crisis has put British food security under the spotlight. At this point in the year, about 90 per cent of the salad usually available in supermarkets is imported. And, as anyone who has done a food shop recently will know, there hasn’t been much in the way of leaves available at all.

But a new generation of food producers is rising to the challenge. Now, a decade since it was founded, GrowUp has become the first vertical farm in the UK to supply branded salad to supermarkets (you can buy their “Fresh Leaf Co” baby leaves in Iceland).

Instead of ploughed fields, the crops are stacked in neat layers and grown inside, in controlled conditions. This reduces drastically the amount of growing space required and removes the confines of a growing season – crops can be harvested all year round. A sophisticated irrigation system delivers a nutrient mix to the plant’s roots. Finely tuned LED lights act as the sun.