Interviewees:
Dr. Robert Jinkerson,Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Department of Botany and Plant Sciences
Mitch Hagney, Director of Food Sustainability at San Antonio Food Bank
Listen and subscribe to Living Planet wherever you get your podcasts: https://pod.link/livingplanet Got a question for us? Email livingplanet@dw.com. And, if you like the show, leave us a rating and review on whichever podcast platform you use – and tell a friend!
Transcript:
Dr. Robert Jinkerson enters his lab at the University of California, Riverside.
He wants to check up on an important experiment. One of his students is already inside. And she is pretty excited.
Robert: So she definitely had a big smile on her face. And, you know, this is the moment she'd been working for several months and something that we were waiting on to see if this idea could actually work.
The idea is to grow algae in the dark.
Now… algae typically need sunlight to survive. Like plants, they rely on photosynthesis to produce energy and grow.
But Robert and his team wanted to see if there was a way to skip this process - to do away with light altogether.
In Robert’s lab, off to the side there are a series of white incubators, a bit like fridges. It’s what you can hear humming in the background. Inside, there’s glass flasks of algae, stored in complete darkness.
Robert: We cover them in aluminum foil so that no light can make it through.
This gives us this really kind of dramatic moment of opening the flask, right? It's like opening a present. We take the flask out, still covered in aluminum foil so we can't see what has happened inside, but then we can peel back this aluminum foil. And then see: Did the experiment work or not?
And there… inside … it was green
Robert: Which was this algae growing in the dark… it's dark green, like the darkest leaf you've ever seen and that is showing that the algae grew.
So this was the moment where we knew that it worked… and that was really where the excitement was.
There’s a reason for this excitement.
For Robert and his team, this algae in the flask is an important breakthrough after years of research.
And it sets in motion his quest to revolutionize the way we grow food. To feed a growing population, and to make food production more resilient, in an era of climate change shocks.
I’m Neil King. And this is Living Planet.
Robert: This is the first time since algae or plants have evolved that we've been able to grow them completely independent of biological photosynthesis. So for millions of years they've done photosynthesis.
And so this is really the breakthrough… This really unlocked all the rest of the work that we did.
And so now it just becomes, what else can we grow?
Neil: The plants that you're also looking at I understand are tomatoes and lettuce, right? That would be a game changer if that really was scalable, right?
Robert: Yes, yes it would.
Growing plants inside, in the dark, without sunlight, would be a big deal. This is futuristic, science-fiction-type stuff.
Robert: Because no one has ever really grown plants this way. So we need to figure out: how does that actually work?
We’ll go a little bit more into the science later. But for now, you just need to know that the algae thriving in Robert’s lab had a compound called acetate added to them. The researchers produced this acetate with electrolysis - a chemical reaction powered by solar electricity.
And the algae used the acetate as its energy source, rather than sunlight.
Basically, it’s a kind of “artificial photosynthesis” that’s completely separated from the environment.
But plants haven’t evolved to grow without sunlight. Or to take up acetate. It can even be toxic for them.
So Robert is using genetic engineering to rewire plants’ metabolism – so they can “eat” acetate and use it as energy. The whole process takes time.
But what is really the point of all this? What’s the long game?
Well, Robert believes the way we produce food has to change fundamentally
ROBERT: So I think that outdoor conventional farming is amazing. It feeds the world, but there's also a lot of negative things associated with it, right?
Here are a few of those negative things: Almost half of the world’s habitable land is currently used for farming. It’s been a key driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss.
And food production and agriculture are responsible for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Yes, it’s true - most of that is caused by livestock farming. But some 30 percent comes from crops and land use for human food.
Robert: The most sustainable agriculture that we can do is no agriculture at all, right? So we're really worried about hurting the environment through pollution, through climate change, sea level rise, things like this, which are going to destroy the environment. But if you think about our agricultural systems over hundreds and thousands of years, we've already destroyed huge areas of the environment and converted forest and meadows and prairies into agricultural lands.
Agriculture is essential for feeding the world.
The rising global population means farmers will have to grow about 50 percent more food by 2050. But how are they going to do that without taking up more land? Without leaving an even bigger mark on the environment?
Not to mention that in many regions, their job is only becoming harder. Droughts, heat waves and storms are becoming more frequent and severe with climate change. And these threats can spell disaster for crop yields.
Robert says a solution could be what his team is working on: growing food completely independently from nature - indoors, and in the dark.
Robert: Most of the things in society are manufactured and produced in a way that is very controlled. Food and agriculture, one of the only things that we still leave up to nature, right? We're really relying on nature to provide us the right environmental conditions, water, temperature, hope that no insects come and eat our crops.
If we can decouple our food production from agricultural lands and move them indoors to vertical farms or controlled environments, then we could take that pressure off the natural outdoor lands of producing food and let them rewild and become native lands again.
And so I think that this is the strongest environmental case for our approach is that, you know, agriculture is inherently destructive. And so how do we move it to something that's more kind of manufactured or produced in a kind of a controlled way?
Robert and his research team estimate that if all food in the US were produced using their method - by growing plants efficiently, stacked indoors, in the dark - it would reduce the amount of land needed for agriculture by around 90%.
No need for pesticides or herbicides. And you could grow crops with a fraction of the water and carbon emissions that come with conventional farming in fields.
It could also make it possible to grow food in less hospitable places – like deserts. On a space ship. Or on Mars. By the way, that’s why Robert’s lab is also getting funding from NASA.
Robert: It's going to be more stable year round. We're not going to have to import food from across the planet because when it's winter you can't really grow things outdoors, yet we want to eat fresh food. And so that has to come from far-away places where the weather is still amenable to growing crops.
And so all these things are really going to help us think about making food in a new way if, I mean, we can solve many of these problems with that approach.
I don't think that we're going to have most of the land on earth dedicated to agriculture.
We’ll be right back
Trailer
Someone that spends his days farming outdoors, relying on land and sunlight, is Mitch Hagney.
He’s skeptical about the idea of moving food production entirely indoors. Instead, he has a different vision of how to grow food in an era of climate change - without increasing the toll on the environment.
Mitch: The effect of climate change in our region here is quite clear. It’s much hotter than it has been, and there’s less precipitation. We definitely struggled with certain crops that that we were more used to. We had a particularly challenging year for tomatoes…
Mitch manages about 75 acres of agricultural land in San Antonio, Texas.
Mitch: … But much of the work that we're doing is trying to select varieties and crops themselves that we think are better adapted to these intense summer conditions…
Mitch is the head of food sustainability at the nonprofit San Antonio Food Bank. Their farms operate organically, so they don’t spray herbicides or synthetic pesticides. And to keep the fields watered, they rely on rainwater collected on the roof and drip line irrigation from historic canals.
Mitch: At the moment… you would see peach trees that have mostly lost their leaves because of the winter, fig trees that - the same most of their leaves are off - and then you see cauliflower, broccoli, radishes, carrots, beets and a lot of cabbage.
Ok, so I bet you’ve heard of all those. But Mitch is also experimenting with lesser known crops that can withstand long periods of heat. Natives, like Texas persimmons and Mexican plums.
Mitch: We're growing more edible cactus, called nopales, in our region. The cactus paddles themselves are edible and then they produce a fruit called prickly pear, which are they are delicious and they're extremely resilient to heat. They were an important crop prior to Spanish colonization that indigenous peoples relied on.
And they’re planting amaranth, a grain that’s a bit like quinoa.
Mitch: It has a full protein complex, so it's very, very nutritious….And it's quite resilient to heat and drought. I'm really excited by this crop because it can be a baseline calorie provider like wheat or like corn, which are both struggling in the intense heat and drought in our region.
This year, Mitch says the food bank is expecting to harvest around 150,000 pounds of fresh organic produce that’ll go directly to the San Antonio community.
Mitch: Most of these people don't have ready access to be able to interact with agriculture. And there's this really large demand and desire to connect more with where food comes from, especially for parents who have kids who really want these kids to be able to understand that food doesn't just come from the store. And the studies that I've seen are really compelling - that children that have been involved in gardening or farming are much more likely to consume fresh produce and as a result have lower rates of chronic disease.
Farming wasn’t the most obvious career path for Mitch. He didn’t grow up on the land. In fact, he’s originally from a suburban area in New Hampshire – on the other side of the country.
Mitch: I grew up probably with a skill set that was more in tune to white collar indoor work…
He came to San Antonio to go to college, where he was recruited to be on the debate team. But while debating on big environmental topics, he realized that rather than making arguments about policy, he wanted to get his hands dirty.
Mitch: …knowing that there were real serious environmental challenges that agriculture was facing, that methods of farming that are widespread contribute to environmental problems, but also the environmental problems like climate change, deforestation, soil erosion that are emerging, make it harder to farm -- to me, it just became really important to devote my life and time to try to improve those issues.
Mitch spent his college summers farming in different places - from Massachusetts and Kentucky, to Arizona and Costa Rica. And now in San Antonio, he believes that despite the immense challenges posed by climate change, outdoor farming still has an important role in providing food. Especially if it’s organic, … the crops are suited to the regional climate, … and if the produce goes to people who live nearby.
But Mitch doesn’t only farm outside. He’s also explored other methods. In what little spare time he has, he also runs a vertical farm inside a shipping container in downtown San Antonio.
He set it up more than a decade ago, growing organic kale for local restaurants and farmers markets.
Inside Mitch’s 40-foot shipping container…
Mitch: …there’s walls of plants as you come in
…columns stacked with plants all the way to the ceiling.
Mitch: You can definitely smell organic matter. It's a kind of nice scent, it’s almost just like a forest floor.
It’s a hydroponic system. So the plants aren’t grown in soil, but their roots are fed directly with a nutrient-rich water solution.
Mitch: And the light that you can see is this kind of beautiful pink light. So it's red and blue LEDs. It's kind of a surreal environment… it feels almost like you're inside a clock with a lot of water.
…You hear pumps going off on a timer... And so you'll hear it the water rushing over the top of the container and then dripping down those columns, getting caught in the recirculation tanks, and going back into the main nutrient tank.
Mitch says in this 40-foot space, he can grow the same amount of crops as in a one-acre field.
Mitch: It's a beautiful thing to put work into farming and have crops come out of it. It's really fulfilling. It's something that all of our ancestors have appreciated. Doing it in a metal cube is a little bit different, but probably emotionally fairly similar. Just because of the fruits of your labor.
It feels a little bit like, ‘OK, this might be what it what it's going to be like if, if people are to be able to cultivate food on another planet,’ because it's not a natural environment. It's very much, you know, a manufactured, intentional engineered process.
It’s a controlled indoor environment, so they don’t have to spray pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. And he says they use about 2% of the water needed for outdoor farming, because all the water gets recirculated through the system.
Mitch: whereas outdoor cultivation, especially in our region, includes lots and lots of water loss.
These are some of the arguments that make vertical farming such a compelling response to the environmental woes of conventional agriculture.
But there are some pretty big downsides too.
Today, growing plants indoors in warehouses or shipping containers means replacing natural sunlight with LED lighting. And then there’s air-conditioning to control the humidity and temperature.
These energy-guzzling systems put a significant dent in the eco-friendly promise of vertical farms. Even cancelling out any environmental benefit.
A 2022 study from the Netherlands did a life cycle assessment comparing the carbon footprint of lettuce grown at a vertical farm to that grown in an open field. It found the footprint was more than 15 times higher at the vertical farm. Electricity accounted for 85% of that. Of course, the result gets better if renewable energy is used instead of fossil fuels. But lettuce grown in a field still had the smaller footprint. And in many regions, relying solely on renewables isn’t possible yet anyway.
Mitch points out that setting up vertical farming facilities in the first place is also an expensive operation. And high energy costs have made it difficult for ag-tech startups in Europe and the US to stay afloat.
Mitch: We've seen bankruptcies and closings of scaled-up vertical farming operations that seem to bite off more than they could chew... This is not to say that in the future these will not be viable operations.
So some of the largest ones in the United States -- Aero Farms or App Harvest -- either declared bankruptcy or had really, really challenging economic times where they had to do a lot of layoffs. Similarly in Europe, Infarm and Agricool, some of the larger hydroponic farms really, really struggled economically because they had such a large amount of capital expense.
Growing plants with energy-intensive artificial light rather than free sunlight comes with a hefty price tag and carbon footprint.
But what if there was no need for light – artificial or natural? If plants could mostly grow in the dark?
Robert: This is where our system would outshine the classical vertical farm or greenhouse…
…Which brings us back to Robert Jinkerson at the University of California.
Robert: If we can really start to grow these with less electricity because we need less light, and supplement that with acetate, it may be able to change the economics. So we have all the savings of water, less pesticides, less fertilizers that you would in a vertical farm or a greenhouse. But now also we can save on the energy cost.
A quick recap: Robert’s team is trying to engineer plants to grow independently from nature. Instead of using sunlight, they want these plants to use acetate – a compound they’re creating with a chemical reaction powered by solar electricity.
Robert says this type of artificial photosynthesis is at least four times more efficient than “traditional” photosynthesis. That’s because:
Robert: plants in a field can only take about 1% of all the light that they're hitting and convert it into biomass… This is a really energy inefficient process.
The researchers are using gene-editing tools such as CRISPR to engineer plants to “eat” acetate. Robert acknowledges that some consumers may have reservations about the idea of their produce being genetically modified. But he says their work only involves fairly small tweaks.
Robert: In the old days it was maybe kind of smashing things with like a hammer. But now we can really take a scalpel and using CRISPR gene editing or other kind of more advanced approaches and make very fine scale changes or alterations that should have the minimum impact on the plant and also kind of have the least chances of having off target or unknown effects… what we're doing is really small compared to breeding plants. When you breed plants, you're shuffling half of the genome every time you cross and breed together 2 plants versus what we're doing is just changing a very, very small part of the genome.
Robert says engineering plants to be able to deal with acetate isn’t such stretch. Because plants already do this when they start life as a seed, buried beneath the soil, in the dark.
Robert: So they already have this metabolism actually when they're just a seedling, but it's turned off in adult plants. So what we're really doing is just turning on the pathways that already exist in the plants.
He says it’s a bit like humans and lactose – the sugar found in milk. We typically drink milk without any issues as infants, but can develop an intolerance as adults.
Robert: Some humans have got a mutation that allows them to continue to consume lactose even as an adult. And so what we're trying to do is actually do the same thing for plants.
It’s a gradual process. None of this is going to be possible in the next few years. But their work has attracted some interest in the industry.
Their genetically modified plants are currently being grown at production scale by the indoor farming platform “Square Roots.” The project’s being funded by the Gates Foundation.
Robert: Their type of vertical farm is like a shipping container that has racks in there that allows the plants to grow.
They're putting acetate in there and seeing how it works. And yeah, so this is something that's really of interest to those vertical farming companies like Square Roots and others, because electricity is one of their largest operating costs. And so if we could, you know, reduce their electricity costs by supplementing some acetate, that may make a lot of economic sense for them.
But even if the energy challenges of farming indoors are solved, it probably won’t be able to feed the world. At least not anytime soon.
Most of the produce grown in vertical farms today are leafy greens and small fruits like strawberries. It’s less suited for growing major crops like wheat, rice and corn that provide most of the world’s calories. For the time being, those ones will still need to be grown outdoors.
But that’s not to say indoor agriculture won’t play a bigger role in the future. Robert is convinced that it will.
At the moment, his team is focusing on lettuce and tomatoes. To try to get them to grow in lower levels of light, and ultimately darkness.
But eventually, down the line, they want to work with crops like cassava, sweet potatoes and grains.
But is it really going to be possible to grow all food crops without light?
Robert: That's an interesting question. So there's some aspects of plant biology that requires light. So some things about their development or some nutrients that are created that require light. So in those kinds of situations, like those are going to be ones that are going to be more difficult to grow completely in the dark. But you can imagine where, instead of having 100% light, now maybe we're only doing 20% of the light that's needed…and then we can supplement the rest with acetate or some other fixed carbon source.
And so I think that some are going to be easy to grow completely in the dark, and some are going to need some light, and then some are going to be even harder to wean off of light. And it's probably going to be different for each crop.
Neil Q: Robert, are there any potential unintended consequences or side effects of this work that you're worried about or that you've, you know, got on your radar?
Robert: Well. There's a few things, if we're making a food type product, we need to make sure that it's nutritious and that it's safe... I think that for our system, because it's not exposed to the environment, in some ways it's easier to exclude kind of harmful pathogens because it's just not going to be interacting with things that are happening out there in a giant farm field where you can't control what's happening, like wild animals or other things that are coming into the field.
The other thing that we're thinking about is nutrition, right? If we're growing things in the dark, how does that affect the nutrition? So far we haven't seen many effects, but there are some nutrients that may require light to be produced and so how does that manifest in our system? Like do we need to grow the plants mainly in the dark but then right before we are harvesting maybe put them in the light to allow some nutrients to be formed?
We want the food to be nutritious and obviously also tasty, right, if it doesn't taste well, then people don't want to eat it.
So what does Mitch Hagney, our urban farmer in San Antonio, think of all this?
Mitch: I would love to learn more.
As someone who owns a vertical farm, he’s intrigued by the idea of growing produce in the dark.
Mitch: So potentially it could substantially decrease operations cost while you are scaling up indoor production in a way that would be resilient to outdoor effects from climate change. Yeah, it's a great idea.
But even if it’s a great idea, he believes it has limitations.
In the coming decades, he thinks most leafy greens will be grown profitably at scale in indoor controlled environments, like vertical farms. Probably also nightshades like tomatoes and eggplants, or vines like berries and melons.
But he still thinks the majority of food will be grown in fields outdoors, in soil.
Mitch: I used to believe that controlled environment agriculture was where all of the food should come from - that vertical farms are…If you just layered enough infrastructure on top of itself, then there would be great opportunities to grow everything that you would need in cities and kind of leave rural areas to be rewilded. I don't believe that anymore based off of working with enough outdoor farms and also just kind of seeing the economics of my own hydroponic farm. I think technology for agriculture is not going to be just contained within buildings.
Mitch says advances in technology can help tackle many of the problems outdoor farmers are grappling with, while boosting yields. Like, deploying robotics and AI that can remove weeds through machine learning. That could mean less herbicides. Or drone technology that uses remote sensing to apply fertilizers or identify stressed crops.
Mitch: Instead of just thinking vertical farms are going to be the solution for agriculture as a whole, I think that these technologies deployed at scale in outdoor environments are probably going to be even more transformative for the food system as a whole…but they're certainly not deployable yet.
Neil Q - What about the space issue, Mitch? We have to feed more mouths, but we don't really want to cut back forests or, you know, encroach more on nature with our agriculture now, do we?
Mitch: I don't know that there's a clear answer to that question. Partially it's we need to consume less. I mean, I would say the majority of deforestation and increased land encroachment is not for crop production, it's for livestock production, so if you had a magic wand, the easier solution would be: We should have more plant based diets, even if it's not entirely plant based diets.
…If I had to guess the best solution to increase demand with limited cultivation space, I would say it's probably mechanization and robotics and machine learning…
Conventional practices that are really damaging to the environment are not so complicated, right? We spray too many herbicides, we spray too many pesticides, we spray too much fertilizer which runs off and then we till too much for, for crops. I mean, there's some other problems, but those are kind of the core of them - organic production could help you get around each of those. If you were observing your pests more closely, you could spray fewer pesticides. If you were able to weed mechanically, not with human labor, but with robotics, whether that's drones or tractor implements, then you wouldn't have to spray those herbicides because you could use more organic methods.
The way we produce food will have to shift if we’re going to be able feed the 10 billion people who’ll be on earth in 2050 without taking up more land or pushing up emissions.
It’s likely new technologies rolled out on conventional farms, like robotics and drones, will help with that. But so could radical ideas, like growing food in the dark, completely separate from nature.
As far as Robert is concerned, however we farm our food in a hundred years’ time, it’s probably going to look vastly different to the way it does today.
Robert: I think we'll (have) discovered ways to produce food in controlled environments like greenhouses, vertical farms, or maybe new types of systems we haven't imagined yet - In the dark, maybe with some light, but essentially grown decoupled from the environment. And I think that you'll still probably be able to buy traditional food grown outdoors in nature. But I think that this will probably be a small fraction of the food that we consume.
I think most of it will be grown in a way that is more kind of controlled and… that's going to have the least environmental impact. It's going to be more sustainable, more stable and ultimately I think lower cost.
This episode of Living Planet was produced by Natalie Muller and edited by me Neil King. Our sound engineers were Jürgen Kuhn and Natalie Wittmann. Living Planet is available on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you think of this episode? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so send us a message. Our email address is livingplanet@dw.com. Of course, you can also leave a rating or review on the podcast platform of your choice. Living Planet is produced by DW in Bonn, Germany.