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WWII Bomb Shelter Becomes Hi-Tech Salad Farm

Posted by Soulskill on from the swords-to-plowshares dept.

asjk points out a story of how a World War II bomb shelter, situated 33 meters beneath the streets of London, has been turned into a high-tech hydroponic farm. "The growing system uses energy-efficient LEDs instead of sun, no pesticides, needs 70 percent less water than growing plants in open fields, and less energy than a greenhouse." The computer-controlled environment is designed to shorten the growth cycle of plants like coriander and radishes. They're currently only using about a quarter of the gear necessary to fill up the shelter, but they can produce 5,000-20,000 kilograms of food per year, depending on what they raise. Co-founder Steven Dring said, "We've got to utilize the spaces we've got. There's a finite amount of land and we can grow salads and herbs — which start losing flavor and quality as soon as you cut them — in warehouses and rooftops in cities near the people who will eat them. Use the rural land for things like carrots, potatoes and livestock."

22 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. What About Nutrition? by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The article (or shall I say shameless advertisement) goes out of its way to talk about how much they shower the growing plants with "nutrients," but says not one iota about the nutritional content of the final product and how it compares to organic or conventionally grown produce.

    1. Re:What About Nutrition? by VorpalRodent · · Score: 4, Funny

      At a minimum, they're probably providing the plants with electrolytes...it's what plants crave.

      --
      Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
    2. Re:What About Nutrition? by MyAlternateID · · Score: 2

      At a minimum, they're probably providing the plants with electrolytes...it's what plants crave.

      It's better than water. Everybody knows that's for the toilet.

    3. Re:What About Nutrition? by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Interesting

      More importantly when will the marijuana growers start using this tech? Washington and Colorado need DIRT CHEAP weed, because it's grown without dirt!

      Funny thing (from an Oregonian's point-of-view): marijuana growing is actually an industry where experimentation with hydroponics and efficiency is usually bleeding-edge. Back when it was still illegal, you wanted the efficiency so that your power consumption was low enough to not alert anyone to those high-intensity full-spectrum lights in your basement/apartment/whatever for 18-19 hours a day. The clandestine nature of the task also demanded that you be as efficient with as much of the hydroponics as possible.

      Now that the stuff is legal, a lot of folks have taken this experience and knowledge to ramp things up to an industrial level, where you still have to be efficient. For instance, a new grow farm was looking to establish themselves in the countryside near my in-laws on the Washington peninsula, and the neighbors' biggest worry was that it would lower the water table too much (believe it or not, most of the Pacific Northwest does have a dry season for a couple of months during the summer, so well water is considered a rather precious commodity, even out here). Anyway, the farm had to demonstrate the efficiencies they had in place in order to persuade said neighbors that yes, the new greenhouses won't dry up their wells... and they even showed the improvements they were working on to make things even more efficient (note that it also saves them money overall as well.)

      --
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    4. Re:What About Nutrition? by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Except this very local, which is the whole point.

      Except that's not the whole point of organic agriculture. Organic farming has a number of points, some of which are valid, some of which are not.

      Now the locality issue has to do with the sustainability arguments of organic advocates, which I consider generally more plausible than their ideas about nutrition or toxins. Centralizing agriculture far away and transporting pesticides and fertilizers to that site and then transporting the produce, sometimes half-way across the globe, represents a huge waste of energy, with the pollution that goes along with that.

      That said, growing crops indoors with electricity derived from, say, a coal-fired power plant is hardly "sustainable agriculture". If you're growing those crops with solar or wind power from your roof that's possibly a different story.

      In any case I'd regard a food system that was more local than what we have in the US to be a good thing. However I don't think that an *entirely* local food system would be a good idea. Yes, local agriculture has sustained human populations for thousands of years, but for thousands of years local famines were common too. So why I purchase locally grown produce, including excellent pasture-raised pork and beef, when it is in season, I don't feel guilty about purchasing Californian or Chilean produce when local produce is out of season, although I'd welcome some kind of "green seal" of sustainability, which would not necessarily be as stringent as, or necessarily a subset of the requirements for the "organic" label.

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    5. Re:What About Nutrition? by Adriax · · Score: 2

      Tomato growers. Every hydroponics user I've talked to in the last 20 years have all been tomato growers.
      Really passionate about it too. A bit paranoid and secretive too. Must be a really competitive field, tomato growing.

      --
      I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
    6. Re:What About Nutrition? by Antibozo · · Score: 2

      The definition for "organic" that I was always familiar with was that something was simply grown without pesticides and "artificial" fertilizer, but I guess if there's no soil, one is forced add minerals (and vitamins? Do plants need vitamins??) somehow.

      That is a common misconception. In fact, organic agriculture uses pesticides; it just has a more limited set of pesticides to work with because "synthetic" pesticides are excluded, except when they aren't because they're too practical, cf copper sulfate.

  2. Same old story... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Use the rural land for things like carrots, potatoes and livestock.

    Tell that to the real estate developer who wants to build $1B in homes on a flood plain, gives contributions to the politicians to make it happen, and won't be around when rising sea levels wipes out the homes that homeowners will expect taxpayers to pay for.

    1. Re:Same old story... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Here in the UK, developers are on the hook for flood risk minimisation etc for years afterward, and have to pay a bond which they only get back after so many years without any flood damage occurring in the development - the bond is set at a level where if they spend the money on the flood defences the developer will profit if they get the bond back.

      Plus, "flood plains" are often a misnomer - my house is in a flood plain, except the river is 200 metres away and 8 metres below ground level, and if it flooded then the entire city would be in a heap of trouble. It hasn't flooded in 150 years, and the defences are such that flooding will be done upriver outside the city, but still my house is classed as being on a flood plain...

    2. Re:Same old story... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

      The flood plain that my apartment complex sits on drains into the San Francisco Bay Area. If sea level rises, the water level in the bay rises and floods the flood plains. See map in the link below.

      The map clearly shows that a sea level rise of only a few meters would inundate hundreds of square miles of land. San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay would enlarge, covering industry, residences and infrastructure. More surprising would be the enormous area of flooding that would occur in the Sacramento Valley. Hundreds of square miles would be underwater there and the intrusion of this salt water would have major environmental impacts.

      http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/san-francisco.shtml

  3. Bullshit by TheCarp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ok, main place I started being skeptical was the LEDs vs the SUN. Now, MAYBE its possible that the LEDs are efficient enough that the electricity cost of running them is offset by the decreased water, other energy needs, but....

    The sun is a lot of energy and plants convert light to sugar.... they need light, so converting it to something else and back has to be less efficient than letting it shine on them directly. But....

    "no pesticides"....no way. None to start maybe but, plant pests will get in and they will require pesticides to remove. Might get your first crop or two pest free, but without pesticides or a complete sanitary cleanout between crops, its not going to last.

    --
    "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
    1. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      they need light, so converting it to something else and back has to be less efficient than letting it shine on them directly.

      Plants only absorb light in the red visible spectrum and parts of the ultraviolet spectrum. In principle, we could make farming more effective by absorbing infrared and green light, converting to electricity, and using the electricity to power red light for the plants to absorb.

    2. Re:Bullshit by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Informative

      So, I had to type "led gree" into Google to have it auto-suggest "led greenhouse lights", and get hits from Amazon, Home Depot, Phillips, and a bunch of other sites.

      Maybe your current knowledge of LEDs for growing plants is outdated and thy actually have the technology for this? Because the sheer number of hits I got tells me it's real technology.

      I have no idea about the pesticides, but people did farming for thousands of years without pesticides ... so I'm not convinced it's not possible to grow plants without pesticides.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Bullshit by VorpalRodent · · Score: 4, Funny

      Insects aren't created from the ether.

      Spontaneous generation says otherwise, though I appreciate that someone at least finally acknowledges the existence of the ether.

      --
      Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
    4. Re:Bullshit by selectspec · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, the no pesticides claim is completely true. First, by having the crops indoors, you seriously cut down on attracting open air pests. Second, the crops are seeded in a cloth mat. After harvest, the mats are removed, cleaned, and if too worn destroyed. The cleaning process happens every 20 days, which is much shorter than the insects life cycle. So, the insects never get a chance to settle in. The cleaning process is like a laundry, removes any eggs.

      --

      Someone you trust is one of us.

    5. Re:Bullshit by swillden · · Score: 2

      I don't think the concern was that we don't have LED technology which can produce good grow lights. The question is whether this can actually be more efficient than letting the sun do the job.

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    6. Re:Bullshit by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Which nobody is claiming ... what they're saying is, given a finite amount of land, and the fact that nutrients are lost once you harvest and begin shipping ... you can also grow some food close to where the people who will eat it actually live. And you can do it year round.

      Efficiency, in this case, includes year round production, shipping, and the ability to have certain kinds of fresh produce without having to ship it around the world.

      Unless you have a way to ship lettuce from Peru to London which is solar powered, you're kind of missing one of the points. Local production has its own efficiencies and benefits.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. Underground scene by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 3, Funny

    a World War II bomb shelter, situated 33 meters beneath the streets of London, has been turned into a high-tech hydroponic farm.

    "We had very little work to do to get it going, as it has been being used as a high tech hydroponic farm, wink, for decades."

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    1. Re:Underground scene by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 2

      "We had very little work to do to get it going, as it has been being used as a high tech hydroponic farm, wink, for decades."

      Actually, that was my first thought when I read the summary. Nobody ever got rich farming lettuce. But herb/weed . . . whatever you want to call it . . . that is a cash crop.

      I'm thinking that they have a couple of secret backrooms in that facility. What an excellent cover story! Urban herb farms get busted, because their electricity usage is way above that of the neighbors. If you already declare that you are farming "lettuce" . . . you claim that is why your electricity bill is so high.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    2. Re:Underground scene by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Ah, but if you're using fancy LEDs instead of big enormous power hungry lamps ... how many LEDs can you run for the cost of a couple of those huge lights?

      If you don't have several kilowats of lighting to deal with, putting out all that excess heat, just how noticeable is it likely to be?

      A few tens of watts versus a few thousand changes a lot ... that's a light bulb or an air conditioning unit instead of the power meter spinning enough to be noticeable.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  5. Repurposed Cold War Era Bomb Shelter in Seattle by C0L0PH0N · · Score: 2

    There is a bomb shelter built under I-5 near Greenlake in Seattle, that was built in the early 60's (ok, fallout shelter). It was touted, I believe, during the 1962 world's fair in Seattle. Here's a King5 video about it: http://www.king5.com/story/new.... It is a circular room with bathrooms under the freeway, with a small entrance. Later, it was used to issue driver's licenses. I got one there myself in the early 70's. Now, it is a grown-over place used as a City of Seattle municipal records storage center for a few years, and then abandoned. A massive cement structure like a bomb shelter doesn't go away, nice they can be reused in peacetime. What could be more peaceful than marijuana :).

  6. What a waste of a great weed growning location by NotDrWho · · Score: 2

    A hidden bunker 100 feet underground with great plumbing and electricity, and you're growing FUCKING LETTUCE??

    --
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