WWII Bomb Shelter Becomes Hi-Tech Salad Farm

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."

Comments

What About Nutrition?

[EmagGeek]

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.

Re:What About Nutrition?

[VorpalRodent]

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

Re:What About Nutrition?

[Penguinisto]

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.)

Re:What About Nutrition?

[hey!]

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.

Re:Same old story...

[Richard_at_work]

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...

Re:Bullshit

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[VorpalRodent]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[selectspec]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[gstoddart]

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.