The Franken veg factory: UK scientists will soon be artificially growing millions of lettuces that'll never see the sun, rain or soil
By Joanna Blythman
Comments (1) Add to My Stories
Close your eyes and think of the perfect summer tomato and you probably imagine a lusciously plump fruit, grown on the vine, its skin ripening an ever deeper red under the hot summer sun. It could be growing on an allotment, or in a greenhouse or market garden - it doesn't really matter.
What matters is that it's been grown slowly at its own natural pace, with real care and horticultural skill and that when you bite into it, it will have the perfect balance between acid and sweet and be bursting with flavour.
Ask our children to do the same thing in 20 years time and the outcome may be nothing like as alluring. For the next generation, the perfect tomato won't be grown on carefully tended soils or in pots of lovingly blended compost.
Test tube baby lettuce: This factory in Tokyo can churn out vegetables 24 hours a day, seven days a week
Instead, tomatoes - and a host of other salad crops, such as cucumbers, peppers and lettuce - will be grown on racks, in vast climate-controlled greenhouses; their roots supported, not by soil, but by an artificial soil substitute, or substrate, and bathed in a chemical cocktail designed to get the product to the supermarket shelves in the shortest possible time.
These plants will never see the summer sun; their roots will never absorb the minerals and complex micro-nutrients washed down by the latest passing shower.
The end result will still be red, plump and shiny, but bite into it and I can guarantee that it will taste of precious little.
The Germans call these factory-farmed tomatoes Wasserbomben, or water-bombs. Don't laugh. If the trend to ever larger glasshouses continues, they may be the only sort future generations can buy.
Of course, there's nothing new about tasteless supermarket tomatoes, you might say, but that's what makes this week's headlines so alarming.
Ripe for eating: Britain's are just starting to enjoy seasonal produce such as tasty tomatoes
Because just as British consumers have finally been rediscovering the delights of fresh seasonal produce with real taste, along come newspaper reports that are the stuff of horticultural nightmare - a Japanese lettuce factory that can churn out immaculate looking lettuces 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
I'm not sure which was the more depressing - the picture of racks of lettuces stacked eight high, illuminated by artificial sunlight, grown at a constant temperature and tended by a technician wearing a full body-suit and face-mask, or the report. Because, apparently, this is the future of vegetable, and some fruit, farming.
According to the article, lettuces, and other green-leaved vegetables, can be cropped up to 20 times a year and are cultivated in such sterile conditions that they require neither pesticides nor, indeed, washing before use. Some of these so-called plant factories are producing up to three million vegetables a year.
In Japan, the produce from these plant factories sells for premium prices, but I'm both depressed and alarmed by their very existence. I don't want my fruit and veg to be grown in perfectly sterile, airtight conditions; I want it to grow in a way that reflects the environment around it - the soil type, the local weather, the passing of the seasons.
If I buy a Little Gem lettuce in Dorset in June, I enjoy that it tastes subtly different from the Little Gem lettuce I buy in Yorkshire in July.
Or indeed, the one I buy in Lincolnshire in August. The same goes for the fresh English asparagus I'm so enjoying at the moment. Right now, it's close to perfection, but in a few short weeks its season will have passed.
For me, and in the past few years many others, that's exactly how it should be: we enjoy a locally grown crop, while it's at its very best, and then move on, safe in the knowledge that it will be ripe and back in season at the same time next year.
I don't want to be able to buy every horticultural crop on the planet, 365 days a year.
I find the ever-changing seasonality and inherent variation of fresh produce exciting and stimulating; very much part of the pleasure of being alive and part of a natural world. But that counts for nothing in the eyes of the giant, multinational corporations that now seek to control the future of vegetable farming through uniform technoveg.
They don't want to work with Mother Nature; they want to make her redundant. They want to replace the sun with artificial heat and light and abandon soil for the sort of materials you might use to insulate your loft.
Be under no illusion; the gargantuan plant factories aren't just found in Japan. Practically all commercial tomato crops in Britain are already produced under glass, but the scale of this production is about to be transformed dramatically.
For over a year, a vast glasshouse complex has been under construction over 220 acres of land that used to be a cauliflower farm in Kent.
Glasshouse food: Thanet Earth in Kent uses hydroponic cultivation techniques to grow vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers
Known as Thanet Earth and already in production, the seven huge greenhouses, when fully completed, will cover an area the size of 80 football pitches and, using similar high-tech production to those in Japan, and will increase the homegrown production of UK salad crops by an estimated 15 per cent.
Peppers and cucumbers will be grown from February to October, while tomatoes will be produced 52 weeks a year. That's not so much extending the growing season of a crop, as traditional glasshouse growers have done for many years; it's removing seasonality altogether.
Just like the plant factories in Japan, ultra-modern glasshouse complexes like Thanet Earth will use so-called hydroponic cultivation techniques. This means the tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers being grown there will never touch the Kent soil at all.
Instead, they will be grown in trays filled with an artificial soil substrate - fibreglass-like Rockwool, granules of volcanic glass or clay pebbles are often used - and with the roots of the plant bathed in a carefully controlled nutrient solution that not only waters the plant but fertilises it, too.
But take away soil and you discard centuries of knowledge that go to the very heart of what horticulture and agriculture are all about.
Carefully controlled: A Thanet Earth worker tends to plants, which have their roots bathed in a nutrient solution
Good growers take the greatest possible care of their soil - they till it, improve it and either rotate the crops on it or rest it altogether for a season. Expert soil husbandry like this has always produced not just the best tasting crops, but the most nutritious, too.
Abandon this time-honoured skill and you're handing over food production to white-coated scientists and sharp-suited economists, men and women dedicated to just one thing - getting the maximum amount of a standardised crop on to the supermarket shelves in the shortest possible time.
We can only begin to guess what the associated costs might be. On the human health front, we are walking into this with our eyes shut. Almost no research has been carried out comparing levels of vitamins and vital micro-nutrients in plants grown in soil versus those grown by high-tech methods.
There are environmental dangers, too. The substrate which hydroponic plants grow on is normally disposed of with each crop rotation, which, given both the speed and scale of these plant factories, is likely to produce a huge mountain of almost-impossible-to-recycle waste.
Astonishing: Thanet Earth is the size of 80 football pitches, capable of growing millions of tomatoes without soil
Then there is the massive drain that these vast plant factories place on local water resources. Of course, they can collect water from their hanger- sized roofs and use local bore holes, but this is all water that, had the greenhouses not been there, would have percolated into the soil and maintained the local water table.
Nor, once it's been mixed with the mineral fertilisers, can excess water be returned to local water courses. It has to be recycled within the glasshouse itself. Not surprisingly, each of the seven glasshouses at Thanet Earth has its own reservoir, but you do wonder what might happen if a long hot summer drought produced water shortages?
Then there's the huge demand for power that these plant factories require - both for heating and supplementary artificial light.
At Thanet Earth, they've built so much generating capacity that they can actually export power to the National Grid during slack times, but that power is still being derived from a carbon fuel - gas, in this case - so we can be pretty certain of one thing. The giant plant factories of the near future will leave a correspondingly huge carbon footprint.
One of the selling pitches for these super-sized glass-houses is that they can reduce pesticide use.
Indeed, in Japan, much is made of the carefully-monitored sterile environment which means that no pesticides need to be used.
But all that is doing is echoing what organic farmers in this country have been doing for years, using traditional techniques and with far less impact on the environment.
And nor are these supposedly super-hygienic, germ-free environments ever quite as germ free as they are made out to be.
If their bio-security systems are breached, entire crops could be wiped out by a single disease or pest or tainted by a pathogenic bacterium.
In the U.S., crops of hydroponically grown alfalfa sprouts, across several states and from different growers, have already had to be withdrawn this year because they were found to be contaminated with salmonella.
A foretaste of such crops' worrying food poisoning potential, perhaps?
I know what kind of fruit and vegetable future I want to savour. That's a natural diversity of local, seasonal produce, preferably grown organically, and at the moment I have no trouble getting hold of it.
But will my children and my children's children be so fortunate? The super-sized plant factories of the future are already here and unless we challenge them they will grow bigger and more numerous each year.
In 20 years' time, I hope I'm still washing the soil off my summer lettuce but, with hydroponics now threatening to arrive on an industrial scale, it could be a close run thing.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1190978/The-Franken-veg-factory-UK-scientists-soon-artificially-growing-millions-lettuces-thatll-sun-rain-soil.html#ixzz0jr4SwOtF
Posts
