ISLANDS OF AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION: INDOOR FARMING IN ASIA
What’s the real state of the indoor farming industry, beyond all the marketing and hype? How are food systems and societies actually adapting to these new forms of production and distribution? These were a couple of the large questions on Jacob Eisenberg’s mind when he decided to leave his job and travel to Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan last fall to seek the answers for himself.
Since that point of inception until his return flight home, Jacob journeyed through the three island nations visiting urban farms, meeting with farm operators and association representatives, and observing the failures and successes that define indoor farming at this present moment.
To share his findings with the world, Jacob created Agri-Future as a space to post firsthand accounts of his adventures within the intersection of food, technology and sustainability. This article is the first part to an Islands of Agricultural Innovation series that will share Jacob’s trip and bring his detailed accounts of Asia’s indoor farming landscape to Agritecture readers far and wide.
Jacob Eisenberg visiting the Veggie Life Plant Factory headquarters in Singapore during his journey throughout Asia. This article is Part 1 of a series that will bring Jacob's adventures to Agritecture readers across the globe. (Credit: Jacob Eisenberg)
“My curiosity first began looking at urban environments,” Jacob explained, adding that he has for many years had “a fascination with the development of cities, particularly of ancient cities and their relation to the natural environment.” For a while, he wanted to become an archeologist or anthropologist.
Similar to countless others, Jacob’s particular interest in urban farming took root while reading The Vertical Farm by Columbia professor Dickson Despommier, in 2011. “Something just clicked with that book,” Jacob reflected. “Even though it was such a novel idea at the time, it helped to address in my mind so many issues that I was trying to grapple with: sustainability, overpopulation, climate change, pollution.”
“There's so much optimism in that book,” Jacob added, “and being able to suspend reality and just imagine future possibilities made me very passionate and excited.”
This experience reading The Vertical Farm happened to coincide with the start of the Arab Spring, when food prices were having enormous geopolitical implications. Jacob was actually in high-school and studying abroad in China at the time, where he says the situation became particularly tense. “The whole experience really solidified my fascination with food’s relationship to the urban environment and to societal challenges and opportunities,” said Jacob.
During college, Jacob was able to pursue his new passion further with a study-abroad program that took him to São Paulo, Cape Town, and Hanoi. “We wanted to see what the state of urban agriculture was in these rapidly developing cities,” Jacob said. While traveling, he interviewed over 60 small-scale urban farmers, each grappling with different challenges and opportunities around growing food in some of the world’s fastest growing cities.
This experience clearly stuck with Jacob, because it wasn’t long after college that he decided to leave his job and go off on a similar adventure of his own. Jacob knew by now that he wanted to be somewhere within the ag-tech space, he didn’t know exactly where, but he was irreversibly attracted to the opportunities.
“Indoor agriculture is by no means the silver bullet,” Jacob writes on his site, “but it does offer a revolutionary opportunity to re-envision our food system — combining six thousand years of agricultural knowledge with precision technologies and food sourcing strategies of today and tomorrow.”
Mahoroba Suikoen Plant Factory in Nara, Japan. In Vertical Farms, or Plant Factories as they're known in Japan, plants are grown hydroponically in stacked layers. Different color LED lights are used to emphasize different attributes during plant growth. (Credit: Jacob Eisenberg)
For some, the prospect of leaving one’s job and venturing off to see the world would have been too daunting of a thought to ever actually pursue. But for Jacob, it was merely practical.
“My thought process at the time was: If I'm really passionate about learning more about this industry, then how can I see the actual state of indoor agriculture?” he said. “I saw this as such a tremendous and unique educational opportunity—well worth the time and preparation to use my savings from my job. I think that the best learning happens on the ground with the people actually doing the work. For me it was my jump into the world of indoor agriculture, instead of working my way up through a technical or business program.”
For this new journey into the world of ag-tech, Jacob selected three countries where he would explore the indoor agriculture industry and visit with farmers and technology providers: Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan.
You may notice some immediate similarities between these places, and for Jacob at least two of them were intentional.
This first obvious similarity is that each country is in Asia, but this wasn’t done simply to make the travel logistics easier. “I always had my eye on what was going on in Asia,” Jacob explains, “and I do speak Mandarin.” He’d also been paying close attention to the local food blogs in Asia and noticed that there's a strong focus on food quality and safety at this moment, leading entrepreneurs more and more into the realm of controlled environment agriculture as a way to recapture consumer trust.
All three countries were also selected because they are islands that are heavily dependent on food imports, which renders them extremely vulnerable to climate or geopolitical events and market fluctuations that are entirely outside their control. Singapore, for example, currently imports over 90% of the food consumed in-country. “They're the most predisposed locations to be food insecure in the near future,” Jacob explains, which has also made them some of the most innovative and important places when it comes to urban farming.
“These countries also have very limited farming land given the size of their populations,” he adds, “plus they each have fairly high levels of recent economic development and similar consumer classes that have diets high in plant based foods.”
Strawberries growing hydroponically at a cultivation test facility outside of Taipei, Taiwan. (Credit: Jacob Eisenberg)
However, as Jacob discovered, not everything in the three island nations is similar. Despite their shared need to become more self-reliant in terms of food production, Jacob also discovered throughout his journey that each country’s indoor agriculture industry has many unique factors surrounding it.
“Taiwanese exploration into this space is often overshadowed by mainland China,” Jacob explained, “which is really unfortunate because there is so much going on in Taiwan with technology around indoor farming, such as horticultural lighting and automated systems.”
He also observed that Taiwanese entrepreneurs “are doing an incredible job of developing different business models for their farms, which are usually on a smaller scale and more diverse in nature than what you find in Japan.” Japan and Taiwan are similar, however, in that each country has a lot of industry associations, such as the more famous Japan Plant Factory Association, whereas these are not as commonplace in Singapore.
In Singapore, however, indoor agriculture currently enjoys an unparalleled amount of government support. The Singapore government has gotten behind urban agriculture in a number of ways, including recently instituted incentives for developers to integrate urban agriculture into new construction. However, “navigating the certifications for food safety and quality is still challenging for starting operations, even with all the government support,” Jacob noted. “I think this highlights the difficult regulatory environment that exists everywhere around urban farms, due to their very nature of being all at once a food business, manufacturer and office space— municipal regulators just don’t know how to deal with these sorts of unprecedented businesses.”
Lettuce growing in a vertically stacked hydroponic system under LED lights at National Taiwan University. (Credit: Jacob Eisenberg)
Without a doubt, Jacob’s journey confirmed a suspicion that he already had: Japan, Singapore and Taiwan are right up there with the global leaders in indoor agriculture. But when pressed to say which nation is currently leading the world, Jacob was reluctant to point towards any single country.
“There's no real leadership in indoor agriculture yet from any one country, in my experience,” Jacob said. And his reason for this is simple: no one model can be exported everywhere, at least not yet. “I think that the Netherlands are incredible with what they've done in terms of glass greenhouses, for example, but their greenhouses can't be used in Taiwan with their monsoon rainstorms,” he explained.
Excluding greenhouses and speaking strictly about vertical farms, “Japan has had a decent start ahead of the competition with their Plant Factories,” Jacob adds, “but they still have their fair share of challenges too before they can be easily dubbed the leader.”
Be sure to stay tuned in coming weeks as we continue this Islands of Agricultural Innovation series and share Jacob’s detailed accounts of the indoor farming world in Asia.
Japan’s Indoor Ag Sector Is Becoming More Collaborative
CONTENT SOURCED FROM AGFUNDER
Ahead of her speaking slot at the Indoor Agtech Summit in New York this week, we caught up with Eri Hayashi, director of International Relations & Consulting of the Japan Plant Factory Association (JPFA), a non-profit organization devoted to academic and business advancements in Japan’s indoor ag industry. Hayashi told us about the differences between the industry in the US and Japan, particularly around secrecy and collaboration.
What is the Japan Plant Factory Association?
We launched in 2011 with support from the Japanese government and are located in the campus of Chiba University, which is famous for agriculture studies and located in Kashiwanoha, an agri smart city. We have 130 local and international company members and 100 individual members, and our mission is to develop and introduce sustainable technologies to the world to solve three major global issues: food, energy, and resources. We want to do so in collaboration with research institutes and companies and currently have more than 20 research and development projects ongoing with different groups. There are around 10 greenhouses and vertical farms onsite that we manage. We focus on fostering collaboration between academia and industry.
We also provide workshops and training, technical business support as well as hosting an international conference. We have been providing these workshops and training courses every month for almost 10 years. We have different topics every month with roughly 100 people joining each session to share information and network with one another. This coming October, we will have an intensive course on vertical farms in English for beginners, covering what you would need to know before or after starting indoor farming business/research. Weekly sessions will include academic and practical classes, such as lighting, plant physiology, nutrient solutions, seedlings, and business case studies of commercial large-scale farms.
Do members pay?
There are different categories and levels of involvement that incur different fees per year. Some members, for instance, will use our onsite greenhouses — which were originally partially funded by the government — and put their own system inside it depends on the research topic. We also have a vertical farm that members can use. But other members utilize JPFA for networking and information sharing, and we also have an onsite tour of more than 5,000 people a year of which 40% are international.
What are some of the technologies being used and tested on-site?
There are multiple technologies being developed and tested on-site, but a particularly notable collaborative R&D project started last year about using artificial intelligence, phenotyping-based environmental controls and breeding for plant factories. Apart from developing a smart module system, we are developing phenotyping units for plant factories.
How would you describe Japan’s indoor ag sector?
From a historical standpoint, the first “boom” for indoor agriculture was in the 1980s, the second in the 1990s and we’ve been in the third boom since 2009 with around 200 plant factories across Japan.
I think we are shifting into the fourth boom now, which will be the scalability boom and the introduction of new technologies from artificial intelligence to phenotyping to automation.
The industry has been largely in research mode since 1970 and now the technology is getting ready for application.
Which are the biggest indoor farms in Japan?
Spread or 808 Factory, for example, are some of the biggest with a couple more of a similar size at the construction stage, but the number of large-scale farms is growing and that’s characteristic of the fourth generation of indoor ag in Japan.
In the US, you see a lot of indoor farms building their own technologies in-house, instead of collaborating with one another to deploy third-party technologies. Is this the same in Japan?
I get to see a lot of indoor farms not only in Japan but in the US and other countries where I think each farm is doing great but they are rather secretive and protective of their intellectual property. Even if I have a good discussion with them about their farms, they will ask me not to tell anyone!
Is it not so secretive in Japan?
It’s been changing; each farm is now realizing that we will need to work together at some point while of course each running a business. At JPFA we have several committee meetings, one of which is really interesting as all the major large-scale farms get together in the same room to discuss profitability and defining the terms and terminologies we use in the industry such as efficiency in electricity, labor, cultivation area, and investment. They also discuss how to improve the profitability of farms so they are actually open to sharing their experiences and it’s actually neat; I love this meeting.
The point of these meetings, and JPFA in general, is also to share data and facilitate research in the industry. Each R&D project has a different perspective on how to do research and this sharing can help to minimize the risk of starting a business. Standardization is also crucial to advance the industry. We also have been organizing LED committee meetings for some years together with leading researchers and LED companies, working on standardization and transparency of this technology. As we see the fourth boom increase the use of new software, AI, machine learning and other dynamic technologies and breeding techniques, there will be more overlap between the businesses.
How else do the US and Japan compare?
In general what’s different between Japan and US is the dynamics of the investment environment. Plenty was a huge investment which could lead them to have more chance to develop and hire more people, as well as develop innovation in-house. Also, Japan is more detailed-oriented while the US is rather more marketing-oriented, and full of entrepreneurial spirit.
What are the main challenges for Japan’s indoor ag sector?
Hiring talent, relatively high electricity costs, and diversity. We also need the industry to start taking more of a social design approach to the sector – not just agriculture and science – but more like an architectural approach to integrate with society and create something new.
I’m currently looking into how to build greenery for an exterior scene I’m working on. I need trees and bushes, and I don’t want them to look too CGI. The Plant Factory is winning: here’s my first attempt, after only half an hour I had unrealistic trunks with very realistic leaves. Rendered in DAZ Studio.
Here is a short video featuring Dr. Mike Dixon who spoke with Business News Network recently about the power of Intravision Group As multi-band variable LED Bio-Light technology. IVG systems are the preferred tool helping CESRF define controlled environment agriculture recipes, which enable their plant researchers to influence and control plant morphology, greatly impacting generation time, taste and nutrition. The mission may be enabling long-term manned space travel but "environmentally modified organisms" and the systems integration platforms being developed by Intravision Light Systems hold the key to achieving food security projects locally and beyond.
If you have a CEA project you would like to discuss with us we would like to hear from you. Intravision can offer consulting, systems integration and turnkey solutions so reach out and let us know how we can collaborate.
A nice warm, ‘we couldn’t have done it without you’ illustration for Greenopia to send to all their backers. It’s amazing how easily stories will build themselves if you start with a solid grid.
