Guest Blog: Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture Conference 2014
Just one week ago, I was lucky enough to attend the first Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture (VFUA) conference, held at the University on Nottingham (UoN). I met loads of interesting people and saw such a wealth of ideas that my brain is still buzzing with it all! This was a conference that included subjects as diverse as community gardens in Paris, rooftop gardens in Switzerland, vertical farms in Singapore and plant factories in Outer Mongolia. From consideration of how to build an entirely sustainable city, to elucidation of the mechanisms behind leaf tip burning in lettuce under LED lamps – the breadth of interest and information was simply staggering!
Initially, we all gathered in the atrium of the building. In this hall were the posters and display stands. As with the conference overall, the breadth of ideas here was amazing, covering everything from posters about a rooftop farm in Thailand (built because of flooding), to modular EFTE panels for building more efficient ‘glasshouses’, to LED grow lamps, home vertical growing kits, education programs in schools and much much more besides.
From there we made our way to the main lecture theatre. Here, all in together, we saw our first group of talks. This took in everything from the global overview by Dr Dickson Despommier (regarded as something of a founding father), through global food security and waste, on to a fascinating description of an up and running high tech vertical farm in Singapore and finally to a decidedly lower tech container based plant factory, designed in Japan for use in the developing world.
A stop for lunch then and a chance to chat about the morning's talks. Then it was time for the afternoon session, which actually split into two. I attended the Sustainable Cities talks for the first half of the afternoon (I'm told the other session, on Plant and Crop Sciences was every bit as good).
This first session took in a description of an experimental, aquaponic rooftop garden and accompanying plant lab in Basel, Switzerland. We then moved on to a talk about architecture, vertical farming and the planning system, primarily in the UK (but with implications elsewhere), from Oscar Rodriguez of Architecture and Food. Finally for this session, we had a description of a prototype vertical farm for study purposes, set up at MIT in the US and a discussion of their efforts to make their data open source (so hopefully encouraging others to do the same).
A brief break for coffee and then I headed over to the Plant and Crop Sciences second session, in time to catch a talk entitled Exploring the potential of Urban Agriculture in Food Smart Cities which managed to take in both the technical and scientific and also the social and economic considerations. Finally, we saw an automated vertical farming system, designed for domestic use, which was heartening given the grand scale of many other talks.
After this we retired to our rooms to get ready for the conference dinner. The dinner was, for me personally, the best part of the whole thing. This was not because of the food (though it was good), but because seeing all those people gathered together, I was reminded again how important such a conference is. Though 200 or so people may have seemed a lot when we were all sat together, we are still few and pretty isolated, once we are split back out across three continents and a population of 7 billion! It was wonderful to be able to sit and chat with other people who knew what I was talking about and who I could understand and learn from. Moreover, it was great to just socialise with like-minded people and feel part of something. I retired to bed (some hours later) a very happy man.
In the morning, after breakfast and another vat full of coffee, we began the second day's talks. For this, we were back altogether in the main lecture hall.
The talks started with the official launch of the UoN Centre for Urban Agriculture and a follow up talk on their efforts to create a hub for academic research and collaboration in the VFUA field.
Moving on from there, we had a talk from Innovate UK, a semi-governmental body offering support via government funding streams, to various technologies. This made the point that central government is showing a surprising amount of interest in developments in the sector, which has to be good news.
The following two talks, on behalf of the RUAF foundation and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences respectively, both focused on some of the broader issues in the VFUA agenda. However, where the former talked mostly about social and development issues (whilst also taking in the technical), the latter was more concerned with technological and scientific concerns (whilst also taking in the social and developmental). The upshot was that these two talks neatly complimented one another, in giving a broad overview of the whole.
After the morning coffee break, we had a talk from FarmedHere LLC in Chicago, who told the story of the creation of this project, their successes and their positive attitude to social issues, which was commendable. Finally we had a talk looking at different types of urban agriculture and on how to delineate one type from another, from Anne-Cécile Daniel of INRA, France. I think these efforts to engage with the typologies are going to be increasingly important in the near future, even though I suspect many who are working in the sector are yet to recognise this.
This marked the end of my conference, as I had to begin my journey back home after lunch, so I was unable to see the afternoon talks. Still, I left the conference with renewed enthusiasm and enhanced excitement at the possibilities for the future. I am now more convinced than ever that these technologies and models have the power to take us forward to a more sustainable future. I am also very glad to have found so many other people that evidently feel the same way and are prepared to stake their time, their money and their names on.
The VFUA future begins now!
Special thanks to Mark Horler of Regrowth.org for this guest post!
