Articles

Skyscraper Farming

Created on Wednesday, 08 February 2012 10:22

Published on Wednesday, 08 February 2012 10:22

	By Mark Shadbolt Follow @Mark_Shadbolt

The picture you have of a farm is probably a quaint one, you imagine it set between the rolling Yorkshire Dales, dry stone walls lining the fields, and a farmer in tweed chugging along in an old, rusty tractor.

As everyone knows, the Japanese tend to do things a little differently. They continue to live up to their technologically advanced reputation by taking agricultural advancement to unprecedented levels.

Their Agriculture Ministry Plan outlined the idea of a farm of huge scale, and one which is almost entirely managed by robots.

The 250 hectare site will be home to unmanned tractors, an LED system to replace fertilisers and a system which converts the carbon dioxide given off by farm machinery into nourishment for plants.

The LEDs will be used to spread light evenly over the plant, and LED lights are much smaller and have five times the life of normal bulbs. Excitingly, research showed that specifically required wavelengths of light can be shed on the plants for maximum growth with these LEDs.

Carbon dioxide recycling is a real possibility, all plant life thrives in CO2 rich atmospheres, for exactly the same reason that animals like us need oxygen – respiration.

Another futuristic scheme to aid farming is in satellite imaging. It can help to point out where the worst growth patches are and can give a better idea as to which path tractors should take to minimise soil damage.

This plan comes around as a result of the 2011 tsunami which destroyed 24,000 hectares of farmland by earthquake (causing physical land-damage), tsunami (causing ground saturation, silt redistribution and the spread of disease) and also some nuclear “fallout” from the affected power plant.

The project is estimated to cost around £33m which is no small undertaking, it reflects the real innovation that has gone into the project, Japan's agricultural situation has needed advancement so this catastrophe could lead to a more positive future for sustainable farming.

Considering that each farm would cover 250 hectares, and 24,000 hectares were damaged by the tsunami, a thousand of these farms would alleviate the problems.

However the problem of radiation remains, not only is the ground full of dangerous types (isotopes) of caesium, iodine and strontium but it was also caked in sea salt and oil, ruining the nutrient quality of the ground.

A number of high-tech organisations are involved with the super farms idea, one of which is Toshiba, who plan to use its revolutionary technology which was originally designed to purify radioactive water at the nuclear power plant, but is said to remove 97% of caesium from radioactive soil.

Their device currently deals with 1.7 tons of radioactive soil per day, but apparently it is possible to make a machine capable of processing 100 times that amount. The device uses absorbent crystals to remove radioactivity from both solids and liquids.

Last year's nuclear disaster badly marred the Japanese public perception of local produce, and the tsunami, caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, killed more than 19,000 people, according to the latest figures. So this so called “dream project” may be so boldly progressive that it pulls these people back into trusting their farmers.

It is important to have trust in the super farms which will produce staple foods like rice, wheat, soy beans, fruit and vegetables which the old farmers used to provide. Management of the newly changed land during the six-year project is expected to be entrusted to local farming corporations.

Other ideas in revolutionary agriculture include “vertical farming” which is a field in a stackable, skyscraper format. This is advantageous in that it uses up very little space, but also allows very precisely controlled growing environments safe from many pests (instantly reducing need for pesticides).

So you may think: “Why don't we make lots of these then?” but they require very large amounts of energy, especially when you consider skyscraper build and maintenance costs being so highly extortionate in comparison to traditional farming: simply keeping a series of hedgerows.

This idea begins in Japan under a disastrous stimulus, but the human population is set to hit 9 billion within the next few years when food consumption and production will be a key issue. So ideas like these may well be expanded upon.

It seems that whichever way you look at it, traditional farming just isn't practical enough for the modern age and modern circumstances.