SPECIAL REPORT VERTICAL FARMING
Would you like to never have to worry about weather conditions, pesticides, or transporting your produce long distances? Then you might be ready to become a ‘vertical farmer’.
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Words LISA SMYTH
KEEPING CUSTOMERS CLO SE
“The biggest advantage that vertical farming offers is the ability to grow your products so close to your customers. And chefs really appreciate their farmers,” says Noah Verin, owner of Urban Green in Sydney (pictured here).
ustralia’s city-dwellers are having a change of heart. Due to the pandemic, house prices are soaring in regional and rural areas as those used to ‘concrete jungles’ look to escape to wide open plains and the freedom of country life. But this desire for a ‘tree change’ will likely be short lived, and the 89 per cent of Australians who live in urban centres will, on the whole, continue to do so – a trend accelerating around the world. It is predicted that there will be close to 10 billion people on the planet by 2050, and nearly 70 per cent of those will live in cities and urban areas. How can we expect to feed so many people nutritious, fresh food when the majority will be living so far from the source? “Globally, there is an increasing awareness of the need to find more sustainable ways of doing things, including farming; there’s a growing realisation that we need to ‘feed the world the smarter way’,” explains Paul Millett, co-founder of InvertiGro, a vertical farming business based three kilometres from Sydney’s CBD. “We will need to grow 56 per cent more food to feed the world’s population by 2050, and we will need to do this without using more land or water,” continues Paul. “Australia has always been the ‘lucky country’ when it comes to farming, but in the last few years droughts, bushfires, floods and COVID-19 supply chain disruptions have really highlighted the need to think more innovatively about the sustainability and reliability of our food production.” A DRY FUTURE
Vertical farming has exploded in recent years, especially in the US and Europe, and the global market is expected to increase from a value of US$2.23 billion in 2018 to US$12.77 billion by 2026. > MAY - JUN 2021
THE FARMER
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