From micro-herbs to menthol and morphine: how far will vertical farms go?

Crops grown in large-scale vertical farming facilities are beginning to enter commercial food chains with the promise of continuity and consistency of supply, reduced food miles and the need for fewer inputs.

But these benefits come at a price.

Tightly-managed, high-care growing environments are expensive to build and run, so these facilities need to grow high-margin produce – ideally in high volume – to generate the necessary returns on investment.

With ambitious expansion plans and increasing global acreage in many of these facilities, this month we are exploring the opportunity for vertical farm/CEA to diversify into non-food crops.

 

Beyond baby-leaf salad

Innovative research spanning a range of crop species has demonstrated the feasibility of using vertical farming to produce field crops such as cereals, legumes, fruit and even seed potatoes.

However, while it might be technically possible to grow food crops in such systems, the question remains about the commercial reality of producing them at scale in such facilities. Are there untapped alternatives that are easier to grow and where the returns could be even higher?

 

Harnessing plant metabolism

Plants naturally make a suite of chemicals that are unrelated to their nutritional properties but still hugely valuable to humans. Plant-derived drugs, for example, represent 5.5% of the global pharmaceutical industry, with their sales revenue over £18 billion.

Flavourings extracted from plants including saffron from crocuses, vanillin from orchids and essential oils from herbs such as evening primrose all command a price premium over their synthetic – or fake – counterparts.

With a move away from a dependence on petrochemicals, there is an increasing focus on using sustainable alternatives for speciality chemicals, such as artificial flavour and fragrance molecules, as well as intermediates in manufacturing processes. Many of these are difficult – or impossible – to make synthetically.

So, what better production system for these complex materials than from the plants themselves?

 

Biofactories for non-food

Some plant chemicals are unique to individual species that are difficult to grow in broadacre because of their precise growing needs, their vulnerability to pests, or a lack of suitable agronomy. But under the right – and consistent – growing conditions these plants can flourish.

Thanks to a number of state-of-the-art facilities across the world, vertical farming at scale is now a viable solution for the widespread commercial production of high value molecules in planta. The controlled environment ensures stringent growing conditions and accommodates high-care needs. With the added benefit of automation and robotics to increase efficiency and minimise contamination.

Generating these kinds of compounds in a controlled environment would maximise outputs and ensure consistency. This would overcome a major barrier to their outdoor production and comfort regulators about the quality of the resulting material. Moreover, VF allows for nuances in growing conditions, where small changes can alter – and improve – the nature of material produced.

 

Next steps

Discussions between vertical growers and food retailers are underway, with bagged salad and herb producers competing with broadacre growers and importers – and potentially between themselves – for market share.

We think it’s time for serious discussions in the cosmetics industry, ingredient suppliers, perfumiers and specialist chemical companies, as well as in the pharmaceutical sector, to consider larger scale production of high value chemicals in a controlled environment.

There will undoubtedly always be a place for baby-leaf salad and micro-herbs in vertical farms, but plants are so much more than just food. We now have the technology to harness – and even enhance – this wealth of potential in a truly controlled way.

 

Members are invited to join our interactive BlogChat online session on 25th April 2-3pm, where we’ll be discussing this topic in more detail. Please contact info@agri-tech-e.co.uk if you’d like to join and we will send the meeting info.