WHAT at first appears to be an inconspicuous grey shipping container sitting on a small block in Adelaide's northern industrial area could actually be housing the future of food production systems.
Inside is Adelaide's first environment-controlled vertical farm, where Eden Towers Adelaide farm manager Santiago Insaurralde is conducting proof-of-concept trials to grow a vast array of leafy greens, herbs and microgreens.
The small trial farm is paving the way for the establishment of a 800 square metre facility at Pooraka, due to start operating early next year.
Based in WA, Eden Towers has bold ambitions to build vertical farms in every major city in Australia, and is also making pitches in Indonesia and the Phillipines.
Mr Insaurralde believes vertical farming will play an increasingly important role in food production due to it's small footprint, carbon neutrality, quick production turnover and the absence of any chemicals or fertilisers.
"It's very sustainable, and keeps prices stable because we can produce all year round," he said.
"If you have floods or droughts, it doesn't impact us."
Microgreens grown in the environment-controlled system, which doesn't even require soil, are ready in less than two weeks, with herbs having a 25 to 28 day turnover.
The Eden Towers farm can produce 300 kilograms of produce a square metre every month, which Mr Insaurralde says is a tenth of the space required to produce the same in a conventional greenhouse or vegetable plot.
"It's faster than a regular greenhouse because I'm giving the plants 18 hours of light a day," Mr Insaurralde said.
"You don't get that any day in a greenhouse.
"We also keep the temperature at 24 to 27 degrees, with humidity between 50 and 70 per cent."
The farm is very low on water use - 3-5 per cent of that use in conventional vegetable production - with an automated ebb and flow system flooding trays only three times a day for one minute at a time.
The system takes PH and EC readings every hour, keeping the EC level between 1 and 1.2, and the PH in the 5.5-6.5 range.
Plants are given 18 hours of light from a series of overhead LEDs.
"The quality of the produce is always A1," Mr Insaurralde said.
"We don't use any chemicals, any pesticides, any herbicides. It's not that we don't want to use them - we don't need to use them."
While the trial farm is only tiny, the planned facility in Pooraka will have close to 50 levels in an eight-metre high warehouse and everything, from watering to lighting to harvesting, will be fully automated.
Mr Insaurralde has recently been scouting the latest in vertical farming technology in Europe.
The Pooraka farm will run off rooftop solar panels, with any additional energy needs sourced from renewables.
Water is constantly recycled, meaning there is little to no water wastage.
While vertical farming has been slow to take off in Australia, it is further advanced in countries who don't have the same luxury of land availability.
Eden Towers is primarily funded by overseas investors, but Mr Insaurralde believes Australian investors will get on board once they see the planned larger-scale farms in action.
The company is running a capital raise campaign on the Swarmer platform, with investments starting from $250.
VERTICAL FARMS ENTER FODDER SPACE
While vertical farming is primarily viewed as suitable for vegetable and fruit production, an Australian company is breaking ground by using the technology in fodder production and says it is getting better feed value than the traditional method.
The Qld-based Vertical Farm Systems has been developing modular and warehouse vertical farms for 13 years.
It took nine years before any of the systems were available commercially and VFS's John Leslie said much of their demand was coming from overseas.
The company is now set to deliver its very first fodder production system to a livestock farm in northern Qld, after nine years of development and testing.
"Our first unit is going up to Far North Qld next month," Mr Leslie said.
"We've also been speaking to various feedlots and graziers. There's good interest here and strong interest overseas as well."
The fodder production unit comes in a shipping container and modular form, with the smaller version producing a tonne of fodder a day and the larger unit producing 2t.
Mr Leslie said there largely automated system only required 15 minutes to 20 minutes to manage a day, compared to other labour-intensive ways of making fodder that could require four hours a day.
With the process taking six days, the unit has six growing areas so the user has a fresh supply of fodder each day.
The units can be connected to mains power, diesel generators or a solar supply. The units are automatically sterilised, the growing areas are reloaded through an automatic system and notify the user if there is an issue with nutrients, growing conditions or grain levels.
"Fodder or sprouted barley grain has been done for 20 or more years, but it has had a poor reputation because of the way it's done," Mr Leslie said.
"It was basically water put onto the barley until it sprouted. In doing so, the final feed value of the barley grass was less than the barley grain it came from because all of the sugar and starch had been washed out while they were growing it. So feedlots would prefer to feed their cattle on barley grain.
"It also used an enormous amount of water. Any runoff water also had to be run to waste because it would ferment and go rancid very quickly due to the sugars and starch in it.
"We took a different tack and because of our experience with other systems and microbiology for growing, we applied the microbiology and nutrients to growing fodder.
"In doing that, we achieved a couple of landmark results. Any water we use can be fully recycled - there's no wastewater that comes out of the system - and secondly we've had fodder tech labs in the US do chemistry tests and the fodder we produce has a higher food value than the grain it was grown from.
"A grazier using our system can increase the value of the feed by growing it from barley rather than reducing."
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