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  [2]Follow the Food

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The farms growing beneath our cities

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  There are huge, untapped areas in the centres of many cities that we
  could be using to make the food chain more resilient.

  Empty supermarket shelves are now a familiar sight to many of us. Even
  if the shelves have begun to be restocked, a snaking queue of shoppers
  now waits for their chance to browse.

  [3]The issue is not, we are repeatedly told, the amount of food
  available. Instead, the challenge is with supply chains and labour
  markets. Workers cannot get to the farms to harvest the crops,
  restrictions on movements are stalling the import of goods and
  [4]wholesale markets have seen their trade plummet, which together
  means it takes longer for produce to reach customers. As a result, the
  massive wheel of big farming has slowly ground to a halt – if only
  temporarily.

  But could there be a more efficient way of doing things?

  To make those supply chains shorter, for example, food needs to be
  grown and sold closer to customers. Much of the US, northern Europe and
  Canada, for example, import the majority of their fresh fruit and
  vegetables over the winter and spring, because customers still expect
  to be able to buy those products all year round.

  While farming near customers sounds sensible, to farm at scale
  efficiently you need space. Industrial agriculture, enabled by
  mechanisation, has led to plummeting consumer costs, allowing more food
  to be available to more people for less. But big farms need big
  machines, with long straight lines for them to run down, which is not
  conducive to farming near people.

  If we want to continue to feed people using farms in the places where
  most people live – in cities – we need to find the space for them.

Reduced car use in Paris has meant underground car parks can be used for
growing mushrooms instead (Credit: Cycloponics)

  One solution is to grow fruits and vegetables in space-efficient,
  climate-controlled indoor farms. [5]High-tech, factory-like indoor
  farms have started popping up all over the world, from Japan to
  Scotland.

  But in already over-developed cities, where can you put a massive food
  factory? [6]It can feel like there is nowhere left to build. But there
  is a lot of room in cities, if you know where to look.

  Underneath Paris, for example, there are 600 hectares of untapped space
  in the form of car parks.

  “It was mandatory to have two car spaces per flat in the 1970s,” says
  Jean-Noel Gertz, chief executive of Cycloponics. Today, with fewer
  people owning cars, much of this space is unused. (To put the 600
  hectares of free underground space into perspective, however, the
  [7]average farm in the US has 179 hectares of land.)

  “People cannot imagine another way to use them,” says Gertz. “It is
  blocked in their mind.”

  But Gertz can. He wants to [8]reuse Paris’s underground car parks for a
  more efficient way of farming – growing organic mushrooms and endives.
  These two crops are perfectly suited to being grown underground. Though
  he acknowledges that 600 hectares is far too much space to grow
  mushrooms and endives exclusively.

Eventually, some foods might be grown, prepared, cooked, stored and delivered
all from underground spaces in the centre of Paris

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  Instead, Cycloponics is as much about underground farming as it is
  about providing space for other food start-ups. “We host one NGO who
  gives 4,000 meals a day to hospital workers. We have another company
  that delivers 500-1,000 packs of vegetables to people in Paris every
  day,” Gertz says. “We have logistics and cold rooms, so we have
  everything start-ups need to feed people.”

  Everything, that is, to prepare food, store it and deliver it. The next
  step is to build small kitchens so the food can be cooked on site, too.
  Eventually, some foods might be grown, prepared, cooked, stored and
  delivered all from underground spaces in the centre of Paris.

  Gertz says the most difficult challenge was first getting permission
  from the fire department to set up a business underground. But slowly,
  opinions towards urban farming are starting to change.

  At the higher-tech end of the scale, some urban farmers have found
  innovative ways to grow a far greater variety of crops. Square Roots
  build farms inside refurbished shipping containers – each with its own
  adjustable climate.

The climate inside shipping containers can be carefully controlled to grow
crops from basil to aubergines (Credit: Square Roots)

  “People want food all over the world but the impact of transporting it
  is huge,” says Tobias Peggs, chief executive of Square Roots. “And
  people forget the impact on the consumer because the nutrients break
  down in shipping. We thought, instead of shipping food, why don’t we
  ship climate data?”

  Rather than growing basil in Genova in the right climate, for example,
  Square Roots studies the local humidity, light, heat, soil nutrients,
  and length of the growing season there, then tries to recreate that in
  an artificial environment. That way, the same basil can be grown in the
  middle of a city every day of the year.

  [11]From their base in Brooklyn, in three years Square Roots have gone
  from growing herbs and leafy greens to aubergines, turnips,
  strawberries and tomatoes. They even had a chilli eating competition
  with some container-grown habaneros this spring.

  The question of what you can grow, and where, is a matter of economics.
  Plants take in carbon dioxide, and use light energy to convert it into
  biomass. The heavier the veg, the more biomass – so you need more
  energy, which ups the expense. But leafy greens, basil, mint and chives
  are low in biomass. Peggs says he can get a product to market that is
  competitive with organic prices and in some cases with conventional
  farming.

Growing produce closer to where it is sold means that consumers can get it at
its freshest (Credit: Square Roots)

  “I imagine going into a supermarket and lining up fruit and veg in
  density – that is our product roadmap,” he says. “Strawberries and
  tomatoes are on the cusp [of being commercially viable], we keep going
  from there. A field farmer cannot make the sun more efficient and halve
  their costs. But indoors, I can make it more efficient through
  technology.”

  Like in Paris, the US has an abundance of parking spaces – only they
  are largely above ground. [12]By some estimates there are two billion
  parking spaces in the US. Add to that the threat of a “[13]retail
  apocalypse” as malls shut down, and the picture of millions of square
  feet of space begins to build. Peggs says that local building
  authorities already have codes for working with shipping containers,
  which means repurposing that space for container farms is easier than
  building new facilities.

You can put it on a truck, drop it in a parking lot, plug in water and
internet, and you have a farmers’ market – Tobias Peggs

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    [15][facebook-icon.988b7862.svg]

  “You get a lot for free with a shipping container, they were built to
  transport food and maintain a climate,” says Peggs. “You can put it on
  a truck, drop it in a parking lot, plug in water and internet, and you
  have a farmers’ market. There are many ways to be creative with
  existing infrastructure.”

  The internet connection is needed because Square Root’s containers are
  AI-powered. Each container can speak to the others to keep an updating
  feedback loop should conditions inside them change.

  In New York, Square Roots sell to grocery retailers – all of which are
  within five miles of the farm. There are no trucks driving around.
  Instead, they have a fleet of battery-powered tricycles with a cold
  storage unit on the front. This means the food usually only has to
  travel for two hours, not two weeks.

  Another underground farmer, Steve Dring, co-founder of Growing
  Underground, likewise saw an opportunity in one untapped urban space:
  [16]a World War Two air raid shelter in south-west London. A few years
  ago, Dring and his co-investor were weighing up the relative values of
  vertical farming. Purpose-built facilities are all very well, but they
  can’t be built easily in the centre of a city. Meanwhile, Transport for
  London possessed the keys to 70,000 square feet (6,500sq m) of empty
  tunnels sprawling under the capital. With a little bit of convincing,
  they handed the keys over to Dring.
  WWII Underground tunnel

Underneath London are disused tunnels from World War Two that are being
converted to grow food (Credit: Growing Underground)

  At first, their set-up looked like something from the TV series
  “Breaking Bad”, he says. There were crops bathed in pink light (both
  blue and red wavelengths are used, optimal for growing, but the lights
  look pink) and rows of plants lining a makeshift polytunnel on a
  mezzanine floor, with water and filtration tanks on the floor below.
  Dring’s farm uses a type of hydroponics called ebb and flow, where
  water is pushed out to the crop and allowed to flow back through a
  filter.

  Like Paris’s underground car parks, this wartime bunker is ideal for
  growing in a controlled way. “If it is -5C [23F] or 30C [86F] above
  ground, it is constantly 14C [57F] down here in the tunnel, 110-120ft
  [34-37m] below London,” he says.

  Dring says that what he and farmers like him are doing has been
  misnamed. While the technology they are using is the same as vertical
  farming, Dring prefers the specific title of “controlled environment
  agriculture”. “We control the environment to a forensic level,” says
  Dring. “If I want to control humidity and heat, it is easier to start
  from a base where it is 14C all year round.”

  Dring says that with a long tunnel, one of the major concerns is good
  airflow, otherwise pathogens build up. But the air raid shelter was
  designed to accommodate 8,000 people, so the space already came with
  “kickass ventilation”.
  Underground car park

Growing pressure on supply chains could make farming closer to market in
cities more appealing (Credit: Paul Marc Mitchell/Growing Underground)

  Now, Dring says he has spoken to every individual with an underground
  car park in London because he and his colleagues are trying to work out
  how to monetise that space in the future as car use declines.

  People are starting to see the opportunities in growing in unusual
  urban spaces. Gertz says that the extra pressure on supply chains now
  has also moved the debate forward, like “jumping 10 years in the
  future”.

  “They are giving much more respect to people working locally with their
  hands [as a result of lockdown],” says Gertz. “They found out it is
  quite useful to have people working locally. They found out how good
  stuff grown locally is.”

  Peggs agrees, saying that in times of financial hardship, people start
  to consider what they eat to a greater extent. “When you are eating at
  home, you have to be looking for value; this happened in 2008,” he
  says, referring to the previous global financial crash. “No one cared
  where their food came from, they wanted cheap calories as convenient as
  possible.”

  But because this recession has been created by a health pandemic,
  people are questioning the choices that they are making around their
  food. Perhaps we will all soon be giving a bit more thought to how far
  our food has come from and what is in it.

  This article is part of [17]Follow the Food , a series investigating
  how agriculture is responding to environmental challenges. [18]Follow
  the Food traces emerging answers to these problems – both high-tech and
  low-tech, local and global – from farmers, growers and researchers
  across six continents.
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References

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  1. https://www.bbc.com/
  2. https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/index.html
  3. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200401-covid-19-why-we-wont-run-out-of-food-during-coronavirus
  4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52066764
  5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-45286413
  6. https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/gla_migrate_files_destination/archives/archive-assembly-reports-plansd-growing-food.pdf
  7. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/fnlo0419.pdf
  8. https://cycloponics.co/
  9. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=The underground farms that could make the food chain more resilient via @BBC_Future&hashtags=&url=https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/the-massive-farms-emerging-beneath-our-cities.html
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 11. https://squarerootsgrow.com/buylocal/
 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html
 13. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42418902
 14. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=The underground farms that could make the food chain more resilient via @BBC_Future&hashtags=&url=https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/the-massive-farms-emerging-beneath-our-cities.html
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 16. http://growing-underground.com/
 17. https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/
 18. https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/
 19. http://www.bbc.co.uk/help/web/links/

  Hidden links:
 21. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n27vnrrj/episodes/guide
 22. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190114-compost-or-phosphorus-fertiliser-in-africa-agriculture
 23. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180821-are-forgotten-crops-the-future-of-food
 24. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170606-the-largest-wind-farms-in-the-world-are-in-the-uk
 25. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190507-weeds-a-surprising-way-to-fight-climate-change

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