Aaron Moore production manager at Bustanica vertical farm growing salad greens. Photo / Supplied
Outside the massive grey Bustanica building, it’s all heat and dust.
In the desert near Dubai’s second airport, temperatures can top 50C in the emirate where on average there is not much more than 2mm of rain a week across the year. It’s as hostile an environment for growing plants as anywhere in the world.
But inside Bustanica, about three tonnes of green vegetables are being harvested each day and the world’s biggest vertical farm is just getting started. Artificial intelligence is applied to nurture each of the one million or so plants growing there at any one time.
Bustanica, meaning “your garden” or “orchard” in Arabic, is a milestone for the United Arab Emirates, which imports close to 90 per cent of its food.
The $60 million farm is the first for Emirates Crop One (ECO1), the joint venture between Emirates Flight Catering (EKFC), one of the world’s largest catering operations serving more than 100 airlines, and United States-based Crop One, an industry leader in technology-driven indoor vertical farming. Green vegetables, mainly lettuces, can be harvested and are being served to premium cabin passengers on Emirates flights within 24 hours.
Passengers are served seasonal side salads featuring different lettuce varieties.
While some start-up vertical farming operations have struggled in other countries, Bustanica has clear advantages: it’s using tested technology, has the backing of Emirates, which is in turn owned by the wealthy Dubai government, and is in a region where fresh food is scarce and precious water needs to be used carefully.
While Auckland was enduring 25mm of rain an hour overnight on Thursday, rainfall in Dubai is between 100mm and 150mm a year.
Bustanica says it uses 95 per cent less water than crops grown outside. It says it uses up to 15 litres to produce 1kg of vegetables, but traditional outdoor farming uses 317 litres for 1kg.
In total, it says about 250 million litres of water is saved every year compared to traditional outdoor farming.
But it is energy-hungry. The water comes from the main supply, which in Dubai is desalinated using a hugely energy-intensive process. That power is generated largely from fossil fuels, with some nuclear generation also coming online.
Once water is in Bustanica’s closed-loop system, much of it is recycled.
On top of desalination, the building has to use more electricity to run the operation. Unlike other countries where indoor growing buildings need to be warmed up, in Dubai, Bustanica needs to be cooled down.
Energy for that comes from one of a growing number of solar farms being developed in the UAE.
Production director Robert Fellows says the time is right in Dubai for the three-level Bustanica, which has a floor area of 3ha and was established to alleviate supply chain issues. The dependable crop guarantees vegetables year-round, so users can plan menus.
The greens, mainly lettuce but also spinach and kale, are grown for the airline but also for supermarkets, cafes and restaurants. Vertical farming techniques eliminate the use of pesticides, chemicals, herbicides, and fungicides.
The risk of fungal and foodborne diseases is almost entirely eliminated as humidity levels are managed, and limited human interaction with the crops removes the risk of contamination.
For that reason, anyone who enters must be in full PPE gear, there are aviary-style vestibules to get into rooms and shoes must be sterilised. It is hospital-level hygiene.
Seeds come mainly from the United States and the Netherlands. They are not genetically modified, in response to customer demand, and there’s no need for seeds to be drought- or pest-resistant. The company looks for high-yield seeds which are chilled to sterilise them and then planted into small biodegradable foam “plant development units”.
They are covered by a humidity dome and for three days have blackout covers to replicate the soil-covered environment outdoors.
Filtered and purified water is treated with a precisely calculated mix of plant-specific nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium, then delivered to the roots of the plants to encourage peak nutritional development.
Once germinated, the seedlings or plantlets graduate to one of 27 rooms that are 550sqm and are stacked six shelves high. It takes two weeks from seed to plantlet and four weeks from transplant to the first harvest. The colour of lighting is tailored to individual crops.
Fellows says lettuces are harvested three times from the same plant. Beyond that, they get too bitter. Crops like kale can be harvested even more as bitterness is not a problem, but yield does decline over time.
The harvested greens are “beyond organic”, ready to eat and don’t need pre-washing – they can be eaten straight out of the box. Fellows says there’s no grit or dirt and local authorities stipulate they must not be washed before being sold.
Some organic produce can be prone to food fraud as the produce is often mislabelled, mishandled, or grown using unethical practices.
Aaron Moore, production manager at Bustanica, says every single seed can be traced to its origin from when it enters the farm to when it’s fully grown, packed and shipped to customers.
Bustanica was opened last year near Dubai World Central – Al Maktoum International Airport, which is likely to be expanded to take more passenger flights. The growing operation uses standard warehouse shelving, standard vacuum cleaners in reverse to sow some trays of seeds, and harvesting is done by the gloved hands of some of the 70 workers, rather than mechanised. Expensive robot harvesters have been partly blamed for farm failures in other countries.
But Bustanica’s plant nutrition and irrigation systems are highly sophisticated and intellectual property protected.
Significant parts of the technology have been built in the UAE. It uses machine learning, artificial intelligence and advanced methods to grow and sustain plants.
This means the plants are supported by millions of data points collected each day for maximum growth.
Currently, the range includes lettuce, beet, parsley, spinach, kale, microgreens, herbs and strawberries. Fellows says it’s possible to grow almost anything hydroponically but Bustanica is concentrating on high-value, fast-growing crops for which there is strong demand.
Some of the strawberries were on board Dubai-London flights as part of a Wimbledon tennis promotion. He says the berries were in the research and development phase, rather than production.
Vertical farming is seen as not just ideal for the desert. Other parts of the world are also good candidates, especially where land is becoming more expensive and climate change is forcing a rethink. That’s the view of South Island equipment supplier Landlogic.
“The increasing unpredictability and frequency of severe weather events, attributed to global warming, along with the rising costs impacting traditional open-field farming, mean it’s more important than ever to consider new approaches to sustainable agriculture,” Landlogic chief executive Alan Cottington said.
A mechanised growing system will be set up in Ashburton by the end of August, with planting to start in early September.
The sector is in its infancy, with a small microgreens operation in Wellington and a bigger production-scale operation in Hamilton that opened recently.
Landlogic sells a $900,000 modular system designed for warehouses - with about 250sqm in area needed - in which plants are grown in multi-level trays contained in climate- and light-controlled cells.
Cottington says the fully automated vertical growing system offers an important alternative to producing commercial levels of leafy greens in the horticulture industry, where traditional outdoor growing systems have taken such a huge hit in recent floods and storms.
“The increasing unpredictability and frequency of severe weather events, attributed to global warming, along with the rising costs impacting traditional open-field farming, mean it’s more important than ever to consider new approaches to sustainable agriculture,” he says.
Like Bustanica, the system is heavily automated with computer-controlled feeding, watering, lighting, and sensors monitoring temperature, pH and humidity levels.
“Our food security is vulnerable when we rely on traditional farming methods or importing for leafy greens, which are a basic and healthy food essential.
“VFS [vertical farming systems] crop turn-around times are 28 days, regardless of external influences. By comparison, outdoor planting to harvest takes approximately 65 to 80 days for midsummer plantings, and up to 130 days for autumn/winter plantings.”
He said depending on the season and power costs, a vertical farm setup selling lettuce at wholesale rates to supermarkets could be profitable.
Cottington says a VFS machine in Australia is producing around 600kg of greens a week and only takes about three hours per week of human labour to run.
The Herald travelled to Dubai courtesy of Emirates.
Grant Bradley has worked at the Herald since 1993. He is the Business Herald’s deputy editor and covers aviation and tourism.
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