Can Technology Replace Traditional Agriculture?
As urban sprawl continues to push farmland out of production and rapid urban development requires more land, food, and water, alternative growing methods and technologies are being proposed as solutions to replace traditional agriculture. While agricultural technology can encompass many topics, several of the most popular and trending technologies are vertical farming, agrivoltaics, and laboratory-grown food.
Can these technologies replace traditional agriculture and do it better?
Vertical Farming
In the last several years, tech companies have designed “vertical farms” that require the use of artificial lights, heaters, water pumps, and computer controls to grow food crops in an indoor, controlled facility. As farmland is being lost and populations are increasing, urban cities are looking for alternative ways to grow food. At first glance, vertical farming sounds like a great solution– it can eliminate food miles, grow crops inside closed systems, recycle water, and require less space.
But, there are large hidden costs associated with this type of farming.
First, growing food indoors requires a lot of energy and materials to operate. Outfitting an indoor space to replicate an outdoor farm is costly and requires a lot of energy to control growing temperatures and environments. One container vertical farms operation, Freight Farms, for example, uses about 80 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day to power the lights and pumps. That’s nearly two to three times as much electricity as a typical American home. Additionally, vertical farms release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than conventional farming due to its energy use. According to a 2021 report, the average vertical farm uses about 18 kilowatt-hours to produce one pound of lettuce. Even vertical farms that are using the latest LED technology, which means fewer kilowatt-hours per pound of final product, are still more energy-consuming than traditional farming. Proponents of vertical farming suggest that renewable energy sources, such as solar panels, can offset the energy needs this type of farming requires. This seems like a good approach except that using solar panels to harvest naturally occurring sunlight to turn into electricity to then serve as artificial light is like trying to use the sun to replace the sun.
Second, food produced by vertical farming is expensive due to its high operating costs. It is far more expensive than conventionally farmed produce and even most organic produce. One report noted that mini-lettuces grown via vertical farming cost twice as much as organic lettuce found in most stores. New York-based Bowery Farming’s indoor-produced kale mix is almost three times more expensive per pound than Whole Foods Market’s baby kale option, and its cilantro is more than five times more expensive than its Whole Foods equivalent. Another vertical farming operation asks $100 for membership and then $69-$99 for one greens box. For the 23 cups of greens provided in each box, this amounts to less than 200 calories of food. A hefty price tag for nutritionally and calorically low food.
Instead of making food more available—especially to families on limited budgets—vertically grown produce comes in at a higher price point and limits access to the food. Rather than feeding the world’s hungry with calorically and nutrient-dense food, vertically grown greens and produce are only going to be affordable to the world’s wealthy for years to come.
Finally, vertical farming is limited by what it can grow—most commonly greens, herbs, strawberries, and tomatoes. The appeal of vertical farms outweighs the reality that in order to feed a growing population an affordable, diverse, and nutritious range of food—we still require soil, farmland, and traditional methods to grow our food.
While vertical farming can potentially provide benefits like using less water and less space, any environmental benefits are largely offset by the enormous energy– and costs– it takes to grow and purchase this kind of food. Vertical farming doesn’t directly solve an environmental problem– such as carbon sequestration– but rather is a small niche market that can only grow a limited variety of specialty produce.
How to approach evaluating “technology as a solution”
Hold a critical eye to the narrative of when a “technology” solution is proposed
Apply context to any technology solution posed (will that work in the setting, environmental conditions, resources, and culture that you live? Is it a “place-based” solution, and is it equitable to those involved?)
Look to who is advocating for the messaging and adoption of the technology (what person, corporation(s), investor, entity is proposing the solution?)
Does the posed solution address root causes?
Who benefits from the proposed solution? And, who doesn’t?
Agrivoltaics
This type of technology asks us to rethink what agriculture and energy production looks like. Agrivoltaics involves placing solar panels above crop production on farmland— a new image to a traditional farmer (and solar developer), but one that is proving to be a holistic approach to integrating technology with agriculture by connecting the food-water-energy nexus involved with growing food. Agrivoltaics enables agricultural and energy production on the same piece of land and benefits farmers, solar developers, rural communities, and the earth itself.
As we begin sourcing more energy from solar panels to help mitigate some of climate change’s future impacts, a thoughtful approach to the deployment of solar energy is needed. Placing solar panels on agricultural lands allows for the panels to be cooled by the crops underneath and the cooling effect enhances the performance of the panels through increased power output and longer life-spans. In turn, the panels shade crops below and reduce the amount of water lost through plant transpiration, thereby reducing the amount of water needed to grow the crop.
By incorporating agrivoltaics, farmers can grow crops or raise livestock under the panels, and this type of farming operation can offer additional economic opportunities to the farmer. Through the combination of solar lease payments (payments made to the farmer from solar developers to place panels on their land) and through continued agricultural production, such reliable and diversified income can greatly benefit many farmers, especially small- and mid-sized farmers who often grapple with cash flow. A farmer can also generate on-farm energy needs through solar panels and, thereby, reduce their operating costs.
Agrivoltaics presents a holistic approach to addressing the energy needs of a growing population while preserving agricultural land. One report concluded that global energy demand would be offset by solar production if even less than one percent of cropland were converted to an agrivoltaic system. Instead of being forced to choose between energy or food, or climate or conservation, this type of technology enables both to co-exist and even thrive when working synergistically.
Laboratory-grown/cultured “meat”
As the world population continues to grow and the demand for protein increases, some claim that lab-grown meat is inevitable in order to avoid a food crisis. Cultured, or lab-grown, “meat” aims to recreate the complex structure of livestock muscles by cultivating animal cells (provided by a live animal) in a controlled culture medium that will provide the necessary nutrients, hormones, and growth factors for cell growth. Humans no longer need to raise livestock to eat animal protein, as the narrative goes. Major investors in cultured meat include large meat packers like Tyson and Cargill and billionaires, such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson.
Several criticisms of growing meat in stainless-steel bioreactors are the costs of the resource-intensive process and the price tags of the resultant meat products. Several reports conclude that the expensive biomanufacturing energy and equipment requirements needed to create cultured meat products are not able to reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Additionally, advocates of cultured meat tout reduced methane emissions from not raising livestock, but one of the few studies carried out on the subject found that lab-grown meat ends up using more energy to produce meat than from raising cows. And, a lot more money would be needed to scale-up lab-grown meat. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need thousands of factories that grow these cell cultures, and all of those facilities would require a minimum of $1.8 trillion. The price tag alone of cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
The Role of Technology in Agriculture
Needing to feed the world has often been the narrative for the justification of investing in and implementing new technology. While we need to be open to the way we do agriculture and open to the disruption that helps agriculture adapt to new challenges, such as climate change and a growing population, the disruption should not stem from a place of taking ecology out of the processes of agriculture. That type of disruption is more about control than improvement.
The “needing to feed the world” narrative brought us The Green Revolution. While this did increase food production, it also resulted in massive soil erosion, agricultural processes dependent on chemical inputs and monoculture, loss of biodiversity, the demise of small and medium farmers, and a highly consolidated and concentrated food system—a system that is fragile, wastes up to 40 percent of the food it produces, and has disabled communities from feeding themselves.
As we consider and implement new technology, it’s important to ask ourselves, what narrative is leading this movement? Technology can enhance and supplement agriculture, but not replace it. It’s not about taking the farmer out of farming—the person most tied to the stewardship of our land and resources and connected to the biological processes that govern food production and ecology.
Instead of investing billions in new technology that purports to do it better than nature’s time-tested ecological processes, what if the money is instead (or even partially) used to strengthen local food systems by making land affordable for farmers, incentivizing regenerative ag practices, and building local processors. What if we instead invest in adaptive agriculture that is integrated with technology and understand that ecological processes and community are the heart of our solutions– and that those are irreplaceable.