Farming's Future: Food Factories
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Does the world face a food crisis in the next 10 years? Or could the solution to world hunger already be at hand? Laurence Knight explores whether technological solutions like multi-storey indoor farms and self-driving tractors could help provide affordable food for everyone.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Photo: Greens growing on floating beds. Credit: Mira Oberman/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Lawrence Knight. Welcome to Business Daily. Coming up, is it safe for you to assume that there will always be food to go on your plate? |
| 0:13.5 | It's absolute complacency, right? Because we've kind of been in a surplus environment where yields continue to climb up, continue to be resilient, but that doesn't |
| 0:22.6 | happen forever. With the world's demand for food rising inexorably and the supply of food |
| 0:27.7 | threatened by climate change, might the solution be to turn the farm into something resembling |
| 0:33.3 | a factory? Virtually every living plant on this planet can be grown indoors. So you need to do it |
| 0:39.2 | in multiple story buildings. And basically, that's my definition of a vertical farm. It's a greenhouse |
| 0:44.1 | that's been stacked on top of itself. That's the future of agriculture here on Business Daily. |
| 0:59.2 | I'm standing next to a tank of mirror cart fish on a rooftop in East London. |
| 1:03.8 | I can't see many of them. They're all huddling in the corner at the moment because it's a very cold day today. |
| 1:09.5 | But these aren't pets. Although they're gorgeous to look at, these fish are for eating. |
| 1:13.6 | This is a farm. And not just any farm. This farm is a showcase of one vision of what the future of agriculture could look like. |
| 1:19.6 | In this, the first of two programs on the subject, I'll be looking at how the business of growing |
| 1:24.6 | food is moving from the open seas and fields to something that looks |
| 1:28.6 | more and more like a factory. And I'm here with Hugo Horlick. Tell us about this place. What are |
| 1:34.0 | because we're standing next to what looks basically like a... Chipping container. Exactly. What is |
| 1:40.0 | this? Okay, so we are at Grow Up Community Farms. This is a old chipping container that's been |
| 1:45.6 | repurposed with a greenhouse built on the top into an aquaponics facility. An aquaponics |
| 1:50.8 | facility? Okay, so obviously there's water involved. I can see a big plastic tank of water next to us |
| 1:55.0 | with the fish in it. Is this the water in the aquaponics? Yes, so you feed the fish. The fish |
| 2:00.2 | defecating the water. This water is then taken you feed the fish. The fish defecating the water. |
| 2:01.7 | This water is then taken up to the plants. |
| 2:04.5 | The plants absorb some of the nutrients from the fish defecation, |
... |
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