Does growing food with less water and no soil sound too good for the climate to be true? It's not as far-fetched as you might think. Since 2019, Stockholm-based startup SweGreen has been working on a way to bring farms directly to supermarket shelves, and the company says it has found one, as Interesting Engineering detailed.
By using a well-known method of soilless agriculture called hydroponics, the company is able to grow food in rock wool plugs — a sterile and controlled environment that it said eliminates the need for pesticides and other chemicals, chops pollution linked to transportation, and consumes up to 99% less water, most of it being recycled — rather than through traditional farming.
As Interesting Engineering put it, SweGreen "has given a new meaning to the word farm fresh."
According to the startup, growing a kilogram of lettuce requires just over one liter of water, against about 250 through traditional farming methods.
Water savings are vital when more than 2 billion people are living in water-stressed countries. And with the global population set to hit nearly 10 billion by 2050, ensuring food security without expanding agricultural land use that only exacerbates the climate crisis must be a priority to avert irreversible damage to the planet's natural life-support systems.
SweGreen's in-store vertical farms are, for the time being, growing aromatic herbs, spices, and leafy greens such as parsley and dill, but they could soon offer customers a chance to pick strawberries and other fruit in more than 25 locations in Sweden and Germany.
Vertical farming, which consists of cultivating crops in vertically stacked layers rather than on a single surface, is already gaining ground on conventional agricultural and even fishing practices, and it can be seen on display at Disney World. But the Swedish group is pioneering setups tailored to store size and to restaurants and hotels in search of fresh, sustainable ingredients, calling it "farming as a service," or FaaS.
The United Nations estimates that roughly a third of the world's food is wasted — with household waste alone accounting for 19% toward that third, or about a billion meals' worth of edible food wasted per day. The other approximately 13% is lost between harvest and retail.
As such, SweGreen's approach promises to cut into that 13%. As you see your next meal grow in front of your eyes, there is no risk of falling for big, juicy fruit full of herbicides or offseason vegetables produced on the other side of the world.
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🔘 Bought more than I could eat 🛒
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🔘 Didn't want leftovers 🥡
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There is one snag, though: Despite using AI-optimized LED lighting, those setups consume a lot of energy.
As content creator Le Monde de Gourdil explained in a Facebook video, this is "a real dilemma between water savings and energy consumption. It's a balance to strike between these two important environmental issues."
Particularly if SweGreen's installations can draw their energy from solar power, in some respects merely redirecting the sun's energy to a more controlled environment, the benefits may stack up with few downsides. A response to both environmental and health issues, SweGreen is hoping to show that developing local, circular food systems is realistic and scalable.
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