One year ago, almost to the date, it was the 20th of April, 2014.
This resupply mission from NASA
delivered more than food to the International Space Station;
it delivered a way to grow food.
Now, this would be the first time that food, plants, grown in space
are not used only for studies but also for consumption.
That's the arrival of space farming.
Commander Steve Swanson is in front of VEGGIE.
VEGGIE is a mini greenhouse that can produce lettuce
just like this one,
in space.
It uses 10 times less water than traditional agriculture,
it takes less power than a desktop computer,
and to transport, it took six times less space than to operate.
Bringing anything to space from Earth costs its weight in gold,
so resources there are precious.
Should we treat our natural resources the same way?
When I look at the globe,
I see Brazil, the country I was born,
a country blessed with many natural resources.
Still, a few weeks ago, I read an article in the press
about the severe drought that's happening in São Paulo.
São Paulo is a metropolitan area with 27 million people.
And they're having a drought
that is one of the worst for the past 100 years.
Now, this journalist was asking this lady
how she was going to cope with the drought.
Brazilians are known to have several showers during the day.
So he was asking her, "Are you going to have less showers,
or are you going to have quicker showers?"
Unfortunately, a second shower is not the most pressing issue we have
when we have water shortage.
Every minute, around the world, a child dies from water-related diseases.
In 10 years, two-thirds of humanity are expected to suffer
from a form of water shortage.
And this is not an emerging-market problem only.
OECD countries, industrialized nations,
are expected to have their water consumption grow
by 65% by 2050.
That's a lot faster than the rest of the world.
So, if we were to put all the water in the world
into one big droplet right next to our planet,
that's what it would look like.
Of that, only one percent is fresh water.
Of this one percent, two-thirds are frozen on our polar caps and on our glaciers.
And of what's left, 70% is used in agriculture.
Water security is food security.
But if we can farm with less water in space,
surely we can farm more efficiently here on Earth.
We can use some of these ideas.
So, I lead a Swiss startup called CombaGroup,
and that's exactly what we set out to do: efficient farming.
This is our research and development greenhouse,
not far from here, from Lausanne.
And we are growing salads out of earth.
We spray a mix of nutrients and water directly onto the roots,
using a technology called aeroponics.
What's not used is recycled.
And for every kilo of salad we produce, we save 180 liters of water.
However, most salad doesn't grow like this.
So, I want to tell you the story of a salad,
from when it's born to the end of its life,
hopefully fulfilling its mission, which is to feed us.
And to do that, I want to go back to the place I came from
before coming to Switzerland; I want to go back to the UK.
Now, I used to live in this lovely village in the countryside of England,
and it had a wonderful pub, a teahouse, and a church, but not much else.
And around, it had a lot of fields for agriculture.
Now, during the cold months, particularly during winter,
not much grew there, but certainly not salad.
Still, I could go to the nearest market and I could buy fresh salad
any time of the year.
More than half the year, this salad will be coming from the south of Spain;
the two main places are Murcia and Almería.
They'll be driven 2,300 kilometers
in the back of a truck for over three days,
and by the time they arrive in England,
they'll have lost more than half of their vitamin C.
What's the impact on waste?
What's the impact on the environment?
Well, let's talk about waste first.
Imagine these are 100 salads growing on the field in Spain,
trying to fulfill their mission.
Seventeen will be lost before they're harvested.
Nine will make it to the shops
but won't be purchased because they don't look that good.
And the biggest amount of waste will happen at home.
We throw away 45% of the salad we buy.
Why do we do this?
Why do we pay for it and throw it away?
The main reason is short shelf life.
It goes past its expiry date,
it smells bad, it tastes bad, so we throw it away.
So, the days it's been traveling in the back of a truck
are important days that they could be with us.
And if we could cut the level of waste we have with salads by 50 percent
and make it, instead of the number one in food waste,
the number two in food waste -
which isn't a great track record -
we could save 300 liters of water for every kilo of salad we eat.
Now, that's enough for that lady to have a second shower
every day of the week for one week.
Unfortunately, these salads don't grow in Brazil; they grow in Spain.
And water reserves in Spain, per capita,
are 12 times smaller than the water reserves in Brazil.
These salads grow in one of the most arid places of Europe.
In the south of Spain, they have half the average rainfall of Spain.
They have six times less rainfall than we have in the UK.
Still, they export the equivalent of 100 million cubic meters of water
in the form of salads to other countries in Europe.
What should we do?
Should we stop eating salad when it's wintertime?
Water reserves in the UK, per capita, are more or less the same as in Spain.
And salads, lettuce, is one of the most water-efficient crops we can have.
If we replace one kilo of salad by one kilo of potato,
we'll be using twice as much water.
If you want a little milk, it's eight times more water.
If you want a kilo of beef, that's 15,000 liters of water,
as opposed to 200 liters of water
that is required to grow one kilo of lettuce.
Furthermore, there's a lot of sunshine in the south of Spain.
That's why we go there for holidays.
It's twice as much sunshine than we get in the UK.
And plants need light and heat to grow.
So, if we were to grow these plants in a greenhouse in the UK
and use electricity to light and heat this greenhouse,
we would spend more money and emit more carbon
than actually we do bringing them by truck all the way from Spain.
So this seems to be the most efficient way for us to eat salad all year round.
But is that how an astronaut would look at the problem?
We saw how we could grow salad with 10 times less water.
Well, we can also start by using light that's more efficient.
We can give the plants only the colors they need: red and blue.
That's why you see the purple light in the picture.
Now, these salads, they grow in the air.
And when they're small, we can huddle them closely together
and gradually give them more space as they grow.
That way, we can produce two times more salad per square meter
than we would in the field
and use the energy from the light and heating more efficiently.
We could also use waste heat to warm up the greenhouse.
Here in Switzerland,
we are going to build a large-scale project
right next to a bio-gas plant.
Now, this power plant throws away heat and CO2
as a byproduct of energy production.
These resources are precious.
We'll connect our greenhouse to this power plant
and warm it up during winter,
also using the CO2 to accelerate plant growth.
By doing that, the carbon footprint we have per kilo produced
is five times lower
than doing the same thing on the field here in Switzerland.
However, energy footprint in the UK
is 70 times higher than what we have in Switzerland.
There are a lot of renewables here,
and we burn a lot of coal in the UK to generate electricity.
So would that math also work for the same ideas, in Britain?
In fact,
we could produce, during winter, with the same CO2 footprint
that the field can produce during summer in the UK
and even lower during winter when we don't need to light them up,
to complement the light -
but furthermore, we could provide a product that's fresher,
locally produced, and hopefully, reduce the amount of waste,
reducing the carbon footprint per kilo consumed,
and bringing it to less than half of what we have right now
importing food from Spain.
Ultimately, we throw more food away than we consume, today.
This is happening right now.
We're growing these plants right next to you.
We will be serving the salad today so we'll be able to taste it.
And if you could replace only 10% of the food imports in the world,
that would be enough
to offset the carbon footprint for one million people
and would save enough water
for 30 million people to have a shower every day during the year -
the whole of São Paulo and the people.
We could even bring the salad alive to our kitchens,
extending space farming all the way to our homes,
have a product that has a longer shelf life, more vitamins,
and reducing waste, therefore saving our natural resources.
This is our team.
We try to dress like astronauts.
We try to think like astronauts.
But what we learn from astronauts about farming
is that we can farm with less water, less energy, and less waste,
and by doing that,
we can have food that's fresher, healthier, and better for the planet.
Thank you.
(Applause)