Not so long ago, in December 2015, I was invited to a party.
A friend of mine was celebrating his PhD.
It was a great evening.
We had lots of fun, couple of beers, really good homemade food.
And of course, as we were celebrating his academic success,
after a while, he wanted to talk about it.
And we the guests were interested to learn more about his work.
"Do you know that most of our food is highly dependent on oil?"
This was his question to introduce his work.
"And do you know we are running out of soil to grow our food?"
This was his second question.
Do you know?
I was stunned because I was absolutely not aware of that.
I was immediately fascinated by those unknown challenges of food production.
And I was thrilled, as my friend claimed to have a solution to those challenges:
urban vertical farming.
Vertical farming as a method to save soil and energy,
a solution to grow food locally where we live,
in the hearts of our cities,
and save the scarce resources of our planet.
I was so thrilled that I quit my job and joined my friend
to found the vertical farm institute.
So this party, two years ago, led my way to you
because what I learn about food production every day
in my work of vertical farm institute is simply mind-blowing.
And although actually being a rather quiet person,
I have to be here and talk to you.
Because I eat, because I love good food, and because I really love our planet.
And we seriously endanger this planet because of the way we produce food today.
I live in a perfect world. Here, you see this pin? That's my house.
Still an urban touch
but right in the middle of fields, meadows, forests, some farms around.
I buy locally grown organic food
every Friday, at our market in my hometown, Ottensheim.
I know the chicken personally, whose eggs I eat,
and the farmer of course.
That's my friend Michael.
I have my own garden.
I grow my own tomatoes,
and I preserve my own vegetables.
What about you?
If you live in a similar surrounding, you might live in the same world as me.
But is this the world we all are living in?
Let us change our perspective.
This is how many people live today, city of Beijing.
This is where our food comes from, Mato Grosso in Brazil,
once a rain forest, now devastated for the production of our soy beans.
This is where tomatoes come from - Almería in Spain.
Actually not,
this is what we see as tourists.
This is where tomatoes really come from,
and what you see here are plastic greenhouses.
Plastic covering an area bigger than Austria's capital, Vienna.
So actually, this does not look too good. It is really bad.
This way of agriculture consumes too much resources, soil and energy.
It's absolutely not sustainable.
I need to spell this out for you clearly,
just as my friend did at the party two years ago,
to make you understand why I could not let this go.
It's all about oil.
Fertilizers consist of fossil resources.
Fossil resources are needed to transport the tomatoes from Almería to your table.
Fossil resources are needed
to heat the glasshouses where our domestic tomatoes grow.
And fossil resources are needed to heat the stoves on which you cook your food.
Fossil resources,
this means with every bite you eat,
you consume oil.
Do we really want to eat food fueled by fuel?
One third of the world's total primary energy is used for the food sector,
fossil resources, hydrocarbon energy, oil.
And this is what I mean when I speak of energy related to food.
So as I said, it doesn't really look good; it's really bad.
It's bad for our planet,
and this is only where we are right now, today.
So let's have a look ahead.
By 2050, we're expected to be 9 or even 10 billion people on Earth.
Seventy percent of us will live in urban areas,
and most of us will live in one of 400 mega cities on Earth.
How will we feed all those people?
Already today,
we use arable land as big as the whole of South America to grow our grain
and not to mention land used by animals.
To feed us in 2050,
we need additional arable land as big as Australia; that's a whole continent.
The good news: there is still arable land available.
The bad news: it's mostly covered in the rain forests.
So the only way to access new arable land is deforestation.
We cut into our planet's green lung
to grow more grain, to feed cows, to have burgers to eat.
Really?
Do you know what this picture shows?
Each and every of those spots here, hundreds, perhaps thousands, is a fire.
It's man-made fires and flamed to burn down our rain forests.
Cultivate new land - cultivation means destruction in this case.
Destruction of living environment for animals, insects, us people of course,
and not even to mention the damage done to oxygen production.
This picture was taken by NASA in spring of 2017.
It shows the Congo Delta in Africa.
It's still a bit abstract, so let me give you the idea of the scale.
The fires burning here
have a size bigger than Italy,
and they might still be burning, just right now.
You think that maybe I'm being overly dramatic.
In our supermarkets,
there're so many products labeled as domestic Austrian products,
so the situation cannot be so bad at all.
Do we really need to be bothered about what's going on in Brazil or in Africa?
I say: yes, we should be.
Let me give you two figures.
About 80% of all the tomatoes we consume here in Austria are imported,
and almost 50% of all our livestock products are imported as well.
This way of producing food is not sustainable.
Our current mass food production is slowly killing the planet.
So what can we do?
Every single one of us here in this room?
Buy organic, locally grown products.
Eat, preferably, only seasonal fruits and vegetables.
Eat less meat.
Generally, be a little bit more humble,
and try to live by what nature provides, if possible.
We all here, we can change the world, and we will change the world.
That's why we are here today.
We are not just the bystanders of history, we make history.
Well, at least that is what we like to think.
To reach big goals, we have to think really big,
we have to think outside the box,
and we have to bring food production to where we live.
Wait a minute. Outside the box?
Food has always been grown just where people lived
for eleven thousand years.
Only until 100 years ago,
when alongside the rise of trains and transportation,
food was grown elsewhere and brought to our cities.
Not sold at markets anymore,
but in stores and supermarkets spread all over the cities.
And this complete decentralization of food production and distribution
is only possible because a massive amount of resources is put in:
soil and energy.
So to solve this problem, we'll just do what always has been done.
But using today's technology,
by growing locally, we cut out transportation.
By growing vertically, we massively reduce the soil needed
by a factor 50 or even more.
And by growing in intelligently designed, multi-functional buildings,
we massively reduce the energy needed.
We can grow food without or almost without fossil resources.
Our solution, today's solution of vertical farms.
Remember the party I told you about, two years ago?
My friend celebrating was Daniel Podmirseg.
His work is dedicated to vertical farming, and it's groundbreaking.
Daniel is the head of research at the vertical farm institute.
And he has one very strong vision,
urban vertical farming in multi-functional buildings,
integrating urban functions, such as markets, restaurants, offices,
and using sunlight as efficiently as possible.
Call it hybrid system,
stacked greenhouse, hyper building, or simply vertical farm.
What you see here is the blue print of the future of food.
That's not my words,
according to Dickson Despommier, the godfather of vertical farming.
The currently dominant design in indoor farming is a closed system,
controlled environments, 100% LED light,
an environment rather easy to control
because all the disturbing external influences are cut out.
But if we consider not only soil, but also energy, a really scarce resource,
why do we cut out the most precious resource we have, sunlight?
Sunlight, it's a matter of overall energy efficiency,
but it's also a matter of taste.
The deeper we get into plant physiology,
the more we learn about so called secondary metabolites.
Secondary metabolites are organic compounds
not directly involved in the normal growth and development of plants.
Chemical structures adding surplus to the plants, taste among others.
Researchers, by the way, also believe that they are beneficial for human health.
I think you all have eaten a tomato grown in a greenhouse
and tasting of absolutely nothing.
It's those secondary metabolites that add taste,
make our food really good and really healthy.
And as far as we know today,
they need the full range of sunlight in order to develop,
not only ultra violet and red light as provided by LEDs.
So indoor farming as we know it today
is not really a solution, but vertical farming is.
Let me explain to you why,
and let me explain to you why our proposal is so special.
We want to design multi-functional buildings for food production,
buildings that also provide other important functions for and to a city.
And we want to produce as sustainably as possible
by minimizing resource input.
Food production in the heart of the city
opens opportunities for local economy, social life, public life.
We need new market areas, new public spaces to buy the food.
Perhaps, we even watched how the food grew.
Over the last months, weeks, days,
we were looking forward to finally tasting it.
We form a new relationship with what we eat
as we see where and how it was grown.
The black box, as we've seen it. You remember the closed system?
It's easy to control.
It provides very stable conditions
and therefore high predictability of the outcomes.
Economically seen, that might make sense.
But why should we bring the light to the plants
if we could also bring the plants to the light.
This question might seem weird.
But letting in sunlight might be the real game changer in urban farming,
as it leads to more energy efficient production
and better and healthier products.
So in our farms we use sunlight to grow the food.
Wow, what an invention.
Instead of putting lots LED in the farm and turning them on for 16 hours a day,
we grow behind transparent facades,
just as in a greenhouse, simply.
But still, there is one challenge left.
In buildings as huge as ours,
the sunlight does not penetrate the building completely.
So the further away from the facade, the darker it gets inside.
But we have to make sure
that each and every plant receives the same amount of daylight.
And to insure this, we transport the plants through the building,
we deliver the plants to the facade and to the sunlight.
And for this transportation, we use conveyor belts.
Depending on design of the building and a lot of other parameters,
such as geography, surroundings,
those belts might be rotating horizontally,
vertically, or in three dimensions.
In any case, they move really slowly, and they consume very little energy.
Yes, we also do have LEDs in our farm, but they only go on when and where needed,
triggered by photo sensors.
So the overall energy consumption in our farm
is way less than in the black box.
And of course, by letting in sunlight,
we promote the creation of secondary metabolites,
and therefore we produce better and healthier food.
Together with the institute of building and technology at Graz -
of building and energy - sorry - at Graz University of Technology,
we develop what is the future of food,
multi-functional vertical farms in the hearts of our cities.
What we propose here will be the new normal.
It's not today, at least not in Europe.
Japan or China are way ahead of us.
A lot of struggling still lies ahead of us.
Research has to be done and technology has to improve.
We have to create acceptance
for products grown indoor in the hearts of our cities,
and we want to help to raise awareness
in how food and energy depend on each other.
But I am sure vertical farming
plays a crucial part in securing the future of food
and in securing the future of our planet.
And I hope very much that I was able today to plant the seed in your head.
(Applause)