Growing higher

长得更高

New ways to make vertical farming stack up

让“垂直农业”叠起来的新方法

Cultivating fresh produce in an artificial environment is getting cheaper

在人工环境中培育新鲜农产品变得越来越便宜

 

Aug 29th 2019 | INVERGOWRIE

 

FROM THE outside it looks like a tall, metal-clad barn. But step in, through a large airlock designed to keep out the bugs, and a kaleidoscopic scene emerges. A central aisle is flanked by two pairs of towers. Each tower is stacked with a dozen or so trays on which are growing strawberries, kale, red lettuce and coriander. And each tray is bathed in vibrant light of different colours, mostly hues of blue and magenta. Douglas Elder, who is in charge of this artificial Eden, taps some instructions into an app on his mobile phone and, with a short whirr of machinery, a tray of lush, green basil slides out for his inspection.

从外面看，它看起来像一个高大的金属包裹的谷仓。但是，通过一个设计用来阻挡虫子的大气闸，一个万花筒似的场景出现了。中央通道两侧有两对塔楼。每座塔上都堆放着十几个托盘，托盘上种着草莓、甘蓝、红生菜和香菜。每个托盘都沐浴在充满生机五彩斑斓的灯光下，大多数色调为蓝色和洋红色。负责这个人造伊甸园的道格拉斯·埃尔德(Douglas Elder)把一些指令输入他手机上的一个应用程序，机器发出短暂的嗡嗡声，一盘郁郁葱葱的绿色罗勒（一种蔬菜）滑了出来，供他检查。

词汇

Kaleidoscopic/千变万化的；万花筒似的

Kale/羽衣甘蓝

Lettuce/生菜；莴苣

Coriander/芫荽，香菜

Magenta/洋红色的；品红色的

Vibrant/充满生机的，生气勃勃的

Whirr/  呼呼声；心烦

Basil/罗勒属植物；紫苏

Mr Elder is product manager for Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a “vertical farming” company based at Invergowrie, near Dundee, in Scotland. Each of the nine-metre-high towers in the demonstration unit that he runs occupies barely 40 square metres. But by stacking the trays one on top of another an individual tower provides up to 350 square metres of growing area. Using his phone again, Mr Elder changes the colours and brightness of the 1,000 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) strung out above each tray. The app can also control the temperature, humidity and ventilation, and the hydroponic system that supplies the plants, growing on various non-soil substrates, with water and nutrients. Armed with his trusty phone, Mr Elder says he can run the farm almost single-handedly.

埃尔德先生是智能生长解决方案公司(IGS)的产品经理，这是一家位于苏格兰邓迪附近因弗高利的“垂直农业”公司。在他管理的示范单位中，9米高的塔楼每座仅占40平方米。但是通过将托盘一个叠一个，一个独立的塔可以提供350平方米的种植面积。埃尔德先生再次使用手机，改变了每个托盘上方1000个发光二极管(led)的颜色和亮度。该应用还可以控制温度、湿度和通风，以及为生长在各种非土壤基质上的植物提供水分和养分的水培系统。埃尔德先生说，有了可靠的手机，他几乎可以独自经营农场。

词汇

Invergowrie/

 

Plant power

（该词最主要释义是工厂供电，这里大概理解为植物能耗研究吧）

Vertical farming of this sort is not, of itself, a new idea. The term goes back to 1915, though it took a century for the first commercial vertical farms to be built. But the business is now taking off. SoftBank, a Japanese firm, Google’s former boss Eric Schmidt and Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos have between them ploughed more than $200m into Plenty, a vertical-farming company based in San Francisco. And in June Ocado, a British online grocery, splashed out £17m ($21.3m) on vertical-farming businesses to grow fresh produce within its automated distribution depots.

这种垂直农业本身并不是一个新概念。这个词可以追溯到1915年，尽管第一个商业垂直农场花了一个世纪才建成。但是这项业务现在正在快速发展。日本软银，谷歌的前老板埃里克·施密特和亚马逊的创始人杰夫·贝佐斯已经向位于旧金山的垂直农业公司Plenty投资了2亿多美元。今年6月，英国在线杂货公司Ocado花费1700万英镑(2130万美元)在垂直农业上，在其自动化配送仓库中种植新鲜农产品。

词汇

splash out/挥霍

 

The interest of investors is growing just as technology promises to turn vertical-farming operations into efficient “plant factories”. The high-tech LEDs in IGS’s demonstration unit are optimised so that nary a photon is wasted. The hydroponics, and the recycling that supports them, mean the only water lost from the system is that which ends up as part of one of the plants themselves. And towers mean the system is modular, and so can be scaled up. Most of the systems which IGS hopes to start delivering to customers early next year will consist of ten or more towers.

正当技术有望将垂直农业转变为高效的“植物工厂”时，投资者的兴趣正在增长。IGS演示单元中的高科技led灯经过优化，因此不会浪费任何光子。水培法，以及支持水培的循环利用，意味着唯一从系统中流失的水，最终成为植物本身的一部分。塔意味着系统是模块化的，因此可以扩大规模。IGS希望明年初开始交付给客户的大部分系统将由10座或更多的发射塔组成。

词汇

Nary/连……也没有的

Photon/光子；辐射量子

Modular/模块化的；模数的

 

Some people, however, remain sceptical about how much vertical farms have to offer that good-old-fashioned greenhouses do not. Vertical farms are certainly more compact—a bonus in places like cities where land is expensive. Since sales of fresh produce to the urban masses are often touted as one of vertical farming’s biggest opportunities, that is important. But a greenhouse gets its light, and much of its heat, free, courtesy of the sun. And modern greenhouses can also use solar-powered supplementary LED lighting to extend their growing seasons and hydroponic systems to save water, says Viraji Puri, co-founder of Gotham Greens, an urban-farming company that operates greenhouses on the roofs of buildings in New York and Chicago. As for food miles, they could not get any shorter for Gotham Greens’s rooftop greenhouse in Brooklyn, which supplies the Whole Foods Market located downstairs.

然而，有些人仍然怀疑垂直农场能提供多少传统温室无法提供的东西。垂直农场当然更紧凑——在土地价格昂贵的城市，这是一个额外的好处。由于向城市大众销售新鲜农产品经常被吹捧为垂直农业的最大机遇之一，这一点很重要。但是温室的光线和大部分热量都来自太阳，是免费的。纽约和芝加哥的城市农业公司Gotham Greens的联合创始人普里(Viraji Puri)说，现代温室还可以使用太阳能补充LED照明来延长生长季节，并使用水培系统来节水。至于食品里程，没有哪个温室能够比位于布鲁克林哥谭镇格林一家的屋顶温室提供更便捷的服务，这个温室能够为楼下的全食超市供给食品。

词汇

Tout/兜售

 

The biggest drawback of vertical farming is the high cost of the electricity required to run the large number of LEDS. This has meant that production has been commercially viable for high-value, perishable produce only, such as salad leaves and herbs. That, nevertheless, is a market not to be sniffed at. But for a broader range of produce, it can prove too expensive. In 2014 Louis Albright, an emeritus professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University in America, calculated that a loaf of bread made from wheat grown in a vertical farm would be priced at about $23.

垂直农业最大的缺点是运行大量LED灯所需的高成本电力。这意味着生产高价值、易腐烂的产品在商业上是可行的，比如沙拉叶子和草药。然而，这是一个不容小觑的市场。但对于更广泛的农产品来说，它可能过于昂贵。2014年，美国康奈尔大学(Cornell University)生物与环境工程荣誉退休教授路易斯·奥尔布赖特(Louis Albright)计算出，用垂直农场种植的小麦制成的面包，售价约为23美元。

词汇

Viable/可行的；能养活的

Perishable/易腐烂的，易变质的

 

Blue is the colour

要的就是蓝色

One way of saving electricity is to use LEDs that generate only the colours that plants require, instead of the full spectrum of plain white light. Plants are green because their leaves contain chlorophyll, a pigment that reflects the green light in the middle of the spectrum while absorbing and using for photosynthesis the blue and red wavelengths at either end of it.

一种节约电能的方法是使用只产生植物所需颜色的LED灯，而不是产生全光谱的普通白光。植物之所以是绿色的，是因为它们的叶子含有叶绿素。叶绿素是一种色素，可以反射光谱中间的绿光，同时吸收光谱两端的蓝色和红色波长，并将其用于光合作用。

词汇

Spectrum/  光谱；频谱

Chlorophyll/叶绿素

Pigment/色素；颜料

Photosynthesis/  光合作用

 

The vertical farm at Invergowrie takes this idea further. It uses LEDs that are highly tuneable. Although the lights produce mostly blue and red wavelengths, researchers now know that other colours play an important role at various stages of a plant’s development, says David Farquhar, IGS’s chief executive. A dose of green at an appropriate moment produces a higher yield. A timely spot of infrared can improve the quality of foliage. The lights can also produce various blue/red mixes.

因弗高里的垂直农场将这一理念进一步发扬。它使用了高度可调的LED灯。IGS的首席执行官大卫·法夸尔说，尽管这些光主要产生蓝色和红色波长，但研究人员现在知道，在植物发育的不同阶段，其他颜色发挥着重要作用。在适当的时候给予一定的绿光会产生较高的产量。适时的红外光斑可以提高叶片的品质。这种灯还可以创造各种蓝色/红色的混合光照。

词汇

tuneable/可协调的

foliage /植物；叶子

 

To operate these LEDs efficiently, the company has developed a low-voltage power-distribution system. This, says Mr Farquhar, can cut energy costs to about half of those incurred by existing vertical farms. As a result, all four towers can produce 15-25 tonnes a year of herbs, salad leaves, fruit and vegetables. This, the company claims, is between two and three times more than a conventional greenhouse with an equivalent but horizontal growing area, and equipped with supplementary lighting and heating, could manage. And the system can grow all this produce at a similar cost-per-kilogram.

为了有效地运行这些LED灯，该公司开发了一个低压配电系统。法夸尔表示，这可以将现有垂直农场的能源成本削减一半左右。因此，这四个塔每年可以生产15-25吨的草药、沙拉叶、水果和蔬菜。该公司声称，这是传统温室的两到三倍，而传统温室的面积与之相当，但他们可以做到水平生长，并配备了补充照明和供暖。而且该系统可以以每公斤相似的成本种植所有这些农产品。

词汇

Incur/招致；遭受

Supplementary/补充的；追加的

 

One of the jobs of the Invergowrie unit is to develop lighting regimes tailored to individual crops. Another is to develop algorithms to control, in an equally bespoke way, the climatic conditions preferred by different crops. The idea is to design crop-specific weather “recipes” in order to boost the yield and quality of whatever varieties are grown in the vertical farm. All the processes involved are engineered to be efficient. Irrigation, for instance, relies on captured rainwater. This is cleaned and recycled, but only 5% gets used up by each harvest—and most of that as the water-content in the plants themselves. Ventilation is also a closed loop, harvesting surplus heat from the LEDs while managing humidity and oxygen levels.

Invergowrie单位的工作之一是开发适合于不同作物的照明系统。另一个是开发算法，以同样定制的方式控制不同作物偏好的气候条件。其理念是设计特定作物的天气“配方”，以提高垂直农场种植的任何品种的产量和质量。所有涉及的过程都被设计成高效的。例如，灌溉依赖于收集的雨水。这是清洁和回收，但只有5%的使用，每一次收获——其中大部分作为水的含量在植物本身。通风也是一个闭环，从LED照明中获取多余的热量，同时控制湿度和氧气水平。

词汇

Tailor/专门制作，订做；调整

Bespoke/定做的，定制的

 

By reducing running costs, the system should make it profitable to grow a wider variety of produce vertically. The firm has already succeeded with some root vegetables, such as radishes and baby turnips. Bulk field crops, such as wheat and rice, may never make sense for a vertical farm, and larger, heavier vegetables would be tricky to raise. This means full-grown potatoes are probably off the menu, at least with existing technology.

通过降低运营成本，该系统应该使垂直种植更多品种的农产品有利可图。该公司已经成功地推出了一些根茎类蔬菜，如红萝卜和小白萝卜。大田作物，如小麦和大米，可能永远不适合垂直农场，更大、更重的蔬菜将很难种植。这意味着完全成熟的土豆可能不在菜单上，至少在现有技术下是这样。

词汇

Radish/萝卜，小萝卜（尤指酒红色的）

Turnip/白萝卜

 

Seed potatoes, though, are a good candidate, says Colin Campbell, head of the James Hutton Institute, a plant-science research centre backed by the Scottish government. It is based next door to IGS and works with the company. Many fields around the world, Dr Campbell observes, are suffering a growing burden of pests and disease, such as potato-cyst nematode. In the controlled environment of a vertical farm, from which both pests and diseases can be excluded, seed potatoes could be propagated more efficiently than in the big, bad outdoor world. This would give them a head start when they were planted out in fields.

然而，由苏格兰政府支持的植物科学研究中心【James Hutton Institute】的负责人Colin Campbell说，土豆种子是一个很好的选择。该研究中心位于IGS的隔壁，与IGS合作。坎贝尔博士观察到，世界上的许多领域正遭受着害虫和疾病带来的的日益沉重的负担，比如马铃薯囊肿线虫。在垂直农场的受控环境中，害虫和疾病都可以被排除在外，种薯可以比在大而恶劣的室外环境中更有效地繁殖。这将使他们在种植到野外时有一个良好的开端。

词汇

Nematode/线虫，线虫类

 

The institute’s researchers are also looking at plant varieties that might do particularly well indoors, including old varieties passed over in the search for crops which can withstand the rigours of intensive farming systems. By dipping into the institute’s gene banks, Dr Campbell thinks it may find some long-forgotten fruits and vegetables that would thrive in the security of a vertical farm.

该研究所的研究人员还在研究可能在室内表现特别好的植物品种，包括在寻找能够承受集约化农业系统的苛刻条件的作物过程中被淘汰的老品种。坎贝尔博士认为，通过研究该研究所的基因库，他们可能会发现一些被遗忘已久的水果和蔬菜，它们会在垂直农场的安全环境中茁壮成长。

词汇

Rigour/严格；严厉；苛刻；精确

 

All this could go down well with foodies, and unlock new and forgotten flavours. Shoppers might even find some exotic varieties growing in supermarket aisles. In Berlin a company called Infarm provides remotely controlled shelved growing cabinets for shops, warehouses and restaurants. Herbs and salad leaves, including exotics such as Genovese basil and Peruvian mint, are resupplied with seedlings from the company’s nursery as the mature plants are picked.

所有这些都可能受到美食家们的欢迎，并解锁新的或是被遗忘的味道。购物者甚至可能在超市的过道里发现一些生长在国外的品种。在柏林，一家名为Infarm的公司为商店、仓库和餐馆提供远程控制的生长柜。在采摘成熟的植物时，公司会从苗圃里重新提供药草和沙拉叶子，包括奇异植物，如吉诺维斯罗勒和秘鲁薄荷。

词汇

go down well with/受……欢迎

Aisle/通道，走道；侧廊

 

Vertical farming then will not feed the world, but it will help provide more fresh produce to more people. It may even be that, as vertical-farming systems improve further, miniature versions will be designed for people to put in their kitchens—thus proving that there is nothing new under either the sun or the LED. Such things used once to be called window boxes.

届时，垂直农业或许无法养活世界，但它将帮助更多的人获得更多的新鲜农产品。甚至有可能，随着垂直农业系统的进一步完善，微型农业系统将被设计成供人们放进厨房的样子，从而证明这无论是在阳光下还是LED光照下都并非新鲜事。而这样的东西曾经被称为窗口框。