8 years ago I did a research project that required me to have a look at the future of intensive horticulture. As a part of that project I spent a month in the UK looking at what was happening, and was astonished to see the beginning of a production ‘flip’.
Horticulture is relatively intense compared to other forms of farming, but it still required lots of land, water, and labor. In the UK I discovered technology was in the early stages of taking over. Innovators had ‘flipped’ the model and were producing vegetables in capital and IT intensive greenhouses. The day I visited one of the leaders, Barfoots of Botley in 2010, they were completing the commissioning of the first 3 anaerobic digesters at their main farm in Sussex, using the green waste from produce grown in greenhouses which was already powering the indoor growing beds and packing shed.
In the 8 years since, the progress has been amazing. AeroFarms in the US has attracted significant venture funding, and is one of those changing the face of agriculture by bringing it back to where the population lives, and Barfoots has expanded geometrically.
In Australia we have very few examples of this sort of innovation. One is Green Camel farms at Cobbitty on Sydney’s southern outskirts, which has combined greenhouse production of organic herbs and tomatoes with an aquaculture infrastructure producing barramundi in a closed loop system.
The point is that agriculture, like all other industries is being disrupted by technology in ways almost unforeseeable a decade ago.
Technology and capital intensity is replacing scale as the defining feature of success.
Lean Manufacturing seeks ever smaller production runs delivering an even flow of finished product matched to customer demand, as it evolves, eliminating WIP and finished goods inventories while delivering customer specific finished products with minimum lead times.
The days of huge integrated manufacturing plants cranking out product at volume to reduce costs by finding the economies of scale are gone.
Equally, production volumes from thousands of acres of open farmland will be replaced by a vertical capital intensive farm in a disused warehouse somewhere in the inner city, close to consumers. Bit hard with livestock, but what are feedlots if not capital intensive small footprint farms?
Irrespective of the manufacturing environment, and I see agriculture as just another form of manufacturing, with inputs, WIP, risks, lead times, and all the rest, ‘de-scaled’ manufacturing will become the model our grandchildren will be familiar with. They will probably also be making engine parts in their bedrooms on desktop printers, it will be as normal as CAD software is today.
Header photo: Aerofarms towers
PS. After reading the post, a friend in the business sent me this link to the Panasonic vertical farm in Singapore. The more I dig around, the more convinced I become of the speed and volume of changes about to hit the supply chains of horticulture.
