Vertical Farming to Improve UK Food System Resilience (VF-UKFSR)

Overview

Our changing environment, political unrest and the threat of further pandemics all place risk on how we ensure continued access to high-quality nutritious food. Vertical farming (VF) is a means of producing food in a totally controlled environment utilising soilless technology and artificial lighting. This innovative approach to agriculture offers an additional tool to increase UK food system resilience, through higher yields, greater land- and resource-use efficiency, year-round production and a decoupling from weather systems. This project is using a whole-system approach to quantify how VF can address key vulnerabilities in the UK food system, whilst co-creating a pathway for innovators to fulfil this potential.

Project aims

The impact of climate change is the biggest medium- to long-term risk for UK domestic food production. This is not limited to the UK, but also affects global food supply chains, upon which we are heavily reliant. Relying on imports brings associated risks from volatilities in energy prices, global conflict or civil unrest, all impacting both food supply and prices. There is fierce debate about the future of food and farming policy: how do we strike a balance between biodiversity, food security and Net Zero goals, in the face of competition for land from renewable energy, land-based greenhouse gas removal, and urbanisation/development. With the UK at its highest ever level of risk, and a food system which is precariously balanced, there is a pressing need to understand how to sustainably increase domestic production on land which suffers the impacts of climate change and is in competition with other uses.

Vertical Farming (VF) can help overcome such challenges. The project focuses on the supply of nutritious leafy greens, essential for a healthy diet and the main foodstuff currently cultivated in VF. We will also seek to understand how VF can supply local, diverse and culturally appropriate foodstuffs given the technical ability to cultivate a much wider range of crops. To date, there has not been such detailed mapping of the cascading risks facing the supply of leafy greens in the UK, nor a detailed interrogation of the benefits/trade-offs VF can offer to the UK food system, nor a roadmap to exploit this potential at scale.

Project outputs will be co-created with farmers, industry, government and the community to ensure a focus on real-life and immediate benefits. The research objectives are:

To map and quantify current and future risks in the UK food system, and how VF can address these.
To develop an open access, spatially explicit decision-making tool to quantify the impacts of VF expansion on food supply, land sparing potential, environmental impacts and socio-economic benefits/trade-offs, and to optimise the expansion of VF through a whole-systems approach
To create a comprehensive framework of social conditions under which transition towards VF can be achieved
To co-create a resilience framework, along with a policy and industry-relevant roadmap to support VF expansion in the UK.

What is vertical farming (VF)?

VF is a means of producing food in a totally controlled environment utilising soilless technology and artificial lighting. It can increase UK food system resilience through higher yields, more efficient use of land and resources, year-round production and a decoupling from weather systems.

Get in touch

Led by Dr Zoe Harris, Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Surrey, we are collaborating with leading academic and industry partners and are seeking further experts to contribute to project outcomes.

If you are a farmer, food system researcher, agri-tech expert or interested in shaping future policy, please get in touch.

Contact John Williamson, Project Coordinator at john.williamson@surrey.ac.uk.

Team

The project is led by Dr Zoe Harris, Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability, Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainability at the University of Surrey. She is supported by an interdisciplinary team made up of whole-system, environmental and social scientists from the Universities of Surrey, Aberdeen and Sussex, supported by UK Urban AgriTech (industry association) and five farm partners (FlexFarming, Innovation Agritech Group, Farm Urban, GrowPura, LettUs Grow).

Principal investigator

Dr Zoe Harris

Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability, Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainability

Biography

Zoe’s core research focuses on how we can use land to provide food and energy provisions whilst minimising environmental impacts. She is currently assessing the feasibility of vertical farming and the potential it has to support the deployment of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

Zoe leads the high profile Taeda Tech Project, a £4m interdisciplinary demonstration project looking at using a novel aeroponic technology to rapidly multiply biomass feedstocks. She has also recently kicked off the Vertical Farming to Improve UK Food System Resilience (VF-UKFSR) project assessing how vertical farming can increase UK food system resilience.

Beyond Surrey, Zoe has a significant international profile with notable positions in the International Energy Agency Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme. Representing the UK, Zoe is Head of Communications of the IEA Bioenergy Executive committee. Zoe also acts as the National Task Lead for the UK for Task 45 In this role she represents the UK research landscape and develops collaborative research for “Climate and Sustainability Effects of Bioenergy within the broader Bioeconomy”.

Zoe also has interests in the role of gender in the energy sector and is founder of the IVUGER network, which aims to support women and BAME women in UK energy research. She has undertaken work into the role of job advert wording on applicant diversity and has a new project assessing the role of diversity in decisions making for transport decarbonisation in Bradford.

Zoe is a keen science communicator and professionally trained actor. She uses her theatre training to deliver workshops on how scientists can better communicate their research.

Prior to joining CES, Zoe was a Research Fellow, and Research Associate, at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London. She has worked in DEFRA as a Science Officer assessing GHG mitigation options for agriculture, and in BEIS and DfT as a Policy Adviser on the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). Zoe completed her PhD and BSc Biology at the University of Southampton.

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Co-investigators

Dr Alex Penn

Senior Research Fellow

Biography

Alexandra Penn is a complexity scientist working on combining participatory methodologies and mathematical models to create tools for stakeholders to understand and “steer” their complex human ecosystems. As a research fellow at the University of Surrey she has developed participatory complexity science methodologies for decision makers to explore interdependencies between social, ecological, economic and political factors in “industrial ecosystems”; in particular, looking at the transition to bio-based economy in a region of heavy industry and fossil fuel energy generation in the Humber Estuary, UK. She is a principal member of the new “Centre for Evaluating Complexity across the Nexus” (energy-environment-food), CECAN, a collaboration between academics, policy professionals and the UK government to generate novel, cutting-edge methods for evaluating policy for complex systems. In this role she has led CECAN-Defra co-produced work on using participatory systems mapping to develop new complexity-appropriate policy for the future farming and countryside domain.

She is currently working with friends and colleagues at Surrey and all over the world to develop a new Participatory Steering of Complex Adaptive Systems research network, to develop new participatory complexity science tools, philosophy and practical projects to address urgent societal challenges.

Alex has an academic background in physics and evolutionary ecology, training at Sussex University and as a junior fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, followed by a Life Sciences Interface fellowship in the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group, University of Southampton. She is also a strong inter-disciplinarian, with a track record of working across disciplines, with a broad variety of stakeholders from policy makers to industrialists and with members of the public as a science communicator.

She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for her work in novel application of whole-systems design to bacterial communities and is a member of the board of directors and Chair for Societal Impact of the International Society for Artificial Life.

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