Vertical farming is changing the world one crop at a time. As processes improve, innovations have begun to yield interesting opportunities to improve health, nutrition, and longevity.
Adapting Dietary Needs by Growing Specialty crops
Alongside clean and flavorful food, there has been a call for and want for ingredients tailored to particular nutritional desires.
Tamagawa University has performed studies alongside Prime Delica, CCS, and Signify to decide the optimal “light recipes” to increase the vitamin levels and dietary value of lettuce. Dr. Céline Nicole from the Philips Lighting Research group has further studied the results of the daily light integral (DLI) and light quality on the nitrate levels of arugula and spinach, alongside the vitamin C levels of arugula and tomatoes.
Through vertical farming, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has additionally effectively produced low potassium kale with elevated glucosinolate content as a unique nutritional choice for renal dysfunction patients.
Growing ingredients with tailored nutritional needs should accordingly make a world of difference in making sure that we acquire extra control over our diets, and permit us to design food-as-medicine alternatives to traditional produce.
Food Safety
By using controlled growing environments, vertical farms are inherently free of harmful pesticides. With the introduction of biological controls, there is no need to contaminate plants with potentially toxic chemicals.
According to the CEA Food Safety Coalition, “Traditional food safety risk profiles associated with conventional agriculture include studying the physical and microbial hazards of the use of water, herbicides and pesticides, and the effects of animals and animal by-products. Manufacturers of CEA are not affected in the same way, if at all. “Although the risk of contamination within CEA facilities is not zero, CEA agricultural products have a lower risk of such occurrences
Compared to traditional field based crops, the EPA regulates pesticides individually and not as a collective, meaning that pesticides can have a cumulative toxic load to human health.