Jonathan Lodge – City Farm Systems
After early years in rural Devon where local food meant milk probably travelled further in the cow than the bottle Jonathan pursued a career in design technology. Steadily focussing on resource efficiency and recognising the increasing pressure along fresh produce supply chains the inspiration for setting up City Farm Systems came when stuck behind a supermarket truck within sight of its destination store. Once instore he found the fresh herb and salad shelves were bare – the store was losing sales, the truck simply adding to congestion and pollution while the shelf life of the produce on board was disappearing.
Recent years have seen Jonathan learn a great deal with City Farm Systems winning awards in most years and has just been declared as Corporate Livewire’s Most Innovative Agri-Tech Business – UK. Along the way Jonathan has become a member of the Institute of Directors. Odd though it may sound for an urban farmer Jonathan and CFS have, by growing without soil, learned a great deal about agriculture as a whole – part of why Jonathan was invited to join the advisory council of the Rural Policy Group.
Jonathan was one of 15 representatives to take part in a Newton Fund sponsored trip to Beijing where he was asked to extend his stay and give a keynote presentation at China Agricultural University’s Conference organised by the Dean of Faculty of their College of Information and Electrical Engineering. He titled his talk ‘Using data to unlock the benefits that can only be found by growing to order at point of need’. This topic has been refined over the last couple of years and, despite the need for what City Farm Systems offer has never been greater, too many are resistant to change and remain committed to failing, complex supply chains.
Jonathan’s lunchtime lecture takes the theme of data forward and highlights how history hints at much needed change and simplified transactions.
Right here good afternoon everybody um can I um firstly welcome you all to this lunchtime lecture of the I agree uh my name is Paul Hemingway and I’m chairing the meeting uh this afternoon can I start by welcoming Jonathan Lodge from City farm systems who’s going to address us today
Um on with some interesting comments I think about the the efficiency um and Asia surrounding production of food and I think probably particularly salad but we’ll get on to that Jonathan was born in Devon in a very rural environment he tells me and in his early career qualified as a deity teacher
Um he he opted out of that for reasons best known to himself and and worked in a variety of public sector roles but there was a common theme there really of elimination of wastage within the sectors with which he worked broadly the Health Service and the police um
He also had a very keen interest in veg gardening and I suppose this this concept of minimizing waste and producing vegetables really led him on to to the career that path that he’s now gone down uh with the result that he’s set up City farm systems uh which he’s
Been been developing over the past few years um I think without further Ado because time is always short at these meetings I’ll now hand over to Jonathan for his address if any of you do have any questions obviously run along uh I’d ask that you please put them in the chat and
We’ll pick them up towards the end of the session Jonathan over to you great thank you good afternoon everybody um it’s hard to believe we’re now six years on from the institutions conference about decarbonizing agriculture my contribution highlighted what we could achieve with data and led on to
Many contributions sorry LED on to my contribution to an academic book about artificial intelligence in our culture it was around that time that Professor Jane Rickman from our president without specialism in soils she asked the question that Set Me On A New Path of learning the more we refine growing
Without soils the better I understand it for agriculture as a whole those six years have seen a lot of hot air devoted carbon but ignoring those who can show The Way Forward too many still increase the need for energy only to hit a crisis point last year
And we’re now at a point where those who know about chat GTP have changed the term to augmented intelligence as in using online information to help us rather than replace us when I spoke to Sarah about today’s event after the August lecture we could see my thinking would make a good
Follow-on to link the two I did think about changing the title to history statistics and nutrition we know there is a need to reduce corporate green washing we certainly need to stop Miss selling in the PV sector Bentley Motors were praised for installing 2.7 megawatts of solar PB of
Other carbox yet angled at five degrees they are never perpendicular to the Sun why should we allow pressure groups to campaign for much needed Farmland to be used PV when the reality is so far from what they claim PV needs to be installed at 40 degrees
To get close to its potential at midday the grass on the lower right show what really happened in August that’s our home installation and almost five hole change from one day to next but if we look closer we can see the output vary from more than one data
Point to the next far more I remember a question at Christmas from a vertical Farm fan asking how many solar panels he would need to deliver the 52 megawatt he expected to use he went very quiet when I showed there was no charts PV could power him through a winter
Then there is carbon solar PV does nothing to remove carbon while regenerative agriculture can rebuild carbon and moisture retention at the 2017 conference nfu’s head of Renewables Jonathan Scurlock showcased grazing sheep around PV as best practice they found no noticeable reduction in Grass growth compared to an open field
Mostly if brass carries on growing through a hot summer when many plants stop growing as they’ll reach 30 degrees two years earlier I had asked him why so many use the fossil fuel overhead rather than sheep to control the weeds a couple of years ago I mentioned this
To the CEO of a Berkshire local Enterprise partnership when talking about the number of PV installations seen alongside the M4 she told me she had been at defra when they removed the ruling that feeding tariffs will not be paid if a land used of solar PV had an additional income
So that’s a classic case of subsidy preventing best practice when I was at the Kent County show in July I saw some of the Machinery used to cut down weeds around Orchard trees and couldn’t help remembering seeing sheep doing that in my childhood and a lot of
Effort has to go into preventing these machines from damaging the tree trunks I can also remember the manager at the duchy of cornwall’s Home Farm talk about how by choice cows would shelter in Woodlands when chewing the cud using one Ben Taylor Davey slides from last year’s conference I also added the
Key point that drives the move for vertical Farms to the Middle East I’ll show later why this is not necessary and give City farm systems a key advantage Mike Barry was still head of plan a for Mark suspensers when during a lockdown webinar he said some Farms are nearing
Is that Net Zero at the farm gate so my work is all based around how this simplistic headline completely ignores the fact that most the cost of our food is added along the supply chain again at the Kent Kent County show I heard yet another accusation that supermarkets are ripping off the consumer
I injected saying that whilst they have many faults in terms of percentages only for us Farmers take less profit profit from our food we need to question why are so many resources not spent growing food we know we wasted or has no nutritional value at the RPGs conference in May baroness
Bennett spoke about the need that the amount of energy needed to produce food she didn’t mention the term but if you look you’ll find discussions about the return on investment for the energy used or eroi historically when the seed Merchants created what we now understood as the
Commercial credit there was as much as a ten to one return with all food being Ultra local over the 20th century that reversed with many taking 10 units for each unit harvested so the revolutions largely enabled by fossil fuels enabled greater distances between farmers and consumers so the eroi deteriorated further and
States in the Middle East that once struggled for food see much of their food air freighted in so a couple of years back we had an intern from uh Cranfield University and one of our one of the interns uncovered the fact that it takes 127 calories to Air Freight a single
Calorie of lettuce vertical Farms are moving to places of low-cost energy but as they abandoned home markets and head for the Middle East they will face Fierce competition their activities are not much better than moving from coal to gas-fired power stations at a time authorities want to ban all fossil fuels
So spending that much to deliver rapidly grown lettuce led me to think about the nutritional values in last week’s rural policy groups red talk about Max mcgillary made some excellent points of the power of Brands and consumer awareness Max mentioned Heinz tomato ketchup so last year some of the retailers refused
To pay the price science wanted so refusing to budge height stood their ground until the retailers saw their customers go elsewhere at that point they agreed to the 50 increase fines are demanded which you can imagine very little that went to the grower so let’s actually start with the history
I start I I used for the title and one of the biggest mistakes is not learning the histories that the lessons history highlights we hear vegans claiming hen VII is dying young is a reason we should stop eating meat but they completely ignore the reality that he lived far longer than expected
And gout is often caused by sugar over the summer an executive head chef in London told us about a conference for 600 people and he faced the request for food issues allergies or intolerances from 120 so that’s 20 or one in fives and yet in France there are hotels that
Don’t see a request for several months at a time so food allergies and intolerances are pretty well uniquely British and we need to look at that so rather than wrote learning your dates for monarchs the school history needs at relevance which I would suggest means the need to teach about life before electricity
Fossil fuels and now not just before the internet but about the time spent dialing numbers on a landline we talk about collaboration and multi-disciplinary approach yet r d funding is segregated into food energy and cities there is pressure to stop the use of fossil fuels yet oil is a starting point
For a huge amount of fashion and contributes to Plastics and oceans and so a return to wool would make both fashion and food far more sustainable so the UK was once able to feed itself with a huge proportion of a albeit much smaller population working in agriculture so it’s the Industrial Revolution
Needing labor and the way to get it was to make farming less labor intensive and the next pair of revolutions saw the introduction of Railways that also enabled the first rapid long distance Communications and a clear route for future telecoms this was the start of feeding a city
Becoming a rigid linear supply chain which of course now is very heavily reinforced by single-use Plastics and then the third agricultural revolution saw a complete break between primary producers and consumers and therefore also the point at which the processes were sucking out all the profits when I talk about data I often compare
It to bees so individually a bee can achieve very little and the same applies from the individual data point we know how valuable bees are in nature vital for pollinating flowers and crops and collectively a swarm of bees can survive a winter pollinate many acres of flowers and create honey
So then we move on to the fourth revolutions when elements of farming and Industry learn the potential enabled by connectivity data was no longer simply about moving from Rolodex cards to electronic memory and onto computers we now had the time and date stamp in primary food production the real
Value of these is seen when a beehive is used to care for and manage a community of bees and we’re only starting to see the full potential of data and we know it could be it could put a stop to fraud such as claims sales of new money far exceeding the maximum possible
However that also means the need for collaboration unfortunately an area where reluctance of food retailers actually sees their data losing its value I can remember going into Morrisons during the lockdown I was asked to eat cheese baps and there were none on the Shelf looking round I saw a gaggle of about
Six people on the floor ranging from the Shelf stacker through to the senior management team and as I peered over them I actually saw the cheese baps I was after and I said excuse me they said oh out of date and again that started me thinking in
Other areas of data and I my first thought was well why aren’t they putting the dates of the expiry of their shelf life on the actual records within their database but then I realized you don’t actually need to the database should be showing that if you have a hundred units
Delivered on a Monday with a five-day shelf life it should it would be a very simple report to come out on Thursday showing they hadn’t sold 50 of them yet and they needed to do something like reduce the price or prepare to get them off the shelf the next day
So there’s so much more that can be done and we need that collaboration and sharing of data when if we look at the typical life of a pig we can see China’s already applied blockchain principles are not only have full face ability but the banks know how
Costs and invoices occur and are happier to finance that supply chain they can trace back from the bacon and show what the value would be at every step of the journey and what the whanau has fed them when they be ready for Slaughter and even the parents to the pig
And in fact they’ve first showcased the um ability of an iPhone to have pig face recognition back in 2018 so there’s huge amounts that can be done with data refused properly I’m so again thinking about the way a city is at the end of a linear supply
Chain we hear a lot about the need for circular economies industry and farming have adopted data and I.T but there’s very little if any connectivity between each link along these overly complex Food Supplies this means Frozen lamb is arriving from New Zealand just as Welsh Lambs heads to
Slaughter unpairs are now arriving from South Africa Spain Belgium and Portugal just as British austrians start harvesting the result is lower market prices that could be avoided we can also see how many crops are harvesting Survivor supply chain rather than for eating and nutritional qualities and this is not and of course these
Supply chains are now heavily enforced with single-use plastics and the experience increasingly expensive techniques designed to increase shelf life yeah quite well fun to think about circularity can be achieved by donating end-of-life foods to the Charities food will never be served there in the sense
Of cradle to cradle or sea to seed after we’ve eaten it looking back to history we can also see the noise about sewage and sea water it’s nothing new as that is how the victorians built their systems to clean up cities we could also say we flush soil Health down the toilet
And I wonder how many sewage overflows are caused by fat bugs the Victorian drains are still we still rely on so heavily we’re not designed to see fats pour down them nobody would have dreamed to wasting such a valuable source of nutrition so this slide is one we use to show why
Collaboration of huge advantages and we have we know food supply chains are overly complex with excessive cash and carbon overheads it was a past director of Tesco who spoke to us about getting a pot of living plants their shelves being 65 of their total cost much of that is need to buy transport
And dispose of Transit only packaging too many don’t recognize as cost of distribution our ability to grow to order at point of need means packaging that is of no interest to Consumer can be totally avoided and in fact in India they’re using rooftop greenhouses to reduce the cost
Of fresh air for Office Buildings so we can turn those into food production facilities and help feed those within the buildings so not only making the building more efficient but actually reducing their food costs and that’s we talk that as consuming scope one emissions to avoid all related
Scope 3 which is a better than net zero solution the majority of us now live in cities are too far away from primary food production yet here we’ve seen City buildings are paying to dump many of the resources needed for intensive Greenhouse production we often hear about the need to invest
In indoor agriculture but we would argue that far too many are failing to address the need to shorten those Supply chains so how smart can a city be if it wastes valuable resources while multiplying the cost of food so that on the top right there the
Handbook of smart cities I was asked to contribute a chapter to that so I called it feeding a smart City we’ve seen some excellent practices by some indoor Growers co-locating with sources of heat and CO2 but they still depend on the traditional business model and cost of distribution
So having said that one does have to wonder how that will ever happen when the department grant chaps used to lead gives us this message I used to share a house with heat and prevent controls engineer and he tells me that most modern most large buildings
In London are paying to dump Heat by midday in winter and all large buildings must pay to dump CO2 whilst many of their indoor grower suppliers I happen to dry and run gas boilers all summer simply create the carbon dioxide their intensive crops need and here’s a key part of the problem
A truck can carry 26 tons of grain and only needs to reserve a small amount of packaging to deliver packed potatoes whilst converting them to crisps a truck can only do the 1.3 tonnes and along with a lot of expensive single-use Packaging so back to the need to feeding a city
And we now have 13 UK cities introducing access charging with a dozen modern planning London needs 17 and a half thousand tons of food to arrive each day but we also know that 6400 of that will be wasted and we also know that London only actually carries enough food for a day
And a half that’s a huge number of vehicles needed if you take a close look at most Supermarket wine the label will tell you that regardless of where it was made it was bottled in Manchester after arriving there in bulk containers this reduces the volume by a factor of
Six and avoids the need to transport glass cardboard and fresh air until that point and while some climate activists are accused of wanting us to return to horse and cart we should also recognize that many cities are so congested that traffic is no longer that fast these points all factor in our thinking
And I can remember it was late last year hearing a Swedish vertical Farm pitching for funds to build the 18 000 square meter facility where they would grow and pack three sadly varieties and all I could think of was that they wanted to recreate the crystal supply chain and
Swap along shelf life crisp for a perishable leaf there are many headline grabbing stories about vertical Farms although a few are starting to show the truth even earlier this year I was at a financial times event in London talking to one of our local reporters sorry lead
Reporters at the bar she spoke about wonderful virtual Farms yet they published a report in 2020 suggesting there was only one making a profit globally it’s shocking that Financial press can have such conflicting articles and put that into perspective most UK vertical Farms are measuring their losses in tens
Of thousands of pounds per week so this is another slide from Ben Taylor Davies and showcases The Madness of over-intensive farming it’s not the operator who makes the profit he made a very good point about the reduction in chemical inputs that could be achieved by regenerative farmer and I
Like to think we can go a stage further and look at the whole supply chain costs so whilst the vertical Farm May reduce food miles why have they chosen to pay city overheads we could install the same capacity on a distribution Depot roof or better still on several custom rooms and avoid the
Need for trucks and trans only Packaging and we like to tell them about the swapping food miles per minutes and meters so collaborating in a city we can work with customers to make the building more efficient our protected IP covers our ability to install an automated Greenhouse with remote monitoring and crop planning
Crops are grown to order at point of need to avoid all costs of distribution and a better match between supply and demand we use mobile truck crop trays moving a wider range of crops past a smaller number of cameras and sensors which allows us to control individual nutrients according to a variety and
Stage of growth and on this little diagram here the middle section has a small propagation area alongside offices or commercial kitchens or educational and research facilities and we can use an automated lift to move between levels and this is a key part of enabling us to use a far wider range of
Age and ability so we could actually have operators working in wheelchairs down at East morning research they are water efficient Technologies or wet Center has noted some significant differences in Strawberry yield from one part of a polytunnel to another and these are down to differences in light and temperature variations during the day
As one of their suppliers told us partly that’s due to their north-south orientation rather than the East-West I think it was David May of Lincoln’s Institute for agricultural technology who mentioned at last week’s red talk that 80 of the labor costs of modern strawberry growing was spent moving through the polytunnels
And this sounds much like parito’s law that 20 is the essential part but the efficiencies will be found in the 80. I’ve had discussions with some involved we’re not yet been able to persuade them they need a fundamental change the need must be to reduce that traveling amongst the plants we
Know cameras and sensors can detect issues long before the human eye when looking at robotics robotics it is much like the complex food supply chains we need to look for the intended outcome which for strawberry grower of course is not to travel between the crops but to
Have picked and packed berries ready for transport with some funding we would soon showcase a strawberry grain facility on the roof of a data center with strawberry plants moving throughout the volume of the greenhouse where the plants would all have similar conditions to avoid the variations seen at the wet Center
The crops move to simpler static Pickers which would avoid the big time lag between picking and packing and I haven’t actually studied it in strawberries but if you go to some of the sweet pepper growers in the Netherlands it can be several hours before picked um sweet peppers can reach the pack house
Foreign this periodic periodic table highlights the individual elements that are essential in biology it also shows a separation of farming practices can be a big problem those who talk of soil is growing as Hydroponics amuse me as all plants with roots grow hydroponically it is the chemistry of dissolved salts in water
And those without soil need to control them more tightly a key Point here of course is the elements are never isolated and the power of chemistry controls compounds and reactions this is why nutrients for Hydroponics are separated into two key concentrates to prevent or slow unwanted reactions
For a healthy human diet we need to understand that plants grow in grown in soils take up other Trace elements coincidentally some of these adding texture and flavor anyone who relies on synthetic fertilizers ignores these additional elements so the more we are encouraged to return to a plant-based diet the less they use
Additional elements are seen and so our diets become less able to keep us healthy and when we look at our need for micronutrients I’ve rarely found anything mentioning lithium yet we know it’s the struggle choice to control bipolar disorders so must be essential and if we look further at the extra 10
Elements we need it doesn’t take long to feel lack of them leads onto most Monday ills unfortunately the abuse of Statistics is where many activists claim these are reasons we should turn to a plant-based diet so picking on two fruit crops the James Hutton Institute were highlighting up
Fruit Focus this year here is a chart showing the chemical makeup one hydroponic nutrient mix does not fit all crops which is why it’s hard for vertical Farm to grow more than salads with electrical conductivity being far too blunt an instrument in our systems we’re making deliver nutrients to suit individual cultivars
And stage of growth so keeping up to date last week when Evans were shown to have won this year’s celebrity MasterChef with a winning main Force having bread of Heavens that includes a slice of bread fried in the lamb juices if we go compare that to the fried slice
For an English breakfast we’ll see one is poor quality bread deep fried in vegetable oil with no sensible level of nutrition comparing that to the other we see many essential nutrients and packed with flavor so we live in a bizarre time with supermarkets selling goose fat for roasting our potatoes and in another
Aisle cans of vegan ghee reading the label shows it to be 80 palm oil so how is that reducing deforestation and loss of wildlife most claim is driven by livestock farming so those of us are old enough can remember the power of positive marking for British agriculture as those agriculture those government
Bodies were sold off agriculture has been the poor relation of corporates who steadily stripped out the profits if these initiatives were rebuilt we might actually see more relevant to r d funding and are much healthier farming sector cool so when someone talks to me about social economies I’m always reminded of
This upside down pyramid and the misguided use of statistics many local authorities boast about the amount of recycled waste typically they say 80 of 70 000 tons collected was recycled but we now know much of that is not actually recycled and again some could be avoided while some waste will never be recycled
So we know that much more can be done to avoid food waste but as the total level of waste dropped the amount recycled could actually be a small total waste so rather than hearing about percentage recycled we really should hear about total amounts going to landfill
So coming back again this is the food Hall in Slough several years back they proudly presented this living wall on the North Face of buildings with lights to Spotlight their green credentials that have now dried up there were only half a dozen plants alive when I took this photo in Spring
So we know an architect who was credited with building Germany’s greenest supermarket in 2014. and that was the start of their Green Building movement he now realizes how much Greener the building could have been if it included one of our food producing greenhouses he also talks about living walls like
This needing to be removed as they Harbor pests and after nesting and hatching their eggs Birds can’t find the food they need for their young one could argue that’s very similar to the problem with bees in areas of monoculture I don’t think the two are connected but
Now Mike Barry is no longer head of plan a for Mark suspensers he’s changed his children and he’s now saying large corporates need to support rather than order their value chain to transforms to burnably and of course that’s not something many are used to he says only those that will do it will
Survive will come out the other side so here are some of our key drivers we can use data to unlock benefits in our case benefits that can only be found by growing to order at point of need we like to think we can offer a carbon-consuming supply chain
Which is a better than net zero solution we talk about it as distributed growing and reducing the need for energy we can actually power one of our greenhouses with a few solar panels through most of the summer and arguably one of the key points here that the failings of a vertical Farm
Is that they talk of being able to grow all year but Overlook the fact that the standard demand halves in a UK winter or disappears in a summer in a hot summer so the hotels and in London don’t have conferences over the whole summer and so they just don’t need it
And at the same time we’ve got traditional Growers hitting peak season so wholesale prices drop so we talk about our cost reduction abilities making health healthy food affordable and hand shelf life to the consumer we also like to think of it as moving Farmers along the value chain
And when you look at the growing educational aspects around that we talk of growing in education with stem so I think that’s a good point to uh hand over to Paul again and ask for any questions okay thank you Jonathan for a very wide-ranging but data filled presentation I must say
It’s just it is slightly spinning with facts I didn’t see any questions yet in the chat so can I just ask clearly you’ve you’ve been preaching this message now for for three four five years I mean you’ve thought about it hugely where do you think the the best opportunities are for matching
The output of a rooftop Greenhouse with the residential capacity or the shopping capacity of the building underneath that greenhouse because you know I’m I’m not a logistics man but I do have a greenhouse and have a fair idea what that will produce in Optimum conditions that’s a very good point thank you
Um our calculations show that half a supermarket roof would enable us to grow more than they could sell of what would really be worth growing locally we’re never going to grow the sweet peppers on at scale on a low pitched roof but we can grow the small crops at the moment we’re focusing
On sort of half a meter in height and uh it’s it’s very interesting one of the key points about strawberries is actually they ripen with the Sun so equally we can look at matching supply and demand more closely so as long this is where Ai and or actually the machine learning aspects
Really come into its own so rather than it the most vertical Farms are trying to grow at Absolute maximum capacity at all times to try and cover some of their costs they never will um and we say that by taking out the costs we can grow more appropriately locally and
AI allows us again this is part of the data sharing aspect and we liken a huge amount of our thinking actually to that of solar PV so the primary benefit is the building below uh because obviously then cut out the cost distribution but if you take short
Cycle crops and Look Backwards you can actually plot a growing cycle and and do very appropriate crop planning and also you can look at varying the crops that you grow to suit what’s needed so again if we were on top of a London hotel we wouldn’t be growing micro herbs through
The summer and we could be growing plants and this is another bug bearer of mine that we always hear r d funding poking at food and all they’re doing is ramming more food into the start of the supply chain and I’m saying but we need to let food out the
Other end of the supply chain and look at what can be achieved and actually balance with you know we don’t only need food we need the other things we need ornamentals and there’s a huge amount of balancing capacity with all the mentals that could be achieved I hope that addresses some of those
Points thank you yes do we have any other questions from any of the audience Jane if we can go to you in Cranfield thank you thanks Jonathan that’s really really interesting can I can I ask a sort of engineering question um it’s the idea that these units would be retrofitted onto existing buildings
And as a supplementary um what about the sort of loading the weight I’m thinking the the water the the vegetation itself probably won’t be very heavy but certainly the growing media and um I’d be really interested in the sort of the engineering building engineering aspect of that has that been
Looked into I’m sure it has very much so thank you yes good to see you Jane um a lot of it is so our protected IP I have patents on how we could if you look at a strawberry facility again they’re tabletop growing and if you actually
Have those as mobile we can mount those on the framing for the polytunnel or Greenhouse so we can actually Point load the all those loadings through to the structural load-bearing points of a steel frame building or other or perimeter buildings uh walls I should say so yes that’s very
Much been thought of uh we can use rainwater harvesting and again some people point at oh well they’ve got air handling units on the roof well thank you very much that’s exactly what we want we want that rainbow to harvesting it yes there are it’s not a total one-size-fits-all obviously but there
Are a huge number of roofs that will take this and there’s ways of achieving it very neatly and again actually what I would really like to see is as we increase the number of installations rather than asking PhD students to actually undertake individual growing trials we could actually take every
Trial they’d like to conceive of and move that in through our spare capacity in some places or even move some of those studies across to real life situations and have a data mining exercise hmm okay and I have there been studies published on that on the sort of technical
Engineering of the building and the facility have there been studies on that looking at load bearing and stuff uh there’s plenty of it actually it’s an interesting point there’s the load-bearing aspect is not so much the weight the bigger issue will actually be wind loading yes yes and funnily enough
Um later this afternoon we’re having a meeting with the building research establishment who would actually quite like us to be based at their um base at Watford and they have been talking uh some of their they have their brilliant standards though it’s the building research attemption environmental
Assessment method I think they call it um and there’s suggestions there that’s retrofitting our systems would actually enable a building to claim Innovation points in their pream in-use standard so yes we’ve we’ve thought about it we thought very hard about it we know a lot
About it and we would love to be working further with Bria with bre and actually giving some of those full-on assessments to prove it um very good thanks Jonathan thank you anybody else I sense that everybody’s John John Steele has his hand up hi daughter so that’s uh I missed the
First part so um I’m hearing you talk very much about commercial properties um one of us all aside or micro like domestic violence and things like that uh and that’s gonna be applied in that direction uh that’s again that’s a very good point thank you um we use a modular approach and two
Meter wide modules and depending on where you want to install it we can start with a single module uh we can move up to several modules with maybe a actual Corridor you can walk along to have the access points uh as you get more we would actually add automation to
Uh have intra module transfer completely automated and we can then carry on and have a what I would love is to work with a supermarket properly and actually have the data handling aspects so we have a lift module on The Big Unit coming down into the retail area
And because we track with RFID because we’ve got to actually keep track of all that data we could actually flag up screens with here’s your your basil will be with you in seconds go get a pizza base or what other related marketing messages okay and housing directly for the Reconstruction by people um
Yeah residential housing would be very good um supermarkets were my point of original inspiration when I got stuck staring at the back of a Tesco truck for 10 minutes with inside of its store and when I got inside the the fresh produce shells are bare um but yeah I mean a residential housing
Block would be perfect and you’d start actually one of the key points about any smart cities not everybody can go to university we need work for some of these people that want more flexible working that want more find working if you like um during the um Kickstart process we
Had one of the lads working for us there who’d come from being a shelf stacker at Tesco and again we have people approaching us love the idea of what we do and then far more appropriate work okay many thanks thank you uh do you do you think that actually this could
Impede some flexibility of supermarkets in terms of their offerings Jonathan because I mean particularly with solid crops which is really where you you seem to be focusing and from a weight point of view that’s a logical place to be you know I mean very clearly the demand
For solid crops on Friday last week with with the coming weekend being hot will be very discernably different from the forecast for solid sales this Friday when it’s going to be much cooler next weekend it’s as simple as that isn’t it you know the weather changes demand for
Solid crops fluctuates broadly if you’re producing yourself when you’re locked in to that production that’s a very good point and it’s one of the things that so a vertical Farm boasts about all year round production at fixed rates and can’t flex and certainly don’t want to because they’ve got such expensive costs
But actual fact we can actually plan for some of that so I for instance strawberries grow according a ripen according to the Sun so if the sun doesn’t shine they’re not ripening as fast and if you’re growing salad crops yeah precisely that I mean you’ve got to plan
Some of it and there are many ways to slow growth so we’ve taken out a huge chunk of cost so we can actually afford to grow more slowly and we can actually use methods to slow growth if you reduce their watering or you reduce the CO2 or
You let them get cooler overnight you can actually slow growth so short-term demand changes you need the weather forecast and work with it but again if it rains this afternoon rather than have you know the supermarkets want a full shelf of salads for a bag holiday and
When it gets wet it’s not just 60 it could be 100 that goes to waste but we have the ability to literally leave it on the roof and it’ll grow for the you do have to build in and plan it correctly but then you can have a wet
Afternoon where you leave it growing and an unexpectedly warm day you bring it down you know tomorrow’s crop is only a few meters away um so again Ai and ml can really enable a better match of supply and demand thank you anybody else yeah but I’ve got a question in the chat
Yeah sorry greenhouses on their roofs and we’ve got examples Tim I think so Tim’s question was have are there any supermarkets within straw greenhouses on their roofs yet uh there have been some small ones trying it um but the bit there are the big supermarkets are some of them have actually identified
Which building we go on first but not yet they don’t want to pay for the first big uh Pilot We have got interest from European retailers and in fact it’s the wife of the German architect uh has links there and again if we can get our full-scale pilot running then there are
Lots of people that really do want it and so a large part of what we’ve been working on is scalability something to actually achieve it rapidly okay thank you William Watley raises a question about you know who’s going to staff where are the technicians going to come from
You know and my observation would be when you look at the general quality of Supermarket plants outside wielding in the sun normally outside the front door you know the supermarkets are not known for their Horticultural prowess are they very true but the biggest point there of course is they don’t really have the
Ability to water them but we could actually bring them down from the roof freshly watered ready to swell uh that’s a very good point about their ornamentals as well how they seem to be what’s the word for it um well showcasing them for others um so you go there see them wilting and
Think it’s time to go to the garden center and get your ornamentals um but fortunately with cameras being able to detect Pest and Z is long before the human eye we can do a lot of that remotely and equally I would argue that there are a lot of people who have
Worked in obscenely overfunded vertical Farms who are Keen to work for us so those that have invested in vertical Farms are actually training our future Workforce yeah um and you don’t need to be on hand at all times so we wouldn’t need an agronomist for individual crops because that can be
Advice given from a central point um but Paul mentioned part of my comment which was quite right um one of the I mean for I designed and installed a rainwater harvesting scheme in a conference center in middle of Birmingham we use collect rainwater off the main roofs store it quite a lot of
It feed it on 10 meters down downstairs to flush the four women’s toilets and it worked very well um we could increase the capacity on collection but that’s another issue so about 5 000 liters a liter of water counting the sewage charging is pretty well nearly four pounds a cubic meter
Um however the big problem is all the stuff on site which is I think probably payroll of about 10. no one has the interest or the technical ability because all Hospitality staff to service it so every six weeks or so I am going in to open up and clean the filters because he
Gets a lot of City Center gets a lot of mug off the roofs um and and the black slogan you know it’s good enough when it reaches the toilet but it’s not because we’re allowed your water bags allow you to use it for flushing toilets so it’s clean
Enough there but the collection system by the time it’s taking the odd bird feather out the filters and stuff um the problem is the servicing of it is technically is compared with leaving seven Trend to open the tap it’s very complicated uh it’s not what you um I think what you’re
Saying is great but is there not something in something in in the message there that you’re making something complicated yes it environmentally good but anyway your comments um well thank you that’s an extra introduction into some of the elements of it um so funny enough we actually work with
Uh an m e engineer who um has been responsible for taking a margin what’s it sorry excuse me I’m taking a major Garden Center off grid and he’s done a lot of work within water as well um yeah I I guess you could argue that’s all all
You’ve spoken about is stuff that needs to be done by the water company currently and perhaps we should value that understand it more when we just think of turning a tap on people just complain um but yeah and if you’re going in six weekly then that’s not a problem we
Would expect to have a similar level of maintenance for various different aspects and overseeing it so that’s a that’s just simply building in the right level of Maintenance and of course many greenhouses are rain water harvesting and they do say if you’ve got the right amount of buffer as you correctly
Recognize there is enough rain water to water a uh a greenhouse of full of tomatoes so there is enough water there it does need to be cared for it does need to be done in the right way and again you could put sensors in there if you’ve got problems it always makes
Me laugh when we hear of people saying oh I’ve got this system it gives me an alarm when something goes wrong and I’m thinking I don’t want an alarm when something’s goes wrong I want a report of when you put it right how you
Put it right and what we could do in the future to avoid the issue um Yeah Tim you’ve asked a question about the efficacy of rooftop solar um well the majority of it isn’t facing the right direction uh intriguingly I was thinking about the other day that
Actually when you think of a field of crops a lot of plants actually orientate their leaves to actually match the Sun and of course the ultimate one for that is the sunflower with its head um yeah solar will not get you through a winter
Uh I think I put on one of the slides no I haven’t when I actually edited to that side the out the claimed 14 gigawatt capacity was actually only delivering five percent of that capacity whereas plants don’t have the same issues and it’s not as simple as the
Amount of sunlight there is all so many other aspects of what a plant needs to grow that can be still carrying on when a cloud passes by okay I guess to add to that actually the comparisons are very very strong in that the primary benefit is the building
Below and the uh so same skill sets method statements and risk assessments for installers would be used and again there are a large number of supermarkets that have given up the idea of PV on their rooftops because they could say they can’t afford the maybe they’ve changed in the last year of course
Um but the amount of strengthening needed to carry those panels so yeah some very interesting comparisons but our our expectations are that we should be able to give a return on investment and half the time of the time of of a PV I have a PV panel right okay yeah okay
Last call then do we have any final question well Jonathan I say it’s five to two now I think everybody’s uh as they say well Jonathan it forced me then to thank you very very much for taking the time both to put the presentation together which
Must have taken some time because it’s I haven’t seen one for quite some time it’s quite so data filled and of course presenting it and answering our questions so ably there’s uh this afternoon so on behalf of the assemble Gathering and the I agree can I thank
You very much indeed for your time thank you