Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA): How Indoor Farming Supports Land Conservation

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA): How Indoor Farming Supports Land Conservation

Plants need space to grow. Regardless of whether food comes from an open field, greenhouse, or indoor facility, it is ultimately connected to the land on which it’s produced. Moreover, unlike many other inputs that plants need — like sunlight and water — land is not a renewable resource.

Globally, agricultural land makes up 38% of all global land surface . Of this 38%, only one-third is used to grow crops, limiting the land available for increasing crop production. Additionally, out of all global land, 40% has been moderately to severely degraded due to climate change and unsustainable agricultural practices. We must, therefore, turn towards new solutions and strategies that preserve and make good use of our farmable areas.

At Crop One, one such solution to land consumption that we’re implementing is Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) . CEA encompasses a variety of controlled environment growth, including indoor farming, aeroponics, hydroponics, and vertical farming technologies. These technologies allow us to grow crops year-round while minimizing arable land requirements. Let’s take a closer look at the struggles being faced within conventional field farming to better compare it to CEA when it comes to land conservation.

Conventional Farming and Land Use

What comes to mind when you hear the word, “Farm”? You might imagine an urban community plot, a mom-and-pop parcel with cows and a red barn, or a massive field that splays out for acres. These are accurate depictions, but when we’re discussing large-scale food production, the latter closely resembles our current food system in the US. Over the past several decades, enormous agribusinesses have consolidated more and more acreage, with the midpoint for harvested acreage from 1987 to 2017 increasing up to 68%. And, at the end of the day, most of the food that we eat in the US is derived from this type of large-scale agricultural producer.

As such, there are some negative aspects of conventional farms’ land usage patterns that are worth noting; these include growing horizontally, overutilizing farmland, polluting other viable sources of land, and neglecting best practices for land conservation. To offer insight into how these aspects differ from the beneficial qualities of CEA methods, let's discuss each and explain the value of CEA.

Horizontal Growing

The most obvious land-related observation about conventional farms is that they generally grow crops horizontally, and in one layer in the ground. Subsequently, their growing space is limited to the square footage present in one plane.

To visualize this constraint, imagine a company constructing office space for its employees in a crowded city. If the number of employees in this office will be low, then it likely won’t be an issue to build a small, single-floor space that holds everyone. However, if it’s a large company with many employees, then the office building will either need to stretch out quite wide to accommodate the workers, taking up a large area and requiring expensive real estate, or it will be built upwards, like a skyscraper, placing the workers on many separate floors to reduce the overall footprint.

Though the complexities of urban real estate are obviously understated here, the end result with agriculture is essentially similar. Growing a vast number of crops has traditionally necessitated that farms expand their fields horizontally. In areas where the amount of available agricultural space is limited, land, therefore, becomes a crucial limiting factor to the economic and environmental viability of building a farm that can produce more food.

Exhaustion of Farm Land

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for conventional farms to overutilize farmland. Over-utilization entails instances in which arable land is handled to a point where crops require excessive resources to grow and retain nutritional value.?

This occurs because the agriculture industry has historically gravitated toward unsustainable planting, harvesting, and maintenance patterns — designed to maximize yield at all costs. One such pattern is the widespread application of synthetic fertilizers, which temporarily provide the chemicals needed for plants to grow, while ultimately leaching nutrients from the ground and degrading topsoil. Other negligent practices, such as mono-crop planting or neglecting to rotate crop fields and animal grazing schedules have also contributed to an operating methodology that is based on extraction, rather than the renewal and ongoing health of the land being farmed.

Subsequently, when we possess a limited and nonrenewable resource that provides us with something so valuable as nutritious food, you would believe that we would want to maintain it more responsibly.

Neglecting Best Practices for Land Conservation

To combat the historical patterns of land abuse that have been systemically implemented throughout the agricultural industry, several organizations , including the USDA and EPA , have published Agricultural Best Management Practices for Land and Water Conservation (BPMs). BPMs lay out the strategies and routines that farmers can use to preserve the sustainability of their land, in order to ensure healthy farms for years to come.

BPMs include some of the following practices: conservation tillage, crop nutrient management, grazing management, and erosion and sediment control, among other behaviors. Primarily, these actions are aimed at keeping nutrients in place, protecting surrounding areas from fertilizer and pesticide runoff, conserving soil, and minimizing the impact of raising animals on nearby land. Although BPMs are encouraged, and even incentivized by the government, there are minimal requirements to enact such practices.

Once again, we’re left wondering — what will be the catalyst for enacting change, short of the inevitable inability to effectively grow food if these actions are not taken in the near future.

The Role of Urbanization, Pollution, and Climate Change on Farmable Land

Even land that isn’t currently farmed has its growing potential threatened by other human-caused factors. Urbanization, for instance, is one concern. As population centers grow, and surrounding areas become developed, areas that may have been able to be used for agriculture are now being used to support these residences. The impact of this outward expansion has not been cited as a significant source of land reduction each year , but what could be significant is the rising demand for food in areas that may not have the capacity to scale local agricultural expansion in tandem.

Pollution is yet another facet that endangers our dwindling supply of land. Conventional agriculture requires healthy soil composition. When chemical plants, Contained Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), or even other farms allow their waste to spread onto nearby plots or the waterways that farms draw from, arable land might be irreparably damaged for a lifetime or longer .

Lastly, climate change from greenhouse gas emissions also generates imminent threats to our farmland. As global temperatures rise, water tables that feed into our agricultural land may dry out, causing drought, or be salinized by rising sea levels. A number of other factors including acidified soils, wind erosion, soil structure, and organic matter levels all also contribute to potential issues of wide-scale land degradation .

As we’ve seen, land degradation is a serious issue. Yet, the demand for crops is simultaneously projected to increase 100–110% between 2005 and 2050 to account for the growing world population. Given this, and our discussed factors that contribute to the decline of available growing space, it’s hard to overemphasize the importance of land.

Crop One is committed to reducing our environmental impact where possible and cultivating a sustainable future. If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of Controlled Environment Agriculture, stay tuned for our next LinkedIn article . This article will highlight the crucial differences for land conservation that hydroponics utilize and our unique approach to food production.

Originally published at freshboxfarms.com on August 23, 2017.

Updated May 2022.