Vegetable Grower News interview with project principal investigator Neil Mattson:
What’s been your focus this year about CEA and Urban Farming?
A key project has been a collaboration between our CEA group and Cornell economists Charles Nicholson and Miguel Gómez. Together we’ve produced a report focused on the economic and environmental footprint and viability to scale urban farming.
We looked at scenarios of producing leafy greens locally in New York and Chicago. For each city our three scenarios were:
- Field production in CA and shipping to the city
- Greenhouse production in a hypothetical facility with 1-acre crop canopy
- Vertical farm production in a hypothetical warehouse facility with 1-acre crop canopy
In the New York City scenarios we considered CEA production in the middle of the city and, in the Chicago scenario, peri-urban CEA production about 50 miles outside the city.
The comparison led to some interesting discussion points around bottlenecks and priorities for the sector to scale. I’ll share more on that below, and in my presentation at the summit.
Aside from that important study, from a plant-science standpoint, Cornell CALS has also continued its work to improve energy-efficient leafy greens, tomatoes and strawberries using LED lighting strategies and CO2 enrichment to photosynthesize through its Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering (GLASE) research efforts.
We’re also collaborating with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to understand the nutritional content of CEA-grown kale vs field-grown kale.