Climate change could give indoor farming a boost

As climate change does its thing to America, what it is going to do to the nation’s food supply is still an open question. Will California’s Central Valley, which grows a third of the produce eaten in the U.S., wither into a vegetable ghost town? Will other locations pick up the slack? Or will agriculture just take a look at the harsher droughts, crazier storms, and prolific insects that the future has in store and move indoors?

It’s this indoor farming future that Allison Kopf, founder and CEO of the agricultural technology startup Agrilyst, is curious about. In an indoor farm, water doesn’t inconveniently evaporate. LED lights can lengthen the hours of sunlight so plants can grow faster. CO2 levels can be tweaked. Even as the weather outside goes haywire, plants farmed indoors can live out an optimized version of the weather that they coevolved with — the weather of the past. The best weather of the past. Or, as Kopf calls it, a “weather-independent environment.”

Kopf’s journey to greenhouse tech was an unexpected one. She majored in physics and in 2009 became the project manager for Team California in the solar decathlon, a biannual competition held by the U.S. Department of Energy. Team California designed and built a house that took advantage of the local climate, but also had a control system, built from scratch, that could monitor the house’s energy and water consumption, along with other vitals, from an iPhone app.

“We will shape the environmental future of this world,” Kopf said, in a speech at the final decathlon competition in Washington, D.C. “And we will make every building under the sun, [be] powered by the sun!”

Read more at Grist