Interview: Harvest London’s Matt Chlebek on Vertical Farming
Photography by Harvest London.
Based in North-East London, Harvest London works with vertical farming and hydroponic technologies to grow a wide variety of herbs and produce for UK chefs, all year round. Hydroponics, as you will learn, is more than the sum of its parts and with many of the technologies involved simultaneously increasing in productivity and decreasing in price, the future is looking bright indeed.
With produce that has unbeatably low food miles, minor waste, ready connection to the renewable energy industry, freshness and excellent reliability, Matt Chlebek, Harvest London’s Founder & Chief Agronomist, sits down to talk us through the nuts and bolts of a deeply practical and dynamic food-growing revolution.
Words by George Maguire
Whilst many of our readers will have heard of vertical farming, could you please define the term in your own words?
Vertical farming is the combination of a number of tried and tested technologies. At the baseline is hydroponics which is feeding and growing plants in water, not soil. It's nothing new and the cliched example is of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but there have been plenty of societies all-throughout history that have been growing in water.
After that, we then add the relatively newly affordable technology of LED lighting which have relatively recently become suitable for growing plants underneath. We also use water pumps, and then climate control air conditioning that helps us keep the environment really nice and stable and steady.
These technologies all live under this banner of what's called controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) which is broad. It can include everything from greenhouses with thermometers all the way to, I don't know, probably growing cannabis in your attic. By combining all those things and stacking these technical layers one on top of another, we can grow a large number of crops in a very small footprint all year round.
We can grow food wherever we want, whenever we want, which allows us to be super close to our customers and keep up with shifting demands.
Interesting. How do you see vertical farming fitting in with more conventional forms of agriculture; what is its role?
We don't see ourselves and we don't think we will ever become a replacement for traditional outdoor agriculture. We're just another way of growing crops.
Primarily, what we focus on is growing things that can't normally be grown year-round in this country. If we were to all eat seasonally, we'd eat tomatoes in the summer and cabbages in the winter. And you know, we wouldn't want basil in December! The consumer demand is of course totally different to that. People want Thai food and pizza in the UK winter, and so on and so on. We're not trying to replace any agriculture in this country. Instead, we're trying to remove the need for importing a lot of crops, mostly consumable leafy greens and herbs.
A big criticism of UK vertical farming is that you can't grow wheat and you can't grow potatoes. So you're not really solving any problems because the crops that you grow are just luxury items right now. I think that's a bit short-sighted because if there's a demand for it, someone somewhere has to grow it. Otherwise, you have to say you can't have it and that's not the way things work.
Take lettuce which can be grown outdoors in the UK. It can also very readily be grown on a vertical farm. So land that is growing lettuce outdoors currently could be used for something else. That land could be used to grow wheat and potatoes. It could be used for rewilding; all sorts of things.
As with anything, there's got to be companies willing to take the first steps in order for the technology to develop and grow. As technology improves, it will open up new avenues to different crops and be able to grow pretty much anything in a vertical farm. It's just whether or not it's economical to grow it, that is the thing!
You're giving plants light, water and everything they need. It's just how long does that process take? At some point, the energy costs outweigh the costs of selling your product. But as renewable energy becomes cheaper, and as the technology becomes more efficient with breeding for vertical farming (as opposed to just breeding for outdoor crops) a lot of these things become more realistic.
At the same time, the climate is not getting any better. At some point, we may find ourselves in a position where certain crops that we traditionally grow outdoors become impossible. Do you throw your hands up in the air and say that we no longer produce this vegetable in our country? You know, fresh mint, or something like that? Or do you say that we have an alternative way of growing it?
I'm assuming that people probably kicked up a fuss when the first tractors came around because they changed how things were done. Every technological advance has some issues to start off with - some criticism to fend off - we think we can exist happily alongside traditional agriculture.
That’s great. We’d love to get a bit more context about Harvest London specifically; how big are you as a company and is the UK market relatively well developed?
So we have been going for about three and a half years and are now on our second farm. Our first farm was in a garage, somewhere in Walthamstow. Our current farm is much more high tech. It's 153 square metres plus of growing space. It does about six tonnes a year of leafy greens and herbs.
We now have a decent amount of automation going including the climate and the other systems that look after the plants are automated. At our first farm, there was three of us. I think now if you're talking about the number of people on the invite list for the Christmas party, it's 10 people. Some people that come in one, two days a week to help out where we need extra labour and so on. We've got a permanent staff of six. We are on the cusp of expanding quite greatly.
We're very close to securing the funding to build a farm 30 times bigger than this one, which will be huge and have all sorts of automation and robotics and cameras looking at plants and making judgments for things and AI and all these other wonderful things.
In terms of the UK market, we're certainly not the oldest vertical farming company. We're also not the youngest by any means. Everyone that exists, seems to do things a little differently. What differentiates us from some other farms is that we grow fully-sized crops. Some people will grow little micro herbs but we grow full-size mature plants. We're different in the way that we sell in that the majority of our customers are either restaurants or meal kits, that sort of thing. Other companies will either go sell directly to consumers, sell wholesale or sell through a supermarket. Almost exclusively, we sell to restaurants which came from an initial decision we made because I knew some chefs. It seemed easier than packing stuff up individually and much better than using small boxes for consumers.
In terms of UK-grown fresh green produce, the vertical farming market is relatively small. But clearly, it’s a small slice of a quite gigantic pie in terms of what we produce in this country via arable farming. But also, obviously, we import a huge amount of stuff from Europe and beyond. Almost every vertical farming company that we're aware of in the UK is expanding; especially the bigger ones, and they're expanding at quite an accelerated rate. Everyone is looking to take bites out of what is a predominantly import market. You go into any supermarket, and it's got Spain, or Israel or Egypt or whatever stamped on the packet. Especially in the larger city, and especially larger supermarkets. Essentially, we're a small part of a pretty big growing pie as well.
What's it like to work with restaurants? Challenges? Perks?
At the start, it made sense to work with chefs from a product development standpoint. If you're selling a bunch of herbs to greengrocers and a customer purchases some and gets it home and for whatever reason, doesn't like it. What's the likelihood of you receiving any feedback on that? Like, it's pretty, pretty minimal. You're not getting an email saying, I didn't like your coriander, right?
In the early days of our company when we were still finding our feet, working with chefs was useful as they would say ‘have you tried this’ and ‘have you thought about growing this herb’. We've had lots of great experiences working with chefs. The direct feedback is brilliant because they will absolutely tell us if something's rubbish, they will tell us if something's great. In a lot of cases, chefs are the authority on telling consumers what's good to eat. What’s cool to eat? Interesting? Exciting? You know, how often do you trust supermarkets marketing?
We've got a restaurant in London where the chef buys Thai basil from us. When we first started growing it for him, he'd come in every week and taste what I was growing, and we'd change the way we did things because we weren’t harvesting at the right time. Together, we tried different varieties with him to get a product that he was really happy with and as a result of that, we learnt a lot about that specific crop.
As we grew bigger, the same sort of ethos stands so our main crop is Italian basil, you know, the kind of basil that you see on pizzas and in pesto and so on. We grow it for Pizza Pilgrims a chain of pizza restaurants in London. When we first started working with them, we were growing all different types of basil for them; every variety we could get our hands on. We'd let them taste the good ones and the bad ones and because some respond better to being grown indoors than others, some are bred for different purposes.
Pizza Pilgrims really know what they're talking about, because their whole business revolves around the quality of their ingredients, and they've got, you know, years of experience in it. Another plus is that they buy in a volume that for us is much, much more workable. And we send out instead of packaging up, you know, 50-gram bags of basil and getting it to a greengrocer and hoping it sells, we forward sell our crops in bulk. They say ‘so we use on average this amount a month’ and so that's exactly how much we will grow. because we're growing advanced orders sometimes six months in advance a year in advance there is very little waste.
Even the smallest of one of these sites is using a few kilos of basil a week. And so we're packaging loose crop up in big reusable crates. We send the crates out, we pick them back up, we wash them out, we reuse them, so there's no single-use plastic. We can help that restaurant be more sustainable.
Ultimately, it means that we have this really consistent predictable demand for crops. We're not growing speculatively, we're not just switching the lights on and planting loads of seeds and hoping we can sell it. So we're wasting very, very little. Working with restaurants just allowed us to reach a scale that we probably would have been harder to reach, go direct to consumer.
There are all sorts of other little added bonuses in there for them and for us. We can do kind of some of the restaurant prep for them in-house a bit so instead of one of their kitchen porters picking all the leaves off because the dish required it we'd be doing that for them as we harvested which would save the customer time. This means we can also give it to them in a way that's really useful for them. For example, one of our customers stores everything in his kitchen in those four-litre plastic ice cream tubs so that’s what we delivered the crop in; straight to the cold store.
In terms of growth, there are plenty more restaurants to be dealing with. We've got a bunch of people who are queuing up. We're at full capacity so we can't supply them but this is really great for the future.
What learnings have you brought to your second Harvest London location? What is crucial now that you may have missed initially?
I think the first learning, which is one of the barriers of this industry is that it's tricky to do it on the cheap. Also, you do get what you pay for. When it comes to a lot of the hardware we use, you know, expensive lights are better than cheap lights. You see a direct result from the investment.
Take climate control. I used to just drill some holes in the wall and bolt some fans on. That worked to a point but it didn't work well enough.
Another learning is that there are an unlimited variety of things you can grow. Just because you can grow something that doesn't necessarily mean you should. There's a reason a lot of these weird unheard-of herbs aren’t grown! No one really wants to cook with them. To be honest, most of our customers probably just wanted some basil, or some parsley or some mint, or some dill. There are certain people who are way more experimental. But obviously, the scale of that is proportional, right? We've worked with some incredibly inventive and exciting chefs who will very happily buy the weirdest stuff we can possibly grow. But it's just one restaurant. So you know, you need the sort of top 10 crops to reach scale, even though you could grow to 1000 different ones.
It's a lot of cleaning and a lot of hard work, you know, just because it's a lot of what goes on around the plants that make the difference.
Another thing is that whilst you can pull an all-nighter, you can't make the crops grow any faster by working on them harder. They will grow at a given rate.
The products you used to feed your crops are pretty crucial. A lot of time is spent on maintenance, cleaning and logistics. We try where we can to adopt lean practices, finding efficiencies in our labour practices, where we couldn't necessarily find efficiencies in our growing practices.
Every improvement we make on how we grow our crops has an inherent time lag. You plant the seed and you've got to wait X amount of time for it to grow. On the other side, improvements that you can make in our working practices can be done immediately and improve the process!
There's a lot of really niched learning. I know a lot more about drains than I ever thought I would need to know! It's really important to have good drains in the buildings, you've got a lot of water moving around. Also, the UK is kind of not quite prepared for urban agriculture because planning permission doesn't exist. We talk to people in the local authorities and they've never heard of what we do. We don't fit into the planning use case for it.
There's also a bit of a steep learning curve on food safety if you've not worked in that industry before. Again, we're in a bit of a grey area because we were growing vegetables, we're not cooking anything. A lot of what we do inhabits this sort of grey area between outdoor farming and the usual sort of food industries you find in the city and we kind of don't fit into either.
There's a lot of work on building direct relationships with the customers. The positive thing is that every person that has visited the farm gets it immediately. We have never had a hard time selling our product because it tastes great, it’s super fresh and it’s grown around the corner. That grabs people.
How many different crops do you have growing at any one time?
When we first started I was growing whatever I wanted to. Anything from the seed catalogue. I’d then take what I had grown to restaurants to see if they wanted it. We had a large breadth of experiments. Over the course of building this company, we’ve grown 150 to 200 varieties of crops. Many of these have been as samples, requests from chefs, or in research development.
As we speak today, we have 6 different crops at the moment with Italian Basil being our main crop. It’s a warm growing environment for the basil, and there are other herbs that like these conditions so we gear towards these exotic varieties. At the moment, we have holy basil, perilla, chrysanthemum leaves, dill, choi, a salad mix and then trial crops; 2 to 3 varieties at any one time. All of this is upwards of 6 tonnes of product per year, depending on what we pick. We gear our facilities towards the demand.
Sustainability is clearly a core part of how your business operates, could you tell more about your approach here?
It’s a complicated subject as the supply chain of most food products is not clear. Whilst we can ascertain the route that a herb, say in Israel, has taken to the UK, we don’t know a lot of the steps in between. And with air freight, we don’t know if the herb was packed in space that was going to be wasted anyway; how does this impact the calculations? It’s a grey area if the plane was travelling anyway carrying something else in its cargo?
What we do know is that outside of airfreight, road, and rail, there is a lot of energy put into the storage of these products as they move across the world; which is something we don’t need to do.
Our electricity bill is very large but it is 100% renewable. Now, we don’t know that as the person buying the electricity directly where your power is coming from but if we are buying renewable energy, then it is getting used somewhere in the grid. As a business owner, it’s important to fund renewable energy to make it as sustainable as possible. We have a longer-term goal to co-locate our farms next to renewable energy sites (e.g solar power or anaerobic digester) and make sure that we directly use energy from these sources. We also hope to make our business more circular with our green waste going into a facility and then coming back to us; also reducing our energy bill. In reality, I think that we will always need to be hooked up to the grid because of the way our facilities work and how much energy we need over time, everything will become more efficient.
Additionally, we don’t use any pesticides. We also use less water than other agriculture. There was a paper written years ago from a researcher in Texas that said that vertical farming has the potential to use 95% less water than in-field ag but this obviously relates to the climate of Texas where doesn’t rain as much. What we do know is that the vast majority of the water that enters our system goes around and around our system. Water is only lost when we clean things, taken out in plant biomass and by our dehumidifier. If you have the money then all of these processes can be optimised further.
Many people do not realise that in professional kitchens a lot of food turns up in terrible condition; I’ve seen kitchens throw out 50% of ingredients. It travelled so far and is either mangy, mouldy, or eaten by a caterpillar. Our stuff turns up perfect 99% of the time. It doesn’t travel far, can’t be hit by hail and there are no pests. 100% of the energy that goes into our farm gets used in the end product whereas other food supply chains use huge amounts of resources for the end result to end up in the bin. Ultimately, sustainability is complex and multi-levelled and will be working on it continuously.
What about the financials of farming this way; how does it stack up to in-field growing?
Again it depends on how you are judging your costs. This is certainly an industry that becomes more affordable, the bigger you are. The bigger the farm, the more efficient and the cheaper it is to grow per plant. We spend a lot less on some things and a lot more on others.
Right now at this point in time, growing a crop seasonally outdoors in the UK is easier and cheaper. But when you get out of in-season or import - then we are far more competitive. We don’t grow a lot of things that grow naturally outside in the UK so it’s hard to compare costs. What about the fuel of the transport? Growing basil in a field in Ethiopia is certainly going to be cheaper (where most basil comes from out of season) because they have unlimited sunshine and warmth. But when you add in freighting, it’s comparable to what we do.
Ultimately, we are not in the business of losing money and our customers are very happy to buy at the price they do. Something right must be happening. I think it’s down to crop selection, working closely with the right customers and competing where we can be competitive.
Looking broadly at the industry, what key trends do you see happening in the next 10-20 years? What will state of the art look like?
Firstly, there will be a lot more vertical farms. I believe that the technology will become better technically and more affordable; lowering the barrier to entry which is the capital need upfront. As more people start vertical farming then there will be more incentive for the lighting manufacturers, HVAC manufacturers, automation manufacturers to bring the price down and become more competitive.
There is also a push to grow more than just leafy greens and herbs and to do this we need more efficient technology.
Another exciting area is plant breeding. Most people growing in vertical farms are using seeds that have been bred for outdoor agriculture. These seeds were bred for things like disease resistance, drought tolerance and extreme weather and all of these things require an energy expense from the plant. Breeding plants for vertical farming can help us grow plants that grow faster or are tastier. All of the tomatoes found in UK supermarkets taste like garbage. This is because they have to be resistant to the transport chain and have to be grown out of season when there is not much sun. If we can grow tomatoes for flavour in December that is a massive deal across many levels. The challenge is always finding the efficiencies and once renewables become cheaper the barriers to vertical sustainability will lower.
In the UK, we are huge growers and exporters of cannabis and it makes a lot of people huge amounts of money. CEA around a crop that is this potentially beneficial and profitable is likely to probably explode at some point.
I’m also really interested in getting plants to grow things like vaccine components, therapeutic components; known as biopharmaceuticals. We can get plants to grow useful things and there is a clear business, as well as wellbeing benefits beyond growing a salad or ingredients for a stew.
We’ve seen a lot of interest in putting vertical farming or glasshouses into buildings and incorporating them within architecture. Bringing food production to the forefront in urban locations is pretty cool. People seeing where their food comes from is always a good idea and I’d like to see a lot more of that.
I hope that the world’s climate doesn’t get so bad that we need to rely on what we do (as that would be really sad) but there is certainly a place for us because ultimately people want to eat pizza all year round and that’s the reality of it! There are other companies working on using these technologies to grow food where it couldn’t be grown and green food becomes possible. As affordability rises, survival aspects become more possible.
How has the pandemic been for the business? Have the restaurants that you work with managed to pivot during the pandemic?
We started building our second farm during the first lockdown so we had real worries that we were going to lose all of our customers. Not all of our customers have managed to pivot. Our main customers have and the fact is, if you are a chain of pizza restaurants then you still sell as much pizza as you did before. Pizza Pilgrims started selling pizza in the post and they thought it would sell a few hundred units a week but then it ended up doing a few thousand units a week. We collaboratively diverted our production to work with their pizza in the post-project and shipped all of our ingredients to them for that purpose. Not all restaurants have managed this, many that we know have not recovered fully or are out of business.
For us, it was some luck and some planning. We actually weathered the storm quite well as a company all things being considered despite our restaurants having closed with Christmas booking cancellations and covid fears. There was no support for those restaurants and we hope they can get through this.
For us, the impact has been felt in delays for building infrastructure. There was a shortage of stainless steel in our new farm build. Staffing has also been difficult. At one point the rules dictated that if one employee gets covid then the whole place had to shut and there was a time we were super short-staffed and working really long hours to keep the ship afloat with half the team being off. Covid and Brexit have also led to delays in getting consumables (seeds) with seeds getting stuck in Holland. Now, there is a much longer lead time on many products, manufacturing that we use. Our customers on the whole did ok, so we did ok!
On your site, you say that you want to build a network of data-driven farms to transform the food system? What can you do with a network like this that you can’t do on an isolated farm?
The network effect is that you have lots more data and lots more learning. The more learnings that you can capture, the better. The network is advantageous as you can then respond to demand based on where the customer is.
At the moment we have one farm in a central location and everything goes out from there but we would like to have numerous farms, and depending on where the order is and the size, we can use technology to manage the farm’s product from a distance. Using automation, we can make sure that the right farm is growing the right things for the right customer at the right time. Even when considering London, if demand picks up in West London, then we can shift production that way. This expands out across the UK to be as close to the customer as possible. The shorter the supply chain; the better!
Learn more about Harvest London here.
