The Magic Factory rewilding indoor farming

i

am a biologist a really serious

scientist

and i believe in magic

when we are watching a magician the

magic

is when there is a surprising result

without us

understanding the details causing this

result

sometimes the magician is nature itself

such as when consciousness is formed

in a brain from electric signals

through all my career there have been

two

ruling perceptions of reality

one is that of the ecologists

which relates everything to nature and

cycles

the other is that of the engineer which

relates everything to production

and efficiency despite being a biologist

specialized in ecology i have a lot of

the engineer in me so i tend to end up

in the intersection between these two

realities

for my masters i joined a

cross-disciplinary

project the traditional western

norwegian farm

as a cultural biological system a study

of farms

operated as in the old days before the

green revolution

i had very nice field work this is

a traditional mixed farming system

where resources are harvested up from

the fjord locally by fishing

and down from the mountains through some

farming and grazing animals

it’s a sustainable system because it’s

based on

local cycles and resources and it also

showed a high

biological diversity it was

a synthesis of man and nature

but very hard work for the farmer and

quite a contrast to what modern

real world agriculture engineered

agriculture looked like

which is a simple linear system of

input machine product often

in the form of monocultures to keep up

with the oil

age it had to be streamlined and

automated and mechanized you know all

that stuff

for some years i also almost

became the engineer and established a

mushroom cultivation facility

but running a production business

is about focusing on the product and

cutting costs

and things like that but i was an

ecologist

at heart after all so instead of doing

the necessary and urgent things

i rather spent my time finding new

connections how i could

connect mushroom cultivation to

greenhouses and so on

so the engineer seeing all the

connections

gave trouble for the efficient

narrow-minded engineer guy

and my business failed after some years

i went back to academia as a phd student

to study how to grow mushrooms from food

waste

but doing a phd is again focusing

very hard on your narrow topic publish

your findings and forget about the rest

and was that me no i just had to look

wider the ecologist searching

integration with

other fields of interest so

i rather took initiatives towards

cross-disciplinary

projects about ecosystems of

waste and food and made sketches and

gave talks about this

when i drew this in 2008 it was purely a

research topic

it received little interest from the

real practical world

of production and engineers except as

space research so i read everything

about closed ecological life support

systems for mars

instead of writing papers about

mushrooms

even though this didn’t give me a phd at

that time

nor a job in nasa it did give me a job

in a waste company there after a couple

of years

i was given the chance to finally do an

engineered system

taking ecology seriously food to waste

to food

and it was exactly that without

compromise

if you’re insisting on growing plants

from waste

you have to struggle for example in

ordinary greenhouses tomato plants are

usually grown without soil

where nutrients are just added into the

water

simply substituting the nutrients with a

soup of digested waste

into the standard system as a greenhouse

engineer would do

didn’t work very well despite the fact

that the chemistry looked good

the plants simply didn’t want to grow

but

we started to experiment and

made a lot of trial and error and

finally we found out that

you could not think just in terms of

plants and nutrients

you have to bring in more wild natural

stuff

so we brought in earthworms my colleague

adapted them to eat pure digested waste

and they started loving it he also found

out you can add them directly to the

pots

so instead of feeding plants nutrients

we fed earthworms

digested waste and then the plants

started growing

like magic so the earthworms

distribute and degrade nutrients making

channels for air and water

and they work the soil for free 24 7

like tractors

actually the magic is in the earthworms

poop

plant stimulating bacteria and hormones

so it seemed that keith’s success was a

more complete

ecosystem and we had plants animals

bacteria but we also wanted to explore

more of the fungi the mushrooms

they are after all the experts of eating

waste

in the wild fairy rings show

how fungi can free nutrients for plants

shown here as a ring of a darker more

healthy grass

could we take this fairy magic into the

greenhouse

to stimulate the plants we succeeded to

grow mushrooms and cucumbers together in

the same container but they ended up

competing for the same nutrients

but then we grew them in sequence first

we grew mushrooms in the digestive waste

then after picking all the mushrooms we

mixed this into the lettuce

potting soil and bingo we had a

significantly higher yield of lettuce

nature’s own cycles again proved

efficient but we have still lots to

learn

there are also other species than homo

sapiens

doing mushroom farming these are grown

by termites

they collect biomass from afar take it

into their mounds

where they magically control the

microbiology in favor

of the fungal mycelium which they then

feed to their larvae

and the fungus gets a chance to make

mushrooms and spread their spores

i like to say i know how to grow

mushrooms but i’m just an apprentice

compared to termites

so active transport of nutrients by

animals like termites and worms

is a characteristic of productive

natural ecosystems

the animals in such systems are called

the ecosystem engineers

gracing domestic animals were our

ecosystem engineers but the logic of

ecosystems was

lost such as taking the animal waste

back to the field

when engineering took over agriculture

natural disturbed ecosystems

can to a large degree fix themselves

surprisingly often it’s just a matter of

stepping back and let the natural

processes then play out on their own

or we can help by deliberately adding

ecosystem engineers missing this kind of

principle for fixing ecosystems is

called rewilding

indoor vertical farming is now proposed

as a

big opportunity for future food

production and i think it is

but are we getting it right the engineer

in me

says yes we can control temperature and

light and all these things but the

ecologist in me says

are we in the process of doing exactly

what einstein said we should not do

solve the problems by using the same

kind of logic as we used when we created

them

where’s the rest of the ecosystem

where’s the dirt

and the bugs to recycle the nutrients

where are

microbes that magically stimulate our

immune system in the right way

is this the very same thing are we just

taking the engineered fields

inside in stacks repeating the

mistake again

four or five years ago a new concept or

term

came onto the scene which changed

everything for me

circular economy when before it was like

yeah interesting concept you have here

but how are we supposed to make money on

this

now it was suddenly like yes this is

exactly how we have to do it

because now everything is about circular

economy

at the magic factory we teamed up with

others

sharing these ideas of a circular

economy for food and

waste our partner had already baptized

the biogas facility the magic factory

which not only for the pupils visiting

but also for me

gave the impetus to innovate with

nature because now there was a reason

circular economy

in the greenhouse together with

professional growers we have scaled up a

rewilded tomato system with thousands of

earthworms

and in addition to being the ecosystem

engineers

distributing nutrients and so on they

are also the top

predators of the soil food web and as

with

ecosystems in general top predators tend

to reduce

pest and disease here they feast on

microbes

and preventing the bad ones from taking

over the party

science literature predicted that we

could never grow commercial yields in

this way using only waste but now it

seems we are there

the magic of biomimicry

to me innovation is about copying others

copying ideas are putting up putting

them together in new ways

i have copied recklessly from space

research

and first of all from nature out there

is an

infinite textbook of solutions

ready to be mimicked especially for

agriculture

i have nothing against engineers not

even the one in my veins

that if we invest

once one-sidedly in classic engineering

we are missing something

allowing for more natural magic works

because these solutions have been around

for much longer than engineering

and they are intrinsically sustainable

teams of species have evolved and

improved their

magic of cooperation through millions

and millions of years

in a continuously dynamic and changing

environment

so i think it’s time to encourage

engineers to

let go of some of the control and

rather go out there and look for these

solutions while they’re still there

so let us add

unknown biodiversity into our systems

allow for some rewilding even indoors

magic will happen i promise