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