Tag: leafy greens

World’s Largest Indoor Vertical Farm

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…More than four years after AeroFarms planted the first seed at their global headquarters, new life has indeed arrived in the city’s Ironbound neighborhood – nearly two million pounds of it. That’s the amount of leafy greens that sprout every year at 212 Rome Street, where an enormous, 70,000 square foot facility houses the “largest indoor vertical farm in the world.”

AeroFarms … has continued to turn heads with its cutting-edge setup at its flagship facility, where a closed-loop, aeroponic water circulation system uses 95 percent less water than field farmed-food, yet yields a whopping 390 times higher per square foot. Since it’s much easier to control the environment indoors, the company is also able to avoid using pesticides on its crops, which include watercress, arugula and kale.

RTFA. A great article, generating hope for someone like me … who would love to have access to a year-round supply of affordable arugula. My Italian-American mom’s favorite green veg.

Growing greener, biofortified greens

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A pioneering project to make our green vegetables even better for us has been launched by scientists at The University of Nottingham. The research will underpin future technological developments in agriculture that could help fight a looming food security crisis.

‘Greens’ like cabbages and broccoli are a well-known part of a healthy diet but they don’t contain as large an amount of key minerals as they might, according to the lead scientist on the project, Associate Professor of Plant Nutrition, Dr Martin Broadley. He’s secured funding to carry out new research into ‘biofortifying’ cabbages and their relatives (Brassica) to boost dietary intakes of calcium and magnesium…

All of us require 22 essential minerals to live. These minerals can be supplied by a balanced and varied diet. Yet billions of people worldwide consume insufficient minerals, including calcium and magnesium. Since most calcium is stored in bones, calcium-deficient diets can reduce bone strength and increase fracture-risks and osteoporosis. In developing countries, calcium deficiency can also cause rickets. Magnesium deficiency is linked to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and pre-eclampsia in pregnancy.

In the UK, vegetables —excluding potatoes —provide less than one tenth of our calcium and magnesium intakes. It’s thought a relatively modest increase in the concentration of these minerals in green leafy vegetables would have a significant beneficial effect on our health. Dr Broadley says this is likely to be achievable by improving fertilizers and breeding programmes…

Professor Douglas Kell, BBSRC Chief Executive said: “Taking social and economic issues aside, the challenge we face is to produce enough nutrition for a growing global population using limited resources and without significant negative impact to the environment. There are a number of ways to approach this through bioscience research, one of which is to actually aim to increase the nutritional value of the food we are producing. Dr Broadley’s project is a good example of where UK bioscience research is taking on this challenge and his success in enriching essential minerals in cabbages, broccoli, Chinese cabbage and pak choi will be an important step in insuring against a future food security crisis.”

Yum.

I love green leafy veggies, anyway. Making them even healthier for us is OK by me.

Food processors pay food safety inspectors – let ’em keep paying!

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Clipboard in hand, Debra Anderson spent three hours one recent sunny morning trooping through a field of romaine lettuce looking for trouble.

She searched for animal tracks at the Church Brothers field, watched picking crews wash their hands and sampled rinse water to make sure it had enough chlorine to kill germs. Though she is a California state employee, Ms. Anderson was working on behalf of the food industry, part of the latest experiment in improving safety.

Am I supposed to feel safer knowing that an unregulated amount of chlorinated water is being sprayed on the leafy greens headed towards my table?

With huge losses from food-poisoning recalls and little oversight from the federal Food and Drug Administration, some sectors of the food industry are cobbling together their own form of regulation in an attempt to reassure consumers. They are paying other government agencies to do what the F.D.A. rarely does: muck through fields and pore over records to make sure food is handled properly.

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

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