Space Apps Challenge 2017

There's a problem with our food chain

With lower food transit costs than any time in history, produce in you local supermarket ends up arriving from Spain, the middle east and further afield. This is in spite of both the environmental cost, and the fact that the United Kingdom produces a surplus of food every year that ends up either exported or wasted. In addition, the duration and conditions of transit between countries and across continents causes significant food wastage itself.

This interdependence on the agricultural structure of far flung countries has also created a disaster scenario where, despite the sheer volume of crops produced in the UK, we could face severe food shortages if these linked countries fail to adapt to our changing and damaged environment.

In line with projected population growth, our current system is simply viable, and the methods of farming will continue to destroy the environment as intensity increases.

A Modern Solution

Many parallels can be drawn between this burgeoning web of dependant countries and systems and that of a heavily used server machine. As more services and load are piled onto the machine, it becomes increasingly likely that there will be conflicts between processes as resources dwindle, and the danger of one small aspect of the system failing causing the entire system to crash.

A popular solution to this issue is containerisation - bundling a service with all of its dependencies in a self contained package that can run in isolation of its sibling containers, and yet are still able to communicate and cooperate when required. If one service fails, the remaining services are unaffected.

So we ask the question - Why not containerise our agriculture?

MICRO FARMING, Self Sufficiency

There are already several start up movements that promote micro farming in built up areas through the utilisation of shipping containers converted into entirely self contained farms. These containers are not restricted by land quality, location, weather or the myriad other factors that must be taken into consideration when planning a traditional farm.

Micro farms of this variety are able to produce a much higher marketable yield of crops (the percentage of crops that will actually be eaten) because of the lack of highly destructive harvesting techniques, pesticides and pests. As an added bonus of this, the need for harmful chemicals in the growth process is cut to almost nothing, and the containers themselves provide the exact sealed environment that addresses the major concern of GMO crops - cross contamination with 'natural' crops.

Vertical farming is another related concept that runs with the same theme. The essence here being that there is only so much surface area that can be converted into farmland. There is, however, and abundance of 'up' that is currently unused for such purposes. With all the benefits of containerised micro farms, "Eco Towers" as they are sometimes called are the next step in terms of space efficiency, by scaling upwards instead of outwards.

One of the most compelling points for globalised farming is the increase in bio diversity within our diets, increasing resiliance to local ecological collapse, but also creating new danger related to ecological collapse in dependent environments, as previously mentioned. Containerised micro farming tackles this aspect as well by providing self contained biospheres for a multitude of crop types, providing this bio diversity at a local scale.

The Product

In short, micro farms allow for dramatic optimisations and environmental savings when it comes to our agricultural system. In order to show this, we have taken the UK as an exemplar of a country that could revolutionise its agriculture through usage of micro and vertical farming, and created a visualisation of crop production deficit and surplus, combined with population consumption data to work out the quantity of containerised farms that could either eliminate the deficits or supplement the surplus that gets exported. This is shown on a choropleth map of the UK, split by counties and boroughs.

The system is capable of being applied to any country for which population and agricultural data could be obtained, allowing the application of this idea to countries in areas such as North Africa (e.g. Egypt) and the Middle East where farming is made more difficult or crop yields are lower due to the arid landscapes. By providing this style of farming to those countries, we would make progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2.1, ensuring access to nutritious and sufficient food year round.

By growing crops in sealed biospheres, the process is made significantly more resilient to environmental change, thus progressing SDG 13.1 due to the universal applicability of a self sufficient shipping container, solar powered and only producing water and oxygen as waste products with minimal input from farmers. Remote areas that could be hit hardest by climate change would then have a safety net for such scenarios, which aids in progressing SDG 1.5.

The locality of the food growth to the communities that would consume it also targets SDG 12.3; Less intensive farming of higher yield crops (and the applicability of GMO crops) reduces food waste both throughout the supply chain and at the end of the chain when the food reaches a consumer.

Our Resources

The application makes use of a heterogeneous data set collated from the following locations:

• UK agricultural yields by regional authority
• UK Populations by county
• UK local authorities by county

More information about existing containerised micro farm solutions was sourced from these commercial companies:

• Freight farms - Stackable shipping container farms with 2 acre (0.8 hectare) marketable yield
• Square roots - Shipping container farms with 2 acre (0.8 hectare) capacity

Our Technologies

We processed our data with Node.js, and also used it with the Koa framework to serve the visualisation client. Our Choropleth map is built using D3 and the Geo map module, alongside topojson provided by that same module.