Maybe not!
Recently Dr Victoria Hatton, the chief executive of NZ’s FoodHQ, returned after several months of travel looking at indoor growing operations in Europe.
As reported by Farmers Weekly, she made this pronouncement:
“We need to realise that the future of farming is not on soil when we think about it from a climate change and sustainability perspective … we grow food on our land because that’s what we think we ought to be doing. It’s not necessarily the way we need to be doing it in the future; it’s about resetting the model.”
That’s a pretty audacious challenge to the status quo!
As best we can tell, there’s not a heap of indoor growing happening yet in Hawke’s Bay, NZ’s fruit bowl; we’re rather committed to our soil, despite our weather challenges.
The best indoor example here in HB might be Tatsumi New Zealand’s strawberry operation in Clive. They have around 19,000m2 of indoor, above-ground growing space, capable of growing 100,000 plants at full production, yielding 150 tonne per year. Bumblebees pollinate the crop, and the plants’ fertigation (water/fertiliser) is controlled and measured. They produce mostly for export to Japan.
We reported on this outfit previously here, terming it one of HB’s ‘mystery’ businesses.
Perhaps some other Hawke’s Bay berry and veggie growers might dive in and take some of the mystery out of indoor growing. If anyone else is growing indoors, we’d like to hear about it.
Wouldn’t it be nice for our region to have a bit of a hedge against increasingly treacherous weather conditions? Perhaps our Regional Economic Development Agency (REDA) can get behind this.
That’s a clever article placement directly below “Dam” article, and exactly the sort of thinking needed in our region. It’s not about extracting more and more from our environment putting entire ecosystems at risk, it’s about being smarter and getting more out of less.
Nice comment Greg – but want to hazard a guess as to what the CHB Water Holdings Group would think of something like this? If such farming practices came to pass they would be fair wetting themselves as their rorts vanished away and they’d have to actually fund stuff by themselves instead of picking the pockets of the ratepayers
Aside from the damage to the environment, the reduced flows in the Tukituki will mean less shingle transport to the coast which will exacerbate coastal erosion. Reduced water flows will also degrade the quality of the water.
Farmers need to introduce good water retention practices for their soil or perhaps, dare I say it, change the current land use, rather than reactivate this extremely costly proposal.