Mapping the Dynamics of the Vertical Farm: A Biopolitical Epistemology of Valuation

ABSTRACT

In early 2020, Sobeys—one of Canada’s largest food retailers—partnered with Infarm Indoor Vertical Farming to install hydroponic vertical farming units in their retail locations. This partnership aims to build a resilient agri-food ecosystem in the face of climate change. Infarm is one of few vertical farming start-ups to reach ‘unicorn’ status in the recent boom of venture capital-backed urban farming solutions. Working to mitigate the climate crisis is critical, but I take venture capital as the spokesperson for green technologies as intuitively strange. Actor-network theory is a powerful tool for describing networks in which modern technical objects are embedded. By mapping the nodes of Infarm’s actor-network and analyzing how and by what the expertise of a ‘black-boxed’ vertical farm is negotiated, we can identify obligatory points of passage that render the epistemology of the network durable. Ultimately, Infarm’s vertical farming practice and its climate change mitigation logics are moulded by venture capital and its biopolitical epistemology of valuation—a way of thinking that conceptualizes ‘life’, biology and, therefore, the climate in terms of political economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Actor-network theory
• black-box
• green-tech
• venture capital

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hydronics is one method of supplying nutrients to plants in a vertical farming system; it uses water-based nutrient delivery systems rather than soil and usually includes a growing substrate such as vermiculite or perlite. Aeroponics is another popular commercial method; it uses mist or air to deliver nutrients and no substrate. Both methods are popular across vertical farming hobbyists, small farmers and commercial enterprises.

2. Sobeys is owned by Empire Company Limited, a Canadian conglomerate focused on food retail and corporate investments. The company owns affiliates or franchises over 1500 stores under the following banners: Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, Foodland, Farm Boy, Fresh Co, Thrifty Foods and Lawton Drugs (Redman 2018).

3. Venture capital is a form of private equity financing provided by investment firms or funds to early-stage, emerging start-ups that display a high growth-potential. The investments typically present as high-risk with the potential for a return on investment—there is a high rate of failure in venture capital investments (Schmitt et al. 2018).

4. Often, start-ups that reach a billion-dollar valuation are mainly based on growth with little account of operating burn. These unicorns—on paper—typically have hundreds of millions in seed funding and extra in potential revenue due to slated expansion efforts. Unfortunately, when fundraising markets become parsimonious, these on-paper unicorns often experience re-proximation during subsequent funding rounds and fall under the billion-dollar threshold.

5. Initially developed by the French philosopher Michel Serres, the concept of ‘translation’ is applied to sociology by Michel Callon.

6. Infarm, also, literally started in a community garden. One of its first commercial locations was a custom vertical farm built into an air-stream in a local park in Berlin’s city-centre. They sold simple meals and drinks (Wolff 2022).

7. The contemporary vision of the vertical farm was developed in earnest within the first decade of the 21^st-century by Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University. Responding to anthropogenic climate change, he considered the urban landscape the ‘new agricultural frontier’. Throughout the early 2000’s, he developed a practical application of hydroponic vertical farming with graduate students and the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. The team developed several pitches for sky-scraper farms in the near metropolitan center in downtown Toronto. These designs featured hundreds of plant types, chicken habitats and fish aquaculture systems integrated into a thirty-story urban facade to produce local food for growing cities (Despommier 2020).

8. Cradle-to-cradle can be defined as the design and production of products of all types in such a way that at the end of their life, they can be truly recycled (upcycled), imitating nature’s cycle with everything either recycled or returned to the earth, directly or indirectly through food, as a completely safe, nontoxic and biodegradable nutrient (Sherratt 2013).

9. This also included a grant in 2016 from the European Union’s Executive Agency for SMEs, valued at €1.9 million.

10. I inserted edits, replacing the word ‘laboratory’ with ‘venture capital’. In the original text, laboratories were positioned as the obligatory passage point for Michel Callon’s example of a new electric vehicle’s actor-network. Callon explains that the laboratory sources some of its political power from its ability to necessitate itself as an obligatory passage point—I think the same of venture capital for the vertical farm.

11. Initial Public Offering, the process of launching public shares of a new company. This move often signals a start-ups transition from dependent-on-investment to profitable.

12. Due to the recent rise of energy costs, the tech-sector is leaning itself. Infarm, at the time of writing, is experiencing drastic downsizing in its operations across North America and Europe (Infarm Indoor Vertical Farming GmbH 2022). This keeps the actor-network in flux and increases its reliance on venture-capital funds to continue operations at its current scale.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hayley Birss

Hayley Birss is beginning a doctoral program this fall. They received a BASc from Quest University Canada and an MA from the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST). Their work centres post-colonial studies of venture capital, climate change mitigation strategies and biopolitics. More broadly, they seek to understand technoscience’s precarious relationship to the planet and its role in mitigating the climate crisis.