This means that instead of sowing the plant, in our case the tomato plant, in the soil, cultivation is carried out using rockwool blocks placed on suspended channels, which are irrigated and fed daily and filled with substances such as nitrogen and potassium, so as to give the plant the right amount of water and nutrients according to the climate, the health of the plant and the temperature.
It is a system controlled by computer and by a high-tech water plant which, first of all, allows us to use only the water that is needed without it being lost in the soil. The figure you gave earlier, 90%, is a proven percentage, because when water is given to the soil most of it, as much as 90%, is lost and cannot be absorbed by the plant. By supplying it over time when needed, that is, so as to keep these rockwool blocks constantly moist but never soaking, and by recovering through these channels any water that the plant cannot absorb, the water is used in an optimal way.
The land saving comes from the fact that this method of cultivation allows the plant to live for a very long time; with hydroponic cultivation at Sfera a plant can live for a whole year, which means eight months of harvest, and this means that, for the same area of land, the plant can actually yield 90% more, or conversely, for the same weight produced, 90% less land is used.
The plant is grown on vertical stems; when it reaches a height of 4 metres it is lowered week by week, so that the part of the plant, the stem, that no longer needs leaves and where there is no more produce to harvest is laid out horizontally. In this way it grows to a length of 12-13 metres horizontally on top of the 4 metres of vertical growth, and it can even reach a year in age.
Alessandro Di Nuzzo: You were founded in 2015-2016. When did you have the idea of creating this large hydroponic greenhouse, and how did you find the funding and the partners to build it? I ask considering that hydroponic technology must clearly still have been in its infancy in Italy.
Andrea Trombetta: I’ll start with the first point. The underlying idea was to combine sustainability and the market, offering not only what we might call geological sustainability but also social sustainability.
The area where we are located, in the southern part of Tuscany, very close to Lazio, has no hydroponic tomato cultivation within 200-300 km.
This means that the choice to locate ourselves here allows us to serve an area within a radius of two or three hundred kilometres on a daily basis: that is, with a service, as they say, from A to A. It was a choice of proximity to the market, in a logic of sustainable production that does not follow the zero-mile approach but is very similar to it.
In fact, experience of hydroponic production in other countries, in particular the Netherlands, was not so young any more, as it already went back some twenty years. So it was a matter of drawing on skills that were more developed and advanced in some other countries, through those suppliers and technicians who had already tried it.
Of course this is still a young trade. We are realising that, since we are dealing with living plants and fresh produce, there is no definitive end point; we are not dealing with bolts or pieces of wood or ceramics.
Plants are alive and interact with the climate, with humidity, with temperature; it is an interactive system that must be capable of very fast response, great agronomic expertise and also very versatile structures.
A frost rather than a ‘blast’ of heat, very intense light rather than four or five days of overcast sky can greatly change hydroponic cultivation techniques. As for funding, Sfera was financed entirely by private capital through a fund and with major shareholders who prefer investing in sustainable ventures like ours. We built a greenhouse of 120,000 square metres, 12 hectares, which we have supported over time: the initial investment had to be followed by further investments and also some recapitalisations, because Sfera still needs to be supported.
It is a venture that is reaching break-even after six years of activity. It began in 2017, sales began in 2018, and we are gradually also approaching economic sustainability.
Alessandro Di Nuzzo: You spoke of the great technological effort behind a company and a type of agriculture like this. You have 260 people assigned to the various tasks: a significant number. On the other hand, I imagine that automation is an increasingly important factor in your type of business. How do you see the future role of automation and the relationship between it and the workforce?
Andrea Trombetta: Today this sector still lives in a situation of dualism, because for some activities, such as irrigation, we have very advanced, computerised technologies, and therefore a high degree of automation.
As for managing the plant, those activities of care for the plant such as lowering, side-shoot removal and clipping, which allow the plant to grow well, and also the more basic activities such as harvesting and removing leaves from the lower part of the plant, we still depend very much on the human factor.
What I personally believe will happen over the course of a decade is that the most repetitive part of these manual functions will be replaced by robots – which can already be seen today but are not yet sufficiently high-performing and are absolutely not economical; in essence they cost much more than what they do.
Hydroponic cultivation technology is a sector into which a lot of capital is arriving and which will certainly develop greatly. We should bear in mind that this is not a production that can be relocated: you cannot go and produce tomatoes on the other side of the world. Moreover, agricultural and hydroponic production will be increasingly close to cities, and will recover and in some way bring back to life spaces on the urban periphery, former industrial and post-industrial areas that will be reclaimed. An important part, roughly half, of what today is necessarily done by people could be done by automation. There is a part that I personally believe will remain the prerogative of human beings, of people, because the plant needs to be interpreted. I believe that for at least thirty years it will be the prerogative of people’s work.
Alessandro Di Nuzzo: You mentioned the relationship between private and public capital. I would like to ask what your relationship is with public institutions, Italian ones and perhaps European ones too. Is there sufficient attention or not? What do you expect from Italy and Europe for the development of your agriculture?
Andrea Trombetta: This is certainly a very important topic with some very delicate aspects.
Let’s talk about the easiest, most obvious one, which is public funding. We all know that in agriculture public funding, especially at European level, is extremely important.
The fact that we were financed with private capital certainly does not make us disdain public finance.
However, our experience teaches us that to this day the public funding system has not evolved. It is a very bureaucratic system with old-fashioned criteria and very discretionary evaluation systems, and it is not looking to the future as it should. That is, it is still based on parameters that are not technological, not those of sustainability, but are still those of surface area and geographical location. The expectation is that funding for agriculture can keep up with the times, both as specific attention to this cultivation system and in terms of evaluation criteria.
The second aspect is that linked to regulations. In general all the legislation is centred on the system of cultivation in the soil; this is a problem because, as we said earlier, for the same product we use 90% less land.
The third thing we notice is that for this cultivation system, which is borderline between the industrial world and the agricultural world, there is a whole series of workplace safety regulations missing, which are fundamental for us and which in reality have never been drawn up for this system. There is in fact a legislative gap that needs to be filled as quickly as possible, because it is in the interest of workplace safety that the laws be changed.
Alessandro Di Nuzzo: One last question. Your crop for the moment is the tomato, grown with an extraordinary yield compared with traditional cultivation. Do you plan to extend cultivation to other products? In general, which products will be best able to develop in a hydroponic, hyper-technological and precision context like your agriculture?
Andrea Trombetta: Our customers do in fact ask us to supply them with other varieties of vegetables: peppers, courgettes, aubergines, nightshades and so on. You see, over time Sfera has managed to provide a level of continuity and quality of service that is very important for large-scale retail – what we might call the world of accessible value. Being able to deliver today what the customer ordered this morning, and which I perhaps harvested this morning and delivered this evening, is a service capability that we have and that our customers would obviously find useful to have for other vegetables too.
At the moment, although we are evaluating the possibility, the preference is to stay with a single product for now and become an even stronger reference point in the world of the tomato.
Alessandro Di Nuzzo: A very last question: how were you received in an area like southern Tuscany, where you are based?
Andrea Trombetta: I would say there are two aspects. In general the approach was very positive because our company was certainly an important source of employment, a source of jobs that the area appreciated.
The same can be said of the market, given that we have a significant Tuscan, Maremma-based production.
The environmental impact was not easy to manage. Ours is a greenhouse that stands amid the hills in the north of the province of Grosseto, in the heart of the Maremma. For some of our neighbours, a 12-hectare greenhouse had a not insignificant impact on the landscape.
Had it been built to the north of the municipality of Grosseto, in a peripheral area, it would probably have had a different impact on the landscape. Today, if I were asked to build a new greenhouse somewhere else, I would look for a location like the one I have just mentioned, in a suburb in need of regeneration.
