While some billionaires are dumping their fortunes into space travel, it's nice to see others are still working to solve problems on Earth—namely, the production of food. Bill Gates has invested billions of dollars in agricultural development in Africa and South Asia, seeking more efficient means of feeding the needy. Now Dyson Farming, James Dyson's agricultural venture, is also making hi-tech strides in the sustainable production of food.

Dyson Farming has turned the company's brainiacs towards the challenge of sustainable, regenerative food production. They've developed a massive 26-acre facility in Carrington, Lincolnshire, designed specifically to satisfy Britain's appetite for strawberries, which are typically imported to the island nation. By growing them at scale and close to market, transportation emissions are reduced significantly.

But this is about more than strawberries, and will eventually have a significant impact on feeding people worldwide. The Lincolnshire facility is the testbed whose learnings will eventually be distributed. While Dyson Farming is profitable—they made £5.2 million (USD $7.1 million) last year—Dyson has invested some £500 million into the company. In other words, no one's chasing a 1% profit margin just so Brits can eat strawberries out-of-season. The larger mission is to harness technology in the name of sustainable agriculture.

To that end, Dyson Farming has developed a complicated but circular system. The company operates large-scale conventional farms that grow wheat, barley, potatoes, sugar beet, onions and peas at scale, as well as sheep and cattle. In order to maintain soil health, the company rotates in maize, rye and barley between their main crop cycles. These latter three are "energy crops;" rather than being consumed, they are used as feedstock for the massive anaerobic digestion plant the company has designed and built.

This digestion plant takes those energy crops, as well as manure from the livestock, and uses microorganisms to convert it into biogas. The resultant gas—enough to power 10,000 British homes—is then used to power their giant strawberry glasshouse. Heat recovered from the digestion plant is also used to heat the glasshouse, while captured CO2 from the plant is pumped into the glasshouse to enhance plant growth.

The digestion plant's leftover material, called digestate, is nutrient-rich. It is harvested and used as fertilizer on the fields.

The result is a facility that produces 1,250 tons of strawberries a year, all using renewable electricity and heat, close to market. And the water used to water the plants is rainwater captured from the glasshouse's roof, stored in a purpose-built lagoon.

That's a lot of words, and I didn't even get into the massive rotating horizontal carousel Dyson's engineers built to expose the plants to maximum light. Check it out in the video below:

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