IELTS Reading

Reading Passage:

In Dhaka, urban farmers are trying a soil-free approach to agriculture that uses less space and fewer resources. Could it help cities face the threats to our food supplies?

On top of a bustling new shopping complex in central Dhaka, the region’s largest urban rooftop vegetable farm has started to thrive. Spinach bunches that are crisp, richly green and surprisingly large grow abundantly from long plastic tubes. Peer inside and you see the tubes are completely hollow, the roots of dozens of spinach plants dangling down inside them. From identical vertical tubes nearby burst row upon row of cabbages; near those are aromatic herbs, such as coriander, fennel and lemongrass. Opposite, in narrow, horizontal trays packed not with soil but with coconut husk, grow okra, chillies, shiny eggplants and brightly coloured gourds.

Rahim Ali, an engineer and sustainable agriculture entrepreneur, began experimenting with vertical farming and aeroponic growing towers – as the soil-free plastic tubes are known – on his Dhaka apartment roof seven years ago. The rooftop space above the shopping centre is slightly smaller: 11,500 square metres and almost exactly the size of a couple of cricket fields. Already, the team of young urban farmers who tend it have picked, in one day, 2,800 heads of cabbage and 200 baskets of spinach. When the remaining two thirds of the vast open area are in production, 18 staff will harvest up to 950 kg of perhaps 30 different varieties of vegetables and herbs, every day. ‘We’re not ever, obviously, going to feed the whole city this way,’ cautions Ali. ‘In the urban environment you’re working with very significant practical constraints, clearly, on what you can do and where. But if enough unused space can be developed like this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eventually target maybe between 6% and 9% of consumption.’

Perhaps most significantly, however, this is a real-life showcase for the work of Ali’s flourishing urban agriculture consultancy, SabujShefali, which is currently fielding enquiries from around the world to design, build and equip a new breed of soil-free inner-city farms. ‘The method’s advantages are many,’ he says. ‘First, I don’t much like the fact that most of the vegetables we eat have been treated with something like 15 different pesticides, or that the intensive farming techniques that produced them are such huge generators of greenhouse gases. I don’t much like the fact, either, that they’ve travelled an average of 1,800 refrigerated kilometres to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because the varieties are selected for their capacity to withstand such substantial journeys, or that 75% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and transport companies, not the producers.’

Produce grown using this soil-free method, on the other hand – which relies solely on a small quantity of water, enriched with organic nutrients, pumped around a closed circuit of pipes, towers and trays – is ‘produced up here, and sold locally, just down there. It barely travels at all,’ Ali says. ‘You can select crop varieties for their taste, not their resistance to the transport and storage chain, and you can pick them when they’re really at their best, and not before.’ No soil is exhausted, and the water that gently showers the plants’ roots every 10 minutes is recycled, so the method uses 88% less water than a classic intensive farm for the same yield.

Urban farming is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Inner-city agriculture is booming from Mumbai to Jakarta and Nairobi to São Paulo. Leafy greens are being grown in reused oil drums, onions in basement sheds. Aeroponic farming, he says, is ‘purposeful’. The equipment weighs little, can be installed on almost any flat surface and is cheap to buy: roughly ৳9,500 to ৳14,000 per square metre. It is cheap to run, too, consuming a tiny fraction of the electricity used by some techniques.

Produce grown this way typically sells at prices that, while generally higher than those of classic intensive agriculture, are lower than soil-based organic growers. There are limits to what farmers can grow this way, of course, and much of the produce is suited to the summer months. ‘Root vegetables we cannot do, at least not yet,’ he says. ‘Radishes are OK, but carrots, potatoes, that kind of thing – the roots are simply too long. Fruit trees are obviously not an option. And beans tend to take up a lot of space for not much return.’ Nevertheless, urban farming of the kind being practised in Dhaka is one part of a bigger and fast-changing picture that is bringing food production closer to our lives.

Questions 1–3

Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1–3 on your answer sheet.

1. Vertical tubes are used to grow spinach, __________________ and herbs.

2. There will eventually be a daily harvest of as much as __________________ in weight of vegetables and herbs.

3. It may be possible that the farm’s produce will account for as much as 9% of the city’s __________________ overall.

2. According to the passage, which of the following is true?

A. …
…

Answer Key:
1. B
2. D