Field Test: Radical Adventures in Future Farming

Science Gallery Dublin Until 5 June 2016.

The visible face of intensive agriculture is supermarkets bulging with vegetables, meat and milk. Yet behind the scenes, as Science Gallery Dublin's latest exhibition reveals, factory farming's reliance on energy-intensive fertilizer manufacture and vast amounts of water raises big questions about sustainability. No one solution is on offer in Field Test, which is curated by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, an artist-led global think tank devoted to imagining a more just, biodiverse food system. But visitors can feast on prototypes, research, revolutionary agronomy manifestos, innovative and imagined farm technologies and speculative cuisines. “We're asking how we can get more from less,” explains acting gallery director Lynn Scarff.

In the installation AQUAlab, plants purify water for fish, which provide fertilizer for the plants. Credit: Science Gallery/Trinity College Dublin

Meat, for instance, is a Western penchant now spreading around the world. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that demand will increase by more than two-thirds over the next 40 years, despite sky-high costs — it takes 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef. The curators' Farmstand Forecast looks at alternatives: attractively packaged insect-based foods, and historical 'miracle' crops such as breadfruit and Chlorella algae. An exhibition strand dubbed 'Farm Cyborgs' features animal-husbandry innovations including Silent Herdsman, a smart collar for tracking data on bovine health. Playing With Pigs: Pig Chase is a video game for alleviating porcine boredom, designed by researchers at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and the Wageningen University and Research Centre, both in the Netherlands. A pig uses its snout to manipulate a virtual ball on a touch-sensitive display, while a person uses a finger to do the same on a tablet computer. The reward for moving the ball in harmony is colourful 'fireworks'.

Imagination-tickling as this is, it does not probe the central issue — demand and supply. That dilemma is framed in 'Grow House'. Does the plastinated leftover of physician Mark Post's 2013 in vitro burger, made by culturing beef cells, represent a viable solution? Bioartist Oron Catts thinks not. “The real price of growing meat in a lab is hidden,” he notes. Muscle cells are macerated in huge quantities of fetal bovine serum obtained by slaughtering pregnant cows — half a litre of serum yields just 5 grams of meat, says Catts. His speculative Stir Fly is a sleek prototype bioreactor co-created by artist Ionat Zurr and designer Robert Foster to grow fly cells in bovine serum. The mix could be siphoned off and eaten as soup, or drained to form insect 'meat'.

Closed-loop urban agriculture systems offer a time-honoured sustainable alternative. AQUAlab, by Dublin-based agricultural start-up firm URBANFARM, harnesses aquaponics — a system in which waste from fish raised for food fertilizes salad and herbs, which in turn purify the water for the fish. (Plants and fish will eventually be harvested as a tasty proof of concept.) The 'Open Ag Lab' showcases another city-farming trend — beekeeping. In the The Dublin Honey Project, Irish black bees do their stuff in six apiaries across the city, and ecologist Jane Stout from Trinity College Dublin will be identifying pollen from the honey to determine foraging sources. Counter-intuitively, the project argues that cities can be relatively clean for bees because of stringent controls on pesticides. Stout argues, too, for ecological intensification — replacing artificial inputs by optimizing ecosystem services and fostering crop diversity. In service to that vision, botanists at Trinity focus on the microbiome. For Endophyte Club, Trevor Hodkinson, Brian Murphy, Anna Kaja Hoeyer and Anindita Lahiri have extracted the microbiome of wild barley and plated the microorganisms that live in the plant out on agar plates. They show how sprinkling seeds with such endophytes can boost yields, potentially reducing fertilizer use.

The show points out that consumer choices can determine how and what is grown. 'LOCI Food Lab' is a cart peddling personalized snacks made from Irish foods, digitally selected on a tablet device using criteria such as biodiverse, traditional or delicious. My attempts yielded sweet-salty yogurt, shoots and leaves, mushroom dust and dillisk seaweed: a locavore's dream nibble.

Field Test has dug up an assortment of agricultural advances, idealistic prototypes and thought experiments. But the quirkiness on show spurs questioning even as the discoveries framed rouse hope. A coordinated solution to our hungry future remains elusive.