A balanced food system for people and our planet
Pressing issues
While we have great reverence for the stars, Libra Design is not named after the seventh sign of the zodiac. Our focus is here on Earth, and our name reflects our mission to create balance between people and our planet by accelerating our transition to controlled-environment agriculture (CEA).
Simply put, how we produce and consume food is both the greatest contributor and solution to our most pressing issues, from deforestation and the associated loss of biodiversity to the climate crisis and global food insecurity.
Deforestation (primarily due to agriculture) is responsible for habitat loss the size of Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington combined. To help address this tragedy, Libra plants one tree (typically more) for every lighting system our clients deploy.
In just the past three decades, more than 1 billion acres of forest (and half of all forest wildlife) have been lost, overwhelmingly due to conventional agriculture¹. Combine this tragedy with the fact forests stabilize the climate by playing an integral part in the carbon cycle (they absorb 2.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year²), we find ourselves in a self-induced crisis.
With atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rising nearly 50% above pre-industrial levels³, it is more imperative than ever to protect, sustainably manage and restore our forests to help address the humanitarian, environmental and economical challenges caused by the climate crisis.
While conventional agriculture exploits natural resources, it plays a critical role feeding our global population. Unfortunately, profiting by a system that exasperates unhealthy diets.
New York, NY contains the largest food desert in the USA despite (and in large pert due to) being surrounded by fast-food.
Nearly 1 billion people on Earth are food insecure⁴, meaning they do not have access to affordable, healthy food, and it’s not a problem isolated to the least developed or developing countries. The richest country on Earth has a food insecurity problem with millions of Americans going hungry each year.
Even with the immense resources put into and consumed by our food system, it is clear conventional agriculture is not designed to handle 7.9 billion people today nor the 10 billion people of tomorrow.
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture⁵
CEA: The best path forward
Shortsighted practices of bulldozing and burning forests, exhausting natural resources and mismanaging farmland is coming to an end (one way or another), and we believe CEA is the best path forward to address food insecurity while simultaneously rehabilitating the environment.
CEA facilities such as vertical farms and greenhouses offer tremendous benefits compared to conventional, field-based agriculture. Exponentially less land, water and other natural resources are needed to cultivate exponentially more crops.⁶
By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity yet conventional agriculture alone accounts for 70% of freshwater use worldwide. Field agriculture is also the primary source of water pollution in the U.S. via large quantities of discharged agrochemicals, organic matter, sediments and saline drainage into water bodies.
While the benefits of CEA are well documented, the main barrier to vertical farming adoption remains the large upfront costs⁷. Half of which goes to replacing sunlight⁸
Dung Duong and I founded Libra to remove this financial barrier. By developing horticulture lighting systems with an initial capital cost and an ongoing operating cost significantly less than today’s leading lighting systems, our goal is to make CEA accessible to all farmers and move crop production from the field to the factory.
Removing barriers
While the unnecessarily high cost of LED systems has been the largest barrier to CEA, it is not the only one. Inadequate performance, inefficient designs and poor quality have also stagnated our transition to CEA. That is why we decided to design customized lighting systems for each of our clients. No two vertical farms or greenhouse facilities are alike, and neither are the companies that operate them. Unique cultivation, operational and business strategies require a unique horticulture lighting system.
Light is arguably the most significant input determining the success of a farm, and it would seem such a critical variable should not be left to a one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf product. Not only do we tailor every lighting system to our clients’ needs, we do so with a transparent pricing model that incentivizes purchase decisions based on function rather than perceived value. Libra clients only pay for what they need. Nothing more.
Addressing the carbon footprint of CEA
In addition to reducing the initial capital cost, we are committed to addressing the unsustainable carbon footprint and operating cost associated with energy consumption. In 2019, horticulture lighting in the U.S. consumed 9.6 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity⁹ the same energy required for 820,000 households.
For all the benefits of CEA, its carbon footprint is not one of them. And while the LED industry will celebrate significant gains in energy efficiency over the past decade (which it should), that alone won’t help us achieve greenhouse gas reductions anytime soon. We must continue to push the envelope on efficacy (our minimum is 2.7 µmol/J and our average system is 3.0 µmol/J) and migrate to renewable energy for horticulture lighting.
A key principal for Libra is to design for emerging DC-grid power systems. Not only are DC grids natively more energy efficient, but they further increase energy efficiency with less harmonic distortion and transformations between power generation (generated in DC), power transmission (delivered in AC) and power consumption of LED systems (consumed in DC). Not only are Libra systems designed for the optimum photosynthetic photon efficacy, they are also designed to interoperate with onsite, renewable power generation and new power distribution technologies.
According to the US Dept. of Energy, the average wind turbine generates 843,000 kWh per month, enough power to produce more than 7 million heads of lettuce grown in an indoor farm annually. Offshore windfarms have an even higher capacity. Math: 17 DLI (262 µmol/m²/s with 18 hour photoperiod) provided by Libra High-Flux LED system at 3.0 µmol/J requires 1.42 kWh per head of lettuce every .25ft² with a seed to harvest cycle of 35 days.
Libra was founded for the purpose of accelerating the transition of our food system from the field to the factory. By designing bespoke horticulture lighting systems with high efficacy and low cost, we believe we’re one step closer.
But we can’t do it alone. We welcome competition and hope to spur the horticulture lighting industry into a new era of low-cost and high-performance, high-quality products for CEA. More importantly, we welcome collaboration. So whether you are a farmer, a CEA facility owner or a fellow agtech provider, let’s work together toward a better future.
Written by Travis Williams. Libra Design Co-Founder & CEO.
¹FAO and UNEP. 2020. The State of the World’s Forests 2020. Forests, biodiversity and people. Rome.
²IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) – 28 rue Mauverney, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland
³Earth Science Communications Team, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory | California Institute of Technology
⁴International Food Security Assessment 2020 - 2030. USDA Economic Research Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture
⁵Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2013) - "Land Use"
⁶College of Agricultural and Environmental Services, UC Davis
⁷Benke, Kurt, and Bruce Tompkins (2017). “Future Food-production Systems: Vertical Farming and Controlled-environment Agriculture.”
⁸Eaves, J., and Eaves, S. (2018). Comparing the profitability of a greenhouse to a vertical farm in Quebec.
⁹US Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Energy Savings Potential of SSL in Agricultural Applications. 2020.