Glimpsing the future of fresh food
Along Spain’s southern coast, a peninsula teeming with greenhouses offers a revealing look at how Europeans are getting fed.
The Spanish coastal plain called Campo de Dalías was once a scrubland where farmers eked out a living on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada. Then in 1963, state agriculture officials put up a few wood-and-wire frames covered in plastic to protect crops in winter. As plants in the rudimentary greenhouses flourished, the practice spread.
Today the area is known as the mar de plastico, a “sea” of 44,000 greenhouses. Together with smaller greenhouse clusters in the surrounding province of Almería, it yields some nine billion pounds of produce a year, mostly for export across Europe. With about 3,000 hours of annual sunshine and low humidity, Almería is ideal for greenhouse agriculture, which has transformed the economy of the once hardscrabble region.
Of course, the boom hasn’t come without costs. Critics have raised alarms about working conditions for the largely migrant laborers, and the year-round growing season puts intense demands on groundwater. But Campo de Dalías is also a lab for innovation, where drones monitor crops and scientists are testing plastic sheeting that can shift wavelengths of sunlight to help plants absorb it.
Perhaps most surprising, researchers from the University of Almería have found that since the 1980s, average temperatures around Campo de Dalías have increased at a fraction of the rate of the broader regional warming trend—presumably because all those reflective roofs reduce solar heating. As more Almería-style complexes spring up worldwide, particularly in China, scientists are looking to these new seas of plastic for insight into how to cool cities on a warming planet.
