Little Farms, Big Movement | Branching Out | Part 2

Today my family and I are hitting the road in search of a farm. A vertical farm is a farm, just like it sounds, that is stacked. But since I'm leading this family adventure, it's not just gonna be your average farm. We are on the hunt to find the next generation of farmers.

See, I grew up surrounded by giant farms in the Midwest, and while industrial farming has helped feed the world, it often requires chemicals, antibiotics, and takes a toll on the planet. I'm Ginger Z, Chief Meteorologist at ABC News. My family and I are hitting the road to help rebuild and get a first-hand look at what it takes to save the planet. So today we traveled to Echo Farm in Fort Myers, Florida, to see how it can be done right.

The world is as diverse as it comes, and Echo tries to demonstrate difficult growing conditions around the world and ways to overcome those. We're all about using what you have to make what you need, focusing on underutilized fruits and vegetables with shorter shelf lives. So we have five plants that have more iron than spinach. Ben likes to be regular on a road trip, so anything you can do to fiber him up. They are truly zero waste; we shear the sheep to make yarn for sweaters, but look, it's us, but in sheep version!

Super efficient. Feed the ducks! We could have the duck cage here, but then they'd get the manure falling down under the cage, having to wash it out, clean it out. If we put it here, the manure fertilizes the phytoplankton and the algae, the fish grow faster, and the farmers have three protein sources: ducks, duck eggs, and the fish. And they don't use any chemicals because they have these guys!

So if you're replenishing a bed, you would mix like manure and compost and then some soil, and that gives you the mixture that you'd need without chemical fertilizer. He ate the whole thing! He's like very strong. It's a return to the way things grow best. Pretty much everything you see is either edible or useful. So this is a fruit you may not have heard of before: black sapote, also known as the chocolate pudding fruit. Yum!

You're just gonna shove my face, aren't you? Please don't! We didn't do cake at our wedding, so take it!

[Laughter]

Creamy, surprising! Creamy, surprising, isn't that fun? It tastes like banana ice cream! We need to show people that real food comes from real places and real people can grow it.

While Echo Farm has flourished in Florida's sun and soil, we also wanted to check out a farm that requires neither dirt nor sunlight. But this farm does demand head to toe PPE. Here in the net! Look at you, cute! You're about to enter the largest vertical farm in the world! Wow! So that's this big, the biggest vertical farm in the world.

This is AeroFarms in Newark, New Jersey. It's an indoor vertical spectacle and almost looks like a city with those endless shelves stacked to the ceiling like skyscrapers made of salad. So here, you want to see some of the roots? If you look up here, you see those little things? Cool! Those are all going to be harvested as plants. The plants get pretty big, so this is in like probably 12 days. That's usually 40 days! The light: all LED. The water: a top-secret irrigation system that also pumps nutrients directly to the roots, so we can use about 95 percent less water. Most people over-irrigate, so we are giving the plant really what it wants.

But is this the future of farming? Is this the way it's going to be, you think? Because it's so sustainable. When you think of how many LEDs, light-emitting diodes, are in your home now versus five years ago, that cost structure is going down, the efficiency is going up. And as LEDs become more and more prolific, then the amount of crops that we could grow becomes more and more!

We saw the world's largest vertical farm. Ginger's moving in; she's not coming home with us, she's staying on aisle four next to the kale. Ready? One, one, two, two, three, vertical farms! I didn't get anybody on that; I had no contact!

And after all the farming, it was finally time for a taste test. Oh, that one's got a spice to it, huh? Got a little kick. Yummy! Since we left Newark, I pretty much polished off an entire wasabi greens!

Do you love me? Huh? You love me? Oh yeah! The best-tasting food is when you get it straight out of the ground or as close to you as you possibly can.

John and Molly Chester are farmers at the forefront of this small farm movement. A few years ago, they left their city life in LA to start the biggest little farm in California. They're sharing more of their sustainable farming practices in a Disney Plus special: it's the biggest little farm: the return.

We had to create the highest level of biodiversity possible. That's exactly how my wife, Molly, and I rebuilt this whole farm over the last decade. When you say the word biodiverse farm or biodiversity, do you feel like when you made the ducks, societally people were kind of like… and now they're getting it more?

Biodiversity, all the different organisms that live in the soil and that live on our planet, are essentially the immune system of the planet and the farm, right? So it makes more sense to people, I think, because they can kind of visualize that there are these mutualistic relationships, these relationships that benefit one another. And that's what biodiversity is really based on, is this idea of mutualism.

Now yours is the biggest little farm, but when we talk about global agriculture, is this just the start? The way that agriculture can really work and has worked for years is more like a patchwork quilt. Like there's no one farm that's going to solve all the planet's issues, or there's no one farming methodology. That's what's so beautiful about diversity; it actually takes lots of little micro sort of ecosystems coming together that create the biosphere that is balanced on our planet.

What is one thing that somebody watching this could take to be a part of the healing of the planet? It would be amazing if we all started composting and encouraged, you know, school settings, institutional settings to require composting and do that in your home. In fact, even what you're doing in rewilding your front yard could have a far more significant impact on the re-diversifying and the healing of biodiversity on our planet than all the farms combined!

Well, we already compost, but this trip has inspired me to go one step further. Do you want to have a goat for home? Yeah, let's tell daddy, let's get a goat! Yep, I'll move! Next time!

The adventure continues as our family discovers new ways to help restore the health of our oceans. Click on the links below to watch more episodes of Branching Out.

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