A new vision for farming seems to be emerging from the second largest food exporter in Europe, i.e. Holland. The future comes in the shape of a skyscraper and it's called Deltapark. A vision of industrial farming envisaging 300,000 pigs, 1.2 million chickens, tens of thousands of fish and a giant vegetable growing area all under one roof. Deltapark will be an "agro-production park", run by managers, not farmers. The key concept is its "clustering" of production, the running together of different productions to maximise environmental efficiency. Stalker noticed in the projected schematics, that sandwiched between pigs and chickens, on floors 1-3, and greenhouses on floors 5-7, was floor 4 set aside for mushroom production. It may sound sci-fi like, it may even sound nightmarish to some, but one thing's for sure, Irish growers already know the huge scale of Dutch mushroom production – the future is already here on that score.
