Billionaire Larry Ellison to Launch Hydroponic Farm Business on His Private Hawaiian Island

By Daisy Prince

March 26, 2018

Software giant Larry Ellison leapt into the health/sustainability arena with the launch last week of a new company, Sensei, a network of hydroponic farms in Lanai, Hawaii.

“As a society, we’ve become so detached from knowing our food, knowing where it comes from and why we eat what we eat,” said cancer specialist Dr. David Agus, who worked with Ellison to develop the company.

“With Sensei we hope to increase transparency and restore our relationship with food,” Agus, the founding director of the University of Southern California’s Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, said in a recent statement from Sensei.

Sensei Farms  will start with 10 greenhouses, each measuring 200,000 square feet, with the expectation they will yield 1.7 million pounds of produce annually, Oracle founder Ellison told the Honolulu Star Advertiser in an interview. That amount is more than enough to supply Lanai, the private Hawaiian island that Ellison bought 98% of in 2012 for $300 million.

The plan is to farm fruits and vegetables from seeds imported from around the world and sell them in Hawaii, which imports about 85% of its food, according to the Sensei statement.

The first crops are Black Trifele tomatoes and Komatsuna mustard greens, grown hydroponically, meaning the plants are grown in water rather than soil.

This method only requires about 10% of the water needed for conventional farming methods and doesn’t use any harmful chemicals, according to the statement. Sensei will use Tesla solar panels for its greenhouses. Sensei will use software and technology to monitor the nutritional value of the crops and collect data on the yield so that researchers can maximize the nutrient and taste potential.

“For so long, agriculture has been one of the least digitized industries,” Daniel Gruneberg, Sensei’s president, said in a statement. “Now, we can combine software, sensors and robotics to make giant leaps in sustainable farming and perhaps, more importantly, the quality of our food.”