Bosses Of Google And Amazon Back Plenty In plan To Bring High-Tech Farm Warehouses To Feed Britain

Danny Fortson, San Francisco

September 24 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

An indoor-farming start-up backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent Alphabet, plans to bring its high-tech farm warehouses to Britain by 2019.

Plenty raised $200m ($148m) in a funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, the $100bn mega-fund created by Saudi Arabia and Japan’s SoftBank. Bezos and Schmidt, who invested in a previous financing, also contributed.

The San Francisco company is in the midst of bringing in more investors to bankroll an aggressive global rollout. Chief executive Matt Barnard wants to open “farms” in the 500 cities around the world with at least 1m people, with that expansion arriving in Britain as soon as 2019.

Plenty’s giant warehouses — where plants are grown in 20ft towers with lighting, temperature, water and pests controlled and managed with artificial intelligence — promise to dramatically improve efficiency and output compared with normal farms.

Barnard claimed lettuce can be grown with less than 1% of the water required in a traditional operation. High energy costs are offset by locating warehouses in or near city centres, doing away with the need for long-haul transport that accounts for up to 40% of the price for fruit and veg.

He said: “What’s going to be stunning for people is the speed at which much of what they eat will be grown.”

Danny in the Valley podcast: Plenty’s Matt Barnard: “You’re eating year-old apples”