Agrify Corporation (AGFY) Stock Is Popping High In Pre-Market: What’s Going On?

By Muhammad Ali

August 4, 2021

Shares of the Agrify Corporation (AGFY) stock are popping high in the pre-market trading session on August 4, 2021. AGFY stock price saw a push of 9.56% to reach $21.31 a share at the time of this writing. It seems that stock is continuing the rising momentum as it went up by 5.53% at the previous closing. Let’s understand the reason behind this bull.

What’s Happening?

Agrify Corporation is the hardware and software solution provider for indoor agriculture in the United States. There is no AGFY stock-specific news to justify the bullish sentiment in today’s date. According to a recent announcement, AGFY stock will release its second-quarter 2021 financial results on August 12, 2021, at 5:00 p.m ET.

Recently Craig-Hallum analyst rated AGFY stock as “Buy” and set a price target of $25 per share. The analyst thinks that this stock will expand by offering its products in the future. Furthermore, he is hopeful that Agrify’s revenue from SaaS will be more than double by 2025.

Agrify University: AGFY stock’s Learning Program

AGFY stock on July 19, 2021, did announce the launch of Agrify University that expands on 3,500 sq. ft. This is the innovative and project-based learning program of Agrify stock equipped with Agrify’s latest farming technology and cultivation methods. The hands-on project-based learning will help cannabis cultivators to cultivate cannabis more efficiently.

David Kessler, Agrify’s Chief Science Officer is leading this project. There will be available on-site, on-demand learning options for people to enhance their knowledge of the latest scientific indoor agriculture methods. The management is optimistic that this project will expand the  Agrify ecosystem.

Financial View of the AGFY stock:

AGFY stock showed extraordinary improvement in its first-quarter 2021 revenue. The revenue was 600% higher as compared to the first quarter 2020 revenue. The sales backlog jumped from $59 million in Q4 2020 to $82 million in Q1 2021. The management expects that its full-year revenue will be between $48 million to $50 million.

Wrap Up:

Agrify stock is hot among investors despite any specific reason. The management is focusing on the expansion and overall growth of the stock. Previous financial results were exceptional in terms of revenue and sales backlog. The upcoming financial results next week will further clarify the position of the stock.

Agtech Company AppHarvest Has Secured A $91m Financing Arrangement With Sustainably-Focused Investment Firm Equilibrium Capital To Fuel The Future Construction of 12 High-Tech Indoor Farms by 2025

By Mary Ellen Shoup

July 27, 2021

Agtech company AppHarvest has secured a $91m financing arrangement with sustainably-focused investment firm Equilibrium Capital to fuel the future construction of 12 high-tech indoor farms by 2025.

Read The Rest Here: HTTPS://WWW.FOODNAVIGATOR-USA.COM/ARTICLE/2021/07/27/APPHARVEST-SECURES-91M-FINANCING-TO-FUEL-2025-INDOOR-FARMING-AMBITIONS 

Center To Announce First Winners of Its “Best In Class” Awards

By July 23, 2021

The Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture, a U.S. based company that supports the growth and development of the vertical and indoor farming industry, will announce the first winners of its Center of Excellence “Best in Class” TM Awards for indoor farm manufacturers at a virtual event scheduled for August 4th with Indoor Ag-Con. The goal of the “Best in Class” Awards is to recognize operational excellence in the indoor agriculture industry through an analysis of KPI’s on indoor farm operations and the supporting equipment.

The announcement will take place in the context of a virtual panel discussion on the importance of metrics to indoor farm sustainability and future investment in indoor agriculture. Finalists and industry thought leaders will sit on the panel. Those interested may register for the event at: indoor.ag/webinar.

The winners will be announced virtually in two categories: commercial indoor production systems and indoor farm lighting fixtures. Indoor production systems are turnkey systems that are optimized for the production of leafy greens and other vegetables in indoor vertical farm facilities. The top systems use the least amounts of water, energy, labor, and other resources to produce the greatest yield. The top lighting fixtures are energy-efficient, affordable, and yield-optimizing.

“We are really excited to recognize excellence among the Agtech manufacturers supporting the indoor and vertical farming industry. Our finalists offer solutions that help indoor farms achieve operational efficiency and sustainability. We believe the awards can help spur innovation in this space,” stated Eric W. Stein, Ph.D., founder and Executive Director of the Center of Excellence.

The winning products were selected through a process that includes being nominated and then evaluated according to technical and operational merits in several categories. The Center performs a quality check on the data before being input into a proprietary weighted multi-criteria model. Products are also evaluated based on interviews and an analysis of online data.

More Info: More detailed information on the Center’s awards can be found at https://indooragcenter.org/awards. Growers and manufacturers are invited to become nominated and begin the application process. Winners receive several benefits including industry recognition, social media exposure as well as participation in future panel discussions and conferences.

About the Center

The Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture provides insights about the economics of indoor farming based on a careful analysis of industry data and from thought leaders in industry and academia. As the first U.S.-based Center of Excellence dedicated to indoor farming, it promotes best practices, benchmarking, networking, knowledge development, and research. Its annual Best in Class Indoor Farming Awards (TM) recognizes top indoor growers and manufacturers. The Center is located in the Philadelphia metro region.

About Indoor Ag-Con

Indoor Ag-Con is an organization that hosts premier events centered around building the indoor agriculture community. They unite growers and engineers alike to create a prime networking opportunity through discussions, workshops, and exhibits enhancing the participants’ knowledge of growing crops in indoor systems.

Media Contact Information

Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture

indooragcenter.org

team@indooragcenter.org

Vertical Farming Startup Oishii Raises $50m In Series A Funding

By Sian Yates

03/11/2021

Oishii, a vertical farming startup based in New Jersey, has raised $50 million during a Series A funding round led by Sparx Group’s Mirai Creation Fund II.

The funds will enable Oishii to open vertical strawberry farms in new markets, expand its flagship farm outside of Manhattan, and accelerate its investment in R&D.

“Our mission is to change the way we grow food. We set out to deliver exceptionally delicious and sustainable produce,” said Oishii CEO Hiroki Koga. “We started with the strawberry – a fruit that routinely tops the dirty dozen of most pesticide-riddled crops – as it has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of vertical farming.”

“We aim to be the largest strawberry producer in the world, and this capital allows us to bring the best-tasting, healthiest berry to everyone. From there, we’ll quickly expand into new fruits and produce,” he added.

Oishii is already known for its innovative farming techniques that have enabled the company to “perfect the strawberry,” while its proprietary and first-of-its-kind pollination method is conducted naturally with bees.

The company’s vertical farms feature zero pesticides and produce ripe fruit all year round, using less water and land than traditional agricultural methods.

“Oishii is the farm of the future,” said Sparx Group president and Group CEO Shuhei Abe. “The cultivation and pollination techniques the company has developed set them well apart from the industry, positioning Oishii to quickly revolutionise agriculture as we know it.”

The company has raised a total of $55 million since its founding in 2016.

Fresh Impact Farms Awarded Arlington's First Agriculture Grant

Mark Hand, Patch Staff

Operating since 2018, Fresh Impact Farms uses hydroponic technology to grow a variety of speciality herbs, leafy greens, and edible flowers indoors. (Mark Hand/Patch)

ARLINGTON, VA — Arlington County received its first-ever agriculture fund grant from the state, money that will go to Fresh Impact Farms, an Arlington-based company that plans to double production at its indoor growing facility.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Monday that he had awarded an Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development, or AFID, Fund grant to Arlington totalling $15,000 to be given to Fresh Impact Farms. The company will receive a total of $30,000 from the government, with Arlington County matching the state grant with local funds.

"Agriculture continues to be a key driver of our economic recovery in both rural and urban areas of our commonwealth," Northam said Monday in a statement. "Innovative, dynamic businesses like Fresh Impact Farms are demonstrating how exciting new opportunities can grow out of pandemic-related challenges."

"I congratulate the company on their success and am thrilled to award the first-ever AFID grant to Arlington County to support this expansion," the governor said.

In recent decades, Arlington County has grown into one of the most densely populated counties in the nation. Up until World War II, Arlington still had plenty of farmland. But over the past 60-plus years, the only farming in the county has been of the backyard and patio variety or in the community gardens in the Four Mile Run area.

Operating since 2018, Fresh Impact Farms uses proprietary hydroponic technology to grow a variety of specialty herbs, leafy greens, and edible flowers indoors.

"Governor Northam's award to Fresh Impact Farms, Arlington's only commercial farm, is an innovative way to celebrate unique uses of technology to help a small business pivot during the pandemic," Arlington County Board of Supervisors Chairman Matt de Ferranti said. "I am thrilled that Fresh Impact Farms is growing and looking to the future of a sustainable food supply."
The company will invest a total of $137,500 as part of the expansion, which will include a second grow room, a larger production facility, and an educational hub where customers, after the pandemic, will be able to see how their food is harvested.

Fresh Impact Farms' community-supported agriculture or CSA, program focuses on leafy greens and home kitchen-friendly herbs and has grown them steadily since the program's creation last April. Along with residential customers, the company now has smaller wholesale clients in the Washington, D.C., area.

The future is bright for urban agriculture, said Ryan Pierce, founder of Fresh Impact Farms, located in the back of a Lee Highway strip mall. (Mark Hand/Patch)

After the start of the pandemic, Fresh Impact Farms decided to shift its business model to a CSA delivery service in order to continue generating revenue.

"Seizing the opportunity created by more people cooking at home, the company initiated a Community Supported Agriculture program targeting area residents," the governor's office said.

"Now, with vaccinations underway and the restaurant industry poised to rebound, Fresh Impact Farms is expanding, which will allow the company to resume supplying their restaurant customers, while also meeting new demand through their CSA program," the governor's office said.

Over the next three years, the company expects to grow an additional 10,500 pounds of Virginia-grown leafy greens, herbs, and edible flowers for restaurant and CSA customers.

The future is bright for urban agriculture, said Ryan Pierce, founder of Fresh Impact Farms, located in the back of a Lee Highway strip mall.

"The support and generosity from the Commonwealth and Arlington County will be valuable as we expand our production and move towards a hybrid model of serving both the needs of restaurants and consumers," Pierce said in a statement. "As the owner of a local food business, nothing gets me more excited than seeing the community come together in support of local food."

The funds from the Arlington County Industrial Development Authority, together with the state grant, represent "an important investment in urban agriculture, sustainability, and technology," Arlington County IDA Chair Edwin Fountain said in a statement. "This project will advance the County's innovative and forward-thinking approach to developing new sectors of economic activity in Arlington."

Vertical Farms Nailed Tiny Salads. Now They Need To Feed The World

Gartenfeld Island, in Berlin’s western suburb of Spandau, was once the bellows of Germany’s industrial revolution. It hosted Europe’s first high-rise factory and, until World War II, helped make Berlin, behind London and New York, the third-largest city on Earth.

Today’s Berlin is still a shell of its former self (there are over a hundred cities more populous), and the browbeaten brick buildings that now occupy Gartenfeld Island offer little in the way of grandeur. Flapping in the gloom of a grey November morning in 2020 is a sign which reads, in German, “The Last Days of Humanity”.

Yet inside one of these buildings is a company perched at agriculture’s avant-garde, part of the startup scene dragging Berlin back to its pioneering roots. In under eight years, Infarm has become a leader in vertical farming, an industry proponents say could help feed the world and address some of the environmental issues associated with traditional agriculture. Its staff wear not the plaid or twill of the field but the black, baggy uniform of the city’s hipsters.

Infarm has shipped over a thousand of its “farms” to shops and chefs across Europe (and a few in the US). These units, which look like jumbo vending machines, grow fresh greens and herbs in rows of trays fed by nutrient-rich water and lit by banks of tiny LEDs, each of which is more than ten times brighter than the regular bulb you’d find in your dining room. Shoppers pick the plants straight from the shelf where they’re growing.

Infarm crop science director, Pavlos Kalaitzoglou, in his Berlin lab

Credit Ériver Hijano

Gartenfeld Island, however, is home to something more spectacular. Here, in a former Siemens washing machine factory, stand four white, 18-metre-high “grow chambers”, controlled by software and served by robots. These are the company’s next generation of vertical farms: fully-automated, modular high-rises it hopes will scale the business to the next level. According to Infarm, each one of these new units uses 95 per cent less water, 99 per cent less space and 75 per cent less fertilizer than conventional land-based farming. This means higher yields, fresher produce and a smaller carbon footprint.

Agriculture is a £6 trillion global industry that has altered the face and lungs of the Earth for 12,000 years. But, unless we change our food systems, we’ll be in trouble. By 2050, the global population will be 9.7 billion, two billion more than today. Fifty-six per cent of us live in cities; by 2050 it will be 70 per cent. If the prosperity of megastates like India and China continues to soar, and our diets remain the same, we will need to double food production without razing the Amazon to do it. That sign on Gartenfeld Island might not be so alarmist.

Vertical farmers believe they are a part of the solution. Connected, precision systems have grown crops at hundreds of times the efficiency of soil-based agriculture. Located in or close to urban centres, they slash the farm-to-table time and eliminate logistics. New tech is allowing growers to tamper with light spectra and manipulate plant biology. Critics, however, question the role of vertical farms in our food future. They are towering lunchboxes for late capitalism, they argue – producing garnishes for the rich when it is the plates of the poor we must fill. Vertical farms already make money, and heavyweights including Amazon and SoftBank are investing in various companies in the hopes of cornering a market expected to be worth almost £10 billion in the next five to ten years. Infarm is leading that race in Europe. It has partnered with European retailers including Aldi, Carrefour and Marks & Spencer. In 2019 it penned a deal with Kroger, America’s largest supermarket chain. Venture capitalists have handed the firm a total of £228 million.

Not bad for a hare-brained experiment that started in a Berlin apartment.

An Infarm employee tends to a batch of seedlings in a special incubator

Credit Ériver Hijano

In 2011, a year before he moved to Berlin, Erez Galonska went off-grid. He grew up in a village in his native Israel, but the young nation was growing too, and farms made way for buildings. Soon the village was a town, and its inhabitants ever more disconnected from their natural surroundings.

Galonska’s father had studied agriculture, and the son had dreamed of recovering a connection with nature he felt he had lost. The search took him to the mountains of the Canary Islands, where he found a plot of land and got to work. He drank water from springs, drew energy from solar panels, and spent long hours farming produce he then sold or bartered at local markets.

When he met his now-wife Osnat Michaeli, “I traded it for love,” he says. “Love is stronger than anything.” In 2012, the couple, alongside Galonska’s brother Guy, who had studied Chinese medicine, moved to Berlin to work on a friend’s social media project. But the hunger for self-sufficiency remained. It was “a personal quest,” Michaeli says. “How we can be self-sufficient, live off the grid. Food is a big part of that journey.”

We meet at a Jewish restaurant in Berlin’s historic Gropius Bau art museum. It is mid-morning, and Covid-19 has cleared the tables. But a row of Infarm units whirs away quietly along one wall, producing basil, mint, wasabi rocket (a type of rocket leaf with the punchy flavour of wasabi), and other, more exotic herbs. Such produce was a pipedream for the three Infarm co-founders eight years ago. Growing crops when living on a tropical island was one thing. Doing it in a small apartment, located in the tumbledown Berlin neighbourhood of Neukölln, was quite another. Soon after moving from the Canaries, Erez Galonska typed “can you grow without soil” into Google.

Japan had taken to indoor farming in the 1970s, and this bore some helpful information on its techniques. The same was true of illegal cannabis growers, who swapped tips about hydroponics – growing with nutrient-packed water rather than soil – across subreddits.
Several trips to a DIY store later, the trio had what resembled a hydroponic farm. It was a big, chaotic Rube Goldberg machine, and it leaked everywhere. Growing wasn’t simply a case of switching on the lights and waiting. Brightness, nutrients, humidity, temperature – every tweaked metric resulted in an entirely different plant. One experiment yielded lettuce so fibrous it was like eating plastic. “We failed thousands of times,” Erez Galonska says.

Two of Infarm’s co-founders, Osnat Michaeli and Erez Galonska

Credit Ériver Hijano

Eventually, the team grew some tasty greens. They imagined future restaurant menus boasting of food grown “in-farm”, rather than simply made in-house, and founded Infarm in 2013. But there was a hitch: indoor-grown cannabis sells for around £1,000 per kilo. Lettuce for £1.20. Most of the early vertical farms required heaps of manual work and operated in the red. “It simply wasn’t a sustainable business model,” Erez Galonska says.

By 2014, they decided to roadshow their idea and shipped a 1955 Airstream trailer – a brushed-aluminium American icon – to Berlin. The trailer belonged to a former FBI agent, but it was conspicuous in a city of Volkswagens, caravans and Plattenbau buildings. Michaeli and the Galonska brothers transformed it into a mobile vertical farm, then pitched up at an urban garden collective in Berlin’s trendy Kreuzberg district. There they proselytised indoor farming to urban planners, food activists, architects and hackers, handing out salads and running workshops. Fresh, local food – even if it cost a little more – would entice a growing number of foodies who were interested in where their meals came from. The trailer cost nothing but petrol money to move, and emissions from the growing process itself were almost nil.

When the designer of a swanky hotel across town came by trailer, he asked if the team could install something similar in his restaurant. “That was really the trigger,” says Guy Galonska. “We rented a workshop and we got to develop a system for them.”

When they installed their first “farm” in a Berlin supermarket, VCs took notice and visited Infarm’s young founders at their Kreuzberg office-cum-kitchen, where they hosted dinner parties featuring Infarm crops. But a return on investment still seemed distant: some investors thought the farms were an art project. Maintaining locations manually was exhausting, and the team almost went bankrupt “two or three times,” Guy Galonska says. “I think all of us got a lot of white hair during that time,” he adds. “It was a very challenging thing to do.”

A €2 million grant from the European Union in 2016 helped. With it came deals to place Infarm units in supermarkets and restaurants across Germany. Managing them all would require something precise, connected and efficient. To become a sustainable business, Infarm would have to behave less like a farm, and more like a tech startup.

An Infarm kiosk in the Edeka Supermarket E Center in Berlin

Credit Ériver Hijano

For around 2,500 years after King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon gifted his wife some hanging gardens, little changed in the world of hydroponic farming. Asian farmers grew rice on giant, terraced paddies, and Aztecs built “chinampa” rigs that floated along the swamps of southern Mexico.

Life magazine published a drawing of stacked homes, each growing its own produce, in 1909, and the term “vertical farming” appeared six years later. The US Air Force fed hydroponically-grown veggies to its troops during World War II, and Nasa explored the tech as a solution for life off-planet. But vertical farming didn’t really capture public imagination until 1999, when Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor, devised a 30-storey skyscraper filled with farms. In 2010, Despommier published The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, which has become the industry’s utopian testament.

“I had no expectations whatsoever that this would turn commercial,” Despommier says. “We just thought it was a good idea, because we didn’t see any other way out of stopping deforestation in favour of farming, and keeping the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere at a reasonable level. It turned out to be a crazy idea whose time has come.”

The vertical farming concept is simple: growing produce on vertically-stacked levels, rather than side by side in a field. Instead of the Sun, the vertical farm uses artificial light, and where there is ordinarily soil, growers use nutritious water or, in the case of “aeroponic” farms, an evenly-dispersed mist.

Vertical farms take up a vanishing amount of land compared to their conventional cousins. They use almost no water, don’t flush contaminating pesticides into the ecosystem, and can be built where people actually live. But, by and large, they have not functioned as businesses. Only the black-market margins of weed, and Japan’s high-income, high-import food ecosystem, have catered to profit. It costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to erect a mid-sized vertical farm, and energy use is prohibitively high.

Advances in technology are changing this. By bolting automation, machine learning and cloud-connected software on to vertical farms, firms can trim physical labour, increase capacity and maintain a dizzying range of cultivation variables. Infarm staff at a separate office to the new Berlin farm, located some 23km southeast of Spandau in the Tempelhof district, keep track of “plant recipe” settings at any one of the startup’s 1,220 in-store units, including CO2 levels, pH and growth cycles, via the company’s Farm Control Cloud Platform, a bit like a giant CCTV room. Machine learning finesses recipes, and keeps each plant as uniform as possible.

Inside the new vertical farm, trays of produce are tended by automated systems

Credit Ériver Hijano

Gartenfeld Island’s employees – mechanical and electrical engineers, software developers, crop scientists and biologists – get closer to the produce, but only just. They monitor via an iPad and feed crops into the building’s four massive grow chambers, or farms, each one about the height and width of two London buses, with ventilation systems that whoosh like a subdued turbine hall.

From there on in, robots do the hard work. Inside the farms, a robotic “plant retrieval system” – basically a tricked-out teddy picker – scoots up and down a perpendicular beam, plucking trays of plants in various stages of growth and shuffling them closer, or further, from LED lights at the summit. The firm claims this reduces service time by 88 per cent. A sliver of the window is the only way to see the device in-person: everything is hermetically sealed to keep out pests. “With automation, you invest once and then that price goes down over time,” says Orie Sofer, Infarm’s hardware lab lead. “With human labour, unfortunately, over time the price goes up.”

The number of crop plants varies depending on the produce, but there are usually just under 300 in a “farm” at any one time. Each farm yields the equivalent of 10,000 square metres of land and uses just five litres of water per kilo of food (traditional vegetable farming uses around 322 litres per kg).

Infarm is not alone in this revolution. AeroFarms, a Newark, New Jersey-based startup, feeds an aeroponic mist to roots that are separated from their leaves by a cloth. It’s most recent funding round was led by Ingka Group, the parent of Swedish furniture giant IKEA. New York’s Bowery Farming, like Infarm, focuses on automation and a proprietary dashboard called BoweryOS that, among other things, takes photos of crops in real-time for analysis. It’s £123 million in backing comes from investors including Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek. Bowery CEO and founder Irving Fain believe his addressable market “is about a hundred billion dollars a year, just in the US, of crops that we think are good candidates for us to grow.”

Leading the vertical farming VC race is Plenty, a San Francisco-headquartered brand that has raised almost half a billion pounds in the capital since it was founded in 2013, including a 2020 Series D round led by Masayoshi Son’s $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund. Plenty feeds its greens with water that trickles down six-metre-tall poles; infrared sensors pour data into an algorithm that nudges the plant’s growth recipe accordingly.

Plenty co-founder and chief science officer Nate Storey, who works at the company’s test farm in Wyoming, likens these deep-tech solutions to the tools that powered agriculture’s most recent revolution: “The tractor allowed farmers to be freed from constraints. Half of their land was dedicated to raising draft animals, and the tractor came along and freed them from a life where they were basically managing animals just so they could plough their land.”

For them, he says, automation is similar. “It allows us to get rid of the hardest work – the work that is unpleasant, the work [growers] don’t like to do – and focus on the work that really matters.”

Infarm kiosks inside the Beba restaurant in the Gropius Bau museum

Credit Ériver Hijano

Infarm differs from the competition on two fronts. The first is its focus on modular design: each component is compatible and scalable, like a giant, noisy LEGO set. Modularity makes it possible to install Infarm units anywhere in the world in a matter of weeks, no matter the size. That enables the company’s second USP: its business model. Infarm has no stores, selling produce instead via its remote units.

Clients tell Infarm which produce they want, and “create a schedule,” says Michaeli. “You buy the plants. Everything on the farm is controlled by Tempelhof. Everything that’s grown belongs to the client.” A chef may demand pesto that’s made from particular three-day-aged Greek and Italian basil, for example. Infarm can do that (Tim Raue, Berlin’s most famous chef, is a customer). “Everyone stops and asks about the farm,” one Berlin store manager says. “It’s great to have innovation here.”

Infarm has “two big advantages,” says Nicola Kerslake, founder of Contain Inc, a Nevada-based agtech financier. “One is that they’ve figured out how to do product onsite, which is really not very easy. And the other is that they have these great relationships with big purchasers like Marks & Spencer.”

“When you look at where the arms race is in this industry,” she continues, “it’s really been in two areas: How do I get hold of as much capital as possible, and how do I sign up the right partners? Having Marks & Spencer in your back pocket is really useful.”

It has helped encourage investors to open their chequebooks. Hiro Tamura, a partner at London VC firm Atomico, first met Infarm’s founding trio in 2018. A year later he led its £75 million Series B round. “They could roll these things out,” he says. “They worked, and they didn’t need some industrial-sized warehouse to do it. I didn’t lean in, I fell into the rabbit hole. And it was incredible. I was like, wow, these guys are thinking about time and speed to market modularity.”

Infarm ploughs a chunk of its revenue back into research. In a mezzanine-level lab sitting above the farms at Gartenfeld Island, a dozen white-coated analysts conduct tests on herbs to a soundtrack of Ariana Grande, measuring crop sugar levels, acidity, vitamins, toxicity, antioxidants and more. Via a process of phenotyping – the study of organisms’ characteristics relative to their environment – they hope to create more flavourful plants, or new tastes altogether.

“It’s not just about the hardware,” Kerslake explains. “It’s about how the hardware interacts with the rest of your farm system. And we’re starting to see a lot more sophistication on that front because the AI programs these companies started three or four years ago are now starting to bear fruit.”

Infarm’s results are high-quality: juicy lettuce, wasabi rocket that kicks, and basil that’s far more fragrant than the budget variety. “The end goal with almost everything that we’re doing is developing some sort of playbook, some sort of modular and standardised system, that we can then copy-paste to wherever we go,” says Pavlos Kalaitzoglou, Infarm’s director of plant science. Across from the lab, tomatoes and shiitake mushrooms grow in wine cellar-size chambers. They are living proof of how the firm is looking to diversify from herbs and leafy greens, whose low energy and water requirements make them the staple crop of every vertical farming startup today.

Rows of LED-illuminated produce inside one of Infarm’s four massive new grow chambers

Credit Ériver Hijano

We are in danger of farming the planet to death. Agriculture already occupies 40 per cent of all liveable land on Earth, and food production causes a quarter of all greenhouse gases. An area the size of Scotland disappears from tropical rainforests, responsible for up to a quarter of land photosynthesis, each year. Clearing more trees to feed our spiralling population will not help.

“We need to go back to the drawing board and rethink which avenues we can environmentally afford to pursue,” says Nicola Cannon, a professor at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester. Nitrogen fertiliser is particularly harmful to the environment, Cannon adds, “and has led us to adopt systems which have grossly exceeded the planetary boundaries.”

Current food systems are wildly inefficient: waste accounts for 25 per cent of all calories. And yet, almost a billion people suffer from hunger worldwide. These are not issues vertical farming will solve, critics, argue. Going local does little beyond satisfying consumers.

Energy is another tricky issue. Ninety per cent of Infarm’s electricity today is renewable, and it wants to reach zero emissions in the next few years. But this doesn’t factor in the environmental cost of building a steel-and-cement facility.

“Vertical farms are a round-off error to the round-off error in terms of contributing to the big levers out there,” Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist based in Minneapolis, says. “Like most technologies that are getting a lot of venture capital and which come from Silicon Valley kind of thinking, it’s being massively overhyped at the cost of real solutions. There’s an opportunity cost to put all this technology, money and renewable energy – that could be used for other things that we need energy for – into growing arugula for rich people at $10 an ounce.”

More than half the world’s food energy comes from its three “mega-crops”: wheat, corn and rice. They require wind, seasons and micronutrients that vertical farms are unable to replicate today. These are the crops that can prevent famine in Somalia, Bangladesh or Bolivia – not lettuce. “Vertical farms are growing the edge of the plate, not the centre of the plate,” Foley says.

But Despommier says it’s too soon to criticise the young industry for not addressing issues such as crop diversity. “What you’re really seeing is a rush towards profitability to get their feet wet, and to get their ledgers in the black and to pay off their investors, before they start diversifying,” he says.

“In a world where you think that land is unlimited and that resources are unlimited, indoor farming would be nonsensical,” Plenty co-founder Storey says. “As crazy as it seems to replace the Sun with electricity, it makes sense today. And it really makes more and more sense as time goes on.”

Much of the hope vested in vertical farms rests on the light-emitting diode. This tiny bead of light is the industry’s packhorse: it is a farm’s biggest financial layout and the nucleus of its most exciting advances. Modern LEDs are nothing like the ones that powered your childhood TV. They’ve progressed at such a rate, in fact, that they’ve developed their own law to adhere to: “Haitz’s Law”. Each decade, their cost drops by a factor of ten, while the light they generate leaps by a factor of 20.

That curve will eventually plateau, experts say. But not before LEDs improve enough to allow vertical farms to profit from food closer to the middle of the plate. Infarm’s current smart LED set-up is over 50 per cent more efficient than the one that lit its first farms. Haitz’s Law has helped some companies experiment in growing potatoes, which require far more energy and water than leafy greens. Turning profit from a crop that delivers the highest calories per acre would be momentous for the industry.

The cutting edge of LED technology today is smart sensors that can regulate the brightness and spectrum of light to replicate growing outdoors – or enhance it. Much of the planet’s first flora grew only in the ocean, which looks blue because it absorbs blue light at least.
Photosynthesis, therefore, occurs best between the blue and red light spectra. By tailoring LEDs to emit only these colours, or by dimming at intervals meant to mirror a plant’s natural cycle, vertical farmers can further reduce their energy burden – like stripping a road car to its bare bones so it can drive faster.

Recent discoveries have been more surprising. Strawberries, for example, react particularly well to green light. Some spectra can increase vitamin C in concentrated fruits like kiwis, while others extend shelf-lives by almost a week. In the future, says Fei Jia, of LED firm Heliospectra, growers “can get feedback from the lighting and the plants themselves on how the lighting should be applied… to further improve the consistency of the crop quality.”
“If you judge it from what you have today, you understand what [critics] are saying,” Guy Galonska says. “How can you grow rice and wheat and save the world? And they are right. But they can’t see ten years ahead: they can’t see all the different trends that are going to support that revolution.”

Other technological advances are helping agriculture in different ways. Drones and sensors help map and streamline growing. Drip irrigation dramatically reduces the burden on dwindling water supplies. Circular production – where waste products from one process contribute to fuelling another – is becoming more commonplace, especially in livestock farming. Cell-grown or insect-based meat (or vegetarianism) will reduce our reliance on livestock, which consume 45 per cent of the planet’s crops. Infarm, and the broader vertical farm cohort, may not be saving the world today. But it wants to build taller farms, place them in public buildings like schools, and teach people the value of fresh, healthy vegetables. If 70 per cent of us are to live in cities, then cities “can become these communities of growing,” says Erez Galonska.

Ultimately, Infarm wants to build a network of tens of thousands of automated farms, each one pumping streams of data back into a giant AI system in Berlin. This “brain”, as Galonska calls it, will pour that information into algorithms to generate better food at lower costs, each new yield shaving fractions from the water, energy and nutrients required. Then, Infarm could become something closer to the dream Galonska left behind in the Canaries: truly self-sufficient.

It’s a long way from the leaky, DIY gadget he and his co-founders built in their front room. “The way the world is going now, it’s very clear to everyone it’s running in the wrong direction,” Galonska says. “We definitely believe in the power of collaboration: bringing those outside-the-box thoughts to create a new system that will generate more food, better food, much more sustainably, and help to heal the planet – because that’s the main issue on the table.”

Saudi Farmer Has Built The Region’s First Vertical Farm

The Saudi farmer Omar Al-Jundi even he is not related to farming by degree. But that is exactly where the industrial engineer found his calling, when he built the region’s first vertical farm in the heart of Dubai. Born in Egypt to Saudi parents, Al-Jundi spent his early years in Alkhobar due to his father’s engineering firm.

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The family moved to Jeddah when he was 12 years old. His last two years of schooling were spent at Bahrain School in Manama. “I wanted to graduate with an American high school diploma,” Al-Jundi said. “At the time, as a Saudi, you couldn’t attend private foreign schools.” Upon graduation, he left the region to study industrial engineering, followed by an MBA at the University of Miami in Florida. Although his father is an engineer and his mother an architect, Al Jundi delved into the world of banking for two and a half years when he moved back to Jeddah upon graduating.

“I then shifted to the hospitality industry, opened the first lounge in Jeddah along with other restaurants with my friends, and ended up selling my share and joining my father’s company,” he said. “You learn that you’re better off doing something on your own than having partners because you end up changing directions.”
After 10 years of “paying his dues” in the family business, he felt compelled to change directions. “As an Arab, you’re always closely tied to the family,” he said. “We’re blessed my father started a business and there’s a place for us in that business, but luckily, my younger brother was a lot more interested in it — I always felt my calling was somewhere else.”

In search of his true passion, he started his journey as an entrepreneur. The field he specialized in had yet to be determined. “I felt that there was a meaning for something else,” Al-Jundi said. “I was free and my family was very supportive.”
Countless research and books later, he became intrigued by the tech space, admitting he believed he would start the next Amazon. “That didn’t follow through,” he said. “Then I thought it would be in mining, but I always looked for something that was away from my comfort zone such as engineering, contracting, real estate and consulting. Just something different. It was a process.”

The young Saudi had reached a point in his life where he felt the need to do something impactful, something which added true value to the region. Eventually, two of his friends introduced him to the concept of modern farming. “I visited some orange farms in Egypt and I was in exploration research mode,” he said. “I enjoyed seeing nature — you’re a lot more relaxed. Here, when you go in and see the plants growing every day, there’s definitely a connection, because you’re seeing the end product, you’re feeling it, and I connect to them.”

The more research he immersed himself in, the more driven his interest became. At the time, the Saudi Government was focused on addressing food security and self-sufficiency. “It’s always been a big topic,” he said. “When you fly out of Riyadh, you find these big circular green spots as they’re trying to green and farm the desert, which was successful, but on the other hand, it depleted our water resources.” According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, agriculture represents around 70 per cent of water consumption in most of the GCC countries. But Al-Jundi did not give up on the thought.

After moving to Dubai in 2014, he learned about King Abdullah’s Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad. Half the capital needed for agricultural projects was offered to Saudis who invested in a list of 31 countries abroad to purchase land, set up a project and export the food back to the Kingdom. It gave him an idea to start his own vertical farm. “I knew it was a big topic,” he said. “I’d never heard we could grow food with no soil. I thought it was intriguing and fascinating. It was enough for me to know there was something there to explore it further.”

With more than 90 per cent of the region’s land unsuitable for agriculture, Al-Jundi set out to find a solution. He spent the following 12 weeks taking courses in aquaponics, aquaculture, hydroponics and horticulture in California and the Netherlands. He even spent time working in a cucumber greenhouse at the Delphy facility in Holland, where he acquired valuable experience in the field. “It was really professional and a great learning experience,” he said. “That’s when I knew what I wanted to do. And I knew I had to completely immerse myself in it.”
The team of Badia Farms, which he founded in Al Quoz in December last year, consists of 12 people, all of whom have experience in farming. “It took 18 months to get it up and running because we didn’t work with any technical partner,” Al-Jundi said. “I knew I was in it for the long haul, so I worked with different growers and learned.”

The 850-square-meter facility includes a “fertigation” room, which fertilizes and irrigates the 18 varieties of crops he currently grows. Gourmet seeds, some of them hybrids, such as lemon basil, cinnamon kale, wasabi, green radish, mustard, micro kale, edible flowers and cinnamon basil, are flown in from the United Kingdom and the United States every three months — from 50 to 300 kilograms at a time. The farm plans on introducing as many as 26 varieties, including sunflowers.

The seeds are placed on a type of mat made of recycled carpet that is food-certified. LED lights flood the room in a pink atmosphere, with each UV light containing a certain spectrum that is beneficial for the plants.
In the tank room, feed and water is scheduled through a computer-based on the crop, with a unique nutrient recipe for each type, including potassium, calcium, magnesium, and ammonium. UV and concentrated oxygen are also able to kill any potential bacteria or pathogens in recycled water. Once the seeds sprout, they are moved to the five stacks in the vertical farm. Four dehumidifiers regulate the humidity in the air, providing each on average with 70 litres of water a day. The eco-system created by Badia Farms uses 90 percent less water than open-field farming and recycles its water up to nine times.

“We’re using hydroponics,” Al- Jundi said. “The biggest advantage is that we do not spray pesticides, which are messing up our health. In fact, we extensively use stickers to attract insects away from the crops.” Different levels of lighting are provided for each stage of the plants before they are sent out as they were grown. “They’re intense in flavor and it’s the freshest you can get that way,” he said. “My personal favourite is chocolate mint.” With 60 clients so far, serving hotels, restaurants, and cafes, the model is a first for the region, which made it challenging to set up. “All the ones abroad are designed for different climatic conditions so none of them are applicable here, where there is extreme humidity and high temperatures,” he said. “And to convince a chef to give you his time, when you don’t have the track record, was a big challenge. I wasn’t a known farmer yet.”

The system’s structure was manufactured in Riyadh, with a plan to set up the next facility by 2020 in Jeddah. Until then, the plan is to cater to Saudi as well as the UAE. “Dubai is a good testing ground and Saudi’s vision now is to support our type of sustainable growing and ecological farms, so it’s perfectly in line with what we want to do,” Al-Jundi said. “The government is now delegated to move into sustainable growing and find viable solutions to address self-sufficiency, so it’s not a slogan anymore: it’s the real deal.”

He hopes to develop similar projects across the Kingdom in the future. “My aim is to make sure we truly become self-sufficient,” he said. “Vertical farming is one solution but it’s not the full one — the ideal solution lies in all models of modern farming. What’s close to my heart is giving people healthy food while preserving our resources, and I believe the new generations of Saudis are ambitious and want to evolve our country. We were just waiting for the opportunity and it has finally come.”

Source: Arab News

Little Leaf Farms Raises $90M to Grow Its Greenhouse Network

by Jennifer Marston

Image from: Little Leaf Farms

Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms has raised $90 million in a debt and equity financing round to expand its network of hydroponic greenhouses on the East Coast. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital as well as founding investors Bill Helman and Pilot House Associates. Bank of America also participated.

Little Leaf Farms says the capital is “earmarked” to build new greenhouse sites along the East Coast, where its lettuce is currently available in about 2,500 stores. 

The company already operates one 10-acre greenhouse in Devins, Massachusetts. Its facility grows leafy greens using hydroponics and a mixture of sunlight supplemented by LED-powered grow lights. Rainwater captured from the facility’s roof provides most of the water used on the farm. 

According to a press release, Little Leaf Farms has doubled its retail sales to $38 million since 2019. And last year, the company bought180 acres of land in Pennsylvania on which to build an additional facility. Still another greenhouse, slated for North Carolina, will serve the Southeast region of the U.S. 

Little Leaf Farms joins the likes of Revol Greens, Gotham Greens, AppHarvest, and others in bringing local(ish) greens to a greater percentage of the population. These facilities generally pack and ship their greens on the day of or day after harvesting, and only supply retailers within a certain radius. Little Leaf Farms, for example, currently servers only parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. 

The list of regions the company serves will no doubt lengthen as the company builds up its greenhouse network in the coming months.

Agritech: Precision Farming With AI, IoT and 5G

Image from: Photo by Mohd Izwan Mohd Nazam/The Edge

For a company that grows and delivers vegetables, Boomgrow Productions Sdn Bhd’s office is nothing like a farm, or even a vertical farm.

Where farms are bedecked with wheelbarrows, spades and hoes, Boomgrow’s floor plan is akin to a co-working space with a communal island table, several cubicles, comfortable armchairs, a cosy hanging rattan chair and a glass-walled conference room in the middle.

At a corner, propped up along a walkway leading to a rectangular chamber fitted with grow lights, are rows of support stilts with hydroponic planters developed in-house and an agricultural technologist perched on a chair, perusing data. “This is where some of the R&D work happens,” says Jay Dasen, co-founder of the agritech start-up.

But there is a larger farm where most of the work behind this high-tech initiative is executed. Located a stone’s throw from the city centre in Ampang is a 40ft repurposed shipping container outfitted with perception technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that mimic the ideal environment to produce more than 50,000kg of vegetables a year.

Stacked in vertical layers, Boomgrow’s vegetables are grown under artificial lights with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to detect everything from leaf discolouration to nitrate composition. This is coupled with AI and machine learning algorithms.

Boomgrow is the country’s first 5G-connected vertical farm. With the low latency and larger bandwidth technology, the start-up is able to monitor production in real time as well as maintain key para­meters, such as temperature and humidity, to ensure optimal growth conditions.

When Jay and her co-founders, K Muralidesan and Shan Palani, embarked on this initiative six years ago, Boomgrow was nowhere near what it is today.

The three founders got together hoping to do their part in building a more sustainable future. “I’ve spent years advising small and large companies on sustainability, environmental and social governance disclosures. I even embarked on a doctorate in sustainability disclosure and governance,” says Jay.

“But I felt a deep sense of disconnect because while I saw companies evolving in terms of policies, processes and procedures towards sustainability, the people in those organisations were not transforming. Sustainability is almost like this white noise in the background. We know it’s important and we know it needs to be done, but we don’t really know how to integrate it into our lives.

“That disconnect really troubled me. When we started Boomgrow, it wasn’t a linear journey. Boomgrow is something that came out of meaningful conversations and many years of research.”

Shan, on the other hand, was an architect who developed a taste for sustainable designs when he was designing modular structures with minimal impact on their surroundings between regular projects. “It was great doing that kind of work. But I was getting very dissatisfied because the projects were customer-driven, which meant I would end up having debates about trivial stuff such as the colour of wall tiles,” he says.

As for Murali, the impetus to start Boomgrow came from having lived overseas — while working in capital markets and financial services — where quality and nutritious produce was easily available.

Ultimately, they concluded that the best way to work towards their shared sustainability goals was to address the imminent problem of food shortage.

“By 2050, the world’s population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion people, two-thirds of whom will be in Asia-Pacific. Feeding all those people will definitely be a huge challenge,” says Jay. 

“The current agricultural practice is not built for resilience, but efficiency. So, when you think of farming, you think of vast tracts of land located far away from where you live or shop.

“The only way we could reimagine or rethink that was to make sure the food is located closer to consumers, with a hyperlocal strategy that is traceable and transparent, and also free of pesticides.”

Having little experience in growing anything, it took them a while to figure out the best mechanism to achieve their goal. “After we started working on prototypes, we realised that the tropics are not designed for certain types of farming,” says Jay. 

“And then, there is the problem of harmful chemicals and pesticides everywhere, which has become a necessity for farmers to protect their crops because of the unpredictable climate. We went through many iterations … when we started, we used to farm in little boxes, but that didn’t quite work out.”

They explored different methodologies, from hydroponics to aquaponics, and even started growing outdoors. But they lost a lot of crops when a heat wave struck.

That was when they started exploring more effective ways to farm. “How can we protect the farm from terrible torrential rains, plant 365 days a year and keep prices affordable? It took us five years to answer these questions,” says Jay.

Even though farmers all over the world currently produce more than enough food to feed everyone, 820 million people — roughly 11% of the global population — did not have enough to eat in 2018, according to the World Health Organization. Concurrently, food safety and quality concerns are rising, with more consumers opting for organically produced food as well as safe foods, out of fear of harmful synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, consumer demand for global organic fruit and vegetables was valued at US$19.16 billion in 2019 and is anticipated to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5% by 2026.

Meanwhile, the precision farming market was estimated to be US$7 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach US$12.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 12.7% between 2020 and 2025, states MarketsandMarkets Research Pte Ltd.

Malaysia currently imports RM1 billion worth of leafy vegetables from countries such as Australia, China and Japan. Sourcing good and safe food from local suppliers not only benefits the country from a food security standpoint but also improves Malaysia’s competitive advantage, says Jay.

Unlike organic farming — which is still a soil-based method — tech-enabled precision farming has the advantage of catering for increasing demand and optimum crop production with the limited resources available. Moreover, changing weather patterns due to global warming encourage the adoption of advanced farming technologies to enhance farm productivity and crop yield.

Boomgrow’s model does not require the acres of land that traditional farms need, Jay emphasises. With indoor farms, the company promises a year-round harvest, undisturbed by climate and which uses 95% less water, land and fuel to operate.

Traditional farming is back-breaking labour. But with precision technology, farmers can spend less time on the farm and more on doing other things to develop their business, she says.

Boomgrow has secured more than RM300,000 in funding via technology and innovation grants from SME Corporation Malaysia, PlaTCOM Ventures and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, and is on track to build the country’s largest indoor farms.

Image from: Boomgrow

The company got its chance to showcase the strength of its smart technology when Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) approached it to be a part of the telco’s Smart Agriculture cluster in Langkawi last October.

“5G makes it faster for us to process the multiple data streams that we need because we collect data for machine learning, and then AI helps us to make decisions faster,” Jay explains.

“We manage the farm using machines to study inputs like water and electricity and even measure humidity. All the farm’s produce is lab-tested and we can keep our promise that there are no pesticides, herbicides or any preserving chemicals. We follow the food safety standards set by the EU, where nitrate accumulation in plant tissues is a big issue.”

With TM’s 5G technology and Boomgrow’s patent-pending technology, the latter is able to grow vegetables like the staple Asian greens and highland crops such as butterhead and romaine lettuce as well as kale and mint. While the company is able to grow more than 30 varieties of leafy greens, it has decided to stick to a selection of crops that is most in demand to reduce waste, says Jay.

As it stands, shipping containers are the best fit for the company’s current endeavour as containerised modular farms are the simplest means of bringing better food to local communities. However, it is also developing a blueprint to house farms in buildings, she says.

Since the showcase, Boomgrow has started to supply its crops to various hotels in Langkawi. It rolled out its e-commerce platform last year after the Movement Control Order was imposed. 

“On our website, we promise to deliver the greens within six hours of harvest. But actually, you could get them way earlier. We harvest the morning after the orders come in and the vegetables are delivered on the same day,” says Jay.

Being mindful of Boomgrow’s carbon footprint, orders are organised and scheduled according to consumers’ localities, she points out. “We don’t want our delivery partners zipping everywhere, so we stagger the orders based on where consumers live. 

“For example, all deliveries to Petaling Jaya happen on Thursdays, but the vegetables are harvested that morning. They are not harvested a week before, three days before or the night before. This is what it means to be hyperlocal. We want to deliver produce at its freshest and most nutritious state.”

Plans to expand regionally are also underway, once Boomgrow’s fundraising exercise is complete, says Jay. “Most probably, this will only happen when the Covid-19 pandemic ends.”

To gain the knowledge they have today, the team had to “unlearn” everything they knew and take up new skills to figure what would work best for their business, says Jay. “All this wouldn’t have been possible if we had not experimented with smart cameras to monitor the condition of our produce,” she laughs.

Vertical Farming ‘At a Crossroads’

Building the right business model to balance resource usage with socio-economic conditions is crucial to capturing new markets, say speakers ahead of Agri-TechE event

Image from: Fruitnet

Although growing crops all year round with Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) has been proposed as a method to localize food production and increase resilience against extreme climate events, the efficiency and limitations of this strategy need to be evaluated for each location. 

That is the conclusion of research by Luuk Graamans of Wageningen University & Research, a speaker at the upcoming Agri-TechE event on CEA, which takes place on 25 February.

His research shows that integration with urban energy infrastructure can make vertical farms more viable. Graamans’ research around the modelling of vertical farms shows that these systems are able to achieve higher resource use efficiencies, compared to more traditional food production, except when it comes to electricity. 

Vertical farms, therefore, need to offer additional benefits to offset this increased energy use, Graamans said. One example his team has investigated is whether vertical farms could also provide heat.

“We investigated if vertical farms could provide not just food for people living in densely populated areas and also heat their homes using waste heat. We found that CEA can contribute to stabilizing the increasingly complex energy grid.”

Diversification

This balance between complex factors both within the growing environment and wider socio-economic conditions means that the rapidly growing CEA industry is beginning to diversify with different business models emerging.

Jack Farmer is CSO at vertical producer LettUs Grow, which recently launched its Drop & Grow growing units, offering a complete farming solution in a shipping container. 

He believes everyone in the vertical farming space is going to hit a crossroads. “Vertical farming, with its focus on higher value and higher density crops, is effectively a subset of the broader horticultural sector,” he said. 

"All the players in the vertical farming space are facing a choice – to scale vertically and try to capture as much value in that specific space, or to diversify and take their technology expertise broader.”

LettUs Grow is focussed on being the leading technology provider in containerised farming, and its smaller ‘Drop & Grow: 24’ container is mainly focussed on people entering the horticultural space.

Opportunities in retail

“This year is looking really exciting,” he said. “Supermarkets are investing to ensure a sustainable source of food production in the UK, which is what CEA provides. We’re also seeing a growth in ‘experiential’ food and retail and that’s also where we see our Drop & Grow container farm fitting in.”

Kate Hofman, CEO, GrowUp agrees. The company launched the UK’s first commercial-scale vertical farm in 2014.

“It will be really interesting to see how the foodservice world recovers after lockdown – the rough numbers are that supermarket trade was up at least 11 per cent in the last year – so retail still looks like a really good direction to go in. 

“If we want to have an impact on the food system in the UK and change it for the better, we’re committed to partnering with those big retailers to help them deliver on their sustainability and values-driven goals.

“Our focus is very much as a salad grower that grows a fantastic product that everyone will want to buy. And we’re focussed on bringing down the cost of sustainable food, which means doing it at a big enough scale to gain the economies of production that are needed to be able to sell at everyday prices.”

Making the Numbers Add Up

The economics are an important part of the discussion. Recent investment in the sector has come from the Middle East, and other locations, where abundant solar power and scarce resources are driving interest in CEA. Graamans’ research has revealed a number of scenarios where CEA has a strong business case.

For the UK, CEA should be seen as a continuum from glasshouses to vertical farming, he believes. “Greenhouses can incorporate the technologies from vertical farms to increase climate control and to enhance their performance under specific climates."

It is this aspect that is grabbing the attention of conventional fresh produce growers in open field and covered crop production.  

A Blended Approach

James Green, director of agriculture at G’s, thinks combining different growing methods is the way forward. “There’s a balance in all of these systems between energy costs for lighting, energy costs for cooling, costs of nutrient supply, and then transportation and the supply and demand. At the end of the day, sunshine is pretty cheap and it comes up every day.

“I think a blended approach, where you’re getting as much benefit as you can from nature but you’re supplementing it and controlling the growth conditions, is what we are aiming for, rather than the fully artificially lit ‘vertical farming’.”

Graamans, Farmer and Hofman will join a discussion with conventional vegetable producers, vertical farmers and technology providers at the Agri-TechE event ‘Controlled Environment Agriculture is growing up’ on 25 February 2021.

Bringing The Future To life In Abu Dhabi

Amid the deserts of Abu Dhabi, a new wave of entrepreneurs and innovators are sowing the seeds of a more sustainable future.

Image from: Wired

A cluster of shipping containers in a city centre is about the last place you’d expect to find salad growing. Yet for the past year, vertical farming startup Madar Farms has been using this site in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, to grow leafy green vegetables using 95 per cent less water than traditional agriculture. 

Madar Farms is one of a number of agtech startups benefitting from a package of incentives from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) aimed at spurring the development of innovative solutions for sustainable desert farming. The partnership is part of ADIO’s $545 million Innovation Programme dedicated to supporting companies in high-growth areas.

“Abu Dhabi is pressing ahead with our mission to ‘turn the desert green’,” explained H.E. Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, in November 2020. “We have created an environment where innovative ideas can flourish and the companies we partnered with earlier this year are already propelling the growth of Abu Dhabi’s 24,000 farms.”

The pandemic has made food supply a critical concern across the entire world, combined with the effects of population growth and climate change, which are stretching the capacity of less efficient traditional farming methods. Abu Dhabi’s pioneering efforts to drive agricultural innovation have been gathering pace and look set to produce cutting-edge solutions addressing food security challenges.

Beyond work supporting the application of novel agricultural technologies, Abu Dhabi is also investing in foundational research and development to tackle this growing problem. 

In December, the emirate’s recently created Advanced Technology Research Council [ATRC], responsible for defining Abu Dhabi’s R&D strategy and establishing the emirate and the wider UAE as a desired home for advanced technology talent, announced a four-year competition with a $15 million prize for food security research. Launched through ATRC’s project management arm, ASPIRE, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, the award will support the development of environmentally-friendly protein alternatives with the aim to "feed the next billion".

Image from: Madar Farms

Global Challenges, Local Solutions

Food security is far from the only global challenge on the emirate’s R&D menu. In November 2020, the ATRC announced the launch of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), created to support applied research on the key priorities of quantum research, autonomous robotics, cryptography, advanced materials, digital security, directed energy and secure systems.

“The technologies under development at TII are not randomly selected,” explains the centre’s secretary general Faisal Al Bannai. “This research will complement fields that are of national importance. Quantum technologies and cryptography are crucial for protecting critical infrastructure, for example, while directed energy research has use-cases in healthcare. But beyond this, the technologies and research of TII will have global impact.”

Future research directions will be developed by the ATRC’s ASPIRE pillar, in collaboration with stakeholders from across a diverse range of industry sectors.

“ASPIRE defines the problem, sets milestones, and monitors the progress of the projects,” Al Bannai says. “It will also make impactful decisions related to the selection of research partners and the allocation of funding, to ensure that their R&D priorities align with Abu Dhabi and the UAE's broader development goals.”

Image from: Agritecture

Nurturing Next-Generation Talent

To address these challenges, ATRC’s first initiative is a talent development programme, NexTech, which has begun the recruitment of 125 local researchers, who will work across 31 projects in collaboration with 23 world-leading research centres.

Alongside universities and research institutes from across the US, the UK, Europe and South America, these partners include Abu Dhabi’s own Khalifa University, and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first graduate-level institute focused on artificial intelligence. 

“Our aim is to up skill the researchers by allowing them to work across various disciplines in collaboration with world-renowned experts,” Al Bannai says. 

Beyond academic collaborators, TII is also working with a number of industry partners, such as hyperloop technology company, Virgin Hyperloop. Such industry collaborations, Al Bannai points out, are essential to ensuring that TII research directly tackles relevant problems and has a smooth path to commercial impact in order to fuel job creation across the UAE.

“By engaging with top global talent, universities and research institutions and industry players, TII connects an intellectual community,” he says. “This reinforces Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s status as a global hub for innovation and contributes to the broader development of the knowledge-based economy.”

Nanobubble Tech Could Revolutionize Aquaculture & Aquaponics

Image from: University of Hawai’i News

The burgeoning fields of aquaculture and aquaponics hold vast potential for growing food. Yet, the efficacy of these microbial-mediated processes is governed by the availability of dissolved oxygen in water. Generally, oxygen has poor solubility in water, which has a negative effect on fish growth and plant yields.

Almost $200,000 in new funding from the USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Water Quantity and Quality Program may expand researchers’ understanding of how nanobubbles could improve aeration and oxygen supplies.

Under the grant, Samir Khanal of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR ) Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering, will apply the technology to these aqueous systems. His goal is to uncover new opportunities for improving fish and plant yields—with concomitant improvements in water quality.

Image from: University of Hawai’i News

“There is a pressing need to develop an alternative to the current highly energy-intensive conventional aeration,” said Khanal. “Nanobubble technology has a potential to revolutionize aquaculture and aquaponic systems, with higher productivity and resource recovery.”

Khanal was initially awarded CTAHR’s Team Science grant, which was critically important to obtaining preliminary data for his grant proposal to NIFA. 

“Thanks to the CTAHR and NIFA grants, we hope our findings will benefit existing Hawaiʻi businesses, as well as a new generation of growers, across the state and beyond,” Khanal added.

Organic: The Battle for a Single Word

Throughout history, when we see great leaps forward in technology, there are always pushbacks from the old world who want to maintain the status-quo. This can be for a variety of reasons and come from a variety of people. Sometimes, the resistance comes from workers, an example of this would be the fierce opposition from workers who protested the mechanisation of their jobs brought about by the industrial revolution. They were often referred to as luddites because of the propensity to destroy the new machines that were taking their jobs.

On the other hand, there can be examples of when the resistance to innovations come from industry competitors who don’t want to lose the dominance they once had. An example of this can be seen through the fossil fuel industries continuous attempts to limit the growth of renewables by lobbying governments to pursue policies more favourable to them.

Today we are seeing resistance to a new green revolution through innovation in the vertical farming sector primarily from industry competitors or even protective policy makers. Politico recently reported on a story regarding a fight between a Danish vertical farming company, called Nordic Harvest, and the EU whereby the former was prohibited from labelling their crops as organically produced. The reason given for this was that EU regulation demanded that anything being described as organic had to be produced in soil. This seems to be the antithesis to their Farm to Fork strategy as it heavily handicaps innovative indoor vertical farming companies.

Image from: Nord Harvest

Now this may not seem much like a significant infringement on the indoor vertical farming sector, but what this does is make it more difficult for companies, such as Nordic Harvest, to indicate to consumers their green credentials. Moreover, under the EU’s Green Public Procurement rules, indoor vertical farming companies gain a smaller share in food market than it normally would have due to the ruling on the definition of organics. The unfortunate aspect of this is that words only mean what we define them as, so the personal opinions of the individuals who made this decision are going down this direction for reasons not non-partisan.

Now there may so semi-legitimate reasons to resist the rise of indoor vertical farming, but it is clear that this will be the future of farming and it must not be kneecapped by ill-intentioned actors. The limitations of the sector, such as intense energy use or limited crop varieties, can only be solved if there is financial and legislative support from the powers that be.

This is clear with the recent certification of Sky Greens in Singapore as organic whereby the central government has been forward thinking. Speaking of their decision, the chair of the Food Standards Committee stated:

“The certification may allow local urban farms to expand into markets outside of Singapore. Having a national organic certification will help local urban farms to be on equal footing with the US…”

The Food Standards Committee in Singapore defined organic differently from the EU affirming that as long as they avoid mineral fertilisers or other pesticides and herbicides, which indoor vertical farms operating on controlled environment agriculture adheres to. At full capacity, Sky Greens can produce up to half a tonne of salads daily without LEDs and using gravity to collect rainwater to avoid pests. An important point to note however is that the vast majority of Singapore is urbanised with no domestic traditional rural farming industry.

Image from: Sky Greens

Another problematic component of this EU ruling is that may prove controversial is its impact on trade. Any vertical farming company from a country not with the restrictive rules and the EU that wanted to export their food produced in a vertical farm, they would as need to abide by these rules. For example, with basil being one of the major herbs produced in vertical farms, we often see it being used in Pesto. Unfortunately, this would not be able to be marketed as organic. With the EU being the largest trading bloc in the entire world, this will affect the global fortunes of the sector. We are also seeing this happen in the US but due to many legal appeals and challenges, they have not currently implemented the same rules as the EU.

So, with all this in mind, it is important to be aware of the pushback that will inevitably happen due to a green revolution brought about by innovation in the indoor vertical farming sector. The debate surrounding the definition of the word organic is only the start. We already see concerted efforts to ban synthetic meat companies from using words such as hamburger, hot dog or steak. However, even with this uneven playing field, indoor vertical farming is on track to increase its market share significantly over the next decade and beyond while traditional farming methods are on the decline.

The Future of the Food Supply Chain Lives on a Rooftop in Montreal

Image from: Lufa Farms

The world’s biggest commercial rooftop greenhouse sits atop a former Sears warehouse in a semi-industrial northwestern quarter of Montreal. Early every morning, staff pick fresh vegetables, then bring them downstairs, where they get packed into heavy-duty plastic totes along with the rest of the day’s grocery orders.

Tablets loaded with custom pick-and-pack software tell them where to put what: This basket has lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, plus some chicken, eggs, and milk. The next one has eggplant, cashew Parmesan, tomato sauce, fresh pasta, and vegan ground round crumble. Whatever Luca doesn’t grow in its four greenhouses comes from local farms and producers, mostly from within 100 miles.

This is a modern foodie’s dream: a tech-forward online shop full of locally grown, pesticide-free, ethically-sourced products at reasonable price points, delivered once a week to either your doorstep or a local pickup point in your neighborhood.

It’s stunning to think Lufa was founded by two people who’d never even grown a tomato before, let alone sold one. “We said, ‘Instead of learning how the food world works, let’s just come up with what we feel the food world should be,’” says Mohamed Hage, 39, who cofounded Lufa with Lauren Rathmell in 2009.

To them, it looked like this: rooftop greenhouses that bring agriculture into cities. No pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. Composting their green waste. Selling direct-to-consumer the same day the food is harvested. Capturing and reusing rainwater. Reusable packaging. 

That’s exactly what they now have—and they feed a portion of Montreal, the second-biggest city in Canada, with it.

Image from: Lufa Farms

Back in the warehouse, workers poke at their tablets, checking off items as they’re packed into the boxes.

Customers—Lufavores, as the company calls them—typically place their orders a few days before delivery through the online store, dubbed “the Marketplace,” which Lufa built from scratch in 2012. That’s how Lufa’s suppliers know how much product to provide: They get forecasts first, then final order numbers, through their Lufa software. Some items, like frozen meat, can be delivered to the warehouse once a week. Others, like bread, arrive fresh every day.

Artisanal Montreal bakery la Fabrique Arhoma started supplying Lufa with bread and pastries about six years ago, co-owner Ariane Beaumont tells Fortune. Today, they hand-make 6,000 individual items a day for Lufa. Beaumont said Lufa now accounts for between 30% to 40% of her commercial sales; since pandemic shutdowns, a lot of the product destined for restaurants got redirected to Lufa. “They’re an exceptional company. I don’t know how they do it,” Beaumont says. “And they pay the fastest, too.” 

Technology is the underpinning of Lufa’s success, and the owners know it.

“We see ourselves as a technology company, in the sense that we solve with software,” Rathmell, 32, says. They didn’t really have any other choice. To fulfill that dream they had back in 2009—years before COVID-19 forced most grocery stores to enable online shopping—they had to do it themselves. 

“Nothing off-the-shelf can be applied to what we do, because it’s so complex,” Rathmell notes. “We harvest food ourselves; we gather from farmers and food makers throughout the province; most of it’s arriving just in time throughout the night to be packed in baskets for that day, and every order is fully unique.”

Lufa now has a team of eight programmers working on software and systems that manage e-commerce, warehouse management, routing, customer relationships, supplier fulfillment, pick-and-pack, vendor payments, delivery ETAs, and more. 

Those technologies were tested on that fateful Friday the 13th last March, when Quebec and Canada each announced their first waves of COVID-19 lockdowns. People panicked, rushing to the grocery store to stock up on flour and toilet paper.

Online, new sign-ups for Lufa’s weekly grocery baskets exploded, and existing subscribers began ordering more than they’d ever ordered before—all while Lufa’s pickup points were shutting down. “We essentially doubled overnight,” Rathmell recalls. Lufa was forced beyond its operational capacity, and the cracks started showing in the systems and software that had, until that point, done a fine job getting the company by.

Lufa temporarily closed the website and opened a wait list. The staff analyzed the pandemic’s trajectory and how they had to adapt at each step; reconfigured their warehouse floor to station workers further apart; then relaunched at the capacity they could handle, gradually scaling each week until they hit their usual stride. Today, they’re humming along at 25,000 baskets a week.

Leading with tech helped make them nimble and strategic during those hairy early pandemic days, said Hage and Rathmell. After some recalibrations and new developments, their software and processes can now handle more customers, vendors, and processes—critical elements as the company continues to scale its greenhouse operations. In August of 2020, Lufa opened its fourth greenhouse, doubling its square footage. The four greenhouses combined produce 57,000 pounds of food a week. A fifth is planned for this year. 

“Our objective at Lufa is to get to the point where we’re feeding everyone in the city,” Hage says.

And after Montreal? They’re planning on a yet to be determined second site in the northeastern pocket of North America, ideally this year. “Our vision is to grow food closer to where people live, and grow it more sustainably,” Rathmell says.

Image from: Lufa Farms

Bringing high-yield crop production into cities is a smart answer to many modern challenges in environmental and human health.

Mark Lefsrud, an associate professor of agricultural and environmental sciences at McGill University, points out that embracing technologies like LEDs and automation to grow indoors and in urban greenhouses means shorter supply chains, better nutritional integrity, less food waste, and reduced vulnerability to climate swings. In cities fed primarily by low-carbon energy (hydroelectricity in Montreal’s case), indoor growing versus importation becomes even more of a no-brainer.

“I’ve been working in the controlled environment and greenhouse industry for 20-some years, and having a company like Lufa has brought a lot of attention to not just urban agriculture, but also the need for greenhouse production,” Lefsrud says, adding that Lufa’s success has prompted more government investment in the sector overall.

“The Quebec government now takes this as a serious venture system, which then means that the students that I’m training, and research we’re doing here at the university, now have employment and have the possibility of setting up their own system,” says the McGill professor.

That idea, of developing more vertically integrated food systems, is a passion of Hage’s—not only for the idea of cutting out production and transformation middlemen to improve profit margins, but also to improve quality, traceability, and ultimately the ethics of food production.

“You know, every time we talk to someone about it, we feel like it’s the ’80s, and we’re holding a big solar panel trying to convince the room that this is the future,” Hage says.

As the larger agricultural industry catches on to vertical integration, it seems Hage and Rathmell are no longer mad scientists with a crazy dream. Instead, they are the voice of reason—and a new generation of food.

As the larger agricultural industry catches on to vertical integration, it seems Hage and Rathmell are no longer mad scientists with a crazy dream. Instead, they are the voice of reason—and a new generation of food.

As the larger agricultural industry catches on to vertical integration, it seems Hage and Rathmell are no longer mad scientists with a crazy dream. Instead, they are the voice of reason—and a new generation of food.

Is AppHarvest the Future of Farming?

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are red-hot right now, with investors clamoring to get into promising young companies.

In this video from Motley Fool Live, recorded on Jan. 28, Industry Focus host Nick Sciple and Motley Fool contributor Lou Whiteman discuss AppHarvest, one such SPAC that is looking to disrupt the agriculture industry. Here are the details on what AppHarvest wants to do, and a look at whether the company represents the future of farming.

Nick Sciple: One last company I wanted to talk about, Lou, and this is one I think it's -- you pay attention to, but not one I'm super excited to run in and buy. It was a company called AppHarvest. It's coming public via a [SPAC] this year. This vertical farming space. We talked about Gladstone Land buying traditional farmland. AppHarvest is taking a very different approach, trying to lean into some of the ESG-type movements.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah. Let's look at this. It probably wouldn't surprise you that the U.S. is the biggest global farm exporter as we said, but it might surprise you that the Netherlands, the tiny little country, is No. 2. The way they do that is tech: Greenhouse farm structure. AppHarvest has taken that model and brought it to the U.S. They have, I believe, three farms in Appalachia. The pitches can produce 30x the yields using 90% less water. Right now, it's mostly tomatoes and it is early-stage. I don't own this stock either. I love this idea. There's some reasons that I'm not buying in right now that we can get into. But this is fascinating to me. We talked about making the world a better place. This is the company that we need to be successful to make the world a better place. The warning on it is that it is a SPAC. So it's not public yet. Right now, I believe N-O-V-S. That deal should close soon. [Editor's note: The deal has since closed.] I'm not the only one excited about it. I tend not to like to buy IPOs and new companies anyway. I think the caution around buying into the excitement applies here. There is a Martha Stewart video on their website talking up the company, which I love Martha Stewart, but that's a hype level that makes me want to just watch and see what they produce. This is just three little farms in Appalachia right now and a great idea. This was all over my watchlist. I would imagine I would love to hold it at some point, but just be careful because this is, as we saw SPACs last year in other areas, people are very excited about this.

Sciple: Yeah. I think, like we've said, for a lot of these companies, the prospects are great. I think when you look at the reduced water usage, better, environmentally friendly, all those sorts of things. I like that they are in Appalachia. As someone who is from the South, I like it when more rural areas get some people actually investing money there. But again, there's a lot of execution between now and really getting to a place where this is the future of farming and they're going to reach scale and all those sorts of things. But this is a company I'm definitely going to have my radar on and pay attention to as they continue to report earnings. Because you can tell yourself a story about how this type of vertical farming, indoor farming disrupts this traditional model, can be more efficient, cleaner, etc. Something to continue paying attention to as we have more information, because this company, like you said, Lou, isn't all the way public yet. We still got to have this SPAC deal finalized and then we get all our fun SEC filings and quarterly calls and all those sorts of things. Once we have that, I will be very much looking forward to seeing what the company has to say.

Whiteman: Right. Just to finish up along too, the interesting thing here is that it is a proven concept because it has worked elsewhere. The downside of that is that it needed to work there. Netherlands just doesn't have -- and this is an expensive proposition to get started, to get going. There's potential there, but in a country blessed with almost seemingly unlimited farmland for now, for long term it makes sense. But in the short term, it could be a hard thing to really get up and running. I think you're right, just one to watch.

Advice For New Vertical Farmers: Grower Spotlight on Andrew Worrall

Last week we spoke about running a farm at LettUs Grow. What excites you about vertical farming? 

It’s the future of the industry. Also, the amount of salad that these farms can produce for their local community. We want to be able to eat salad all year round and we import to make that happen. However, just a small farm can easily provide for its local community, very efficiently and all year round. The sustainability element is also exciting: with our salad there’s no food miles, it’s very minimalistic. You could use an electric van or bike to distribute this crop if you wanted to. It’s a step forward in terms of what we need to do to take care of our planet. 

What do you think are the biggest downsides to vertical farming?

It’s still a new technology and it can be expensive. The biggest roadblock facing the industry is that we need more people and companies to collaborate together to make sure we can build these farms at a sensible rate, so we can provide farms to anyone. We want to be able to provide farms to people, communities and countries that don’t have a lot of money, so that they can provide affordable fresh produce to local people. 

How has vertical farming impacted your life?

Massively!  I wanted to find my passion, a job that I loved - that was very important to me. It’s satisfying to be in a position now where I’m very happy to be doing what I do and I look forward to going into work. I was happy to make the move from London to Bristol. I would have moved even further if it meant being able to continue working within this industry.

Image from: LettUs Grow

How do you see vertical farming playing a part in the future? 

When indoor farming first came about, it had a reputation of being competition for outdoor farming, which just isn’t the case. There’s so much we can’t grow that outdoor farming can provide, such as cereal crops. I’m glad we’re at a stage where indoor and outdoor farms can start to work together to optimise both methods. With these new relationships, there should be a good increase in the amount of indoor farms you’ll be seeing. What LettUs Grow offers with DROP & GROW™ is an exciting project because that’s a 40ft shipping container which can be placed pretty much anywhere. It’s not that big - it could go in a car park or behind a restaurant, but actually provide quite a lot of salad to that area. 

How much of our food should be grown this way? 

Good question. If you had asked me a while back I would have just said salad, but now I’ve changed my mind. Indoor farming can have a massive impact on propagation, especially aeroponics, because of how we aerate and nourish our roots. We could start lettuce for greenhouse projects and we can also propagate tomatoes, strawberries and tree whips. Propagating trees in this way could potentially be hugely beneficial and it’s something we want to do more of. 

We can also quickly grow large amounts of microgreens, baby leafs, herbs and we can grow fruiting crops like strawberries. We are slowly chipping away and it’s really exciting. I’m waiting to see if I can ever say I’ve grown or propagated every crop that can be grown in these farms! 

What do you think are the biggest benefits of vertical farming? 

How fast these crops can grow! The turnover can be as short as 5 days from seed, depending on the crop. Also how clean it can be - I’m very dedicated to making sure these farms are built to ensure they are easy to be maintained and clean. The most exciting part is the crop growth rate though - it’s incredible how fast our crop grows from seed to plate. In a very well maintained growing calendar, which Ostara® is great for supporting, you can optimise your beds so that the day you harvest can also be the day you germinate onto that same bed. Your farms can be forever providing salad at very fast rates. 

Image from: LettUs Grow

What was the biggest change you encountered during your years indoor farming?

Moving from being a production grower to an R&D grower. It has been a great change! As a production grower I knew what I needed to know about growing the plant safely and getting it onto a plate so it was good for the consumer. Now I’m fully optimising, learning and understanding the plants completely, so that I can help the grower that I used to be. We spend a lot of time on crop recipes to make sure that whoever we sell our farms to can start up very quickly and they won’t have to spend months developing their crops. If they have the customers and clients behind them, they can buy DROP & GROW and start producing salad as soon as it's been commissioned. 

What was the biggest change you encountered in the industry?

More and more people are speaking about what’s going on in the industry and getting involved. I get so many messages on LinkedIn with people who want to get into this career. It’s exciting to see that indoor growing is a career people can access now. When I was developing my skills I didn’t know I would end up in indoor farming. There are more opportunities than ever before. For example, our Crop Technician is doing a placement here for 2 years. The aim is that they can gain the skill sets and knowledge they need to then go off and do the same practice in any farm they want. 

What advice do you have for people who are looking to start a career in growing? 

Reach out to companies who are already out there. You could start off part-time or as an assistant. If you are patient and dedicated then it’s a journey I promise you won’t regret. It takes a lot of work, but the outcome is amazing - you’ll be learning so much about this new technology. You’ll also build great relationships: there are so many amazing people in this industry who are so interesting, with different backgrounds, who are willing to share their knowledge. You can always learn more and other people are a great source of that. 

What about for those looking to start a vertical farming business?

Do your homework.  There are people out there who you can reach out to and it’s very easy to get information. It’s very easy to get excited about the idea and jump straight into it, because it is exciting and can be very rewarding, but it’s really important to do it step by step. Know how to scale properly, learning the differences between a small and larger farm. Understand how many people you’ll need and the logistics. I’d also advise people to get some practical work experience before you buy. You want to start the company knowing the tricks of the trade. 

Image from: LettUs Grow

LettUs Grow Blog: www.lettusgrow.com/blog/advice-for-vertical-farmers

The Capital Expenses For Vertical Farms And Greenhouses

28-01-202 | Agritecture

Written By: Djavid Amidi-Abraham

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Breaking down the differences in CapEx between Vertical Farms and Greenhouses. If we peer into the portfolios of some venture capital investors with funds dedicated to agriculture investments, we see a hesitance to invest in vertical farms.

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Here at Agritecture, we have performed side-by-side analyses of vertical farms and greenhouses. For most US markets, the greenhouse model comes out ahead on both capital and operational costs.

Let’s look at an example located in a New York Metropolitan market scenario with two similarly sized facilities having similar amounts of bed space (production capacity). The below tables indicate their differing costs per lb of leafy greens grown in the first year.

This analysis focuses on production systems and has thus excluded costs relating to installation and land acquisition, but includes an additional distribution cost for the greenhouse model, as this greenhouse is likely to be located outside of an urban area but still within the “local” range. In the interest of equating production conditions, the greenhouse model also includes additional capital and operational costs for the integration of supplemental lighting in order to bring the daily light integral to equal quantities provided by most vertical farms.

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While we may see different scenarios in the future, this assessment draws on current prices and equipment performance. 

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Greenhouses draw a lot of their value from the fact that the production surfaces are mostly illuminated by the sun, a free resource. Vertical farms, on the other hand, have to pay for the light that their crops see, a significant added cost that often occupies high percentages of operational costs. 

In addition, a specialized HVAC system must be designed and implemented to neutralize the heat emitted by the lights. Additional dehumidification capacity is also required with design setpoints relative to the transpiration rate of the crops being grown. HVAC is often the second-highest, non-labor expenditure for VF operations and when dehumidification is added into the mix, overall HVAC operational costs can even exceed lighting electricity costs.  

As LEDs become more efficient, less power will be required to cool the space and the economic scenario for VFs becomes more attractive as two of the highest operational costs have been reduced.

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To date, the introduction of LEDs to the agriculture industry has made VFs possible. In the future, the continued improvement of LEDs will make VFs more competitive against other modes of controlled environment crop production. It’s hard to say if VFs will outcompete greenhouses on their costs of production as greenhouses similarly benefit from lighting efficiency improvements that will enable them to serve more northern markets at lower operational costs.

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https://design.agritecture.com/learn/?utm_campaign=capital-expenses-vf&utm_medium=agr-com&utm_source=blog

While greenhouses outcompete vertical farms today, there may be a future where those tables are turned.

It should be considered that the efficacy of either of these approaches to CEA will be informed by local market conditions. In relation to both the revenue generated and the costs of operation, markets around the world provide differing contexts for the production of crops in protected agriculture scenarios, and these varying costs and opportunities create a unique scenario in every market. 

Agritecture’s consultants have a deep understanding of these costs and opportunities and have provided these insights to over 100 clients in more than 20 countries. If any of our readers would like to explore the possibilities in their local region, reach out to Agritecture and we can assess this opportunity through our unique approach and assessment methodology.

This is the second of a two-part series on how vertical farming compares to other farming methods, from our Lead Systems Designer, Djavid Amidi-Abraham. To read Part 1, click here.

Source and Photo Courtesy of Agritecture

Receive Insights From The 2020 Global CEA Census Report

AgTech leaders Autogrow and Agritecture Consulting have concluded our 2nd Annual Global CEA Census, focusing on understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on controlled environment agriculture (CEA) operations around the world.

Major insights of the Global CEA Census

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“The optimism reflects what we have seen across many areas of the industry including increased technology adoption and increased consumer expenditure on fresh produce. And despite the challenges we’re seeing an overwhelming number of new entrants into the market,” says Autogrow CEO Darryn Keiller.

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“What has not changed is the high percentage of new growers, almost 50%, that have no experience in agriculture before starting their business. That lack of experience has an impact on new technology solutions created and the need for more education to be available to support them. It also shows a real desire to make a difference considering their willingness to start during a pandemic.”  

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Other takeaways from the Census:

• CEA businesses showing optimism and resilience despite the COVID hurdles

• 88% of growers surveyed are below age 50

• 29% of respondents receive funding from multiple sources

Receive The Full Report For Free!

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Hamill Has Moved Into Agritecture

When COVID-19 hit Canada in February 2020, the Hamill Group of Companies was in its early inception. “We weren’t quite sure how things were going to play out, but we knew that whatever challenges were, we could tackle them head on!” said CEO Bob Benner. As a leader in manufacturing services and having carved out a niche for microgreens harvesting equipment, Hamill quickly realized it would need to do more to support their growers.

The company took the step forward and moved to Agritecture. Vertical, hydroponic, and aquaponic farms are taking hold in many major cities throughout the world. With the help of enhanced indoor and vertical farming practices, the US growers have been able to produce microgreens on a large scale.

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Canadian farmers are relying on indoor farming than greenhouse farming for growing microgreens because of the electricity needed for lighting and also growing indoors eliminates many of the pest and disease problems of outdoor production” [1].  

One of the major crops that they grow are microgreens but these farming environments presented new challenges in and of themselves. As growers looked to establish their systems, they realized they needed the Hamill Group of Companies to propel them forward. This was due to Hamill's superior experience in 3D engineering, manufacturing, prototyping, electrical. For Hamill, they had to rapidly shift their focus from just harvesting equipment to innovating and designing farms, and full production facilities being an end-to-end provider.

Hamill’s ability to adapt and pivot meant that the Hamill Group of Companies could foster new partnerships throughout Canada and the US. They have undertaken projects such as with AquaGreens in Toronto, Intravision Group in Welland, as well as are in the preliminary stages of planning with InCity Farms in the United States.

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For more information:
Hamill Agricultural Processing Solutions
contactus@hamillaps.com
www.hamillaps.com 

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Publication date: Thu 3 Dec 2020

More Than $30 Million of Additional AgTech Deals in Abu Dhabi’s Pipeline

September 24th, 2020

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The Abu Dhabi Investment Office

The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) announced today upcoming developments in Abu Dhabi’s agriculture sector as part of continued plans to bolster local AgTech capabilities and innovations in desert agriculture. In the coming months, more than AED 110 million (USD 30 million) in financial incentives are to be offered to AgTech companies looking to establish or fast track their growth in Abu Dhabi.

The update was given at ADIO’s first sector-focused webinar, “Inside Abu Dhabi: Innovation in Agriculture”, which took place on 23 September and highlighted opportunities in the emirate’s AgTech space. The webinar was attended by participants from all across the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and India.

The new pipeline is part of ADIO’s incentive programme, established under the Abu Dhabi Government’s Ghadan 21 accelerator programme. The incentive packages include competitive financial incentives and other non-financial benefits for companies that develop and commercialise new arid and desert agriculture solutions based on pre-determined criteria.

The new deals will build on the milestones achieved by the four AgTech pioneers – AeroFarms, Madar Farms, Responsive Drop Irrigation (RDI), and RNZ – ADIO partnered with earlier this year to establish R&D and production facilities in the emirate.

H.E. Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, said: “We have made significant headway towards realising our mission of turning sand into farmland, prioritising innovation that has the potential to make real, lasting change in the region and beyond. Despite the current global conditions, 2020 will be a transformational year for AgTech in Abu Dhabi as we close in on deals to bring more pioneering companies to the UAE. We will continue to work closely with ecosystem players like the Ministry of Food Security, the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA), and ADQ to support AgTech founders and startups with the resources and infrastructure they require to achieve long-term success in the emirate.”

ADIO announced in April that it made AED 367 million (USD 100 million) in financial incentives available to four AgTech pioneers, partnering individually with AeroFarms, Madar Farms, RDI, and RNZ to establish new R&D and production facilities in Abu Dhabi. During the first “Inside Abu Dhabi” webinar, each company announced significant milestones in their respective projects over the past five months.

USA-headquartered vertical farming company AeroFarms has set up its corporate office at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to plug into the emirate’s innovation ecosystem and support R&D plans aimed at tackling agriculture problems within desert and arid climates. The company has also built out a local team, including hiring a general manager to lead AeroFarms’ Abu Dhabi strategy.

David Rosenberg, Co-Founder, and CEO of AeroFarms, commented: “Our excitement grows as we advance in Abu Dhabi the building of the world’s largest R&D indoor vertical farm in the world. We have set up corporate offices and started to build out an incredible team including our General Manager. We are working to finalise partnerships to co-innovate together in our Abu Dhabi facility as we work to solve some of the most pressing problems in agriculture in the region and the world. We are honoured to be working closely with ADIO to make Abu Dhabi a nexus for AgTech innovation and we encourage companies and universities to reach out and partner with us as we work on the next generation of agriculture breakthroughs.”

Madar Farms, a home-grown UAE AgTech innovator, has made significant progress in developing the local food offering in the market. The company has launched new products and is reaching consumers through expanded distributors and platforms. It is also partnering with a UAE education institution to teach students about AgTech and hydroponic systems, educating them about sustainable indoor agriculture from an early age.

Abdulaziz AlMulla, CEO and Co-Founder of Madar Farms, said: “We are happy to be part of the conversation. At Madar Farms, we are already leading a new agriculture revolution by growing a wide range of high-quality fresh produce every day here in the UAE with the use of advanced farming technologies. We want to create a lasting change by providing a holistic approach to sustainability and every day we are working towards achieving our vision and establishing Abu Dhabi as a global AgTech leader.”

RDI, which has developed an innovative irrigation system to transform water usage in UAE agriculture, has secured a facility in Abu Dhabi’s integrated trade, logistics, and industrial hub, KIZAD, to be used for industrial research, product manufacturing, and distribution. Given the emirate’s strategic location at the intersection of the Middle East, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia regions, the new distribution hub will allow RDI to reach more water-stressed countries that can benefit from its irrigation solution. The company is also set to install pilot projects using green technologies in Abu Dhabi over the coming months, paving the way for the development of the best AgTech practices in desert environments.

Jan Gould, Co-Founder, and CEO of RDI, commented: “The foresight and vision of Abu Dhabi’s ruler and its government leaders to focus and support innovations in agriculture has defined the UAE capital as a leader in ensuring food security for its citizens, developing local food supply chains, addressing challenges and preserving the planet’s precious resources for the future. Responsive Drip Irrigation is committed to working with ADIO and our partners in the AgTech programme to build a greener tomorrow for generations to come. With Abu Dhabi’s leadership and support, there is hope for recovery if we all work together. We just need to plant the seed.”

RNZ, which produces customised solutions for farming communities, has broken ground on a plot in KIZAD and laid the foundations for its new R&D centre, expected to be operational towards the end of the first half of 2021. The team is steadily being assembled with both a Head of Research and Head of Production appointed. The centre will look into developing effective agri-inputs to yield higher productivity, with an early focus being the development of 100% organic and residue-free solutions to support the region’s date palm farmers.   

Raza Soomar, CEO of RNZ, said: “As our new R&D centre in Abu Dhabi begins to take shape, we are just months away from looking into solving problems for farmers and bringing effective solutions to the market that are relevant in Africa, Asia, and the Gulf. We are proud to be part of Abu Dhabi’s AgTech ecosystem and excited about the possibilities for RNZ’s new R&D hub.”

ADIO will announce further details of its upcoming AgTech deals in the coming months. 

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