AppHarvest Acquires Agricultural Robotics And Artificial Intelligence Company Root AI To Increase Efficiency

Acquisition of Root AI and its signature robot, Virgo, bolsters the company’s intelligent tools to produce foods sustainably. Root AI CEO Joins AppHarvest as Chief Technology Officer

MOREHEAD, Ky., April 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AppHarvest, Inc. (NASDAQ: APPH, APPHW), a leading AgTech company and Certified B Corp focused on farming more sustainably using 90 percent less water than open-field agriculture and only recycled rainwater, announced today that it has acquired Root AI, an artificial intelligence farming startup that creates intelligent robots to help manage high-tech indoor farms. The acquisition of Root AI and its robotic universal harvester, Virgo, is expected to provide AppHarvest with a baseline of harvesting support working alongside crop care specialists focused on more complex tasks. AppHarvest expects the game-changing advantage of the technology to be in the data the robots can collect as they harvest, which can help evaluate crop health, precisely predict yield and optimize overall operations of the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) facility. 

“Farming as we’ve known it is broken because of the increasing number of variables such as extreme weather, droughts, fire, and contamination by animals that make our food system unreliable. Indoor farming solves for many of those challenges, and the data gathered can exponentially deliver more insights that help us predict and control crop quality and yield,” said AppHarvest Founder & CEO Jonathan Webb. “One of the key challenges in agriculture is accurately predicting yield. Many downstream decisions from work scheduling to transportation to retail planning are based on that. Any deviation between projection and actual yield can result in fire drills for numerous functions to adjust for the change, and AI can help solve for that.”  

Root AI co-founder and CEO Josh Lessing will take on the role of Chief Technology Officer for AppHarvest where he will take the lead in continuing to develop the robots and their AI capabilities for the network of indoor farms that AppHarvest is building. Lessing, along with co-founder Ryan Knopf who will join AppHarvest as vice president of technology, helped establish Root AI as an early leader in employing artificial intelligence in CEA. Virgo is the world’s first universal harvester, which can be configured to identify and harvest multiple crops of varying sizes including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and more delicate fruits such as strawberries among others.

Though Virgo can work indoors or out, the robot’s focus has been on controlled environment agriculture. Over the past three years, it has collected the world’s largest data set of tomato images to enable it to identify more than 50 varieties in multiple growing environments and at varying stages of maturity to learn how and when to harvest. 

Virgo uses a set of cameras combined with an infrared laser to generate a 3D color scan of an area to determine the work it can perform. Once it maps the tomatoes, it assesses their orientation and determines if they are ripe enough to pick. The robot can be programmed to make other quality assessments as well. The scan enables the robot to find the least obstructive and fastest route to pick the crop ahead of the arrival of the robotic arm and gripper. The robot can identify hundreds of tomatoes in a fraction of a second without having to connect to the cloud. Virgo keeps score on its success rate like a video game. A built-in feedback mechanism constantly evaluates its efficiency so it learns how to harvest any given configuration of fruit most effectively.

“A piece of food—whether that’s a tomato or a berry or a cucumber—is an outcome from many variables that are part of the growing process. Enhanced data collection for each plant through the robot can lead to insights that teach us precisely how to design better, more resilient food systems that are reliable and that produce more food with fewer resources,“ said Lessing. “Joining forces with AppHarvest is a natural fit: we want to ensure a stable, safe supply of the nutritious and healthy food that people should be eating -- grown sustainably -- and doing that at the scale of AppHarvest gives us the opportunity to make the greatest difference.” 

Gathering more data through AI enables growers to use real-time information to improve a number of sustainability efforts such as detecting and eliminating pests naturally, helping indoor farms successfully grow chemical pesticide-free fruits and vegetables.

AppHarvest is investing approximately $60 million, consisting of approximately $10 million in cash and the balance in AppHarvest common shares, to acquire Root AI. The Company will issue approximately 2,328,000 shares for the transaction.

Founded in 2018, Root AI is based in Somerville, Mass., and has 19 full-time employees, all of whom are expected to join AppHarvest’s technology group to help advance the mission of building a resilient and sustainable food supply.

About AppHarvest

AppHarvest is an applied technology company building some of the world’s largest high-tech indoor farms in Appalachia that grow non-GMO, chemical pesticide-free produce using 90 percent less water than open-field agriculture and only recycled rainwater while producing yields up to 30 times that of traditional agriculture on the same amount of land with zero agricultural runoff. The Company combines conventional agricultural techniques with cutting-edge technology and is addressing key issues including improving access for all to nutritious food, farming more sustainably, building a domestic food supply, and increasing investment in Appalachia. The Company’s 60-acre Morehead, Ky. facility is among the largest indoor farms in the U.S.

For more information, visit https://www.appharvest.com/.

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.

Bowery Farming Lettuce Now In 275 Acme, Safeway Stores

By AMY SOWDER

03/23/2021

New York City-based vertical grower Bowery Farming has placed its products in 275 Safeway and Acme stores in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

The company now serves almost 800 grocery stores and major e-commerce platforms after this partnership with Albertsons Cos. Inc., which oversees the Acme and Safeway banners, according to a news release.

“Whether our customers shop with us in store or through our websites and apps, they expect to find fresh and sustainable produce for delicious meals at home,” Ricardo Dimarzio, produce sales manager of Albertsons’ Mid-Atlantic division, said in the release. “We’re proud to offer Bowery Farming’s innovative and sustainable produce to help meet customer demand for high-quality local indoor-grown greens and herbs.”

*700% growth is only for brick-and-mortar store sales

Bowery builds high-tech indoor farms close to the cities it serves. BoweryOS, its proprietary operating system, uses sensors, vision systems, machine learning and automation to monitor and control the variables in crop growth.

Every new farm the company builds benefits from the collective knowledge of the operating system, improving the entire network of farms.

Bowery’s greens and herbs grow in completely controlled environments year-round, independent of weather and seasonality.

“We’re proud to partner with Albertsons Cos. to bring millions of shoppers our local, wildly delicious protected produce and meet unprecedented demand for our growing category, which we believe is the next frontier of agriculture,” Katie Seawell, Bowery’s chief commercial officer, said in the release.

Five of Bowery’s most popular stock-keeping units are now available in 164 Acme stores (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Delaware and Maryland) and 111 Safeway stores (Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.).

The initial five products are baby butter lettuce, crispy leaf, spring blend, kale blend and basil.

Bowery has seen nearly 700% growth in sales since January 2020 with brick-and-mortar grocery retailers, and more than quadrupled its sales with e-commerce platforms, including Amazon, according to the release.

To sustain this growth and meet demand for its produce, Bowery is building its largest and most technologically advanced farm yet in Bethlehem, Pa., which will further automate the growing process from seed to store and expand its reach throughout the East Coast.

The company also has two commercial farms in Kearny, N.J., and Nottingham, Md.

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.”

The Salad Days of AI

Nidhi Jain has never had much luck growing plants. "I've tried to work with plants, but they didn't want to work with me," said the senior computer science major from California. "So I've stuck to succulents."

Green thumb or no, Jain and her classmates in the School of Computer Science's "Autonomous Agents" course this fall-applied their knowledge of artificial intelligence, including machine learning and computer vision, to grow lettuces and radishes in small, automated greenhouses. Without ever seeing or touching their plants in person, they worked in groups of three to nurture their sprouts, writing programs that made all of the decisions on adjusting light, humidity, and soil moisture based on sensor data.

Reid Simmons, who teaches the course with Stephanie Rosenthal, said using AI to grow vegetables is a good way for students to put the knowledge of AI-based autonomous agents that they learned in class into practice. Agents have applications in many areas, such as self-driving cars, intelligent factories and smart homes. Another — automated greenhouses — proved a good match to the need for a course exercise. 

View fullsize

The autonomous farm

"We wanted something that was physical, that would have to interact with the environment," explained Simmons, a research professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department (CSD) who directs SCS's undergraduate AI degree program. And they wanted these agents to run for two weeks at a time. "Most of the alternatives were robots and the likelihood that a robot would work for two weeks was very low." 

Plants grow — and die — slowly, so they don't provide the immediate, dramatic feedback of, say, a robot running into a wall. But students said they nevertheless learned a lot about the pitfalls of autonomous agents during the two growing periods during the semester.

"Deployment isn't as easy as you think," said Vicky Zeng, a senior artificial intelligence major from Singapore. The autonomous agents receive input from temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and light sensors, which they interpret to make adjustments on light, watering, and fan operation. Faulty soil moisture sensors, however, plagued all of the teams, resulting in plants going without needed water. "Even if your agent is running fine, it can end up making poor decisions if it's getting bad sensor data," she said.

"Some of what they're learning is that relying only on your sensor values can be problematic," said Rosenthal, an assistant teaching professor in CSD. During the second growing period, she noted, moisture sensors showed there was plenty of water in the soil despite most teams never having watered, "but after a week we know the plants probably need water." In that case, the students were allowed to make a one-time adjustment to prevent all their plants from dying.

Autonomous agents thus must be designed to cope with errors, Zeng said. More than that, "we can't be waiting to see errors; we have to have methods for predicting errors. Sometimes things are out of your control but you try to prevent them from getting into that state." One solution: setting a maximum number of days that the plants can go without watering. 

View fullsize

The harvest

Arthur Dzieniszewski, a senior computer science major from New Jersey, comes from a family of gardeners and was immediately intrigued by the "Autonomous Agents" course when he heard about it. Many courses in computer science are heavy on theory, so having a course grounded by growing plants makes it more interesting and relatable, he said. 

Overall, the teams had great success in the two growing periods. Though they were graded based on the first two weeks of growth, Simmons and Rosenthal allowed the plants to grow an extra two weeks so they had a chance to grow big enough for harvesting.

The vegetable-growing exercise proved popular with the students, Rosenthal said, and several chose to take the course, in part, because of it. Dzieniszewski has even created his own automated greenhouse that is functionally equivalent to what the class used. Though he doesn't have any plants growing yet, he can control the greenhouse remotely and use an autonomous agent to run it.

After each growing period, the teams would make presentations to the class, summarizing their experiences and lessons learned. Jain said this was one of her favorite parts of the class. Another highlight, she said, was when Simmons harvested some of the vegetables from the first growing period and ate the radishes during class.

"This was really exciting because I was finally able to have some success at growing some plants," Jain added.

View fullsize

For more information:
Carnegie Mellon University
www.cmu.edu 

View fullsize

21 Dec 2020

Could AI-Controlled Vertical Farms Be The Answer To Feeding The Growing Population?

Erika P.

Dec 31, 2020

Scientists said that the Earth had lost one-third of its arable lands in the last 40 years. That means, lesser land to grow crops that will provide food for humanity. But these days, vertical farms have slowly become a trend in cities, growing leafy vegetables inside a controlled room.

In the next 30 years, it is estimated that the world's population will grow to 9.7 billion people, which poses many challenges, such as producing food for everyone. Agricultural lands are slowly vanishing in some countries due to industrial development and urbanization that turn rural areas into cities.

Vertical Farming

Vertical farms are becoming a trend these past few years in various countries, like in the US, the UK, and Dubai. Vertical farming makes farming possible even with a scarce land area because it is producing food on vertically inclined surfaces instead of a field or greenhouse.

In vertical farming, produce is vertically stacked in layers commonly integrated into the other structures, such as a skyscraper, shipping container, and repurposed warehouse or night clubs.

This modern idea of indoor farming uses the Controlled Environment Agriculture technology that controls the room's temperature, light, humidity, and gases. Vertical farming is somewhat similar to greenhouses that use metal reflectors and artificial lighting to augment natural sunlight.

Ultimately, vertical farming's primary goal is maximizing crops in a limited space and providing more food for the whole population.

ALSO READ: Dubai's Green Revolution Starts at Its Vertical Farms in the Middle of the Desert

AI-Controlled Vertical Farms Promise A Revolution in Food Production

Nate Storey, who co-founded the San Francisco agricultural-technical startup called Plenty, uses vertical farming to answer the increasing food demands of the growing population.

His company has constructed climate-controlled vertical farms that have drawn over $400 million funding from Soft Bank, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, TechXplore reported.

His vertical farms only use about two acres, yet it can produce 720 acres worth of fruit and vegetables. He uses AI-controlled robots to control the lighting, temperature, and watering. Meanwhile, LED panels to serve as the sunlight, which means that food is grown 24/7 inside his vertical farms, and water is recycled because the evaporated water is recaptured so that there is no waste.

Plenty's vertical farms are so efficient that it uses 99% less land and 95% less water than conventional farming practices. Also, the rows of hanging plants produce 400 times more food per acre. Indeed, a revolution in food production.

The AI-controlled robots monitor the plant growth and constantly adjust the environmental factors to ensure more efficient and economic output.

Vertical farming looks more promising, especially in times like the pandemic when food production is disrupted. In Dubai, their food supply was not affected so much during the pandemic's early days because of their vertical farms. The San Francisco-based company's approach to farming also plays a similar role in the stability of the food chain.

"Free agriculture from the constraints of weather, seasons, time, distance, pests, natural disasters, and climate," Plenty's website reads.

READ MORE: Hydroponics Farming Is the Next-Gen Food Production Technology

SWEDEN: Vinnova Grants Swegreen And Research Partners 9,1 MSEK Funding For An AI-driven Vertical Farming Project

Nov 13, 2020

Swegreen, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and Mälardalen University team up in an innovation and research cluster named AIFood - From Farm to Fork.

Swedish AgTech rising star Swegreen, together with research partners RISE and Mälardales University, secures funding from Vinnova, for a 9,1 MSEK project aiming to develop further Swegreens’ platform for AI-driven vertical farming and to evolve a digitalized supply chain from farm to fork.

The research partners Swegreen, Mälardalen University and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, have teamed up together to digitalize the urban farming industry and restructure the urban food industry towards climate neutrality by help of Artificial Intelligence. The core for the partners research is Swegreens’ innovation for hyper-local vertical farming and building connected and circular models for integration of those facilities in host buildings.

The cluster started off earlier this year with the project ‘NeigbourFood’, funded with 2 MSEK by Swedish Innovation Agency Vinnova, to further develop a data-driven monitoring and optimization for precision farming in closed-loop indoor environment for Swegreen’s offer for Farming as a Service FaaS. The clusters' new project, called ‘AIFood’, has now been granted with 9,1 MSEK, corresponding to approx. 1 Million USD, to enhance the local and sustainable food production systems in urban environments with help of digital technologies.

– A data-driven approach on Vertical Farming has been Swegreens’ main focus from day one, and sustainability is embedded in our DNA as a greentech company, Andreas Dahlin, CEO of Swegreen, says.

– Hand in hand with our technological development, our concrete collaboration with the leading research and academic institutions of Sweden gives us the upper hand to lead this industry’s development as a spearhead enterprise – and our partnership with RISE and Mälardalen University keeps our position on the edge of the development, globally speaking, Andreas Dahlin continues.

The call ‘AI in the service of the climate’ has been launched by the Swedish Innovation Agency Vinnova to support initiatives that focus on use of Artificial Intelligence for minimizing various industries' climate-negative impact. The agricultural and food sector accounts for 30% of the global GHG emissions, and vertical farming can create urban symbiosis as a key factor for resource efficiency and integration of farming facilities into urban infrastructure for significant global greenhouse gas emission cutback.

The ‘AIFood’ project runs for two years and focuses on a proof of concept for autonomous orchestration of vertical farming facilities modeling, and on development of an AI-based platform for precision farming, integration of vertical farms into host buildings, and autonomous interaction of the production facilities with the after-harvest actors.

Dr. Baran Cürüklü, from Mälardalen University – a vibrant AI development academic center – is the Project Lead for the cluster.

– AI can go beyond narrow and specific contributions. In this project, our aim is to demonstrate that complex and intricate systems can be orchestrated by AI, and contribute to rapid transition to a more sustainable agriculture, and even innovative services connecting the whole chain from producer to citizens, says Dr. Baran Cürüklü.

The project has a close collaboration with two other national project platforms as reference groups: Sharing Cities Sweden, a national platform for sharing economy with four testbeds in Stockholm, Umeå, Gothenburg, and Lund and a cluster called Fastighetsdatalabb which focuses on data-related advancement of the real-estate sector.

Dr. Charlie Gullström, a senior researcher at RISE, Sweden’s major research institution and head of Sharing Cities Sweden’s Stockholm testbed, plays an indispensable role in this project. She convenes an interdisciplinary climate panel connected to this project including household name researchers who focus on the climate aspect of the project. Dr. Alex Jonsson from RISE is another senior researcher that attends to the needs for the project from a technical perspective.

Dr. Gullström adds:

– I believe that urban food production can speed up climate transition because it has the potential to engage citizens in local consumption and circular business models that both reduce food waste and unnecessary transports. AI allows us to explore how to complement existing agricultural systems by actively involving stakeholders in the value chain as a whole. In this way, AIFOOD really points the way to a new green deal.

Sepehr Mousavi, Chief Innovation Officer of Swegreen remarks:

– We are proud of this collaboration with leading Swedish research institutions and researchers and see it as a successful model for how a private entity could collaborate with academia and offer its assets as a research infrastructure for the good of the whole industry, in a planet and prosperity win-win model.

– This green transformation of the food sector is dependent on empowering factors such as innovation and circularity enhancement, a connectivity-based and data-driven approach through the whole chain; and the application of Artificial Intelligence as an exponential enabler. Autonomous control of the vertical farming facilities for maximum resource efficiency, scalability and preciseness of operations is of extreme and fundamental importance for both the industry and our company to move forward, adds Sepehr Mousavi.

View fullsize

Andreas Dahlin

Press Contact

VD

andreas.dahlin@swegreen.se

View fullsize

Sepehr Mousavi

Chief Innovation Officer

Sepehr.Mousavi@swegreen.se

+46(0)733140043
 

Tags#AI#SweGreen#ArtificialIntelligence#smartcities#foodtech#faas#Viablecities#RISE#MälardalenUniversity#agriculture

TURKEY: Use of Artificial Intelligence In Greenhouse And Vertical Agriculture

October 25, 2020

Vertical farming is the production of products vertically stacked so that even if the land is used it can now be produced as a more effective method, smart agriculture.

Vertical farming is generally used when the yield of the soil is low or under unused conditions and it also contributes to the cultivation of crops. Consequently, many vertical fields and greenhouses are designed as closed spaces and are inclined to provide better light.

In vertical farming, artificial light is often used in combination with natural daylight, and pioneers who prefer this method, such as ForFarming have observed positive impacts on future food safety and human health, and the need for agricultural land will be reduced. One of the most important reasons for this is the protection of natural life and the prevention of environmental pollution.

Another important issue is the importance and use of artificial intelligence in vertical agriculture. IoT-based artificial intelligence system, developed by ForFarming, “Farmio” with a stylish and elegant design that you are currently producing greenhouses, parks, and gardens can be controlled and monitored simultaneously with Farmio plays a role.

Farmio can be controlled from anywhere with its advanced algorithm system, and it ensures that your current harvest can be measured automatically such as humidity, temperature, temperature, pH, or CO2. This feature provides great advantages to the users, and the fact that it can be followed in a coordinated manner has a great effect on the maximum utilization of production.
ForFarming, which wants to be the world’s landless agricultural technology provider, provides the world’s first and only artificial intelligence supported intelligent agriculture solution, and provides healthy and fresh products throughout the year.

With its elegant design, Farmi is ready to be used in many different areas than you can imagine and is suitable for use in many places from supermarkets to restaurants, offices, and hotels. In addition, Farmi enables its customers to grow more than 30 plants, and by using artificial intelligence in all processes from production to harvest (Farmio), it provides customers with great advantages in tracking processes and makes this work much more enjoyable.

How Could AI Improve Controlled Environment Agriculture?

View fullsize

by David Kuack

The use of artificial intelligence in the production of controlled environment crops has the potential to grow crops more quickly and efficiently.

Most people are familiar with the term artificial intelligence or AI. Ken Tran, founder of Koidra LLC, said artificial intelligence is a very loosely defined term.

View fullsize

In his efforts to apply artificial intelligence to controlled environment agriculture, Ken Tran (right) collaborated with horticulture specialists worldwide, including Dr. Xiuming Hao (left) and Shalin Khosla in Canada. Photos courtesy of Ken Tran

“AI very broadly means anything that a computer can do to perform a task,” said Tran. “Classical AI can be a program that doesn’t have the capability to learn and improve all the time. For example, a program can be written for a computer to play chess. A computer can play chess by itself, but it follows a specific logic imposed by the programmer. This type of AI doesn’t improve over time with data.”

A second type of AI can have accountability to learn and improve over time with additional data.
“This type of AI is very promising because it can continuously improve,” Tran said. “With this type of AI a computer can autonomously learn how to use the data.”

Tran said both types of AI are useful and will enhance each other.

“The second type of is considered the second stage of AI,” he said. “The learnable AI is the next phase of the expert-system type of AI. Both types of AI could have major applications to controlled environment agriculture.”

Greenhouse challenge incorporates AI
Tran was the principal investigator and leader of a team of AI and horticulture experts that won the first International Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge organized by Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. Tran was the principal research engineer for the Project Sonoma team. At the time Tran participated in the challenge he was an employee of Microsoft Research where much of his focus was on machine learning.

View fullsize

Ken Tran (second from left) was the principal investigator and leader of a team of artificial intelligence and horticulture experts that won the first International Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge.

The greenhouse challenge ran from May through December 2018, with five teams growing a cucumber crop in their own greenhouse compartment at the university. The purpose of the challenge was to combine AI with greenhouse data to maximize crop production while minimizing greenhouse inputs.

“The success of the Sonoma team in the competition came from our collaboration with horticulture researchers,” Tran said. “Without their participation and the domain knowledge they provided we wouldn’t have achieved this success.”

The team worked with researchers including Dr. Xiuming Hao at Agriculture and Agrifood Canada, Shalin Khosla at Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Agriculture, and Dr. Chieri Kobota at Ohio State University.

“Before growing cucumbers for the competition, we had not grown cucumbers, but we were still able to win,” Tran said. “During the competition, our team outperformed a team of expert Dutch growers who had previously grown cucumbers. Our team was able to produce more than 55 kilograms of cucumbers per square meter. Also, the net profit on the cucumbers was 17 percent higher than the Dutch growers.”

Potential benefits for CEA
While Tran was employed at Microsoft he worked on reinforcement learning. He explained reinforcement learning, in a simplistic definition, is a data-driven method used in control applications. It learns to find the best actions based on reward or punishment data.

“We wanted to find a good application to motivate our reinforcement learning research,” he said. “In 2017, I was looking for a pure application, meaning an application that would have a great impact and would also be doable for reinforcement learning. I began with indoor vertical farms which are a good application because it is a well-controlled environment with little influence from the outside. It is easy to get started because the test environment can be as simple as a small growth chamber.

“Some types of applications that would fit include using reinforcement learning to solve a control problem. We wanted to solve a problem in the real world, but applying reinforcement learning in the real world is really challenging. That is why I was looking for applications that are well controlled and can have different scales from a small growth chamber to a large grow room.”

Tran saw the potential that vertical farms had to help solve sustainable food production problems worldwide. He spoke with CEA researchers and experts around the world, including the United States, Japan, and China. One of the institutions that Tran contacted was Wageningen University.

“When we were visited the university we learned about how they were going to organize this greenhouse challenge,” Tran said. “We discussed with them exploring collaborative opportunities. With this competition platform we could get our feet wet by actually doing something and not just talking about theory and the possibilities.”

Collecting more data from growers
Tran said much more data is needed from growers in order for computers to autonomously learn how to use the data.

“We are trying to understand how good growers produce a crop,” he said. “This isn’t just one grower, but multiple growers. We study the plant science and try to come up with a sound formula for how to grow a crop. That formula doesn’t evolve itself. It is a fixed formula. It is reacting to changing conditions that indicate under these conditions to try this.

“This is the first step in our research and it was very successful. It already performed better than many other growers would because we were able to aggregate the knowledge from multiple expert growers. We are trying to develop AI that can learn and improve over time with more data. We don’t want to stop at one system.”

Tran said controlling a vertical farm is easier than controlling a greenhouse.

“However, in both scenarios, our current technology can already be used,” he said. “This technology will keep evolving for even further impact. The technology can be used in both applications by using what we already know about plant science, machine learning, and AI in general. It’s not like having to wait for new technology or the research is not ready and we have to wait. We can already leverage the technology today and we have demonstrated that in multiple scenarios.”

View fullsize

Ken Tran is working on a commercial artificial intelligence program that will be adaptable to a variety of crops grown in vertical farms and greenhouses.

Tran is working on a commercial AI program that will be adaptable to a variety of crops.
“The process is going to be similar for developing a program for any CEA crop,” he said. “The data will include environmental data from inside and outside the greenhouse. This data will be generated automatically from multiple sensors installed inside the greenhouse, including light levels, temperature, relative humidity, nutrient levels, water quality, and carbon dioxide levels.

“For every crop, we would need to talk with the growers to find out how they currently grow to set up a baseline. Crop data would be provided manually by the growers on a daily and/or weekly basis depending on the crop. The program will evolve from the baseline with more data coming in. We want the program to be safe for every crop.”

Principles for adopting AI to horticulture
Tran said in order for growers and the horticulture industry to adopt AI, safety-first principles must be followed. These include:

• The AI system must start growing the same way as what growers want with no risky deviations from what growers would do. This growing would continuously improve.

• Growers could easily switch between manual, recommendation and autopilot modes. The greenhouse operator is always in control and can choose to exit AI control mode at any time. In recommendation mode, the AI system would only send recommendations to the operator for review and the setpoints would still be inputted manually by the operator.

• The system must support easy and continuous monitoring.

For more: Ken Tran, Koidra LLC, (512) 436-3250; ken@koidra.ai.

David Kuack is a freelance technical writer in Fort Worth, Texas; dkuack@gmail.com.

Posted in Interviews

US: CHICAGO - Indoor Farm of The Future Uses Robots, A.I. And Cameras To Help Grow Produce

September 27, 2019

By: Ash-har Quraishi

Farm of the future uses robots and A.I. to help grow produce

CHICAGO – According to the USDA, the average head of lettuce travels 1,500 miles from harvest to plate. That transport leaves a heavy carbon footprint as flavors in the produce also begin to degrade. While many have looked to vertical farming as an Eco-friendly alternative, high costs have been a challenge.

But inside a warehouse on Chicago’s south side, one entrepreneur hopes to unlock the secret to the future of farming.

For the last three years Jake Counne, the founder and CEO of Backyard Fresh Farms, has been pilot testing vertical farming using the principles of manufacturing.

“Being able to have the crop come to the farmer instead of the farmer going to the crop,” said Counne. “That translated into huge efficiencies because we can start treating this like a manufacturing process instead of a farming process.”

It’s a high-tech approach – implementing artificial intelligence, cameras, and robotics that help to yield leafy, organic greens of high quality while reducing waste and the time it takes to harvest.

Some have called it Old McDonald meets Henry Ford. Large pallets of vegetables are run down conveyor belts under LED lights.

“The system will be queuing up trays to the harvester based on where the plants are in their life-cycle,” explains Counne.

It’s the automation and assembly line he says that makes this vertical farming model unique. Artificial intelligence algorithms and cameras monitor the growth of the crops.

Lead research and development scientist Jonathan Weekley explains how the cameras work.

“They’re capturing live images, they’re doing live image analysis,” he said. “They’re also collecting energy use data so we can monitor how much energy our lights are using.”

“So, what essentially happens is the plant itself is becoming the sensor that controls its own environment,” Counne added.

Another factor that makes the process different is scaleability. Right now, Backyard Fresh Farms can grow 100 different varieties of vegetables with an eye on expansion.

“There’s really no end to the type of varieties we can grow and specifically in the leafy greens,” said Counne. “I mean flavors that explode in your mouth.”

And it’s becoming big business.

The global vertical farming market valued at $2.2 billion last year is projected to grow to nearly $13 billion by 2026.

Daniel Huebschmann, Corporate Executive Chef at Gibson’s Restaurant Group, says the quality of Backyard’s produce is of extremely high quality.

“We’ve talked about freshness, but the flavors are intense,” he says. “It’s just delivering an unbelievably sweet, tender product.”

Counne says he has nine patents pending for the hardware and software system he and his team have developed in the 2,000 square foot space. But, he says the ultimate goal is to have the product make its way to grocery shelves nationwide.

“The vision is really to build 100 square foot facilities near the major population centers to be able to provide amazing, delicious greens that were grown sustainably,” he said.

If he succeeds where others have failed, his high-tech plan could get him a slice of the $63 billion U.S. produce market. At the same time, he hopes to bring sustainable, fresh vegetables to a table near you.

Our Cultural Need To Integrate Local Food Production And Artificial Intelligence

View fullsize

September 14, 2019

View fullsize

Julian Vigo Contributor

Social Media I cover the anthropological intersections of tech, politics & culture.

View fullsize

Matt Barnard, chief executive officer and co-founder of Plenty Inc., speaks at the SoftBank World 2019 event in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday 2019. Barnard said the company's high-tech approach to growing crops indoors results in plants that yield more without pesticides, use a fraction of water of their counterparts in the field and taste better, to boot. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg Photo credit: © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP © 2019 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP

The use of AI (artificial intelligence) in agriculture is not new and has been around for some time with technology spans a wide range of abilities—from that which discriminates between crop seedlings and weeds to greenhouse automation. Indeed, it is easy to think that this is new technology given the way that our culture has distanced so many facets of food production, keeping it far away from urban spaces and our everyday reality. Yet, as our planet reaps the negative repercussions of technological and industrial growth, we must wonder if there are ways that our collective cultures might be able to embrace AI’s use in food production which might include a social response to climate change. Similarly, we might consider if new technology might also be used to educate future generations as to the importance of responsible food production and consumption.

While we know that AI can be a force for positive change where, for instance, failures in food growth can be detected and where crops can be analyzed in terms of disease, pests, and soil health, we must wonder why food growth has been so divorced from our culture and social reality. In recent years, there has been great pushback within satellite communities and the many creations of villages focussed upon holistic methods of food production. Indeed, RegenVillages is one of many examples where vertical farming, aquaponics, aeroponics and permaculture are part of this community's everyday functioning. Moreover, across the UK are many ecovillages and communities seeking to bring back food production to the core of social life.

Lammas is one such ecovillage which I visited seven years ago in Wales which has, as its core concept, the notion of a “collective of eco-smallholdings working together to create and sustain a culture of land-based self-reliance.”  And there are thousands of such villages across the planet whereby communities are invested in working to reduce their carbon footprint while taking back control of their food production. Even Planet Impact’s reforestation programs are interesting because the links between healthy forests and food production are well known as are the benefits of forest gardening which is widely considered a quite resilient agroecosystem. COO & Founder of Planetimpact.com, Oscar Dalvit, reports that his company’s programs are designed to educate as much as to innovate: “With knowledge, we can fight climate change. Within the for-profit sector, we can win this battle.” Forest gardening is a concept that is not only part of the permaculture practice but is also an ancient tradition still alive and well in places like Kerala, India and Martin Crawford’s forest garden in southwest England where his Agroforestry Research Trust offers courses and serves as a model for such communities across the UK.

But how can AI help to make sustainable and local farming practices over and above industrial agriculture? Indeed, one must wonder if it is possible for local communities to take control of their food production. So, how can AI and other new tech interfaces bring together communities and food production methods that might provide a sustainable hybrid model of traditional methods and innovative technology?

We know already that the IoT (internet of things) is fast becoming that virtual space where AI is being implemented to include within the latest farming technology. And where businesses invested in robotics are likewise finding that there is no ethical implementation of food technology, we must be mindful of how strategies are implemented which incorporate the best of new tech with the best of old tech. Where AI is helping smaller farms to become more profitable, all sorts of digital interfaces are transmitting knowledge, education and the expansion of local farming methods. This means, for instance, that garden maintenance is continued by others within the community as some members are absent for reasons of vacation or illness. Together with AI, customer experience is as much a business model as it is a local community standard for communication and empowerment.

The reality is that industrial farming need not take over local food production and there are myriad ways that communities can directly respond to climate change and the encroachment of big agriculture. The health benefits of local farming practices are already well known as are the many ways that smartphone technology can create high-yield farms within small urban spaces.

It is high time that communities reclaim their space within urban centers and that urban dwellers consider their food purchasing and consumption habits while building future sustainability which allows everyone to participate in local food production. As media has recently focussed upon AI and industrial farming, we need to encourage that such technology is used to implement local solutions that are far more sustainable and realistic instead of pushing big agriculture.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

View fullsize

Julian Vigo

I am an independent scholar and filmmaker who specializes in anthropology, technology, and political philosophy. My latest book is "Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development" (2015) and I am a contributor to Quillette, TruthDig, Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, The Morning Star, The Ecologist, HuffPost UK and CounterPunch.

RoBotany Builds 60,000-Square-Foot Vertical Farm In Braddock, Plans Nationwide Expansion As Fifth Season

The company's first urban farm, incubated at Carnegie Mellon University, uses proprietary robotics technology to grow affordable fresh produce for Pittsburgh-area grocery stores and restaurants

View fullsize

NEWS PROVIDED BY Fifth Season

September 24, 2019

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 24, 2019,/PRNewswire/

Fifth Season, an indoor farming pioneer, announced plans for its first highly efficient, commercial-scale indoor vertical farm, which will open in early 2020 in Braddock, a historic steel town near Pittsburgh.

View fullsize

Fifth Season, originally founded as RoBotany Ltd., is a consumer-focused technology company that was incubated at Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship—an alliance of CMU's business, robotics, and other schools focused on fostering innovation. The company has raised over $35 million to date led by Drive Capital and other private investors with close ties to CMU. Its leadership team has deep expertise in plant science, robotics, AI and systems engineering.

View fullsize

Austin Webb, Fifth Season's co-founder, and CEO

Austin Webb, Fifth Season's co-founder, and CEO said the company's 60,000-square-foot Braddock farm will set a new vertical agriculture standard for efficient, safe and sustainable production of pesticide-free leafy greens and herbs in urban communities.

Fifth Season developed and perfected its technology with two R&D vertical farms in Pittsburgh's South Side neighborhood. Their leafy greens have been sold at local retailers, such as Giant Eagle and Whole Foods Market, along with popular Pittsburgh restaurants Superior Motors, honeygrow and Kahuna.

Produce from the flagship production farm coming to Braddock will also be available in Pittsburgh-area grocery stores and restaurants.

"The goal through our first three years of development was to prove we could bring fresh food to urban customers at prices competitive with conventionally grown produce," Webb said.

"We have developed fully integrated, proprietary technology to completely control the hydroponic growing process and optimize key factors such as energy, labor usage and crop output," Webb added. "The result is a vertical farm design that has over twice the efficiency and grow capacity of traditional vertical farms. Our unprecedented low costs set a new standard for the future of the industry."

Webb said the Braddock farm's ideal growing environment will deliver perfect, pure produce, in any season. It will produce over 500,000 pounds of lettuce, spinach, kale, arugula and herbs from its 25,000-square-foot grow room during the first full year of operation. The facility is partially solar-powered and requires 95 percent less water compared to traditional growing operations.

Webb said the company is planning a staged expansion in additional, similar-sized cities across the U.S.

Photos and graphics to accompany this announcement can be downloaded at this link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8ucvpnvlln10o7x/AADzxmH2iA3rr9LGNO_BrMc1a?dl=0

Contact:

Grant Vandenbussche, Fifth Season (248) 240-4694, grant@robotany.ag

or

Michele Wells, Wells Communications (303) 417-0696 or mwells@wellscommunications.net

SOURCE Fifth Season

Combining Artificial Intelligence With Urban Farming Can Be A Game Changer For Developing Countries

View fullsize

September 1, 2019

View fullsize

Daphne Ewing-Chow Contributor

An Israeli agtech company called Seedo might have the solution for the challenges of urban agriculture in vulnerable areas such as the Caribbean, that struggle with environmental and climate factors that lead to crop loss.

View fullsize

A Seedo container is the size of a small fridge. SEEDO

Latin and America and the Caribbean is the most urbanised region in the world with up to 80% of the region’s population residing in cities (UN-Habitat 2012). While urbanization is an important element of economic growth and modernization, the diminishing ratio of food producers to food consumers in urban settings negatively impacts local food systems, causing populations to be more susceptible to non-communicable diseases, obesity and undernourishment.

Urban farming practices such as rooftop gardens, community greenhouses and vertical farms have provided an alternative to rural agriculture, but given the high cost of urban land, space and size limitations, non-conducive environmental conditions and limited human resources, these methods have not been without their challenges.

Vertical farming’s “closed and controlled” approach has been successful in eliminating the risk of insects, pests and diseases that are prevalent in traditional agricultural systems but the infrastructure required has typically been cost-prohibitive and highly reliant on fossil fuels (solar power is typically not enough).

Seedo is the world's first fully-automated and controlled indoor-growing technology for the "at-home" market— the self-driving car of agriculture. Compact commercial containers that resemble small refrigerators utilize AI algorithms to produce optimal water and light conditions— essentially controlling the weather— through a hybrid system of hydroponics and aeroponics.

Seedo can grow fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs— up to five species at a time per system, and has become extremely popular within the cannabis industry.

“The advantage of Seedo technology is that you can grow a wide range of crops in any climate and any season with no knowledge of how to grow and still achieve high-quality crops,” says Seedo’s CEO, Zohar Levy. “Seedo’s AI algorithm makes life easy for growers and of course, it is pesticide-free. You can enjoy fresh and tasty food year-round.”

The team at Seedo has recognized the relevance of their technology for environmentally vulnerable communities. In May 2019, the company qualified as a registered vendor for the United Nations Global Marketplace and intends to establish pilot programs in countries suffering from extreme climates. In a nod to its applicability to sustainable and climate-smart development, Dr. Jendayi Frazer, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and one of the United States’ leading voices in international policy, has joined Seedo’s Board of Directors.

“Making AI technology such as Seedo accessible and affordable at the grassroots level will enable food systems to be localised without soil exploitation, deforestation or exposure to climate risk,” says Levy.

At the time of publication, a Seedo system retailed for a mere $2,400— a small fraction of the cost of typical vertical farming systems. The price includes the Seedo box, filters (water, air), starting nutrients and access to the Seedo app, which allows users to receive notifications about growth, health and harvest time. But the real savings are in the diminished risk of crop loss and the elimination of labour requirements. According to Levy, Seedo can do away with the estimated 40% of annual farm costs that are funnelled into wages, salaries and contract labour expenses.

Levy, in a recent report to shareholders, indicated that the combined capabilities of artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, and remote grow technologies makes Seedo and optimal solution for farmers “in a variety of "at-risk" markets. Stackable containers afford dramatic savings in land-use, water consumption and human labor needs… independent of climate conditions.”

According to the International Data Corporation, global spending on artificial intelligence will grow to around $58 billion by 2021. The agriculture sector has been particularly responsive to these technologies, particularly in environmentally vulnerable contexts. In the context of the Dominican Republic, artificial intelligence has enabled the growth of the agricultural sector to 14% of GDP.

Seedo could be a huge advance for small island economies that disproportionately struggle with climate change impacts, food insecurity, knowledge gaps and limited capital or farming technology.

View fullsize

Daphne Ewing-Chow

I’m an environmental writer with a focus on food and agriculture, and commute between the Southern Caribbean (Barbados) and the Northern Caribbean (Cayman Islands). I have a Master’s Degree in International Economic Policy from Columbia University and am passionate about Caribbean social, economic and environmental issues. I am intrigued by the resilience of the Small Island Developing States of the region as well as the opportunities for sustainable and regenerative growth through agriculture. I recently headed up communications for a climate change in fisheries project (CC4FISH) at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and have worked in development banking, environmental not-for-profits, and in the venture capital industry. My work has appeared in wide cross-section of Caribbean newspapers and magazines, the Sunday Times (of London), Elite Daily, Elephant Journal and other publications. Follow me on Twitter at @daphneewingchow.

Read More

Autogrow Appoints New Chief Technology Officer

August 13, 2019:  Autogrow has named Jonathan Morgan as its new Chief Technology Officer responsible for continuing development of their innovation utilizing the latest technology, plant biological science and artificial intelligence.

“We are very pleased to welcome Jonathan to the Autogrow family and look forward to seeing him put his talents to use to deliver world class products and customer experiences,” says CEO Darryn Keiller.

Jonathan brings to the role more than 18 years of commercial expertise in software and integrated technology solutions for customers. Leading teams in product development, continuous improvement and customer experience.

His previous role was as Ventures VP Engineering at EROAD, a global leader in road charging, compliance and telematics services across NZ, Australia and North America.

“I’m excited to join a progressive team like Autogrow who is leading disruptive innovation within the AgTech space and creating new and exciting solutions to help grow food. It’s an area I’m interested in exploring and seeing how we can make positive impacts in the pockets of farmers and on the planet,” explains Jonathan.

Over the past two years Autogrow has doubled their employee number and launched some of the most cutting-edge solutions for indoor growing including the first API (Application Programming Interface), the first SDK (Software Development Kit), the first indoor agtech hackathon – #CropsOnMars, and most recently the integrated farm management platform FarmRoad.

“It’s been a busy two years and we are only set to become bigger with more innovative solutions for farmers. Jonathan’s appointment will ensure that we continue to push forward within CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture), an industry that is evolving at a rapid pace,” says Darryn.

Jonathan will begin his role 18 September and will be based at the Autogrow Head Office in Auckland, New Zealand.

Indoor Farmers Bet On Robots, AI

View fullsize

Erik Groszyk, 30, used to spend his day as an investment banker working on spreadsheets. Now, he blasts rapper Kendrick Lamar while harvesting crops from his own urban farm out of a shipping container in a parking lot in Brooklyn, New York, US. REUTERS/Mike Segar/Files

Leafy salad greens grown under banks of LED lights, with mist or drips of water are having their day in the sun. Several top US indoor farms, stacked with plants from floor to ceiling, tell Reuters they are boosting production to a level where they can now supply hundreds of grocery stores.

Plenty, Bowery, Aerofarms, and 80 Acres Farms are among young companies that see a future in salad greens and other produce grown in what are called vertical farms that rely on robotics and artificial intelligence, along with LED lights.

While the first versions of modern vertical farms sprouted about a decade ago, in recent years the introduction of automation and the tracking of data to regulating light and water has allowed them to get out of lab mode and into stores. Now they are trying to scale up.

Plenty and others say their customized, controlled lighting — some more blue light here, some more red light there — makes for tastier plants compared to sun-grown leaves and that they use 95 percent less water than conventional farms, require very little land, and use no pesticides, making them competitive with organic farms.

And because vertical farms exist in windowless buildings that can be located in the heart of urban areas, produce does not have to travel far by fossil-fuel-guzzling trucks to reach stores.

The companies’ expansion comes as plant-based burger makers Beyond Meat Inc and Impossible Foods captivate investors and make inroads in high-end restaurants and fast-food chains.

But whether the sunless farms can compete financially with their field-grown brethren, given big upfront investments and electric bills, remains a question.

“We’re competitive with organic today and we’re working very hard to continue to make more and more crops grocery store competitive,” said Matt Barnard, chief executive and co-founder of Plenty, which is based in Silicon Valley.

Plenty’s salads sell on organic grocery delivery site Good Eggs for 99 cents an ounce, while a leading brand, Organic Girl, on grocery chain Safeway’s online site was priced at 80 cents an ounce.

Plenty said its new farm, dubbed “Tigris,” can produce enough leafy greens to supply over 100 stores, compared with its previous farm that could only supply three stores and some restaurants.

The technology world is paying attention. In its last round in 2017 Plenty raised about $200 million from investors including Japan’s Softbank, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and former Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt. New York City-based Bowery raised $95 million in a fund-raising round led by Google Ventures and Temasek last year.

View fullsize

LED lights glow from a cluster of 10 hydroponic climate-controlled farms housed in repurposed 320-square-foot metal shipping containers where entrepreneur farmers enrolled in the "Square Roots" farming program are growing and selling a variety of organic greens in the parking lot of a former Pfizer factory in Brooklyn, New York, US. REUTERS/Mike Segar/Files

Bowery said its third farm coming online soon will help it supply hundreds of stores from dozens today, and Aerofarms, in New Jersey, said it is doubling its space to meet demand.

None of the three companies would give details about costs.

Former Vertical Farm CEO Matt Matros is sceptical that sunless farms can make economic sense. He invested in and ran Chicago-based FarmedHere in 2015, but changed its business into food processing.

“The issue with indoor farming was that you could really only grow a couple things efficiently — namely basil and micro greens. But the problem is the world just doesn’t need that much basil and micro greens,” Matros said.

80 Acres Farms in Cincinnati says it already grows and sells tomatoes and cucumbers, and Plenty is testing cherry tomatoes and strawberries in the lab.

Agriculture technology investor Michael Rose says vertical sunless farms are more expensive to run than modern greenhouses that rely on sunlight, supplemented by LED lights. He sees limited areas where it makes sense, such as the Middle East, where much of the food is imported, or China’s mega-cities where pollution and urban sprawl limit the availability of premium fresh food.

At Plenty’s new farm, robots put seedlings in tall, vertically hung planters. The planters move along a wall of LED lights for 10 days and are then put through a harvesting machine that shaves off the leafy greens.

The machines minimize labour needs, and Plenty says the speed of production also helps control pests.

“We use no pesticides,” said Nate Storey, co-founder and chief scientist at Plenty. “We don’t even have to use things like ladybugs, because we go so fast in our production that we out-race the pests themselves.”

View fullsize

Canon Exploring The Vision of Indoor Agriculture

June 12, 2019

AUTHOR: Ivan Ball - Content Contributor to iGrow News

The well known digital imaging company, Canon U.S.A. Inc., attended the 2019 Indoor Ag Con in Las Vegas.

A small team based out of Richmond, Virginia brought a prototype vision system for the indoor vertical farm industry. One of the team members claimed that they were attending the conference just to learn more about the needs and wants of indoor farmers to further develop a fully autonomous plant vision system.

The prototype at the conference utilized a small RGB camera encased in a 3D printed housing that allowed the camera to travel along a rail system throughout a vertical shelf farm on display. This camera would travel over the tops of the plants and snap pictures at different locations to monitor their growth. Once the camera is finished capturing images of the plants, it would travel back to a wireless charging station to fill its battery as well as upload all the images and locations of the plants. One of the engineers explained that this technology would make it cheaper to implement fewer cameras for a larger farming facility.

Each farming shelf could use just one camera that would travel the shelf in an oval pattern. Canon has been developing high quality imaging equipment for over 80 years and could bring a disruptive technology for farms in the near future. This new system combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning could allow indoor farmers to receive quicker growing insights for making operational decisions.

Dennis Riling, Director of Business Development at Illumitex presented on the interaction between light and plants. He explained how Illumitex is using FarmVisionAI to attach cameras to their grow lights to detect pest outbreaks, leaf wilting, growth rate, nutrient deficiencies, and predict yield estimates.

This image feedback combined with the ability to manipulate light spectrums, dose fertilizers, and adjust pH could allow farmers to even change the taste, color, and texture of plants according to Blake Lange, Business Development Manager at Signify, formerly Philips lighting. Blake is doing research with dynamic spectrum LEDs on their GrowWise Control System to find light recipes to change the taste of plants.

Keep an eye out for Canon as they continue to investigate the industry of controlled environment agriculture (CEA). The team is highly aware of the growing indoor agriculture industry and plans to find new innovative ways to join the space as they learn more from the farmers.

Japan Plant Factory Association Announces Innovative Approach To Sustainability With Plant Factories With Artificial Lighting (PFAL)

Industry: Agriculture

A New approach to sustainability with plant factories was announced this month by Toyoki Kozai, Japan Plant Factory Association (NPO)

New York City, NY (PRUnderground) April 18th, 2019

Plant Factory is a facility that aids the steady production of high-quality vegetables all year round by artificially controlling the cultivation environment (e.g., light, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, and culture solution), allowing growers to plan production.  Japan leads the world in the cutting-edge technology contained in plant factories and it continues to motivate entrepreneurs and start-ups.

View fullsize

In the book “Smart Plant Factory: The next generation indoor vertical farms”, Toyoki Kozai has tried to provide readers with an accurate understanding of plant factories. The book presents an overview of the role of plant factories in the 21st century. Furthermore, it comprises of a lucid description of the concept, characteristics, methodology, design, management, business, recent advances and future technologies of plant factories with artificial lighting (PFAL) and indoor vertical farms.

According to the Shift, indoor farming is the future of urban farming as it allows vertical farms that grow all crops, in any place, at any time. It has been observed that there is an emerging interest around the globe in smart PFAL R&D and business and this book tries to cover smart solutions in PFAL et al.

In another book, “Light-Emitting Diodes, the readers can gain insight into the latest theories, technologies, and applications of LEDs based on III-V semiconductor materials. Jinmin Li and G.Q. Zhang describe the latest developments of LEDs with spectral coverage from ultra-violet (UV) to the entire visible light wavelength.

The book is a highly recommended read for all the researchers and students working with semiconductors, optoelectronics, and optics. It delves into the various novel ways LEDs can be used, for example, the benefits of LEDs in healthcare and wellbeing or the innovative solutions LEDs can provide in horticulture and animal breeding. The foreword of the book is written by Hiroshi Amano, one of the 2014 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on light-emitting diodes. Overall, the book is an interesting, thought-provoking read.

In a research paper, “Benefits, problems, and challenges of plant factories with artificial lighting (PFALs), T. Kozai has discussed the potential and actualized benefits of the PFAL, the current unresolved problems of PFALs and the challenges for the smart PFAL. According to the Kozai, the global and local trilemma on foods, resources, and environment can be solved with the help of PFALs. According to Kozai et al., the benefits of the PFAL are high resource-use efficiency (RUE), high annual productivity per unit land area, and the production of high-quality plants without using pesticides.

However, high initial investment, electricity, and labor costs remain a challenge which has further led to a limited number of profitable PFALs.  Kozai suggests that it is vital to understand the concepts behind the benefits and the methodology before designing and operating a PFAL to actualize the potential benefits of the PFAL. In addition to the above, a considerable amount of systematic research, development, and marketing with the appropriate vision, mission, strategy, and methodologies is also crucial.

The research on PFALs shows that actualization of potential benefits is relatively easy compared to a greenhouse in which the energy and material balance and the plant-environment relationship is much more complex. Hence, the straightforward approach with respect to the PFAL is helpful.

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, factories, News, plant, Science

Machine Learning Is Making Pesto Even More Delicious

View fullsize

MELANIE GONICK

Intelligent Machines

Researchers at MIT have used AI to improve the flavor of basil. It’s part of a trend that is seeing artificial intelligence revolutionize farming.

• by Will Knight

• April 3, 2019

What makes basil so good? In some cases, it’s AI.

Machine learning has been used to create basil plants that are extra-delicious. While we sadly cannot report firsthand on the herb’s taste, the effort reflects a broader trend that involves using data science and machine learning to improve agriculture.

The researchers behind the AI-optimized basil used machine learning to determine the growing conditions that would maximize the concentration of the volatile compounds responsible for basil’s flavor. The study appears in the journal PLOS One today.  

The basil was grown in hydroponic units within modified shipping containers in Middleton, Massachusetts. Temperature, light, humidity, and other environmental factors inside the containers could be controlled automatically. The researchers tested the taste of the plants by looking for certain compounds using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. And they fed the resulting data into machine-learning algorithms developed at MIT and a company called Cognizant.

The research showed, counterintuitively, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best taste. The research group plans to study how the technology might improve the disease-fighting capabilities of plants as well as how different flora may respond to the effects of climate change.

“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant's experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” said Caleb Harper, head of the MIT Media Lab’s OpenAg group, in a press release. His lab worked with colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin on the paper.

The idea of using machine learning to optimize plant yield and properties is rapidly taking off in agriculture. Last year, Wageningen University in the Netherlands organized an “Autonomous Greenhouse” contest, in which different teams competed to develop algorithms that increased the yield of cucumber plants while minimizing the resources required. They worked with greenhouses where a variety of factors are controlled by computer systems.

Similar technology is already being applied in some commercial farms, says Naveen Singla, who leads a data science team focused on crops at Bayer, a German multinational that acquired Monsanto last year. “Flavor is one of the areas where we are heavily using machine learning—to understand the flavor of different vegetables,” he says.

Singla adds that machine learning is a powerful tool for greenhouse growing, but less useful for open fields. “These controlled environments are where you can do a lot of optimizing by understanding the complex variables,” he says. “In the open environments it’s still a question how we can close the gap.”

Harper added that in the future his group will consider the genetic make-up of plants (something that Bayer feeds into its algorithms), and that they will look to release the technology to anyone. “Our goal is to design open-source technology at the intersection of data acquisition, sensing, and machine learning, and apply it to agricultural research in a way that hasn't been done before,” he said.

Learn from the humans leading the way in machine learning at EmTech Next.

Register Today!
June 11-12, 2019
Cambridge, MA

Register now 

View fullsize

Will Knight Senior Editor, AI

Will Knight is MIT Technology Review’s Senior Editor for Artificial Intelligence. He covers the latest advances in AI and related fields, including machine learning, automated driving, and robotics. Will joined MIT Technology Review in 2008 from the UK science weekly New Scientist magazine.

Does AI Hold The Key To A New And Improved “Green Revolution” In Agriculture?

View fullsize

Producing enough healthy food to feed the world—on a changing planet—is going to be a steep challenge. These researchers are giving farmers AI-driven techniques and tools to find solutions.

View fullsize

BYJACKIE SNOW FEBRUARY 19, 2019 NOVA NEXT

Automation in agriculture may soon make robots as common in greenhouses as they are on factory floors. Photo credit: Shutterstock

On a stretch of highway in the Netherlands not far outside of Amsterdam, a row of greenhouses at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) poke up like knuckles along the flat landscape. The Dutch university is known for its cutting-edge agricultural research, but some of these greenhouses recently ran an experiment that’s novel even for them: autonomous growing.

Stepping into a humid box from a brisk autumn day, you hear the noises of machines adjusting themselves mixing with the sounds of leaves rustling. The amount of light, water, fertilizers, and carbon dioxide—along with the temperature of the greenhouse—are all set by deep learning algorithms and executed by machines. Humans are still responsible for moving vines up the lattices as they grow, as well as pruning and harvesting.

But it’s pretty clear who—or rather, what—is calling the shots.

The Future of Farming?

By 2050, we’ll need to feed nine billion people with about a third less arable land than we had in the 1970s, experts estimate. Farmers will need all the help they can get, including insights gleaned from artificial intelligence, or AI. Developed carefully—and with the people who will be using it taken into account—AI can be part of the solution to feeding a growing world, according to the Refresh report, a document put together by researchers from Google, university professors, nonprofits, and farmers. And as an added bonus, some of the unsustainable practices developed over the past 70 years could be reversed with more efficient, AI-driven technology.

The Green Revolution was a set of advances that started in the 1950s in areas like high-yield crops, synthetic fertilizers, and irrigation technology that greatly increased food production, especially in developing countries—saving an estimated one billion people from starvation. But it left in its wake a culture of pesticides, reduced agricultural biodiversity, and overuse of chemical fertilizers that deplete the soil and poison waterways.

“It was never meant to be used in the long term,” says Danielle Nierenberg, the president of Food Tank, a non-profit working to build a better food system that also worked on the Refresh document. Farmers were supposed to transition back to organic, Nierenberg adds: It just never happened because increased yields generated by industrial-scale farming put pressure on smaller farms to follow suit.

One of the main ways AI could help agriculture transition out of practices forged in the Green Revolution and into a more sustainable future is with precision farming. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way for farmers to learn from historical or real-time data. But AI-powered programs can combine data on weather patterns, crop yields, market prices, and more to guide farmers to planting at the right time, adding the appropriate level of fertilizers, and harvesting at peak ripeness.

View fullsize

WUR is one of the places where big data approaches to growing food are being tested. Last fall, five teams of AI researchers and biologists from around the world competed in growing cucumbers in separate 96-square-meter greenhouses, with a sixth grown manually as a reference. Each team trained its own algorithm, although the teams had the ability to decide how closely to follow the solutions that their AI models came up with. The teams kept an eye on their crops with sensors and cameras, and could feed the algorithms new data and tweak them as needed. To win, teams had to maximize total yield and net profits while minimizing the use of resources.

The winner was a team called Sonoma, made up of Microsoft Research employees and students from Danish and Dutch universities. According to Silke Hemming, head of the scientific research team for greenhouse technology at WUR, Sonoma’s plan used more artificial light earlier and kept carbon dioxide levels higher than a typical gardener might. But other teams also discovered counterintuitive ways to increase yield, such as pruning smaller cucumbers close to harvest or letting bigger ones have a chance to grow a little more.

Like all problems in AI, growing cucumbers and other crops by algorithm demands a food source of its own: data—and lots of it. The cucumber contest was a start at putting information together that other researchers can build on with future projects.

“You have a dataset you would never have,” Hemming says. “You can learn so much from that.”

The researchers organizing the competition chose cucumbers because they are a fast-growing crop cultivated worldwide, and problems like blight show up in them immediately. But this project could transform how other indoor crops are grown. It’s a first step in finding ways to combine humans and AI technology to produce more food, more efficiently.

“It’s not all about winning.” Hemming says. “It’s also about learning.”

FARMWAVE Founder and CEO Craig Ganssle uses its smartphone app with an automated kernel count feature to assess corn yield. Photo credit: FARMWAVE

AI on the Farm

“Farming is a lot more complicated than other industries,” says Joshua Woodard, an agricultural business and finance professor at Cornell and founder of the farming data company Ag-Analytics. “It’s a really complex system of environment and management practices."

Ag-Analytics’s wants to bridge that gap with easy-to-use data analysis tools to help farmers plan and monitor their fields. Their farm management platform takes data from sensors in John Deere farm equipment and combines it with other datasets, like satellite imagery and weather forecasts, to develop predictions for individual farms.

Algorithms working from afar could make a huge impact for less tech-heavy farms, too. Farmers in the developing world are working with minimal data and stand to make leaps in productivity with algorithms in the cloud instead of expensive machinery in their fields. According to the United Nations, 20 to 40 percent of crop yields are lost each year due to pests and diseases. AI tools like Plant Village and FARMWAVE allow farmers to take photos with their phones of sickly plants, bugs, and weeds, and then have computer vision-powered algorithms diagnose the problem from afar in seconds. FARMWAVE is already working with farmers in countries across the world, who, despite their distance, are all dealing with similar problems that AI can spot.

"Army worm in corn looks the same in Africa versus the U.S.,” says Craig Ganssle, the founder and CEO of FARMWAVE.

In India, a team at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is working on providing real-time pest predictions to help Indian farmers take specific actions to protect their crops. ICRISAT uses cloud computing, machine learning, and data from IoT (short for the “Internet of Things”) sensors to come up with personalized predictions about pest risks.

View fullsize

Dr Avijit Tarafdar of ICRISAT converses with chickpea farmer Mr Srinivasa Boreddy in Adilabad District, Telangana. Photo credit: D Chobe, ICRISAT

“Whenever [farmers] see the pests in the field, they simply go for pesticides,” says Dr. Mamta Sharma, a principal scientist at ICRISAT. “It will help them reduce the amount of sprays that farmers are applying."

ISCRISAT has offices in Africa that could eventually use the tool, with interest coming from South America as well. As these offices collect more data, Sharma says, it could be used to spot new risks due to climate change.

“It helps us recognize emerging threats,” she says.

Robot Green Thumbs

Indoor farming currently occupies around 2.3 million square feet worldwide. But based on information from growers, the analysis firm Agrilyst predicts this number will balloon to 22 million square feet over the next five years. Despite the expense of setting up these spaces and the limited types of produce that can currently be profitably grown, much of AI research is being done in greenhouses and other indoor spaces because, with the reduction of arable land, these production methods will become more critical. Indoor farming can also produce up to 20 times as much fruit and vegetables per square foot as outdoor farming, while using up to 92 percent less water, according to one study, with one company claiming it needs 99 percent less water.

In San Carlos, California, two robots cruise within a hydroponic farm developed by the start-up Iron Ox. These robots, which plan, care for, and harvest produce, are overseen by a computer program affectionately nicknamed “the Brain.” Even before the advent of AI, hydroponic systems were known to use less water, need fewer pesticides, grow faster, and produce more plants in less space. However, hydroponics are notoriously labor-intensive, requiring plants to be moved to different vats throughout the growing phase. Training robots for this monotonous task could make razor-thin profit margins a little less tight.

“A lot of things that weren’t feasible outside of a lab five years ago are possible now,” says Brandon Alexander, the CEO of Iron OX.

In the end, improved agricultural processes lead to better food options. And making small indoor farms more efficient could open up the possibilities of food grown closer to city centers. Most produce travels an average of 2,000 miles from farm to shelf in the U.S., which forces farmers to plant fruits and vegetables that can handle being transported—not necessarily those that taste good.

“Fresh produce isn’t that fresh,” Alexander says.

After improving its robotic systems, Alexander says, Iron OX’s long-term plans include breeding plants using data currently being gathered on its farm. Algorithms crunching this data and other local information, like what sells best, could replace tasteless, homogenized tomatoes and lettuce with more varieties suited to different communities’ tastes.

“We could make delicious, extra healthy things that people want to eat,” Alexander says.

Does AI Hold the Key To A New And Improved “Green Revolution” In Agriculture?

Producing enough healthy food to feed the world—on a changing planet—is going to be a steep challenge. These researchers are giving farmers AI-driven techniques and tools to find solutions.

BY JACKIE SNOW | FEBRUARY 19, 2019 | NOVA NEXT

Automation in agriculture may soon make robots as common in greenhouses as they are on factory floors. Photo credit: Shutterstock

On a stretch of highway in the Netherlands not far outside of Amsterdam, a row of greenhouses at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) poke up like knuckles along the flat landscape. The Dutch university is known for its cutting-edge agricultural research, but some of these greenhouses recently ran an experiment that’s novel even for them: autonomous growing.

Stepping into a humid box from a brisk autumn day, you hear the noises of machines adjusting themselves mixing with the sounds of leaves rustling. The amount of light, water, fertilizers, and carbon dioxide—along with the temperature of the greenhouse—are all set by deep learning algorithms and executed by machines. Humans are still responsible for moving vines up the lattices as they grow, as well as pruning and harvesting.

But it’s pretty clear who—or rather, what—is calling the shots.

The Future of Farming?

By 2050, we’ll need to feed nine billion people with about a third less arable land than we had in the 1970s, experts estimate. Farmers will need all the help they can get, including insights gleaned from artificial intelligence, or AI. Developed carefully—and with the people who will be using it taken into account—AI can be part of the solution to feeding a growing world, according to the Refresh report, a document put together by researchers from Google, university professors, nonprofits, and farmers. And as an added bonus, some of the unsustainable practices developed over the past 70 years could be reversed with more efficient, AI-driven technology.

The Green Revolution was a set of advances that started in the 1950s in areas like high-yield crops, synthetic fertilizers, and irrigation technology that greatly increased food production, especially in developing countries—saving an estimated one billion people from starvation. But it left in its wake a culture of pesticides, reduced agricultural biodiversity, and overuse of chemical fertilizers that deplete the soil and poison waterways.

“It was never meant to be used in the long term,” says Danielle Nierenberg, the president of Food Tank, a non-profit working to build a better food system that also worked on the Refresh document. Farmers were supposed to transition back to organic, Nierenberg adds: It just never happened because increased yields generated by industrial-scale farming put pressure on smaller farms to follow suit.

One of the main ways AI could help agriculture transition out of practices forged in the Green Revolution and into a more sustainable future is with precision farming. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way for farmers to learn from historical or real-time data. But AI-powered programs can combine data on weather patterns, crop yields, market prices, and more to guide farmers to planting at the right time, adding the appropriate level of fertilizers, and harvesting at peak ripeness.

View fullsize

In a greenhouse at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands, cucumbers grow with the help of deep-learning algorithms and machines. Photo credit: Dr. Silke Hemming, WUR

WUR is one of the places where big data approaches to growing food are being tested. Last fall, five teams of AI researchers and biologists from around the world competed in growing cucumbers in separate 96-square-meter greenhouses, with a sixth grown manually as a reference. Each team trained its own algorithm, although the teams had the ability to decide how closely to follow the solutions that their AI models came up with. The teams kept an eye on their crops with sensors and cameras, and could feed the algorithms new data and tweak them as needed. To win, teams had to maximize total yield and net profits while minimizing the use of resources.

The winner was a team called Sonoma, made up of Microsoft Research employees and students from Danish and Dutch universities. According to Silke Hemming, head of the scientific research team for greenhouse technology at WUR, Sonoma’s plan used more artificial light earlier and kept carbon dioxide levels higher than a typical gardener might. But other teams also discovered counterintuitive ways to increase yield, such as pruning smaller cucumbers close to harvest or letting bigger ones have a chance to grow a little more.

Like all problems in AI, growing cucumbers and other crops by algorithm demands a food source of its own: data—and lots of it. The cucumber contest was a start at putting information together that other researchers can build on with future projects.

“You have a dataset you would never have,” Hemming says. “You can learn so much from that.”

The researchers organizing the competition chose cucumbers because they are a fast-growing crop cultivated worldwide, and problems like blight show up in them immediately. But this project could transform how other indoor crops are grown. It’s a first step in finding ways to combine humans and AI technology to produce more food, more efficiently.

“It’s not all about winning.” Hemming says. “It’s also about learning.”

View fullsize

FARMWAVE Founder and CEO Craig Ganssle uses its smartphone app with an automated kernel count feature to assess corn yield. Photo credit: FARMWAVE

AI on the Farm

“Farming is a lot more complicated than other industries,” says Joshua Woodard, an agricultural business and finance professor at Cornell and founder of the farming data company Ag-Analytics. “It’s a really complex system of environment and management practices."

Ag-Analytics’s wants to bridge that gap with easy-to-use data analysis tools to help farmers plan and monitor their fields. Their farm management platform takes data from sensors in John Deere farm equipment and combines it with other datasets, like satellite imagery and weather forecasts, to develop predictions for individual farms.

Algorithms working from afar could make a huge impact for less tech-heavy farms, too. Farmers in the developing world are working with minimal data and stand to make leaps in productivity with algorithms in the cloud instead of expensive machinery in their fields. According to the United Nations, 20 to 40 percent of crop yields are lost each year due to pests and diseases. AI tools like Plant Village and FARMWAVE allow farmers to take photos with their phones of sickly plants, bugs, and weeds, and then have computer vision-powered algorithms diagnose the problem from afar in seconds. FARMWAVE is already working with farmers in countries across the world, who, despite their distance, are all dealing with similar problems that AI can spot.

"Army worm in corn looks the same in Africa versus the U.S.,” says Craig Ganssle, the founder and CEO of FARMWAVE.

In India, a team at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is working on providing real-time pest predictionsto help Indian farmers take specific actions to protect their crops. ICRISAT uses cloud computing, machine learning, and data from IoT (short for the “Internet of Things”) sensors to come up with personalized predictions about pest risks.

View fullsize

Dr Avijit Tarafdar of ICRISAT converses with chickpea farmer Mr Srinivasa Boreddy in Adilabad District, Telangana. Photo credit: D Chobe, ICRISAT

“Whenever [farmers] see the pests in the field, they simply go for pesticides,” says Dr. Mamta Sharma, a principal scientist at ICRISAT. “It will help them reduce the amount of sprays that farmers are applying."

ISCRISAT has offices in Africa that could eventually use the tool, with interest coming from South America as well. As these offices collect more data, Sharma says, it could be used to spot new risks due to climate change.

“It helps us recognize emerging threats,” she says.

Robot Green Thumbs

Indoor farming currently occupies around 2.3 million square feet worldwide. But based on information from growers, the analysis firm Agrilyst predictsthis number will balloon to 22 million square feet over the next five years. Despite the expense of setting up these spaces and the limited types of produce that can currently be profitably grown, much of AI research is being done in greenhouses and other indoor spaces because, with the reduction of arable land, these production methods will become more critical. Indoor farming can also produce up to 20 times as much fruit and vegetables per square foot as outdoor farming, while using up to 92 percent less water, according to one study, with one company claiming it needs 99 percent less water.

In San Carlos, California, two robots cruise within a hydroponic farm developed by the start-up Iron Ox. These robots, which plan, care for, and harvest produce, are overseen by a computer program affectionately nicknamed “the Brain.” Even before the advent of AI, hydroponic systems were known to use less water, need fewer pesticides, grow faster, and produce more plants in less space. However, hydroponics are notoriously labor-intensive, requiring plants to be moved to different vats throughout the growing phase. Training robots for this monotonous task could make razor-thin profit margins a little less tight.

“A lot of things that weren’t feasible outside of a lab five years ago are possible now,” says Brandon Alexander, the CEO of Iron OX.

In the end, improved agricultural processes lead to better food options. And making small indoor farms more efficient could open up the possibilities of food grown closer to city centers. Most produce travels an average of 2,000 miles from farm to shelf in the U.S., which forces farmers to plant fruits and vegetables that can handle being transported—not necessarily those that taste good.

“Fresh produce isn’t that fresh,” Alexander says.

After improving its robotic systems, Alexander says, Iron OX’s long-term plans include breeding plants using data currently being gathered on its farm. Algorithms crunching this data and other local information, like what sells best, could replace tasteless, homogenized tomatoes and lettuce with more varieties suited to different communities’ tastes.

“We could make delicious, extra healthy things that people want to eat,” Alexander says.