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This ensures reliable yield and consistency in crop production year-round with climate control, and no effects of external environment factors such as diseases, pests, or predator attacks.
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Farming Goes Indoors
THE pandemic has shone a light on many of the gaps that exist in the country’s economy. And one of these is the need for better food security, an issue that resonated with Gerard Lim long before Covid-19
By JOY LEE
06 Feb 2021
Beyond profits: Lim, seen here briefing an investor, says the company is also looking at creating new high-valued jobs and generate income for local communities.
THE pandemic has shone a light on many of the gaps that exist in the country’s economy. And one of these is the need for better food security, an issue that resonated with Gerard Lim long before Covid-19.
Many years ago, he started noticing that most of the vegetables sold in local supermarkets and grocers were not necessarily the best of quality as top-grade vegetables grown here were mainly exported. That means locals were consuming lower grade vegetables.
Additionally, a lot of the vegetables that can be grown in Malaysia were, in fact, imported.
Lim wasn’t a farmer but he knew that technology could help boost quality production for local consumption and improve the local supply chain for vegetables.
“My exposure and experience with farming started about five years ago when I introduced smart farming solutions using sensors, the Internet of Things, and Big Data to various farmers. But I found that many farmers in Malaysia were smallholders who could not afford the technology.
“I knew that if I wanted to move the needle, I had to adopt the technology and build large commercial scale, industrial-grade farms to achieve better economies of scale.
“What was compelling to me was that I was not alone in wanting better quality food and vegetables. There was a ready and strong demand from friends and contacts who wanted the same good quality, clean and fresh vegetables, ” he points out.
Lim has vast experience with tech startups and had previously served in the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).
When he left the regulatory body last year, the time seemed right to embark on a venture that would focus on scaling up smart farming. And with the Covid-19 pandemic ongoing, it became even more evident that there was a need to grow food and vegetables closer to where they are consumed.
He founded Agroz Group Sdn Bhd, an agritech and indoor vertical farming company, to simplify the distribution supply chain of vegetables while reducing the long- and mid-haul transport of vegetables from far away farms. This is done by establishing indoor vertical farms to grow vegetables in local neighbourhoods instead.
Lim is targeting to build 100,000 sq ft of indoor vertical farms in Malaysia this year to make Agroz the largest indoor vertical farm operator in Malaysia.
While it should seem like a no-brainer to support a move into the agriculture industry at a time like this, Lim notes that it is not all straightforward. A lot of stakeholders do not understand that smart farming is different from traditional farms.
“Malaysia does not have policies to support the use of advanced technologies for smart farming, urban farming and indoor vertical farming. So, existing special grants, incentives and loans are provided for the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides for traditional farming but there are no grants, incentives and loans for the use of technology in smart farming, ” he says.
This makes it a challenge for the company to access ongoing assistance for the agriculture industry.
The lack of policy support and guidelines also make it difficult for them to get funding from financial institutions. Lim says most banks in Malaysia were not particularly supportive of indoor vertical farming as they do not understand these new modern, high-tech forms of farming.
Agroz is currently seeking to raise RM100mil through the issuance of redeemable convertible preference shares to fund its expansion.
Lim says the company has drawn interest from several investors, both local and foreign, and they are in the midst of evaluating some of these offers. He is, however, open to any other interest.
To sweeten the deal for potential investors, Lim is looking at exit plans in five years’ time, either through an initial public offering or via a trade sale to a special purpose acquisition company.
At the moment, Agroz has a small farm in Seri Kembangan, Selangor. It is in the midst of building a 3,000 sq ft farm in Sg Buloh and upgrading a commercial-scale indoor vertical farm in Shah Alam to 90,000 sq ft.
Lim believes Agroz’s indoor vertical farms will complement traditional farming.
“Customers who demand for higher quality will prefer to buy their vegetables from sources like Agroz, which delivers clean, fresh and quality vegetables from farms that you can see and are located within your neighbourhood.
“At the same time, we need to recognise that the market is huge with Malaysia importing over RM5bil worth of vegetables in 2019 alone. And this number is increasing.
“So it will take an entire industry of indoor vertical farmers to grow clean and fresh vegetables in farms within the city before we even make a dent in the traditional agriculture space. Taking even a 10% share, which is only RM500mil, of the multi-billion ringgit market would take some time, ” he says.
However, its efforts, and perhaps that of many other budding agritech companies that have popped up in recent times, are moving in the right direction.
Lim points out that Malaysia ranks 28th on the 2019 Global Food Security (GFS) Index, according to the Economist Group. Singapore, on the other hand, which hardly produces its own food, has topped the index two years in a row, in 2018 and 2019.
A myriad of advanced technologies to ensure that the methods and approach of growing food is repeatable, scalable and traceable to feed a growing population is key to achieving better sufficiency to meet domestic demands.
“We also aim to create hundreds of new high-valued jobs and generate income in our local communities heading into this post-Covid-19 era, ” Lim says.
In some countries, green jobs have been mulled over as a potential area to generate jobs to help with economic recovery. This could also be a space that policymakers could explore further.
Currently, Agroz’s produce is sold directly to consumers through a subscription programme and also supplied to neighbourhood grocers, eateries, restaurants and the hospitality industry.
The company is already growing 200kg of produce per month and will soon have the capacity to grow 1 tonne per day from the various farms already committed.
Once its 100,000 sq ft of indoor vertical farms is achieved, it is expected to produce 3 tonnes of vegetables every day.
Agroz has a current order book of RM5mil to license its technology including supply of its indoor vertical farm systems to warehouses and land asset owners as well as through supply of vegetable products to consumers and businesses. Lim says its got more orders in the pipeline.
TAGS / KEYWORDS:SME , Startup , Indoor Farming , Agroz ,
TOPIC: Corporate News SME
Warehouse Becoming Vertical Farms — And They’re Feeding New Jersey
New Jersey's vertical farms are transforming agriculture by helping farmers meet growing food demand. New Jersey Agriculture Secretary Doug Fisher said that while conventional farming in outdoor fields remains critical, vertical farming has its advantages because of its efficiency and resistance to pests and thus less need for chemicals
Image from: New Jersey 101.5
New Jersey's vertical farms are transforming agriculture by helping farmers meet growing food demand.
New Jersey Agriculture Secretary Doug Fisher said that while conventional farming in outdoor fields remains critical, vertical farming has its advantages because of its efficiency and resistance to pests and thus less need for chemicals.
Vertical farming is the process of growing food vertically in stacked layers indoors under artificial light and temperature, mainly in buildings. These plants receive the same nutrients and all the elements needed to grow plants for food.
Vertical farms are also versatile. Plants may be growing in containers, in old warehouses, in shipping containers, in abandoned buildings.
"That's one of the great advantages — that we can put agriculture in the midst of many landscapes that have lost their vitality," said Fisher.
ResearchandMarkets.com says the U.S. vertical farming market is projected to reach values of around $3 billion by the year 2024.
The one drawback is that its operational and labor costs make it expensive to get up and running.
Image from: AeroFarms
In the past decade, however, vertical farming has become more popular, creating significant crop yields all over the state.
AeroFarms in Newark is the world's largest indoor vertical farm. The farm converted a 75-year-old 70,000-square-foot steel mill into a vertical farming operation. AeroFarms' key products include Dream Greens, its retail brand of baby and micro-greens, available year-round in several ShopRite supermarkets.
Kula Urban Farm in Asbury Park opened in 2014. Vacant lots are transformed into urban farms and there's a hydroponic greenhouse on site. That produce is sold to local restaurants.
Beyond Organic Growers in Freehold uses no pesticides and all seeds and nutrients are organic. There's a minimum of 12,000 plants growing on 144 vertical towers. On its website, it says the greenhouse utilizes a new growing technique called aeroponics, which involves vertical towers where the plant roots hang in the air while a nutrient solution is delivered with a fine mist. It also boasts that by using this method, plants can grow with less land and water while yielding up to 30% more three times faster than traditional soil farming.
Vertical farms in New Jersey help feed local communities. Many are in urban areas and are a form of urban farming.
Fisher predicts that vertical farms will be operational in stores and supermarkets around the state.
"It's continued to expand. There's going to be many, many ways and almost any area in the state has the opportunity to have a vertical farm," Fisher said.
Student Farmers Get A Chance To Learn How Their Garden Grows
On April 19, Meier and Mital will present “The Grow Pod Lab: A UO Indoor Agriculture Experiment” at the food studies Food Talks series. UO and community members are invited to tour the pod and learn more about potential research, curriculum and community engagement opportunities associated with the Grow Pod
April 8, 2019
On the outside, it may look like an ordinary industrial shipping container, but on the inside it’s nothing short of extraordinary.
Step into the temperature-controlled environment — a virtual oasis of calm bathed in purple lights that emanate from dozens of overhead, state-of-the art LED lights — and breathe in the rich aroma of soil and take in the rows upon rows of grow trays teeming with verdant green plants and herbs.
First-year students in Bean Hall’s Community for Environmental Leaders academic residential community — many of whom have never grown plants from seeds before — have spent the last few months getting their hands dirty and raising their first crops of indoor tomatoes.
“The students just light up when they come into the pod,” said Briana Meir, a doctoral student in the environmental sciences, studies and policy program and graduate employee in the Office of Sustainability. “It smells like dirt and plants and soil, and it’s funny because it’s a shipping container: It’s gray, it’s metal, it’s sort of ugly on the outside and you walk inside and there’s all this light. They find it a relaxing place. They have formed friendships.”
Designed to promote ongoing research, learning and innovation for sustainable urban food production, the idea for bringing indoor agriculture to the UO campus came with the generous donation of a shipping container by Imagination International Inc. Additional help came from a $10,000 applied environmental science seed grant awarded to the food studies program and the UO Office of Sustainability to support the start-up.
“These young environmental leaders in their first year at the UO are helping to grow food,” said Steve Mital, UO’s sustainability director. “Access to and knowledge about food production are an important part of a sustainability-focused education, and we’re hopeful that some of them will really explore these issues more deeply while they are undergraduate students here at the university.”
As the first group of academic residential community students to tend to and nurture a crop of tomatoes in the Grow Pod, emulating inside a 20-foot-long metal box what naturally occurs outside comes with its own set of challenges. That includes everything from determining the correct amount and strength of light the plants get, how much water they get and the precise consistency of soil and nutrients to figuring out how the plants can pollinate if there is no wind or bees to carry the pollen from plant to plant.
When a student posed the pollination question, it led to an ingenious solution: electric toothbrushes. Applied gently to the plant’s blooms, the vibration releases the pollen into the enclosed environment allowing pollination to occur.
Meir said the learn-as-you go approach has evolved since they started last fall, and recently they brought in a master gardener to help.
“It’s been a collective effort to figure out things as we go along, but the students are doing a pretty good job of taking ownership over it,” she said.
Courtney Kaltenbach, a music major, and Sydney Gastman, who is majoring in landscape architecture, got involved in the Grow Pod project through the Environmental Leaders academic community and agree the experience has been amazing.
“The greatest satisfaction was seeing something grow and being a part of that and working with a team of people with the same goals,” Kaltenbach said.
“Understanding how plants grow and getting involved with the science of it all has been such a great learning experience,” Gastman said. “I may not have the opportunity to take biology classes, so it’s been a really good way to get my science fix.”
Look for students from the program selling a variety of plant starts at a table outside the Erb Memorial Union during Earth week, April 22-24.
The Office of Sustainability is also exploring a number of additional academic and co-curricular opportunities. They include computer science classes using data generated from the lab to study machine learning, and UO business classes identifying income-generating opportunities for crops raised in the pod.
The indoor, controlled-environment agriculture industry has grown dramatically in the past several years. Shipping containers outfitted for growing vegetables are being used by farm-to-table restaurants, to support experiential education programs and for niche social enterprises that increase local food production in areas where land-based farming is limited.
Mital said shipping containers might support urban homesteading or post-disaster recovery efforts in the future. “We’re hoping our faculty and local entrepreneurs help us explore the possibilities,” he said.
On April 19, Meier and Mital will present “The Grow Pod Lab: A UO Indoor Agriculture Experiment” at the food studies Food Talks series. UO and community members are invited to tour the pod and learn more about potential research, curriculum and community engagement opportunities associated with the Grow Pod.
—By Sharleen Nelson, University Communications
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A Glimpse Inside A Chinese Indoor Farm
Vertical farming is big, and one of the biggest countries in the world, China, is no stranger to this movement. ECNS offers us a glimpse inside one of the country's indoor farms
Vertical farming is big, and one of the biggest countries in the world, China, is no stranger to this movement. ECNS offers us a glimpse inside one of the country's indoor farms.
Here, vegetables grow in a plant farm belonging to the Institute of Advanced Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui Province. The farm, housed inside a closed container, uses artificial lighting to help the vegetables grow well.
Dr. Zhang Fangxin, the general manager of Anhui Angkefeng Photoelectric Technology, said the system allows plants to grow well even when placed in an underground space.
Publication date : 3/13/2019
Gordon Food Service And Square Roots Reveal Location of First Urban Farm
March. 27, 2019
BROOKLYN, NY and WYOMING, MI - Early this month, Gordon Food Service made headlines when the foodservice provider unveiled a new partnership with Square Roots and new plans to erect indoor farming campuses throughout North America. And this week the two partners announced the first location to serve locally-grown produce to Gordon Food Service’s network of foodservice partners—along with additional details about the site. The two companies will build their pilot in Gordon Food Service’s hometown of Wyoming, Michigan.
Rich Wolowski, North American President and CEO, Gordon Food Service“
This partnership brings together technology, agriculture, young farmers, and scalability, in a model that could revolutionize our food systems,” said Rich Wolowski, North American President and CEO of Gordon Food Service. “And it’s wonderful to be starting in our own backyard.”
According to a press release issued by the two companies, the partnership’s local, fresh produce offerings will be non-GMO, pesticide-free, and meet Gordon Food Service’s high quality and safety standards. Product will be available for purchase by both commercial chefs and consumers at Gordon Food Service’s area retail stores.
Construction and installation of the first container farm campus is expected to be completed by the fall of 2019, with growing operations beginning immediately thereafter.
Gordon Food Service made headlines when the foodservice provider unveiled a new partnership with Square Roots and new plans to erect indoor farming campuses throughout North America
Plans for the new campus include ten specially designed Square Roots shipping containers in direct production, with four additional containers providing operational support. Containers will occupy less than two acres of the Gordon Food Service HQ’s fifty-acre site, yet are projected to produce more than 50,000 lbs of herbs annually.
Tobias Peggs, Co-Founder and CEO, Square Roots“This partnership means we will grow delicious, local, real food at huge scale,” said Tobias Peggs, Co-Founder and CEO of Square Roots. “We’re so happy to be working with a mission-aligned partner in Gordon Food Service—leveraging technology to bring real food to a huge number of people across the country, while delivering real social impact by empowering thousands of young people to become our country’s future farmers.”
The two companies also noted that Square Roots is expected to recruit and hire a class of new farmers to participate in its unique, year-long Next-Gen Farmer Training Program at the new Wyoming, Michigan farm campus. The recruitment process will start in early summer, and the program will begin in the fall. Interested applicants can find out more about the program on the Square Roots website and sign up for early access to applications here.
Jack Poll, Mayor, City of Wyoming, Michigan“
Our community is proud to be home to an international business leader like Gordon Food Service and to support new, game-changing innovations in fresh, local food production and distribution,” Jack Poll, Mayor of the City of Wyoming, Michigan, noted.
The new campus is expected to function as a template for future farms, and the partnership plans to develop additional farms at or near Gordon Food Service’s U.S. and Canadian distribution centers.
Will Gordon Food Service’s pilot have transformative effects on the supply chain? AndNowUKnow will continue to report as the program expands.
Gordon Food Service Square Roots
Gordon Food Service Urban Farming Protected Agriculture Michigan Expansion Rich Wolowski Tobias Peggs Jack Poll
COMPANIES IN THIS STORY
Gordon Food Service
Gordon Food Service is the largest privately-held, family-managed broadline foodservice distributor in North America-and...
In-Store Mini Farms Could Change How We Eat
BY MEGAN CERULLO
FEBRUARY 20, 2019
Andrew Carter and Adam DeMartino want to revolutionize the way we eat by installing compact farms in restaurants and grocery stores across the country. Their goal is to distribute fresh produce on-site and at scale.
Cognizant of the physical limitations of traditional farming, the former college roommates married their backgrounds in indoor agriculture and business to find a way to make farming infinitely scalable, accessible and affordable. The answer? Smallhold, New York City's first and only remotely operated mushroom farm.
Founded in 2017, Smallhold places proprietary mini-farms in restaurants and grocery stores, allowing subscribers to grow fresh produce in their aisles or kitchens and deliver it directly to customers.
No farming knowledge is required -- the company operates the units using remote technology.