Farm Tech Investing Is Accelerating Faster Than Ever – New Report

By Jessica Pothering & Louisa Burwood-Taylor

August 4, 2021

We’ve been watching the surge of investor interest in upstream, close-to-the-farm technologies since the Covid-19 pandemic started. We now have numbers that show just how significant that farm tech investor interest is.

‘Farm tech’ investing soared to $7.9 billion in 2020, topping 2019 investments by $2.3 trillion, or 41%, according to AgFunder’s latest Farm Tech Investment Report. [Disclosure: AgFunder is AFN‘s parent company.]

To put this in perspective, farm tech’s acceleration was about six percentage points greater than agrifoodtech overall — that’s foodtech and farm tech combined — and 37 percentage points higher than global VC’s year-over-year increase in 2020 (which Crunchbase pegged at just 4%.)

Much of the investment activity was led by two sectors: Ag Biotechnology and Novel Farming Systems (mostly the indoor farming of crops and insects). Investors pumped more than $1.5 billion into each category. Ag Biotech companies attracted particular interest from investors: 173 deals closed, representing 58% growth from 2019. Novel Farming Systems deal activity grew by 47% year-over-year.

As difficult as 2020 was globally (2021 hasn’t been pretty in many parts of the world), the pandemic seems to have buoyed farm tech because it “exposed cracks in the industrial agricultural system,” particularly the vulnerability of the food supply chain, Infarm’s CEO Erez Galonza told AFN in an interview featured in the report. The German hyper-local vertical farming venture, whose modular units can be found in grocery stores across Europe, secured $170 million from investors last year.

“[The pandemic] highlighted the need for resilient, localized solutions,” he added.

Farm tech funding 2012-2020

Yellow bar denotes projected total by end of 2021 as more 2020 data come to light. Credit: AgFunder

SPACs for best-funded farm tech categories

Perhaps the biggest winner, in that sense, was US-based high-tech greenhouse operator, AppHarvest. The company announced plans to go public last September via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It officially listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in January, just weeks after shipping its first harvest.

AppHarvest recently purchased robotics leader and AgFunder portfolio company Root AI, making founder Josh Lessing the publicly listed company’s new CTO. Read more here.

AppHarvest kicked off a SPAC trend for Farm Tech companies, and Novel Farming ventures specifically. We’ve since seen four other agrifoodtech companies announce plans to go public through SPACs: agbiotech companies Benson Hill and Gingko Bioworks and novel farming ventures AeroFarms and Local Bounti. (Keep up to date with agrifoodtech SPAC news here.)

It is interesting to see public listing activity happening in the two agrifoodtech sectors that surged the most in terms of deal activity last year; it signals that there could be more to come if the process proves successful for these early case studies. For now, it’s certainly providing an exit opportunity to early agtech ventures that bet on deep technologies requiring significant amounts of time (and certainly hefty commitments of resources) to become revenue-generating, much less profitable.

That in and of itself is a significant milestone for a maturing agtech industry.

Pandemic pivots

It isn’t all about Ag Biotech and Novel Farming Systems; the biggest deals of 2020 were in the Agribusiness Marketplace sector. Boston-based Indigo Ag raised two investment rounds, totaling $535 million last year, and San Carlos, Calif.-based Farmers Business Network raised $250 million.

Indigo Ag’s executive team told AFN that because it deals directly with the food supply chain, the company confronted an immediate shock from the pandemic.

“The global pandemic was an external challenge that required our team, like many others, to quickly adapt to ensure that our customers and employees were supported,” they said in a special interview featured in the report. “While we were fortunate that our operations were not significantly impeded by the pandemic, we did have to quickly expand our support services and tap our creativity to enable our farmers, buyers and partners to manage their business with confidence during the early stages of Covid-19.”

The company launched a transport support hotline for grain growers, carriers and shippers to ensure the supply of grain could continue to move as efficiently as possible. It also focused on developing pricing tools, access to grain marketing advisors, and even a podcast to help growers grapple with pandemic-related market volatility.

Indigo Ag isn’t a stranger to unchartered business terrain. The company has put itself in the middle of the evolving but murky carbon markets. “With new players entering the carbon space nearly weekly – many taking less rigorous approaches to verification and measurement – Indigo has remained steadily focused on enabling farmers to make informed decisions about how, when and why to participate in the carbon market,” the Indigo Ag team told AFN.

They added: “By leveraging our scientific insight, technological capabilities, and use of industry-leading carbon accounting protocols, Indigo ensures farmers are supported with the right tools and information to take advantage of the opportunity to raise a new and increasingly valuable crop: carbon.”

Food’s sustainable future

Verification of carbon-capture accounting is indeed getting increased attention and scrutiny. It’s likely to be a key theme in the agriculture industry going forward, and it’s one of AgFunder’s key trends to watch in 2021, alongside overall food system sustainability.

“We can invent a new, sustainable food industry, feeding the planet all the while protecting its biodiversity, and combatting climate change,” the executive team behind French insect farming venture Ynsect told AFN. The company sees insects as a crucial component of food’s sustainable future.

“Insects can aid food security and be a part of the solution to food shortages, given their high nutritional value, low requirements for land and water, low emissions of greenhouse gases, and the high efficiency at which they can convert feed into food,” the Ynsect team argued in an interview featured in the report.

Investors seem to agree: Ynsect scored the largest amount of funding in the novel farming sector in 2020, raising $222 million in 2020, taking its Series C total to $372 million, to build an industrial-sized farm for its Molitor mealworms near the city of Amiens. Ynsect went on to acquire Dutch insect farming company Protifarm in April of this year.

Many of the world’s consumers may as yet be skeptical of insects as a protein source. But consumer consciousness and demand for high-quality, low-environmental impact foods is certainly a trend influencing the evolution of Farm Tech, as evidenced by the range of startups that attracted funding in 2020.

Ag Biotech ventures like Benson Hill, GreenLight Biosciences, and Pivot Bio secured investor backing for helping to diversify crop input technology away from environmentally-harmful synthetic chemicals.

Novel Farming ventures are developing highly efficient and resource-conservative approaches to growing fresh foods.

Farm Management Software, Sensing & IoT companies like ICEYE, Aclima and Cervest are illuminating climate change impacts and helping companies anticipate and forecast climate-related disruptions.

Food preservation technologies like Apeel Sciences’s are helping reduce food waste, as are e-grocery services like Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods, which sell “ugly produce” that would otherwise be wasted among their fresh foods and grocery offerings.

Companies like Celtic Renewables are turning farm waste into a resource through the production of biofuels.

“As companies increasingly make commitments to improve their environmental impact – and governments at all levels enact policies to encourage climate-smart agriculture,” said the Indigo Ag team, “the opportunity for agriculture to act as a climate solution will only become more apparent.”

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.

A Greenhouse In A Box For Small Farmers

Lush growth inside a low-cost Kheyti greenhouse in Telangana.

With one-tenth of the water and pesticides required and a manifold increase in yield, greenhouses can be transformative. The catch is that their upfront investment cost puts them beyond the reach of those who need them the most—small farmers dependent on rain or borewells. But what if a minimalistic greenhouse is designed from the outset, keeping in mind the needs and limitations of small farmers?

Hyderabad-based Kheyti has partnered with manufacturing and design companies to introduce such a concept. Its modular greenhouse kit, including a drip irrigation system, occupies just a tenth of an acre and costs less than ₹1 lakh. That’s much smaller and cheaper than normal greenhouses which only large farmers can afford. Around 500 farmers in Telangana are the early adopters of this “greenhouse in a box", which comes along with inputs like the appropriate seeds and fertilizers.

It began on a 1.8-acre farm in Narayanpur village, 60km north of Hyderabad, in 2017, recalls Kaushik K., co-founder, and CEO of Kheyti. “Venkatesh and his wife Lakshmi were growing rice along with some vegetables on the side. They worked hard, but their annual income of ₹30,000 barely sufficed for a family of five. The biggest challenge for them was that they could not fully utilize even their 1.8 acres of land because their borewells would run dry in the summer months," says Kaushik.

Model farm

Kheyti had set up an R&D farm on the outskirts of Hyderabad to demonstrate its greenhouse to small farmers. Venkatesh was among the first to visit the farm. “We showed him he could grow high-quality vegetables with so much more yields. But he had only one question: How much water would it need? When we explained that for the greenhouse he would run his borewell pump for only five minutes compared to an hour’s running time for his open field, he was ready to sign up," says Kaushik.

There was a hitch. The ₹5 lakh cost of the greenhouse was relatively low but still too much to raise for the likes of Venkatesh. So, why not make it even smaller and more affordable? It’s from such interactions that Kheyti’s greenhouse designs evolved.

“Venkatesh was the first one and after getting his greenhouse, he continued to give us feedback on what we should do for the next version," recounts Kaushik.

Today, Kheyti offers a 400 sq. m greenhouse for ₹80,000, with insect netting, shade netting, and polyethylene sheets to protect crops from pests, heat and excessive rain. That compares favourably with the ₹25 lakh that a one-acre (4,047 sq. m) greenhouse of this type would cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

An Infarm kiosk in the Edeka Supermarket E Center in Berlin

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infarm kiosks inside the Beba restaurant in the Gropius Bau museum

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit Ériver Hijano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget Politics, Danny Ayalon Wants to Effect Change on The Ground

Having transitioned from politics to agriculture, Danny Ayalon shares how vertical farming, which provides fresh fruits and vegetables all year round, and lab-grown meat can rehabilitate the environment and dramatically reduce household expenditures.

Image from: Yehoshua Yosef

The coronavirus pandemic has drawn attention to humankind's carbon footprint. More than ever before we ask ourselves, how can we become more sustainable? Can we prevent pollution? How can we minimize waste? What about lowering emission levels? Will there be enough food for everyone in the future?

Danny Ayalon, a former ambassador and foreign policy adviser to three prime ministers-turned entrepreneur,  believes that the answer to many of the world's problems lies in modern agriculture. 

Having transitioned from politics to agriculture, he works with Future Crops, an Amsterdam-based company focused on vertical farming – the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers that often incorporates controlled-environment agriculture, which aims to optimize plant growth – and MeaTech, a company that creates lab-grown meat.

"Ever since the coronavirus came into our lives, we realized that man is not in charge of the universe," Ayalon told Israel Hayom. 

"Our control over the forces of nature, of Earth, of our future is more limited than we had thought. And when we are no longer in charge of the world, only three things guarantee our lives here: food, water, and energy security. Food, water, and energy are three resources that can be depleted and therefore literally cast a cloud on our world. 

"Experts have come to a conclusion that one of the most important fields to focus on is agriculture, and indeed we are currently witnessing the most significant agricultural revolution ever since the first agricultural revolution that took place about 10,00 years ago."

Q: Back then, in the first agricultural revolution, there was a need for a lot of land. 

"But today we have technology. The name of the game is to reach maximum output with minimum input in the smallest space possible. This is the holy grail of the new revolution. And that is how technology enters the picture. To grow fruits, vegetables and spices today requires lots of space. The technology we developed at Future Crops allows us to minimize the space, increase production and redefine the food supply chain."

Q: How exactly? 

"We have a nine-story hangar in Amsterdam to grow crops like coriander, basil, dill, and parsley. It has LED lights, and each plant gets exactly the amount of light it needs. We are the plant psychologists, [we] listen to all its needs and do everything to make sure the plant grows in the most optimal way. 

Image from: Future Crops

"If it lacks something, it immediately receives water. Everything is done without a human's touch. We use algorithms and big data in collaboration with world-class researchers from the Weizmann Institute. It is essentially the application of vertical farming, growing various crops in vertically stacked layers,  in enclosed structures, on soil platforms. 

"For example, if it takes a month to grow lettuce in an open field, in a vertical farm, it takes two weeks, half that time. There's also a significant reduction in water consumption, and no pesticides or sprays are used at all. Also, the produce is available in all seasons; it does not depend on the temperature. Whoever likes mangos and strawberries, for example, will be able to enjoy them all year round."

Q: So if produce is grown faster and within a smaller space, is it going to cost less?

"The prices might be a bit higher today because this technology and the various infrastructures require an economic return of the initial investment in them. With time, the process will become more efficient, and the investments will be repaid, so in the end, the prices that the consumer will need to pay will be lower than today. 

"Let me give you a simple example. Do you know how much a kilogram [2.2 pounds] of basil costs in Europe today? €90 ($108). In Israel, the price is €20 ($24). In the [United Arab] Emirates, where almost everything connected to food is imported – the prices go accordingly as well. Once you have more innovative vertical farms, consumers will pay much less."

Q: Should we expect vertical farm skyscrapers to pop up all over? 

"I'm not sure that we will need skyscrapers, as with time the facilities will become smaller. Imagine that in every supermarket there will be a vertical produce stand with all the vegetables and spices, and later also fruits which you pick on the spot, without the need to move the produce from place to place. That is why vertical farming is also called urban farming, meaning there is no need for fields; you can grow [produce] on the rooftop. No resource limits you."

Q: What about the taste? 

"Ours is a fresher and tastier product. I ought to give credit to the Weizmann Institute here. The challenge for them wasn't the quality of the vitamins but the taste, and they managed to achieve a great taste. In the Netherlands, Future Crops already sells parsley, and it tastes outstanding."

Q: Regular parsley lasts for about two weeks in the fridge. What about Future Crops parsley? 

"Our parsley has a two-month shelf life, and it does not oxidize within a week or two."

Q: If every country will be self-reliant in terms of agriculture, do you think it will affect relations between countries? 

"Economies will become self-sufficient eventually, which will ensure security with far fewer conflicts. There is less and less water in the Middle East, which might someday lead to tensions. We hope technology will reduce the tensions between countries, and territory will be less critical. Our world faces crucial challenges. Food and water security have the potential to either divide or bring us together and ensure our long-term existence. 

"By the way, in every developed Western country, like the United States, Australia, and also in Europe, issues of food security, climate, and greenhouse emissions are on the top of the political agenda. We are not talking about it [in Israel,] as security and foreign affairs take the central stage, but Israel does have a lot to offer here."

Q: Do we have the potential to become the Silicon Valley of advanced agriculture? 

"Israel takes tremendous pride in its actions that help save the world. Will we become the Silicon Valley of agriculture? There is no doubt about it. We can already see foreign investors who come here to look for opportunities, including my business partner Lior Maimon, co-founder and CEO of Silver Road Capital, and Steven Levin, one of the leaders of the US food industry. Silver Road Capital is a holdings and financial advisory firm with a broad portfolio of high-tech companies, as well as agricultural and food technologies, and represents international companies and funds in investments in Israel and the world. 

"Future Crops's goal is to raise 35 million shekels on the Israeli stock exchange to invest in enlarging the existing facilities and [set up] other production lines and facilities in Europe and other continents. We cooperate with the Albert Heijn supermarket chain [in the Netherlands] and a leading food chain in France."

Q: Vertical farming is estimated at $3 billion. Google and Amazon have invested hundreds of millions in the field as well. What is their goal? 

"A simple answer would be profit. A longer answer is that they [large corporations] understand that food has the highest demand. People cannot live without food and water, and Google and Amazon understand that potential."

Q: US President Joe Biden took office with the largest team of climate experts ever. That ought to give the field momentum. 

"Green energy and vertical farming will get a considerable boost. Climate change and green energy are well-rooted in the Democratic Party's ideology. 

"It is also possible that large companies entered the agriculture fields precisely because of the Biden administration; they are worried about their future. They are afraid of a certain dismantling, so focusing on secondary fields is part of a security scenario for them."

Q: Biden also wants to address greenhouse emissions, which are the result of the food production industry, mainly meat. Are Amazon and Google's food counterparts - McDonald's and Burger King - looking for meat substitutes?

"Firstly, cultured [lab-grown] meat does not require grazing land, cows do not need to be fed, and so much land can instead be turned into forests that support the environment. This is an optimistic industry that leaves us with a better world. 

"As for the meat alternatives market, there are two major companies in the US that produce plant-based protein, Beyond Meat, and Impossible Foods. 

"Impossible's burgers are already at Burger King, McDonald's has partnered up with Beyond Meat, and last November, it announced that it would create its own plant-based burger. 

"The problem is that pea protein [used in plant-based burgers,] does not have all the amino acids that animal protein contains. Also, they need to add additives to supplement for taste and smell.

"At MeaTech, where I'm a director, we are on our way to producing animal meat, cultured meat, real stakes: we take a cow's own stem cell from which meat can be produced in almost unlimited quantities. We also use 3D digital printing technology. And we also created a thin layer of meat, carpaccio. Needless to say, no cow was harmed in the process."

Image from: MeaTech

Q: Why do you use 3D printers? 

"Because there is no need for a human being's involvement. It is relevant now during the coronavirus pandemic when the food supply chain is disrupted. With such printers, your production can continue without delays, whenever you want. 

Also, it is theoretically possible to provide food for space flights. Astronauts who go out into space will not have to take food with them; rather, they will be able to produce it on the spot.

"People understand that crises like the coronavirus can disrupt the supply chain and are looking for alternatives. A 3D printer allows restaurants, supermarkets, and butcher shops to have meat without relying on the supply chain."

Q: The death rate from obesity is higher than the death rate from hunger. How will cultured meat affect these statistics? 

"It is possible to create meat with much less fat and more protein in each portion and add various nutrients in the future to strengthen the immune system and prevent disease. This, of course, requires a lot of research and approvals. Just like there's talk about customized medicine, so it will be possible to produce food that suits a person's genetic structure and body in the most optimal way."

Q: Will the cost of this meat also be optimal? 

"They will cost more in the beginning compared to regular meat because there are initial costs that have to be repaid. When it becomes a mass production, prices will drop over time."

Q: With your vast experience in politics, what do you think of Israeli politics these days? Do you ever consider a political comeback? 

"No election campaign goes by without someone making me an offer [to return to politics] but I'm not interested. Unfortunately, the Israeli government, and all governments in the Western world, have not been able to run their countries properly in recent years.

"For example, more of the government's national taks are transitioning to the private market or the third sector. We see that associations [are the ones] who take care of the needy, establish settlements in the Negev and in the Galilee, bring immigrants to Israel and provide Israelis with information. All these things should be done by the government.

"The Israeli government lacks vision, ideologies, every matter is personal and is charged with negative sentiments. If I do return one day, it will only happen after we change the government system which will take its power from small [political] parties.

"In my opinion, we need to transition to a regional choice, by district. This will result in higher quality politicians. How so? Because whoever wants to be elected will need to run and convince the people who live in his area and district, and they are the ones who know his activities best. Also, closed primaries should be avoided because they make all kinds of deals possible. That needs to change."

Vertical Farming: Ugandan Company Develops Solution for Urban Agriculture

We speak to Lilian Nakigozi, founder of Women Smiles Uganda, a company that manufactures and sells vertical farms used to grow crops in areas where there is limited space.

Image from: How We Made It in Africa

1. How Did You Come Up with the Idea to Start Women Smiles Uganda?

Women Smiles Uganda is a social enterprise formed out of passion and personal experience. I grew up with a single mother and eight siblings in Katanga, one of the biggest slums in Kampala, Uganda. I experienced hunger and poverty where we lived. There was no land for us to grow crops and we didn’t have money to buy food. Life was hard; we would often go to sleep on empty stomachs and our baby sister starved to death.

Growing up like that, I pledged to use my knowledge and skills to come up with an idea that could solve hunger and, at the same time, improve people’s livelihoods, particularly women and young girls living in the urban slums. In 2017, while studying business at Makerere University, I had the idea of developing a vertical farm. This came amid so many challenges: a lack of finance and moral support. I would use the money provided to me for lunch as a government student to save for the initial capital of my venture.

I managed to accumulate $300 and used this to buy materials to manufacture the first 20 vertical farms. I gave these to 20 families and, in 2018, we fully started operations in different urban slums.

2. Tell Us About Your Vertical Farms and How They Work.

Women Smiles vertical farms are made out of wood and recycled plastic materials. Each unit is capable of growing up to 200 plants. The product also has an internal bearing system which turns 360° to guarantee optimal use of the sunlight and is fitted with an inbuilt drip irrigation system and greenhouse material to address any agro-climatic challenges.

The farms can be positioned on a rooftop, veranda, walkway, office building or a desk. This allows the growth of crops throughout the year, season after season, unaffected by climatic changes like drought.

In addition, we train our customers on how to make compost manure using vermicomposting and also provide them with a market for their fresh produce.

Image from: How We Made It in Africa

3. Explain Your Revenue Model.

Women Smiles Uganda generates revenue by selling affordable, reliable and modern vertical farms at $35, making a profit margin of $10 on each unit. The women groups are recruited into our training schemes and we teach them how to use vertical farming to grow crops and make compost manure by vermicomposting. Women groups become our outgrowers of fruits and vegetables. We buy the fresh produce from our outgrowers and resell to restaurants, schools and hotels.

We also make money through partnering with NGOs and other small private organisations to provide training in urban farming concepts to the beneficiaries of their projects.

4. What Are Some of the Major Challenges of Running This Business?

The major challenge we face is limited funds by the smallholder farmers to purchase the vertical farms. However, we mitigate this by putting some of them into our outgrower scheme which helps them to generate income from the fresh produce we buy. We have also linked some of them to financial institutions to access finance.

5. How Do You Generate Sales?

We reach our customers directly via our marketing team which moves door to door, identifying organised women groups and educating them about the benefits of vertical farming for improved food security. Most of our customers are low-income earners and very few of them have access to the internet.

However, we do also make use of social media platforms like Facebook to reach out to our customers, especially the youth.

In addition, we organise talk shows and community gatherings with the assistance of local leaders with whom we work hand in hand to provide educational and inspirational materials to people, teaching them about smart agriculture techniques.

6. Who Are Your Main Competitors?

Just like any business, we have got competitors; our major competitors include Camp Green and Spark Agro-Initiatives.

Image from: The Conversation

7. What Mistakes Have You Made in Business and What Did You Learn From Them?

As a victim of hunger and poverty, my dream was for every family in slums to have a vertical farm. I ended up giving some vertical farms on credit. Unfortunately, most of them failed to pay and we ended up with huge losses.

This taught me to shift the risk of payment default to a third party. Every customer who may need our farms on credit is now linked to our partner micro-finance bank. By doing this, it is the responsibility of the bank to recover the funds from our customers and it has worked well.

8. Apart from This Industry, Name an Untapped Business Opportunity in Uganda.

Manufacturing of cooler sheds for the storage of perishable agricultural produce is one untapped opportunity. Currently, Ugandan smallholder farmers lose up to 40% of their fresh produce because of a lack of reliable cold storage systems.

Providing a cheap and reliable 24/7 cold storage system would dramatically reduce post-harvest losses for these farmers.

Is AppHarvest the Future of Farming?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advice For New Vertical Farmers: Grower Spotlight on Andrew Worrall

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

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

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

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

How has vertical farming impacted your life?

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

Image from: LettUs Grow

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

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

How much of our food should be grown this way? 

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

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

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

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

Image from: LettUs Grow

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

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

What was the biggest change you encountered in the industry?

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

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

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

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

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

Image from: LettUs Grow

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

This Startup Wants Vertical Farmers To Hire A Robot Gardener

Lucas Ropek

Arugula micro greens are grown at AeroFarms on February 19, 2019, in Newark, New Jersey.

Photo: Photo by Angela Weiss (Getty Images)

In recent years, vertical farming has emerged as a futurist’s solution to the world’s agricultural problems. The growing trend seeks to use controlled environments to boost food production, leveraging indoor labs where temperature, light, and nutrients can be mechanically controlled.

Yet while vertical farms have gained in popularity, they are also still very expensive. When compared to conventional farming, these farms necessitate the purchase of pricey equipment to aid human labor—a fact that, when paired with other economic pressures, has apparently led to an industry “littered with bankruptcies.”

One company hopes to change this dire picture. Enter Watney the robot.

Watney was designed by start-up Seasony. The company, which was featured today at this year’s Alchemist Accelerator’s Demo Day, has sought to make the tech-farming trend more accessible by automating away some of the more difficult labor involved.

Image: Screenshot: Youtube/TV2LORRY

“By automating the production with robotics and remote monitoring, we can lower labor costs and offer solutions for food producers that is economically viable and environmentally sustainable,” the company claims on their website.

Indeed, Watney is designed to augment (and, in many ways, replace) a human labor force—currently one of the biggest expenditures for vertical farms. Essentially an intelligent, automated cart, the robot was designed to “move and transport plant trays” within a farming hub. In techno-jargon, it is an autonomous mobile manipulation robot (AMMR), a type of machine known for moving and manipulating items on its own. It is also equipped with a camera that captures image data and sends it back to farm management software for human analysis. Watney also gathers valuable horticultural data to help farmers optimize yields, said Christopher Weis Thomasen, Seasony’s CEO and Co-Founder, in an email.

From left to right: Erkan Tosti Taskiran, Servet Coskun and Christopher Weis Thomasen.

Photo: Photo from Seasony.

“We are doing for vertical farming what the integration of autonomous mobile robots did to amazon. We are able to decrease the costs of growing food in a vertical farm by alleviating the logistics pains of working from scissor lifts,” said Thomasen.

Thomasen, a mechanical engineer, and his two co-founders electrical engineer Servet Coskun and business specialist Erkan Tosti Taskiran, were inspired to create the business while brainstorming what it would take to sustain life in outer space (Watney the robot is named after Mark Watney, the astronaut in the movie The Martian, who, after being stranded on the Red Planet, fertilizes potatoes with his own poop to survive).

“It quickly evolved to Seasony setting up a vertical farming lab and exploring the technical challenges facing the new industry. Reducing the costs related to labor is key in order to scale vertical farming and make agriculture more sustainable,” Thomasen said.

There is, of course, some debate in the farming community about the social costs incurred through the large-scale displacement of human labor.

Presumably, we will have to wait to see what that cost-saving process looks like. Seasony, which is still getting off the ground, plans to do a pilot trial with the largest vertical farm in Europe in April. It has plans to conduct further testing with several smaller vertical farms, as well, Thomasen said.

Lucas Ropek

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Staff writer at Gizmodo

AppHarvest Announces First Harvest of Tomatoes From Flagship High-Tech Indoor Farm Shipping To Grocery Stores

The Beefsteak tomatoes are chemical pesticide-free, non-GMO, and sustainably grown with 100% recycled rainwater; will first arrive in select national grocery stores this week

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January 19, 2021 (Morehead, Ky.)—AppHarvest, a leading AgTech company building some of the country’s largest high-tech indoor farms to grow affordable, nutritious fruits and vegetables at scale, has announced that its first-ever harvest— Beefsteak tomatoes from its 60-acre Morehead, Kentucky, flagship indoor farm—will start to roll out in grocery stores this week.

The sustainably grown tomatoes first will be available in select national retailers such as Kroger, Publix, Walmart, Food City, and Meijer.

Shoppers will be able to find the Beefsteak tomatoes in the produce aisle, co-branded with Sunset Grown, and the products are expected to be comparable in price to standard tomatoes. AppHarvest’s Beefsteak tomatoes are chemical pesticide-free, non-GMO and are grown with 100% recycled rainwater.

This first harvest occurs as AppHarvest continues expansion plans for additional indoor farms to meet the increasing demand for sustainably grown U.S. produce. The company is preparing to list publicly after the closing of the previously announced business combination of AppHarvest with Novus Capital Corporation (Nasdaq: NOVS) and then will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker APPH.

At ramp-up, AppHarvest’s Morehead facility alone is expected to produce about 45 million pounds of tomatoes annually from about 720,000 tomato plants, a mix of Beefsteak and “Tomatoes on the Vine.” AppHarvest has two more facilities under construction—a similar 60-plus acre facility outside Richmond, Ky., and a 15-acre facility to grow leafy greens in Berea, Ky. AppHarvest also is planning for more facilities across Kentucky and Central Appalachia, with the goal of 12 total farms by the end of 2025.

The AgTech company recently appointed AppHarvest Board Member David Lee as president to manage strategy and operations, while leading the sales, marketing and finance functions as AppHarvest continues to grow as a sustainable fresh foods company. Lee joins AppHarvest from Impossible Foods, where he has served as chief financial officer since 2015 and is credited with significant growth accomplishments including securing more than $1.3 billion in funding to accelerate manufacturing, product development and distribution.

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In August 2020, AppHarvest announced that food entrepreneur and icon Martha Stewart and best-selling author and investor J.D. Vance would join the board of directors, alongside Inclusive Capital Partners Founder & Managing Partner Jeffrey Ubben and Rise of the Rest Seed Funds Partner Anna Mason and others committed to transforming the future of agriculture and supporting entrepreneurial efforts in Middle-America.

AppHarvest’s high-tech indoor farms are
designed to use 90% less water with yields that
are up to 30 times higher compared to traditional open-field agriculture on the same amount of land. Its location in Appalachia allows it to deliver a strong social impact by building a diversified economy in economically distressed areas of the country, while enabling its products to reach about 70% of the U.S. population within a single day’s drive. As a result, AppHarvest expects to deliver fresher fruits and vegetables, ripened on the vine for peak flavor and nutrition, with an 80% reduction in diesel consumption required for transportation, as compared to produce shipped from Mexico.

“As a mission-driven company that prioritizes Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles, this first harvest is monumental for our business, and we want to set a benchmark for the industry,” said Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO. “We are determined to build a climate-resilient infrastructure to offer folks a delicious tomato that is sustainably grown right here in Appalachia with 100% recycled rainwater and zero chemical pesticides, making it better for both them and the environment.”

“AppHarvest’s high-tech, sustainable approach is the future of food, and this first harvest allows us to provide consumers with chemical pesticide-free, nutrient-rich, flavorful produce that’s making a difference they can feel good about,” said Martha Stewart, Board Member of AppHarvest. “I’ve been testing the early sample tomatoes, which are delicious, and I’m already looking forward to integrating them into my kitchen and recipes this year.”

For more information on where to purchase AppHarvest products, visit www.AppHarvest.com. ###

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About AppHarvest

AppHarvest is an applied technology company building some of the world’s largest indoor farms in Appalachia. 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 home-grown 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/.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements included in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally are accompanied by words such as “believe,” “may,” “will,” “estimate,” “continue,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “expect,” “should,” “would,” “plan,” “predict,” “potential,” “seem,” “seek,” “future,” “outlook,” and similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends or that are not statements of historical matters. All statements, other than statements of present or historical fact included in this press release, regarding Novus Capital’s proposed acquisition of AppHarvest, Novus Capital’s ability to consummate the transaction, the benefits of the transaction and the combined company’s future financial performance, as well as the combined company’s growth plans and strategy, future operations, estimated financial position, estimated revenues and losses, projected costs, prospects, plans and objectives of management are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on various assumptions, whether or not identified in this press release, and on the current expectations of AppHarvest’s management and are not predictions of actual performance. These forward-looking statements are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not intended to serve as, and must not be relied on as, a guarantee, an assurance, a prediction, or a definitive statement of fact or probability. Actual events and circumstances are difficult or impossible to predict and will differ from assumptions. Many actual events and circumstances are beyond the control of AppHarvest. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in Novus Capital’s registration statement on Form S-4, filed with the SEC on October 9, 2020 (the “Registration Statement”), under the heading “Risk Factors,” and other documents Novus Capital has filed, or will file, with the SEC. If any of these risks materialize or our assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements reflect AppHarvest’s expectations, plans, or forecasts of future events and views as of the date of this press release. AppHarvest anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause its assessments to change. However, while AppHarvest may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, AppHarvest specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing AppHarvest’s assessments of any date subsequent to the date of this press release. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed upon the forward-looking statements.

Important Information for Investors and Stockholders

In connection with the proposed transaction, Novus Capital has filed the Registration Statement with the SEC, which includes a preliminary proxy statement to be distributed to holders of Novus Capital’s common stock in connection with Novus Capital’s solicitation of proxies for the vote by Novus Capital’s stockholders with respect to the proposed transaction and other matters as described in the Registration Statement, as well as the prospectus relating to the offer of securities to be issued to AppHarvest’s stockholders in connection with the proposed transaction. After the Registration Statement has been declared effective, Novus Capital will mail a definitive proxy statement, when available, to its stockholders. Investors and security holders and other interested parties are urged to read the proxy statement/prospectus, any amendments thereto and any other documents filed with the SEC carefully and in their entirety when they become available because they will contain important information about Novus Capital, AppHarvest and the proposed transaction. Investors and security holders may obtain free copies of the preliminary proxy statement/prospectus and definitive proxy statement/prospectus (when available) and other documents filed with the SEC by Novus Capital through the website maintained by the SEC at http://www.sec.gov, or by directing a request to: Novus Capital Corporation, 8556 Oakmont Lane, Indianapolis, IN 46260. The information contained on, or that may be accessed through, the websites referenced in this press release is not incorporated by reference into, and is not a part of, this press release.

Participants in the Solicitation

Novus Capital and its directors and officers may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies of Novus Capital’s shareholders in connection with the proposed business combination. Security holders may obtain more detailed information regarding the names, affiliations and interests of certain of Novus Capital’s executive officers and directors in the solicitation by reading the Registration Statement and other relevant materials filed with the SEC in connection with the business combination when they become available. Information concerning the interests of Novus Capital’s participants in the solicitation, which may, in some cases, be different than those of their stockholders generally, is set forth in the Registration Statement.

Delta Singapore Showcases Smart And Green Solutions For Factory, Building And Farm Automation At its ITAP 2020 Virtual Event

October 27, 2020

ACROFAN=PRNewswire mediainquiries@prnewswire.com | SNS

An interactive experience of Delta Singapore's energy-efficient and innovative portfolio for the smart city

SINGAPORE, Oct. 27, 2020,/PRNewswire/ -- Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., a provider of power and thermal management solutions, launched an innovative 3D virtual showcase of its smart and green and automation solutions for factory, building, and vertical farm operations at the Industrial Transformation ASIA-PACIFIC (ITAP) 2020. The online showcase featured products and solutions which enable industrial automation, building automation, data centers, Electric Vehicle (EV) charging, mobile power, display and projector, and vertical farming.

Commenting on Delta Singapore's innovative digital exhibition, Mr. Jackie Chang, President of Delta in Southeast Asia, India, and Australia, said, "As an innovative solutions provider, Delta is excited to leverage digital technology to reach our audiences despite COVID-19 challenges. We welcome visitors to explore our new Singapore office on the online platform and see how Delta's automation, data centers, EV charging, mobile power, display and projector, and vertical farming will enable more energy efficiency and productivity in the next normal."

Ms. Cecilia Ku, General Manager of Delta Electronics (Singapore), said, "Due to the pandemic, business outlook and behaviors have changed tremendously. Smart automation can enable Singapore businesses to stay competitive in the region. As an innovative solutions provider, Delta Singapore is looking forward to collaborating with the industries and bring new ideas and solutions to local businesses."

ITAP 2020 was both the first trade event for Delta Singapore to attend since the COVID-19 pandemic and its first launch of a 3D virtual exhibit and tour experience. Visitors could get an exclusive look at Delta Singapore's offerings at a virtual model of the new company building located at 17 Kallang Junction.

Visitors to Delta's ITAP 2020 virtual exhibition freely explored Delta's latest solutions including:

Automation: Delta's automation solutions include industrial automation for factories. Delta's smart manufacturing and cloud-integrated smart manufacturing solutions combine high performance and reliable automation products with IIoT and cloud-based software systems to give a 360-degree monitoring view of manufacturing and boost productivity. Building automation solutions by Delta's subsidiaries, Loytec and Delta Controls, offer intuitive building management and automated control for efficient and livable indoor spaces. Delta's HVAC control solution integrates AC motor drives fans and pumps to save energy.

Infrastructure: Delta's scalable and modular data center solutions cover power and thermal management, facility infrastructure, and environment monitoring and control. Delta's EV charging portfolio ranges from AC EV chargers for residential and workplace applications all the way to DC fast chargers for filling stations. Delta's energy-saving video walls and large scale display solutions support indoor control rooms and malls as well as outdoor venues. 

Smart Living: Delta's vertical farming solution is designed to increase productivity and automate labor-intensive tasks in agriculture.  Delta's brands, Vivitek, offers a broad range of display and projection solutions for personal, educational, and professional applications. Innergie power products offer maximum power and compact size for mobile devices.

Another highlight at the event was the signing of MOU among Singapore Polytechnic, TUV SUD, Delta Electronics Inc., and Singapore's Smart i4.0 Transformation Alliance (SiTA) to provide end-to-end Industry 4.0 (I4.0) solutions to small-medium enterprises, local large enterprises as well as multinational corporations in the manufacturing cluster.

At the same time, there was another signing of a MOU among Singapore Polytechnic and the Asian Development Bank for strategic collaboration to jointly establish Singapore's first Global Technology Innovation Village (GTiV). Delta is one of the 19 selected organizations that will support the GTiV which aims to allow more players in the region to step up on I4.0 adoption and push ahead with its business transformation plans.

In addition, Delta hosted a series of online training seminars about Delta's industrial automation, building automation, infrastructure, and vertical farming solutions. The seminars on building automation and vertical farming received the most positive feedback from attendees.

Visitors can experience Delta virtual showcase at https://www.deltaonlineshowroom.sg/.

About Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore)

The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Electronics Inc. Delta, founded in 1971, is a global provider of switching power supplies and thermal management products with a thriving portfolio of smart energy-saving systems and solutions in the fields of industrial automation, building automation, telecom power, data center infrastructure, EV charging, renewable energy, energy storage and display, to nurture the development of smart manufacturing and sustainable cities. As a world-class corporate citizen guided by its mission statement, "To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow," Delta leverages its core competence in high-efficiency power electronics and its CSR-embedded business model to address key environmental issues, such as climate change. Delta serves customers through its sales offices, R&D centers, and manufacturing facilities spread over close to 200 locations across 5 continents.

Throughout its history, Delta has received various global awards and recognition for its business achievements, innovative technologies, and dedication to CSR. Since 2011, Delta has been listed on the DJSI World Index of Dow Jones Sustainability™ Indices for 8 consecutive years. In 2017, Delta was selected by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) for its Climate Change Leadership Level for the 2nd consecutive year.

For detailed information about Delta, please visit: www.deltaww.com 

Related Links :

https://www.deltaww.com/

Lead photo: Delta Singapore Showcases Smart and Green Solutions for Factory, Building and Farm Automation at its ITAP 2020 Virtual Event

Infarm Raises $170M In Equity And Debt To Continue Building Its ‘Vertical Farming’ Network

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Steve O'Hear@sohear

September 17, 2020

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Image Credits: Infarm

Infarm, the vertical farming company that has built a network of urban farms to grow fresh food closer to consumers, has raised $170 million in new investment in a “first close” of a Series C.

Leading the round — which is expected to reach $200 million and is a mixture of equity and debt — is LGT Lightstone,  with participation from Hanaco, Bonnier, Haniel, and Latitude. Existing Infarm investors Atomico, TriplePoint Capital, Mons Capital, and Astanor Ventures also followed on. It brings the company’s total funding to date to more than $300 million.

That’s likely a testament to the speed of new retail partnerships over the last 12 months. They include Albert Heijn (Netherlands), Aldi Süd (Germany), COOP/Irma (Denmark), Empire Company’s Sobeys, Safeway and Thrifty Foods (Canada), Kinokuniya (Japan), Kroger (U.S.) and Marks & Spencer and Selfridges (U.K.).

With operations across 10 countries and 30 cities worldwide, Infarm says it now harvests more than 500,000 plants monthly, and in a much more sustainable way than traditional farming and supply chains. Its modular, IoT-powered vertical farming units claim to use 99.5% less space than soil-based agriculture, 95% less water, 90% less transport, and zero chemical pesticides. In addition, 90% of the electricity used throughout the Infarm network is from renewable energy and the company has set a target to reach zero emission food production next year.

Founded in 2013 by Osnat Michaeli, and brothers Erez and Guy Galonska, Infarm’s “indoor vertical farming” system is capable of growing herbs, lettuce and other vegetables. It then places these modular farms in a variety of customer-facing city locations, such as grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls and schools, thus enabling the end-customer to actually pick the produce themselves. To further scale, it also installs Infarms in local distribution centers.

The distributed system is designed to be infinitely scalable — you simply add more modules, space permitting — whilst the whole thing is cloud-based, meaning the farms can be monitored and controlled from Infarm’s central control center. It’s also incredibly data-driven, a combination of IoT, Big Data and cloud analytics akin to “Farming-as-a-Service.”

The idea, the founding team told me back in 2017 when I profiled the nascent company, isn’t just to produce fresher and better-tasting produce and re-introduce forgotten or rare varieties, but to disrupt the supply chain as a whole, which remains inefficient and produces a lot of waste.

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“Behind our farms is a robust hardware and software platform for precision farming,” explained Michaeli at the time. “Each farming unit is its own individual ecosystem, creating the exact environment our plants need to flourish. We are able to develop growing recipes that tailor the light spectrums, temperature, pH and nutrients to ensure the maximum natural expression of each plant in terms of flavor, color and nutritional quality.”

On that note, I caught up with two of Infarm’s founders to get a brief update on the Berlin-headquartered company and to dive a little deeper into how it will continue to scale.

TechCrunch: What assumptions did you make early on that have turned out to be true or, more interestingly, not panned out as expected?

Osnat Michaeli: When we first chatted about four years ago, we were 40 people in Berlin, and much of the conversation centered around the potential that our approach to urban vertical farming might have for retailers. While for many it was intriguing as a concept, we couldn’t have imagined that a few years later we would have expanded to almost 10 countries (Japan is on its way) and 30 cities, with partnerships with some of the largest retailers in the world. Our assumptions at the time were that retailers and their customers would be attracted to the taste and freshness of produce that grew right in front of them in the produce section, in our farms.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much and how quickly the demand for a sustainable, transparent, and modular approach to farming would grow as we, as a society, begin to feel the impact of climate change and supply chain fragility upon our lives, our choices and our food. Of course, we also did not anticipate a global pandemic, which has underscored the urgency of building a new food system that can democratize access to high-quality, amazing-tasting food, while helping our planet regenerate and heal. The past few months have confirmed the flexibility and resilience of our farming model, and that our mission is more relevant than ever.

In terms of signing on new retailers, based on your progress in the last 12 months, I’m guessing this has gotten easier, though undoubtedly there are still quite long lead times. How have these conversations changed since you started?

Erez Galonska: While lead times and speed of conversations can vary depending upon the region and retailer. In mature markets where the concept is familiar and we’re already engaged, deal conversations can reach maturity in as little time as three months. Since we last spoke we are already working with most of the leading retailers that are well established in Europe, the U.K., and North America. Brands which in each of their markets are both forerunners in a retail industry rapidly evolving to meet the demand for consumer-focused innovation, while proving that access to sustainable, high-quality, fresh, and living produce is not only possible, but can be available in produce aisles today, and every day of the year, with Infarm.

I’m interested to understand where Infarms are installed, in terms of if the majority is in-store and consumer-facing or if the most scalable and bulk of Infarm’s use cases are really much larger distribution hubs in cities or close to cities, i.e. not too far away from places with population/store density but not actually in stores. Perhaps you can enlighten me on what the ratio looks like today and how you see it developing as vertical farming grows?

Erez Galonska: Today across our markets, the split between our farms in stores and in distribution centers is roughly 50/50. However, as you anticipate, we will be expanding our network this year with many more distribution hubs. This expansion will likely lead to an 80/20 split as early as next year, with the majority of our regions being served with fresh, living produce delivered throughout the week from centrally located hubs. This not only offers retailers and restaurants flexibility in terms of volumes of output, and the ability to adapt the presentation of our offerings to floor areas of different sizes, but it also allows us to begin to serve whole regions from our next-generation farms under development today.

Based in our hubs, these farms will deliver the crop equivalent of an acre or more of fresh produce on a 25 m2 footprint, with significant further savings in energy, water, labor and land use. We believe this technology will truly challenge ideas of what is possible in sustainable, vertical farming and we look forward to talking about it more soon.

Lastly, what are the main product lines in terms of food on the shelves?

Osnat Michaeli: We have a catalog of more than 65 herbs, microgreens, and leafy greens that is constantly growing. Our offerings range from the known and common varieties like Coriander, Basil, or Mint, to specialty products like Peruvian Mint, Red Veined Sorrel or Wasabi Rucola.

Because our farms give us excellent control over every part of a plant’s growth process and can imitate the complexity of different ecosystems, we will be able to expand the diversity of Infarm produce available to consumers to include root vegetables, mushrooms, flowering crops, and even superfoods from around the world in the near future. What you see today with Infarm is still only the beginning.

Farm Tech Society, Indoor Ag-Con Partner to Present "Future of Farming | Educating The Next Generation to Make CEA Scalable" | August 19, 2020 - 2 PM EST

New Session Joins Indoor Ag-Conversations Webinar Series,
August 19, 2020, From 2:00 - 3:00 pm EST

(AUGUST 10, 2020) -- As the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) industry grows, companies are facing greater shortages in qualified talent. How can innovation in training and education accelerate the industry to the benefit of all? Hosted by the Farm Tech Society and Indoor Ag-Con, LLC,  "The Future of Farming: Educating the Next Generation To Make CEA Scalable," will bring together a panel of top educators to explore viable answers to this pressing challenge.

The latest topic to join the Indoor Ag-Conversations free webinar series, the program will be held on Wednesday, August 19, 2020, from 2:00 - 3:00 pm EST.

Moderated by Farm Tech Society Chairman Ian Kanski, Director, Center for Advanced Agriculture & Sustainability, Harrisburg University of Science & Technology, the panel will include Dr. Laura Vickers, Senior Lecturer in Plant Biology, Harpers Adams University; Sonny Ramaswamy, president, Northwest Commission on Colleges & Universities; and Dr. Marito Garcia, Fellow, Darden School of Business, Center for Global Initiatives (DCGI), University of Virginia.

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"We're excited to partner with the Farm Tech Society to foster discussion around this vitally important topic," says Brian Sullivan, co-owner, Indoor Ag-Con, LLC. "The COVID crisis has certainly brought attention and increased awareness to the myriad benefits CEA can offer -- from local food/supply chain solutions to year-round production. Attracting and educating a younger generation are critical to helping CEA reach its full potential."

"Strengthening and securing the future of the CEA industry are key to the Farm Tech Society mission. The new Indoor Ag-Conversations webinar series offers a wonderful platform to exchange ideas and spark new ones. We're looking forward to a great discussion," adds Farm Tech Society Board Chairman and program moderator Ian Kanski. "

During the 60-minute program, the panel will discuss a range of topics, including:

• Upskilling and retraining from challenged industry sectors

• Skills gaps, labor challenges, and automation

• Micro-credentialing and industry certifications

• Portability of skills learned in CEA operations

• Public-private partnerships for training and education

The program is free and attendees can register at www.indoor.ag/webinar

The Indoor Ag-Conversations panelists will bring a wealth of educational industry experiences and insights to the discussion.

 Ian Kanski  is a social entrepreneur with a career dedicated to human development and sustainable technology. He is the Director of the Center for Advanced Agriculture and Sustainability at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, Board Chair for FarmTech Society in Brussels, Belgium and co-founder of INTAG. Ian is also Co-Founder of the STEM Education consultancy B Theory Inc and is the former Chief Product Officer of Zoetic Global.

Dr. Laura Vickers gained her Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of Birmingham before working as a postdoc at Harper Adams University (HAU). She took up her role as Lecturer at HAU in 2014 and was also awarded a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship in Horticulture, where she worked with the Horticulture Innovation Partnership in producing an R&D strategy for the Ornamental industry. She is now a Senior Lecturer at HAU and a leading member of the Urban Farming Group.

Sonny Ramaswamy assumed the presidency of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities in 2018 after six years of service as President Obama's appointee as the Director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in Washington, DC. Prior to this position in the federal government, he worked for 30 years at several Land-Grant Universities, rising through the ranks from assistant professor to dean.

Dr. Marito Garcia is a Fellow at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA. He is a Board Director at Learning Equality, a non-profit education technology company based in San Diego, CA. He is co-founder of Italpinas Development Corporation, a green-building development company in Asia, based in Manila, Philippines; and Orenko Ltd (Cambridge, UK), an energy development company. He also served as senior staff at the World Bank, Washington, DC in various capacities.

Indoor Ag-Con LLC created the new Indoor Ag-Conversations series to share content originally planned for its May 2020 in-person annual conference that was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.   To learn more about this session, as well as other upcoming programs on the schedule, visit www.indoor.ag/webinar

ABOUT INDOOR AG-CON LLC
Founded in 2013, Indoor Ag-Con, LLC produces the premier event for the indoor | vertical farming industry touching all sectors of the business —  produce, legal cannabis, hemp, alternate protein and non-food crops. In December 2018, three event industry professionals – Nancy Hallberg, Kris Sieradzki and Brian Sullivan – purchased Indoor Ag-Con LLC, setting the stage for further expansion of the events globally. For more information, visit: https://indoor.ag

ABOUT FARM TECH SOCIETY
The Farm Tech Society (FTS) is an international non-profit industry association that unites and supports the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) industry, seeking to strengthen the sector through the development and implementation of resilient and future proof methods and technologies for indoor growing For more information, visit https://www.farmtechsociety.org

Indoor Ag-Con, 950 Scales Road, Building #200, Suwanee, GA 30024, United States