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.

Study On Analytic Tools To Measure Future Plants Stress

New work from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) highlights the potential of recently developed analytical tools that can provide tissue-cell or organelle-specific information on living plants in real-time and can be used on any plant species.

In a perspective paper titled “Species-independent analytical tools for next-generation agriculture” published in the journal Nature Plants, researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) within SMART review the development of two next-generation tools, engineered plant nanosensors and portable Raman spectroscopy, to detect biotic and abiotic stress, monitor plant hormonal signalling, and characterize soil, phytobiome, and crop health in a non- or minimally invasive manner. The researchers discuss how the tools bridge the gap between model plants in the laboratory and field application for agriculturally relevant plants. The paper also assesses the future outlook, economic potential, and implementation strategies for the integration of these technologies in future farming practices.

Crop loss
An estimated 11-30 per cent yield loss of five major crops of global importance (wheat, rice, maize, potato, and soybean) is caused by crop pathogens and insects, with the highest crop losses observed in regions already suffering from food insecurity. Against this backdrop, research into innovative technologies and tools is required for sustainable agricultural practices to meet the rising demand for food and food security — an issue that has drawn the attention of governments worldwide due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sensors
Plant nanosensors, developed at SMART DiSTAP, are nanoscale sensors, smaller than the width of a hair, that can be inserted into the tissues and cells of plants to understand complex signalling pathways. Portable Raman spectroscopy, also developed at SMART DiSTAP, encompases a laser-based device that measures molecular vibrations induced by laser excitation, providing highly specific Raman spectral signatures that provide a fingerprint of a plant’s health. These tools are able to monitor stress signals in short time-scales, ranging from seconds to minutes, which allows for early detection of stress signals in real-time.

“The use of plant nanosensors and Raman spectroscopy has the potential to advance our understanding of crop health, behavior, and dynamics in agricultural settings,” says Tedrick Thomas Salim Lew SM '18, PhD '20, the paper’s first author. “Plants are highly complex machines within a dynamic ecosystem, and a fundamental study of its internal workings and diverse microbial communities of its ecosystem is important to uncover meaningful information that will be helpful to farmers and enable sustainable farming practices. These next-generation tools can help answer a key challenge in plant biology, which is to bridge the knowledge gap between our understanding of model laboratory-grown plants and agriculturally-relevant crops cultivated in fields or production facilities.”

Early detection
Early plant stress detection is key to timely intervention and increasing the effectiveness of management decisions for specific types of stress conditions in plants. Tools capable of studying plant health and reporting stress events in real-time will benefit both plant biologists and farmers. Data obtained from these tools can be translated into useful information for farmers to make management decisions in real-time to prevent yield loss and reduced crop quality.

The species-independent tools also offer new plant science study opportunities for researchers. In contrast to conventional genetic engineering techniques that are only applicable to model plants in laboratory settings, the new tools apply to any plant species, which enables the study of agriculturally relevant crops previously understudied. Adopting these tools can enhance researchers’ basic understanding of plant science and potentially bridge the gap between model and non-model plants.

Technologies in agriculture
“The SMART DiSTAP interdisciplinary team facilitated the work for this paper and we have both experts in engineering new agriculture technologies and potential end-users of these technologies involved in the evaluation process,” says Professor Michael Strano, the paper’s co-corresponding author, DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator, and the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “It has been the dream of an urban farmer to continually, at all times, engineer optimal growth conditions for plants with precise inputs and tightly controlled variables. These tools open the possibility of real-time feedback control schemes that will accelerate and improve plant growth, yield, nutrition, and culinary properties by providing optimal growth conditions for plants in the future of urban farming.”

“To facilitate widespread adoption of these technologies in agriculture, we have to validate their economic potential and reliability, ensuring that they remain cost-efficient and more effective than existing approaches,” the paper’s co-corresponding author, DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator, and deputy chair of TLL Professor Chua Nam Hai explains. “Plant nanosensors and Raman spectroscopy would allow farmers to adjust fertilizer and water usage, based on internal responses within the plant, to optimize growth, driving cost efficiencies in resource utilization. Optimal harvesting conditions may also translate into higher revenue from increased product quality that customers are willing to pay a premium for.”

Collaboration among engineers, plant biologists, and data scientists, and further testing of new tools under field conditions with critical evaluations of their technical robustness and economic potential will be important in ensuring sustainable implementation of technologies in tomorrow’s agriculture.

For more information:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
www.mit.edu 

New York’s Gotham Greens Plans Solano County Indoor Produce Farm

GARY QUACKENBUSH

FOR THE NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

Example of the greenhouse operated by Gotham Greens which announced plans to open in Solano County (Photo courtesy of Gotham Greens)

Gotham Greens Holdings LLC, a firm with indoor agriculture operations across the U.S., Tuesday, announced plans to build a facility next to the University of California, Davis.

The first phase of this 10-acre Solano County facility is expected to open later this year. It will be located on 33.6 acres of agricultural land purchased from the university adjacent to Interstate 80.

The company stated its plans will provide it with the ability to deliver fresh leafy greens, herbs, plant-based dressings, dips and cooking sauces to more retailers, foodservice operators and consumers on the West Coast.

“… We are partnering with one of the highest-ranked agricultural research centers in the world to advance the entire agriculture system,” said Viraj Puri, co-founder and CEO of Gotham Greens. “California is responsible for growing one-third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the nation’s fruit, yet in recent years, issues surrounding drought, food safety and worker welfare have demonstrated the need for continued innovation.”

The greenhouse will generate 60 full-time jobs and provide UC students with the opportunity to learn first-hand how to sustainably grow produce year-round in a safe, clean, climate-controlled environment. The company stated its facilities use 95% less water and 97% less land than conventional farming. Nationwide, Gotham Greens has 500,000 square feet of greenhouse space at five locations staffed by 400 employees.

The UC Division of Agriculture and National Resources and the UC Davis College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences has entered into a partnership with Gotham Greens to advance research and innovation in the areas of indoor agriculture, greenhouse technology, and urban agriculture to help advance the science, workforce technology, and profitability of indoor agriculture globally.

“We are building a Controlled Environment Agriculture Consortium to support and advance the indoor farming industry, grow more fresh produce on less land and create new jobs for Californians,” said Gabriel Youtsey, the division’s chief innovation officer. “Gotham Greens is an anchoring partner of this research and industry collaboration that we hope will spur innovation, create a new indoor farming workforce and support industry growth.”

Helene Dillard, dean of the college, said, “This partnership will offer our students the chance to learn best practices from leading experts in indoor farming.”

Gotham Greens recently raised $87 million in new equity and debt capital bringing the company’s total financing to $130 million to fuel the next phase of growth.

Founded in 2009 in Brooklyn, New York, Gotham Greens (gothamgreens.com) owns and operates greenhouses in New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, Maryland and Colorado. Its produce is available in more than 40 states and 2,000 retail stores, including Albertsons Companies (Safeway, Jewel-Osco, and Shaw’s), Whole Foods Market, Target, King Soopers, Harris Teeter, and Sprouts.

The company’s products can also be purchased through e-commerce sites including AmazonFresh, FreshDirect and Peapod.
Lead Photo: Gotham Greens

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.”

Hydroponics Greenhouse Provides Hands-On Learning At Hudson High School

Yeji Kim

Special to the Hudson Hub-Times

A Jan. 15 tour led by HHS AP Environmental Science teacher Matthew Kearns offered members of The Kiwanis Club of Hudson insight into the hydroponic greenhouse. The club donated a $20,000 grant to help fund the project. Submitted Photo

Project-based learning is a learning model where students work together to engage in real-world questions and problems, and the Hudson High School hydroponics greenhouse centres around this approach to education.

The hydroponics greenhouse started roughly two years ago, and Phillip Herman, Superintendent of the Hudson City School District, and Christina Wooley, HCSD Curriculum Coordinator, are credited with most of the original idea.

Herman first learned about hydroponics gardening and greenhouses from a community member and thought there may be a way to better utilize the HHS greenhouse space to create learning opportunities for students. He began by discussing the idea with teachers, visiting an operating hydroponics greenhouse and exploring areas of the curriculum that could be enhanced.

The first year consisted largely of planning, strategizing and raising money, and this past year was when equipment started to come in and crops began to grow.

A hydroponics greenhouse differs from a traditional greenhouse in that no soil is required. Instead, the plants draw up nutrient-rich water. Less water is used since the water is recycled, and because of the absence of soil, hydroponics greenhouses take up less space — the plants can be stacked vertically. The HHS hydroponics greenhouse also includes a monitoring computer system that measures what is currently in the water and what will be needed.

A $20,000 grant was given by The Kiwanis Club of Hudson to support the project, and this money was used to purchase greenhouse equipment.

CropKing, an Ohio-based hydroponics equipment company, was the supplier for the equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and the firm also aided in setting up the equipment and trained those involved with the greenhouse.

Two other grants, an ADAR grant and a grant from the Hudson Parent-Teacher Organization supplemented the Kiwanis grant money. The greenhouse itself is located off of HHS biology classes and has been there before the hydroponics greenhouse was started.

Students are faced with real-world questions, such as how to sustain crops in regions without sufficient access to water, ways to use the land effectively and properly, impacts on the environment and how to grow sustainably and locally.

Science teacher Matthew Kearns said students have been seeing the benefit of this project, which includes those in the AP Environmental Science class he teaches, special education students who work with Intervention Specialist Kristin Stonestreet and biology classes taught by Ron Wright. Students visit at least once a week to monitor the crops.

Currently, the greenhouse is growing its first round of crops, which includes lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Stonestreet and Kearns are considering adding cilantro, basil and peppers as well. The diversification would enhance the project-based learning aspect, as students will need to work together to figure out how much additional lighting and heat every crop needs.

The long term goal is to get involved with the community; through connecting with the business department and forming a club, students plan to sell produce from the greenhouse at the Hudson Farmers Market in the summertime and sell to HCSD faculty and staff when school is in session, engaging aspects of science, business and team-work. Several potential products for sale in the future include a salsa kit, tomato sauce and fresh herbs.

Herman notes how this greenhouse works to enhance classroom activity and curriculum.

“Over recent years, we have continued to learn more about and explore opportunities for project-based learning. Project-based learning enables students to learn course content and develop other essential success skills by beginning with a challenging problem or question and conducting a sustained inquiry to explore solutions to the problem and answers to their questions. Together, Christina Wooley, Mr Kearns and Mrs Stonestreet dug in and worked collaboratively to do the hard work to bring an idea to implementation.”

Saudi Farmer Has Built The Region’s First Vertical Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Arab News

Plenty Ranked Number One on Prestigious FoodTech 500

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.

Plenty, the flavor-first vertical farming company with a mission to improve the lives of people, plants, and the planet, today announced its #1 ranking on the esteemed Forward Fooding 2020 FoodTech 500.

Referred to as the “Fortune 500 list of agrifood companies,” the FoodTech 500 highlights global entrepreneurial talent at the intersection of food, technology and sustainability. Forward Fooding’s proprietary algorithms evaluate a business on its size, digital footprint and sustainability as measured against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Plenty came in first on the ranked list of 500 and out of a total of 2,000 nominees.

“It is an honor to be included on the FoodTech 500 and we are thrilled to be ranked first,” said Nate Storey, co-founder and CSO of Plenty. “The world is in need of an agricultural revolution, and there are many exciting areas where innovators are changing the future of food. At Plenty, we’re focused on using our proprietary, scalable vertical farming technology to deliver the freshest, most favorable produce year-round, while preserving our most precious resources.”

Plenty grows pesticide-free, non-GMO produce that tastes like it was fresh-picked from the garden because it was. The company ships from its farm to local stores every day. The farm’s controlled environment means the company can grow leafy greens year-round, regardless of the season. Plenty’s leafy greens are so clean, there is no need to wash because there is nothing to wash away - no bleaches, chemicals, soil or pesticides. The company wants the first person to touch their produce to be the consumer opening the package in their kitchen. Plenty plants are cultivated in an optimum growing environment, reaching peak flavors and nutrient value year-round, across every harvest.

The world is running out of usable land for growing crops and the global water supply is under severe threat of depletion. Plenty was founded on the need to create a more sustainable way to grow food using less land and water. Plenty yields hundreds of acres of crops in a building the size of a big box retailer, without cutting down a single tree, and using a fraction of the water required in the field. It’s San Francisco-based farm uses 100% renewable energy, and its greens are stored in 100% recyclable packaging and shipped locally to minimize the transportation footprint. Plenty’s data analytics and machine learning capabilities deliver 200 years’ worth of data each year, helping to quickly iterate and improve farm yield, quality and efficiency.

“The FoodTech 500 was created to shine a spotlight on the leading global innovators across the AgriFoodTech ecosystem, from farm to fork, who are making impactful solutions to better our food system,” said Alessio D’Antino, Forward Fooding founder and CEO. “This year’s list focused on understanding the driving factors behind the leading companies’ success and innovation, and we were thrilled to learn more about the top industry players, like Plenty, that are transforming our food system.”

The list represents 38 technology domains within the AgriFood space, including the broad categories of alternative proteins, farm management and precision farming, and vertical/indoor farming. The full ranking and more data about the 2020’s FoodTech 500 and its methodology can be found here.

About ForwardFooding

Forward Fooding is the world’s first collaborative platform for the food & beverage industry via FoodTech Data Intelligence and corporate-startup collaboration. Data services include The FoodTech Data Navigator data subscription service and facilitating corporate-startup collaboration through bespoke innovation programs and FoodTech consultancy.

To learn more visit: www.ForwardFooding.com

About Plenty

Plenty is an American farming technology company that frees agriculture from the constraints of land, weather, seasons, time, distance, pests, natural disasters, and climate. The company’s plant scientists, engineers, and farmers have developed its indoor vertical farming technology to grow nutrient-rich and pesticide-free plants with extraordinary flavor. The Plenty platform is designed to grow multiple crops in a building the size of a retail box store, yielding hundreds of acres using a fraction of the water and other precious resources. Plenty's flagship farm and headquarters are located in South San Francisco, and the company operates the largest of its kind Research and Development farm in Laramie, Wyoming. Plenty is currently building the world's highest-output, vertical, indoor farm in Compton, California.

View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210301005069/en/

CONTACT: Jane Gideon

Press@plenty.ag

KEYWORDS: CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: ENVIRONMENT TECHNOLOGY OTHER TECHNOLOGY FOOD/BEVERAGE AGRICULTURE SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT RETAIL NATURAL RESOURCES SCIENCE OTHER SCIENCE

SOURCE: Plenty

Copyright Business Wire 2021.

PUB: 03/01/2021

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BRITISH COLUMBIA: Agri-Tech To Anchor New Okanagan Falls Industrial Park

JOE FRIES

A vertical farming operation similar to this is planned for an Okanagan Falls industrial park. 

USDA/Special to The Herald

Vertical farming could be what finally helps a light-industrial park take root in Okanagan Falls.

Avery Group purchased the 110-acre former Weyerhaeuser mill site for $3.2 million in July 2020, and this week received tentative rezoning approval from the board of the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen.

The application, which would down-zone the site from its current heavy-industrial rating,  is now set for a public hearing March 18.

At the heart of the redevelopment plan is a 30-acre lot on which Avery Group wants to build a vertical farming facility, in which rows of crops would be stacked on top of one another in a warehouse-like environment.

“This really is the future of agriculture,” said Monique Janower, senior marketing and strategy director for Avery Group.

Potential crops include lettuce and leafy greens that vertical farming operations around the world had parlayed into a $2-billion industry as of 2018, according to Forbes Business Insights, which projects the market will expand to $12 billion by 2026.

The rest of the land at 1655 Maple St. would then be subdivided into lots ranging from 2.5 to 15 acres for a variety of uses, ranging from storage and food packaging to beverage processing and light manufacturing.

Janower, who cautioned there are still many regulatory hurdles to be cleared, said there has nonetheless been “tremendous interest” from potential buyers due to the relative rarity of new industrial land and the site’s central proximity to Alberta and the Lower Mainland.

Avery Group is owned by Garry Peters, who has deep ties to the area, according to Janower, so the company appreciates the site’s context within the community.

“We understand we’re not just creating bricks and mortar,” said Janower. “It’s very much tied to regional economic development of the area.”

The rezoning application already has the support of RDOS staff and a key community group.

“Rezoning of the property could potentially bring an influx of new and growing industrial businesses to Okanagan Falls,” Matt Taylor, president of the Okanagan Falls Community Association, wrote in a letter to the RDOS board.

“This in turn could lead to additional employment, a need for more residences and even more tourism. These factors would all contribute to and support the community.”

Since the 2007 closure of Weyerhaeuser, the site has been the subject of multiple development proposals, including an industrial park, residential development and, most recently, a cannabis production facility.

If rezoning is granted, Avery Group will then apply for the RDOS development permit required for the vertical farming operation. At the same time, it will apply to the B.C. government for subdivision. If all goes well, the company expects the park to be open for business in 2022.

WEBINAR: Learning Transfer From The Cannabis Industry To The Vertical Farming Industry

MARCH 3, 2021

AT 16:00 Central European Time

ONLINE

Register

Critical Lessons: Learning Transfer from the Cannabis Industry to the Vertical Farming Industry

We are thrilled to organize a Webinar focusing on the technical aspects and experience of these experts:

Our speaker Emil Breza is Co-Founder, President, and CEO of AgricUltra™ Advancements Inc. Bringing together his interdisciplinary technical expertise and many years of product development and innovation he introduced to AgricUltra a PlantFirst™ design approach to create one of the industries most advanced Turn-Key Vertical solutions for Controlled Environment Agriculture applications.

Prior to founding AgricUltra, Emil had years of experience in Process Engineering, the Automotive Industry, Professional consulting, and the Military where he honed his ability to identify the root cause of problems and develop solutions that are outside the box.

Our speaker Buck Young is co-founder and Executive Director at CannTx Life Sciences Inc, a Canadian LP focused on leveraging innovation and science to produce exceptional cannabis products and provide solutions to the industry. He is also the CEO of Saed Technologies Ltd, which develops and licenses technologies related to plant propagation, a Board member of Mary Agrotechnologies, and sits on the management committee for a cannabis botanical drug strategic alliance with Devonian Health Group. He is passionate about translating research findings into commercial outcomes, advancing the adoption of precision agriculture, and understanding nature’s pharmacopeia.

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Emil Breza

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Buck Young

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Dr. Joel Cuello

Please register here, there is only a limited number of tickets available.

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TAGS: ADVANTAGES OF VERTICAL FARMING AFRICA AGRITECHNICA AGROSPACE AVF WORKSHOP BRAINSTORM THE ECOSYSTEM DESIGNING THE ECOSYSTEM DLG ECOLOGICALLY ECONOMICALLY EVENT FOOD SAFETY FOOD SECURITY FOOD SYSTEM FOODSYSTEM FOOD TRACEABILITY FRAUNHOFER FRAUNHOFER IME HOW VERTICAL FARMING WORKS HUNGER INFARM INFOGRAPHICS INSPIRATIONAL ITALY MOTIVATION OPPORTUNITIES OPPPORTUNITIES PARTNER EVENT REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT RETAIL ROME RZ SOCIALLY SOUTHAFRICA STORYTELLING SUBMISSION SUMMIT SUPERMARKET SUPPLYCHAIN SUSTAINABILITY THE SIX SESSIONS URBAN AG VERTICAL FARMING WORKSHOP WORKSHOP WARM UP

How This Vertical Farm Grows 80,000 Pounds of Produce per Week

Bowery Farming uses technology to prioritize accessibility and sustainability in their produce growing operations

To some, the pristine growing conditions and perceived mechanical interference of a vertical farm can seem unnatural, but at Bowery Farming “interference” is actually not the goal at all. “We don’t really think about how people are involved in the growing process, but how to take people out of the growing process” says chief science officer Henry Sztul. “Our goal is actually to have as few people walking around our plants as possible.”

Bowery Farming is a network of vertical farms working to reengineer the growing process. Using a system of light and watering technology, Bowery is able to use 95 percent less water than a traditional outdoor farm, zero pesticides and chemicals, and grow food that tastes as good as anyone else’s. 

Bowery Farming uses vertical farm-specific seeds that are optimized for flavor instead of insect resistance and durability. Seeds are mechanically pressed into trays of soil, and sent out into growing positions, or racks within the building that have their own lighting and watering systems. Each tray gets its own QR code so that they can be monitored and assigned a customized plan for water and light until they’re ready to be harvested.

Irving Fain, Bowery Farming’s founder and CEO contemplates the prediction from the United Nations that 70 to 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in and around cities in the next 30 years. “Figuring out ‘how do you feed and how do you provide fresh food to urban environments both more efficiently as well as more sustainably?’ is a very important question today, and an even more important question in the years to come.”

CGTN Conversations: Chinese Firms Add Strength To Dubai's Future Tech Ecosystem

Abhishek G Bhaya

Over the decades, the Gulf city of Dubai has emerged as a land of innovation and a place where the future could be felt right now in the present. The city is actively encouraging global collaborations to drive innovation and future technology in the United Arab Emirates and internationally through its Dubai Future Accelerators (DFA) initiative that was launched in 2016 under the aegis of Dubai Future Foundation.

In recent years, many Chinese tech firms and start-ups – which are known for their technological prowess – have partnered with DFA to contribute to their mission of imagining, designing and co-creating solutions for future challenges.

One such successful initiative has come from Beijing-headquartered Alesca Life, an agro-tech company that is creating next-generation urban farming solutions that consume five per cent water and 30 per cent energy vis-à-vis conventional farming.

To get an overview of DFA's future innovation agenda and how Chinese firms are contributing in making that vision a reality, CGTN Digital's International Editor Abhishek G. Bhaya spoke with Faisal Al Hawi, the head of Accelerator and Incubators at the Dubai Future Foundation, and Stuart Oda, the founder and CEO of Alesca Life.

Al Hawi is responsible for creating a myriad of programs that connect different stakeholders, government and private, with innovative startups and companies from around the world to experiment with and making Dubai the testbed for future ideas.

Oda is an investment banker-turned- urban farmer with a passion for innovation and sustainability. He founded Alesca Life in 2013 with an aim to make food production more localized and data-driven.

Edited excerpts:

Bhaya: Faisal, please tell us a bit about the vision of the DFA initiative and what it aims to achieve and also some of the main areas and technologies it has tasted success in the past four years?

Al Hawi: Dubai Future Accelerators is an initiative that was born four years ago under the Dubai Future Foundation. The vision was pretty much straightforward – to put Dubai as a leading city of the world when it comes to technology innovation. Our mission is to turn Dubai into a global testbed for innovations and technologies. The DFA looks around for all the start-ups in the global scene, trying to understand the technology needs, the partner needs, the local ecosystem needs, and trying to bridge the gap between these two players of the market.

We do this in what we call the Area 2071, which is like the heart of our ecosystem in Dubai and we've had tremendous success. Throughout the four years, we've run eight cohorts, the eighth cohort is ongoing as we speak. We've engaged with more than 300 start-ups and over 60 pilot projects were produced out of DFA and more than 150 memoranda of understanding or commercial agreements were signed with different government entities and private sector partners.

Dubai Future Accelerators is positioned in a way that basically bridges the gap between the big players, be it government or private sector, and the start-up innovators from around the world.

Bhaya: How many Chinese firms and start-ups have availed the DFA program so far? Please name some of the major projects the Chinese entities have undertaken in the UAE as part of the DFA initiative.

Al Hawi: We've worked with Chinese companies ever since Cohort 1 back in 2016. So, Alesca Life is one of them. Shellpay, which was a fintech company working with the General Directorate of Immigration in Dubai, was another company. There was another company called Future Trends, working with Dubai Health Authority on medical imaging, and utilizing the technologies of AI and machine learning to optimize the diagnosis of late-stage cancers.

Yitu Technology is another Chinese AI-based company which worked very closely with [UAE's largest telecom service provider] Etisalat on solving some of their telecom related issues. So these are just to name a few companies that worked with us.

We really understand the strength Chinese ecosystem brings to our ecosystem. And I think we complement each other in a lot of areas.

Another example, broader than just Dubai Future Accelerators, is within Area 2071, where SenseTime actually has an office here, and they work very closely with the AI office, in a couple of strategic projects.

So, the partnership is growing stronger and stronger, year after year. And we definitely believe that there are areas specifically in the fourth industrial revolution technologies, blockchain, AI and IoT and the likes that we will definitely materialize more and more outcomes and success moving forward.

Bhaya: Stuart, what is the story behind Alesca Life?

Oda: Seven years ago, I started Alesca Life here in Beijing. The vision of the company is to democratize access to fresh and nutritious food by democratizing the means and the knowledge of production.

And the more research that I was doing, it became very clear that one of the most pressing challenges over the next decades wasn't so much actually related to connectivity, as these things were becoming easier with the proliferation of smartphones and computers, but access to fresh and nutritious food. And so, my team and I wanted to find a way in which we can make this access a lot easier. And wherever it made sense to localize that fresh food production, and wherever food production currently existed to make it more data driven.

So we set on this journey seven years ago, and we currently have our teams and offices across Japan, China, and the United Arab Emirates and we have partnerships across many more countries. We're developing precision farming tools to accomplish, to increase the productivity, the profitability, and the predictability of food production by up to 10 times.

Bhaya: The urban farming technologies including vertical farms and data-driven food production are certainly relevant for an arid region like the Arabian Peninsula. How did your partnership with DFA come about and what has been the journey like in the UAE for Alesca Life?

Oda: In 2016, our team was selected into the DFA program as part of Cohort 1. It was actually our first entry into the Gulf region. We knew that the technology had huge promise and potential in the region, and we wanted to make a serious commitment to the region. The DFA program was kind enough to offer us a spot in Cohort 1.

It has been hugely transformational in two ways. You know, the way in which business is done in the Middle East is very different. And to be able to have an organization like DFA, both providing the meaningful introductions, reducing some of the barriers related to the company's formation, and then also just the credibility that is bestowed on some of the companies that get to go through the program. All three of these things contributed enormously to our success in the region.

Through this program we've also been able to find meaningful strategic partnerships to mitigate some of the challenges related to concentration of supply chain, for example, even being in a place like China, to have manufacturing bases and other places in other countries, is beneficial for us.

So, right after the DFA program, we had an opportunity to localize the manufacturing of our container farm in the Emirates of Ajman in the UAE, so that we can serve our customers and our base in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) and also to showcase our commitment to the region that we're not just there to sell our systems, but that we are there for the long term.

Bhaya: The year 2020 has been a watershed in many ways for the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforcing our increasing reliance on digital and AI technologies without which we can't imagine a future. How did the global crisis impact the long-term vision of DFA?

Al Hawi: The pandemic has definitely affected everyone. At DFA, we realized that innovation is the way to be resilient for the future, prepared for the future and understanding exactly the problems of today that potentially, and unfortunately, led us into the pandemic. We had just a very short drop-in time in which everybody had to just realign ourselves, and that was around March. But we immediately resumed back in October.

Not just the DFA, I think all the government entities, as well as start-ups, realized how important a role they play in this ecosystem. And Cohort 8, that is currently ongoing and will last until the end of March, is specifically looking at challenges that will basically be more specific around life after COVID.

I'll share a couple of examples. The Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is looking into new solutions of shared mobility. We are very much accustomed to the ride-hailing apps and public transport systems. But that has changed forever. So they (RTA) are really being proactive in trying to foresight what new models of public transport and shared mobility will be out there. And we're really excited to see what comes out as solutions in a couple of weeks' time.

Another entity which is really looking at how things might evolve in the health care sector is the Dubai Health Authority. They are focusing on preventive health care measures, solutions and products, but not only from a sense of being preventive or proactive but in a sense of also democratizing access to that device.

Bhaya: Food security is already a global concern and going to be a top challenge in the future. It did aggravate last year due to the supply-chain disruption caused by the pandemic. What are some of the innovative solutions that Alesca Life offers to meet this challenge and has COVID-19 triggered a sense of greater urgency?

Oda: This is a great point. Pre-pandemic, in 2018-19, a lot of the interest and investment from governments, companies and investors was in food tech, which was related to food delivery and meal kits at home. And it was really focused on one thing, which was consumer convenience. What has happened in 2020, with the pandemic and now that we're in 2021, is that the focus has shifted materially from food tech to agtech - agricultural technology, which is focused on resilience. It's about community resilience, as opposed to consumer convenience.

So, one of the solutions, the benefits or the outcomes of the pandemic, was a renewed interest in agtech. And by that, I mean, local food production is in control of your own supply chain for fresh and nutritious food. So, since the pandemic has happened, since the lockdowns have begun, I've probably spoken to individuals and government entities from over 30 countries that are interested in finding ways in which they can secure a minimum supply of local fresh food production in their own countries, in their own communities.

The shift has accelerated towards this localization, towards this decentralized form of food production that can happen almost anywhere. And one of the solutions that we're providing for this is to bundle all of our precision farming tools – our monitoring equipment, our automation systems, our farm management and software tools, and even our latest computer vision AI cameras – and bundle all these products together to create an incredibly capital efficient indoor farm. And this allows both governments, at large scale, and even community, at a smaller scale, to be able to be in control of their local food production needs.

Interviewer and script: Abhishek G Bhaya

Video editors: Meiyi Yan & Wu Chutian

Cover image: Du Chenxin

Infographics: Jia Jieqiong

Director: Mei Yan

Bringing The Future To life In Abu Dhabi

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

Image from: Wired

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image from: Madar Farms

Global Challenges, Local Solutions

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

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

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

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

Image from: Agritecture

Nurturing Next-Generation Talent

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

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

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

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

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

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."

Warehouse Becoming Vertical Farms — And They’re Feeding New Jersey

Image from: New Jersey 101.5

New Jersey's vertical farms are transforming agriculture by helping farmers meet growing food demand.

New Jersey Agriculture Secretary Doug Fisher said that while conventional farming in outdoor fields remains critical, vertical farming has its advantages because of its efficiency and resistance to pests and thus less need for chemicals.

Vertical farming is the process of growing food vertically in stacked layers indoors under artificial light and temperature, mainly in buildings. These plants receive the same nutrients and all the elements needed to grow plants for food.

Vertical farms are also versatile. Plants may be growing in containers, in old warehouses, in shipping containers, in abandoned buildings.

"That's one of the great advantages — that we can put agriculture in the midst of many landscapes that have lost their vitality," said Fisher.

ResearchandMarkets.com says the U.S. vertical farming market is projected to reach values of around $3 billion by the year 2024.

The one drawback is that its operational and labor costs make it expensive to get up and running.

Image from: AeroFarms

In the past decade, however, vertical farming has become more popular, creating significant crop yields all over the state.

AeroFarms in Newark is the world's largest indoor vertical farm. The farm converted a 75-year-old 70,000-square-foot steel mill into a vertical farming operation. AeroFarms' key products include Dream Greens, its retail brand of baby and micro-greens, available year-round in several ShopRite supermarkets.

Kula Urban Farm in Asbury Park opened in 2014. Vacant lots are transformed into urban farms and there's a hydroponic greenhouse on site. That produce is sold to local restaurants.

Beyond Organic Growers in Freehold uses no pesticides and all seeds and nutrients are organic. There's a minimum of 12,000 plants growing on 144 vertical towers. On its website, it says the greenhouse utilizes a new growing technique called aeroponics, which involves vertical towers where the plant roots hang in the air while a nutrient solution is delivered with a fine mist. It also boasts that by using this method, plants can grow with less land and water while yielding up to 30% more three times faster than traditional soil farming.

Vertical farms in New Jersey help feed local communities. Many are in urban areas and are a form of urban farming.

Fisher predicts that vertical farms will be operational in stores and supermarkets around the state.

"It's continued to expand. There's going to be many, many ways and almost any area in the state has the opportunity to have a vertical farm," Fisher said.

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.

VIDEO: Potato Seeds Made Without Soil With Little Help From Peru

Parveen Arora

Potato Technology Centre, (PTC) Shamgarh, in the district in collaboration with Central Potato Research Institute (CPRI) in Shimla and International Potato Centre (CIP), Peru, has started producing potato seeds in the air with the help of aeroponic technique.

Scientists show a potato breed at Potato Technology Centre at Shamgarh village in Karnal district. Sayeed Ahmed

In this technique, there is no need for soil and other growing media like coco-peat for production. The scientists say that in aeroponics technique, potato seeds are grown in mist environment. They claim potato seeds grown through this technology are free from soil-borne diseases.

“We have started the process of growing minituber (potato seed) plants with the help of aeroponic technique. It is the latest technique for growing plants and potato seed production in an air or mist environment. There is no need for soil and this technology is free from soil-borne diseases,” said Dr Prem Chand Sindhu, Deputy Director, PTC, Shamgarh.

He maintained that they have established three units which have the capacity to grow 10 lakh minitubers in one crop cycle which is for three months. The scientists claimed that the production of seeds through this technique is much higher than conventional methods.

Dr Manish Sainger, the senior consultant at PTC, said that on an average, 30 minitubers and maximum 50-60 minitubers can be obtained from each plant. He said that through this technique, 7-10 times more minitubers can be obtained in comparison to conventional methods like net-house or open field.

About the technology, Dr Sainger said they planted tissue culture plants in the grow chambers which have pipes and nozzles for mist spray on the roots of the plant. “The roots of the plant hang in the air in the chamber and all the nutrients are provided through the mist, which consists of all the required elements for plant growth and tuberisation, periodically. The upper part of plant remains at the top of the chamber,” he added. He said that the size of minitubers is uniform at 3-4 gm.

Dr Sainger said it is easy to transport minitubers at minimal cost. “These seeds will be given to growers at subsidised rates by the Department of Horticulture. Later, seed growers will cultivate these seeds in the soil for the multiplication of seeds.”

Signify’s Expanded GrowWise Control System Helps Growers Boost Operational Efficiencies

Signify has expanded its GrowWise Control System, allowing for higher levels of automation and reducing manual labor and operational costs. This can be achieved by automating the lighting planning for their crop’s full growth cycle, up to one year ahead. The software tool brings dynamic lighting to greenhouses and vertical farms and fits seamlessly with modern climate computers and greenhouse management systems. This enables growers to automatically adjust light levels to maintain consistent levels on cloudy days, save energy on sunny days and simulate sunrise and sunset throughout the day or season.

 Growers, like the Italian vertical farm, Planet Farms, and the Belgium greenhouse, De Glastuin, are already using the expanded system providing additional value within their growing facility. 

“Using the GrowWise Control System is ideal for us,” says Luca Travaglini, co-founder of Planet Farms. “We want to automate as many aspects of our operations as possible to become more cost efficient. Now we can easily create custom light recipes and set them to run year-round to provide the right light recipe with the right light intensity at the right time throughout the crop’s growth cycle. By automating our full light strategy during the growth cycle, for the whole year, we can run our operations very efficiently and keep our manual labor costs low. That makes it easier for us to maintain consistent quality as we scale up our production.”

 The demand for the GrowWise Control System is increasing for greenhouse applications as well. “The lighting can be used much more efficient, since it gives us the flexibility to reduce light levels at any moment we need to,” says Wouter de Bruyn, owner at De Glastuin. Lettuce grower De Glastuin is using the GrowWise Control System to control the Philips GreenPower LED toplighting compact grow lights via its climate control system. “The climate computer is equipped with a daylight sensor that sends actual light measurements to the GrowWise Control System so we can adapt our light levels automatically to ensure an even light level throughout the day and season. This results in a continuous high-quality crop. In case the electricity is the limiting factor, we are still able to use the LEDs evenly for the whole greenhouse in a lesser intensity.”

 “Dynamic lighting in a greenhouse is the next step in improving the cost-efficiency and quality for the cultivation process,” says Udo van Slooten, Business leader Horticulture LED solutions at Signify. “It allows growers to effortlessly maintain a consistent level of light throughout the day to produce the best possible crops. The system compensates for cloudy weather and creates a more controlled growing environment for your crop.”

For more information about the GrowWise Control System and our Philips-banded horticulture lighting, visit our horticulture pages.

Or please contact:

 Global Marcom Manager Horticulture at Signify

Daniela Damoiseaux

Tel: +31 6 31 65 29 69

E-mail: daniela.damoiseaux@signify.com

www.philips.com/horti

About Signify

Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals and consumers and lighting for the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact connected lighting systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. With 2019 sales of EUR 6.2 billion, we have approximately 37,000 employees and are present in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. We achieved carbon neutrality in 2020, have been in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index since our IPO for four consecutive years and were named Industry Leader in 2017, 2018 and 2019. News from Signify is located at the Newsroom, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Information for investors can be found on the Investor Relations page.

Vertical Farming Takes Root In Taiwan

BY JULES QUARTLY

Exposed root system for hydroponically grown plants at YesHealth's iFarm in Taoyuan. Photo: Jules Quartly

After becoming a world leader in semiconductors and other electronic products, Taiwan is now looking to smart agriculture as its next vine to climb. The island aims to supply much of the world’s fruit and vegetables within the next 30 years.

This might seem rather unlikely until you consider that the future of farming is not land and labor but factories and robots. Furthermore, Taiwan already possesses in abundance the tools that tomorrow’s smart farmers will use, including solar and advanced light technology, chemicals, gene editing, drones, smart sensors, software, algorithms, data mining, and big data.

Many of these technologies are being put to use in a glittering new 14-story vertical farm at Copenhagen Markets in Denmark’s capital. The first phase of construction of the 7,000-square-meter facility finished in early December. It is one of Europe’s biggest and most efficient vertical farms and was built using a blueprint of patented technologies from Taiwan’s YesHealth Group.

The result of a partnership between YesHealth and Danish agritech startup Nordic Harvest, the farm looks like a fancy warehouse from the outside. The interior is fitted with rows upon rows and columns upon columns of trays containing leafy greens, growing under an intense battery of more than 20,000 smart LED lights. The plants are tended by engineers in lab coats and guided by software that processes over 5,000 individual data points to optimize plant health.

Rows of fresh produce grown under batteries of LED lights at iFarm. Photo: Jules Quartly

The LEDs provide variable spectrum light for 100 different kinds of plants, nanobubble hydroponics oxygenate the roots and inhibit bacterial growth, and liquid microbial fertilizers derived from oyster shells, brown sugar, and soy milk provide essential nutrients for plants and soil. Even the music played to the plants is science-infused, with classical or light jazz music ranging between 115 and 250 Hertz seeming to work best.

Production at the new vertical farm is set to begin in the new year and will scale up to around 3,000 kilograms of leafy vegetables per day by the end of 2021, equating to approximately 1,000 tons of greens annually. Crucially, unlike most farms, these figures are close to guaranteed since production is not at the mercy of climate, the weather, pests and disease, pesticide residue, nitrate levels, or hundreds of other variables that affect traditional farming. 

According to Jesper Hansen, YesHealth Group’s Chief Communications Officer, the partnership with Nordic Harvest has been a productive one so far. It took just five months to install the farm and all the produce is pre-sold to ensure the operation is profitable by Q3 of 2021.

“This collaboration is just the start of a long-term journey together,” Hansen said in an email from Denmark. He notes that the two partners plan to expand to other Scandinavian countries over the next several years.

Hansen credits Taiwan for its efficient development of the technology and know-how to reproduce vertical farms all over the world and calls the Danish development “a crucial milestone in our international expansion.” He adds that the company is eyeing new partners in Europe, Asia, and the MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) region.

YesHealth is the brainchild of serial tech entrepreneur Winston Tsai, who started an LCD screen company at age 21. His “eureka moment” came after being diagnosed with liver cancer and partly linking his illness to pollution in foods. After recovering, he made it his mission to produce affordable, pesticide-free produce by harnessing the power of technology.

He founded YesHealth Agri-Biotechnology Co. Ltd. in 2011 and six years later established YesHealth iFarm in Taoyuan’s Luzhu District. The iFarm cultivates an ever-expanding range of leafy vegetables and herbs in a 2,500-square-meter warehouse factory. It produces 1,500 kilograms of leafy greens per day, a yield which the company says is 100 times more efficient than a traditional farm using the same space and requires only 10% as much water. In addition, YesHealth has a farm in China’s Shenzhen, which harvests up to 2,500 kilograms per day.

A tour of iFarm is well worth a visit and introduces the wide variety of plants grown there. Photo: Jules Quartly

YesHealth’s products are sold to major retailers both in Taiwan and abroad, including restaurants, hotels, and airports. Its stated aim is to supply a total of 7,000 kilograms of leafy greens per day worldwide in 2021.

Diners enjoy a meal at iFarm’s restaurant, which overlooks the vertical farm. Photo: Jules Quartly

Having sampled the produce at the iFarm, I can confirm the arugula grown there is as tasty as any I have tried, while the lettuce and leguminous alfalfa is a perfectly clean, green, and crunchy eating experience – the result, I was informed, of an optimal growing environment and harvesting at exactly the right time.

A plate of salad featuring leafy greens grown at the iFarm site. Photo: Jules Quartly

In a sense, it’s back to the future for Taiwan, which had a largely agricultural economy up until the 1950s. Agriculture was one of the pillars supporting the nation’s economic miracle after World War II. With the help of mechanization and productivity gains, agricultural production at that time contributed around a third of Taiwan’s GDP.

In more recent times it has accounted for just 1.8-1.9% of GDP. That greatly reduced figure, which includes animal husbandry, fishing, and forestry, is not due to a decline in agricultural output per se, so much as the growth in manufacturing and the emergence of a pervasive service sector.

Taiwan has a wide range of rich, often volcanic soils that are exceptionally fertile, along with a subtropical climate that provides plentiful sun and rain. It is known as the “Fruit Kingdom” because of the quality of its fruit, with dozens of varieties ranging from bananas and papayas to wax apples and guavas. More than 100 kinds of vegetables grow all year round.

On the other hand, Taiwan’s mainly mountainous geography means just 25% of the land is suitable for farming. Meanwhile, climate change is affecting agricultural production by increasing summer temperatures and making rainfall more unpredictable. At the same time, considerable soil erosion, acidification, contamination by chemicals and heavy metals, and strong pesticide use have diminished soil quality over the last 50 years.

Furthermore, the proportion of Taiwanese involved in farming has rapidly declined, from 37% of the population in the early 1970s to the current 15% or less, according to the Yearbook of the Republic of China. Not only is the farming population declining, but it’s also ageing as well.

Those factors may not pose as much of an issue, however, since the old model of agriculture is being disrupted so dramatically that even economies of scale are being upended. Given the large size and advanced technology of the U.S., it may come as no surprise that it is the world’s biggest exporter of food as measured by value. Second on the list, however, is the Netherlands, which has just 0.045% the area of the U.S.

According to a National Geographic report in September 2017, the Netherlands’ achievement can be attributed to the work coming out of Wageningen University & Research, 80 kilometres from Amsterdam in the heart of Food Valley – the world’s agricultural equivalent of Silicon Valley in California. The university strives to come up with ways to increase yields and sustainability, and then to disseminate that knowledge.  

New generation

With its strong background in information technology, Taiwan is in a good position to follow that example. The island manufactures everything required for what is known as precision agriculture, a farming management concept that uses IT to collect data from multiple sources as a means of increasing crop yields and boosting profitability. Taiwan is thus the ideal place for putting together prototypes relatively quickly and cheaply.

YesHealth, for example, makes its own LED lights through a local contractor rather than relying on a major manufacturer like Philips, which means it’s nimbler in terms of bringing focused, new tech to the market – and reaping the dividends. According to the company’s Program Manager, Dennis Jan, Taoyuan’s iFarm has the sixth generation LED lighting, while new iterations that are increasingly productive and energy-efficient are being rolled out on an almost annual basis.

The Council of Agriculture (COA) recognized some time ago the need for a precision approach to farming. In 2016, it developed the “Smart Agriculture 4.0 Program,” which was passed by the legislature a year later.

COA realized that the nation’s “calorie-based food self-sufficiency rate is relatively low” and that “shortages in food supplies and escalations in food prices” will inevitably occur as the world’s population expands from 7.5 billion to an expected 10.5 billion by 2050. 

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that in order to meet the needs of all these additional people, about 70% more food needs to be produced. Gains achieved in improving crop yields have plateaued and are unlikely to rise again without a complete transformation of the agricultural landscape through the introduction of city farms, vertical farming, and the application of information technology.

In a written response to Taiwan Business TOPICS, COA commented: “With the rapid development of sensing technology, smart machinery devices, IoT, and big data analysis, smart agriculture has been growing in various fields.

“For example, it can monitor and control the production environment automatically to keep animals and crops in the best condition,” COA said. “It can predict harvesting dates and yields through data analysis and make adjustments to maintain a balance of production and marketing, and it can use smart automated machinery in agricultural operation to significantly reduce the labor burden.” Such uses, says the Council, “make agriculture more competitive.”

Fruitful results

Besides fruit orchards, other sectors that COA has included within Agriculture 4.0 include seedlings, mushrooms, rice, aquaculture, poultry, livestock, and offshore fisheries.

COA cites Taiwan Lettuce Village as an enterprise that has benefited from precision farming. The company halved fertilizer use but improved harvest efficiency 1.5 times by introducing a fertilization recommendation system, a harvesting date and yield prediction system, synchronous fertilizing technology, and transplanter and harvester technology.

According to COA the application of precision farming increased yield prediction accuracy by 5% and prevented 350 metric tons of overstocking. In addition, plant disease and pest control were improved through the use of a cloud-based system and machine learning algorithm. “The results were very fruitful,” COA concluded.

Agriculture 4.0 doesn’t just apply to the growing of produce; it also looks at the storage, transport, and export of goods. As an example, COA points to a relatively new fruit hybrid that was originally developed in Israel in the late 1960s. The atemoya – or pineapple sugar apple (鳳梨釋迦), as it is known in Taiwan – is a heart-shaped fruit with green, scaly skin. A cross between wax apples and the cherimoya (often referred to as Buddha’s head fruit locally), it has become synonymous with Taiwan and export success, much like the kiwi fruit and New Zealand.

Previously, 90% of the country’s atemoya exports went to China because it is so close. Later, the Taitung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station introduced a frozen whole-fruit technique that enables 95% of thawed fruit to have a “consistent ripening texture and dramatically improved the raw material quality.”

The technique involves a quick freeze to -40° Celsius, which inhibits bacteria, allowing the whole fruit to be transported at a fairly standard -18°C. After thawing, it can meet the rigorous food safety standards of Japan and South Korea.

Traditional farmers may harbor concerns about agriculture becoming a primarily manufacturing process, taking place under artificial light. However, Kevin Lin, Head of Business Development at YesHealth, insists that what the company is doing is still agriculture.

“This is nature; we are just optimizing it,” he says. “Sustainability is at the forefront of what we do, and our focus now is on ensuring the energy costs of vertical farming – such as heating and lights – are lowered and the source is sustainable.”

In this way, Lin says, Taiwan can produce cheap, healthy, and environmentally friendly food that can help feed the world, even as the global population approaches the staggering 10.5 billion mark.

PODCAST: An Interview With Henry Sztul - Chief Science Officer At Bowery Farming

Season 2 Episode 18

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Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show physicist, entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed tinkerer, Henry Sztul. Henry is the Chief Science Officer at Bowery Farming, a modern farming company on an ambitious mission to transform the future of food and change the face of agriculture.

In this episode, Harry and Henry discuss the promise that vertical farming provides to the world and why it resonated so soundly with Henry. Henry shares his personal career journey, his thoughts on the current state of agriculture, and what excites him most about the future of hydroponics and the AgTech industry in general.

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