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Vertical Farms Grow Veggies On Site At Restaurants And Grocery Stores
The Vertical Field setup retains many of the advantages of hydroponic vertical farms, but instead of the plants growing in a nutrient-packed liquid medium, the container-based pods treat their crops to real soil, supplemented by a proprietary mix of minerals and nutrients
By Paul Ridden
The Vertical Field urban farm pod can be installed in parking lots or inside warehouses, with a modular design that can grow according to customer need Vertical Field
Last month we reported that a huge vertical farming operation near Copenhagen in Denmark recently completed its first harvest. That setup uses hydroponics, but the veggies grown in Vertical Field urban farming pods take root in real soil.
Traditional agricultural farming involves the use of a lot of land and resources to grow crops, and then even more resources to harvest and transport the goods – sometimes thousands of miles – to where consumers can get to them.
As well as requiring a fraction of the growing space, controlled-environment agriculture systems such as hydroponics operations can be much more efficient, are no longer bound by season or location, the growing to harvest cycle is reduced and crops could be produced all year, and as with the Copenhagen operation, they can be set up close to where the food is purchased or consumed.
The Vertical Field setup retains many of the advantages of hydroponic vertical farms, but instead of the plants growing in a nutrient-packed liquid medium, the container-based pods treat their crops to real soil, supplemented by a proprietary mix of minerals and nutrients. The company says that it opted for geoponic production "because we found that it has a far richer flavor, color, and quality."
Vertical Field's urban farms grow walls of veggies inside recycled shipping containers
Vertical Field
"Vertical Field offers a revolutionary way to eat the freshest greens and herbs, by producing soil-based indoor vertical farms grown at the very location where food is consumed," said the company's CEO, Guy Elitzur. "Not only do our products facilitate and promote sustainable life and make a positive impact on the environment, we offer an easy-to-use real alternative to traditional agriculture. Our urban farms give new meaning to the term ‘farm to table,’ because one can virtually pick their own greens and herbs at supermarkets, restaurants or other retail sites."
The recycled and repurposed 20- or 40-ft (6/12-ft) shipping containers used to host the farms can be installed within reach of consumers, such as in the parking lot of a restaurant or out back at the grocery store. Growers can also scale up operations to more than one pod per site if needed, and the external surfaces could be covered in a living wall of decorative plants to make them more appealing.
The vertical urban farms are claimed capable of supporting the production of a wide range of fruits and veggies – from leafy greens and herbs to strawberries and mushrooms, and more. And it's reported to use up to 90 percent less water than a traditional farming setup.
"Through internal experiments with our irrigation method using data from sensors and models we have understood that this is the level of water efficiency," Vertical Field's Noa Winston told New Atlas. "Thus we arrived at an optimal irrigation protocol tailored to the needs of the plant."
According to the company's website, though pesticide-free, the system is not yet considered organic (though Vertical Field is currently in the process of attaining organic certification for the urban farm unit from the USDA). The crops also grow in a bug-free environment.
"The container is kept bug-free because it is sealed off, automated, and we limit human entry to only essential people and essential work," Winston explained. "The container farm itself is not a street vendor or a point of sale, therefore unnecessary or frequent entry does not occur."
Installing a Vertical Field urban farm in a grocery store parking lot means that consumers can benefit from fresh veggies all year long Vertical Field
Unlike some high-tech farming solutions, staff won't need special training to work with the vertical farm as the automated growing process monitors, irrigates, and fertilizes the crops as they grow thanks to arrays of sensors that continually feed data on climate, soil condition, LED lighting and so on to management software. Each vertical farm unit has its own Wi-Fi comms technology installed to enable operators to tap into the system via a mobile app.
The company told us that, by way of example, one container pilot farm offered a growing space of 400 sq ft (37 sq m) and yielded around 200 lb (90 kg) of produce per month, harvested daily. Lighting remained on for 16 hours per day. We assume that the pods are completely powered from the grid at their respective locations, though the company says that it is looking at ways to make use of solar panels as well as making more efficient use of water.
Vertical Field has been around since 2006 and has built a number of living green walls around the world since then. The soil-based vertical farm initiative was started in 2019.
Recent installations include the first Vertical Field container farm in the US at a restaurant named Farmers & Chefs in Poughkeepsie, New York, which started producing its own crops of fresh greens in mid-April 2020. Last month, following a successful pilot, Israel's largest supermarket chain, Rami Levy, signed an agreement with the company to roll vertical farms into dozens of store locations over the course of the next five years.
"The Rami Levy chain understands the social responsibility that it has for customers as related to food security and supplying the highest quality products while maintaining low prices," said the chain's Yafit Attias Levy. "Our customers bought Vertical Field's produce during the pilot and returned to purchase more. Therefore, we have decided to expand the partnership with Vertical Field to additional branches of the supermarket, and to offer fresh, high-quality, and pesticide-free produce in a way that increases shelf-life for our customers."
The Vertical Field urban farm can produce crops year round, without the use of pesticides Vertical Field
And earlier this month, Moderntrendo SRO – one of the largest agricultural distributors in Ukraine – signed up for a pilot project that will start with supermarket chain Varus, and potentially expand to other chains.
"We are extremely excited about our partnership with Moderntrendo SRO which has led to the project with Varus and will lead to more projects in the near future with more chains in Ukraine," Vertical Field's Guy Elitzur said. "One of the realizations that have surfaced during the COVID-19 crisis is the need to develop solutions that allow urban residents access to healthy food, with minimal human handling and without depending on transportation and shipping from remote locations. We are delighted to be able to provide - and expand access to - healthy, and high-quality vegetables grown right outside the consumer's door."
As well as grocery outlets and restaurants, the company sees its container-based vertical farms also being installed in hotels, universities, hospitals, and so on, in the future. The video below has more.
Grow Vegetables On-Site with Vertical Field
Source: Vertical Field
Automated Vertical Indoor Farming Set To Sprout
Vertical farming, which utilizes vertically-stacked layers of crops grown in climate-controlled facilities, utilizes significantly less water and soil than traditional agriculture
Vertical Farms Could Make Use of Abandoned Professional
Spaces As The Pandemic Grinds On
By Greg Nichols for Robotics
August 20, 2020
A Finish startup has been climbing the walls during the pandemic. At least the crops it helps grow in vertical gardens have been, including greens, berries, and vegetables in areas like the Middle East.
Vertical farming, which utilizes vertically-stacked layers of crops grown in climate-controlled facilities, utilizes significantly less water and soil than traditional agriculture. Increasingly we're seeing examples of the concept scaling to industrial-levels, which is good news with populations booming, arable land in ever-shorter supply, and waning interest in agriculture among city-bound youth.
iFarm has figured out a smart value proposition in the still-nascent market as a developer of vertical farm management technology, essentially an operating system that utilizes tremendous volumes of sensor data to fine tune automated crop growing. The company believes it's entering a market primed for steep growth.
"Investors can participate in the worldwide network of vertical farms and receive a rate of return well above bank deposit rates.", says Alex Lyskovsky, co-founder and President of iFarm. "We already have a group of financial partners involved in the development of our farms, and now there is a direct opportunity for this type of investment in Finland, UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Russia and UAE."
One of the interesting advantages of vertical farming, particularly in a pandemic when so many professional spaces stand empty, is that it's possible to utilize the urban environment to facilitate crop growing. By growing crops closer to city dwellers, the company can offer logistics efficiencies and unparalleled freshness.
This at a time when traditional farming is less and less viable. Global agricultural productivity is suddenly slowing for the first time in decades. No one is quite sure why, but it's likely a systemic problem related to the rise of monocultures and the overuse of fertilizers, which add harmful salts to soils. Farmers are also aging globally as younger generations migrate to cities. That's largely because a productivity boom over the last century has kept food prices low, which makes farming unattractive economically. It's a double whammy now that that productivity can no longer be taken for granted without major rethinks to the food supply chain.
Vertical farming and other smart agriculture innovations may offer realistic alternatives, and they've captured imaginations due to novel use of space and cutting edge technologies. iFarm's Growtune tech platform allows growers to leverage technologies like computer vision, machine learning, and huge volumes of data. The system can enable farming operations to spread vertical farms across distributed networks while still maintaining centralized control. And if there's any doubt that farming has changed, the level of control is staggering. The Growtune platform can determine the plant's weight, as well as growth deviations or pathologies, and build a system that improves crop quality and characteristics on its own. According to iFarm, the optimization will reduce labor costs for crops like strawberries, cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, radish, and others.
"The 2020 pandemic exposed the problems of the global food system – food supplies, sowing and harvesting were disrupted across the globe", says Mikhail Taver, Managing Partner at Gagarin Capital. "iFarm is taking a novel approach to agriculture, offering an automated solution to grow crops close to the consumer and ensure food security. We believe that the future of the food market lies in modern technologies and are excited to support the project on its way."
This Planter System Instantly Transforms Chain Link Fences Into Vertical Gardens
Kingston, New York, based designer, Bryan Meador released his latest product, the Sead Pod, an invention that uses recycled plastic to convert chain link fencing into lush vertical gardens in one easy step
Designer Plant Seads
Kingston, New York, based designer, Bryan Meador released his latest product, the Sead Pod, an invention that uses recycled plastic to convert chain link fencing into lush vertical gardens in one easy step. Sead Pods give people a quick and easy way to transform any urban space into a green haven while embracing a cyclical plastic economy that cleans our environment of single-use plastic waste.
Design Team
Bryan Meador
"The Sead Pod represents a new way of thinking about green design in an urban context," said Bryan Meador, Plant Seads' Founder and Chief Design Officer. "By reimagining existing architectural elements like chain link fencing as a tool in the fight against climate change, we're able to leap into the green movement immediately, fighting climate change at the grassroots level and making our cities cleaner, healthier, and more livable—right now."
Taking its name from the acronym 'Sustainable Ecology, Adaptive Design,' Plant Seads was founded as a reaction to the sluggish response of government and multinational companies to address the emergency of climate change. As a young, creative, and somewhat impatient person, Sead's founder Bryan Meador was frustrated by the lack of urgency surrounding this issue. " Our generation is the first to be born into Climate Change. This crisis is not hypothetical to us, and we're tired of waiting around for others to address this issue in a meaningful way."
Using 3d printing and rapid prototype development, the Sead Pod was designed, manufactured and released in less than 9 months. "We're inspired to take up this fight by young people like Greta Thunberg, who said, 'I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is,' That quote is printed large in our studio to serve as a daily reminder of what is at stake. Plant Seads is a brand with a mission; to create long term sustainable solutions for life in an environment that's changing more quickly than it ever has.
From those first drawings, we went through months of iterations to hone the design into its final form. We needed something that would be rigid enough to support the weight of a plant, along with the soil it needed, while hanging onto a fence. Something that could be manufactured at an industrial scale and look refined enough to fit in someone’s home. And most importantly, it had to be suitable for as many plants as possible.
"By harnessing the CO2 conversion that plants accomplish naturally, Sead Pods enable people to begin the larger process of CO2 sequestration at the grassroots level while governments and multinational companies figure out how to scale this process up to an industrial scale. Sead Pods also cool and clean the air we breathe by introducing more plants into our polluted urban spaces.
Sead Pods were conceived, designed, and manufactured in New York's beautiful Hudson Valley, eliminating the need for international shipping in its manufacturing supply chain.
True to its mission as a provider of grassroots solutions to a global problem, Plant Seads is funding its initial wide release of the Sead Pod through a Kickstarter campaign.
Process
Initial prototypes were 3D printed and sent out across the country for field testing, but the results were pretty poor. The basins in these initial prototypes were far too small to support something growing. Also, because there was so little space for soil, they dried out almost immediately, killing anything that managed to gain a foothold. Lastly, they looked great, but the hyper organic form was impossible to manufacture as one part, creating a prohibitively high cost for production. Our final planter accommodates more than 3 times as much soil as these first planters, allowing the soil to hold onto more water and roots to grow. They're also designed to be manufactured using injection molding, enabling a significantly lower price point and the capacity to fulfill large orders.
Materials were also a major concern. We worked with a local plastics manufacturer with decades of experience to determine what recycled material would be well suited for this project. It needed to be many things at once; durable enough to endure years of exposure to the elements, chemically stable enough to be safe even for someone wanting to grow food, and ideally it could be recycled again, re-entering and reinforcing the cyclical plastics economy. We decided that HDPE (high-density polyethylene) would be best. The material's excellent heat history (meaning that it can be heated up, molded, melted down and reformed again and again without losing structural integrity), non-toxic nature and easy recyclability were perfect for our needs.
To purchase your own Sead Pods, go to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plantseads/sead-pods-shapeshift-plastic-waste-into-vertical-gardens or just Google 'Plant Seads Kickstarter'
You can also sign up for our newsletter at PlantSeads.com and follow us on Instagram at @PlantSeads
Learn More About This Project
Durban: Vertical Farming In The Spotlight
Vertical gardening is one way to cool a building and reduce the need for air conditioners, said passionate gardener Wendy Taylor, who designed a vertical garden for the eThekwini Municipality
14 SEPTEMBER 2019 / DUNCAN GUY
Bubbles add oxygen to a pond with tilapia at the vertical garden on display at 77 Monty Naicker Street. Picture: Duncan Guy
Durban - Air conditioning may cool a building, but it doesn’t stop the ice melting in the world’s polar regions; it just contributes to it.
Vertical gardening is one way to cool a building and reduce the need for air conditioners, said passionate gardener Wendy Taylor, who designed a vertical garden for the eThekwini Municipality.
It’s in a building opposite the International Convention Centre where vertical gardening and other urban agriculture practitioners will brainstorm at the coming Urban Agri World 2019 conference.
In spite of China having the heaviest carbon footprint of all countries, Taylor was impressed with its vertical gardens on a recent visit there.
“There are many of them in all the main cities in China. Some are for to grow food, others are for beautiful plants. They adorn the streets,” she said.
Taylor said poor urban areas of Brazil lead the way when it came to vertical gardening for food. “There is not much land, people are poor and there is community farming.”
The garden Taylor designed and landscaping technologist Amy Gwillam implemented, receives drip irrigation from the top of the wall and the water drains into a pond, which is stocked with tilapia, and pumped back up. “It was intended for vegetables, but the condition wasn’t right; there wasn’t enough sun.”
Eventually, indoor plants that could take the shade and handle lots of water were found to be best suited.
Taylor said that while vertical gardens were becoming more trendy all over the world, she did not expect them to take-off in South Africa unless legislation required them.
“A disadvantage is that they require high maintenance. One must ensure irrigation systems never block up.”
The conference, from September 17 to 19, will discuss the key issues pertaining to progressive farming developments for the indoor and vertical farming industry. There will be an emphasis on food production.
“Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050,” read a conference document.
“United Nations projections show that urbanization. combined with the overall growth of the world’s population. could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, with close to 90% of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa.
“To feed another 2 billion people in 2050, food production will need to increase by 50% globally. The challenge of growing enough healthy food for growing cities is enormous.
“At the same time, the stresses of climate change, and the declining availability of arable land and freshwater are challenging conventional agriculture as never before.”
The vertical garden and rooftop garden are at 77 Monty Naicker (Pine) Street.
They are open to the public from 7.30am to 3.30pm on Mondays to Fridays.
Groups of more than 10 should call 0313228280 in advance.
South Jakarta Residents Turn Urban Spaces Into Vegetable Gardens
Residents of Pengadegan sub district in Pancoran, South Jakarta, have been running a successful urban farming program using hydroponics.
Jakarta / January 16, 2019
Residents of Pengadegan in South Jakarta prepare the walls along an alley in their neighborhood to start a vertical garden. (Via wartakota.tribunnews.com/Istimewa)
Residents of Pengadegan subdistrict in Pancoran, South Jakarta, have been running a successful urban farming program using hydroponics. On Tuesday, they started transferring the plants to a soil medium.
Pengadegan subdistrict head Mursid said that transplanting would start in the RW 05 community unit, as it had several open spaces.
“RW 05 fits the characteristics of the space required to grow plants in soil,” he said as reported by wartakota.tribunnews.com.
He added that growing plants in soil was more efficient, easier and cheaper, and that the results would be as satisfying as hydroponically grown plants.
The urban farming program was initiated at the Pengadegan subdistrict office to provide a model for residents to copy in their neighborhoods, said Mursid.
“We’re planting different kinds of vegetables like water spinach and Chinese mustard. They’re useful for people,” he said.
Earlier, urban farming groups in Kebayoran Lama Selatan subdistrict had harvested 150 kilograms of vegetables from their gardens, located in the dense neighborhoods near Tanah Kusir Cemetery. (vla)
A Recent Study In Senior Living Communities Learned What Residents Miss The Most From Their Own homes.
Number One Is Their Music, Number Two Is Gardening.
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For an older adult who feels as though they’ve lost their purpose, gardening delivers a sense of meaning and accomplishment. It gives them a piece of home and familiarity. It makes them proud to see that something they created is being used.
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Vertical Gardening Systems:
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For more information, contact
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Vertical Gardening Systems