SARAH DEVINE

19 September 2019

Scotland’s agriculture sector is changing rapidly, with rural businesses across the country driving forward groundbreaking innovations in attempts to address the myriad challenges of the land.

Globally, some 113 million people across 53 countries reportedly experienced food poverty last year, and it is expected that the world’s population will reach 9.8 billion by 2050, according to the UN.

However, inventive organizations across Scotland are devising new and creative ways to tackle the global food shortage.

Invergowrie-based Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) has created Scotland’s first vertical farm, pictured here, and the company has recently harvested a £5.4 million cash boost from the Scottish Investment Bank, agri-food investor S2G and online venture capital firm AgFunder.

The firm, which is based at the James Hutton Institute situated on the outskirts of Dundee, provides vertical farming technology to enable efficient food production through indoor crops around the world, having built its demonstration facility at Invergowrie last year.

It features stacked layers, LED lights and app-controlled air vents to create the perfect conditions for crops to thrive all year round.

The early-stage company states that its patented Internet of
Things-enabled power and communications platform is able to reduce an organization’s energy usage by up to 50 percent and labor costs by up to 80 percent, in comparison to other indoor growing environments, and can produce yields of 225 percent compared to crops that have been grown under glass.

IGS experimented with colored LED lights, growing basil plants at the indoor facility in an impressive 20 days.

Its chief executive, David Farquhar, explains that such developments are urgently needed because at present an astonishing 30 percent of the world’s food is put to waste.

“Vertical farming allows experimentation to take place in order to impact the yield or cost of production, flavor, nutrients, appearance or a combination of those things,” he says.

“Producers want consistency, assurance of supply, and to know they are going to fill supermarket shelves or supply those Michelin-starred restaurants every day of the week. Those are things that farmers struggle with all the time.”

Farquhar adds: “If there is a forecast for bad weather and a supermarket decides to only take half of their delivery, what are they going to do with the rest of the produce?”

Using the vertical farm, a crop’s growth can be slowed down or sped up to prevent waste.

“People have been talking about vertical farms for several years, but we are now at the starting point. Over the next six months, we will get going with the first technology in the world that is capable of delivering this on an industrial scale.”

The firm, which was formed in 2013, plans to use this recent funding to create jobs in areas such as software development, engineering, robotics, and automation.

Investment into such areas is also needed across Scotland because dietary demand is changing, according to David Ross, chief executive of Edinburgh-based Agri-EPI Centre.

“Environmental sustainability is personal now for everyone and therefore there are challenges for primary producers to adapt to the needs of the consumer, the needs of society and the overall sustainability of the planet,” he says.