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Vertical Farming Funding On The Rise in 2017 & Predictions for 2022
Vertical Farming Funding On The Rise in 2017 & Predictions for 2022
by Sierra Clark
Vertical farming is an industry with the enormous potential to change the way we eat. By saving resources and producing local food, vertical farming may alleviate many of the concerns facing traditional agriculture. However, to become a thriving, sustainable industry will require funding. This means venture capitalists, angel investors, crowd funders, and government must demonstrate enough interest to dedicate money to vertical farming ventures. Without proper funding, a future with vertical farming, and other indoor agriculture methods will not be possible.
Funding for vertical farming has grown
Luckily for the vertical farming industry, funding is on the rise. In 2017, two major methods of funding saw rapid growth. From 2016 to 2017, venture capital funding for vertical farming increased by 653% from 36 million to 271 million. Most of this funding was funneled to a few large companies with strong tech initiatives (read: Plenty). Additionally, crowdfunding for a variety of indoor agriculture initiatives, on sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, increased by 900% from 2.8 to 28 million.
Plenty raised $226 million
Plenty received the largest amount of funding for a vertical farming venture to date. In July 2017, their Series B of $200 million was led by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son with SoftBank Vision Fund and notable investment funds for Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Already Plenty has a vertical farm in South San Francisco and a testing facility in Wyoming. With recent funds, they plan to expand to a 100,000 square foot farm in Washington, twice the size of their San Francisco farm, and globally.
Multiple companies raised tens of millions this year
Other indoor agriculture companies have also seen major increases in funding. AeroFarms, an urban ag and clean tech company in New Jersey, has raised $142.9 million to date. In November 2017, they closed a $40 million Series D round to increase staff and expand globally. Bright Farms, a greenhouse company in New York, has raised $57.9 million to date. In September 2016 they completed a $30 million Series C round led by Catalyst Investors to expand nationally. Bowery, a vertical farm company in New York, has raised $31 million to date. In June 2017, their Series A of $20 million was led by General Catalyst.
Predictions
By 2022, the vertical farming industry will have developed and matured. We believe that the industry is here to stay. In growing numbers, people are demanding local food. Led by this major trend, we expect to see two major advances in the industry within the next five years.
Sources of funding will increase and diversify
Not all vertical farming or indoor agriculture companies are receiving millions in funding. In fact, funding is still a major issue for many vertical farmers. However, where leaders go the rest may follow. Since respected influencers like Schmidt and Bezos are betting on the industry, we can expect interest and funding opportunities to grow. Expect to see investment firms dedicate funds specifically for vertical farming and controlled environment agriculture. We see this already in firms like Equilibrium and Contain Inc.
While the government is typically slower to act than private companies, expect to see more grants and dedication to the sustainable farming space. Cities like Atlanta already have focused urban agriculture initiatives, such as the AgLanta Conference and Urban Food Forest.
Robots and automation will become more integrated in the industry
Labor is one of the largest operational costs (around 25%, following electricity at 26%) for a vertical farm. By reducing labor costs companies can reduce product cost and increase margins, ideally with the aim to provide local food to everyone. Certain countries, such as Holland and Japan have been using automation and robots in indoor agriculture practices for years. Holland is known for acres of fully automated greenhouses, while Japan has over 240 plant factories (comparably, the US has 50), many of which utilize robots instead of traditional labor. Both countries have mature indoor agriculture industries and likely serve as an example of what is to come in the United States. Already, Plenty has integrated robots into their system using small robots, called Schleppers, to transplant seedlings.
This year the indoor ag industry has received more funding than ever before. We expect that funding opportunities will continue to grow, as will technological advances in the space. For now, we must continue to innovate, discover, and raise the industry forward. The future of the world depends on it.
LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TO FUND URBAN AND VERTICAL FARMING BUSINESSES DURING THE SMART FINANCE TOPIC AREA OF THE 2018 AGLANTA CONFERENCE ON MARCH 27 & 28 IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA.
urban agriculture, vertical farming, indoor agriculture, CEA, future, funding, investment, venture capital,automation
Applications Are Now Open For The Iowa AgriTech Accelerator’s Class of 2018.
i Grow News is a proud supporter of the Iowa AgriTech Accelerator. Based in Des Moines, Iowa. The Accelerator seeks early-stage companies with an idea, intellectual property or prototype for agricultural innovation for its Class of 2018.
Applications are now open for the Iowa AgriTech Accelerator’s Class of 2018.
If you know of an early-stage company with an idea, intellectual property or prototype for agriculture, they can apply for this year’s cohort at www.agiowa.com/apply.php.
Companies selected to participate will receive seed funding, subsidized housing, time with mentors and investors and opportunities to build strategic partnerships.
I’m pleased to be a mentor for this year’s cohort.
Indoor Farmers Report Access to Capital Is Biggest Challenge, Agrilyst Survey Says
While last year, indoor farmers reported the cost of operations as their biggest challenge, this year growers say that access to capital is their biggest hurdle, according to a new report from indoor farming software company Agrilyst.
Indoor Farmers Report Access to Capital Is Biggest Challenge, Agrilyst Survey Says
While last year, indoor farmers reported the cost of operations as their biggest challenge, this year growers say that access to capital is their biggest hurdle, according to a new report from indoor farming software company Agrilyst. It may seem impossible, with indoor farms like AeroFarms, Bowery Farming, and Plenty announcing large early rounds of venture funding, but indoor farming contains much more variety than these high tech coastal operations, as the annual Agrilyst report seeks to demonstrate.
Indoor Farming, on the whole, is maturing, according to the report and Agrilyst CEO Allison Kopf, with greenhouse operations making the most progress to date.
“I’m seeing the most maturation in the high-tech, smart greenhouse industry. Growers in greenhouse operations who have been operating for a number of years are perfecting growing methods and reinvesting profits into new technologies, instead of inventing systems and methods from scratch. Profit margins are pretty stable for these operations and both revenue and costs are incredibly stable across all facility sizes, whereas other facility types (like vertical farming) showed large spreads across different size and age facilities,” Kopf told AgFunderNews.
The report is the result of a survey of 150 indoor farms in eight countries and paints a picture of the financial health and hurdles of various kinds of indoor farming operations. A clear majority (81%) of respondents were US-based with 12% from Canada and 7% from other countries. Nearly half of respondents represent hydroponic farms, while 24% run soil-based operations, 15% aquaponics, 6% aeroponics, and 6% use a mixture of growing technologies.
The most dominant type of facility was glass or poly greenhouses (47%) followed by indoor vertical farms (30%), which generally convert existing industrial buildings. Plastics hoop houses, container farms and other types of structure make up the remaining 23% of respondents.
Costs Rise As Farms Grow Up
In terms of challenges, access to capital is followed by what the report calls “building-related” challenges such as pests and maintaining optimal growing environments followed by labor, and financial sustainability.
Indoor growers continue to focus on specialty crops to take advantage of high margins since operation expenses remain high, with labor at the top of the list.
While labor is a major cost center for all types of indoor farming, vertical farms require the most employees per square foot. “This makes automation technologies incredibly important as the industry matures,” concludes the report.
In terms of inputs, costs are generally split evenly between seeds, nutrients and grow media, except for vertical farms, where grow media represents half of input costs. The report explains that even in profitable vertical farming operations, the cost per square foot is $37.10 while the cost of a hydroponic operation is $13.86. While growing in stacked layers may mean that this difference isn’t as dramatic as it appears.
Profitability Depends on Farm Type and Crop, Not Tech
Profitability remains a challenge for indoor growers with only 51% of reporting farms operating profitably.
The type of farming operation most likely to be profitable according to the report, are indoor deep water culture operations followed by glass or poly greenhouses with 75% and 67% of respondents reporting profitability, respectively. The third most profitable growing method in the survey is container farms (50%) followed by indoor vertical farms (27%) and low-tech plastic “hoop houses” (25%).
The report notes however that “vertical farms reporting limited profitability is most likely because it is a new industry that is just beginning to mature.” Indeed even funding record-breaking vertical farm Plenty is less than five years old. The average age of the unprofitable farms was five years, while the average age of the profitable farms was seven years.
Flower-growing operations are by far most likely to profitable with 100% of farms in the survey reporting operating in the black. Flowers are followed by tomatoes with 67% profitability and micro greens with 60% profitability. Kopf said that this year’s survey did not receive responses from enough cannabis growers to include in the report, but cannabis likely remains the most profitable crop grown indoors.
The type of growing technology seems less correlated to profitability as most technology types range from 50-60% of farms reporting profitability with one exception. Only 25% of farms reporting using a mix of growing technologies operate profitably.
Common Misconceptions
The survey seeks to underline that indoor farming is not only an urban phenomenon, though urban operations generally receive more media attention and seem to draw more venture funding. What might come as a surprise to those who follow the big names in indoor farming is that the majority of respondents were in rural locations (47%) while urban farms made up 43% of respondents and the rest suburban.
“Indoor agriculture isn’t equivalent to urban farming. This is a big misconception. As evidenced by the data, indoor farms typically locate close to the point of sale or where efficiency can be maximized. For a tomato grower, this may mean locating a greenhouse in a rural area where energy is cheaper and closer to a distribution center,” reads the report.
It is also a common misconception that indoor farms can only grow tomatoes, greens, and cannabis. Though these are definitely staples of indoor farms, the crop assortment among the 150 operations surveyed is much more varied and includes: leafy greens, tomatoes, cannabis, flowers, microgreens, strawberries, herbs, cucumbers, peppers, mushrooms, onions, leeks, hops, figs, sweet corn, eggplant, fish, insects, carrots, and shrimp but the main crops are leafy greens, microgreens, herbs, flowers, and tomatoes.
To find out more about the costs associated with each farm type and growing method, and the state of indoor farming generally, download the full report.
Tortuga AgTech Raises $2.4m Seed Round for Indoor Ag Robotics
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Tortuga AgTech Raises $2.4m Seed Round for Indoor Ag Robotics
DECEMBER 4, 2017 EMMA COSGROVE
Tortuga AgTech, a Denver-based robotics startup targeting controlled-environment fruit and vegetable growers has raised a $2.4 million Seed round.
Tortuga Agtech is developing robotic systems for harvesting fresh produce in controlled environments, from indoor hydroponics to greenhouses, starting with strawberries.
“Our products will enable advanced growing methods to compete with scale agriculture, which means growers will be able to grow better produce that’s also better for the planet,” says the company’s website.
The round was led by early-stage hardware VC Root Ventures and closed in September. Root Ventures is also an investor inMomentum Machines, San Francisco’s burger-making robot company, which raised $18.4 million in June.
Also participating in this round were Silicon Valley tech VCs Susa Ventures and Haystack, data-focused firm AME Cloud Ventures, AI and robotics VC Grit Labs, the Stanford-StartX Fund and SVG Partners, which runs the Salinas Valley-based Thrive Agtech Accelerator. AME Cloud is also an investor Zume Pizza, a pizza delivery company in the Bay Area with a robot for a chef, which raised $48 million in October.
Harvesting of row crops has been automated for decades, but harvesting of specialty crops, like nuts, fruits, and vegetables, remains an elusive skill for farm robotics startups. Not only do these crops vary greatly in size, height, and color, they can also be more delicate and require not just a light touch in picking, but immediate assessment and packing by size or quality.
Though high-tech indoor agriculture is ripe for robotics interventions because of the easier and more stable working conditions compared to the field, not many robotics startups have emerged servicing this kind of growing.
Spread is a Japanese indoor vertical farming company that will open an automated lettuce farm in early 2018 allowing for a 50% reduction in human labor, according to the company. Transplanting seedlings, managing the growth process, and harvesting will all be automated, according to the company’s website.
South San Francisco-based vertical farm Plenty’s CEO told Business Insider that the company uses tiny robots in its seeding process. Though the company is not yet commercially growing strawberries, CEO Matt Barnard told AgFunderNews this is in the works.
Most operating vertical farms today are growing only leafy greens and microgreens due to the short growing cycles and high yields. There are just a few growing strawberries such as Japan’s Ichigo Company.
Greenhouses, however, are gaining market share of strawberry cultivation worldwide. Though greenhouse-growing of strawberries in the US has not yet taken off, 24% of strawberries grown in the Netherlands, the worlds second-largest exporter of food (by value) grow in a greenhouse according to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics.
Also working on harvesting strawberries, but in outdoor environments, are Agrobot and Harvest Croo
Indoor Ag-Con Asia Returns to Singapore, Introduces Indoor AG Pitch Competition with $150,000 In Cash Grant Prizes
NOVEMBER 27, 2017 BY RONY DELUCIA
Indoor Ag-Con Asia Returns to Singapore, Introduces Indoor AG Pitch Competition with $150,000 In Cash Grant Prizes
Indoor Ag-Con
Indoor Ag-Con covers growing using hydroponic, aeroponic & aquaponic techniques. It is hosting a 2-day conference, trade show & pitch competition on Jan 16-17.
Still buzzing from @indooragcon Asia! Thanks for the great event.” — @Galactic Farms
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SINGAPORE, SG, November 27, 2017 /EINPresswire.com/ —
The indoor agriculture industry has grown rapidly as consumer demand for fresh, local produce anytime, anywhere is forcing shifts in global supply chains. Indoor Ag-Con is the premier event covering the technology of growing crops in indoor systems, using hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic techniques. It is returning to Singapore for the third time in January 2018. This years’ event will be focused on accelerating innovation in the industry, in areas as diverse as plant biology and artificial intelligence.
Our two-day event will be hosted at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore on January 16-17, 2018, and will include an exhibition hall and an exciting lineup of speakers including representatives from AEssense, Eco Insect Farming, Microsoft, Sanan Bio and Urban Crop Solutions, among many others. We will be covering a broad range of crop types – such as leafy greens, mushrooms, insects, aquaculture and medicinal crops – as well as technologies ranging from artificial intelligence to LED lighting to control systems. Participants will receive an exclusive hard copy of the newest edition in our popular white paper series in the event gift bag. Participants will have the chance to network during the day, through our event app and at our popular after party on the first evening of the event. The event is sponsored by Fresh Box Farms, Upgrown Farming, and Urban Crop Solutions.
For the first time, Indoor Ag-Con Asia’s exhibition hall will include country pavilions, with companies from Canada, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands able to represent their home countries at the event. Further details on joining a country pavilion can be found at indoor.ag/Asia.
Our events have long supported entrepreneurs in this fast-growing industry, for instance, we sponsored the first Startup Weekend Singapore to include an indoor agriculture focus in 2017. We are taking this commitment one step further in 2018 with an indoor agriculture pitch competition – Indoor Ag-Ignite – to find the most innovative new ideas globally in indoor agriculture. The competition is open to any team or company of under 40 employees developing or deploying technologies for the indoor agriculture industry. Three winning teams will receive prize packages including Startup SG grants of S$50,000 per team thanks to the sponsorship of SPRING Singapore. Startup SG grants are divided into two parts; a S$25,000 non-dilutive cash grant and a further S$25,000 grant with an option to convert into equity at the next institutional fundraising.
We’re accepting applications to pitch on our website until January 8, 2018. The initial round of pitches will take place on January 15, 2018 at Marina Bay Sands, and a panel of three judges will select five finalists to pitch to our entire Indoor Ag-Con audience on January 17, 2018. A panel of judges will select the three winners. Please visit our website at indoor.ag/pitch for more information.
Participant Feedback: @Galactic Farms “Still buzzing from @indooragcon Asia! Thanks for the great event.”
Indoor Ag-Con, which hosts meetings in Las Vegas and Philadelphia in addition to Singapore, is the leading convener of growers, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and investors involved in the growth of the sector. Our audience includes greenhouse and vertical farm growers, technology companies, executives from the food and beverage sector, venture firms, startups and established urban farmers.
Since it was founded in 2013, Indoor Ag-Con has captured an international audience at all its, attracting some of the top names in the business. Events have welcomed over 2,250 participants from more than 20 countries.
Newbean Capital, the host of the conference is a registered investment advisor; some of its clients or potential clients may participate in the conference. The Company is ably assisted in the event’s production by Rachelle Razon, Michael Nelson and Sarah Smith of Origin Event Planning.
3rd Annual Indoor Ag-Con Asia
Date – January 16-17, 2017
Place – Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
Registration – currently open to the general public from US$399
Features – Two-day seminar, with keynote speakers, exhibition hall, after-party, and pitch competition
For more information, please visit www.indoor.ag/asia or call +1.775.623.7116
Nicola Kerslake
Newbean Capital
7756237116
email us here
S2G Ventures Wants to Professionalize AgriFood Tech Investing With $180m Fund, New Hires
“It’s amazing that food and agriculture is probably the largest industry in the world but that the amount of capital, innovation, and entrepreneurship is relatively small compared to what we see in other industries; that was my first takeaway on entering this space,” says Aaron Rudberg, the recent high profile hire by S2G Ventures, the agrifood tech venture capital firm.
S2G Ventures Wants to Professionalize AgriFood Tech Investing With $180m Fund, New Hires
NOVEMBER 13, 2017 | LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
“It’s amazing that food and agriculture is probably the largest industry in the world but that the amount of capital, innovation, and entrepreneurship is relatively small compared to what we see in other industries; that was my first takeaway on entering this space,” says Aaron Rudberg, the recent high profile hire by S2G Ventures, the agrifood tech venture capital firm.
S2G recently closed its second fund on $180 million and is the most active dedicated agrifood tech venture capital firm today with 30 investments under its belt.
Rudberg is S2G’s chief operating officer and joined the Chicago-based firm from the $3.3 billion private equity and venture capital business Baird Capital where he spent nearly 10 years as a partner overseeing global strategy, investor relations, marketing and business development. The agrifood industry is fairly new to Rudberg who says his experience is mostly in technology and software.
Rudberg’s role will focus on building out the firm’s infrastructure so it can continue to scale. This will involve introducing best practices on how to manage funds, providing more structured support to portfolio companies, particularly in hiring talent, structuring their sales processes, and interacting with industry corporates.
“While this sector has not been a focus before, I’m familiar with the business model, characteristics, and best practices that bring both successes and failures, so I hope to bring that experience to bear at S2G,” he says.
AgriFood Tech VCs Behind Operationally
Operationally, Rudberg believes the agrifood tech venture industry has some catching up to do with other startup industries such as healthcare and software.
“I have seen few, if any, [agrifood tech investment] firms that have extensive resources to help portfolio companies on the operating side,” he says. “Looking at our 30 portfolio companies, they are all going through growing pains and often have more opportunity than resources, so that’s an opportunity for us to offer them more support around sales or human capital, performance assessment, and corporate relationships to help accelerate their growth.”
By building this “operational toolkit,” Rudberg hopes S2G will differentiate itself from others, and become a better partner for startups.
“We want to be more than just capital,” he says. “We will provide capital to get into the game, then offer advice and counsel based on pattern recognition and experience.”
S2G will focus on building out support for its portfolio companies in three core areas: sales, human capital, and corporate development.
Key Support: Sales, Human Capital, Corporates
In sales, Rudberg says the firm aims to help companies leverage online channels, digital content, and data to build a sales process that’s repeatable.
For human capital, it’s about building the right culture internally to find the right talent. This is likely to involve S2G making direct recommendations for hires based on the build-out of its own CRM system of top executives. Rudberg references Baird, which had two people working full time to support its portfolio companies in hiring talent.
For corporate development, Rudberg wants S2G to continue to build relationships with strategic industry players; he says half of the firm’s 80 co-investors are strategics.
“All startups are looking for relationships with large corporates; the more we can be engrained in those relationships and bring startups insights from top strategics, the more we can provide better insight on tactics and strategy, as we well as potential exit opportunities,” he says.
Building Virtual Vertical Integration in the Portfolio
S2G invests in startups from farm-to-fork with the aim of assembling a “virtual” vertically-integrated portfolio of agrifood tech companies, Sanjeev Krishnan, managing partner of the firm, tells AgFunderNews.
The firm’s first $125 million
S2G’s portfolio to-date
The firm aims to use this virtual vertical integration to create connections across the supply chain and link consumer trends to decisions made on the farm. Clusters of portfolio companies around certain issues can then form, presenting opportunities for the companies to work together, thereby creating efficiencies in the supply chain.
For example, two portfolio companies — MycoTechnology and Blue Prairie Foods — are working on ingredients (or “inputs”) that reduce sugar use in food products, while another five are producing low-sugar foods — Back to the Roots, Maple Hill Creamery,Froozer, Ripple, and Once Upon a Farm.
“One portfolio company’s issue can be a purchase order for another,” says Krishnan.
The other food system issues these startups are working on include climate change, human health, sugar consumption, food waste, the democratization of organic food, farmer profitability, food access, the future of proteins, nutrition, traceability, water, transparency, and soil health.
What’s Next for Fund II?
Fund II will largely follow a similar strategy to Fund I, investing across the food ecosystem, but may make larger investments, says Krishnan adding that it will invest between $250k and $25 million per company, syndicating larger investments too.
Finding other investors for agrifood tech deals is not without its challenges, however.
“While the US food system is a $1.2 trillion industry, there is not enough dedicated risk capital available to support entrepreneurs during their critical growth stage,” says Krishnan. “We spend significant time syndicating our investments and ensuring that our entrepreneurs work with trusted financial and strategic partners.”
Fund II also attracted commitments from a similar subset of investors — predominantly family offices, some of which are associated with the food industry.
The team will be hiring at least three new members of staff in the near future.
Fund II also attracted commitments from a similar subset of investors — predominantly family offices, some of which are associated with the food industry.
The team will be hiring at least three new members of staff in the near future.
AfDB President Lauds Agric Minister For Reviving Agricultural Sector In Ghana
The Agricultural sector in Ghana has over the past ten months been at the forefront of Ghana's economy after witnessing eight years of decline.
AfDB President Lauds Agric Minister For Reviving Agricultural Sector In Ghana
Ridwan Issah Alhassan | November 21, 2017
Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto
The Agricultural sector in Ghana has over the past ten months been at the forefront of Ghana's economy after witnessing eight years of decline.
After consistent decline, the agricultural sector recorded a massive growth of 4.3% this year, according to the 2018 Budget Statement presented to Parliament on Wednesday by the Finance Minister, Mr. Ken Ofori Atta.
This significant achievement of the sector has largely been attributed to the roll out of the Government's flagship Planting for Food and Jobs campaign.
The campaign was envisioned by the President, His Excellency, Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo and initiated by the Sector Minister, Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, to support smallholder farmers by providing them with subsidized inputs such as improved seeds, fertilizers, free extension services and ready markets for their produce.
Not only has the programme generated interest from domestic but it has also received international commendations from leading figures, with the latest coming from the President of the African Development Bank(AfDB) Dr. Akinwumi Adesina.
The President of the AfDB, who was delivering his first major public speech after receiving "The World Food Prize Award" in October this year, singled out the Minister of Food and Agriculture of Ghana, Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, for commendation.
Dr. Adesina was addressing participants including Food and Agriculture Ministers from selected countries during the 2017 edition of the SARA Exhibition held in the Ivorian, Abidjan.
The President of the AfDB whose speech highlighted the need for African to adopt technology and mechanization to ensure food security commended the Food and Agriculture Minister of Ghana for his commitment towards tackling food security and improving the socio-economic condition of farmers through the PFJ programme.
According to him, the commitment and dexterity exhibited by the Minister towards arresting the declining fortunes of agriculture in Ghana, deserves to be commended.
"We have gathered here today discussing how to improve the fortunes of agriculture in Ghana and I must commend the Food and Agriculture Minister of Ghana who is here with us," He noted, adding that Hon. Dr. Afriyie Akoto was doing wonderfully well to revive his country's Agriculture with the laudable Planting for Food and Jobs(PFJ) campaign.
As a brainchild of the Minister, the PFJ campaign hinges on five main pillars; provision of improved seeds, fertilizer, extension services, access to marketing and application of ICT in the implementation of the programme.
A successful implementation of the pilot phase of the programme saw a little over 200,000 farmers across the 216 districts benefiting from the huge subsidy offered by government.
Apart from the increase in food production which is likely to reduce the huge bills accrued every year as a result of the importation of basic food items, nearly 800,000 jobs have also been created through direct production and along the value chain
Meanwhile, adequate provision has been made in the 2018 budget to cover half a million as the Ministry seeks to expand the campaign in the coming crop season.
Amongst the strategy, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture is encouraging the participation of Chiefs (One Chief, One Farm), educational institutions (Food Farms for Schools), Corporate bodies and the general public through urban and peri-urban farming.
The expansion also forms part of moves by the Ministry to explore fertile and arable lands in the Afram Plains and Fufulso- Sawla Valleys.
Additionally, the Ministry is also set to implement the ambitious Marshall Plan, a comprehensive strategy that seeks address challenges confronting the agricultural sector such as infrastructure, agric financing, agro-processing, agribusiness amongst others.
Ag Tech Investor Conference - Des Moines, IA - November 9, 2017
Purchase your tickets now
To attend Prairie Crest Capitals Annual
Ag Tech Conference Featuring Keynote Speaker
Steve Forbes and National Ag Leaders
Prairie Crest Capital invites you to its Agricultural Technology Investor Conference, to be held Thursday, November 9, in Hy-Vee Hall at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa. The conference will highlight the opportunities, challenges and successful deployment methods in investment in emerging companies in the Ag Tech sector.
For Confirmed Speakers and Agenda
Visit our website at prairiecrestcapital.com
AeroFarms Brings in IKEA and David Chang to Close $40m Series D
US indoor agriculture group AeroFarms has closed a $40 million Series D round, adding IKEA Group and David Chang, chef and founder of the Momofuku Group, and retired US Army General David Petraeus to a previously released list of international investors.
AeroFarms Brings in IKEA and David Chang to Close $40m Series D
OCTOBER 27, 2017 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
*First Published May 30, 2017. Updated October 27 to reflect final close on $40m.
US indoor agriculture group AeroFarms has closed a $40 million Series D round, adding IKEA Group and David Chang, chef and founder of the Momofuku Group, and retired US Army General David Petraeus to a previously released list of international investors.
A May Securities & Exchange Commission Filing indicated that AeroFarms had raised $34.3 million of a targeted $40 million.
AeroFarms grows leafy greens using aeroponics –- growing them in a misting environment without soil –- LED lights, and growth algorithms.
The round takes AeroFarms’ total fundraising efforts to over $130 million since 2014, including a $40 million debt facility from Goldman Sachs and Prudential.
AeroFarms attracted new, international investors in this latest round, including Meraas, the investment vehicle of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai.
The round marks the first investment for ADM Capital’s new growth stage agriculture-focused Cibus Fund, and global asset management firm Alliance Bernstein also invested. Existing investors Wheatsheaf Investments from the UK and GSR Venturesfrom China also joined the round.
The filing also revealed that AeroFarms had renamed its holding company to Dream Holdings, as part of its move from an LLC to a C-Corp, referencing its new retail brand Dream Greens. The Dream Greens brand hit the shelves of ShopRite, Whole Foods, FreshDirect, and Newark chain Seabras in February. Before that, the business was selling its greens into food service under the AeroFarms brand.
AeroFarms’ global list of investors is representative of its plans to expand globally, David Rosenberg, CEO, told AgFunderNews.
“We want to expand domestically and overseas, and we are excited about the potential for Meraas to help us expand into that region,” he said.
AeroFarms is not the only group to consider building indoor farms in the Middle East; Pegasus Agriculture Group, is a hydroponics-based indoor ag company that is based in Abu Dhabi, with facilities across the Middle East and North Africa.Egyptian Hydrofarms is another local example, and Indoor Farms of America recently made its first farm sale in the region.
AeroFarms also wants to add to its 120-strong team of plant biologists, pathologists, microbiologists, mechanical engineers, system engineers, data scientists and more. In particular, the company wants to add team members to its research & development department, with a view to improving the quality and operating costs of the business, according to Rosenberg. “This is where the data science and software platforms we’re using can really pull the business together.”
AeroFarms just completed construction of its ninth indoor farm, with four in New Jersey including its state-of-the-art 69,000 square foot flagship production facility in Newark. It also has plans to build in the Northeast of the US.
For more about AeroFarms, read our earlier interview with CEO David Rosenberg here.
FFAR Makes Grant to Vertical Farming Company
FFAR Makes Grant to Vertical Farming Company
The Hagstrom Report
September 11, 2017
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research announced a grant awarded to AeroFarms, an indoor vertical farming company based in Newark, N.J. to improve crop production.
FFAR, a nonprofit set up in the 2014 farm bill to combine public and private research dollars, gave AeroFarms $1 million, and the company will matched that with a $1 million commitment.
Roger Buelow, the company's chief technology officer, will use the grant to collaborate with scientists at Rutgers University and Cornell University to improve crop production by defining the relationships between stressed plants, the phytochemicals they produce and the taste and texture of the crops grown.
The work will result in commercial production of improved leafy green varieties and yield science-based best practices for farming, FFAR said.
The grant was announced at an event in the patio of the Agriculture Department's headquarters attended by FFAR Executive Director Sally Rockey; David Rosenberg, AeroFarms co-founder and CEO; Ann Bartuska, the acting undersecretary for research, education and economics; and Tom Stenzel, president and CEO of the United Fresh Produce Association.
Rockey said vertical farming allows scientists to take advantage of the precision that is possible in indoor systems, where "stressors" from light to humidity to temperature can be controlled consistently and precisely to improve specialty crop characteristics such as taste and nutritional quality.
Rosenberg said "This FFAR grant is a huge endorsement for our company and recognition of our history and differentiated approach to be able to optimize for taste, texture, color, nutrition, and yield and help lead the industry forward."
Stenzel said "Pioneering initiatives like the work by AeroFarms and FFAR will help lead the produce industry with a science-backed approach to understand how to grow great tasting and nutritionally dense products consistently all year. We believe that there is a need for even more public/private partnerships like this to spur breakthroughs."
Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., praised FFAR for making the grant.
"Urban agriculture has incredible potential to spur economic opportunity, increase access to healthy food, and inspire the next generation of farmers. I'm pleased that the foundation is committed to new techniques to grow food in innovative ways," said Stabenow, who has introduced a bill to establish an office of urban agriculture at USDA and to make urban farms more easily eligible for federal funding.
The grant to AeroFarms was made through FFAR's Seeding Solutions grant program, and is being funded within the Urban Food Systems Challenge Area, which aims to augmenting the capabilities of the current food system to feed urban populations by enhancing urban and peri-urban agriculture.
Masayoshi Son’s Grand Plan for SoftBank’s $100 Billion Vision Fund
Masayoshi Son’s Grand Plan for SoftBank’s $100 Billion Vision Fund
By KATIE BENNER | OCT. 10, 2017
Eric Gundersen, chief executive of Mapbox, met in July with Masayoshi Son, who led a $164 million investment in Mapbox that was announced on Tuesday. CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — When Eric Gundersen, the chief executive of a mapping start-up called Mapbox, met Masayoshi Son, the head of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, in late July, he expected to have to sell Mr. Son on what made Mapbox important.
Son recently told Matt Barnard, the chief executive of Plenty, that computers were ushering in a revolution in agriculture not seen since the invention of the plow.
But Mr. Son, 60, did not need to be convinced that Mapbox’s technology — which powers Lyft drivers and companies like Snap and Mastercard — had value. After a whirlwind courtship, Mr. Son’s nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, which SoftBank unveiled last October with money from Saudi Arabia and others, led a $164 million investment in Mapbox that was announced on Tuesday.
In the process, Mr. Son also explained his grand plan for deploying the Vision Fund to Mr. Gundersen. The Japanese billionaire said he believed robots would inexorably change the work force and machines would become more intelligent than people, an event referred to as the “Singularity.” As a result, Mr. Son told Mr. Gundersen, he is on a mission to own pieces of all the companies that may underpin the global shifts brought on by artificial intelligence to transportation, food, work, medicine and finance.
“For Masa, his vision is not just about predictions like the Singularity, which has gotten a lot of hype,” Mr. Gundersen said. “He understands that we’ll need a massive amount of data to get us to a future that’s more dependent on machines and robotics.”
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What Mr. Son laid out for Mr. Gundersen helps explain why SoftBank and its Vision Fund have invested billions of dollars in a seemingly random sample of more than two dozen companies since the fund was announced. The investments span robotics software start-ups like Brain Corporationand the indoor farming business Plenty, as well as more prominent companies like the business software maker Slack. The deals have run the gamut from smaller investments in start-ups to larger deals with public companies.
Mr. Son is deploying SoftBank’s nearly $100 billion Vision Fund by investing in a network of companies.CreditAlessandro Di Ciommo/NurPhoto, via Getty Images
Yet the companies all have something in common: They are involved in collecting enormous amounts of data, which are crucial to creating the brains for the machines that, in the future, will do more of our jobs and creating tools that allow people to better coexist.
Most recently, SoftBank has been involved in a plan to buy nearly a fifth of the existing stock of Uber, the world’s biggest ride-hailing company and one that has changed the transportation industry. SoftBank is aiming to accumulate Uber’s stock through a tender offer that could value the company at a discount to its current valuation of $68.5 billion, according to people briefed on the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were confidential. The tender offer could still fall apart, one of the people said.
If it ends up being completed, Mr. Son would own significant chunks of ride-hailing companies globally because SoftBank already owns stakes in Uber’s rivals like Didi Chuxing in China and Ola in India. Altogether, SoftBank would have a network of companies that gather valuable logistics data and operate large, connected fleets that could work well with self-driving car technology.
“Location data is central and mission critical to the development of the world’s most exciting technologies,” Rajeev Misra, who helps oversee SoftBank’s Vision Fund, said about Mapbox in a statement on Tuesday. He added that the investment was part of SoftBank’s plan to put money into “the foundational infrastructure for the next stage of the Information Revolution.”
SoftBank declined to comment further for this article.
For more than three decades, Mr. Son has consistently made over SoftBank with acquisitions and investments to keep it on the cutting edge. The company began in 1981 as a PC software distributor in Japan and expanded to the United States in 1994 with the acquisition of the PC trade show operator Comdex.
Mr. Son later became the largest shareholder of Yahoo, started Yahoo Japan and, in the last decade, invested in broadband and telecommunications companies — SoftBank agreed to buy the majority of Sprint for $21.6 billion in 2012 — anticipating the need for high-speed connectivity. He has also invested in e-commerce companies, including the Alibaba Group of China and Gilt Groupe, as well as video game businesses like Supercell and media like HuffPost and BuzzFeed.
A Mapbox office in San Francisco. The company makes mapping technology that powers fleets of Lyft drivers and companies like Snap.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
In a speech last month in New York, Mr. Son declared that in 30 years, there would be as many sentient robots on Earth as humans and that those robots, which he called metal collar workers, would fundamentally change the labor market.
“Every industry that mankind ever defined and created, even agriculture, will be redefined,” Mr. Son said. “Because the tools that we created were inferior to mankind’s brain in the past. Now, the tools have become smarter than mankind ourselves.”
Mr. Son is having many of the same conversations with entrepreneurs these days as he looks to spread investments from the Vision Fund. Many entrepreneurs said Mr. Son’s conversations jumped from philosophical discussions about technology’s impact on humanity to the minutiae of a technical problem.
Mr. Son recently told Matt Barnard, the chief executive of Plenty, that computers were ushering in a revolution in agriculture not seen since the invention of the plow. Mr. Son led a $200 million investment in Plenty in July, part of an effort to make it a global leader in indoor farms. Plenty, which has no farms operating at scale, is now planning its first farm in South San Francisco that will open by the end of the year.
“I really do like to believe he likes us a lot,” Mr. Barnard said of Mr. Son. “I’d say the thing we have in common with his other investments is that they are all part of some of the largest systems on the planet: energy, transportation, the internet and food.”
Some entrepreneurs travel the globe to spend time with Mr. Son at his palatial home in Woodside., Calif., and his offices in India, San Francisco and Tokyo. The SoftBank chief is known for almost always smiling and speaking slowly. He rarely picks up phone calls and his email signature includes the whirring fan icon that shows a computer is booting up, or “thinking.”
Many of the entrepreneurs speak of Mr. Son with reverence.
“Only people close to him know how huge his vision is,” said Eugene Izhikevich, the chief executive of Brain Corp., a company based in San Diego that makes the software that controls autonomous robots.
Mr. Son’s engineers stumbled on Brain Corp. when they were looking for self-driving car technology. Mr. Izhikevich was soon seated across from Mr. Son, talking about robotics as well as how Britain operated 200 years ago when the landed gentry did not work, but came up with new inventions and business improvements.
Like many other entrepreneurs, Mr. Izhikevich said SoftBank moved “scary fast” to sew up its investment. Mr. Son’s team swarmed Brain Corp.’s businesses and spent hundreds of hours on due diligence, wrapping up in a few months.
Unlike other investors, Mr. Son, who is already talking about a second Vision Fund, does not insert himself into the day-to-day operations of most of the companies he has invested in. His Sprint deal has yet to pan out and may be dependent on merging with another company. When other investments have lagged, as did his investment in Snapdeal, an online retailer in India, he has invested in competitors, leading a $2.5 billion investment into Flipkart, a rival Indian e-commerce company.
Some entrepreneurs said Mr. Son’s breakneck investing pace with the Vision Fund was unlikely to slow.
“Masa is in a hurry,” said Vijay Sharma, the chief executive of Indian digital payments start-up Paytm, which SoftBank put $1.4 billion into in May. “He sees this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where everything we touch can become a market, where we’re at the opening up of a new industrial revolution.”
Urban Farming is Booming, But What Does it Really Yield?
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that 800 million people worldwide grow vegetables or fruits or raise animals in cities, producing what the Worldwatch Institute reports to be an astonishing 15 to 20 percent of the world’s food.
Urban Farming is Booming, But What Does it Really Yield?
The benefits of city-based agriculture go far beyond nutrition.
Photo by Marcin Szczepanski
WRITER | Elizabeth Royte
@ElizabethRoyte | Science and environment writer and author
April 27, 2015 — Editor’s note: This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a non-profit investigative news organization.
Midway through spring, the nearly bare planting beds of Carolyn Leadley’s Rising Pheasant Farms, in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit, barely foreshadow the cornucopian abundance to come. It will be many months before Leadley is selling produce from this one-fifth-acre (one-tenth-hectare) plot. But the affable young farmer has hardly been idle, even during the snowiest days of winter. Twice daily, she has been trekking from her house to a small greenhouse in her side yard, where she waves her watering wand over roughly 100 trays of sprouts, shoots and microgreens. She sells this miniature bounty, year round, at the city’s eastern market and to restaurateurs delighted to place some hyperlocal greens on their guests’ plates.
Leadley is a key player in Detroit’s vibrant communal and commercial farming community, which in 2014 produced nearly 400,000 pounds (181,000 kilograms) of produce — enough to feed more than 600 people — in its more than 1,300 community, market, family and school gardens. Other farms in postindustrial cities are also prolific: In 2008, Philadelphia’s 226 community and squatter gardens grew roughly 2 million pounds of mid-summer vegetables and herbs, worth US$4.9 million. Running at full bore, Brooklyn’s Added-Value Farm, which occupies 2.75 acres, funnels 40,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables into the low-income neighborhood of Red Hook. And in Camden, New Jersey — an extremely poor city of 80,000 with only one full-service supermarket — community gardeners at 44 sites harvested almost 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms) of vegetables during an unusually wet and cold summer. That’s enough food during the growing season to feed 508 people three servings a day.
In addition to raising vegetables, urban gardens can help families raise kids who enjoy the outdoors. Photo of Rising Pheasant Farms’ Carolyn Leadley and family by Marcin Szczepanski.
That researchers are even bothering to quantify the amount of food produced on tiny city farms — whether community gardens, like those of Camden and Philly, or for-profit operations, like Leadley’s — is testament to the nation’s burgeoning local-foods movement and its data-hungry supporters. Young farmers are, in increasing numbers, planting market gardens in cities, and “local” produce (a term with no formal definition) now fills grocery shelves across the U.S., from Walmart to Whole Foods, and is promoted in more than 150 nations around the world.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that 800 million people worldwide grow vegetables or fruits or raise animals in cities, producing what the Worldwatch Institute reports to be an astonishing 15 to 20 percent of the world’s food. In developing nations, city dwellers farm for subsistence, but in the U.S., urban ag is more often driven by capitalism or ideology. The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t track numbers of city farmers, but based on demand for its programs that fund education and infrastructure in support of urban-ag projects, and on surveys of urban ag in select cities, it affirms that business is booming. How far — and in what direction — can this trend go? What portion of a city’s food can local farmers grow, at what price, and who will be privileged to eat it? And can such projects make a meaningful contribution to food security in an increasingly crowded world?
Urban Advantages
Like anyone who farms in a city, Leadley waxes eloquent on the freshness of her product. Pea shoots that have traveled 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) to grace a salad are bound to taste better and be more nutritious, she says, than those that have traveled half a continent or farther. “One local restaurant that I sell to used to buy its sprouts from Norway,” Leadley says. Fresher food also lasts longer on shelves and in refrigerators, reducing waste.
New York City–based Gotham Greens produces more than 300 tons per year of herbs and greens in two hydroponic facilities. Photo by TIA (Flickr/Creative Commons)
Food that’s grown and consumed in cities has other advantages: During times of abundance, it may cost less than supermarket fare that’s come long distances, and during times of emergency — when transportation and distribution channels break down — it can fill a vegetable void. Following large storms such as Hurricane Sandy and the blizzards of this past winter, says Viraj Puri, cofounder of New York City–based Gotham Greens (which produces more than 300 tons (270 metric tons) of herbs and microgreens per year in two rooftop hydroponic operations and has another farm planned for Chicago), “our produce was the only produce on the shelf at many supermarkets across the city.”
Despite their relatively small size, urban farms grow a surprising amount of food, with yields that often surpass those of their rural cousins. This is possible for a couple reasons. First, city farms don’t experience heavy insect pressure, and they don’t have to deal with hungry deer or groundhogs. Second, city farmers can walk their plots in minutes, rather than hours, addressing problems as they arise and harvesting produce at its peak. They can also plant more densely because they hand cultivate, nourish their soil more frequently and micromanage applications of water and fertilizer.
As social enterprises, community gardens operate in an alternate financial universe: they don’t sustain themselves with sales, nor do they have to pay employees.
Though they don’t get as much press as for-profit farms and heavily capitalized rooftop operations, community gardens — which are collectively tended by people using individual or shared plots of public or private land, and have been a feature in U.S. cities for well over a century — are the most common form of urban agriculture in the nation, producing far more food and feeding more people, in aggregate, than their commercial counterparts. As social enterprises, community gardens operate in an alternate financial universe: they don’t sustain themselves with sales, nor do they have to pay employees. Instead, they rely on volunteer or cheap youth labor, they pay little or nothing in rent, and they solicit outside aid from government programs and foundations that support their social and environmental missions. These may include job training, health and nutrition education, and increasing the community’s resilience to climate change by absorbing stormwater, counteracting the urban heat island effect and converting food waste into compost.
Funders don’t necessarily expect community gardens to become self-sustaining. These farms may increase their revenue streams by selling at farmers markets or to restaurants, or they may collect fees from restaurants or other food-waste generators for accepting scraps that will be converted into compost, says Ruth Goldman, a program officer at the Merck Family Fund, which funds urban agriculture projects. “But margins on vegetable farming are very slim, and because these farms are doing community education and training teen leaders, they’re not likely to operate in the black.”
It’s the microgreens that keep Leadley from joining the ranks of the vast majority of U.S. farmers and taking a second job.
Several years ago, Elizabeth Bee Ayer, who until recently ran a training program for city farmers, took a hard look at the beets growing in her Youth Farm, in the Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. She counted the hand movements involved in harvesting the roots and the minutes it took to wash and prepare them for sale. “Tiny things can make or break a farm,” Ayer notes. “Our beets cost US$2.50 for a bunch of four, and people in the neighborhood loved them. But we were losing 12 cents on every beet.” Ultimately, Ayer decided not to raise the price: “No one would have bought them,” she says. Instead, she doubled down on callaloo, a Caribbean herb that cost less to produce but sold enough to subsidize the beets. “People love it, it grows like a weed, it’s low maintenance and requires very little labor.” In the end, she says, “We are a nonprofit, and we didn’t want to make a profit.”
Sustainable and Resilient
Few would begrudge Ayer her loss leader, but such practices can undercut for-profit city farmers who are already struggling to compete with regional farmers at crowded urban markets and with cheap supermarket produce shipped from California and Mexico. Leadley, of Rising Pheasant Farms, realized long ago that she wouldn’t survive selling only the vegetables from her outdoor garden, which is why she invested in a plastic-draped greenhouse and heating system. Her tiny shoots, sprouts, amaranth and kohlrabi leaves grow year-round; they grow quickly — in the summer, Leadley can make a crop in seven days — and they sell for well over a dollar an ounce.
Nodding toward her backyard plot, Leadley says, “I grow those vegetables because they look good on the farm stand. They attract more customers to our table, and I really love growing outdoors.” But it’s the microgreens that keep Leadley from joining the ranks of the vast majority of U.S. farmers and taking a second job.
Mchezaji Axum, an agronomist with the University of the District of Columbia, the first exclusively urban land-grant university in the nation, helps urban farmers increase their yields whether they are selling into wealthy markets, like Leadley, or poorer markets, like Ayer. He promotes the use of plant varieties adapted to city conditions (short corn that produces four instead of two ears, for example). He also recommends biointensive methods, such as planting densely, intercropping, applying compost, rotating crops and employing season-extension methods (growing cold-tolerant vegetables like kale, spinach or carrots in winter hoop houses, for example, or starting plants in cold frames — boxes with transparent tops that let in sunlight but protect plants from extreme cold and rain).
“You learn to improve your soil health, and you learn how to space your plants to get more sunshine,” Axum says. Surveying D.C.’s scores of communal gardens, Axum has been surprised by how little food they actually grow. “People aren’t using their space well. More than 90 percent aren’t producing intensively. Some people just want to grow and be left alone.
“Using biointensive methods may not be part of your cultural tradition,” Laura J. Lawson, a professor of landscape architecture at Rutgers State University and the author of City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America, says. “It depends who you learned gardening from.” Lawson recalls the story of a well-meaning visitor to a Philadelphia garden who suggested that the farmers had planted their corn in a spot that wasn’t photosynthetically ideal. The women told their visitor, “We always plant it there; that way we can pee behind it.”
Noah Link checks on his bees at Food Field, a commercial farm in Detroit. Photo by Marcin Szczepanski.
Axum is all about scaling up and aggregating hyperlocal foods to meet the demands of large buyers like city schools, hospitals or grocery stores. Selling to nearby institutions, say food policy councils — established by grassroots organizations and local governments to strengthen and support local food systems— is key to making urban food systems more sustainable and resilient, to say nothing of providing a living to local growers. But scaling up often requires more land, and therefore more expensive labor to cultivate it, in addition to changes in local land use and other policies, marketing expertise and efficient distribution networks.
“Lots of local institutions want to source their food here,” says Detroit farmer Noah Link, whose Food Field, a commercial operation, encompasses a nascent orchard, vast areas of raised beds, two tightly wrapped 150-foot (46-meter)-long hoop houses (one of which shelters a long, narrow raceway crammed with catfish), chickens, beehives and enough solar panels to power the whole shebang. “But local farms aren’t producing enough food yet. We’d need an aggregator to pull it together for bulk sales.”
Link doesn’t grow microgreens — the secret sauce for so many commercial operations — because he can break even on volume: His farm occupies an entire city block. Annie Novak, who co-founded New York City’s first for-profit rooftop farm in 2009, doesn’t have the luxury of space. She realized early on that she couldn’t grow a wide enough diversity of food to satisfy her community-supported agriculture customers in just 5,800 square feet (540 square meters) of shallow raised beds. “So I partnered with a farm upstate to supplement and diversify the boxes,” she says. Now, Novak focuses on niche and value-added products. “I make a hot sauce from my peppers and market the bejesus out of it,” she says. She also grows microgreens for restaurants, plus honey, herbs, flowers and “crops that are narratively interesting, like purple carrots, or heirloom tomatoes, which give us an opportunity to educate people about the value of food, green spaces and our connection to nature,” she says.
Brooklyn Grange in New York grows more than 50,000 pounds of produce each year in its rooftop gardens. Photo © Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm / Anastasia Cole Plakias.
Sometimes being strategic with crop selection isn’t enough. Brooklyn Grange, a for-profit farm atop two roofs in New York City, grows more than 50,000 pounds (23,000 kilograms) of tomatoes, kale, lettuce, carrots, radishes and beans, among other crops, each year. It sells them through its CSA, at farm stands and to local restaurants. But to further boost its income, Brooklyn Grange also offers a summerlong training program for beekeepers (US$850 tuition), yoga classes and tours, and it rents its Edenic garden spaces, which have million-dollar views of the Manhattan skyline, for photo shoots, weddings, private dinners and other events.
“Urban farms are like small farms in rural areas,” says Carolyn Dimitri, an applied economist who studies food systems and food policy at New York University. “They have the same set of problems: people don’t want to pay a lot for their food, and labor is expensive. So they have to sell high-value products and do some agritourism.”
Under Control
On a miserable March morning, with a sparkling layer of ice glazing a foot of filthy snow, a coterie of Chicago’s urban farmers toils in shirtsleeves and sneakers, their fingernails conspicuously clean. In their gardens, no metal or wood scrap accumulates in corners, no chickens scratch in hoop-house soil. In fact, these farmers use no soil at all. Their densely planted basil and arugula leaves sprout from growing medium in barcoded trays. The trays sit on shelves stacked 12 feet (3.7 meters) high and illuminated, like tanning beds, by purple and white lights. Fans hum, water gurgles, computer screens flicker.
With 25 high-density crops per year, as opposed to a conventional farmer’s five or so, CEA yields are 10 to 20 times higher than the same crop grown outdoors
.FarmedHere, the nation’s largest player in controlled environment agriculture — CEA —pumps out roughly a million pounds (500,000 kilograms) per year of baby salad greens, basil and mint in its 90,000-square-foot (8,000-square-meter) warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Chicago. Like many hydroponic or aquaponic operations (in which water from fish tanks nourishes plants, which filter the water before it’s returned to the fish), the farm has a futuristic feel — all glowing lights and stainless steel. Employees wear hairnets and nitrile gloves. But without interference from weather, insects or even too many people, the farm quickly and reliably fulfills year-round contracts with local supermarkets, including nearly 50 Whole Foods Markets.
“We can’t keep up with demand,” Nick Greens, a deejay turned master grower, says.
Unlike outdoor farms, CEA has no call for pesticides and contributes no nitrogen to waterways. Its closed-loop irrigation systems consume 10 times less water than conventional systems. And with 25 high-density crops per year, as opposed to a conventional farmer’s five or so, CEA yields are 10 to 20 times higher than the same crop grown outdoors — in theory sparing forests and grasslands from the plow.
Is CEA the future of urban farming? It produces a lot of food in a small space, to be sure. But until economies of scale kick in, these operations — which are capital intensive to build and maintain — must concentrate exclusively on high-value crops like microgreens, winter tomatoes and herbs.
Reducing food miles reduces transit-related costs, as well as the carbon emissions associated with transport, packaging and cooling. But growing indoors under lights, with heating and cooling provided by fossil fuels, may negate those savings. When Louis Albright, an emeritus professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University, dug into the numbers, he discovered that closed-system farming is expensive, energy intensive and, at some latitudes, unlikely to survive on solar or wind power. Growing a pound of hydroponic lettuce in Ithaca, New York, Albright reports, generates 8 pounds (4 kilograms) of carbon dioxide at the local power plant: a pound of tomatoes would generate twice that much. Grow that lettuce without artificial lights in a greenhouse and emissions drop by two thirds.
Food Security
In the world’s poorest nations, city dwellers have always farmed for subsistence. But more of them are farming now than ever before. In Africa, for example, it’s estimated that 40 percent of the urban population is engaged in agriculture. Long-time residents and recent transplants alike farm because they’re hungry, they know how to grow food, land values in marginal areas (under power lines and along highways) are low, and inputs like organic wastes — fertilizer — are cheap. Another driver is the price of food: People in developing nations pay a far higher percentage of their total income for food than Americans do, and poor transportation and refrigeration infrastructure make perishable goods, like fruits and vegetables, especially dear. Focusing on these high-value crops, urban farmers both feed themselves and supplement their incomes.
Urban farming is common in Ghana and other sub-Saharan countries. Photo by Nana Kofi Acquah/IMWI
In the U.S., urban farming is likely to have its biggest impact on food security in places that, in some ways, resemble the global south — that is, in cities or neighborhoods where land is cheap, median incomes are low and the need for fresh food is high. Detroit, by this metric, is particularly fertile ground. Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University, calculated that the city, which has just under 700,000 residents and more than 100,000 vacant lots (many of which can be purchased, thanks to the city’s recent bankruptcy, for less than the price of a refrigerator), could grow three quarters of its current vegetable consumption and nearly half its fruit consumption on available parcels of land using biointensive methods.
No one expects city farms in the U.S. to replace peri-urban or rural vegetable farms: cities don’t have the acreage or the trained farmers, and most can’t produce food anything close to year-round. But can city farms take a bite from long-distance supply chains? NYU’s Dimitri doesn’t think so. Considering the size and global nature of the nation’s food supply, she says, urban ag in our cities “isn’t going to make a dent. And it’s completely inefficient, economically. Urban farmers can’t charge what they should, and they’re too small to take advantage of economies of scale and use their resources more efficiently.”
That doesn’t mean that community gardeners, who don’t even try to be profitable, aren’t making a big difference in their immediate communities. Camden’s 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms) of produce might not seem like a lot, but it’s a very big deal for those lucky enough to get their hands on it. “In poor communities where households earn very little income,” says Domenic Vitiello, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, “a few thousand dollars’ worth of vegetables and fruit grown in the garden makes a much bigger difference than for more affluent households.”
History tells us that community gardening — supported by individuals, government agencies and philanthropies — is here to stay. And whether these gardens ultimately produce more food or more knowledge about food — where it comes from, what it takes to produce it, how to prepare and eat it — they still have enormous value as gathering places and classrooms and as conduits between people and nature. Whether or not cultivating fruits and vegetables in tiny urban spaces makes economic or food-security sense, people who want to grow food in cities will find a way to do so. As Laura Lawson says, “City gardens are part of our ideal sense of what a community should be. And so their value is priceless.”
UPDATED 05.06.15: A source was added for the percent of global food grown in cities.
You're Invited
Ag Tech Investor Conference
Des Moines, Iowa
About the Conference
Prairie Crest Capital invites you to its Agricultural Technology Investor Conference, to be held Thursday, November 9, in the lower level of Hy-Vee Hall at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa. The conference will highlight the opportunities, challenges and successful deployment methods in investment in emerging companies in the Ag Tech sector.
About Prairie Crest Capital
Prairie Crest Capital is a venture capital firm in Des Moines focused on early-stage investments in promising agricultural and breakthrough technology firms. Leveraging their experience and Midwest location, Prairie Crest Capital connects investors to underserved and compelling opportunities in the Ag Tech sector in order to deliver superior returns.
Agenda and speaker bios are available at
prairiecrestcapital.com
$200M of Plenty(ful) Capital – The Next Wave of Vertical Farming
$200M of Plenty(ful) Capital – The Next Wave of Vertical Farming
Posted on October 5, 2017by Yoachim Haynes
The $200M raise by Plenty – a pre-revenue company who just one month prior, acquired somebody else’s technology (Bright Agrotech) – is not something you hear about every day. Jeff Bezos, Softbank and Alphabet may have deep pockets, but they are not philanthropic organizations. And for Bezos, this is a follow-on to a 2016 round for Plenty that provided $26M. So, the question is – what are the growth plans for this vertical farming business following the July 2017 investment?
Vertical farming is certainly an area with potential: resource efficient, near consumer demand, and better nutrition – all at competitive costs from current producers of high value leafy greens, herbs and other potential crops. Robotics, sensors, controlled environments, and lots of data combine to create a new level of food production that is a long way from farming. Venture capital has been active in the past several years supporting commercialization of early-stage companies. AeroFarms raised $34M in May 2017, $20M in Dec 2015, and $36M in Nov 2014 and is currently on its 10th (or more) iteration of production facilities. Innovation in controlled-environment farming business models is also sprouting. BrightFarms’ use of long term fixed price purchase agreements helped the company raise $30M in Sept 2016, even though their approach is slightly less controlled due to lighting coming primarily from the sun instead of LEDs. Freight Farms recently increased customer focus on college and commercial campuses as the target for their shipping container-sized farms, following a $7M raise in July 2017. These companies all have operating projects with customers.
Sounds easy, but others have not been doing as well. Past start-ups such as FarmedHere, PodPonics, Alterrus, and Local Gardens have gone bankrupt in attempting to address labor costs, lighting costs, rent, farm productivity, and revenue management. Adapting to the market, Freight Farms laid off some of their work force as part of the shift toward commercializing targeted customers and pulling back on R&D in new areas.
But back to Plenty. The plan, discussed in interviews with us, is all about scale with the underlying belief that customers are ready. No need for market validation – it’s all about infrastructure and scale. Plenty’s proprietary technology subdivides smaller growing environments for flexibility and rapid deployment. The goal is to provide a scalable solution that can be deployed anywhere in the world within a few weeks. The production facilities will be sited near cities with over 1 million people, and product mix will be tailored to the local market. Hence the need for access to substantial capital.
Plenty claims that an essential element of the company’s differentiation comes from its proprietary technology and process, which it acquired from Bright Agrotech. Bright Agrotech’s ZipGrow emerged from the University of Wyoming Entrepreneur Competition in 2011, moving to its own facility in 2015. The two companies have had a close relationship prior to the acquisition: Nate Storey, the founder of Bright Agrotech became Plenty’s full-time chief science officer earlier this year. Physically, one of the unique attributes of the technology are the 15-20-foot growing towers, an alternative approach to the trays often seen in other vertical growing approaches. Like most others in this space, the software, use of machine learning, lighting, nutrient balance, etc. are all proprietary. An area that is still being refined is sourcing of seeds: identifying those that are heirloom-based or clearly stand out in taste.
Monitoring of the continued growth of Plenty, as well as the overall market, should focus on deployment of production facilities –the speed and number of cities, ideally with purchase agreements for the produce. Market saturation of locally grown produce from controlled environments is not an immediate concern; however, first to market in cities might make local expansion easier and create barriers for new entrants. To that end, we might also expect more capital coming into other companies that have demonstrated operating facilities and the need to expand quickly. Probably not a land grab yet, but something to watch. Other areas to monitor should include direct-to-user targeted approaches like Freight Farms’ focus on campuses versus grocery-type markets. The bottom line is that there is ‘plenty’ of competition as the technology moves to commercial deployment, and successfully scaling is now the focus.
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Keynote Speaker Steve Forbes and Governor Kim Reynolds
Keynote Speaker Steve Forbes and Governor Kim Reynolds
This conference will highlight the opportunities, challenges, and successful deployment methods in investment in emerging companies in the Ag Tech sector.
About Prairie Crest Capital
Prairie Crest Capital is a venture capital firm in Des Moines focused on early-stage investments in promising agricultural and breakthrough technology firms. Leveraging their experience and Midwest location, Prairie Crest Capital connects investors to underserved and compelling opportunities in the Ag Tech sector in order to deliver superior returns.
- Although the Midwest is home to approximately 20 percent of the US population, top research universities, entrepreneurial talent, and research and development spending, the region receives less than 5 percent of venture capital investment.
- Investment activity in agriculture technology is anticipated to grow from $1.2 billion to approximately $7 billion over the next several years.
Click here to register now
US Representative Marcy Kaptur Introduces Bipartisan Urban Agriculture Production Act
Linked by Michael Levenston
Kaptur helped kick off a capital campaign for the next phase of the successful Oneida Street greenhouse project in 2011. Young people learned urban agriculture techniques, aquaculture, apiary science, gardening, and life skills.
Bill Bolsters USDA Nutritional and Farmers’ Market Programs and Works to Spur Economic Development
Press Release | September 8, 2017
Washington, D.C. – Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (OH-09), today introduced the Urban Agriculture Production Act (H.R. 3699), a bipartisan bill to bolster nutritional and farmers’ market programs and help create the next generation of local, urban farmers and food producers. The bill is supported by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Farmers Market Coalition.
“Too many urban neighborhoods are in food deserts that lack stores where people can purchase fresh, healthy foods, so the federal government needs to step up and improve access to nutritious foods,” said Kaptur. “Nutritious and healthy eating can reduce the rate of diabetes, hypertension and obesity related illnesses and my bill builds on successful nutritional programs, like the Seniors Farmers’ Market. As Congress readies to debate the Farm Bill, I’ll fight for programs that bolster farmers, develop our urban centers and help create jobs.”
The bill works to spur the development and expansion of regional and local food systems in nontraditional agriculture production areas, like cities and towns. The bill also works to strengthen farmers’ markets, improve nutrition for low-income seniors and veterans and bolster existing U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs that support farmers, ranchers, and producers as a tool for economic development.
“Communities are addressing these challenges by developing local farmers markets, community gardens, greenhouses, and other food systems to provide fresh, affordable and healthy foods throughout underserved communities and this bill will build on that work,” Kaptur continued.
During her tenure in Congress, Kaptur has been a champion of farmers’ markets and other programs and one of the chief authors of urban agriculture legislation. Her legislative efforts have focused on creating places in urban areas to cultivate community agriculture that improve the self-sufficiency of neighborhoods.
Kaptur introduces the Urban Agriculture Production Act just as Congress prepares to debate the upcoming Farm Bill reauthorization. Her key goals are to support direct marketing opportunities for local farmers and producers, advance local agriculture in our nation’s most underserved areas, and increase the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables for our seniors and veterans.
What does the bill do?
Establishes an Urban Agriculture Liaison and Outreach Program at USDA
Expands the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program to include veterans
Provides for competitive grants to advance agriculture production in underserved, undernourished metropolitan areas
Creates a loan and loan guarantee program for projects that expand and promote direct producer to consumer marketing and assist in the development of local food business enterprises.
Improves federal agricultural reporting with the inclusion of Farmers Markets in the Ag. Census
Japan’s SoftBank Is Investing Billions In The Technological Future
Japan’s SoftBank Is Investing Billions In The Technological Future
By Peter Rejcek | Aug 29, 2017
Remember the 1980s movie Brewster’s Millions, in which a minor league baseball pitcher (played by Richard Pryor) must spend $30 million in 30 days to inherit $300 million? Pryor goes on an epic spending spree for a bigger payoff down the road.
One of the world’s biggest public companies is making that film look like a weekend in the Hamptons. Japan’s SoftBank Group, led by its indefatigable CEO Masayoshi Son, is shooting to invest $100 billion over the next five years toward what the company calls the information revolution.
The newly-created SoftBank Vision Fund, with a handful of key investors, appears ready to almost single-handedly hack the technology revolution. Announced only last year, the fund had its first major close in May with $93 billion in committed capital. The rest of the money is expected to be raised this year.
The fund is unprecedented. Data firm CB Insights notes that the SoftBank Vision Fund, if and when it hits the $100 billion mark, will equal the total amountthat VC-backed companies received in all of 2016—$100.8 billion across 8,372 deals globally.
The money will go toward both billion-dollar corporations and startups, with a minimum $100 million buy-in. The focus is on core technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet of Things.
Aside from being Japan’s richest man, Son is also a futurist who has predicted the singularity, the moment in time when machines will become smarter than humans and technology will progress exponentially. Son pegs the date as 2047. He appears to be hedging that bet in the biggest way possible.
Show Me the Money
Ostensibly a telecommunications company, SoftBank Group was founded in 1981 and started investing in internet technologies by the mid-1990s. Son infamously lost about $70 billion of his own fortune after the dot-com bubble burst around 2001. The company itself has a market cap of nearly $90 billion today, about half of where it was during the heydays of the internet boom.
The ups and downs did nothing to slake the company’s thirst for technology. It has made nine acquisitions and more than 130 investments since 1995. In 2017 alone, SoftBank has poured billions into nearly 30 companies and acquired three others. Some of those investments are being transferred to the massive SoftBank Vision Fund.
SoftBank is not going it alone with the new fund. More than half of the money—$60 billion—comes via the Middle East through Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund ($45 billion) and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company ($15 billion). Other players at the table include Apple, Qualcomm, Sharp, Foxconn, and Oracle.
During a company conference in August, Son notes the SoftBank Vision Fund is not just about making money. “We don’t just want to be an investor just for the money game,” he says through a translator. “We want to make the information revolution. To do the information revolution, you can’t do it by yourself; you need a lot of synergy.”
Off to the Races
The fund has wasted little time creating that synergy. In July, its first official investment, not surprisingly, went to a company that specializes in artificial intelligence for robots—Brain Corp. The San Diego-based startup uses AI to turn manual machines into self-driving robots that navigate their environments autonomously. The first commercial application appears to be a really smart commercial-grade version that crosses a Roomba and Zamboni.
A second investment in July was a bit more surprising. SoftBank and its fund partners led a $200 million mega-round for Plenty, an agricultural tech company that promises to reshape farming by going vertical. Using IoT sensors and machine learning, Plenty claims its urban vertical farms can produce 350 times more vegetables than a conventional farm using 1 percent of the water.
Round Two
The spending spree continued into August.
The SoftBank Vision Fund led a $1.1 billion investment into a little-known biotechnology company called Roivant Sciences that goes dumpster diving for abandoned drugs and then creates subsidiaries around each therapy. For example, Axovant Sciences is devoted to neurology while Urovant focuses on urology. TechCrunch reports that Roivant is also creating a tech-focused subsidiary, called Datavant, that will use AI for drug discovery and other healthcare initiatives, such as designing clinical trials.
The AI angle may partly explain SoftBank’s interest in backing the biggest private placement in healthcare to date.
Also in August, SoftBank Vision Fund led a mix of $2.5 billion in primary and secondary capital investments into India’s largest private company in what was touted as the largest single investment in a private Indian company. Flipkart is an e-commerce company in the mold of Amazon.
The fund tacked on a $250 million investment round in August to Kabbage, an Atlanta-based startup in the alt-lending sector for small businesses. It ended big with a $4.4 billion investment into a co-working company called WeWork.
Betterment of Humanity
And those investments only include companies that SoftBank Vision Fund has backed directly.
SoftBank the company will offer—or has already turned over—previous investments to the Vision Fund in more than a half-dozen companies. Those assets include its shares in Nvidia, which produces chips for AI applications, and its first serious foray into autonomous driving with Nauto, a California startup that uses AI and high-tech cameras to retrofit vehicles to improve driving safety. The more miles the AI logs, the more it learns about safe and unsafe driving behaviors.
Other recent acquisitions, such as Boston Dynamics, a well-known US robotics company owned briefly by Google’s parent company Alphabet, will remain under the SoftBank Group umbrella for now.
This spending spree begs the question: What is the overall vision behind the SoftBank’s relentless pursuit of technology companies? A spokesperson for SoftBank told Singularity Hub that the “common thread among all of these companies is that they are creating the foundational platforms for the next stage of the information revolution.All of the companies, he adds, share SoftBank’s criteria of working toward “the betterment of humanity.”
While the SoftBank portfolio is diverse, from agtech to fintech to biotech, it’s obvious that SoftBank is betting on technologies that will connect the world in new and amazing ways. For instance, it wrote a $1 billion check last year in support of OneWeb, which aims to launch 900 satellites to bring internet to everyone on the planet. (It will also be turned over to the SoftBank Vision Fund.)
SoftBank also led a half-billion equity investment round earlier this year in a UK company called Improbable, which employs cloud-based distributed computing to create virtual worlds for gaming. The next step for the company is massive simulations of the real world that supports simultaneous users who can experience the same environment together(and another candidate for the SoftBank Vision Fund.)
Even something as seemingly low-tech as WeWork, which provides a desk or office in locations around the world, points toward a more connected planet.
In the end, the singularity is about bringing humanity together through technology. No one said it would be easy—or cheap.
Formerly the world’s only full-time journalist covering research in Antarctica, Peter became a freelance writer and digital nomad in 2015. Peter’s focus for the last decade has been on science journalism, but his interests and expertise include travel, outdoors, cycling, and Epicureanism (food and beer). Follow him at @poliepete.
Israel Agritech Market Map: 400 Startups Putting The Tech in Agritech
There are now more than 400 Israel agritech startups working on innovations for the global agriculture sector, according to new research from Start-Up Nation Central, an Israeli NGO and Greensoil Investments, a local agritech venture capital firm.
Israel Agritech Market Map: 400 Startups Putting The Tech in Agritech
AUGUST 10, 2017 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
For a young nation built on the collectivist agricultural ethos of the Kibbutz movement, it’s perhaps no surprise that Israel’s agricultural technology startup ecosystem is booming.
There are now more than 400 Israel agritech startups working on innovations for the global agriculture sector, according to new research from Start-Up Nation Central, an Israeli NGO and Greensoil Investments, a local agritech venture capital firm.
These agritech startups are innovating across a range of challenges such as drought and water efficiency, as well as crop productivity and waste.
While Israel’s agritech funding footprint might look relatively small compared to other leading markets such as the US — according to AgFunder, Israeli agritech startups raised just 2% of funding dollars in 2016 ($51.7m), accounting for 3.3% of deal-flow (19 deals) in 2016, while US startups raised 58% of funding dollars and 48% of deal-flow — this is still impressive with a population of 8.5 million next to the US’s 323 million.
Israel is undoubtedly an innovation hub, and there are many serial entrepreneurs moving into agritech bringing experience, tech, methodologies, and connections from other sectors into the agritech vertical.
Companies like ATP Labs and Agritask were founded by people moving from military data analytics and sensor technology, respectively, into the peaceful and impactful area of agritech.
Israeli agritech is also growing in terms of incoming investments. Since the beginning of 2017, there have been many large investments such as Prospera’s $15 million Series B financing, Taranis’ $7.5 million Series A, a strategic $15 million investment in Hinoman, and others.
Currently, Start-Up Nation’s online, searchable startup database includes more than 5,500 profiles of active, innovative startups across all tech verticals, including agritech.
Along with Greensoil Investments, Start-Up Nation Central has used the Start-Up Nation Finder platform to build a taxonomy that identifies different sub categories in agritech. This has been visualized in an Israeli agritech market map along with a representative, and non-exhaustive, selection of companies in each category.
Here is a description of each category according to Start-Up Nation and Greensoil, and some company examples.
• Biotech – Typically involves breeding of plants and bacteria with improved traits to help plant growth. Some companies use genetic technologies for that. These include companies such as Groundwork BioAg, Rootility, and Kaiima.
• Smart farming – Data-based technologies making use of big data and predictive analytics to help farmers make better decisions on daily farm issues (irrigation, pest management, risk management, etc). Some of the more known companies are Taranis, Phythech, Cropx, and Prospera
• Crop protection – Biological or chemical substances used for protecting the crops from pests & diseases, nontoxic and environmentally friendly. Companies like Biofeed which lures insects away or EdenShield.
• Machinery and Robotics – Companies that build all kinds of robotics, machinery, and equipment used primarily to automate farm work, harvest crops and to sort it. Metomotion is one example with a robotic system developed for greenhouses.
• Irrigation & water management – Israel is well known for water innovation, but there are new companies that are creating innovative irrigation methods and water efficiency, such as Neotop which covers water reservoirs and Emefcy which created an Energy-efficient Wastewater Treatment.
• Post-harvest – Technologies to reduce post-harvest losses in diverse ways (e.g. storage, packaging, treatments and climate management technologies). An example for these companies can be found in Amaizz which deals with drying produce or Valentis Nanotech, which produces polymeric films for coating.
• Farm to consumer – Companies that leverage new business models to shorten and simplify the supply chain by connecting the farm to the end consumer. Usually done through digital platforms. A good example would be Avenews-GT, which builds a digital trading platform connecting food wholesalers with producers.
• Novel farming systems – Innovative systems for growing plants, new types of greenhouses, urban farming, hydroponics, and aquaponics. It could be small scale growing in the case of Flux or lighting solutions for farmers such as FloraFotonica.
• Livestock – Companies that create technology for farm animals and pets. With mass vaccination companies such as adst Technologies and Eggxyt’s pre-hatch sex detection for chicks
• Waste technologies – Processing livestock manure, fertilizer run-off, harvest, and food waste to reduce harmful substances and reuse the materials. Companies like 3PLW and HomeBiogas which convert organic waste to bioplastic and cooking gas, respectively.
• Special crops – Companies which deal with medicinal plants from growing human tissue repair plants, such as Collplant to cannabis-based products, in the case of Corsica Innovations
• Aquaculture – These are companies that develop technologies to grow things in water – algae (e.g., Algalo), fish or sea food (e.g., BioFishency)
“The Israel agritech market map displays the wide variety of Israeli agritech innovation and the growth of this sector”, says Eitan Elkin, Start-Up Nation Central’s director of marketing, “The number of companies behind it and the fact that most of them were founded in recent years really brings to attention of the boom which this industry enjoys in Israel and the appeal it has to many entrepreneurs.”
Click here to download your own free copy of the Israel Agritech market map.
About Start-Up Nation Central
Start-Up Nation Central is an independent, nonprofit and nonrevenue organization committed to leveraging deep knowledge of the Israeli innovation ecosystem to connect business, government, and NGO leaders from around the world to people and technologies in Israel to help them solve their most pressing challenges while creating value for the Israeli innovation ecosystem.
Start-Up Nation Central has curated the largest and most up-to-date collection of Israeli innovators and entrepreneurs, providing critical information on over 6,000 companies across dozens of industries. To search Start-up Nation’s Finder, click here.
About Greensoil Investments
With offices in Raanana and Toronto, and $100m under management, GreenSoil Investments funds companies in the agro & food technologies and building innovation sectors. Founded in 2011, GreenSoil’s agro & food technologies fund has a portfolio of six promising companies and is the largest dedicated fund in this space in Israel.
$8.8m Awarded To Support Innovation In US Strawberry Production
$8.8m Awarded To Support Innovation In US Strawberry Production
US Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded two research grants to help California strawberry farms manage soil disease. One grant for $4.5 million supports a national team of experts led by University of California (UC) Davis to identify strawberry plants naturally resistant to certain diseases.
The other grant for $2.5 million supports another national team of experts led by UC Santa Cruz to continue research on bio-fumigation (a natural process that suppresses soil disease).
“California strawberry farmers have a history of innovation and collaboration with scientists at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz. We are optimistic that these two world-class research projects will identify new solutions to help our local farms through sustainable improvements to remain competitive in a global environment,” said Rick Tomlinson, president of the California Strawberry Commission.
Identifying Strawberry Plants with Natural Disease Resistance
The grant for $4.5 million will support a team of scientists from UC, Davis, UC, Riverside, UC, Santa Cruz, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, UC Agricultural and Natural Resources, and University of Florida, to identify genetic markers that are naturally present in some strawberry plants. This work will help plant breeders use plants with natural disease resistance to develop new strawberry varieties that can tolerate disease in the field, while still producing delicate and great tasting fruit for the consumer.
After a briefing with UC Davis researchers, strawberry farmers took action by adding another $1.8 million to the UC Davis Public Strawberry Breeding Program. These funds will augment the $4.5 million to support a collaborative research initiative to support the long-term sustainability of U.S. strawberry production.
“The California Strawberry Commission continues to be a key partner in advancing the work of the UC Davis Public Strawberry Breeding program, “ said Steve Knapp, director of the UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program, who will head the collaborative team of scientists. “We look forward to another century of support from California’s strawberry growers to develop the world’s best strawberry varieties and production practices.”
Control for Organic and Conventional Farming
USDA also announced a $2.5 million grant to UC Santa Cruz, for further collaborative research integrating knowledge in anaerobic soil disinfestation, crop rotation and strawberry varieties to manage diseases in strawberry production.
The core of the research focuses on adding a soil supplement such as rice hulls, and then adding water to cut-off the oxygen supply. The microbes in the soil naturally shift to an anaerobic state, digesting the soil supplement to clean the soil of disease.
In recent years, the California Strawberry Commission has funded UC Santa Cruz scientists, and introduced this natural process to strawberry farmers. The additional USDA funding supports work to make bio-fumigation a more reliable process for a variety of different soil types and conditions, and for different diseases.
“These projects are a natural extension of the commission’s farming without fumigants initiative launched in 2008. This grant is key to crucial research addressing plant diseases in the soil as fumigants are phased out,” said Dan Legard, vice president of research and grower education at the commission.
“California continues to lead the world in agricultural innovations. These grants are good news, keeping our state’s strawberry farmers at the forefront of sustainable farming practices,” said Karen Ross, Secretary for California Department of Food and Agriculture.
“As a representative of the salad bowl of the world, I believe it is of the utmost importance to equip our researchers and farmers with the most effective tools possible to foster innovation and growth. These USDA grants will help our strawberry farmers thrive,” said Congressman Jimmy Panetta, representative of the central coast region of California, where the majority of the state’s strawberries are grown.
Both grants are funded by the USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative. This is a highly competitive program awarded only two grants to California projects.
A full summary of each project can be read here.
Publication date: 8/29/2017
Seattle-Based iUNU Raises $6 Million To Launch LUNA
Seattle-Based iUNU Raises $6 Million To Launch LUNA
Turning Commercial Greenhouses Into Predictable, Demand-Based Manufacturers
iUNU (“you knew”) has raised $6 million from 2nd Avenue Partners, Initialized Capital, Fuel Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others, to bring large scale, computer vision-based, industrial manufacturing process and inventory management to the commercial greenhouse market.
"This solution turns greenhouses into data driven manufacturing plants. It is both a seriously practical and crucial commercial application of AI to a fundamental industry,” says Alexis Ohanian of Initialized Capital.
Building detailed models of individual plants
Following three years of development and testing in large scale commercial operations, LUNA combines computer vision and machine learning technologies to continuously build detailed models of individual plants, unique among millions, throughout the day. Using high resolution and 3D imagery, as well as real-time bioinformatics, LUNA monitors even the most minute changes in health of individual plants, giving growers the precise knowledge they need for proactive management.
“When we saw how differentiated LUNA is from the other solutions in this space, we knew we had to invest in iUNU,” said Liquid 2 Ventures in a statement (Joe Montana, Mike Miller, and Michael Ma). “LUNA provides a truly comprehensive understanding of each plant’s health and growth, focused on the plant’s actual performance, not just the environment around it. Closing the control loop has the potential to change the equation of the economics of commercial-scale, indoor horticulture.”
Greenhouse growers must deal with pests, diseases and other environmental threats to plants. The struggle is quantifiable: up to 20 percent of fruits and vegetables go to waste before they have even left the farm — and that number can be even higher for delicate ornamentals. At the same time, growers are under relentless pressure from retailers to deliver consistently on quantity and quality. While technologies such as sensors and cloud computing offer incremental relief to growers, LUNA offers a solution that enables greenhouses to operate as modern, demand-based, information-driven, manufacturing facilities.
Model crop and timelapse comparison
Empowering growers
“We have built a customer focused, plant-first solution with LUNA that does more than just improve a grower’s reaction time to problems,” said Adam Greenberg, CEO of iUNU. “We reject the premise that ‘reactive mode’ is the natural state for growers. With the right technology, thoughtfully applied, we can give them better computer driven visibility, greenhouse operations can be as precise, proactive, and predictable as modern manufacturing. We are empowering growers to see and control more.”
LUNA begins to learn, and remember, the moment her cameras and sensors are first installed in your greenhouses, giving growers historical records of every detail of every plant in the system, as well as live information – everything they need to make the decisions to run their business, all in one place.
Contact: John Murray
iUNU | Tel: 202-821-2219 | pr@iunu.com | www.iunu.com