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Vertical Farming: Lettuce From The Skyscraper Next Door
Vertical Farming: Lettuce From The Skyscraper Next Door
09.02.2018
Graz (TU GRAZ) - Vertical farms are greenhouses - only the cultivated areas are not laid out next, but rather stacked up on top of each other. A Graz-Viennese concept combines structure with urban architecture.
Urban farming, in other words carrying out agricultural projects in urban surroundings, has been a thing for years. Vertical farming goes one step further - a step upward, to be precise. Use is made of building façades to grow fruit and vegetables and to yield a proper return, on the one hand, and to create added benefits for the building in terms of energy technology, on the other. Many existing projects involving vertical cultivation resemble classic greenhouses - only laid out vertically, not horizontally. In Graz and at the Vertical Farm Institute in Vienna, the aspiration is to integrate cultivated areas into the architecture of buildings, thus using synergies and saving energy. "Our goal is to maximize cultivation area while at the same time minimizing the necessary surface area - currently we can create up to 50 times more cultivation area on traditional farming surface areas.
At the same time, we would like to design energy use as efficiently as possible and integrate the farm into the building symbiotically," explains Sebastian Sautter of the Vertical Farm Institute in Vienna and staff member of TU Graz's Institute of Building and Energy. Having dealt with the concepts for many years, he has now, together with colleagues in the exploratory project "Vertical Farming", simulated a prototype farm in Vienna's Urban Lakeside Aspern, and is about to launch a pilot experiment at the Tabakfabrik (former tobacco factory) in Linz.
Up high
But everything in the right order. Vertical farms are greenhouses which are arranged vertically rather than horizontally. Today, classic greenhouses no longer grow their crops in soil, instead, they use hydroponic systems with the plants being grown in so-called trays. The plant boxes are watered regularly with a blend of nutrients. "This also makes them very efficient regarding water consumption because the plants only absorb the water they need - the rest is recirculated," explains Sebastian Sautter.
In traditional greenhouses, the light the plants need to survive and thrive comes through a glass roof. "In vertical farming, the light cannot come from above because the plants are stacked on top of each other. Light can only come into the greenhouse through the façade. This means the plants' best exposure to light takes place directly via the façade. The idea is to transport the plants to daylight," explains Sautter. "Plants don't have to be exposed to light constantly. They can store light energy and you just have to supply the required daily ration of light. This makes them happy and they grow."
In the exploratory project Vertical Farming funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), researchers at TU Graz's Institute of Building and Energy, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, (BOKU Wien) and Siemens are examining current findings in vertical farming and seeing where more research should be done. The project will be phased out in March of this year. The follow-up project is already in the planning stage: a pilot experiment at the Tabakfabrik in Linz.
Lift to the light
A kind of lift system has been developed at TU Graz which transports the plants to the light. The trays are hung and slowly vertically rotated. The plants thus receive the required light in a uniform way. On top of this, they can also get artificial sunlight in the morning and evening or on bad weather days. "We're in the optimization phase at the moment, and we're investigating when the best time to turn the artificial lighting on and off is. At the moment we're planning to turn it on at 4 a.m. and turn it off at approx. 10 pm. The plants need a dark rest period for about six hours a day."
The purpose of the farms is not only to provide fruit and vegetables: optimizing energy consumption is also an important topic. The trays can also serve as thermal insulation next to external walls and are also able to use waste heat for better plant growth. They can also be positioned in areas facing south or west to provide shade and a good indoor climate. "We've got several ideas here, and we're working on optimizing them. Of course, it would be ideal to be involved in planning such a farm when constructing a new building. But they can also be integrated into existing buildings," says Sautter.
Prototype for Linz
The first machine will be installed in the listed former porter's lodge of the Tabakfabrik in Linz. "It's not absolutely ideal because it faces north. But it's wonderful and the windows look out onto a street - but it needs to be optimized for the users," explains Sautter. It is intended to build the vertical farm behind the window façade and to move the trays on a slow circular path. Another arm, which extends into the room, is intended to be used for maintenance and harvesting. You can imagine it as a horizontal T. The technology group Siemens was able to be won over as a partner. Siemens wants to equip the trays with sophisticated sensors to measure the supply of water and light to optimize growth.
This is how the prototype in the Tabaktrafik in Linz should work: In this YouTube-Video the people responsible are introducing their plan.
Transparency in foodstuff production
The concept has been precisely designed to achieve a rich yield of fruit and vegetables. "At the same time, we also want to reduce foodstuff waste. About a third of foodstuffs are currently thrown away due to transport waste. That wouldn't happen in our case, of course, because the head of salad which is eaten or sold would be harvested directly," explains Sautter. Transparency in foodstuff production is also an important topic. "At the moment I cannot at all say where my fruit and vegetables come from, even when it says on the package. We want to change this using visible growing areas and thus create trust among the customers."
Information
The Vertical Farming Institute is organizing the Skyberries Conference in Vienna which runs from 28th February to 2nd March and is part of the Urban Future Conference. You can pick up all the important information on the subject there, also from well-known speakers such as the mastermind of vertical farming, Dickson Despommier, and establish contacts in the scene. By the way, tickets are available at a discounted price for members of TU Graz - see contact box for details.
Contact: Sebastian David Sautter Dipl.-Ing. Institute of Building and Energy Rechbauerstraße 12/II | 8010 Graz Phone: +43 316 873 4756 sautter@tugraz.at
AVA Awards 10 Land Parcels to Vegetable Farmers With Innovative Concepts
AVA Awards 10 Land Parcels to Vegetable Farmers With Innovative Concepts
Farm deLight stacks its plants on multiple layers and grows them indoors using high-tech methods like artificial lighting to provide an optimal growth environment. Its combined proposal with KG Farm was one of the winning submissions for the land tender. PHOTOS: EDEN PURELY FRESH FARM
February 9, 2018 | Derek Wong
SINGAPORE - Ten vegetable farming land parcels in Lim Chu Kang have been awarded to eight companies based on their concept proposals rather than the amount they bid.
This means that the farmers did not have to worry about engaging in a price war for the land but focused more on refining their ideas, having in mind Singapore's push for greater productivity through technological innovation and efficient use of scarce resources.
It is the first time the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) has awarded a tender on such grounds, the authority said in a press statement on Friday (Feb 9). It was launched in August 2017.
The size of the plots are about 2ha each and sold for $273,000 to $317,000 with a 20-year term. They are located in Neo Tiew Lane, Neo Tiew Link and Neo Tiew Place.
There were 12 land plots put up for tender, but two remain unsold as there were no suitable proposals for them, said AVA. This land will be re-tendered.
The winning proposals feature productive and innovative farming systems. These include green houses with automation and smart controls, multi-tier hydroponic systems using LED lights and data analytics to optimise growing conditions, and multi-storey farms that use automated soil-less cultivation system and robotics.
One of the winning submissions was a joint effort by Farm deLight and KG Farm. They will be paying $288,000 for their 20,167 sq m land plot.
Farm deLight's general manager Edmund Wong, 51, is looking forward to bringing his indoor-farming methods to a bigger space. Currently housed in a 600 sq m space in Boon Lay, it uses a soil-based growing method (geoponics) and organic fertilisers, with the plants stacked in tiers.
High-tech automation and artificial lighting allow Mr Wong to control the environment's humidity and carbon dioxide composition, among other things.
He now mostly provides herbs for a niche fine-dining market via business-to-business transactions.
But with the new space, Mr Wong intends to extend the operations to produce leafy vegetables like lettuce for the mass market.
"We intend to start making sales on the new land within nine months to a year," said Mr Wong.
Eden PurelyFresh Farm, another winning tenderer, is also at the cutting edge of farming technology.
Its chief executive officer Desmond Khoo, 30, will create a "hybrid" farm on the new space, with some sections using a multi-tier system and others using hydroponics in shipping containers. The farm will also harness solar energy and collaborate with Fresh Hub Vending to continually study technological improvements to the space.
Mr Khoo said even artificial intelligence or robotics are possible add-on options in future.
He hopes to kick off full-scale operations in less than a year.
"The work starts now," he said.
Mr Melvin Chow, AVA's group director for food supply resilience, said: "These proposals have the potential to optimise scarce land, reduce reliance on unskilled labour and bolster Singapore's food security."
Concept proposals were evaluated by a Tender Evaluation Committee (TEC) comprising external experts with deep knowledge in agriculture sciences and technology, as well as relevant government agencies.
It assessed the proposals using criteria such as production capability, production track record, relevant experience and qualification of the applicant, and innovation and sustainability.
Seven of the eight successful tenderers are local companies. AVA will be tendering more land for vegetable farming in the second quarter of 2018 and from 2019.
An Agriculture GCSE Will Help Grow The Next Generation of Farmers
February 13 2018, The Times
An Agriculture GCSE Will Help Grow The Next Generation of Farmers
JulianSturdy is a Conservative MP for York Outer
Last week I led a debate in Parliament calling on the government to introduce a GCSE in agriculture. This is already available in Northern Ireland owing to that region’s strong rural tradition and vital contribution to the local economy. However, I would assert that the same could be said for many regions across Britain, and this GCSE could be valuable to pupils from all areas.
I felt it was important to start a parliamentary conversation, since a new qualification of this kind would offer significant skills and career opportunities to secondary-aged children, and could increase the pool of educated younger workers from which the farming sector could draw on. One of the main functions of our education system is to equip young people with necessary skills to make a contribution to the social and economic life of our country. Given pupils can currently study for GCSEs in geology, astronomy, business and psychology, surely they should also be able to learn about farming at the earliest possible opportunity, given how essential it is for putting food on everyone’s tables, and managing our landscapes and natural environment.
The average age of a farmer is 59 in the United Kingdom, so there is a serious need to encourage fresh talent into the sector. Agriculture is the essential foundation of the UK food and drink industry, our largest manufacturing sector, which contributes over £100 billion annually to the economy, and sustains more than 400,000 jobs. There is also the urgent global challenge of food security, with its huge implications for international development and economic growth in poorer nations. World population growth means have to produce 70 per cent more food over the next 30 years, and do so in a sustainable way that maximises finite resources. This challenge in some respects is as significant as climate change, and putting this on the school curriculum through an Agriculture GCSE could inspire young minds to help us produce a solution.
Young people could gain a huge amount from being able to undertake a practical vocational qualification that is directly-linked to a diverse field of employment. Agriculture is increasingly a high-tech, high-skill industry that will be transformed by unfolding scientific developments, and we should be looking to engage our young people with these advances and alert them to the opportunities for a fulfilling and socially useful career.
Methods in farming are changing at a rapid pace with the increased use of robotics, biotechnology, gene editing and data science. A school leaver entering the farming sector in the next few years could expect to use GPS technologies to harvest wheat, driverless tractors, drones to deliver herbicide to weeds on a precision basis, grow wheat with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and new technologies that will drive up animal welfare, such as robotic milking parlours.
Our country is home to some of the best agri-science research in the world, such as at Rothamstead Research in Hertfordshire, and Fera Science just outside my constituency in North Yorkshire. We should be trying to fire the imaginations of our young people by engaging them in the classroom with such examples as soon as possible, just as we try to inspire pupils with the achievements of British scientists and astronauts, and the richness of British cultural and literary achievements in their science and English GCSE courses
Furthermore, the development of indoor vertical farming using hydroponics will also expand the opportunities for growing food in urban areas, which could serve to make agricultural knowledge just as relevant to a pupil in an urban area as in a rural one.
The majority of farms are family businesses (mine being no exception) and the routes to getting involved if you are not from a farming background can be quite limited, to the detriment both of the sector and school leavers, who are restricted in their ability to get a taste of an industry they might well be able to thrive in. Putting an Agriculture GCSE on the curriculum would widen opportunity and access for students by giving them the option to learn about a sector that relatively few of them will have knowledge of, or consider as a career choice.
A new Agriculture GCSE would also represent a sensible extension of the government’s very welcome plans to expand the provision of vocational and technical education, in order to create a better-skilled workforce. The development of T-levels as a full technical alternative to A-levels is encouraging, but if we are truly to establish the parity of esteem necessary to seriously boost take-up of the vocational and technical route, this option needs to be offered to pupils at the first point they select the qualifications they will take — at GCSE level.
Young Startup Brings Vertical Farming To Your Doorstep
Are you an organic food lover and have you ever wanted to grow your own vegetables or herbs at home but is unable to do so for lack of space?
Young Startup Brings Vertical Farming To Your Doorstep
By S V Krishna Chaitanya | Express News Service | Published: 10th February 2018
A model of the vertical mini farm developed by Mumbai-based start-up U-Farm Technologies
CHENNAI: Are you an organic food lover and have you ever wanted to grow your own vegetables or herbs at home but is unable to do so for lack of space?
If so, here is a Mumbai-based start-up firm U-Farm Technologies that is using the hydroponic gardening technique to customize modular farm for an individual apartment complex or for a supermarket.
A group of four, comprising three graduate students from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS) Pilani and a horticulturist came with an innovative idea of building an automated, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered small-scale vertical farming appliance for farming in the city (supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals and households).
Utsav Gudhaka, one of the founders, said the idea was to grow fresh organic food at one’s place. “There are large-scale hydroponic farms in places like Hyderabad and Pune located 100 km away from the cities. The nutrition value comes down by half by the time it reaches the customer and there are complaints of wilting. To overcome this problem, we came up with this idea,” he said.
He clarified that U-Farm is not the first hydroponic start-up. “There are a few players, but the difference is they give the set-up and you have to manage, which is found to be difficult in most cases. Here, we will set-up the farm and our professional growers will come every day doing the routine and the only thing that is required is subscribe to our produce. Our business model will work in an apartment complex having a minimum of 40 families. We are still working on revenue sharing formula with supermarkets,” Gudhaka said.
He said the project was initially supported by Department of Science and Technology (DST) through IIT-Bombay receiving a grant of `3.67 lakh per year and now under Carbon Zero Challenge-2018 the team has received `five lakh to develop the prototype. The team received applause from the jury.
While one can grow almost anything hydroponically, some vegetables thrive more in hydroponic systems than others. “We have chosen plants that don’t mind moisture and that don’t get too big for our set up, such as wheat grass, lettuce, herbs, microgreens and leafy greens.
On the price, the team said it would cost the same as quoted in “Nature Basket” for organic produce. For instance, spinach (250 grams) would cost around `65.
What is hydroponic gardening?
The science of soil-less gardening is called hydroponics. It basically involves growing healthy plants without the use of a traditional soil medium by using a nutrient like a mineral-rich water solution instead.
A plant just needs select nutrients, some water and sunlight to grow. Not only do plants grow without soil, they often grow a lot better with their roots in water instead
A Man Waters Plants In A Rooftop Garden On Top of Le Bon Marché Department Store In Paris
A man waters plants in a rooftop garden on top of Le Bon Marché department store in Paris. Regis Duvignau/Reuters
Big Data Suggests Big Potential for Urban Farming
February 15, 2018 AMY CRAWFORD
A global analysis finds that urban agriculture could yield up to 10 percent of many food crops, plus a host of positive side benefits.
otham Greens’ boxed lettuces have been popping up on the shelves of high-end grocers in New York and the Upper Midwest since 2009, and with names like “Windy City Crunch,” “Queens Crisp,” and “Blooming Brooklyn Iceberg,” it’s clear the company is selling a story as much as it is selling salad.
Grown in hydroponic greenhouses on the rooftops of buildings in New York and Chicago, the greens are shipped to nearby stores and restaurants within hours of being harvested. That means a fresher product, less spoilage, and lower transportation emissions than a similar rural operation might have—plus, for the customer, the warm feeling of participating in a local food web.
“As a company, we want to connect urban residents to their food, with produce grown a few short miles from where you are,” said Viraj Puri, Gotham Greens’ co-founder, and CEO.
Gotham Greens’ appealing narrative and eight-figure annual revenues suggest a healthy future for urban agriculture. But while it makes intuitive sense that growing crops as close as possible to the people who will eat them is more environmentally friendly than shipping them across continents, evidence that urban agriculture is good for the environment has been harder to pin down.
A widely cited 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that transportation from producer to store only accounts for 4 percent of food’s total greenhouse gas emissions, which calls into question the concern over “food miles.” Meanwhile, some forms of urban farming may be more energy-intensive than rural agriculture, especially indoor vertical farms that rely on artificial lighting and climate control.
An operation like Gotham Greens can recycle water through its hydroponic system, but outdoor farms such as the ones sprouting on vacant lots in Detroit usually require irrigation, a potential problem when many municipal water systems are struggling to keep up with demand. And many urban farms struggle financially; in a 2016 survey of urban farmers in the U.S., only one in three said they made a living from the farm.
Although cities and states have begun to loosen restrictions on urban agriculture, and even to encourage it with financial incentives, it has remained an open question whether growing food in cities is ultimately going to make them greener. Will the amount of food produced be worth the tradeoffs? A recent analysis of urban agriculture’s global potential, published in the journal Earth’s Future, has taken a big step toward an answer—and the news looks good for urban farming.
“Not only could urban agriculture account for several percent of global food production, but there are added co-benefits beyond that, and beyond the social impacts,” said Matei Georgescu, a professor of geographical sciences and urban planning at Arizona State University and a co-author of the study, along with other researchers at Arizona State, Google, China’s Tsinghua University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii.
A MODIS Land Cover Type satellite image of the United States, similar to imagery analyzed by the researchers. Different colors indicate different land uses: red is urban; bright green is a deciduous broadleaf forest. (Obtained from https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/ maintained by the NASA EOSDIS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center, USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science Center)
Using Google’s Earth Engine software, as well as population, meteorological, and other datasets, the researchers determined that, if fully implemented in cities around the world, urban agriculture could produce as much as 180 million metric tons of food a year—perhaps 10 percent of the global output of legumes, roots and tubers, and vegetable crops.
Those numbers are big. Researchers hope they encourage other scientists, as well as urban planners and local leaders, to begin to take urban agriculture more seriously as a potential force for sustainability.
The study also looks at “ecosystem services” associated with urban agriculture, including reduction of the urban heat-island effect, avoided stormwater runoff, nitrogen fixation, pest control, and energy savings. Taken together, these additional benefits make urban agriculture worth as much as $160 billion annually around the globe. The concept of ecosystem services has been around for decades, but it is growing in popularity as a way to account, in economic terms, for the benefits that humans gain from healthy ecosystems. Georgescu and his collaborators decided to investigate the potential ecosystem services that could be provided through widespread adoption of urban agriculture, something that had not been attempted before.
The team began with satellite imagery, using pre-existing analyses to determine which pixels in the images were likely to represent vegetation and urban infrastructure. Looking at existing vegetation in cities (it can be difficult to determine, from satellite imagery, what’s a park and what’s a farm), as well as suitable roofs, vacant land, and potential locations for vertical farms, they created a system for analyzing the benefits of so-called “natural capital”—here, that means soil and plants—on a global and country-wide scale.
Beyond the benefits we already enjoy from having street trees and parks in our cities, the researchers estimated that fully-realized urban agriculture could provide as much as 15 billion kilowatt hours of annual energy savings worldwide—equivalent to nearly half the power generated by solar panels in the U.S. It could also sequester up to 170,000 tons of nitrogen and prevent as much as 57 billion cubic meters of stormwater runoff, a major source of pollution in rivers and streams.
“We had no notion of what we would find until we developed the algorithm and the models and made the calculation,” Georgescu said. “And that work had never been done before. This is a benchmark study, and our hope with this work is that others now know what sort of data to look for.”
Robert Costanza, a professor of public policy at Australian National University, co-founded the International Society for Ecological Economics and researches sustainable urbanism and the economic relationship between humans and our environment. He called the study (in which he played no part) “a major advance.”
“This is the first global estimate of the potential for urban agriculture,” Costanza wrote in an email. “Urban agriculture will never feed the world, and this paper confirms that, but the important point is that natural capital in cities can be vastly improved and this would produce a range of benefits, not just food.”
“Urban agriculture will never feed the world … but the important point is that natural capital in cities can be vastly improved.”
Costanza said he would like to see the researchers’ big data approach become standard in urban planning, as a way to determine the best balance between urban infrastructure and green space—whether it’s farms, forests, parks, or wetlands. That is the researchers’ hope as well, and they’ve released their code to allow other scientists and urban planners to run their own data, especially at the local level.
“Somebody, maybe in Romania, say, could just plug their values in and that will produce local estimates,” Georgescu said. “If they have a grand vision of developing or expanding some city with X amount of available land where urban agriculture can be grown, they can now quantify these added co-benefits.”
That could be very valuable, said Sabina Shaikh, director of the Program on the Global Environment at the University of Chicago, who researches the urban environment and the economics of environmental policy.
“Ecosystem services is something that is very site-specific,” she said. “But this research may help people make comparisons a little bit better, particularly policymakers who want to think through, ‘What’s the benefit of a park vs. food production?’ or some combination of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean, because it has the additional benefit of food production, that a farm is going to be more highly valued than a park. But it gives policymakers another tool, another thing to consider.”
Meanwhile, policy in the U.S. and internationally is already changing to accommodate and encourage urban agriculture. California, for example, passed its Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act in 2014, allowing landowners who place urban plots into agricultural use to score valuable tax breaks. The idea has proven controversial—especially in housing-starved San Francisco. Beyond raising rents, critics have argued that urban agriculture, if it impedes the development of housing, could reduce density, contributing to the sort of sprawl that compels people to drive their cars more. Put urban farms in the wrong place, and an effort to reduce food’s carbon footprint could have the opposite effect.
On the other hand, businesses like Gotham Greens that aim to expand may still be hampered by zoning—Puri and his co-founders had to work with New York’s zoning authority to change regulations affecting greenhouses before they could open their first farm. As the company looks to add sites in other cities, the wide array of their zoning rules, utility access, and regulations will influence its decisions.
“I think we could benefit from the more cohesive policy,” Puri said, “but it’s also a very new industry. And then there are so many approaches to urban agriculture. How does a city approach something that is so broad and diverse at this stage?”
While more data about the potential ecosystem services and tradeoffs would surely help create a more navigable regulatory landscape, Puri, like others in his industry, is also something of an evangelist, eager to put in a word for urban farming’s less quantifiable benefits.
“I don’t believe that urban farming is ever going to replace more conventional farming,” he said. “I don’t think a city is going to be able to produce its entire food supply within city limits, but I think it can play a role in bringing people closer to their food, and in making our cities more diverse and interesting and green.”
About the Author
Amy Crawford has written for Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, Slate, and Smithsonian. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Vertical Farming, LEDs and The Flavor of Leafy Greens
Vertical Farming, LEDs and The Flavor of Leafy Greens
A large climate cell with endless racks of microgreens illuminated with soft pink or white light works 24/7 to bring delicious microgreens to the kitchens of some of Amsterdam’s top restaurants. GROWx is one of Europe’s most known vertical farms and its offering of more than 20 microgreen varieties has quickly earned its spot within Amsterdam’s top 10% restaurants. At the moment it is only microgreens and only for the city of Amsterdam but the ambitions of GROWx’s founders are to re-invent agriculture for urban areas. ‘This revolution can’t come fast enough’ says the CEO and Co-Founder, Mr.John Apesos.
This high tech, futuristic looking environment is what the farming of the future could look like. Nevertheless, when it comes to the end customers, restaurant chefs and their patrons in this case, it is primarily about flavor and freshness. These microgreens go from the farm to the dinner plate in a matter of hours and according Mr.Apesos this is what keeps the flavors intense. The varieties include everything from the common pea-shoots to the more exotic ones like the borage crest.
The GROWx vertical farm is fully equipped with Valoya’s LED grow lights. The primary spectrum used is the AP673L which has been optimized for the vegetative stage of plant development. This means that plants grown under this light will quickly develop biomass (stems and large, thick leaves) while flowering will be delayed or completely prevented making it ideal for microgreens and leafy greens in general. In a research conducted by Wageningen University and Democritus University, the AP673L spectrum boosts the development of chicoric, rosmarinic and caffeic acids and other phenolic compounds making the plants more flavorful and nutrient dense1. The other spectrum is NS1, a sunlight replica spectrum, good for the entire growth cycle. Both spectra are wide and patented with a high CRI (Color Rendering Index) value meaning that plants and other objects look natural under them i.e. their colors look as they would under natural sunlight.
1 F. Bantis et al.(2016) Artificial LED lighting enhances growth characteristics and total phenolic content of Ocimum basilicum, but variably affects transplant success, Scientia Horticulturae 198 (2016) 277–283
About Valoya Oy
Valoya is a provider of high end, energy efficient LED grow lights for use in crop science, vertical farming and medicinal plants cultivation. Valoya LED grow lights have been developed using Valoya's proprietary LED technology and extensive plant photobiology research. Valoya's customer base includes numerous vertical farms, greenhouses and research institutions all over the world (including 8 out of 10 world’s largest agricultural companies).
Ways We Can Make The Food System More Sustainable
If you’ve been paying any attention to the changing food climate over the past several years, you’ve probably heard a certain buzzword repeated time and time again: sustainability.
Ways We Can Make The Food System More Sustainable
February 7, 2018
Written by Megan Ray Nichols
If you’ve been paying any attention to the changing food climate over the past several years, you’ve probably heard a certain buzzword repeated time and time again: sustainability.
But what does a sustainable food system refer to, exactly?
The answer is complex and composed of many moving parts, but at its heart, a sustainable model in the food system promotes the physical health of the public, the economic health of farmers and producers and the fair treatment of the earth, animals and people.
A sustainable food system also refers to an approach that makes the most of the earth’s resources for future generations. It guards against depleting these resources. Why, then, has sustainability not yet been achieved? Perhaps it’s because not enough folks know how to achieve it.
Here are 10 ways that consumers, food producers and legislators can work together to make the food system more sustainable.
1. Local eating
The cost of transporting food across the globe isn’t measured just in dollar signs, but in carbon emissions too. When you buy food from local farmers, you’re contributing to your community’s economy and also decreasing your impact on Mother Nature. Win-win.
Tip: If you really want to reduce your food miles, we recommend growing your own herb garden. It’s easy, economical and sustainable. Check out this post on growing herbs.
2. Encourage cooking
Since sustainability promotes better health among consumers, learning to cook at home more skilfully — and more frequently — is an essential component. When people have control over their own food, they can eliminate ingredients like added sugars and fats. This, in turn, creates a healthier public.
Tip: Check out the video below that we created to encourage people not only to cook vegan, but to grow their own food too!
3. Design menus to follow seasons
Eaters like to enjoy fruits and veggies year-round which is part of the reason foods are imported from all over the world: to gratify the appetites of consumers. This however is unsustainable. If you stick to seasonal produce, however, you’ll be able to buy almost everything locally — and make sure that you get more variety in your diet over the course of a year. This practice will help to reduce your carbon footprint and boost your health.
4. Rotate crop varieties regularly
When farmers plant the same crops again and again, they eventually suck the nutrients out of the soil, making it near useless and often necessitating chemical-laden fertilizers. There’s a simple, natural and time-tested trick to avoid this, though. Farmers can plant different crops every few years to keep the soil healthy. Consumers just have to get on board with mixing up their diet too.
5. Waste less
If you added up all the food to be produced from now until the year 2050, the sum would equal the same amount of food that’s been consumed over the past 8,000 years. Clearly, as the food industry grows, so will its impact on the earth. In order to offset this impact, consumers should strive to toss out less food at home and make the most of their groceries. Businesses, supermarkets and industry should stop throwing out food too and strive to donate to charity or other organisations.
Tip: It’s important that food isn’t sent to landfill as it adds to the carbon pollution problem as rotting food in landfills help to create methane, a greenhouse gas. So make sure to compost your food. To learn more about the food waste problem, we recommend reading this post which runs through the issue in great detail.
6. Support Fair Trade
Foods that bear the Fair Trade label have been produced in a way that ensures fair treatment of employees and the earth. So if you’re committed to the sustainable food movement, you should opt for Fair Trade foods whenever possible to support the right kinds of producers.
Tip: If you really want to support a sustainable food system, make sure to choose more plant-based foods, reduce your meat intake or try a vegetarian or vegan diet.
7. Consider food’s true cost
The “true cost” of food refers to the often unseen environmental and social impacts that mass food production creates. Although unsustainable foods may be cheaper at the supermarket, they ultimately have a higher “true cost” in their negative impact on people and planet. It’s important to keep this issue in mind when you buy food.
Tip: If it’s more sustainable to support local grocers, farmers and primary producers, why not quit the big supermarkets? This post offers some helpful advice.
8. Invest financially
The Netherlands is a small nation, but it exports the second-highest amount of food in terms of value, second only to the United States. How? The Dutch have invested in sustainable agriculture. They get innovative, using indoor farming techniques to make the most of every square inch of land. They also forego most chemical pesticides so they can keep their soil fertile.
Tip: Vertical farming is a great example of indoor farming. Not sure what it is? This beginner’s guide will bring you up to speed.
9. Avoid additives, pesticides and go organic
Synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and antibiotics take a toll on the earth and on animals, but are used frequently by primary producers and livestock farmers in conventional farming to ensure produce and animals grow – and turnover profit – as quickly as possible. When you have the option, try to buy organically grown and additive-free produce and grass-fed meats where possible This should be clearly marked on the packaging but if it isn’t, make sure to ask an assistant.
10. Be willing to forgo convenience
Supporting a sustainable food system isn’t easy. When you commit to buying locally-produced foods and Fair Trade foods and adhering to other tenants of sustainable living, these conscious choices may cost you time and money. But ultimately, you’re working toward a greater cause that will ensure you pass on a healthy earth to future generations.
Contributing to a sustainable food system may require a personal investment on your part, but when you weigh the benefits, it’s well worth the effort. With just a few minor tweaks to your daily life, you could have a huge impact on the way the food system develops in the coming decades. So pick one or two of these steps that you can take to do your part in living (and eating) more sustainably.
Urban Farming Platform Infarm Gets $25M Funding Endorsement
Berlin-based urban farming startup Infarm has received a rousing endorsement for its vertical, indoor farms in the form of cash. Like, lots of cash.
Urban Farming Platform Infarm Gets $25M Funding Endorsement
Photo Credit: Infarm
Berlin-based urban farming startup Infarm has received a rousing endorsement for its vertical, indoor farms in the form of cash. Like, lots of cash.
Balderton Capital was the leading investor in a Series A funding round, with other names such as Mons Investments, Cherry Ventures, and LocalGlobe claiming their stake in the promising indoor farming company. The round brings Infarm’s total funding to date to $35 million, and they plan on using the new capital to expand their international footprint in Paris, Copenhagen, London, and other German cities while improving upon their Berlin-based R&D headquarters.
The goal: 1,000 Infarm vertical farms in operation globally by 2019’s end.
Here’s how Infarm works. They conceived and control the glass-walled ‘vertical indoor farms’, allowing clients such as grocery stores and restaurants to place the Infarm incubator in their business. From there customer can pick their own herbs, lettuce, or other vegetables out for themselves, much like they would with any other fruit or vegetable. The difference is that they know Infarm produce is guaranteed fresh because they are picking the produce or herb from the incubator in which it’s grown.
Infarm’s techs and agricultural experts can manage their modules remotely, taking maintenance issues out of the hands of clients while using A.I. and a mass of analytical data to ensure that the produce is being grown as near to perfect as possible.
We collect 50,000 data points throughout a plant’s lifetime, Erez Galonska, cofounder and CTO explained, each farm acts as a data pipeline, sending information on plant growth to our platform 24/7 allowing it to learn, adjust, and optimize.
Each module can be controlled to establish the perfect amount of light, pH levels, temperature, and nutrients depending on what is being grown. The Infarm modules have been likened to their own contained, highly-controlled ecosystems, and Galonska has said that he hopes to create a world where seasonal changes and drought are irrelevant to one’s ability to produce food.
Infarm’s model makes too much sense for grocery stores, restaurants, and other establishments that waste countless funds throwing out over-ripe produce daily to overlook. It’s no wonder so many investors are willing to put their big bucks behind Galonska and his partners, brother Guy and Osnat Michaeli, and their one-of-a-kind urban farming platform.
The challenge [now] is in finding the right partners. Our initial focus is on supermarket chains, online food retailers, wholesalers, hotels, and other food-related businesses, for whom the superior quality and range of produce — with no fluctuation in costs — makes Infarm an attractive partner, Michaeli explains. In return, we can reintroduce the joy of growing to the urban population.
The Promise of Indoor, Hurricane-Proof ‘Vertical’ Farms
A worker rides a lift past stacks of vertical farming beds with LED lights
A worker at an indoor vertical farm in Newark, New JerseyMike Segar / Reuters
The Promise of Indoor, Hurricane-Proof ‘Vertical’ Farms
They might be an efficient way to produce food in a world withmore extreme weather—but only if growers can figure out a successful business model.
February 12, 2018, The Atlantic Daily | MEAGAN FLYNN
Federico Marques feared the worst for his farm as he watched live coverage of Hurricane Harvey ravaging fields across the Gulf Coast and inundating every pocket of Houston.
Marques was trapped at home during Harvey and could only monitor his crops from his couch, anxiously viewing footage from the farm’s single working indoor camera. “We couldn’t get in here for four days,” Marques said as he showed me around on an unseasonably warm afternoon this November. “I’m looking at all these aerial photos and thinking, ‘Oh my God, everything is underwater.’ When we finally got back, we had 10 inches of water on the floor—but we only lost maybe 5 percent of the product. The rest was perfectly fine.”
In a way, Harvey was a test for Moonflower Farms. Founded by Marques in December 2015, it was one of the state’s very first indoor “vertical” farms—where plants are stacked in trays on shelves, instead of laid out horizontally across larger plots of land. In these high-tech structures, plants don’t rely on sunlight or soil, rainwater or pesticides, but LED lights and minerals instead. The goal of vertical farms isn’t just to save space; it’s also to find a more economical way of producing food for the growing population—and to reduce the costs and consequences of getting that food to where people actually live.
Moonflower is in an industrial area about 15 miles south of downtown Houston, tucked away inside a relatively small, unassuming white shack. The small farm is housed in a 900-square-foot room with a 14-foot ceiling. There are hot-pink lights and a small irrigation system quietly feeding 20 varieties of micro-greens, which sprout up from a mineral-based substitute for soil called vermiculite. In Marques’s growing room, everything from the temperature to the lighting to the watering schedule has been engineered to replicate conventional outdoor farming, but without all the interruptions that plague it: seasonal changes, droughts, bitter cold, fires, and, of course, floods.
A Moonflower Farms employee checks on produce in the 900-square-foot growing room in southeast Houston. (Meagan Flynn / The Atlantic)
Houston has developed other vertical-farm concepts in the past two years. There’s Space City Farms, a backyard aeroponic vertical garden; Dream Harvest, a hydroponic system similar to Moonflower; and Acre in a Box, a literal take on the operation housed in a shipping container.
Acre in a Box’s founders—Andrew Abendshein, who works for an oil and gas trading firm in Houston, and Ana Buckman, a Rice University languages and creative-writing instructor—had no background in agriculture when they invested $80,000 in their first shipping-container farm. Abendshein said he has long had an interest in getting fresh produce to urban food deserts and hopes to one day start moving shipping-container vertical farms into those neighborhoods. For now, though, Acre in a Box’s two farms are hidden in the parking lot of an abandoned drill-bit factory at the end of a dead-end street in Houston’s East Downtown, a few blocks from where Houston’s two largest bayous intersect.
Harvey, and the deluge it brought, are exactly the kind of scenario that vertical farms are designed to withstand. Catastrophic flooding events like Harvey are only expected to become more frequent, and threats of food and water scarcity are projected to worsen in the years to come—all as the population grows. The United Nations projects that the world’s population will be 9.8 billion by 2050, with roughly two-thirds of those people living in urban areas, which aren’t exactly conducive to large-scale farming.
To meet the growing demand for food, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that there needs to be a 50 percent increase in global agriculture production—a distinct challenge, the UN warns, in the face of climate change and the growing need for water conservation. Vertical farms present a potential solution: There is no fertilizer runoff into the groundwater, fewer CO2 emissions from delivery trucks’ long journeys, and no land to till. They require only a fraction of the acreage and use only a fraction of the water—anywhere from 90 to 97 percent less—that traditional farms do.
“We are kind of at the beginning of a revolution,” Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a graduate-school professor at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, told me. “We’re at the beginning of a very rapid development in the use of indoor controlled facilities for producing vegetables and some fruits,” he said. “No matter what happens with climate change, you still have your controlled environment.”
The technology used for these farms has been around for decades. In fact, Marques began studying it in the 1990s after learning that NASA used it to grow plants in space. But only in the last several years has interest in using the technology for urban, commercial-scale agriculture picked up. Indoor farms have recently sprouted up in old warehouses, shipping containers, and small skyscrapers in New Jersey, South Korea, Germany, India, and Dubai—places where traditional farming is either difficult or impossible due to climate, population density, or the land itself. In Houston, sprawling commercial and residential developments were built on top of a swamp, making large-scale outdoor farming virtually impossible.
Marques and I hopped in his minivan and headed about a mile away from his garden to the site of the Moonflower Farms expansion, where men in hard hats were surveying the land. The new facility doesn’t look like much yet—just a large elevated mound of dirt with metal poles sticking out of it. But by the time it’s operational, Marques plans to have a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse that he expects will churn out 1,000 pounds of produce per day—compared with the 20 pounds that his tiny facility produces now. He currently sells to a couple dozen restaurants but plans to expand to regional and national distributors and local grocers once the new facility is up and running.
The elimination of long, cross-country transports to get the produce to grocery stores means consumers wind up with fresher food. Right now, Marques said, the time from harvest to table is sometimes only a matter of hours, which means that produce arrives in better shape and then lasts longer both in the store and in people’s homes. “If we can make this work in the city of Houston and produce 1,000 pounds a day or more of product—high-quality product that has three times the shelf life—then we have a good model that we can pretty much [take] to any city in the world and replicate,” Marques said.
The new greenhouse will operate like a research-and-development facility, helping Marques perfect a prototype that interested farmers around the world can use as a template. He already knows that he’ll need to make some changes. For starters, he’s not going to rely exclusively on LED lighting as he does now; instead he will mostly use sunlight, plugging in energy-efficient lighting as a supplement—a measure that will cut costs significantly. Marques said he has already had inquiries about this model from a food distributor in Cairo, where the arid climate and heavy reliance on imported crops make the food supply unpredictable. Marques says he has also talked to strawberry growers in Norway, where thousands of metric tons of strawberries are imported every year due to the short growing season. And he has heard from cattle farmers in Brazil, where the shrinking availability of pastureland and prohibitions on razing rainforests mean that some farmers may need to import grass to feed their cows.
Ana Buckman, Acre in a Box’s CFO, shows off kale that was later sent off to local businesses in Houston. (Meagan Flynn / The Atlantic)
Cutting the costs of building and maintaining the systems themselves will be crucial as vertical farms continue to evolve, according to Henry Gordon-Smith, the co-founder of the International Association for Vertical Farming and a consultant at the New York-based firm Agritecture. As a result of high costs, Gordon-Smith said, several vertical farms in North America have failed in recent years. That’s what happened at LocalGarden, a rooftop vertical farm in Vancouver that went bankrupt in 2014, and at PodPonics, a shipping-container vertical farm in Atlanta, where high labor and technology costs were consistently undermining return on investment.
Mike Nasseri, who was the harvest supervisor at LocalGarden, said that design flaws had inflated the endeavor’s operational and energy costs to the point that the farm couldn’t make enough money. Even though the farm had started small, Nasser said the crew decided to scale up too quickly to a commercial operation. To make matters worse, Nasseri said, the costs of the real estate in the middle of downtown Vancouver—a central location he said he would not recommend for new vertical farmers —were way too high. “That placement [in the middle of downtown] is basically the first way you can screw up,” Nasseri said.
Still, he’s a major proponent of vertical farming, primarily because of its environmental benefits. He’s now working at a startup called Ava Technologies, developing indoor “smart gardens,” essentially mini vertical farms that can fit on kitchen counters.
Gordon-Smith said the industry-wide goal going forward has to be to minimize the risk of failure, financial or otherwise, as much as possible in order to make vertical farming more accessible to the younger generation of produce growers, who have been moving steadily away from rural areas and toward cities over the past few decades. Still, he said, the failures serve as lessons for new investors as they continue to develop various types of vertical farms.
Like Marques, Abendshein, the founder of Acre in a Box, was stuck at home monitoring his produce from the couch during Harvey. But he knew he could rest assured that, as the waters raged, his produce was safe. Without land that could be ruined for an entire season, the worst that could happen, he thought, was that his farms would float away.
How Urban Farmers Are learning To Grow Food Without Soil Or Natural Light
Growing food in cities became popular in Europe and North America during and immediately after World War II.
How Urban Farmers Are learning To Grow Food Without Soil Or Natural Light
February 13, 2018
Mandy Zammit/Grow Up, Author provided
Author
- Silvio Caputo
Senior Lecturer, University of Portsmouth
Disclosure statement
Silvio Caputo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
University of Portsmouth provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.
Growing food in cities became popular in Europe and North America during and immediately after World War II. Urban farming provided citizens with food, at a time when resources were desperately scarce. In the decades that followed, parcels of land which had been given over to allotments and city farms were gradually taken up for urban development. But recently, there has been a renewed interest in urban farming – albeit for very different reasons than before.
As part of a recent research project investigating how urban farming is evolving across Europe, I found that in countries where growing food was embedded in the national culture, many people have started new food production projects. There was less uptake in countries such as Greece and Slovenia, where there was no tradition of urban farming. Yet a few community projects had recently been started in those places too.
Today’s urban farmers don’t just grow food to eat; they also see urban agriculture as a way of increasing the diversity of plants and animals in the city, bringing people from different backgrounds and age groups together, improving mental and physical health and regenerating derelict neighbourhoods.
Many new urban farming projects still struggle to find suitable green spaces. But people are finding inventive solutions; growing food in skips or on rooftops, on sites that are only temporarily free, or on raised beds in abandoned industrial yards. Growers are even using technologies such as hydroponics, aquaculture and aquaponics to make the most of unoccupied spaces.
Something fishy
Hydroponic systems were engineered as a highly space and resource efficient form of farming. Today, they represent a considerable source of industrially grown produce; one estimate suggests that, in 2016, the hydroponic vegetable market was worth about US$6.9 billion worldwide.
Hydroponics enable people to grow food without soil and natural light, using blocks of porous material where the plants’ roots grow, and artificial lighting such as low-energy LED. A study on lettuce production found that although hydroponic crops require significantly more energy than conventionally grown food, they also use less water and have considerably higher yields.
Growing hydroponic crops usually requires sophisticated technology, specialist skills and expensive equipment. But simplified versions can be affordable and easy to use.
They grow up so fast. Mandy Zammit/Grow Up, Author provided
Hemmaodlat is an organisation based in Malmö, in a neighbourhood primarily occupied by low-income groups and immigrants. The area is densely built, and there’s no green space available to grow food locally. Plus, the Swedish summer is short and not always ideal for growing crops. Instead, the organisation aims to promote hydroponic systems among local communities, as a way to grow fresh food using low-cost equipment.
The Bristol Fish Project is a community-supported aquaponics farm, which breeds fish and uses the organic waste they produce to fertilise plants grown hydroponically. GrowUp is another aquaponics venture located in an East London warehouse – they grow food and farm fish using only artificial light. Similarly, Growing Underground is an enterprise that produces crops in tunnels, which were originally built as air raid shelters during World War II in London.
The next big thing?
The potential to grow food in small spaces, under any environmental conditions, are certainly big advantages in an urban context. But these technologies also mean that the time spent outdoors, weathering the natural cycles of the seasons, is lost. Also, hydroponic systems require nutrients that are often synthesised chemically – although organic nutrients are now becoming available. Many urban farmers grow their food following organic principles, partly because the excessive use of chemical fertilisers is damaging soil fertilityand polluting groundwater.
To see whether these drawbacks would put urban growers off using hydroponic systems, my colleagues and I conducted a pilot study in Portsmouth. We installed small hydroponic units in two local community gardens, and interviewed volunteers and visitors to the gardens. Many of the people we spoke to were well informed about hydroponic technology, and knew that some of the vegetables sold in supermarkets today are produced with this system.
A simplified hydroponic frame in Portsmouth. Silvio Caputo/University of Portsmouth, Author provided
Many were fascinated by the idea of growing food without soil within their community projects, but at the same time reluctant to consume the produce because of the chemical nutrients used. A few interviewees were also uncomfortable with the idea that the food was not grown naturally. We intend to repeat this experiment in the near future, to see how public opinion changes over time.
And while we don’t think hydroponic systems can replace the enjoyment that growing food in soil can offer, they can save water and produce safe food, either indoors or outdoors, in a world with increasingly scarce resources. Learning to use these new technologies, and integrating them into existing projects, can only help to grow even more sustainable food.
As with many technological advancements, it could be that a period of slow acceptance will be followed by rapid, widespread uptake. Perhaps the fact that IKEA is selling portable hydroponic units, while hydroponic cabinets are on the market as components of kitchen systems, is a sign that this technology is primed to enter mainstream use.
Vertical Planting Establishes Roots In Laramie
An example of vertical gardens in downtown Laramie. (Photo taken by Seth Haack)
Vertical planting established more permanent roots in Laramie when the company Plenty, formerly Bright Agrotech, began construction on their new headquarters; providing jobs as well as fresh herbs in the community.
Rising from the ground in upright containers under controlled lighting and water systems, the latest trend in agriculture is featured just past the entrance of Washakie dining center and according to University of Wyoming researchers, vertical farming is here to stay.
“Plenty’s farms will be located near communities around the world, delivering industry-leading yields of delicious, locally-grown, backyard-fresh produce,” a Plenty spokesperson, Senior Communications Manager Patrick Mahoney stated in an email. “By shaving thousands of miles and weeks off the journey from farm to table, Plenty will transition agriculture to a reliable, predictable and resource-efficient model.”
The company was founded by Dr. Nate Storey, a UW alumnus.
“Nate Storey was a student of mine,” Extension Horticulture Specialist Karen Panter said. “He got all three of his degrees here in our department of plant sciences. The company includes engineers and computer experts and plant growth people and researchers and [Plenty’s] got some plant breeders now, there’s a lot of people working here in Laramie.”
Vertical farming allows for an increase in production per square foot, Panter said.
“So, there’s a limited amount of land that we can grow food on, limited resources, we have what growing people often refer to as ‘food deserts’ which are centers of urban settings with limited access to fresh produce,” Associate Professor of Agroecology Urszula Norton said. “And the fact that you can actually produce fresh green vegetables that don’t really take too many days and a way shorter period of time under optimum growth conditions.”
Indoor controlled conditions don’t experience drought, hail or other afflictions, resulting in a quicker growth turn around. The crops that are most compatible with vertical farming conditions tend to be leafy greens and some herbs, like lettuce and spinach.
“Plenty’s vertical towers can achieve industry-leading yields of fresh fruits and vegetables,” Mahoney stated in an email. “Up to 350 times greater per square foot than the field. Plants that get too big like tomatoes or that kind of thing just don’t work. The plants’ architecture is just completely wrong. It’s really hard to grow larger, longer, vining type plants.”
Norton, along with Liping Wang and other plant scientists, are in the midst of submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation to better understand and improve on efficiency of water and energy using vertical farming settings.
“It is generally a proposal about learning more about where are we standing in terms of efficiency of vertical farming and how can we move it toward increasing effectiveness, efficiency, water use and energy,” Norton said. “My role would be pretty much to assess the growth yield and the quality of the produce.”
While the research and growth of vertical farming programs are certainly hot topics in the ag community, horizontal farming is not becoming obsolete by any means.
“[Vertical Farming is] not going to supplant traditional farming because there’s so many crops that can’t be grown in this type of system,” Panter said. “It’s not likely that we’ll be growing wheat or anything like that in this kind of a system, but for niche crops, it’s another tool to use.”
Introduce Vertical Farming by Hydroponics and Aquaponics in Dry Arid Regions of India
It is known for everyone in India that the farming communities of the dry and arid regions of Central India mostly in the regions of Bundelkhand, Vidarbha and Marathwada have been struggling for a long time.
Introduce Vertical Farming by Hydroponics and Aquaponics in Dry Arid Regions of India
Independent started this petition to pmoindia and 4 others
It is known for everyone in India that the farming communities of the dry and arid regions of Central India mostly in the regions of Bundelkhand, Vidarbha and Marathwada have been struggling for a long time. Droughts and Farmer Suicides are rampant in Vidarbha and Marathwada. There were times when people have to eat even grass to kill their hunger in Bundelkhand. Unfortunately even though new technologies have been developed around the world to develop crops and food in most difficult situation, still these technologies have not reached these farmers who are in dire need of hope.
Hence I appeal to the Govt of India and the Ministry of Agriculture to introduce Vertical Farming by Hydroponics (and Aquaponics) to the farmers of these regions. Hydroponics is the method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent. This method can be used to grow plants in Vertical Towers and Stands without any need for soil.
Advantages of Vertical Farming using Hydroponics:
- No need for soil so can be set up in dry and arid regions.
- No effect of drought or storms or unseasonal rains.
- 80-90% less usage of water due to water recycling.
- Crops grow quickly hence improved productivity of 10-12 crops per year instead of 2-3 crops per year.
- Scope of Installing Solar Panels for Generation of Solar Electricity on top of Warehouse.
- Vertical Farms give more crops per acre. No limit of vertical expansion of farm.
Today, the advanced countries have been using these technologies for mass production of food for the people of their countries. Vertical Farming in Temperature Controlled Warehouses are now a proven and standard system for food production. Combined with installing Solar Panels on top of the roofs, these system can become a food production industry in itself and can bring the farming communities of Bundelkhand, Vidarbha and Marathwada out of Poverty. Since the plants being raised using Hydroponics are not dependent on soil, these can be setup in the dry and arid regions easily (and also anywhere in the country).
I am sure the ministry of agriculture must be aware of these technologies. I request the ministry and the Govt of India to urgently look at introducing Vertical Farming by Hydroponics in India. Not only it has the potential to eliminate poverty of the farming communities but also it can bring enough food for all the needy and the poor.
Hope the farmers of India can be benefitted and they come out of poverty quickly.
Regards
Souvik Jana
Agrilyst Adds Horizons Ventures to New Round with Eyes on China
Agrilyst Adds Horizons Ventures to New Round with Eyes on China
FEBRUARY 2, 2018 EMMA COSGROVE
Indoor farming software startup Agrilyst has raised an undisclosed strategic round, bringing in new investors with the aim of expanding the scope of its product offering and entering the Chinese market.
Agrilyst offers a software-as-a-service platform to help indoor agriculture operations maximize their efficiency. The platform offers workflow management tools, inventory tracking, and pest and nutrient management. The company analyzes data about these metrics to provide growers with recommendations on the best way to fine-tune their growing plans and increase profitability.
New investors in the round include iSelect Fund, Argonautic Ventures, Horizons Lab and Onlan Capital Ventures, with existing investors Compound and New York State Innovation Venture Capital Fund joining also participating.
Horizons Lab is the seed fund of Hong Kong-based Horizon Ventures, the VC fund belonging to billionaire Li-Ka Shing.
The firm is invested in major tech startups like Slack, Facebook, and Skype, but also several agrifood tech startups such as algae-based food company Algama, as well as alternative protein startups Impossible Foods, Modern Meadow, Hampton Creek, and Perfect Day Foods.
“We see a world where computation cost is driven to zero and we now have the resources to monitor the growth, health, and biology of every single seed,” says Phil Chen, Advisor at Horizons Lab. “I see Allison and her team at Agrilyst as the interpreters of this data to secure future food sources.”
Agrilyst CEO Allison Kopf told AgFunderNews that the company currently has customers in Singapore, but is looking to expand into the Chinese market.
Kopf said that iSelect Fund is also a strategic investor to her company’s growth as the St. Louis firm’s other agtech portfolio companies could be ideal partners. iSelect is also invested in Agrible and Benson Hill Biosystems among others.
This year Agrilyst will ad an app to its web-based suite of tools, which will allow growers to use traceability tools in their growing environments without ideal connectivity.
The company will also release a new inventory management module in the coming months that will eventually help growers to get better pricing on inventory items.
Kopf says the ultimate goal is for Agrilyst to be a central platform aggregating other data and services that indoor farmers might need.
“Our API has been open from day one. We are definitely trying to build an ecosystem with our growers and with our partners on the technology side. The more people we bring in, the more profit we can push back to the farmers,” said Kopf.
Agrilyst added more than 100 new customers in 2017 and has seen 500% growth in terms of both revenue and customers since 2016. The platform is currently available in 10 countries and its customers grow 800 different crop varieties, including cannabis, flowers, and insects, which are relatively new additions to the platform.
The company raised $1 million in seed funding in 2016 led by New York seed stage investors Brooklyn Bridge Ventures with participation from NYC early-stage tech investors Metamorphic Ventures as well as a group of angel investors.
Tregren's IoT Kitchen Garden Is Boosting The Strong Urban Gardening Trend
Tregren's IoT Kitchen Garden Is Boosting The Strong Urban Gardening Trend
NEWS PROVIDED BY Tregen
HELSINKI, February 8, 2018, PRNewswire
The ever growing urban gardening trend is hitting cities across the globe with an increasing intensity. We see this trend bringing green buildings, urban farms and now even automated gardens into our kitchens. The latest technologies in lighting and IoT have enabled the development of affordable kitchen gardens to be used in everyone's home. Tregren is the first company to bring these fully automated gardens to the consumers. Tregren's T-series kitchen gardens have been an instant success in Europe and North America.
"We could sense the potential already last year when we introduced our new T-series Kitchen Garden concept to our B2B customers at Ambiente-fair in Frankfurt. The first time we knew that we were on to something big was when our Kickstarter campaign was successfully overfunded. The strong demand continued when we recently announced the start of shipments and we immediately received orders from more than 15 countries across Europe. We are happy to see years of hard work is bearing fruit," says Tregren's CEO Jyri Timonen.
The success of T-series kitchen gardens is based on IoT combined with the innovative use of hydroponic cultivation. The state of the art technology in the T-series provide many benefits as it produces three times faster growth, big stable yields and the possibility to grow more than 100 different species of plants. The best thing is that this can be achieved without any previous knowledge of gardening.
The three times faster growth pace is the result of Active Growing TechnologyTM, a combination of hydroponic cultivation, the latest in growing light technology and growth nutrients. With T-series, Tregren also launched the Smart GardenerTM application. The Smart GardenerTM controls the Active Growing TechnologyTM that creates the right growing condition for the different plant species.
"Like human beings, every plant has its own special needs. Some plants need a lot of water when others don't. Some plants need more light than others and some need to grow in a nutrient-rich environment to flourish, whereas for others this can be harmful. This is something that many of us experience as challenging, even to the extent that we don't consider gardening as an option. With the T-series, we wanted to omit this hurdle and provide an easy and effective solution to indoor gardening for everyone. We believe that the T-series will do the same for urban gardening that iPhone did to mobile phones," says Tregren's CVO and founder Markus Nilsson.
The T-series isn't only about good yields and intuitive usability, but it is also about design. The T-series consists of three products, the T3, T6, and T12. The T3 is the perfect product for small households. The T6 is the family-friendly kitchen garden, where your family can have all of their favorite herbs growing in your kitchen all year round. The T12 is designed for high yield households and public places where continuous harvest is needed. The recommended price 89€ for T3, 139€ for T6 and 179€ for T12. The Smart GardenerTM works with both Android and iOS devices.
Tregren T-series takes a new approach to indoor gardening, incorporating innovative technologies, effortless usability, and contemporary design into a unified product. Easy to set up, easy to take care of and guaranteed success enabled by Active Growing TechnologyTM and the Smart GardenerTM application make T-series a unique product of the future.
Tregren develops and manufactures consumer products intended for cultivation in urban areas, particularly indoors. The products are examples of a new kind of Nordic design where functionality and form support each other. Tregren's product philosophy is based on consumer-friendly functional design. Tregren operates in more than fifteen countries and more than one hundred thousand products developed by Tregren have been sold since the company was established in 2010. The products are developed and manufactured in Finland. For more information, visit http://tregren.com
SOURCE Tregen
Agrilyst Raises Another $1.5M For Its Intelligent Indoor Farming Platform
Agrilyst Raises Another $1.5M For Its Intelligent Indoor Farming Platform
February 7, 2018 | Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)
Agrilyst, a platform that makes it easier for indoor farmers to manage their crops based on sensor data, today announced that it has raised a $1.5 million funding round from iSelect Fund, Argonautic Ventures, Horizons Lab (Horizons Venture’s seed fund) and Onlan Capital Fund. The new investors were joined by existing investors Compound and the New York State Innovation Capital Fund. That’s on top of the $1 million round Agrilyst announced in 2016.
As Agrilyst co-founder and CEO Allison Kopf tells us, the company, which won our Disrupt San Francisco Startup Battlefield in 2015, has been on a bit of a roll lately. It added 100 new customers in 2017 and saw 500 percent growth in both revenue and customers since 2016. Its service is now available in 10 countries and its tools support more than 50 vegetables and 800 crops.
When the company launched, the team was very adamant that it didn’t want to be seen as a tool for indoor cannabis growers, but it recently added support for cannabis, as well as for floriculture and insect productions.
“We see a world where computation cost is driven to zero and we now have the resources to monitor the growth, health, and biology of every single seed,” says Phil Chen, advisor at Horizons Lab. “I see Allison and her team at Agrilyst as the interpreters of this data to secure future food sources.”
As for the team, it’s worth noting that the company recently brought on both a new CTO (to replace co-founder and CTO Jason Camp, who left the company last year) and a VP of Customer Success.
Unsurprisingly, Agrilyst plans to use the new funding to support its growth and expand into new markets and product lines. Having a number of new investors that focus on the large Chinese market (Horizons, Argonautic, and Onland) will surely help the company expand into this market, too.
Panasonic Vertical Farm in Full Operation
February.5, 2018 - 23:28 — Evangeline_H 311 pageviews
Panasonic Vertical Farm in Full Operation; Special Horticultural LED Lighting Deployed to Increase Vegetable Production
Multinational electronics company Panasonic will start growing and marketing high-value vegetables in China from March 2018 with its vertical farm in Suzhou. Those vegetables will be made into salads and sold to up to 30 shops in Suzhou and Shanghai.
(Image: Panasonic)
In China, food safety has become more and more important. Panasonic claims monitoring and management at each stage will be thoroughly executed in hope to increase the sales in the Chinese market.
Panasonic in 2016 started running a vertical farm in its electronic component manufacturing subsidiary in Suzhou. The vertical farm, taking a 1,000 square meter area, is now officially in full operation.
The company aims to raise the plant production by 3 times to a monthly production of 9 tons.
Prices of the vegetables will be 2-2.5 times higher, compared with prices local plant growers set for their production. Those vegetables grown in the vertical farm were sold to merely two channels in Suzhou—the AEON MALL and the Izumiya Supermarket. In the future, Panasonic plans to approach local shops as well, broadening the channel to market its plant production to the Chinese community.
Panasonic uses special LED lighting to provide and adjust the light in the vertical farm to ensure the temperature, humidity, and the density of carbon dioxide are maintained at a certain level. That turns the farm an environment suitable to grow β-carotene-rich plants anytime of the year.
The company says the salads it offers are nutrient-rich and safe to eat, and looks for collaborations with local restaurants. It will also be working with local e-commerce companies to develop strategies to market both high-value vegetables and the equipment in the vertical farm.
People in China have become more aware of food safety after being affected by overuse of pesticides. The awareness towards vertical farms thus increased. Plant factories have been built in several regions in China since 2010.
At the early stage, these facilities were simply regarded as the demonstration of advanced plant production technology by governments and big corporations. Later on, more companies established their vertical farms once the government released more subsidies.
Establishments across the nation eventually scaled up, with the largest facility (approximately 9,000 square meters) that is able to produce 45 tons of vegetables on a monthly basis.
Growing Their Own At Corner Cafe
Growing Their Own At Corner Cafe
Cooking students soon will have fresh herbs to harvest
Natovia Talbot, a junior at Princeton Township, IL, High School, places bok choy seedlings into the new tower garden at the Corner Cafe in the Area Career Center’s Dolan Building next to the La Salle-Peru Township High School. The 5-foot tower circulates water and nutrients under artificial light to grow lettuce and herbs, which culinary arts students will harvest and use. Tracey MacLeod
- Jeff Dankert | February 6, 2018
Indoor growing technology is putting fresh herbs into the hands of culinary arts students.
A 5-foot tower garden is starting to green up in the dining area of the Corner Cafe, which is in the Area Career Center’s Dolan Building on the La Salle-Peru Township High School campus.
A few students took a break from the kitchen a few days ago to transplant lettuce, onion, chard, arugula, bok choy and basil into the tower. The plants were started in trays where each plant was labeled with a plastic spoon.
The tower herbage should be ready in a few weeks, said Susan Stiker, culinary arts instructor.
The students use many greens and herbs in the kitchen.
“Actually quite a bit. Kale, basil for pesto,” said Abby Nord, a junior at Princeton Township High School. The Area Career Center teaches students from several area high schools.
“Aren’t we going to try Chinese and use the bok choy with it?” said Natovia Talbot, also a junior at Princeton High.
The new gadget and the growing plants get frequent checks by the students.
“Every day when they come in, they check this first,” Stiker said.
The growing tower looks like high-tech hydroponics but the maker calls it aero-ponics because the plants are not sitting in the water.
Seeds are started in a synthetic medium called rockwool inside grow trays. The clumps of rockwool, bearing tiny seedlings, are transplanted into slotted pods on the outside of the tower cylinder. A rack surrounding the tower glows with three florescent light tubes, oriented vertically, to provide energy for photosynthesis. The lights are on for 14 hours and off for 10, Stiker said.
At the bottom of the tower cylinder is a 20-gallon water reservoir that holds dissolved fertilizers and nutrients. A pump circulates water up and drips it down along the inside, watering and feeding the clumps of rockwool and plant roots growing within. The watering is set on a timer.
“It cycles on for 15 minutes and is off for 45 minutes,” Stiker said.
Deborah Aldana checks the progress of celery, avocado and potato roots growing inside jars of water. These plants won’t go into the tower garden but are a demonstration of how vegetable roots can be used to grow new plants.
This project integrates with the educational buzzword, STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math. Preparing and cooking food has many STEM opportunities, Stiker said.
“I’m doing all of that STEM stuff all the time. That’s what this is,” she said, pointing to the tower. “Students looking to do an independent study, this would be a great thing. I had the kids research how to harvest and how to check the pH.”
The $900 apparatus came with all the equipment and supplies to get started. It was funded by a grant from the La Salle-Peru Township High School Foundation for Educational Enrichment.
The Corner Cafe is a restaurant with a fully-equipped kitchen and dining area for the public. Students prepare food to sell and for events. Students recently made pies for a buffet, prepared food for a group of eighth graders, made chili for a fundraiser and prepared Super Bowl snacks for staff.
Indoor garden towers are a thing among urbanites. The vertical design uses less space, such as a corner of the dining area inside the Corner Cafe.
“I knew I had to do something smaller here,” Stiker said.
Stiker got the idea from a middle school in Texas that was growing plants in an indoor tower. School gardens, indoors and outdoors, have taken off, she said.
“There are schools that actually supply their cafeteria,” Stiker said.
Streator Township High School students constructed six indoor plant towers that are now growing lettuce, said agricultural educator, Riley Hintzsche.
Streator students have a vegetable garden two blocks away and grow sweet corn on one-fourth of an acre outside of town. Students harvest the vegetables and donate them to the food pantry, he said.
“We do have some of the food classes use the produce occasionally as they need them,” Hintzsche said.
Jeff Dankert can be reached at (815) 220-6977 or lasallereporter@newstrib.com. Follow him on Twitter @NT_LaSalle.
Infarm Reinventing Food Supply With Vertical Urban Farms
Infarm Reinventing Food Supply With Vertical Urban Farms
By Katy Askew
06-Feb-2018
Infarm founders Osnat Michaeli and the brothers Erez and Guy Galonska have big ambitions for their urban farm model
German urban farming group Infarm aims to expand its network of urban farms to 1,000 locations throughout Europe by 2019.
Infarm was founded in 2013 by Osnat Michaeli and the brothers Erez and Guy Galonska. The company distributes what it describes as “smart modular farms” targeting urban areas.
Fusing vertical farming techniques with the internet of things technology and data science, the group aims to develop an “alternative food system” that is “resilient, transparent, and affordable”.
“Rather than asking ourselves how to fix the deficiencies in the current supply chain, we wanted to redesign the entire chain from start to finish; Instead of building large-scale farms outside of the city, optimising on a specific yield, and then distributing the produce, we decided it would be more effective to distribute the farms themselves and farm directly where people live and eat,” explained Erez Galonska, co-founder and CEO.
How it works
A single two meter squared farm unit can deliver an output of 1,200 plants per month.
Infarm’s indoor vertical farms are connected by the company’s central farming platform, creating what the company claims is a “first of its kind” urban farming network.
Each farm is a controlled ecosystem with growing recipes that tailor light, temperature, pH, and nutrients to ensure the maximum natural expression of each plant.
“We collect 50,000 data points throughout a plant’s lifetime,” Guy Galonska, co-founder and chief technical officer elaborated. “Each farm acts as a data pipeline, sending information on plant growth to our platform 24/7 allowing it to learn, adjust, and optimize.”
Infarm therefore not only distributes the vertical farming tech: the company operates as a service provider.
It can also personalize its farms to each customer’s needs, growing different varieties for different supermarket locations or equalizing the flavor of the produce to better suit the taste palate of a customer’s clientele.
Early success
Having introduced the concept two years ago, Infarm now operates more than 50 farms in supermarket aisles, restaurant kitchens and distribution centers throughout Berlin.
Infarm units can grow produce in retail locations
Infarm has integrated in-store farming into Edeka and Metro locations, partnering with two of Germany’s largest food retailers where it grows “dozens ” of herbs and leafy greens.
Infarm’s marketing project manager Peter Prautzsch told FoodNavigator that the company has already grown 300 different plants on its farms.
“Our modular and scaleable farms units are easily integrated into any given client space. We offer and operate both InStore and InHub installation,” he explained.
Infarm’s solutions also reach beyond addressing sustainability issues to deliver other benefits to its customers, he continued. “Cutting the supply chain to the minimum helps our produce to retain all of its nutrients and therefore an intense natural flavor. We considerably improve the safety and environmental footprint of each plant. We can offer a consistent supply, no matter the season [and] our farms create a unique and impactful customer experience.”
“We bring a world of choice right into your neighborhood without having to compromise on quality, safety, and taste. [...] B y eliminating the distance between farm and fork, we offer produce that has retained all of its nutrients and therefore, intense natural flavour," noted Osnat Michaeli, co-founder, and CMO.
Funding growth
Infarm announced yesterday (5 February) that it has completed a €20m series A funding round, which was led by an investment from Balderton Capital, alongside TriplePoint Capotal and Mons Investment as well as previous investors Cherry Ventures, QUIDIA and LocalGlobe.
Balderton Capital partner Daniel Waterhouse said that the investment vehicle believes Infarm can help develop a solution to some of the greatest challenges facing the food supply chain today.
“Urban living is growing unrelentingly across the world and societies are at a point where they have to confront the big existential questions such as how to feed their growing populations sustainably. Infarm is right at the forefront of a new wave of companies setting out to tackle the inefficiencies in the current food supply chain by making it possible to grow fresh produce right in the heart of our communities. We are delighted to be backing a company whose mission we believe in so passionately.”
The fresh wave of investment brings Infarm’s total capital raising to €24m, including a €2m grant awarded to the group by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 program.
Overseas ambitions
Infarm will be launching in Paris, London, and Copenhagen this year, as well as extending to additional cities throughout Germany.
“This is the beginning of the urban farming revolution: it will redefine what it means to eat well, reshape the landscape of cities, and re-empower the people to take ownership of their food,” predicted Erez Galonska. “Our ambition is to reach cities as far as Seattle in the United States or Seoul, South Korea with our urban farming network.”
The new investment will be used to grow Infarm’s team into a global operation and to further develop its 5,000 square meter R&D center in Berlin. The center focuses on the promotion of biodiversity and further expanding the company’s product assortment; tomatoes, chilies, a variety of mushrooms, fruits and flowering vegetables are to be introduced next.
A Growing Opportunity Has Dracut, New York Students Filling Salad Bar
A Growing Opportunity Has Dracut, New York Students Filling Salad Bar
By Amaris Castillo, acastillo@lowellsun.com
02/05/2018
A group of Dracut High School students in late November planted lettuce seeds at Justus C. Richardson Middle School in Dracut, which would produce food to be incorporated in the high school s salad bar. The students are also members of the school s Environmental Action Club. SUN PHOTOS / AMARIS CASTILLO
DRACUT -- A group of Dracut High School students in late November bent their heads over a row of soil press seed plates on a long table at Justus C. Richardson Middle School. Slowly and carefully, the teens (also members of the school's Environmental Action Club) planted the first set of lettuce seeds in each hole that, in time, would produce organic food meant for the high school's salad bar and prepared meals for students.
"It's been growing as hoped and expected, and they have harvested lettuce," Dracut High School principal Richard Manley said last week of the students' progress in the district's greenhouse.
Dracut High students are using the indoor grow technology through a collaborative effort between teachers, the middle school, and the Food Services Department.
(SUN / AMARIS CASTILLO)
The company that brought forth the technology is New York-based 2445 Organics.
According to Andy Maslin, the founder of 2445 Organics, this system takes the "ag farm back into the school" rather than a school busing students to a farm for the experience. It's the first time his company is branching into Massachusetts.
"This is allowing the farmers to become year-round sustainable and allowing the schools to grow their own foods year-round," Maslin said.
Maslin said his New England distributor, Todd Bard, CEO of EvanLEE Organics, worked to bring the opportunity to Town Manager Jim Duggan. Bard has previously conducted business with the town.
"It's a job creator. It's got agricultural and educational components to it, and I think it's a fantastic opportunity," Duggan said.
Philips Lighting North America launches new GreenPower LED Interlighting with greater efficacy and plug and play installation
Philips Lighting (Euronext Amsterdam ticker: LIGHT), a global leader in lighting, announced the new Philips GreenPower LED Interlighting Generation 3 (Gen 3) is now available for the North America market.
February 6, 2018
Philips Lighting North America launches new GreenPower LED Interlighting with greater efficacy and plug and play installation
Eindhoven, The Netherlands – Philips Lighting (Euronext Amsterdam ticker: LIGHT), a global leader in lighting, announced the new Philips GreenPower LED Interlighting Generation 3 (Gen 3) is now available for the North America market.
Designed to be placed within the crop canopy, the bi-directional or sideways-facing LEDs of the Interlighting system direct growth-stimulating light on the most vital parts of crops to boost the yield of high-wire tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. The added light is particularly valuable during the darker months of November through February. Moreover, the new Interlighting Gen 3 will do this highly efficiently as it offers a system efficacy of 2.7 to 3.0 μmol/J.
“We are excited to roll out the new Interlighting Gen 3 module to the North America market. It has been very well received by growers in Europe since being introduced to the European market at the IPM show last year,” said Ron DeKok, Business Development Director Horticulture at Philips Lighting. “Growers in Canada and the U.S. are eager to have access to the Gen 3 model because it offers a higher light intensity compared to the previous Interlighting module and it’s much easier to install.”
Installation ease and flexibility
The new system is designed to simplify the installation process with a plug and play connector and flexible cable connections. The Philips Interlighting Gen 3 is available in two lengths, 2.0 meter and 2.5 meters, and two light intensities—a high output version and regular output version. The high output version operates at 81 to 100 watts with an efficacy of 3.0 μmol/J; the regular output module operates at 64 to 79 watts with an efficacy 2.7 to 2.8 μmol/J.
Proven highest yields
After seeing strong results achieved by the tomato grower Herdi as well as record yields of 107 kg achieved last season by Proefstation Hoogstraten, Belgian tomato grower Tomaline decided to install the GreenPower LED InterLighting system in the new greenhouse it will build. “The very high light output of 220 μmol/s and resulting high efficacy of 2.8 μmol/J will give us exactly what we need to increase our yield,” said Kris van Haute co-owner of Tomaline. “The system comes as either a 2 meter or 2.5 meter version allowing us to tailor it to our specific situation and create a uniform light distribution right until the end of the row.”
Developed in cooperation with growers
Udo van Slooten, Business Leader Horticulture at Philips Lighting said, “These latest innovations in our horticultural applications are a result of the long-term collaboration between Philips Lighting and our customers across the world. By working closely with them, we were able to identify exactly how we could further advance the system. As a result, we have developed and introduced the new Philips GreenPower LED Interlighting Gen 3 system providing greater ease of installation and a higher light efficacy which in turn results in higher yields”.
For further information, please contact:
Barbara Perzanowski
Marketing Communications Specialist
Philips Lighting – Horticulture LED Solutions
E-mail: barb.perzanowski@philips.com
About Philips Lighting
Philips Lighting (Euronext Amsterdam ticker: LIGHT), a global leader in lighting products, systems, and services, delivers innovations that unlock business value, providing rich user experiences that help improve lives. Serving professional and consumer markets, we lead the industry in leveraging the Internet of Things to transform homes, buildings and urban spaces. With 2016 sales of EUR 7.1 billion, we have approximately 34,000 employees in over 70 countries. News from Philips Lighting is located at http://www.newsroom.lighting.philips.com