Will Bitcoin Work in Agriculture?

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Will Bitcoin Work in Agriculture?

December 5, 2017

By: Nathan Faleide

If you checked the Internet lately, you’ve probably seen the words, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. I won’t describe them in great detail here, but Google is your friend.

Currently, Bitcoin is the talk of the town gaining 1,000% in value in the last year and now is worth north of $10,000 a coin from $1,000 earlier in the year. Some say it’ll go to a million by 2020. There are also other cryptos like Ethereum, Litecoin, and bitcoin Cash that have gained in value and interest. Some are naturally worth more than others and have unique attributes to them. Behind it all is this thing called blockchain. Basically, it’s a recording system ledger that tracks every single transaction and where it came from going back from the beginning. Many industries are trying to find ways to incorporate blockchain and cryptos and I think agriculture is next.

Now there are some oddities when it comes to cryptocurrency. With Bitcoin, for example, it’s really not that great of a currency currently. There is a limit of 21 million coins and you actually have to mine them via solving complex mathematical problems that can only be solved by supercomputers, which takes a lot of energy. It is kind of a crazy process. Because of these limits in the amount of coins, this brings wild swings in the value, and thus most people are using it as an investment instead of using it for buying things. Also, there is a fear of missing out, “FOMO” for short, because of the increased value.

Many governments, banks, and investment groups still don’t trust cryptos due to zero regulation and control. They are havens for “bad money,” especially for laundering and everything that goes with that. The wild swings in value also scare off established groups. In addition, the amount of money involved and the changes in the way money is being handled is scaring these groups because people have a new way to manage money. The scariest thing of all for governments and banking groups is that cryptos will allow an open and trackable way to manage, invest, and control money without them.

With all this being said, cryptos and blockchain technology are becoming very popular and it seems are not going away. I’m no expert in this topic, but I see YUGE (to quote our president) possibilities for both of these new technologies in agriculture.

Below are a few ways I see cryptos and blockchain becoming advantageous for ag:

• Tracking data ownership: As it is well known, data ownership and control in ag are huge issues. With blockchain technology, each transaction can be tracked very precisely in a standard way that cannot be changed. It can provide the true source, identity, and ownership regardless of where it comes from. For instance, whoever created the data can create their own special code that only they know and can basically lock that data or parts of that data to anyone they want, while also giving access to others that they feel want it. This is all tracked and whoever does use the data can be looked up easily.
• Crypto Commodities: The beauty of cryptocurrencies is that anyone can actually create them. Many companies are creating their own currencies to have others invest in. Those groups of cryptocurrencies then can only be traded for that one company creating a certain value. I can see this being used with crops, whether specialty or larger markets like corn, beans, and wheat. Think of it this way, a small or large farm could create their own cryptocurrency to invest in the farm or to buy certain crops they grow because they do it differently. Each farm is unique in its own way and cryptos could provide a way to bring that unique value to the farm without having commodity traders and outside influences change the value. The value then comes from how that farm produces that crop. Oh, I did I mention it is all tracked from start to finish with blockchain? The industry could start small, crypto wheat, corn, soybeans, etc… and this could be done by region or state then slowly get into more defined areas. The possibilities are endless, and at the end of the day, it puts control in the hands of the producer. A dream for every farmer.
• Easier trading: From what I’ve already brought up, trade is a big issue especially with talks of NAFTA imploding. Cryptos and blockchain could disrupt this entire process. The transfer of money tied to trade is a huge issue in the world. This is sometimes why there is so much waste of food and why the efficiencies of transporting goods sometimes fail. Having a centralized currency that is unique to a crop could benefit millions by providing fair and even trade throughout the world. This would allow smaller farmers to provide similar value to their crops as large corporate farms. Someone could even place the smaller farmer’s crops at a greater value and track where that commodity is exchanged anywhere without complex tariffs, trade regulations, and money transfers. What it really can do is reduce the bureaucracy involved with trading any commodity. Of course, many groups and countries would still need to accept this, but I do think agriculture is destined to go this way eventually.

So, these are a few major reasons why cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology can help agriculture and I’m sure there are many more. In all reality, these things may never happen and maybe my wild ideas are just crap. I’m not hear to say they will absolutely work. But I will say some of the core issues with ag could potentially be solved, or if anything helped, by technologies like cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I recommend looking into it more to educate yourself on the potential.

I’ll try to really excite you for a moment here. With Bitcoin and Ethereum gaining 1,000% and more over the last few years, envision using precision ag technology on the farm, which can be tracked and allow you to value your corn crop at, say $8/bu. Some may want your corn more than Joe Blow neighbor, who doesn’t use precision ag and thus only gets $3/bu. Since you can prove what you did in a marketplace, anyone can basically invest in you while you create your own value.

Heck, I’m going to “coin” a few phrases here: CornCoin, Wheatereum, SoyCash. Imagine farmers pushing the value based on how they perceive the market instead of speculators or traders in Chicago that don’t know squat. Oh, how the ag market could change. You could start “farming” CornCoins like they “mine” Bitcoin. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I hope that people smarter than me figure this out somehow because personally I only see positives going forward as long as bread doesn’t cost $10 a loaf.

Either way, check these technologies and currencies out and think about how you could see them work in ag. Maybe it’s the next big thing or next big flop. Only one way to tell. Bring on the vultures to fund it, I guess. I’ll take 100 million, please.

Electrical Conductivity: The Pulse of the Soil

Electrical Conductivity: The Pulse of the Soil

November 30, 2017 in Crops, Disease, Eco-Farming, Soil Fertility, Soil Life, Soils

Traditionally soil consultants have used electrical conductivity to measure salinity, however conductivity can tell us much more about the physical structure and health of the soil. Based on these direct measurements, electrical conductivity can also indirectly measure crop productivity.

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When we walk into our home on a dark night, the first thing we usually do is turn on the lights. With the flip of a switch, we complete the electrical circuit initiating the flow of electricity to the light bulb, illuminating our home.

In the human body, electricity controls the flow of blood from the heart to all organs. In the same way we flip a switch turning on the lights, electrical signaling in the body tells the heart when and how often to contract and relax. These electrical signals can be altered by the intake of nutrients. Case in point, the intake of high-salt foods can lead to a higher pulse rate. With a higher pulse rate, your heart and other organs must work harder in order to function properly. Certainly this extra work puts added stress on the body. In contrast, consuming a balanced form of energy can reduce the stress put upon the body.

Waking up in the morning and only consuming caffeine does not give you the same energy as waking up and eating a balanced breakfast. While both inputs may increase your readiness in the morning, physiologically they affect the human body in different ways. Inputs into any biological system whether human, animal, plant or soil consequently will affect the system in different ways.

In 1946, Albert Einstein theorized that all matter is energy. His theory, which gave us the formula E=mc2, laid the foundation for future generations to begin using energy theories in daily problem-solving. If all matter is equal, simply a form of energy, then conceptually the human system is no different than the soil/plant system. Furthermore, the same concepts which we apply to our own physical health can be applied to soil and plant health.

Quantifying the human body’s energy level is done by monitoring pulse rate. In the soil, the current energy level in the field or in the lab can be achieved by measuring the electrical conductivity of the soil. Electrical conductivity is a direct measure of the energy flow in the soil system. Energy, measured in ergs (energy released per gram per second), is a function of the soil’s ion concentration, clay type, moisture content, porosity, salinity and temperature.

As consultants and growers we are focused on crop productivity. We often aim to maintain the nutrient or ion concentration in the soil solution best suited for the highest crop production.

This ion concentration is expressed by the quantity of ions surrounding the diffuse layer of the soil colloid and also by the soil’s moisture content. Electrical conductivity is a direct measurement of these factors and can be used in the field to tell us how much energy is available for plant growth.

It is important to note that natural fluctuations in electrical conductivity can occur. In the soil, the conductor of electrical current is water. As soil moisture changes due to dry periods and/or rainfall events, electrical conductivity can vary. Abiotic factors are variables in the accurate representation of the ion concentration in the soil solution.

However, overall, if the electrical conductivity (concentration of ions in the soil solution) is either too high or too low it will be reflected in decreased crop productivity. From our experience, the majority of problems facing growers and consultants can be related to abnormal electrical conductivities.

Crop productivity is governed by three disciplines of science: physics, chemistry and biology. Explaining electrical conductivity on a chemical or biological level requires a much more lengthy and detailed explanation. By focusing on the physics of electrical conductivity, referring to it as energy, simplicity can be brought to such a complex topic.

Einstein taught us that an object’s mass is a function of energy. If you apply this concept to crop production, crops (mass) are simply an expression of energy. In order to produce mass (yield), energy is needed. For a plant to perform photosynthesis and produce mass; an initial energy requirement must be met. This energy requirement comes largely from the electrical current in the soil. Thus, soil electrical conductivity can be utilized as a direct measurement of energy and an indirect measurement of crop productivity.

Crop Productivity

Crop productivity can be simplified into two stages: growth and decomposition. We can discern that the growth stage of the plant life cycle has different energy requirements than the decomposition stage. The energy needed to produce mass in the form of plant growth varies between 200 and 800 ergs. When the energy in the soil falls below or above these values for a prolonged period of time, the plant can no longer produce mass (growth) and decomposition will set in. With the onset of decomposition in the plant tissue, disease and decay will follow. During the growth life cycle of the plant, energy must be present to produce mass (growth).

In order to produce mass in the form of a nutrient-dense, healthy plant, the energy coming from the electrical conductivity of the soil must come from “good” sources. Electrical conductivity coming from biological activity, flocculation, soil moisture and clean balanced nutrients (ions) can be considered “good” sources of energy. Electrical conductivity coming from salinity in the soil solution can be defined as a “bad” source of energy. “Bad” sources of energy will produce nutrient-poor, unhealthy, low-energy and quickly decomposable mass.

Nutrient-dense, healthy, high-energy plant mass is what we as consultants and growers should be trying to achieve. Yes, by using these “bad” sources of energy you can produce high quantities of mass (high yields). We see this year in, year out with the use of synthetic fertilizers.

However, if your goal is to produce high-quality, nutrient-dense, healthy plant mass, your energy source must come from “good” sources. Low salt fertilizers, organic matter, biological amendments, cover cropping and proper soil stewardship can provide your soil with “good” sources of energy. All of which indirectly restores your soils’ fertility and sustainability for future generations.

If all matter is energy and all energy is matter, we as consultants and growers must begin to think in terms of energy.

In order for seeds to germinate, an energy requirement must be met. In order for plants to grow, an energy requirement must be met. In order for plants to reproduce, an energy requirement must be met. In order for plants to dry out and be harvested, an energy requirement must be met. In order for your soil to repair itself over winter, an energy requirement must be met. And in order for you to have read this article, an energy requirement was met.

By Glen Rabenberg & Christopher Kniffen. This article appeared in the April 2014 issue ofAcres U.S.A.

Glen Rabenberg is the CEO and owner of Soil Works LLC. Soil Works LLC is home to Genesis Soil Rite Calcium, PhosRite, TestRite Labs and GrowRite Greenhouse. Glen Rabenberg extensively travels the world solving soil problems with a little bit of simplicity and the “rite” tools.

Christopher Kniffen is writer, public speaker and manager of the research and development department of Soil Works LLC. For more information Rabenberg and Kniffen can be reached at Soil Works LLC. 4200 W. 8th St., Yankton, SD 57078, 605-260-0784.

Resources:

Eigenberg, R.A., J.W. Doran, J.A. Nienaber, R.B. Ferguson, and B.L. Woodbury. “Electrical conductivity monitoring of soil condition and available N with animal manure and a cover crop.” Special issue on soil health as an indicator of sustainable management. Agric. Ecosyst. Environ.

Johnson, C.K., J.W. Doran, H.R. Duke, B.J. Wienhold, K. Eskridge, and J.F. Shanahan. 2001. “Field-scale electrical conductivity mapping for delineating soil condition.” Faculty Publications, Department of Statistics. Paper 9, digitalcommons.unl.edu/statisticsfacpub/9.

McBride, R.A., A.M. Gordon, and S.C. Shrive. 1990. “Estimating forest soil quality from terrain measurements of apparent electrical conductivity.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 54:290-293.

McNeill, J.D. 1980. “Electrical conductivity of soils and rocks.” Tech. note TN-5. Geonics Ltd., Mississauga, ON, Canada.

Rhoades, J.D., N.A. Manteghi, P.J. Shouse, and W.J. Alves. 1989. “Soil electrical conductivity and soil salinity: new formulations and calibrations.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 53:433-439.

Block Rockin Eats: How Blockchain Could Revolutionize The Global Food Chain

Block Rockin Eats: How Blockchain Could Revolutionize The Global Food Chain

Source: Sharon Cittone - Seeds&Chips - Chief Content Officer

12-05-2017

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Unless you’ve been on a vision quest somewhere outside of the bounds of data coverage, you’ve probably been hearing quite a bit about blockchain recently. It is the technology upon which cryptocurrencies like bitcoin depend, and as the value of a Satoshi continues to climb, so too do the potential applications for blockchain in other areas of global commerce.

Companies have begun to test blockchain technology within the global food chain, with startups and well-established corporations alike trying their hand at what may be the next big leap in the Internet of Things. If you’re still at a loss as to how blockchain works, how it could be applied to things like tomatoes or olive oil, and why it might make a difference don’t worry, you’re not alone. Blockchains are a complicated concept that even the most tech savvy people have a hard time explaining but beneath all of the jargon is a system that could make a huge difference in the food that makes its way to your table.

Blockchain Explained: A Primer

Imagine an old-timey General Store like the ones in a Western that your grandfather used to watch. There was inevitably a wise old store owner who kept records of everyone’s purchases on his ledger, and he might apply his own unique codes to each purchase whether he was to be paid in cash, or in trade. As long as the store owner was able to keep track of the ledger, ensure that it was kept up to date, and keep it in a safe place, this could be quite an effective system. Indeed, relationships like these, based on mutual trust between merchant and client, were often the backbone of local economies.

Now imagine that the same ledger were to be used, but with no old-timey shopkeeper and instead of tracking the transactions of a local business, the ledger would keep a record of large sums coming in and out from around the world in a sort of intergalactic general store. How could you be sure that it would be kept safe? How would you be able to track all of the transactions? How could you trust anyone in the system, if you didn’t even know who they were or where they were from?

Enter blockchain. This digital ledger is administered and monitored by a peer-to-peer network that records, observes, and encrypts every single economic transaction, not only of money but of pretty much anything and everything that has value. Each transaction that is recorded and encrypted becomes a block, and when the transactions continue they form chains. As such, no blocks can be altered without altering every other block that follows it in the chain, and that requires the approval of everyone monitoring the system. Because the system is so vast and those virtual hall monitors are themselves rewarded when more people sign on to the ledger, there are a lot of checks.

With these controls, Blockchain makes it possible to establish an economy based on trust between individuals that is decentralized and incorruptible, and which opens a financial system to everyone. In a blockchain based system, individuals don’t have to worry about their credit rating, a bank branch that will see them, or a loan for which they might not meet the strict criteria set up by a bank or financial institution. All you need is a smartphone, a bit of bandwidth (ok, a lot of bandwidth) and something of value that you want to be included in the ledger. The old timey general store is dead, long live the old timey general store.

The Food Chain on the Blockchain

Until now, blockchain technology has been most successful when applied to cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (for which it was invented) along with hundreds of other cash-based networks. With the coming of Ethereum, blockchain advanced beyond the idea of currency exchange with Dapp, or decentralized application. Where Bitcoin and others provide users with a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Ethereum makes it possible to apply the same concept to things like title registries, voting systems, or regulatory compliance.

Or, food. The global food chain is made up of countless steps and exchange points between planting, harvesting, transporting, packaging, shipping, and purchasing any one of the millions of things we eat every day. Moreover, the very nature of the food chain is decentralized because nearly anyone can grow their own food and sell it on the global market, as long as they are in compliance with health and safety regulations.

But this is where things start to get messy. The global food system is mired in competing and often contradictory regulations that differ by state, region or country and along the way, there is no telling what happens to the products themselves. The recent EU egg recall is a perfect example of this dilemma: in September 2017, 40 different countries were found to be selling eggs tainted by the pesticide Fipronil, which may be harmful if consumed in large quantities. While two people in the Netherlands were detained for their role in the scandal, the actual origin and cause of the contamination remains a mystery.

Enter blockchain. Because it relies on the collaboration of many different players with competing that are nonetheless all directed towards the same goal, blockchain technology manages to transform anarchy into a functional system. There is no one focal point or director of a blockchain, but each individual involved has an interest in doing their part to make the system work. Applying this to the food chain means that the entire life cycle of a product could be monitored, recorded, and protected against interference or corruption so that when it reaches your plate, you know exactly where it came from. More specifically, there are three areas where blockchain technology could significantly improve the global food system:

1. Transparency and accountability. By tracking a product from its point of origin to its point of sale, each hand that touches it is tracked and signs off on their participation in the life cycle of a food item, whether tomatoes, baby food or beef. If a recall must be put into force, regulatory bodies can much more quickly identify the points along that cycle, target their inquiries, and come up with definitive solutions.
2. Monitoring best practices, origin, and processing integrity. Products claiming to be ‘farm to table’, ‘organic’, or ‘fair trade’ abound on the global market, but there is no foolproof way to ensure that these labels are legitimately applied and that the foods they label are faithful to those ethical standards. Moreover, counterfeit products account for tremendous losses on the global market, not only to large companies but to the small farmers who try to ensure the standards of their products. Tracking a product like olive oil from the time olives are harvested from the tree to their bottling in a plant and distribution around the world could save billions of dollars a year while also delivering the high-quality product that consumers believe they’re buying.
3. Access to the market for developing countries. Because blockchain is available to anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection, farmers and producers in developing countries can participate in the global food chain on their own terms instead of relying on multinational conglomerates to do their bidding. The cocoa trade, which relies largely on West African cocoa farmers, translates to low returns to the people actually doing the hard work of growing and harvesting. If we truly want to support ‘fair trade’ we must create the conditions under which it can actually happen.
4. Ensuring international labor standards. As the Guardian recently uncovered, conditions for vegetable farmers in Southern Italy are tantamount to indentured slavery. Sadly, this is but one example of a vulnerable population whose rights go unprotected while they provide a vital service for the survival of the world’s population. Building labor standards into the blockchain is as easy as entering a few computer codes, and enforcing them becomes a necessary part of the product as growing, transporting, or packaging.

These may sound like lofty goals, strung together by wide-eyed millennials who think the problems of the world can be solved by a few lines of computer code. However, integrating blockchain into the global food chain can increase productivity, efficiency and ultimately profit, which should give anyone who stands to gain from the food industry cause for reflection. Indeed, food-based blockchain is already being developed by some of the biggest names in international business.

Building Blocks: Blockchain in Action

Applications of blockchain to the food system are already sprouting up, and they’ve got some big names behind them. Ripe.io, a startup that uses blockchain in agriculture, was started by two former Wall Street financiers who believed that blockchain could be used in more meaningful ways than just mining for cash. Their pilot project, on Ward’s Berry Farm outside of Boston, tracks and documents the supply chain of the first ever blockchain tomatoes. They monitor the ripeness, color, and sugar content of 200 tomatoes on 20 different plants using sensors to record environmental factors including light, humidity, and air temperature. Additional sensors placed in the buckets where the tomatoes are packed for distribution keep track of the humidity in the storage facilities. Ripe has also partnered with Sweetgreen Inc., a farm-to-counter salad franchise, to track their crops and distribute that information to farmers, food distributors and restaurants to whom they deliver. The result is a higher quality product with a traceable chain of custody that can legitimately call itself farm-to-table.

Swiss startup Ambrosus has also employed the blockchain protocol to track one of the most contentious and corrupted products in the supply chain, olive oil. Their project mapped the olive oil supply chain and identified the stakeholders and weak points in the system, with extensive research into the ways that olive oil can be mislabeled and mishandled, resulting in a poor quality product that makes its way onto supermarket shelves around the world. Fraud is rampant in the olive oil industry, with an estimated 70% of the olive oil sold in the US either counterfeited or adulterated. These cases of fraud are not only economically damaging: in 1981, counterfeit olive oil sold in Spain led to thousands of deaths after the oil was found to have been adulterated with industrial grade-grapeseed oil. Due to the lack of transparency in the olive oil supply chain, the guilty parties were never found. The Ambrosus Olive Oil project shows that while the olive oil supply chain is particularly vulnerable as the popularity of olive oil continues to grow around the world, implementing blockchain protocols could effectively save the industry from its own success.

Perhaps the biggest sign that blockchain means business is the August announcement that some of the largest groups in the global food chain would collaborate with IBM on a blockchain protocol designed to increase consumer confidence in their products. The computer giant introduced a fully-integrated, enterprise-grade production blockchain platform via the IBM Cloud which allows users to access data about any number of products within minutes. Using the Hyperledger open source software, the IBM blockchain has tested a number of pilot projects where any participating member has a level of control over transactions, but no one member has exclusive control. Thus far, IBM has delivered their blockchain platform to over 400 companies including financial services, supply chains and logistics, retail chains, governments, and health care systems. The food supply consortium includes Dole, Nestle, Unilever and Walmart among many others. If blockchain began as a refuge for techies, it’s certainly much more than that now.

Hitting a Roadblock? Challenges to the Blockchain Protocol

With all of these applications and many others on the horizon, the future looks bright for blockchain. But as any revolutionary will tell you, there’s a big difference between ideas and execution, and bringing blockchain from the virtual world of bitcoins to the real world of tomatoes is not without difficulties. Those digital general store ledgers work because they’re comprehensive, and every aspect of the system is integrated into the larger goal of creating and protecting value. When you apply that to the lived experience of a food product, there are an enormous amount of factors to consider. For example, what if the truck drivers transporting the food aren’t members of the blockchain? Even the founders of Ripe admit that blockchain is a great resource, as long as people are willing to collaborate. What if unionized truck drivers aren’t allowed by their own rules to be in the blockchain?

Generating incentives is another major challenge standing in the way of making blockchain a comprehensive solution for the global food chain. Ripe didn’t generate any revenue on their pilot project with Ward’s Berry Farm, and for a farmer living hand to mouth, this might not entice them to invest in the equipment, certification, and training that blockchain protocols require. And while IBM’s blockchain protocols may be attracting the likes of Unilever and Nestle, there’s no indication that small or medium sized businesses will gain any greater access to the market, solely by virtue of their participation in the system. For blockchain to become truly transformative, the people whose lives and livelihood are most affected by it need to know that it will make their businesses stronger in the long run, and they need to see it for themselves. Just as with Bitcoin, it’s the wealthy investors with capital to lose who are best positioned to take big risks. For the little guy, blockchain might still be a handful of magic beans that they sell the farm for in the hopes that they’ll grow.

All of this leads to the biggest challenge of blockchain to the food system, legitimacy. In its earliest stages, blockchain technology looks incredibly promising for farmers, distributors, and consumers. But if it doesn’t manage to ensure the quality of a product, or if it doesn’t result in fewer cases of food contamination, will people still believe that it has value? Any new idea or innovation ultimately faces this challenge, but in the global food chain, the stakes are increasingly high. Putting all of our eggs in the blockchain basket risks lowering consumer confidence even further, and raising skepticism among the very people that blockchains are meant to protect.

While it’s too early to tell if blockchain is the wave of the future or a passing fad, the potential rewards do seem to outweigh these concerns. If the global food chain can truly become the global blockchain, the very nature of our relationship to food could be transformed for the better. 

By Sharon Cittone - Seeds&Chips - Chief Content Officer

Former Polartec Plant to Become "Industrial Innovation Hub"

Former Polartec Plant to Become "Industrial Innovation Hub"

• By Zoe Mathews zmathews@eagletribune.com
•  
  • 12-10-17

METHUEN/LAWRENCE  — The industrial facility that once housed the Polartec textile plant is in for a makeover.

On Saturday, its new owner — California-based real estate broker Jitender Makkar — welcomed city and state officials onto the factory floor to unveil his plans for the facility, which he has given a new moniker: IndusPAD.

The facility, which includes two buildings on a 14.5-acre lot on the Lawrence/Methuen city lines, had been put up for auction this spring and sold for $5.35 million.

Makkar said he intends to subdivide the facility and attract multiple mixed-use tenants to what he envisions as a "take off and landing pad" for young entrepreneurs and innovators.

This is Makkar's first East coast investment.

After starting his career in New Delhi, India in construction and architectural design, Makkar relocated to California in 2000 and became involved in real estate investment and sales, according to Purnima Dey, director of public relations and community outreach for IndusPAD, and Makkar's fiance.

"We envision the opportunity of inspired entrepreneurs in our property," he said. "Our team aims to work strategically and diligently to build something memorable."

The first business to open will be a 30,000 square foot vertical farming facility, growing organic produce, said Makkar, in a partnership with Dutch indoor agriculture company Beyond Organic.

"With that, we hope to expand it within in the next couple of years to a much larger facility, which can create maybe 30, 40, 50 new technology jobs," said Makkar. 

He thanked both Lawrence Mayor Daniel Rivera and Methuen Mayor Stephen Zanni for their support, and highlighted Zanni's vision to bring "the jobs of the future" to the region.

"Mayor Stephen Zanni is really the spirit behind what we have planned," said Makkar. "He is the man who has given me the vision to run rather than walk."

"Almost everybody said the biggest challenge we will have is in subdividing this facility, is in creating the option to bring in multiple tenants," said Makkar. "They all saw it was used for one vertical use, and it was hard to transform. What I saw in it was possibilities of a different kind. I saw in it the possibility of somebody from MIT, somebody from Mass. University (sic) to take their projects, take advantage of the infrastructure here, and make it their journey."

Polartec fleece was manufactured in the facility until last year, when Polartec LLC laid off more than 200 workers and moved its operations to Tennessee. When the facility was put up for auction, the listing indicated Polartec had invested more than $6.2 million in the property.

"This brings not only jobs to the Merrimack Valley and beyond, but more importantly it brings about a sustainable company," said Zanni. "A lot of companies come and go, as the company that was here, Polartec moved out to Tennessee and actually moved part of their operations to China. This is an operation that will go over a lifetime."

Methuen Community Development Director Bill Buckley said no other tenants have signed on with IndusPAD yet, but he was aware of some local interest. 

"I think you might see some more traditional industrial tenants initially, that might not fit the vision of innovation," he said.

With nearly 600,000 feet of space in the facility, IndusPAD certainly has room to grow.

State Senator Barbara L'Italien welcomed IndusPAD as "the next chapter in this glorious footprint that was Polartec."

"It sounds like there's going to be some innovation, a place for innovation for ideas for allowing small businesses to be able to begin their dreams and launch, and we know what that has done for Boston area, so we welcome that in the city of Methuen and the city of Lawrence."

Urban Agriculture Just Got Serious! Plantagon Is ​​​​​​​Building 10 Underground City Farms In Stockholm – And Locals Are Invited To Join In…

Urban Agriculture Just Got Serious! Plantagon Is Building 10 Underground City Farms In Stockholm – And Locals Are Invited To Join In…

Press Release   •   Dec 01, 2017

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Plantagon is building 10 underground city farms in Stockholm – and locals are invited to join in…

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (December 1, 2017) – We hear a lot about smart sustainable innovations coming from Sweden, from turning rubbish into fuel, recycling excess heat from data centres, geothermals etc… Swedish pioneers Plantagon, are now taking on sustainable city farming on an industrial scale.

Plantagon CityFarm® is a new concept for using empty premises for resource efficient and sustainable food production in cities. The first plant is located under Stockholm’s iconic “DN Skrapan” in Kungsholmen, and the goal is to have ten production facilities for indoor production in the Stockholm area by 2020. Now the public is invited to a crowdfunding campaign on the Fundedbyme Investor Platform to support the expansion.

"The reason for a crowdfunding campaign is that we believe that people that care about the future of cities, food production and the health of our planet should be given the opportunity to be a part of the solution. To us, it is important to create and expand together, showing that we are a movement for healthy sustainable food. Together, we can make a difference for safe food production in cities - now and in the future", says Owe Pettersson, CEO of Plantagon International.

The goal of the campaign is to reach between 3.5 and 7.5 million kronor. The minimum amount to participate is set at SEK 1,000. All who participate will get a blueprint for a home-growing system if they would like to start cultivating at home. For all who participate at the level of SEK 10,000 or more, a private guided tour and your own harvest of vegetables and herbs inside the facility are included. Read more about the campaign here: www.fundedbyme.com/plantagon

Collaborators in the project include Samhall (a state-owned company with a mandate to create work that furthers the development of people with functional impairment causing reduced working capacity), ICA Maxi Lindhagen (a very local supermarket store), and world-renowned chef Pontus Frithiof with the restaurant, Pontus Tidningspressen, in the same building.

Ten units by 2020

"The first unit in the DN house is already fully funded and under construction. We aim to sign contracts on plant number two and three in March 2018 to start these in December 2018. Then we continue with plant four and five. The goal is that we have ten facilities running in Stockholm by 2020", says Owe Pettersson.

Plantagon CityFarm Stockholm is part of Plantagon Production Sweden AB, a subsidiary of Plantagon International AB. CEO of the new production company is Owe Pettersson, who is also CEO of Plantagon International AB.

Plantagon's technology for industrial indoor and urban cultivation is a response to the need for new solutions for sustainable food production that can provide for the growing urban population around the world while maximizing the use of unused urban spaces. Cultivation takes place in a controlled environment without any forms of chemical pesticides. Plantagon CityFarm® saves 99 percent of water consumption compared with traditional agriculture and carbon dioxide emissions are reduced to almost zero, while 70 percent of the energy used is reused to heat the offices in the DN House. By saving and reusing resources, production costs are significantly reduced.

What does Urban Agriculture really mean?

For Plantagon, it means that it must be sustainable environmentally, sustainable for society and also economically sustainable. Many players in food tech talk about urban agriculture or city farming, but no one has managed to cover all three goals. Delivering locally and using smart energy systems minimizes costs as well as emissions. Large-scale production using efficient cultivation systems while training the future farmers through Samhall, Plantagon plans on taking urban agriculture to the next level and developing the industry globally.

Plantagon launches its first City Farm out of ten until 2020 in the Swedish capital Stockholm. Plantagon invites the crowd to be part of a movement #feedingthecity. Under the famous building "DN-Skrapan" up to 70 metric tonnes of high quality food will be produced yearly - from a place previously being used as a storage room.

Please go to investment page for more information

Contacts

Carin Balfe Arbman, Communications Manager, Plantagon, tel. +46-70-633 35 08, carin.balfe-arbman@plantagon.com

Anna Karlsson, Press Contact, Manifest Stockholm, +46-735-20 28 80,anna@manifeststockholm.se

Plantagon International is a world-leading pioneer within the field food security and CSR – combining urban agriculture, innovative technical solutions and architecture – to meet the demand for efficient food production within cities; adding a more democratic and inclusive governance model. 
www.plantagon.com  www.plantagon.org

Skyscraper Farms Could Be The Answer To The Global Food Crisis

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Source: PLANTAGON

Skyscraper Farms Could Be The Answer To The Global Food Crisis

BY TESSA LOVE

November 6, 2017

Mainstream agricultural practices have a few major problems in need of innovative solutions. For one, industrial farming practices are hard on the environment. Farms emitted 6 billion tons of greenhouse gases in 2011, or about 13 percent of total global emissions. That makes the agricultural sector the world’s second-largest emitter, after the energy sector. Additionally, 38 percent of the world’s total land area was used for agriculture in 2007 and agriculture is responsible for over 70 percent of global freshwater consumption.

On top of that, the way we grow our food now is not sustainable to feed a growing global population, which is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. We'd have to use more land, more environmentally harmful farming practices and ship more food across continents and the globe, particularly to reach people in concentrated urban centers. In short, it's not realistic. And facing this fact, we have to come up with better solutions.

Swedish company Plantagon believes they may have found an answer. The company has developed plans for "plantscrapers," massive vertical greenhouses meant for growing large-scale organic farms in cities, using less energy and and a smaller carbon footprint than the way we grow food now. 

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PLANTAGON

The "plantscraper" is exactly what it sounds like: a futuristic-looking glass skyscraper filled with an indoor farm and some office space for the workers. After years of research and development, Plantagon is now working to make its first prototype a reality: the company is currently crowdsourcing funds to construct a 16-story building called The World Food Building in Linköping, Sweden, which would serve as an international model for industrial urban farming. 

The prototype—and all subsequent plantscrapers—would use Plantagon-patented technology to produce 500 metric tons of food every year in a climate-controlled environment. Half the energy used in food production would be recycled and used to heat the floors in the office portion of the building. Plantagon estimates that it could save 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and 50 million liters of water compared to traditional farming methods.

Urban farming has long been looked to as a potential solution to our impending global food crisis. But until now, urban farming has been on a much smaller and more localized scale. Plantagon wants to change that. 

"Our vertical farming technology is a solution to the food crisis caused by our human population growing so rapidly," the company said in a press release. "We are growing, the earth is not and vertical farming will make the difference."

Plantagon launches its first City Farm out of ten until 2020 in the Swedish capital Stockholm. Plantagon invites the crowd to be part of a movement #feedingthecity. Under the famous building "DN-Skrapan" up to 70 metric tonnes of high quality food will be produced yearly - from a place previously being used as a storage room.

Village Farms: For The Good of The Earth

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Village Farms: For The Good of The Earth

For the technology-driven growers of Village Farms, cutting-edge sustainable practices yield a bumper crop of success.

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The bright red cherry tomato bursts with a pop as you sink your teeth into it, and for a few delightful seconds it’s still summertime—even though it’s winter. You take another bite to make sure you’re not imagining that freshness, and, sure enough, it’s just as bright, tart, and sweet as the first. The taste takes you back to your childhood, when you’d steal tomatoes from a neighbor’s garden, helping yourself to another, and another…

As summer fades and the air grows colder you’ve become accustomed to the average pinkish-orange globes posing as tomatoes that start filling the shelves of the produce department. Thankfully, Village Farms has no interest in growing average produce, and its environmentally-friendly growing methods allow for fresh, high-quality produce year-round. In fact, nothing that the North American-based company does is anywhere near average, and that’s not just great for veggie lovers—it’s great for the planet, too.

As the premier greenhouse grower of tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, and other crops in North America, Village Farms’ dedication to sustainability, technology, and innovation shows with every pristine vegetable picked. Launched in Pennsylvania in 1988, Village Farms has grown from a single 10-acre greenhouse operation to a vertically-integrated agricultural enterprise.

“On day one it wasn’t the plan,” admitted Mike DeGiglio, Village Farms’ President and CEO. “Our first crop was half peppers, half tomatoes, and our focus was on being a grower.”

When that first crop was rejected by a surly Northeastern produce broker for being “no good,” DeGiglio ignored the slight.

“We hired a sales guy the next day and never looked back.”

New Day, New Business Model

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When the company began, all the disciplines in traditional produce companies were separate.

“The grower is the grower, who went to a labor manager to pick the crop, then to a processor who graded and sorted it. Then that’s sent to a trucking company, then to a broker. That broker would send it to a retailer,” DeGiglio recounted. “We asked ourselves, ‘why can’t we do all of it?’”

The answer was, “We can.” Today, Village Farms is an end-to-end operation.

“Today we have 270 skus and 35 tomato varieties,” he noted. “We slowly added more salespeople, distribution centers, and transportation. We became a vertically integrated producer. We have our own engineering, even though there are plenty of companies that build greenhouses.”

The company built a sophisticated greenhouse in West Texas, in part of the Chihuahuan Desert.

“It’s not quite a biosphere but pretty close. It’s 110 degrees all summer and only 20 degrees in winter,” he chuckled, a trace of awe in his voice. “Nothing grows there but tumbleweeds and lizards. We’re like an oasis—it blows people away.”

Today, the company owns and operates seven facilities in British Columbia and Texas, and provides operational and technical support and logistics services for more than an additional 150 acres of greenhouse production throughout Canada and Mexico.

The Greenhouse Difference

Greenhouse growing is far superior to conventional land farming, producing better crops with markedly less waste and dramatically less environmental impact.

“It’s a combination of food safety, quality of the product, shelf life of the product, and taste—it’s consistent, available 365 days a year, and not just seasonal,” DeGiglio explained.

Indoor growing is the premier method of sustainable production and allows Village Farms to use integrated pest management as biological control, meaning they release good bugs to combat bad bugs instead of using chemical pesticides. “Of all agricultural products, proteins like beef and chicken, row crops, and fruits and vegetables, I think greenhouse growing is by far the most sustainable type of agriculture there is, even over organic growing methods,” he said.

“When you are in a controlled environment greenhouse, utilizing the same resources an outdoor farmer would use like sunlight and water, you can do it in an environment that is much more efficient and productive,” he added.

These carefully monitored environments offer protection against elements typical farmers have no control over like wind, rain, and extreme heat and cold.

“We can produce output that has 30 times more yield per acre than crops grown on farmland. A 100-acre greenhouse produces the equivalent of a 3,000-acre farm. And you can locate a greenhouse close to anywhere depending on the technology you use.”

Earth First

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Village Farms’ approach to sustainability abides by a commitment to preserve the earth’s resources for future generations.

“The way Village Farms fits that definition of sustainability is: one, we don’t use soil, so it takes a lot less land for the same amount of crops. Two, we don’t take any nutrients out of the soil. Three, we don’t leachate any of our solutions into the ground,” DeGiglio enumerated.

“It took 500,000 years for the first one billion human beings to be on the planet. There are now seven-plus billion of us. The demographics say that by 2050, there will be a 30 percent increase of the population of the planet. That’s 2.5 billion people. Whether that number is up or down by twenty percent doesn’t matter,” he posited. “How is agriculture going to feed that amount of people with the same amount of water? It has to come from efficiency and sustainability.”

The company chose growing regions in British Columbia and Texas based on the climate conditions most favorable to producing consistently superior quality crops.

“You can’t move your farm to take advantage of a better climate,” he mused. “In Texas, we grow at the southernmost latitude at the highest elevation in the U.S. We are at a 5,000-foot elevation. We do that because of the warm days and cool nights.”

Natural gas is used to heat the greenhouse at night.

“The boilers designed for greenhouses over the past three decades are so efficient and clean, the carbon dioxide (CO2) that’s released is food grade. We capture all of it, and pump it into the greenhouse,” he revealed. “As you remember from ninth grade biology, plants take in CO2 and make oxygen. Not only do we not extract the CO2 into the atmosphere, we convert it into oxygen. That can’t be done outside.”

Village Farms produces only non-GMO crops, grown in an organic medium made of coconut husks. Crops are vine ripened and hand-picked at the exact right moment for the absolute best taste.

“A lot of field growers pick tomatoes when they’re green,” he said. “If a tomato doesn’t get to a certain level of maturity, then the ripening process never occurs. So they spray an ethylene gas on it so it turns an orangey pink. Bananas are shipped green, and when they’re ready to ship to the store they spray them with ethylene. Vine ripened taste is much better.”

The company’s agricultural engineers are working on extending product shelf life.

“There’s all kinds of good things happening that drives a better tasting, safer product, and people can trust that brand,” he added.

Committing to the Cannabis Crop

Canada approved the use of medical marijuana in 2001, and pending legislation is expected to legalize it for recreational use in mid-2018. Village Farms recently entered into a partnership with Emerald Health Therapeutics, a bio-pharma company focused on the use of cannabinoids to treat disease.

“We are currently in the process of converting our smallest greenhouse footprint of 1.1 million square feet to cannabis in British Columbia. It’s a very new crop, and a lot of the early folks that got into it weren’t farmers, they were just folks who saw an opportunity. We thought our ability to grow any crop was a good fit,” he stated.

“We’ve done modeling, we talked to Health Canada, and we saw a great opportunity in conversions of our Canadian high-tech greenhouses as a lower cost model rather than building new ones because we feel that it will eventually become commoditized out, and when it does, in the end it’s the low-cost producer that survives. That’s always a prudent thing in agriculture.”

While practicality is at the heart of everything Village Farms does as a business, the people of Village Farms are really what makes the difference and our planet—and palates—are much better for it.

Farmers Business Network Raises $110m Series D, IPO Likely in 2-5 Years

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Farmers Business Network Raises $110m Series D, IPO Likely in 2-5 Years

NOVEMBER 30, 2017  |  LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR

Farmers Business Network (FBN), a farmer-to-farmer digital network offering data insights, input procurement, and crop marketing services, has raised $110 million in Series D funding.

FBN is one of just a few farmtech startups that have raised rounds larger than $100 million: vertical farming group Plenty and biological inputs startup Indigo are two recent examples. This latest round brings FBN’s total fundraising to $200 million.

The round attracted new, lead investment from two large institutional investors: global asset management firm T. Rowe Price and Singapore state fund Temasek. These lead investors typically invest in later stage, private equity deals, highlighting how far FBN has come since its founding three years ago, argues Charles Baron, co-founder and VP of product.

“These are blue chip investors who are investing in the growth and proven track record FBN has built,” he told AgFunderNews. “We’ve built a phenomenally high-growth business with membership doubling year-on-year to nearly 5,000 farms around the US across 16 million acres, taking on another million acres each month.”

To put this in perspective, there are about 50,000 large-scale farms growing commodity crops like corn and soy in the US where FBN has focused most of its attention.

Existing investors Acre Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, GV (Google Ventures) and DBL Partners also participated in the round.

The company has grown in other ways too: its input procurement business has expanded from selling 170 products initially to over 1,200, it launched a crop marketing business earlier this year, it is expanding into Canada, and its team is now 200-strong, with plans to increase by another 100 in the next 12-18 months.

This growth puts an exit for the founders and investors in FBN in the cards within the next few years, and while most agrifood tech startups plan to exit their businesses through a trade sale to one of the large agrifood corporates, FBN has always planned to remain an independent company, according to Baron.

“We’d like to be a public company that farmers can invest in; that’s the best way for us to realize the vision of an independent company,” he said, adding that a public listing and IPO is likely in the next two to five years.

What is FBN?

FBN started life as an ag data platform with the intention of helping farmers manage their data and gain insights from each other on areas such as seed selection, compare productivity, and benchmark field performance over time. The platform predominantly collects data extracted from farm equipment but also aggregates farmers’ manually recorded data.

It later launched a seed finder app to share seed performance results and research with farmers to help them make better purchasing decisions.

Using data collected and crowdsourced from farmers about their seed and other input purchases, FBN was able to bring transparency to an otherwise opaque input pricing system.

“Prices are rarely listed online, and zone pricing is incredibly common where input suppliers will divide up the country into zones and charge different prices: a farmer in northern Illinois can pay a totally different amount to a farmer in southern Illinois,” said Baron.

FBN has also used its network to crowdsource genetic information about seeds, and revealed that the exact same genetic variety of seed could be sold by as many as 12 different companies under different brand names and at different prices.

“That’s been a total black box for farmers, but we were able to build up a database from thousands of seed label pictures of the exact seed varieties uploaded by our farmers,” said Baron.

An Input Procurement Business

So the natural progression was for FBN to start selling inputs to farmers with this transparent pricing and it now sells over 1,200 seed, pesticide, fertilizer, and other input products from a variety of suppliers including direct from the manufacturers.

“The way to think about FBN Direct is as an open marketplace; we welcome anyone that wants to supply our farmers from the major agrochemical companies to smaller distributors. Many companies have been blocked from reaching farmers as they can’t get into the highly consolidated retail market that works predominantly with the agrochemical majors; we’re creating more competition,” said Baron.

The input procurement business FBN Direct is now an e-commerce platform enabling farmers to discover and purchase supplies completely online — FBN Direct launched as an over-the-phone service initially — which also offers farmers credit on their purchases through flexible payments or loans via third-party providers. This part of the business, that enables farmers to share their farm data with financial providers, could naturally develop into a more general farm loans marketplace in the future, added Baron.

“The farm economy is not set up to meet the needs of farmers, but to meet the needs of the supplier,” said Baron. “FBN puts farmers first in the system and closer to the consumer by helping them to get the benefit of industry aggregation via the network and the scale of e-commerce.”

Industry insiders tell AgFunderNews that FBN’s business model does pose a threat to ag retailers and the large agrochemical companies: “There is enough money and energy behind FBN for it to be something big ag needs to keep an eye on, especially if you look at how other industries have been disrupted,” said one insider from a large agribusiness.

“Any startup that can successfully harness technology to drive network effects is going to be a huge threat to the incumbents,” said Rob Leclerc, CEO of AgFunder. “Like we’ve seen time and time again in other industries, the incumbents usually don’t get it until it’s too late.”

But some insiders are also critical of FBN’s approach and rhetoric around the role of the retailers.

“You don’t have to demonize the retailer to be still creating value. Retailers provide much more than prices and product sales; they provide a service including consultancy,” said the same source.

He added that the retailer and agrochemical majors are also starting to move some of their sales online in some geographies so will adapt to the online trend FBN is taking advantage of.

A Crop Marketing Platform

FBN last raised funding in March of this year with a $40 million Series C and raised the Series D preemptively “to capitalize on its new businesses, particularly crop marketing,” according to Baron.

The company will use the latest proceeds to build out this crop marketing platform with the intention of enabling buyers from all over the globe to buy directly from US farmers.

“This is where an online, digital network can be so transformational; now a food company from anywhere in the world can work with FBN and the best farms in America to avoid going through multiple middlemen,” said Baron. “It also allows farmers to use data to market their crop better, yield them better prices, but also bring them production contracts in advance so that they can know their price and costs before the season has even started to a much greater level of detail.”

FBN will also provide them with cash advances for working capital, “taking the risk with them” said Baron.

FBN has hundreds of thousands of acres under contract for the 2018 growing season, according to Baron.

Moving into New Territory

FBN serves farmers growing 25 different crops across 42 states. The majority still grow the major commodity crops, corn, soy, and wheat, but the company’s footprint is growing in large specialty crops like lentils, and chickpeas as well as orchard crops and vegetables on the west coast, according to Baron.

The company’s offering is slightly different for these farmers as they aren’t capturing the same data from machinery as the broadacre farmers are; it’s more focused on pricing intelligence and input benchmarking, according to Baron.

FBN will also use the proceeds of this round to expand into Canada where it’s opening offices shortly. New territories globally are also in the pipeline, and with investment from Singapore’s Temasek, it’s likely Asia will be a target in the medium term.

What Blockchain Technology Trial in Tomatoes Could Mean For Produce Industry

What Blockchain Technology Trial in Tomatoes Could Mean For Produce Industry

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Intrigued by how blockchain was changing finance, an ex-banker at Wells Fargo & Co. and a former executive at Nasdaq Inc. began looking for other opportunities. They looked at applying the technology to insurance, law, even music. Then they hit on farming.

Raja Ramachandran and Phil Harris met when they were both working on Wall Street, in 2005 after Citigroup Inc. acquired electronic trading company Lava Trading. The pair remained friends for more than a decade, and decided to leave finance to start Ripe.io, which uses blockchain in agriculture, and has big aspirations to weave it through the food supply chain. 

“We left financial services to find a more meaningful application of blockchain. We knew it was going to be profound,” said Harris. As Ramachandran put it, they “stumbled on food.”

The next step for Ripe was a pilot project on Ward’s Berry Farm, a 180-acre farm southwest of Boston, where the fields overflow with carrots, baby beets, bok choy, chard, kale, cabbage, sweet potatoes, onions, radishes, fava beans, squash, pumpkins and zinnias, which farmer Jim Ward keeps in rotation because his wife loves it when he brings them home to her in a fresh bouquet. 

Added to that lineup this year: blockchain tomatoes. Beginning in August, their ripeness, colour and sugar content were tracked step by step, reducing spoilage and documenting the supply chain.

Controlling Variables

“My job is to gain control of as many variables as I can,” Ward said on a recent blustery fall day on his farm in Sharon, Massachusetts. Standing in a field of vines studded with sensors connected to a solar-powered device that routes information to the cloud, Ward plucked a tomato and popped it into his mouth. “Flavor and quality is what my business is,” he said.

Ripe partnered with farm-to-counter salad franchise Sweetgreen Inc. to show blockchain can be used to track crops, yielding higher-quality produce and putting better information in the hands of farmers, food distributors and restaurants.

The biggest player in the area is International Business Machines Corp., which partnered with food titans including Dole Food Co., Nestle SA, Unilever NV and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. this summer on a pilot to add blockchain to their businesses. IBM says its technology can show where produce came from in seconds. Traditional methods can take up to a week.

The experiment on Ward’s farm this summer was designed to test whether the same principle could work for boutique restaurants committed to knowing the origins of all of their ingredients. Sweetgreen already uses tomatoes grown on Ward’s farm in salads sold at its Prudential Center location in Boston. In their pilot program with Ripe, tomatoes were tracked using Analog Devices Inc. and Blustream Corp. sensors, and some were taste tested against “normal” tomatoes from Ward’s farm.

Light, Humidity

Ripe tracked 200 tomatoes on 20 different plants, in red Sweet 100 and orange Sungold varieties, in both early and late-season fields. Sensors recorded environmental factors including light, humidity and air temperature. In the buckets of tomatoes loaded on to trucks for distribution, another set of sensors logged the humidity where they were stored.

While an easy-to-use database is key to managing a complex supply chain, sceptics say it doesn’t necessarily need blockchain. The technology also requires adaptation. While bitcoin exists only on a blockchain, tomatoes exist in the real world. At most, what Ripe can provide is a detailed record of their qualities and condition at each step of the growing and distribution process. 

No Cure-All

For those reasons, blockchain isn’t an immediate cure-all, said Charles Cascarilla, CEO and co-founder of Paxos, a blockchain company that caters to financial institutions. 

“It’s a tool, and you have to apply it to the right set of problems,” he said. “What it tends to be very good for is knowing who owns what and when,” Cascarilla added. “It’s not a magic bullet.”

Beyond quality, the sensor and blockchain tracking system can also prove where an agricultural product came from, she said. For instance, if you wanted to know if the grapes used to make your Champagne were really from Champagne, France, or the Vidalia onions you’re sautéing are really from Vidalia, Georgia, a blockchain could prove a product’s authenticity.

“There’s a lot of fraud in food origins, especially now that it’s hot,” Myran said. “People say ‘this is local,’ or ‘this is organic,’ or ‘this is grown using certain practices.’ With this system, you can prove it.”

Back in a cafe near Manhattan’s Union Square, Sweetgreen co-founder Jonathan Neman said the project could potentially apply to all kinds of produce, seasons and farms. Tomatoes were just a test.

“We’re still drawing the maps and laying the foundation,” he said.

Source: bloomberg.com

Publication date: 11/13/2017

Philips Lighting Provides LED Lighting for New Sustainable Algae Production Facility at AlgaeCytes

Philips Lighting Provides LED Lighting for New Sustainable Algae Production Facility at AlgaeCytes

October 19, 2017

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• Philips LED lighting provides an efficient lighting source to produce algae-derived Omega-3 oil
• LED system enables algae to be grown in a controlled environment with mild temperatures
• Promotes higher yields, reduced energy usage and more control over production 

Eindhoven, The Netherlands – Philips Lighting (Euronext: LIGHT), the world leader in lighting, today announced that AlgaeCytes, based in Kent, UK, installed Philips GreenPower LED interlighting in its new algae farm, which uses a patented technology to meet the growing demand for Omega-3 supplements and oils without depleting the world’s fish stocks. AlgaeCytes chose Philips LED lighting because it is ideally suited for creating a mild, controlled, and energy-efficient production environment for algae, where it can ramp up production to meet demand. The company chose Philips Lighting as its partner because of its lighting expertise for horticulture, research into algae with Wageningen University and its focus on building long-term relationships with its business partners.

Producing fish oil without the fish

Bio-based products are one of the many growth markets in the horticulture sector, and Omega oils from non-marine sources are attracting a lot of attention. Dependence on traditional marine-animal sources of Omega-3 oil puts pressure on global fish stocks, which is unsustainable. “AlgaeCytes has developed a process that captures the properties of algae-high-value-ingredients for the health and personal care markets. The company has built its first production module using a photobioreactor system and freshwater algal strains to produce algae-derived EPA, an Omega-3 oil which has known health benefits. High-quality protein and carbohydrates are also produced as a by-product of the process,” said Naz Bashir, CEO AlgaeCytes. “The opening of this new facility on October 26, 2017, marks an exciting stage for AlgaeCytes that we believe will unlock the potential of algae for nutritional and health care markets.”

Supporting the bio-based market

“We are excited to be participating in this novel production facility for bio-based ingredients,” said Udo van Slooten, Business Leader Horticulture at Philips Lighting. “It is just one more example of how growers and researchers are opening new opportunities with LED lighting. I think this is just the start and we can expect LED lighting to be a driving force for many other innovations in bio-based markets.” 

LED lighting is ideal for algae production

Producing algae at commercial scale requires an enormous amount of light, which makes it challenging to prevent warm temperatures. Until now, growers have used sunlight or high pressure sodium (HPS) grow lights to cultivate algae. However, sunlight is seasonal and HPS grow lights generate too much heat. Using LED lights enables AlgaeCytes to maintain optimal conditions for the growth of algae. It is also very energy efficient compared to HPS. At the AlgaeCytes facility, Philips Lighting’s Horti LED partner, Cambridge HOK, installed a unique LED system. Multiple lines of Philips GreenPower LED interlighting are placed on the sides of large glass tubes filled with nutrient-rich fresh water and algal strains. The LED interlighting produces high levels of light without increasing the temperature around the tubes. 

For further information, please contact:

Philips Lighting
Daniela Damoiseaux, Global Marcom Manager Horticulture
E-mail:  daniela.damoiseaux@philips.com 
www.philips.com/horti 

AlgaeCytes Limited

Naz Bashir, CEO

Email: nazbashir@algaecytes.com

www.algaecytes.com

CambridgeHOK

Tim Haworth, General Manager

E-mail: thaworth@cambridgehok.co.uk

www.cambridgehok.co.uk

About Philips Lighting

Philips Lighting (Euronext: LIGHT), the world 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 the Newsroom, Twitter and LinkedIn. Information for investors can be found on theInvestor Relations page.

About AlgaeCytes

AlgaeCytes is a business that is focused on delivering ingredients and products from algae for the personal care, nutrition therapeutics and health markets.  At AlgaeCytes our ambition and constant objective is to develop products according to the principles of the green economy, naturally and with minimal waste.  We are always aiming to have a positive impact on health and nutrition.  At AlgaeCytes we aim to add value by offering ingredients such as vegetarian Omega 3 oils EPA and other algae-based ingredients.  AlgaeCytes can also make high-quality protein and carbohydrates from algal biomass from traceable sources.  AlgaeCytes' patented technology offers a number of benefits in terms of sustainability. It allows for continuous indoor algae farming production in regular commercial locations, near skilled employees, transportation and markets.

About CambridgeHOK

CambridgeHOK is the UK’s leading Glasshouse, Heating and LED lighting specialist with its own inhouse expert design engineers. It specialises in bespoke turnkey design and installation adapting every solution to the client’s needs using the very latest in technology. More information can be found on its website: http://cambridgehok.co.uk/.

Levi’s Stadium LEEDs the Way

Levi’s Stadium LEEDs the Way

Story and photos by Diane Andrews

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Nine stories up, atop the roof of the SAP Tower of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, is a thriving 7,000-square-foot organic vegetable and herb garden now going on two years old. Called the Faithful Farm, it is located on the tower’s 27,000-square-foot NRG Solar Terrace, high above the scrambles and scrimmages of the San Francisco 49ers football team on the field below.

Established in July of 2016, the rooftop garden is a first for a National Football League (NFL) stadium.  It was the inspiration of Danielle York, wife of 49ers CEO Jed York, who thought vegetables would be a tasty addition to the grasses and succulents already planted on the roof to help reduce heating and cooling requirements for the tower suites below.

“The garden wasn’t cheap, but it’s beyond that. It’s more about being a leader, a pioneer of sustainability. That means more to the York family than saving dollars,” said Jim Mercurio, 49ers Vice President of Stadium Operations and General Manager. “The York family gives us the resources to make a difference.”

Consider the logistics. Everything must be hauled up to the roof—soil, flats of plants, fertilizer, gardening tools, the drip watering system using reclaimed water—everything. Then once grown, the produce must be hauled down to the kitchen.

“We get everything more intensely up here. Wind rips things out. The sun is very intense without much shade, so the crops get nuked,” said Lara Hermanson, principal of Farmscape LLC, which manages the Faithful Farm and is the largest urban farming venture in California (www.farmscapegardens.com).

The farm is tended by three gardeners working three days a week. Annuals such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, kale, lettuce, pumpkins, edible flowers and fine-leafed herbs are part of the fall harvest. In all, about 40 different vegetables and herbs are rotated over the year.

“We plant off-beat varieties. The chef can get regular things,” said Hermanson. “We plant hard-to-source specialties, varieties you can’t find through traditional ordering.”

The farm, expanded from 4,000-square-feet, has yielded over 7,000 pounds of produce, and Hermanson works a month ahead with yield predictions. She creates weekly spread sheets for Executive Chef Dinari Brown of Centerplate, the stadium’s food hospitality partner, who plans menus around the produce available. Food that isn’t served in club spaces during games and at private events hosted at the stadium, is donated.

“I was shocked when I looked at tonnage and how fast things grow,” said Mercurio. “What an amazing kind of transformation.”

“You feel proud. The team feels as if we’re working with pioneers here, in some cases being pioneers,” said Mercurio. “We’re opening up possibilities to people in the industry.”

Indeed, other NFL stadiums are following suit in the growing trend for edible gardens tucked into unexpected urban places. Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Falcons, opened in August of this year with a street-level garden.

However, it was San Francisco’s AT&T Park, home to the Giants baseball team, that led the way as the first pro sports franchise with an edible garden. In June of 2014, raised boxes of vegetables (also tended by Farmscape) were installed behind the centerfield wall, just under the scoreboard.

LEED, standing for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, recognizes best-in-class building strategies and practices, and Levi’s Stadium prides itself on achieving LEED Gold certification in two categories.

It was the first NFL stadium to open—in August 2014—with LEED Gold certification for new construction. Then in 2016, it received LEED Gold certification for operations and maintenance of an existing building, making it the first NFL stadium to receive LEED Gold certifications from the U.S. Green Building Council in both categories.

And with the success of the Faithful Farm, Levi’s Stadium further LEEDs the way for the 49ers and the City of Santa Clara.

Scientists Are Trying to Grow Fruit and Vegetables on Mars

gmutlu / istockphoto.com

Scientists Are Trying to Grow Fruit and Vegetables on Mars

Nov 16, 2017  |  By Taylor Rock  Editor

And it’s not to feed the aliens

To answer David Bowie’s burning question from 1971, “Is there life on Mars?” No — but soon, there very well could be. The United States Emerites is spending tons of money — over $5.4 billion — to experiment with growing fruits and vegetables on the red, desolate planet. The oil-rich country has been ambitious about colonizing on Mars and, naturally, people will have to eat when they get there.

The UAE Space Agency is using its location here on Earth as a test site for what could become the agricultural future for Mars. They say it’s not much different than the desert, as they’re both seemingly uninhabitable environments where it’s unlikely for plants to flourish.

"There are similarities between Mars and the desert," UAE Space Agency senior strategic planner Rashid Al Zaabi told the BBC. "The landscape of the UAE, the soil, are similar."

via GIPHY

These out-of-this world efforts come in preparation for the end of an era for oil, the region’s biggest money-maker.

“There are 100 million young people in the Arab region. We want them to play a part in the future and take the region to the next level,” project manager Omran Sharaf told the BBC. “It’s about creating a post-oil, knowledge-based, creative-based economy. So it is important we become well-established scientific center. We have created many engineers, but not many scientists. This [Mars project] is purely a scientific mission.”

The UAE is launching a probe to Mars from Japan in 2020, making it one of only nine countries attempting to explore the planet. If efforts prove successful, UAE expects that man will set foot on the planet’s soil within the next 100 years.

Also — country singer Sammy Kershaw may want to change the lyrics to that song he wrote about his unfaithful girlfriend. (When they grow cantaloupes on Mars, I’ll come back to you.) Hang in there, buddy. But hey, speaking of music and places beyond human reach, here are 10 destinations you can’t travel to — because they exist only in song.

Valagro Showcases Innovation at Biostimulants Congress

Valagro Showcases Innovation at Biostimulants Congress

 CINDY ZIMMERMAN NOVEMBER 28, 2017

One of the gold sponsors at the 3rd Biostimulants World Congress in Miami this week is industry pioneer Valagro.

“Valegro started in business in 1980…so for the past 30 and more years, we have been developing biostimulants,” said Mario Mastrangelo, Valagro USA country manager. The company is headquartered in Atessa, Italy with a product distribution network covering more than 80 countries. “Our main geography in the USA is California, Florida, and the Midwest.” Valagro is using virtual reality at the Congress to showcase the company’s strong commitment to research and development with a virtual tour through their facilities.

This is the first time the Congress has been hosted in the United States, which Mastrangelo says is significant because the use of biostimulants is growing significantly here. “We are seeing an increase in the adoption rate and U.S. farmers have started asking about biostimulants,” he added. “The North America market is projected to become the biggest market for biostimulants in the near future.”

Learn more about Valagro and the biostimulants congress in this interview. INTERVIEW WITH MARIO MASTRANGELO, VALGRO USA

The 3rd Biostimulants World Congress is being held through November 30th, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Miami with more than 1,200 delegates from around the world expected to participate.

Sensors Applied to Plant Leaves Warn of Water Shortage

Sensors Applied to Plant Leaves Warn of Water Shortage

Source: MIT News

20-11-2017

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Forgot to water that plant on your desk again? It may soon be able to send out an SOS.

MIT engineers have created sensors that can be printed onto plant leaves and reveal when the plants are experiencing a water shortage. This kind of technology could not only save neglected houseplants but, more importantly, give farmers an early warning when their crops are in danger, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

“This appears to be the earliest indicator of drought that we have for agricultural applications,” Strano says. “It’s hard to get this information any other way. You can put sensors into the soil, or you can do satellite imaging and mapping, but you never really know what a particular plant is detecting the water potential.”

Strano has already begun working with a large agricultural producer to develop these sensors for use on crops, and he believes that the technology could also be useful to gardeners and urban farmers. It may also help researchers develop new ways to engineer drought-resistant plants, he says.

Volodymyr Koman, an MIT postdoc, is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Nov. 8 online edition of the journal Lab on a Chip.

Printable sensors

When soil dries out, plants slow down their growth, reduce photosynthetic activity, and suffer damage to their tissues. Some plants begin to wilt, but others show no visible signs of trouble until they have already experienced significant harm.

The new MIT sensor takes advantage of plants’ stomata — small pores in the surface of a leaf that allow water to evaporate. As water evaporates from the leaf, water pressure in the plant falls, allowing it to draw water up from the soil through a process called transpiration.

Plant biologists know that stomata open when exposed to light and close in darkness, but the dynamics of this opening and closing have been little studied because there hasn’t been a good way to directly measure them in real time.

“People already knew that stomata respond to light, to carbon dioxide concentration, to drought, but now we have been able to monitor it continuously,” Koman says. “Previous methods were unable to produce this kind of information.”

To create their sensor, the MIT researchers used an ink made of carbon nanotubes — tiny hollow tubes of carbon that conduct electricity — dissolved in an organic compound called sodium dodecyl sulfate, which does not damage the stomata. This ink can be printed across a pore to create an electronic circuit. When the pore is closed, the circuit is intact and the current can be measured by connecting the circuit to a device called a multimeter. When the pore opens, the circuit is broken and the current stops flowing, allowing the researchers to measure, very precisely, when a single pore is open or closed.

By measuring this opening and closing over a few days, under normal and dry conditions, the researchers found that they can detect, within two days, when a plant is experiencing water stress. They found that it takes stomata about seven minutes to open after light exposure and 53 minutes to close when darkness falls, but these responses change during dry conditions. When the plants are deprived of water, the researchers found that stomata take an average of 25 minutes to open, while the amount of time for the stomata to close falls to 45 minutes.

“This work is exciting because it opens up the possibility of directly printing electronics onto plant life for long-term monitoring of plant physiological responses to environmental factors, such as drought,” says Michael McAlpine, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the research.

Drought alert

For this study, the researchers tested the sensors on a plant called the peace lily, which they chose in part because it has large stomata. To apply the ink to the leaves, the researchers created a printing mold with a microfluidic channel. When the mold is placed on a leaf, ink flowing through the channel is deposited onto the leaf surface.

The MIT team is now working on a new way to apply the electronic circuits by simply placing a sticker on the leaf surface. In addition to large-scale agricultural producers, gardeners and urban farmers may be interested in such a device, the researchers propose.

“It could have big implications for farming, especially with climate change, where you will have water shortages and changes in environmental temperatures,” Koman says.

In related work, Strano’s lab is exploring the possibility of creating arrays of these sensors that could be used to detect light and capture images, much like a camera.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Singapore’s Agency for Science, Research, and Technology.

Everlane Is Using Black Friday Sales To Bring Farm-Fresh Food To Garment Workers

By Andrew Amelinckx on November 22, 2017

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There's a farm in that shipping container. Freight Farms

Everlane, a San Francisco-based e-commerce clothing retailer known for ethical, sustainable fashion and transparent pricing, is using its Black Friday sales to provide container farms—and farm-fresh produce—for its garment workers in Vietnam.

The fashion industry is pretty well known for having a crappy record when it comes to sustainability and ethical issues—things like wasting natural resources and not paying garment workers a living wage. But Everlane has made sustainability a priority, working with ethical factories around the world and being super transparent about what it costs the company to make its clothes (even going so far as offering “Choose What You Pay” pricing that labels how much goes to cover manufacturing costs vs company profit). 

In a new move, Everlane is partnering with Freight Farms, a Boston-based ag-tech startup that makes ready-to-go hydroponic farms in shipping containers, to bring three of their Leafy Green Machines to the Saitex International factory in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which makes Everlane’s denim clothing. And the company is using money its Black Friday sales to fund the effort, which is part of its ongoing program to improve the lives of its workers. 

What Is The Leafy Green Machine?

We’ve written about Freight Farms a few times since the company launched back in 2011. It’s Leafy Green Machine comes in a 40-foot-long upcycled shipping container and is operated remotely via smartphone by a computer system that controls temperature, moisture, humidity, and nutrient levels in the hydroponic system. The LGM uses LED lights for its vertical grow towers, doesn’t require pesticides or herbicides, and uses about 90 percent less water than conventional farming the same crops, according to the company.

The inside of one of the Leafy Green Machines. Freight Farms

The container farms will be used to supply the cafeteria that serves the 3,900 employees at the LEED-certified denim factory (LEED means the facility meets stringent environmental requirements having to do with energy and natural resource conservation). Everlane reps tell Modern Farmer the container farms will be used for growing lettuce, herbs and root vegetables—like onions, carrots, and radishes—with a portion of space reserved for experimenting with tomatoes and other crops.  The three LGMs, depending on what vegetables are being grown, can produce somewhere in the range of 1,500 heads of lettuce, 135 to 240 pounds of herbs, and 180 to 300 pounds of leafy greens—a week. That comes to between six and 12 tons of produce a year. The farms, which cost around $75,000 each, are scheduled to be delivered this coming spring. 

Everlane decided on this project due to the widespread unregulated use of highly toxic pesticides in Vietnam’s farming sector and wanted to provide pesticide-free produce for the garment workers there, according to the company.

3D Printed Connectors Make This Startup's Sustainable Indoor Garden Grow

3D Printed Connectors Make This Startup's Sustainable Indoor Garden Grow

by Sarah Saunders | November 22, 2017, | 3D Design, 3D Printing, Business

The first time we planted a garden in our backyard, I couldn’t get enough of watching the vegetables grow. I would go out in the yard and gently move aside the leaves to get a glimpse of the tiny green beans that were getting bigger every day. We had an abundance of tomatoes that year – so much that the cages were starting to bend from the weight. At the time, I had friends who lived in an apartment and were unable to garden outside, so they grew tomatoes indoors in one of those hanging garden set-ups. Hexagro Urban Farming, an Italian startup, is working to innovate urban farming, and this same kind of hanging garden, using 3D printing technology.

The Milan-based startup works to develop scalable, sustainable and sharing economy-based solutions, so customers can improve their production and supply of fresh, healthy, home-grown food. Last month, Hexagro launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Katana platform, which runs through New Year’s Eve, for its sustainable Living Farming Tree – an attractive, maintenance-free indoor garden, complete with 3D printed connectors.

The Living Farming Tree aims to bring nature from the outside to the inside of any workplace, like businesses, hotels, and restaurants, where its air-cleaning plants and healthy vegetables can enhance the well-being of the people there.

Irish 3D printing company Wazp, which worked with IKEA this summer on its first mass-produced 3D printed collection of home objects, also announced a partnership with the Hexagro startup for the Living Farming Tree, in order to provide a sustainable, socially responsible solution that could work in the catering industry.

“This partnership is a notable example of how 3d printing can facilitate innovative companies, like Hexagro, scale; by enabling stock-purchasing to be critically managed at the early stage of a business, so that essential capital is not tied up in stocks, while also giving a long-term option for commercial production,” said Wazp Product Development Manager Daniel Barrett. “Working with the Hexagro team is an exciting opportunity for us, to be a part of a new and innovative approach to a more sustainable farming future for countries around the world, which will be a global success.”

The Living Farming Tree is available in three size options:

• 4 Module Kit with 24 vases
• 7 Module Kit with 42 vases
• 13 Module Kit with 78 vases

The connectors for the modules are 3D printed, so that the design of the Living Farming Tree system is adaptable, modular, and scalable – thus making it possible for any person to bring nature into their own space, whether it’s at work or home.

L-R) Hexagro Urban Farming Team: Felipe Hernandez, Alessandro Grampa, Milica Mladenovic, Arturo Montufar

“We are glad to have found a partner that can help us in developing our 3D printed parts for prototyping and early fulfillment,” said Alessandro Grampa, CMO and Business Development at Hexagro. “This will allow us to maintain a dynamic product development, adapting to customer needs and feedback. Thanks to Wazp high-quality technology, we can provide our clients with the best modular and scalable farming systems adaptable to any of their indoor environments.”

By utilizing 3D printing technology to manufacture the module connectors, they can be scaled up to increase production, making the system adaptable to different kinds of crops; they also have a modular design, so the system can be customized to fit in any space. The system includes an automated monitoring device, which uses data analysis and dedicated crop planning software to adapt the Living Farming Tree to individual environmental conditions; it also comes with LED lights and an automatic irrigation system. According to the startup, the best crops for the Living Farming Tree include herbs like basil, mint, and oregano, and leafy green vegetables like kale, spinach, and lettuce.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen 3D printing technology used to augment urban gardens, and by taking advantage of the benefits that 3D design and scalable production that Wazp’s supply chain solution offers, Hexagro will be able to bring the Living Farming Tree to the market faster, while also improving the system by listening to, and implementing, customer feedback and needs.

Speaking of customers, there are still super early bird rewards left on the Living Farm Tree’s Katana campaign – a pledge of €549 (a 30% discount from the retail price) will get you one of the first small configurations of the system, which includes a water pump, nutrient container, monitoring system, irrigation system, four LED lamps, four farming modules, 11 3D printed global connectors, and one app, with included user credentials.

The Living Farm Tree has been shortlisted for the Katana Opencircle Project, part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 initiative.

Let us know what you think about this, and other 3D printing topics, at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below. 

Spider Webs and Succulents Inspire This Water-Collection Startup

Spider Webs and Succulents Inspire This Water-Collection Startup

Heather Clancy

November 8, 2017

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Shutterstock

The system designed by NexLoop combines biomimetic principles inspired by cribellate orb weaver spider webs, dwarf honey bees, mycorrhizal fungi and crystalline ice plants (pictured).

The core team behind NexLoop, a biomimicry venture, has been collaborating on its nature-inspired water collection technology for almost two years. But the first time the three entrepreneurs met in person was in mid-October in California, when their idea won the $100,000 grand prize in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge.

"We have tons of people who are excited about pilots around the world," said C. Mike Lindsey, who hails from Brooklyn, New York, and aspires to a career in urban agriculture. "That's the main goal now: To see what it can do in various climates, and how it can scale."

His partners, who started the project, are Jacob Russo, a Carnegie Mellon-educated architect working toward his masters in international design in Stuttgart, Germany; and Anamarija Frankic, an expert in biomimicry who splits her research work between Boston and Zadar, Croatia.

The AquaWeb incorporates lessons on how nature captures, stores and distributes water in a novel new design that enables urban farms to feed our growing populations.

Russo and Frankic met at a workshop in New York, and pulled in Lindsey when they began exploring food-related applications. Their concept combines research associated with architecture, agriculture and materials.

The trio's invention, AquaWeb, mimics the way that natural systems capture, store and distribute water — not just rainwater, but ambient moisture such as fog. NexLoop believes that the approach initially will be useful in helping container farms or indoor vertical farms to become more self-sufficient. In theory, the system could have broader approaches, such as amplifying rooftop rainwater harvesting and storage for large buildings — but that's not the current focus of their pilot work. 

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NexLoop

The AquaWeb module is a multifunctional biomimetic system to integrate water capture, filtration, storage and distribution into food production building envelopes such as greenhouses and container farms.

"The Ray of Hope Prize judges were impressed by NexLoop's push to further their design — making it more locally attuned, more energy-efficient and decentralized — by looking to living organisms for design clues every step of the way," said Megan Schuknecht, director of the design challenge. "The result is functional and beautiful, as well as resilient, and a great example of regenerative biomimetic design. We are all looking for ways to make our cities more resilient to the effects of climate change. The AquaWeb incorporates lessons on how nature captures, stores and distributes water in a novel new design that enables urban farms to feed our growing populations reliably and affordably using locally available resources."

The contest is run by three nonprofits: the Biomimicry Institute and Bioneers (both focused on identifying innovative technologies that could be part of solutions to address climate change); and the Ray C. Anderson Foundation (named for the late Interface Carpet founder and sustainability pioneers), which funds projects around the world. The main award, the "Ray of Hope," is meant to help the winners move toward commercializing their idea.

A convergence of biomimetic principles

AquaWeb's design actually combines several ideas. The water capture mechanisms are inspired by cribellate orb weaver spider webs, which are "engineered" to collect fog out of the air; the storage concepts mimic the approaches used by drought-tolerant succulents (such as the crystalline ice plant) to hold on to water; and the trio studied the ways that certain mycorrhizal funghi, such as the Jersey cow mushroom, distribute water to the entire plant structure.

They also have been busy borrowing from bees: Each module of the system is shaped as a hexagon, like a hive structure. They can be stacked together depending on the required application — a stacked pair measures 16 inches tall by 18.5 inches wide. "They can be scaled up or down depending on the needs of who we are working with," Russo said.

In theory, the system could have broader approaches, such as amplifying rooftop rainwater harvesting and storage for large buildings.

The NexLoop team will be collecting data on several areas during the next phase of its pilot tests. For one thing, it will study how the system performs in a variety of climates — including very arid regions in Hawaii, Morocco, and Africa. They also will evaluate how materials and fabrics affect how much water can be collected. 

In simulations where water is sprayed onto the system, AquaWeb captures about 50 percent, according to NexLoop's early test results — or about 2,000 milliliters per square meter of fog. Right now the prototype can store about five liters of water per unit. The team estimates it would take about 20 units to support a shipping container.

Aside from systems that could be added to a rooftop or onto the structure of a greenhouse, NexLoop is studying ways that these ideas could be incorporated directly into building envelopes — offering multiple functions with minimal material additions.

Who knows? Perhaps it could provide the foundation for decentralized water systems that support a variety of functions across next-generation buildings. For now, NexLoop will get busy proving its concept.

Topics: Tags: 

• Biomimicry  
• freshwater
• Urban Water
• water scarcity
• urban agriculture

Autogrow Launches Cloud Application To Grow Anywhere And On Any Device

Autogrow Launches Cloud Application To Grow Anywhere And On Any Device

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22 November 2017, San Francisco, U.S. 

Global ag-tech company Autogrow has further revolutionized indoor agriculture with an API-enabled cloud application giving growers access to grow anywhere, on any operating system and viewed on any device.

“With our growers now in 40 countries; our new IntelliGrow application can seamlessly support their crop production via the cloud, giving them the ability to access their Intelli controllers, change and set new data points and monitor and manage their crops – from anywhere and on any device,” says CEO Darryn Keiller.

The ability to control the devices remotely is due to the IntelliGrow API (Application Programming Interface) that Autogrow created for the IntelliDose and IntelliClimate control systems.

“Our IntelliGrow utilizes an open API which means it can integrate with any third-party systems including lighting, HVAC, sensors and machine vision systems,” explains Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Law.

“We have also ensured enterprise-level data security of our cloud platform for peace of mind. We have had a great core group of growers as beta testers, so we have designed IntelliGrow with growers, and for growers.”

Alongside real-time data, IntelliGrow also captures unlimited historical data enabling data-driven decision making. Current language features on the user interface have also been enabled for English and Chinese with Spanish and Arabic rolling out over the next few months, reflecting Autogrow’s core customer markets of the Americas, Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

"Being cloud-based, we enable a significantly better, more flexible and highly scalable growing experience. Growers have historically been tethered to their growing operations and we're now removing the need to be physically present onsite. Not only that, we're empowering them with real-time data, so they're more informed, more agile to changes in their growing environment, enabling better crop management and more profitable operations," notes Mr. Keiller.

To find out more about IntelliGrow visit www.autogrow.com/intelligrow

Amazon’s Seattle Campus Is Using Data Center Next Door As A Furnace. It’s Pretty Neat

Amazon’s Seattle Campus Is Using A Data Center Next Door As A Furnace. It’s Pretty Neat

Using “waste heat” from digital infrastructure to stay warm downtown.

Updated by David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com  Nov 22, 2017

The hippest new technology: big pipes carrying hot water.   Jordan Stead/Amazon

Retail giant Amazon has a rather mixed reputation among progressives, to say the least. There are ongoing debates about its labor practices and its ruthless competitive tactics, which have driven competitor after competitor out of business. Among environmentalists, opinion is also divided — some argue that online shopping (and shipping) has accelerated wasteful consumer culture, others that it has reduced the carbon footprint of shopping that was going to happen anyway.

Putting those broader disputes aside, there is one area where the company is making substantial and undeniable progress. After years of what could charitably be called benign neglect, Amazon has recently moved aggressively toward corporate sustainability.

It plans to have 15 rooftop solar systems, with a total capacity of around 41 MW, deployed atop fulfillment centers by the end of this year, with plans to have 50 such systems installed by 2020.

Amazon was the lead corporate purchaser of green energy in 2016. That year, it also announced its largest wind energy project to date, the 253 MW Amazon Wind Farm Texas. Overall, the company says, it has “announced or commenced construction on wind and solar projects that will generate a total of 3.6 million megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually.”

(Of particular interest to Vox nerds: The company also signed on to an amicus brief in support of Clean Power Plan, Obama’s signature climate policy, which the Trump administration wants to kill.)

But what recently caught my eye is the clever way that Amazon’s giant new campus in downtown Seattle will keep its occupants warm in the winter — a pleasingly low-tech solution that sits squarely at the intersection of several of my enduring obsessions: the importance of smart design, the benefits of urban density, and the need for electrification of the power system.

Juicy! Let’s take a look.

Hot water is so hot right now

Amazon is building a giant four-block campus in downtown Seattle’s Denny Triangle, which will eventually encompass five towers and five million square feet. This schematic is fromGeekwire (which has its own excellent story on Amazon’s project).

That’s a lot of space to heat during the dreary Pacific Northwest winters.

Good fortune! Just across 6th Avenue from Doppler Tower is the 34-story Westin Building Exchange, a regional telecom “carrier hotel” that houses computer and server hardware for some 250 telecom and internet companies. About 70 percent of the building is occupied by data centers.

All that hardware creates an enormous amount of heat. Lacking any better options, Westin has been venting that heat into the Seattle air, through giant cooling towers, at considerable expense.

Waste heat, meet heat consumer.

Amazon and the co-owners of the Westin — Seattle’s Clise Properties and San Francisco’s Digital Realty Trust — struck a deal: Amazon would buy some of the Westin’s waste heat.

As winter approaches, an innovative heat source will be keeping our Seattle headquarters warm. #greenenergyhttp://amzn.to/2j2t8pI

The super-efficient heat source hidden below Amazon's Seattle headquarters

Thanks to a collaboration across city agencies, engineers, a “carrier hotel” and others, Amazon’s newest building is heated by recycling excess energy from a neighboring data center

Amazon News✔@amazonnews

The technology is impressive at this scale, but conceptually, it’s pretty simple. Water circulates in PVC pipes throughout the Westin, gathering heat. It is then sent beneath the street (city waivers had to be granted to cross public rights of way, a huge problem for waste-heat projects historically) to Doppler tower.

Beneath Doppler, a series of large heat exchangers run the Westin’s warm water next to cool water from Amazon, heating it up (exchanging the heat). That warmed water is around 65 degrees, so it is run through a series of five heat-reclaiming chillers to raise the temperature to 130 degrees (also reducing the volume of water).

Amazon’s five big chillers, chilling. 

(Jordan Stead/Amazon)

That hot water is then circulated beneath the floors of the campus buildings via radiant heating systems, providing more than three-quarters of the heating required by the campus, at about four times the energy efficiency of a comparable HVAC system.

The cooled water then returns to the basement to gather more heat, and lo, the cycle continues.

Westin’s building manager told the Seattle Times that the building generates the heat equivalent of about 11 megawatts per day. During winter, Amazon will siphon off about 5 megawatts of that.

In effect, Westin is replacing Amazon’s need for natural gas boilers to heat the water, which would have run close to a million dollars annually in fuel and maintenance costs. Another way of looking at it: the system will allow Amazon to avoid the purchase of some 4 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

What’s more, the data center is a rock-solid, reliable source of heat; it is guaranteed to always be running (unless the grid goes down). Amazon has a couple of efficient natural gas boilers for backup, but at least over the past two winters, it says they have rarely been run.

In exchange, during the winter, Amazon’s campus is serving as a giant cooling tower for the Westin, substantially reducing its cooling bill — and paying for the privilege.

It is, to risk cliché, a win-win.

To pull all this off, Amazon and Clise had to create an “ecodistrict” (navigating a thicket of city bureaucracy). The coolest part is that there’s lots more heat to use, so there’s no reason the district couldn’t be extended to more Amazon buildings, or to surrounding buildings.

An aerial view of Amazon’s Doppler Tower and Meeting Center (with its green roof). Note the “biospheres,” which will be filled with plants.   (Amazon)

Old technology with intriguing new applications

There’s nothing new about “district heating” — i.e., heating multiple buildings using a single source and a network of pipes. The concept dates all the way back to the Roman Empire. In the Industrial Era, such systems were frequently used to exploit the heat from small in-city power plants. A number of modern cities, from Paris to Tokyo to Vancouver, BC, have district heating systems in use today, fueled by everything from biomass to sewer water to solid waste incineration.

What is somewhat novel about Amazon’s arrangement is the use of an electricity consumer — a data center — as the heat source. (Waste heat from data centers is used in other places, though Amazon says this is the first contract between a data center and a heat consumer with different owners.)

As I mentioned, this sits right at the intersection of three of my enduring obsessions.

First, it represents enormous energy savings with relatively old and reliable technology — it’s just water run through pipes. What produced the savings was not some whiz-bang tech innovation, but simple design. Cities produce enormous amounts of waste heat and then import enormous amounts of energy to warm themselves. It’s kinda crazy. Smarter design could help close that loop, reducing the need for imports, reducing emissions, and bringing more of a city’s energy management under its own control.

Second, along the same lines: cities! Cities are everything this century. State, provincial, and national governments are often captured by rural or corporate interests, creating substantial status quo bias. In cities, however, constant change is a fact of life and governments are at least somewhat more nimble — and that’s especially true when it comes to experimentation and innovation around the clean-energy transition. The more cities can generate and manage their own energy, the less hostage they are to state and national policy shifts.

With that in mind, why not bring more highly energy-intensive operations — not just data centers, but, oh, indoor farms, or marijuana grow operations — into dense urban areas? They have traditionally been built in the hinterlands, where land and power are cheap, but if they could make a substantial second income selling their waste heat, they might be able to justify urban locations.

That would reduce shipping supply lines. It would bring tax-paying, profit-making industrial facilities that don’t pollute into urban boundaries and budgets. It could potentially reduce urban HVAC bills, if the facilities are hooked up to district heating systems. And it would give cities more direct control over their energy fate.

Indoor farming generates lots of waste heat.   Plenty

Third: Amazon explicitly decided against an electricity-based heating system, instead opting for hydroponic (fluid-circulating) system, which must draw on local sources of heat. Is this an exception to my “electrify everything” mantra?

Yes and no. Mostly no. The key difference here is that the local source of heat is itself electrical — a data center. So in that sense, Amazon is using electricity for heat. In fact, it is helping Seattle use its electricity more efficiently, getting more work out of the same kWh.

The expert community is divided on the possibility, or advisability, of moving all HVAC to electricity (like heat pumps). It would require an enormous amount of capital and produce an enormous new electricity load. Limitations on both probably mean that we’ll need zero-carbon HVAC alternatives that still draw on heated water or combusted fuel, which can substitute more easily in retrofits of today’s buildings.

Perhaps some of that fuel can itself come from electricity — it is increasingly possible tosynthesize liquid fuels that way. But a great deal of the heated water can come from existing and planned sources of waste heat, preferably drawing on electrical sources.

Making sunlight and CO2 into methane and other liquid fuels.  MIT

If electricity is zero carbon, then all subsequent derivatives, from waste heat to synthetic liquid fuels, will be zero carbon as well. That is the magic of clean electricity.

Better design, urban density, and electrification all require far-seeing investment

There’s a telling line in Amazon’s blog post on this project:

Because of the up-front investment to build it, the ecodistrict isn't currently delivering heat that's any cheaper compared to a typical system, according to [Mike Moriarty, the Senior Engineering Manager who leads operations and maintenance for campus], but “the price of electricity is only going to go up.”

This is like so many clean-energy technologies: The upfront investment is high relative to the alternatives, but it pays back many times over throughout its life.

As Amazon adds buildings to the system — and maybe someday, as Seattle expands the system beyond Amazon’s campus — the savings will pile up ever higher, eventually dwarfing the upfront investment.

A robust district energy system could save Seattle money for a hundred years. Again, it’s just pipes with water, a technology that has stood the test of time. All that’s needed is policy coordination and good design.

Whatever its other sins, Amazon has shown itself willing to make patient investments; that’s why it keeps growing but never makes much profit. It invests for the long term.

Almost more than anything, it is that mentality — the willingness to sink upfront investment into long-term savings — that can move corporations (and society) toward sustainability. For that reason alone, I hope this project pays off for Amazon.

And I hope Amazon carries the lesson over to its next headquarters.

Renewable Energy: Smart Greenhouses Generate Solar Power and Grow Crops At The Same Time

Renewable Energy: Smart Greenhouses Generate Solar Power and Grow Crops At The Same Time

BY SYDNEY PEREIRA ON 11/6/17

Tomatoes and cucumbers appear to grow just fine—and just as healthily—in smart, solar-powered greenhouses that capture solar energy for electricity. 

Scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, have shown how crops can grow as healthily in these new greenhouses as they do in conventional greenhouses. 

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"Plants are sensitive not just to the intensity of light but also to color," says Michael Loik. "But it turns out the plants grow just as well."(Photo by Nick Gonzales) 

"We have demonstrated that 'smart greenhouses' can capture solar energy for electricity without reducing plant growth, which is pretty exciting," Michael Loik, professor of environmental studies at UCSC, said in a press release. Loik is the lead author for the paper, published in the American Geophysical Union's journal Earth's Future. 

Solar Power Trapped by a Red Roof

Bright magenta panels cover the tops of the greenhouses, soaking up sunlight and transferring the energy to photovoltaic strips. From there, electricity is produced. 

The greenhouses are able to take sunlight for energy and leave the rest, allowing plants to grow using a technology called Wavelength-Selective Photovoltaic Systems (WSPVs). The technology, developed by co-authors Sue Carter and Glenn Alers, is less expensive and more efficient than traditional photovoltaic systems. 

The team tested the growth and fruit production across 20 varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, lemons, limes, peppers, strawberries and basil at two locations at the Santa Cruz campus and one in Watsonville, California. Scientists reported that 80 percent of the plants were unaffected by the slightly darker lighting from the magenta panels, and 20 percent of the crops grew better. Tomato plants needed 5 percent less water under the magenta panels. 

Reducing the energy used in greenhouses is crucial since the use of greenhouses to grow food has increased by sixfold in the past 20 years, according to Loik. 

Solar-powered greenhouses are one of several developments for new ways of farming in recent years.

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Plants grown in the smart greenhouse were just as good as plants grown in conventional greenhouses.NICK GONZALES

Smart Greenhouse Detects Infestations

Another company, NatureSweet, has outfitted its greenhouses in Arizona with artificial intelligence, reported CNN. The plants are monitored with 10 cameras installed in the greenhouse ceilings which continuously take photographs to detect insect infestations or dying plants.

The software, developed by a company called Prospera, recognizes those problem spots and sends feedback 24/7. Previously, reported CNN, NatureSweet's employees walked through the greenhouse in order to spot issues with the plants. 

Green roofs are another method of growing food in an attempt to utilize space and close gaps in access to foods in urban areas.

In Washington, D.C., Up Top Acres has opened five urban farms on the rooftops of buildings since 2015, reported Washington City Paper. Green roofs improve storm-water collection, habitat protection and energy preservation, in addition to providing food. The company's co-founder, Kathleen O'Keefe, told the paper that the company may not produce enough food for the city, but green roofs can change the way people think about food, in addition to utilizing unused space.