Vertical Farming Startup Oishii Raises $50m In Series A Funding

By Sian Yates

03/11/2021

Oishii, a vertical farming startup based in New Jersey, has raised $50 million during a Series A funding round led by Sparx Group’s Mirai Creation Fund II.

The funds will enable Oishii to open vertical strawberry farms in new markets, expand its flagship farm outside of Manhattan, and accelerate its investment in R&D.

“Our mission is to change the way we grow food. We set out to deliver exceptionally delicious and sustainable produce,” said Oishii CEO Hiroki Koga. “We started with the strawberry – a fruit that routinely tops the dirty dozen of most pesticide-riddled crops – as it has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of vertical farming.”

“We aim to be the largest strawberry producer in the world, and this capital allows us to bring the best-tasting, healthiest berry to everyone. From there, we’ll quickly expand into new fruits and produce,” he added.

Oishii is already known for its innovative farming techniques that have enabled the company to “perfect the strawberry,” while its proprietary and first-of-its-kind pollination method is conducted naturally with bees.

The company’s vertical farms feature zero pesticides and produce ripe fruit all year round, using less water and land than traditional agricultural methods.

“Oishii is the farm of the future,” said Sparx Group president and Group CEO Shuhei Abe. “The cultivation and pollination techniques the company has developed set them well apart from the industry, positioning Oishii to quickly revolutionise agriculture as we know it.”

The company has raised a total of $55 million since its founding in 2016.

Kimbal Musk’s Quest To Start One Million Gardens

MARCH 20, 2021

The tech veteran and restaurateur (and brother of Elon) has been preaching the ‘real food’ gospel for years — and his newest project may be his most ambitious yet

By ALEX MORRIS

Million Gardens Movement

On the day he almost died, Kimbal Musk had food on the brain. The internet startup whiz, restaurateur, and younger brother of Tesla’s Elon had just arrived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from a 2010 TED conference where chef Jamie Oliver had spoken about the empowerment that could come from healthy eating. This was something Musk thought about a lot — food’s untapped potential, how he might be a disruptor in the culinary space — but beyond expanding his farm-to-table ethos along with his restaurant empire, Musk hadn’t yet cracked the code. Then he went sailing down a snowy slope on an inner tube going 35 miles an hour and flipped over, snapping his neck. The left side of his body was paralyzed. Doctors told the father of three that he was lucky: Surgery might bring movement back.

“I remember telling myself, ‘It’s all going to be fine,’ and then realizing that tears were streaming down the side of my face,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, OK. I don’t really know what’s going on. I’m just going to, you know, let things go.’”

Musk, 48, eventually made a full recovery, but it involved spending two months on his back, which gave him plenty of time to think about the intersections of food, tech, and philanthropy. Since then, he has launched an initiative to put “learning gardens” in public schools across America (now at 632 schools and counting); courted Generation Z into the farming profession by converting shipping containers into high-tech, data-driven, year-round farms; spoken out vociferously against unethical farming practices and vociferously for the beauty and community of slow food; and this year, on the first day of spring, is kicking off a new campaign with Modern Farmer’s Frank Giustra to create one million at-home gardens in the coming year.

Aimed at reaching low-income families, the Million Gardens Movement was inspired by the pandemic, as both a desire to feel more connected to nature and food insecurity have been at the forefront of so many people’s lives. “We were getting a lot of inquiries about gardening from people that had never gardened before,” says Giustra. “People were looking to garden for a bunch of reasons: to supplement their budget, because there was a lot of financial hardship, to help grow food for other people, or just to cure the boredom that came with the lockdown. To keep people sane, literally keep people sane, they turned to gardening.”

The program offers free garden kits that can be grown indoors or outdoors and will be distributed through schools that Musk’s non-profit, Big Green, has already partnered with. It also offers free curriculum on how to get the garden growing and fresh seeds and materials for the changing growing seasons. “I grew up in the projects when I was young, in what we now call food deserts,” says EVE, one of the many celebrities who have teamed up with the organization to encourage people to pick up a free garden or to donate one. “What I love about this is that it’s not intimidating. Anyone can do this, no matter where you come from, no matter where you live. We are all able to grow something.”

Rolling Stone recently talked with Musk about the Million Gardens Movement, why shipping containers can grow the most perfect basil, and how he is channeling his family’s trademark disruptor drive to change America’s relationship with food.

How did you first get interested in food and then how did that grow into an interest in agricultural innovation?
I’ve always loved food. I started cooking for my family when I was 12, maybe even 11.

What was the first meal you made? Do you remember?
It’s actually funny. My mother is a wonderful person, great dietitian, but because she’s a dietitian, the food we ate was brown bread and yogurt or bean soup. I mean, as a kid, it drove me crazy. So I asked my mom, “If I could cook, could we get something else?” And so I went to the butcher, and I asked them, “How do you roast a chicken?” And he said, “Put it in a really hot oven for one hour.” And I was like, “Oh, how hot is hot?” He was like, “Make it as hot as your oven goes for one hour, and if it starts to burn, then just take it out.” And he gave me the chicken, and that was it. I’ve kept that recipe forever. 450, 500 degrees, one hour. That’s a great straight-up recipe.

And then my mother insisted on a vegetable, so I decided to do French fries, which was my funny way of convincing her that I’m doing a vegetable.

It is a vegetable.
I totally screwed up the French fries. I didn’t heat up the oil ahead of time, and if you don’t do that, the potatoes actually soak in the oil so you’re eating basically a sponge of oil. I made everyone throw up. But the roast chicken was delicious. Everyone loved that. And so I was encouraged to cook more. I cooked for my friends in university. I didn’t have any money, so I figured out how to cook for 40 cents a person. It was a Kraft dinner with weiner sausages. And if someone chipped in an extra dollar, I’d get actually real cheese instead of the powdered cheese.

Anyway, I studied business, and then went down to California to start a company with my brother building maps and door-to-door directions for the internet.

I read that you and your brother were sleeping in your office and showering at the YMCA and that sort of startup lifestyle made you appreciate food.
Yeah, that’s totally right. We only had enough money for rent for either an office or an apartment, so we rented an office. I had a little minibar fridge and put one of those portable cooktops above it, and that was our kitchen. But we also ate at Jack in the Box all the time because it was the only place that was open late. Ugh, 25 years later, I can still remember the items on that menu. It was just really, really not great — a huge inspiration to go focus on real food after that.

And I just did not like the lack of social connection. It’s a work-hard-go-to-sleep-and-work-hard-again culture with not much socializing in the way that I enjoy, which is eating food, eating together over a meal, talking about ideas. I kind of was suffocating a little bit.

It’s a Soylent culture.
Yeah, exactly. They actually want food to be a pill. So I kind of needed to leave. We ended up selling [our company] for a gazillion dollars when I was 27, and I had this sort of opportunity to do whatever I wanted. So I went to New York to enroll at the French Culinary Institute.

Was culinary school as brutal as people make it out to be?
Absolutely brutal. It was Full Metal Jacket, but cooking. They just totally break you down. They make sure you don’t have any faith in your own abilities — within a few months, you’re like, “I am a completely useless fool” — and then after that, they start building you up with the skills they want you to have. It was very, very hard on the ego. I managed to graduate, but I would say 70 percent of the people that start don’t finish — and you pay upfront.

I actually graduated just a few weeks before 9/11 and woke up to the sounds of the plane hitting the building. That’s how close we were. Fourteen days later, I started volunteering to feed the firefighters. We would do 16-hour days, every day — there was never a reason not to work because the alternative is you sit at home during the nightmare after 9/11, where no one was on the streets or anything. I started peeling potatoes and eventually got to the point where I would drive the food down to Ground Zero. The firefighters would come in completely gray in their face and gray in their eyes, covered in dust. And then they’d start eating, and you’d see the color come back in their face, the light in their eyes.

And you worked as a line cook after that?
Yeah, for Hugo Matheson, at his restaurant. He was the chef of a popular restaurant in Boulder, and I just wanted to learn. I was a line cook for $10 an hour for probably 18 months. And loved it. You know, it’s a submarine culture. And you get in there and everything you do in the moment is measured in the moment. It’s very much the opposite of [building] software.

You and Hugo eventually started a restaurant [The Kitchen] that practiced the farm-to-table thing before it was even really a term. Why was it so important to you to have local suppliers and organic methods? At that point, was it mainly about flavor, or was there a bigger ethic behind it?
For sure flavor was the driver. But I think that the thing that I resonated with more was the sense of this concept of community through food. You know, when I was feeding the firefighters, it was all about community. The fishermen would come and give us their fish, so we got the best fish you can imagine. The cooks were all volunteers. We were going through this really tough time. So for me, the community through food was what I loved about it.

[At The Kitchen], we literally had a basic rule to farmers saying we’ll buy whatever you grow. We said that if you can deliver by 4 p.m., then we will get it on the menu that evening.

Oh, wow.
We would get fiddlehead ferns at 4 p.m. and be trying to think, “OK, what can we do with this?” If you turn the food around that quickly, it really does show up in the flavor.

Food that had potentially been in the ground that morning.
Not potentially. Every day was working with the harvest of that day. We had 43 different farmers coming to the back door. It was awesome.

Let’s move ahead to the part of the story, after your accident, when you’re like, “All right, I’ve gotten this new lease on life and now what am I going to do with it?” Obviously, within the food space, there are a lot of choices you could have made. So how did you decide where to go from there?
So when I came out of that hospital, I resigned as CEO of my software company. I told my wife I wanted a divorce. The spiritual message I got was: Work with a way to connect kids to real food, to get kids to understand what real food is. And real food for me is food that you trust to nourish the body, trust to nourish the farmer, trust to nourish the planet. It’s very simple. Processed food would be the opposite of that. There’s no nourishment there. The farmer gets hosed and it’s terrible for the planet. So I [looked into] farm-oriented work and cooking-skills training. Turned out giving kids knives isn’t a good idea.

What? [laughter]
Yeah. Exactly. But the thing that came back to me was the value of a school garden. I actually was pretty frustrated with school gardens. I had been a philanthropic supporter of them for a few years and found them to be expensive, hard to maintain — a passionate parent would put it in, and then their kid would graduate, and it would become this mess in the corner of the schoolyard. So we [created] learning gardens. They’ve got a beautiful Fibonacci sequence layout. They’re made in a factory, but they have a natural look and feel. These are totally food-safe and can go on any school ground. They’re [wheelchair] accessible, easy to teach in, and built into the irrigation system of the school. We go in and we do 100 of them at a time. Pre-COVID we got to almost 700 schools in Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Memphis, L.A.

How did you decide which cities to go into?
I believe this is useful anywhere, but what I found was low-income communities were the areas where you really needed it. Private schools or wealthier schools, they all have gardens — there’s not a private school out there that doesn’t embrace having a school garden. It’s actually the low-income schools that don’t have it. And that is also, coincidentally or not, where the obesity is. And so what I wanted to do is take what existed in private schools and put it into low-income schools and to do it in a way where it would be the most beautiful thing in the school. So instead of that sort of eyesore that was in the backyard, we said, “These have to be right next to the classroom, right next to the playground. You’re not allowed to build a fence around it. And if you don’t want to do that, great, we’ll just find another school. But these are the rules for learning garden.” And because we were doing 100 at a time, the districts would work with us, including maintenance and installation and curriculum and teacher training. Pre-COVID we were teaching almost 350,000 kids every school day.

And are there measurable effects?
Absolutely. Studies show that fifth grade in particular is the most effective grade. If you teach science in fifth grade to a kid, the exact same lesson in the garden versus in the classroom, you will get a 15-point increase on a 100-point score on their test scores.

And then if you teach kids 90 minutes a week in school, which is not hard to do because it’s beautiful and fun to be outside, you’ll double their intake of fruits and vegetables. Now they’re not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, so the base is low, but you’re still doubling. The way I like to look at it is you’re really not trying to make them eat vegetables all the time — that’s too hard — you just try to change the course of their life by a few degrees; if you can do it by third, fourth, fifth grade, they’re going to be a different adult when they grow up. We’re not here to claim that what we do changes everything. We believe that the cafeteria needs to improve, that we need grocery stores to exist in these food deserts. There are many legs of the stool, but the school garden movement is a critical leg.

Are there any other technological innovations in this space that are really giving you hope?
I think there’s a lot of cool things going on around carbon capture with regenerative farming, because if you do farming correctly, you’ve become a wonderful carbon sink. And there needs to be an economy around it. So what is the value of a carbon credit? They’ve got value for that in Europe, but they haven’t valued it in America. So I think there’s a lot of government policy that needs to work there. But it’s a fascinating area to look at.

It’s interesting, the concept of bringing innovation to agriculture, which is—
So old school! Yeah, it’s fun. I do get frustrated that it doesn’t move fast enough. Then I’m reminded of how big this is and I’ve got my whole life to work on it. So I’m learning to embrace going a little slower. If you are in the software world, it’s more “move fast and break things,” and I think with food, it’s something in between.

Yeah, you don’t want to break the food chain.
No, people need to eat. Exactly.

And I know you’ve been advocating, too, for policies that help farmers shift to organic methods.
Yeah, I’ve been a supporter of that, but I really have pushed my energy now to work with young farmers of any kind. I’m not against organic at all. I love organic. But I’ve kind of said, “You know, we just need young farmers.” Real food doesn’t require it to be organic. If it’s a zucchini that happens to be grown conventionally, I’m still in favor of that.

It’s still a zucchini.
Right. That being said, organic is better. Farmers make more money on it. But it’s really about young farmers getting them into the business.

If you don’t mind, let me take one minute to just talk about [another initiative called] Square Roots. So there was a sort of a turning point in indoor farming technology around 2014, where you could really do quality food. Indoor farming’s been around forever, but the quality was really terrible. It would taste like water. No real flavor. But the technology of lighting really changed in 2014, and so by 2016 we said, “You know, there is a way here.” And what got me going was I really wanted to create this generation of young farmers. I love technology and I love food. And I think that if we bring the two together, we will get young people interested in farming again. And so we started out Square Roots as really a training entity.

And with Square Roots, you’re growing food in shipping containers? There’s no soil?
Yeah, we refine the nutrients [through the water]. We’ve gotten very, very thoughtful about what the nutrients are so that we can re-create as best we can the soil that they would get normally. The shipping containers, what’s beautiful about them is the fact that we can totally control the climate. For example, we have found that Genoa in Italy is where the best basil in the world is grown. It’s four weeks in June that are the best, and actually, 1997 was the best June. And so we re-create the climate of 1997 Genoa, Italy, in each of those containers to create the tastiest basil you can possibly imagine. Using data, we can monitor the growth and how they work. And every square meter of the air in there is exactly the same. That’s why containers are so valuable. Plants factories have to grow basil or cilantro or whatever all in the same climate. We get to grow arugula, basil, parsley, cilantro or whatever each in their own climate. For example, we’ve discovered that mint grows best in the Yucatan Peninsula — superhuman, grows like a weed, delicious. And we re-create that climate.

Square Roots Basil Farm in Brooklyn.

Square Roots

And the shipping containers, the idea for that was, “Let’s use things that we can recycle”?
Well, they are recycled. But no, it wasn’t that. It was actually climate control. They’re actually like refrigerators. We can drop that temperature in there to 40 degrees Fahrenheit for a particular growth cycle. If we have any pests, we don’t use pesticides, we have something called Mojave mode where we turn it into the Mojave Desert for four days. We bring the temperature up to 120 degrees, drop the humidity down to four percent and nothing can survive. That’s how we remove pests. No one else can do that unless you use these kind of containers. So it’s really a technology solution.

You’ve referred to food as being the new Internet. Do you still feel that way?
Oh, my god. Absolutely. It’s showing itself. Food is different to social media and so forth. It takes a long time to build up supply chains, get consistent growing. It’s not as fast-moving, but it is a much bigger business. Software is a $400 billion business. Food is an $18 trillion business. So the opportunity is much, much bigger in food than it is in software.

What are the top two or three things that really bother you about the industrial food system right now?
The processing of food. For some reason back in the ’70s, America just started to idolize processed food. And so what you have is a high-calorie hamburger, for example, that is nutritionally irrelevant. In other words, people were just not thinking about nutrition. And they used laboratories to adjust the flavor, chemicals to adjust the flavor, artificial ingredients. The result was a very high-calorie, highly processed kind of a Frankenstein burger that did please the pallet, but it made you feel awful afterwards.

The other one that is absolutely ludicrous is ethanol. Forty percent of our corn fields are growing ethanol. That’s 25 million acres of land that could be used to grow real food. People keep feeding us bullshit that we need to try and feed the world. We have so much food that we are turning 40 percent of it into ethanol. It takes a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol. So it’s just a total boondoggle for the corn farmers and it’s terrible for the environment. In fact, it’s hilarious: It’s the only thing that both the oil industry and the environmentalists hate. Can you imagine there’s something that those two can agree on? And it’s ethanol.

Why the hell are we doing it?
It’s a subsidy for farmers. We do it because old people vote, and they control the farms, and they would all be devastated right now if the true demand of corn is what they had to deal with. And until a politician has the courage to make those hard decisions, we’re going to be stuck growing ethanol. Now, the good thing is we are all switching to electric cars, so ethanol is going to go away anyway. But for a while, the next five to 10 years, ethanol is going to be a part of what we do.

Let’s talk about the Million Gardens Movement. How did you get the idea that you wanted to do it?
Frank [Giustra] and his team pitched us on joining forces and doing the Million Gardens Movement. And we loved it. We thought it was a great idea. Because of Covid, we had been forced to pivot our model from the learning gardens because we couldn’t really teach people in the gardens anymore. And so we had done this trial of what we call little green gardens, which are round, beautiful sort of beige sacks, and you can come in and pick these up from a local school in your community. You can grow them on a windowsill as long as there’s some light. You can grow them indoors, which enables any city to be able to use them.

Say you get to a million gardens, are there any projections on what the environmental impact of that might be?
What we would be doing with these little green gardens is inspiring people to garden and empowering them to garden. The average garden generates about $600 to $700 worth of food a year. So it provides actual food to your family. You’re having a lower carbon footprint because you’re not shipping food around. It’s great for mental health. Think about Covid and how crazy we all are. This gets you out there. It connects you to your kids. Gardening is such a beautiful thing to do for yourself, for the community, for the environment.

It’s easy to think about what has been lost during this time, but I do like this idea of using COVID as an opportunity for change.
It’s obviously one of the worst things we’ve gone through as a society, but if we do this correctly, if we take this opportunity well, it could be one of the best things that’s happened to society — in a few years, we’ll look back and say, “OK, this was a good way to restart and focus more on climate change, focus more on gardening with your family, being connected to each other.” I think it has a lot of potential, as long as we take that potential and we leverage it. So the Million Gardens Movement is a part of that.

In This Article: covid-19, Elon Musk, food, gardening

How Vertical Farms Are Revolutionizing Agribusiness

William Ramstein ・ 1 March 2021 ・ Vertical Farming

Urban planners are tasked with answering some pressing inquiries: how can farming be brought closer to consumers; is digital agriculture an essential ingredient for making cities smarter; and can vertical farming improve socio-economic disparities?

Key Takeaways:

• Vertical farming uses LED, Robotics and AI to bring vegetables closer to city dwellers.

• The total addressable market for vertical farming is estimated at around $700 billion.

• Spread, a Japanese vertical farm is profitable but most firms fail.

• Vertical farming is a great way to produce controlled supplies of a customized plant.

• Vertical farming struggles with electricity costs despite reducing carbon emissions.

What is vertical farming and why does it matter?
The bedrock characteristic of cryptocurrency technology is called decentralization, a sovereign and flexible organizational system led by a commune, and today other industries like farming are catching the bug. Farming needs to change its practices in order to meet ecological objectives set up by governments and decentralization could open the door to increasing food access and reducing carbon emissions from food transportation. Smart decentralized vertical farming implies using technology like digital platforms, robotics and artificial intelligence to bring food closer to the growing demand seen in cities.

Despite the difficulty of competing against the cost structure of traditional farming, vertical farming offers numerous advantages. It grants more yield per square meter and reduces waste in both carbon and water usage. The production of vegetables is made in large and often times un-used warehouses close to city centers thus cutting transportation costs and middlemen expenses. The supply is more easily controlled, protected, and priced regardless of global weather and plants are customized to local consumer preferences. Consumers are already paying a premium on farmer’s market products, so why not vertical farm products too?

Cases of vertical farming: Nigeria is one of the most promising African nations because of its age pyramid. But with a large young population comes questions around food and water access and today, more than 170 million Nigerians need prolonged and sustainable access to these resources. Nigeria currently imports $3.5 billion worth of food products while exporting only 1/7 of that figure. Fresh Direct is Nigeria’s first Hydroponics Company (growing crops without standard soil) that combines vertical farming to its business model to reduce the distance between cities and rural farming regions.

The firm is able to produce seven to 10 times the yields because of its stackable shipping containers, which use technologies such as drip irrigation, and cold storage. Direct Farming operates with a community mindset, with the goal to inspire more young farmers to set up shop in urban centers and become urban farmers. The company also trains and finances low-skilled workers into urban farmers and increases economic productivity in unemployed youth groups.

In Japan, a company called Spread is one of the world’s most sophisticated examples of vertical farming. Their factory mainly produces lettuce. Large robotic arms transplant lettuce seedlings into pots where they are left to grow under LED lights. Believe it or not, but the factory can produce 30,000 lettuce heads a day. CEO Shinji Inada boasts of being the only large-scale vertical farm that is profitable and hopes that more widespread adoption continues growing.

However, companies like Spread and A-Plus (another similar farm in Fukushima) struggle to lower unit economics because of their low-scale operations, and they find it hard to penetrate the traditional downstream sellers. When producing high-priced lettuce by the tonne, trucking goods to the local wholesaler does not work partly because vertical farming offers customized products for specific local needs, not necessarily for broad demand. These players have thus geared their focus towards international buyers like UAE to export their goods.

Is vertical farming there yet?
Most vertical farms have failed because of the high initial costs and high operational expenses of running robotic equipment. While sunlight is free, the energy cost of running LEDs is not. The solution could be to install renewable energies like solar panels and wind turbines. However, the fixed cost of that installation would inevitably factor into the end-product, or at least on the balance sheet as a liability assuming they keep prices reasonable for consumers.

While Mr. Inada can rightly boast of turning profits, most firms toss lettuce at a loss. The industry should see more growth ahead, however, with research group IDTechEx forecasting that annual sales of $700 million could more than double to $1.5 billion in 2030. There remain technological challenges though. While many competitors boast of successfully leveraging AI and robotics and filtration, new entrants have seen problems with watering automation systems, mold, and infestations (most players do not use pesticides).

Some analysts suggest that while the excitement around vertical farms makes sense, the farming style might just end up becoming just another way of farming amongst greenhouse and open sky farms. More specifically, vertical farming will focus on high-margin crops rather than commodities like bulk grains.

While the challenges of vertical farming are clear, every country has different needs and constraints. There is a large interest from smaller island countries like Singapore or Iceland, rich economies, and countries that have a higher propensity to import due to less arable lands. Britain is a good example of a country that meets the criteria and in the context of Brexit, it makes all the more sense because of import costs and independence constraints. A potential labor crisis could soon loom too assuming seasonal workers are denied entry into the country. Vertical farms only require one-third of the manpower to run and could therefore alleviate the industry.

 The market opportunity…According to research by Barclays Investment Bank, the market opportunity for vertical farms is large. Analysts estimate the size of the global fruit and vegetable market to be $1.2 trillion and the total addressable market for vertical farms to be $700 billion. The purchased energy use to produce 1kg of lettuce is 247-kilowatt hours far exceeding Netherland greenhouses’ 70-kilowatt hours consumption. With retailers being asked to meet more carbon-neutral objectives, some vertical farms believe they will be able to overcome their expense through increased demand and scale.

The pandemic has imposed many supply chains disruptions and labor shortages threatening food security in regions around the world relying heavily on imports. Vertical farming is recognized lately and since 2014, has seen a flow of funds equal to $1.8 billion according to data group Dealroom. SoftBank fundraised $140 million into Plenty, a start-up, and countries like Abu Dhabi want to build farms in deserts.

Some of the top players in the global farming market include Vertical Farm Systems (Australia), American Hydroponics (US), Agrilution (Germany), Green Sense Farms (US), Everlight Electronics (Taiwan), Koninklijke Philips (Netherlands), Sky Greens (Singapore), Illumitex (US), Urban Crop (Belgium), Aerofarms (US) and InFarm (Germany).

SweGreen Becomes Partner In Viable Cities

03-03-2021 | Swegreen

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SWEDEN- Farming as a Service becomes a new tool in the fight against climate change as the FoodTech enterprise SweGreens joins the Swedish Strategic Innovation Program, Viable Cities.

Viable Cities is an innovation program for smart and sustainable cities. The aim is to accelerate the transition to inclusive and climate-neutral cities by 2030 with digitalization and citizen engagement as enablers.

SweGreen is an innovation company based in Stockholm focused on futuristic, smart, and circular solutions for controlled-environment urban farming. SweGreen own technologies which enables integration of smart vertical farming solutions into real-estate properties. Recently SweGreen has introduced a service for urban production of leafy greens, called Farming as a Service (FaaS), which allows clients to produce greens under their license and close to the city population.

• Sweden inspires many other nations and has a leading position in the transition of urbanization context and fighting the climate change through smart and sustainable solutions that could be implemented in cities, says Sepehr Mousavi, member representative, and Chief Sustainability Officer at SweGreen.

• Smart urban farming in infrastructure-integrated settings and by harnessing urban resources could be an exponential factor in localizing the food chains in Sweden and cutting back the carbon footprint associated with our food production and supply, he continues.

Viable Cities is growing steadily and new members like SweGreen are joining the current member pool, the likes of Swedish municipalities, Swedish universities and research institutes and other leading innovation companies. Running from 2017 to 2030, the program gathers partners from industry, academia, public and civil society organizations, and jointly funded by the Swedish Innovation Agency (Vinnova), the Swedish Energy Agency and Formas with a total investment of 1 billion SEK (about 100 million EUR).

Viable Cities is coordinated by KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

• Together with our member organizations and other stakeholders, we aim to accelerate the transition to climate-neutral cities by 2030 with a good life for all within planetary boundaries, says Olga Kordas, Program Director of Viable Cities and a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

• Transforming our food systems are one of the key challenges, Olga Kordas continues, and we are happy to be joined by SweGreen to co-create solutions for the future.

Andreas Dahlin, CEO of SweGreen, highlights:

• We are honored to be part of such a committed and influential strategic program and partner pool as Viable Cities’. We hope to contribute with innovations around the concept of Farming as a Service, which really could impact food production today and in the future. The ability to produce fresh and nutrient food close to the consumer will be one of the big missions for the food industry in the upcoming decades.

  
  For more information:

Sepehr Mousavi, CSO SweGreen, sepehr.mousavi@swegreen.se +46(0)73-3140043

Andreas Dahlin, CEO SweGreen, andreas.dahlin@swegreen.se +46(0)70-9240032

Åsa Minoz, Head of Communications, Viable Cities, asa.minoz@viablecities.se +46(0)722108826

SweGreen is a Swedish GreenTech company that offers digital, efficient, and circular solutions for urban cultivation in a closed and controlled environment. By combining computer science, advanced technology, and plant sciences, SweGreen contributes to the development of urban sustainable food production. The company was established in 2019 and provides consumer products such as various leafy greens and herbs under the brand of Stadsbondens. www.www.swegreen.com

Source and Photo Courtesy of Swegreen

Vertical Farms Nailed Tiny Salads. Now They Need To Feed The World

Gartenfeld Island, in Berlin’s western suburb of Spandau, was once the bellows of Germany’s industrial revolution. It hosted Europe’s first high-rise factory and, until World War II, helped make Berlin, behind London and New York, the third-largest city on Earth.

Today’s Berlin is still a shell of its former self (there are over a hundred cities more populous), and the browbeaten brick buildings that now occupy Gartenfeld Island offer little in the way of grandeur. Flapping in the gloom of a grey November morning in 2020 is a sign which reads, in German, “The Last Days of Humanity”.

Yet inside one of these buildings is a company perched at agriculture’s avant-garde, part of the startup scene dragging Berlin back to its pioneering roots. In under eight years, Infarm has become a leader in vertical farming, an industry proponents say could help feed the world and address some of the environmental issues associated with traditional agriculture. Its staff wear not the plaid or twill of the field but the black, baggy uniform of the city’s hipsters.

Infarm has shipped over a thousand of its “farms” to shops and chefs across Europe (and a few in the US). These units, which look like jumbo vending machines, grow fresh greens and herbs in rows of trays fed by nutrient-rich water and lit by banks of tiny LEDs, each of which is more than ten times brighter than the regular bulb you’d find in your dining room. Shoppers pick the plants straight from the shelf where they’re growing.

Infarm crop science director, Pavlos Kalaitzoglou, in his Berlin lab

Credit Ériver Hijano

Gartenfeld Island, however, is home to something more spectacular. Here, in a former Siemens washing machine factory, stand four white, 18-metre-high “grow chambers”, controlled by software and served by robots. These are the company’s next generation of vertical farms: fully-automated, modular high-rises it hopes will scale the business to the next level. According to Infarm, each one of these new units uses 95 per cent less water, 99 per cent less space and 75 per cent less fertilizer than conventional land-based farming. This means higher yields, fresher produce and a smaller carbon footprint.

Agriculture is a £6 trillion global industry that has altered the face and lungs of the Earth for 12,000 years. But, unless we change our food systems, we’ll be in trouble. By 2050, the global population will be 9.7 billion, two billion more than today. Fifty-six per cent of us live in cities; by 2050 it will be 70 per cent. If the prosperity of megastates like India and China continues to soar, and our diets remain the same, we will need to double food production without razing the Amazon to do it. That sign on Gartenfeld Island might not be so alarmist.

Vertical farmers believe they are a part of the solution. Connected, precision systems have grown crops at hundreds of times the efficiency of soil-based agriculture. Located in or close to urban centres, they slash the farm-to-table time and eliminate logistics. New tech is allowing growers to tamper with light spectra and manipulate plant biology. Critics, however, question the role of vertical farms in our food future. They are towering lunchboxes for late capitalism, they argue – producing garnishes for the rich when it is the plates of the poor we must fill. Vertical farms already make money, and heavyweights including Amazon and SoftBank are investing in various companies in the hopes of cornering a market expected to be worth almost £10 billion in the next five to ten years. Infarm is leading that race in Europe. It has partnered with European retailers including Aldi, Carrefour and Marks & Spencer. In 2019 it penned a deal with Kroger, America’s largest supermarket chain. Venture capitalists have handed the firm a total of £228 million.

Not bad for a hare-brained experiment that started in a Berlin apartment.

An Infarm employee tends to a batch of seedlings in a special incubator

Credit Ériver Hijano

In 2011, a year before he moved to Berlin, Erez Galonska went off-grid. He grew up in a village in his native Israel, but the young nation was growing too, and farms made way for buildings. Soon the village was a town, and its inhabitants ever more disconnected from their natural surroundings.

Galonska’s father had studied agriculture, and the son had dreamed of recovering a connection with nature he felt he had lost. The search took him to the mountains of the Canary Islands, where he found a plot of land and got to work. He drank water from springs, drew energy from solar panels, and spent long hours farming produce he then sold or bartered at local markets.

When he met his now-wife Osnat Michaeli, “I traded it for love,” he says. “Love is stronger than anything.” In 2012, the couple, alongside Galonska’s brother Guy, who had studied Chinese medicine, moved to Berlin to work on a friend’s social media project. But the hunger for self-sufficiency remained. It was “a personal quest,” Michaeli says. “How we can be self-sufficient, live off the grid. Food is a big part of that journey.”

We meet at a Jewish restaurant in Berlin’s historic Gropius Bau art museum. It is mid-morning, and Covid-19 has cleared the tables. But a row of Infarm units whirs away quietly along one wall, producing basil, mint, wasabi rocket (a type of rocket leaf with the punchy flavour of wasabi), and other, more exotic herbs. Such produce was a pipedream for the three Infarm co-founders eight years ago. Growing crops when living on a tropical island was one thing. Doing it in a small apartment, located in the tumbledown Berlin neighbourhood of Neukölln, was quite another. Soon after moving from the Canaries, Erez Galonska typed “can you grow without soil” into Google.

Japan had taken to indoor farming in the 1970s, and this bore some helpful information on its techniques. The same was true of illegal cannabis growers, who swapped tips about hydroponics – growing with nutrient-packed water rather than soil – across subreddits.
Several trips to a DIY store later, the trio had what resembled a hydroponic farm. It was a big, chaotic Rube Goldberg machine, and it leaked everywhere. Growing wasn’t simply a case of switching on the lights and waiting. Brightness, nutrients, humidity, temperature – every tweaked metric resulted in an entirely different plant. One experiment yielded lettuce so fibrous it was like eating plastic. “We failed thousands of times,” Erez Galonska says.

Two of Infarm’s co-founders, Osnat Michaeli and Erez Galonska

Credit Ériver Hijano

Eventually, the team grew some tasty greens. They imagined future restaurant menus boasting of food grown “in-farm”, rather than simply made in-house, and founded Infarm in 2013. But there was a hitch: indoor-grown cannabis sells for around £1,000 per kilo. Lettuce for £1.20. Most of the early vertical farms required heaps of manual work and operated in the red. “It simply wasn’t a sustainable business model,” Erez Galonska says.

By 2014, they decided to roadshow their idea and shipped a 1955 Airstream trailer – a brushed-aluminium American icon – to Berlin. The trailer belonged to a former FBI agent, but it was conspicuous in a city of Volkswagens, caravans and Plattenbau buildings. Michaeli and the Galonska brothers transformed it into a mobile vertical farm, then pitched up at an urban garden collective in Berlin’s trendy Kreuzberg district. There they proselytised indoor farming to urban planners, food activists, architects and hackers, handing out salads and running workshops. Fresh, local food – even if it cost a little more – would entice a growing number of foodies who were interested in where their meals came from. The trailer cost nothing but petrol money to move, and emissions from the growing process itself were almost nil.

When the designer of a swanky hotel across town came by trailer, he asked if the team could install something similar in his restaurant. “That was really the trigger,” says Guy Galonska. “We rented a workshop and we got to develop a system for them.”

When they installed their first “farm” in a Berlin supermarket, VCs took notice and visited Infarm’s young founders at their Kreuzberg office-cum-kitchen, where they hosted dinner parties featuring Infarm crops. But a return on investment still seemed distant: some investors thought the farms were an art project. Maintaining locations manually was exhausting, and the team almost went bankrupt “two or three times,” Guy Galonska says. “I think all of us got a lot of white hair during that time,” he adds. “It was a very challenging thing to do.”

A €2 million grant from the European Union in 2016 helped. With it came deals to place Infarm units in supermarkets and restaurants across Germany. Managing them all would require something precise, connected and efficient. To become a sustainable business, Infarm would have to behave less like a farm, and more like a tech startup.

An Infarm kiosk in the Edeka Supermarket E Center in Berlin

Credit Ériver Hijano

For around 2,500 years after King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon gifted his wife some hanging gardens, little changed in the world of hydroponic farming. Asian farmers grew rice on giant, terraced paddies, and Aztecs built “chinampa” rigs that floated along the swamps of southern Mexico.

Life magazine published a drawing of stacked homes, each growing its own produce, in 1909, and the term “vertical farming” appeared six years later. The US Air Force fed hydroponically-grown veggies to its troops during World War II, and Nasa explored the tech as a solution for life off-planet. But vertical farming didn’t really capture public imagination until 1999, when Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor, devised a 30-storey skyscraper filled with farms. In 2010, Despommier published The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, which has become the industry’s utopian testament.

“I had no expectations whatsoever that this would turn commercial,” Despommier says. “We just thought it was a good idea, because we didn’t see any other way out of stopping deforestation in favour of farming, and keeping the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere at a reasonable level. It turned out to be a crazy idea whose time has come.”

The vertical farming concept is simple: growing produce on vertically-stacked levels, rather than side by side in a field. Instead of the Sun, the vertical farm uses artificial light, and where there is ordinarily soil, growers use nutritious water or, in the case of “aeroponic” farms, an evenly-dispersed mist.

Vertical farms take up a vanishing amount of land compared to their conventional cousins. They use almost no water, don’t flush contaminating pesticides into the ecosystem, and can be built where people actually live. But, by and large, they have not functioned as businesses. Only the black-market margins of weed, and Japan’s high-income, high-import food ecosystem, have catered to profit. It costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to erect a mid-sized vertical farm, and energy use is prohibitively high.

Advances in technology are changing this. By bolting automation, machine learning and cloud-connected software on to vertical farms, firms can trim physical labour, increase capacity and maintain a dizzying range of cultivation variables. Infarm staff at a separate office to the new Berlin farm, located some 23km southeast of Spandau in the Tempelhof district, keep track of “plant recipe” settings at any one of the startup’s 1,220 in-store units, including CO2 levels, pH and growth cycles, via the company’s Farm Control Cloud Platform, a bit like a giant CCTV room. Machine learning finesses recipes, and keeps each plant as uniform as possible.

Inside the new vertical farm, trays of produce are tended by automated systems

Credit Ériver Hijano

Gartenfeld Island’s employees – mechanical and electrical engineers, software developers, crop scientists and biologists – get closer to the produce, but only just. They monitor via an iPad and feed crops into the building’s four massive grow chambers, or farms, each one about the height and width of two London buses, with ventilation systems that whoosh like a subdued turbine hall.

From there on in, robots do the hard work. Inside the farms, a robotic “plant retrieval system” – basically a tricked-out teddy picker – scoots up and down a perpendicular beam, plucking trays of plants in various stages of growth and shuffling them closer, or further, from LED lights at the summit. The firm claims this reduces service time by 88 per cent. A sliver of the window is the only way to see the device in-person: everything is hermetically sealed to keep out pests. “With automation, you invest once and then that price goes down over time,” says Orie Sofer, Infarm’s hardware lab lead. “With human labour, unfortunately, over time the price goes up.”

The number of crop plants varies depending on the produce, but there are usually just under 300 in a “farm” at any one time. Each farm yields the equivalent of 10,000 square metres of land and uses just five litres of water per kilo of food (traditional vegetable farming uses around 322 litres per kg).

Infarm is not alone in this revolution. AeroFarms, a Newark, New Jersey-based startup, feeds an aeroponic mist to roots that are separated from their leaves by a cloth. It’s most recent funding round was led by Ingka Group, the parent of Swedish furniture giant IKEA. New York’s Bowery Farming, like Infarm, focuses on automation and a proprietary dashboard called BoweryOS that, among other things, takes photos of crops in real-time for analysis. It’s £123 million in backing comes from investors including Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek. Bowery CEO and founder Irving Fain believe his addressable market “is about a hundred billion dollars a year, just in the US, of crops that we think are good candidates for us to grow.”

Leading the vertical farming VC race is Plenty, a San Francisco-headquartered brand that has raised almost half a billion pounds in the capital since it was founded in 2013, including a 2020 Series D round led by Masayoshi Son’s $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund. Plenty feeds its greens with water that trickles down six-metre-tall poles; infrared sensors pour data into an algorithm that nudges the plant’s growth recipe accordingly.

Plenty co-founder and chief science officer Nate Storey, who works at the company’s test farm in Wyoming, likens these deep-tech solutions to the tools that powered agriculture’s most recent revolution: “The tractor allowed farmers to be freed from constraints. Half of their land was dedicated to raising draft animals, and the tractor came along and freed them from a life where they were basically managing animals just so they could plough their land.”

For them, he says, automation is similar. “It allows us to get rid of the hardest work – the work that is unpleasant, the work [growers] don’t like to do – and focus on the work that really matters.”

Infarm kiosks inside the Beba restaurant in the Gropius Bau museum

Credit Ériver Hijano

Infarm differs from the competition on two fronts. The first is its focus on modular design: each component is compatible and scalable, like a giant, noisy LEGO set. Modularity makes it possible to install Infarm units anywhere in the world in a matter of weeks, no matter the size. That enables the company’s second USP: its business model. Infarm has no stores, selling produce instead via its remote units.

Clients tell Infarm which produce they want, and “create a schedule,” says Michaeli. “You buy the plants. Everything on the farm is controlled by Tempelhof. Everything that’s grown belongs to the client.” A chef may demand pesto that’s made from particular three-day-aged Greek and Italian basil, for example. Infarm can do that (Tim Raue, Berlin’s most famous chef, is a customer). “Everyone stops and asks about the farm,” one Berlin store manager says. “It’s great to have innovation here.”

Infarm has “two big advantages,” says Nicola Kerslake, founder of Contain Inc, a Nevada-based agtech financier. “One is that they’ve figured out how to do product onsite, which is really not very easy. And the other is that they have these great relationships with big purchasers like Marks & Spencer.”

“When you look at where the arms race is in this industry,” she continues, “it’s really been in two areas: How do I get hold of as much capital as possible, and how do I sign up the right partners? Having Marks & Spencer in your back pocket is really useful.”

It has helped encourage investors to open their chequebooks. Hiro Tamura, a partner at London VC firm Atomico, first met Infarm’s founding trio in 2018. A year later he led its £75 million Series B round. “They could roll these things out,” he says. “They worked, and they didn’t need some industrial-sized warehouse to do it. I didn’t lean in, I fell into the rabbit hole. And it was incredible. I was like, wow, these guys are thinking about time and speed to market modularity.”

Infarm ploughs a chunk of its revenue back into research. In a mezzanine-level lab sitting above the farms at Gartenfeld Island, a dozen white-coated analysts conduct tests on herbs to a soundtrack of Ariana Grande, measuring crop sugar levels, acidity, vitamins, toxicity, antioxidants and more. Via a process of phenotyping – the study of organisms’ characteristics relative to their environment – they hope to create more flavourful plants, or new tastes altogether.

“It’s not just about the hardware,” Kerslake explains. “It’s about how the hardware interacts with the rest of your farm system. And we’re starting to see a lot more sophistication on that front because the AI programs these companies started three or four years ago are now starting to bear fruit.”

Infarm’s results are high-quality: juicy lettuce, wasabi rocket that kicks, and basil that’s far more fragrant than the budget variety. “The end goal with almost everything that we’re doing is developing some sort of playbook, some sort of modular and standardised system, that we can then copy-paste to wherever we go,” says Pavlos Kalaitzoglou, Infarm’s director of plant science. Across from the lab, tomatoes and shiitake mushrooms grow in wine cellar-size chambers. They are living proof of how the firm is looking to diversify from herbs and leafy greens, whose low energy and water requirements make them the staple crop of every vertical farming startup today.

Rows of LED-illuminated produce inside one of Infarm’s four massive new grow chambers

Credit Ériver Hijano

We are in danger of farming the planet to death. Agriculture already occupies 40 per cent of all liveable land on Earth, and food production causes a quarter of all greenhouse gases. An area the size of Scotland disappears from tropical rainforests, responsible for up to a quarter of land photosynthesis, each year. Clearing more trees to feed our spiralling population will not help.

“We need to go back to the drawing board and rethink which avenues we can environmentally afford to pursue,” says Nicola Cannon, a professor at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester. Nitrogen fertiliser is particularly harmful to the environment, Cannon adds, “and has led us to adopt systems which have grossly exceeded the planetary boundaries.”

Current food systems are wildly inefficient: waste accounts for 25 per cent of all calories. And yet, almost a billion people suffer from hunger worldwide. These are not issues vertical farming will solve, critics, argue. Going local does little beyond satisfying consumers.

Energy is another tricky issue. Ninety per cent of Infarm’s electricity today is renewable, and it wants to reach zero emissions in the next few years. But this doesn’t factor in the environmental cost of building a steel-and-cement facility.

“Vertical farms are a round-off error to the round-off error in terms of contributing to the big levers out there,” Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist based in Minneapolis, says. “Like most technologies that are getting a lot of venture capital and which come from Silicon Valley kind of thinking, it’s being massively overhyped at the cost of real solutions. There’s an opportunity cost to put all this technology, money and renewable energy – that could be used for other things that we need energy for – into growing arugula for rich people at $10 an ounce.”

More than half the world’s food energy comes from its three “mega-crops”: wheat, corn and rice. They require wind, seasons and micronutrients that vertical farms are unable to replicate today. These are the crops that can prevent famine in Somalia, Bangladesh or Bolivia – not lettuce. “Vertical farms are growing the edge of the plate, not the centre of the plate,” Foley says.

But Despommier says it’s too soon to criticise the young industry for not addressing issues such as crop diversity. “What you’re really seeing is a rush towards profitability to get their feet wet, and to get their ledgers in the black and to pay off their investors, before they start diversifying,” he says.

“In a world where you think that land is unlimited and that resources are unlimited, indoor farming would be nonsensical,” Plenty co-founder Storey says. “As crazy as it seems to replace the Sun with electricity, it makes sense today. And it really makes more and more sense as time goes on.”

Much of the hope vested in vertical farms rests on the light-emitting diode. This tiny bead of light is the industry’s packhorse: it is a farm’s biggest financial layout and the nucleus of its most exciting advances. Modern LEDs are nothing like the ones that powered your childhood TV. They’ve progressed at such a rate, in fact, that they’ve developed their own law to adhere to: “Haitz’s Law”. Each decade, their cost drops by a factor of ten, while the light they generate leaps by a factor of 20.

That curve will eventually plateau, experts say. But not before LEDs improve enough to allow vertical farms to profit from food closer to the middle of the plate. Infarm’s current smart LED set-up is over 50 per cent more efficient than the one that lit its first farms. Haitz’s Law has helped some companies experiment in growing potatoes, which require far more energy and water than leafy greens. Turning profit from a crop that delivers the highest calories per acre would be momentous for the industry.

The cutting edge of LED technology today is smart sensors that can regulate the brightness and spectrum of light to replicate growing outdoors – or enhance it. Much of the planet’s first flora grew only in the ocean, which looks blue because it absorbs blue light at least.
Photosynthesis, therefore, occurs best between the blue and red light spectra. By tailoring LEDs to emit only these colours, or by dimming at intervals meant to mirror a plant’s natural cycle, vertical farmers can further reduce their energy burden – like stripping a road car to its bare bones so it can drive faster.

Recent discoveries have been more surprising. Strawberries, for example, react particularly well to green light. Some spectra can increase vitamin C in concentrated fruits like kiwis, while others extend shelf-lives by almost a week. In the future, says Fei Jia, of LED firm Heliospectra, growers “can get feedback from the lighting and the plants themselves on how the lighting should be applied… to further improve the consistency of the crop quality.”
“If you judge it from what you have today, you understand what [critics] are saying,” Guy Galonska says. “How can you grow rice and wheat and save the world? And they are right. But they can’t see ten years ahead: they can’t see all the different trends that are going to support that revolution.”

Other technological advances are helping agriculture in different ways. Drones and sensors help map and streamline growing. Drip irrigation dramatically reduces the burden on dwindling water supplies. Circular production – where waste products from one process contribute to fuelling another – is becoming more commonplace, especially in livestock farming. Cell-grown or insect-based meat (or vegetarianism) will reduce our reliance on livestock, which consume 45 per cent of the planet’s crops. Infarm, and the broader vertical farm cohort, may not be saving the world today. But it wants to build taller farms, place them in public buildings like schools, and teach people the value of fresh, healthy vegetables. If 70 per cent of us are to live in cities, then cities “can become these communities of growing,” says Erez Galonska.

Ultimately, Infarm wants to build a network of tens of thousands of automated farms, each one pumping streams of data back into a giant AI system in Berlin. This “brain”, as Galonska calls it, will pour that information into algorithms to generate better food at lower costs, each new yield shaving fractions from the water, energy and nutrients required. Then, Infarm could become something closer to the dream Galonska left behind in the Canaries: truly self-sufficient.

It’s a long way from the leaky, DIY gadget he and his co-founders built in their front room. “The way the world is going now, it’s very clear to everyone it’s running in the wrong direction,” Galonska says. “We definitely believe in the power of collaboration: bringing those outside-the-box thoughts to create a new system that will generate more food, better food, much more sustainably, and help to heal the planet – because that’s the main issue on the table.”

Saudi Farmer Has Built The Region’s First Vertical Farm

The Saudi farmer Omar Al-Jundi even he is not related to farming by degree. But that is exactly where the industrial engineer found his calling, when he built the region’s first vertical farm in the heart of Dubai. Born in Egypt to Saudi parents, Al-Jundi spent his early years in Alkhobar due to his father’s engineering firm.

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The family moved to Jeddah when he was 12 years old. His last two years of schooling were spent at Bahrain School in Manama. “I wanted to graduate with an American high school diploma,” Al-Jundi said. “At the time, as a Saudi, you couldn’t attend private foreign schools.” Upon graduation, he left the region to study industrial engineering, followed by an MBA at the University of Miami in Florida. Although his father is an engineer and his mother an architect, Al Jundi delved into the world of banking for two and a half years when he moved back to Jeddah upon graduating.

“I then shifted to the hospitality industry, opened the first lounge in Jeddah along with other restaurants with my friends, and ended up selling my share and joining my father’s company,” he said. “You learn that you’re better off doing something on your own than having partners because you end up changing directions.”
After 10 years of “paying his dues” in the family business, he felt compelled to change directions. “As an Arab, you’re always closely tied to the family,” he said. “We’re blessed my father started a business and there’s a place for us in that business, but luckily, my younger brother was a lot more interested in it — I always felt my calling was somewhere else.”

In search of his true passion, he started his journey as an entrepreneur. The field he specialized in had yet to be determined. “I felt that there was a meaning for something else,” Al-Jundi said. “I was free and my family was very supportive.”
Countless research and books later, he became intrigued by the tech space, admitting he believed he would start the next Amazon. “That didn’t follow through,” he said. “Then I thought it would be in mining, but I always looked for something that was away from my comfort zone such as engineering, contracting, real estate and consulting. Just something different. It was a process.”

The young Saudi had reached a point in his life where he felt the need to do something impactful, something which added true value to the region. Eventually, two of his friends introduced him to the concept of modern farming. “I visited some orange farms in Egypt and I was in exploration research mode,” he said. “I enjoyed seeing nature — you’re a lot more relaxed. Here, when you go in and see the plants growing every day, there’s definitely a connection, because you’re seeing the end product, you’re feeling it, and I connect to them.”

The more research he immersed himself in, the more driven his interest became. At the time, the Saudi Government was focused on addressing food security and self-sufficiency. “It’s always been a big topic,” he said. “When you fly out of Riyadh, you find these big circular green spots as they’re trying to green and farm the desert, which was successful, but on the other hand, it depleted our water resources.” According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, agriculture represents around 70 per cent of water consumption in most of the GCC countries. But Al-Jundi did not give up on the thought.

After moving to Dubai in 2014, he learned about King Abdullah’s Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad. Half the capital needed for agricultural projects was offered to Saudis who invested in a list of 31 countries abroad to purchase land, set up a project and export the food back to the Kingdom. It gave him an idea to start his own vertical farm. “I knew it was a big topic,” he said. “I’d never heard we could grow food with no soil. I thought it was intriguing and fascinating. It was enough for me to know there was something there to explore it further.”

With more than 90 per cent of the region’s land unsuitable for agriculture, Al-Jundi set out to find a solution. He spent the following 12 weeks taking courses in aquaponics, aquaculture, hydroponics and horticulture in California and the Netherlands. He even spent time working in a cucumber greenhouse at the Delphy facility in Holland, where he acquired valuable experience in the field. “It was really professional and a great learning experience,” he said. “That’s when I knew what I wanted to do. And I knew I had to completely immerse myself in it.”
The team of Badia Farms, which he founded in Al Quoz in December last year, consists of 12 people, all of whom have experience in farming. “It took 18 months to get it up and running because we didn’t work with any technical partner,” Al-Jundi said. “I knew I was in it for the long haul, so I worked with different growers and learned.”

The 850-square-meter facility includes a “fertigation” room, which fertilizes and irrigates the 18 varieties of crops he currently grows. Gourmet seeds, some of them hybrids, such as lemon basil, cinnamon kale, wasabi, green radish, mustard, micro kale, edible flowers and cinnamon basil, are flown in from the United Kingdom and the United States every three months — from 50 to 300 kilograms at a time. The farm plans on introducing as many as 26 varieties, including sunflowers.

The seeds are placed on a type of mat made of recycled carpet that is food-certified. LED lights flood the room in a pink atmosphere, with each UV light containing a certain spectrum that is beneficial for the plants.
In the tank room, feed and water is scheduled through a computer-based on the crop, with a unique nutrient recipe for each type, including potassium, calcium, magnesium, and ammonium. UV and concentrated oxygen are also able to kill any potential bacteria or pathogens in recycled water. Once the seeds sprout, they are moved to the five stacks in the vertical farm. Four dehumidifiers regulate the humidity in the air, providing each on average with 70 litres of water a day. The eco-system created by Badia Farms uses 90 percent less water than open-field farming and recycles its water up to nine times.

“We’re using hydroponics,” Al- Jundi said. “The biggest advantage is that we do not spray pesticides, which are messing up our health. In fact, we extensively use stickers to attract insects away from the crops.” Different levels of lighting are provided for each stage of the plants before they are sent out as they were grown. “They’re intense in flavor and it’s the freshest you can get that way,” he said. “My personal favourite is chocolate mint.” With 60 clients so far, serving hotels, restaurants, and cafes, the model is a first for the region, which made it challenging to set up. “All the ones abroad are designed for different climatic conditions so none of them are applicable here, where there is extreme humidity and high temperatures,” he said. “And to convince a chef to give you his time, when you don’t have the track record, was a big challenge. I wasn’t a known farmer yet.”

The system’s structure was manufactured in Riyadh, with a plan to set up the next facility by 2020 in Jeddah. Until then, the plan is to cater to Saudi as well as the UAE. “Dubai is a good testing ground and Saudi’s vision now is to support our type of sustainable growing and ecological farms, so it’s perfectly in line with what we want to do,” Al-Jundi said. “The government is now delegated to move into sustainable growing and find viable solutions to address self-sufficiency, so it’s not a slogan anymore: it’s the real deal.”

He hopes to develop similar projects across the Kingdom in the future. “My aim is to make sure we truly become self-sufficient,” he said. “Vertical farming is one solution but it’s not the full one — the ideal solution lies in all models of modern farming. What’s close to my heart is giving people healthy food while preserving our resources, and I believe the new generations of Saudis are ambitious and want to evolve our country. We were just waiting for the opportunity and it has finally come.”

Source: Arab News

Plenty Ranked Number One on Prestigious FoodTech 500

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.

Plenty, the flavor-first vertical farming company with a mission to improve the lives of people, plants, and the planet, today announced its #1 ranking on the esteemed Forward Fooding 2020 FoodTech 500.

Referred to as the “Fortune 500 list of agrifood companies,” the FoodTech 500 highlights global entrepreneurial talent at the intersection of food, technology and sustainability. Forward Fooding’s proprietary algorithms evaluate a business on its size, digital footprint and sustainability as measured against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Plenty came in first on the ranked list of 500 and out of a total of 2,000 nominees.

“It is an honor to be included on the FoodTech 500 and we are thrilled to be ranked first,” said Nate Storey, co-founder and CSO of Plenty. “The world is in need of an agricultural revolution, and there are many exciting areas where innovators are changing the future of food. At Plenty, we’re focused on using our proprietary, scalable vertical farming technology to deliver the freshest, most favorable produce year-round, while preserving our most precious resources.”

Plenty grows pesticide-free, non-GMO produce that tastes like it was fresh-picked from the garden because it was. The company ships from its farm to local stores every day. The farm’s controlled environment means the company can grow leafy greens year-round, regardless of the season. Plenty’s leafy greens are so clean, there is no need to wash because there is nothing to wash away - no bleaches, chemicals, soil or pesticides. The company wants the first person to touch their produce to be the consumer opening the package in their kitchen. Plenty plants are cultivated in an optimum growing environment, reaching peak flavors and nutrient value year-round, across every harvest.

The world is running out of usable land for growing crops and the global water supply is under severe threat of depletion. Plenty was founded on the need to create a more sustainable way to grow food using less land and water. Plenty yields hundreds of acres of crops in a building the size of a big box retailer, without cutting down a single tree, and using a fraction of the water required in the field. It’s San Francisco-based farm uses 100% renewable energy, and its greens are stored in 100% recyclable packaging and shipped locally to minimize the transportation footprint. Plenty’s data analytics and machine learning capabilities deliver 200 years’ worth of data each year, helping to quickly iterate and improve farm yield, quality and efficiency.

“The FoodTech 500 was created to shine a spotlight on the leading global innovators across the AgriFoodTech ecosystem, from farm to fork, who are making impactful solutions to better our food system,” said Alessio D’Antino, Forward Fooding founder and CEO. “This year’s list focused on understanding the driving factors behind the leading companies’ success and innovation, and we were thrilled to learn more about the top industry players, like Plenty, that are transforming our food system.”

The list represents 38 technology domains within the AgriFood space, including the broad categories of alternative proteins, farm management and precision farming, and vertical/indoor farming. The full ranking and more data about the 2020’s FoodTech 500 and its methodology can be found here.

About ForwardFooding

Forward Fooding is the world’s first collaborative platform for the food & beverage industry via FoodTech Data Intelligence and corporate-startup collaboration. Data services include The FoodTech Data Navigator data subscription service and facilitating corporate-startup collaboration through bespoke innovation programs and FoodTech consultancy.

To learn more visit: www.ForwardFooding.com

About Plenty

Plenty is an American farming technology company that frees agriculture from the constraints of land, weather, seasons, time, distance, pests, natural disasters, and climate. The company’s plant scientists, engineers, and farmers have developed its indoor vertical farming technology to grow nutrient-rich and pesticide-free plants with extraordinary flavor. The Plenty platform is designed to grow multiple crops in a building the size of a retail box store, yielding hundreds of acres using a fraction of the water and other precious resources. Plenty's flagship farm and headquarters are located in South San Francisco, and the company operates the largest of its kind Research and Development farm in Laramie, Wyoming. Plenty is currently building the world's highest-output, vertical, indoor farm in Compton, California.

View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210301005069/en/

CONTACT: Jane Gideon

Press@plenty.ag

KEYWORDS: CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: ENVIRONMENT TECHNOLOGY OTHER TECHNOLOGY FOOD/BEVERAGE AGRICULTURE SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT RETAIL NATURAL RESOURCES SCIENCE OTHER SCIENCE

SOURCE: Plenty

Copyright Business Wire 2021.

PUB: 03/01/2021

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210301005069/en

INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP: How To Make Your Network Part of Your Net “Worth”

Join Us Monday To Hear From

The Leaders of Ag In Europe

Register TODAY

It doesn’t matter the industry, the gold coin of success is making your network “worth” something towards your career goals. Discovering job opportunities, bridging industries, gaining product knowledge, climbing the ladder – they all can be pushed to new heights through strategically managing your connections.

How do you do this? It’s as easy as 1-2-3!

1.     First, register for the interactive workshop How to Make Your Network Part of Your Net “Worth" on 8 March 2021 that is part of the annual Women in Agribusiness (WIA) Summit Europe.

2.     Second, tune in (virtually, so this is very easy to do) to every word that accomplished speaker, Dorothy Dalton, CEO of 3Plus International Ltd., will share with you during the session.

3.     Third, stay and attend the entire WIA Summit Europe (8-10 March) and put your new networking skills to practice by mingling with dozens of attendees from several countries!

Your net “worth” is in your hands.

Get strategic with your networking and achieve your career goals!

Learn More And Register Here

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Agri-Tech To Anchor New Okanagan Falls Industrial Park

JOE FRIES

A vertical farming operation similar to this is planned for an Okanagan Falls industrial park. 

USDA/Special to The Herald

Vertical farming could be what finally helps a light-industrial park take root in Okanagan Falls.

Avery Group purchased the 110-acre former Weyerhaeuser mill site for $3.2 million in July 2020, and this week received tentative rezoning approval from the board of the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen.

The application, which would down-zone the site from its current heavy-industrial rating,  is now set for a public hearing March 18.

At the heart of the redevelopment plan is a 30-acre lot on which Avery Group wants to build a vertical farming facility, in which rows of crops would be stacked on top of one another in a warehouse-like environment.

“This really is the future of agriculture,” said Monique Janower, senior marketing and strategy director for Avery Group.

Potential crops include lettuce and leafy greens that vertical farming operations around the world had parlayed into a $2-billion industry as of 2018, according to Forbes Business Insights, which projects the market will expand to $12 billion by 2026.

The rest of the land at 1655 Maple St. would then be subdivided into lots ranging from 2.5 to 15 acres for a variety of uses, ranging from storage and food packaging to beverage processing and light manufacturing.

Janower, who cautioned there are still many regulatory hurdles to be cleared, said there has nonetheless been “tremendous interest” from potential buyers due to the relative rarity of new industrial land and the site’s central proximity to Alberta and the Lower Mainland.

Avery Group is owned by Garry Peters, who has deep ties to the area, according to Janower, so the company appreciates the site’s context within the community.

“We understand we’re not just creating bricks and mortar,” said Janower. “It’s very much tied to regional economic development of the area.”

The rezoning application already has the support of RDOS staff and a key community group.

“Rezoning of the property could potentially bring an influx of new and growing industrial businesses to Okanagan Falls,” Matt Taylor, president of the Okanagan Falls Community Association, wrote in a letter to the RDOS board.

“This in turn could lead to additional employment, a need for more residences and even more tourism. These factors would all contribute to and support the community.”

Since the 2007 closure of Weyerhaeuser, the site has been the subject of multiple development proposals, including an industrial park, residential development and, most recently, a cannabis production facility.

If rezoning is granted, Avery Group will then apply for the RDOS development permit required for the vertical farming operation. At the same time, it will apply to the B.C. government for subdivision. If all goes well, the company expects the park to be open for business in 2022.

Belgian Bio-Planet Now Sells Vertically-Farmed Coriander Too

Just under a year ago, Bio-Planet first introduced its basil to the market. This came from this Belgian store's self-developed vertical farm. "This cultivation method differs from conventional farming. It requires less water and space and fewer nutrients. That results in herbs with tiny ecological footprints. For us, the story didn't end with sustainable basil. We now have the technique down for coriander. We've been selling this second vertically-farmed herb since 19 February. That's in the Bio-Planet webshop and 31 stores", says a representative from this supermarket chain.

"Consistent, year-round quality"
"The Colruyt Group is the only retailer in Belgium with its a self-developed vertical farm. It grew basil plants for Bio-Planet last year. That was in a closed system, in two rows, one above the other. The group could, therefore, test out its vertical farm for a year. That was in all aspects, from production through logistics to sales. And the results are impressive. In a challenging year, we managed to guarantee a stable production of quality basil plants," says Jan Van Holsbeke, Bio-Planet's Manager.

"The global pandemic ensured it wasn't the easiest test year. We had to scale up our vertical farm. That's was due to the increased sales in our stores. At the same time, this demonstrates the power of indoor multilayer cultivation. We can create the perfect growing conditions, regardless of the weather. That means the herbs have consistent, year-round quality. And we can match production to demand." And demand there certainly was. More people bought fresh basil from Bio-Planet last year than the previous year.

"Coriander with a tiny environmental footprint"
Bio-Planet sees potential in this new farming method. They can grow herbs with a minimal ecological footprint. "Up to 20 times less space is needed the same number of plants. They also need 50% fewer nutrients and 90% less water. The herbs are 100% pure too because no pesticides are used," adds the company spokesperson.

"We integrated the farm into one of the group's distribution centres. So, transportation was cut five-fold. The farm uses purified rainwater that's collected on the DC's roof. It has self-developed, energy-efficient LED lighting and an innovative ventilation system. These make the farm very energy efficient. Moreover, the system runs on 100% green electricity. This is generated by wind turbines and solar panels."

“All these factors make the farm and its herbs very sustainable. That's crucial for Bio-Planet. We want to offer our shoppers sustainable, local, innovative products. We think other herbs and even leafy green vegetables can be vertically-farmed too. This, however, requires more research and investment. Also, the technology has to be further developed," concludes Jan.

Kalera Acquires Customised Seed Developer Vindara For Vertical Farming

By Emma Upshall

US vertical farming company Kalera has announced the acquisition of Vindara, a S2G Ventures portfolio company which breeds plant varieties specifically designed for use in vertical indoor environments.

Founded in 2018, Vindara develops customised, non-GMO seeds for use in high-tech vertical indoor farm environments, as well as other controlled environmental agriculture farming methods.

Based in North Carolina, the company uses genomics, machine learning and computational biology along with traditional breeding methods to meet the market need for produce that is non-GMO, nutritious and high-yielding.

View fullsize

Following the acquisition, Vindara will become a fully-owned subsidiary of Kalera and will operate out of Kalera’s headquarters in Orlando, Florida.

Kalera says Vindara will significantly increase the output from its current and future facilities by reducing the plant grow cycle and providing higher yields.

According to the press release, Vindara’s breeding process shortens development time from the usual 5-7 years to just 12-18 months, resulting in increased output and optimising yield and profitability.

Together, the companies say they are better positioned to offer differentiated products – expanding beyond leafy greens to include high yield basil, spinach and strawberries – and have improved ability to optimise colour, texture, flavour and nutrient profile.

“While advances in technology such as lighting, robotics, sensors, and planting substrates are all improving grower economics, seeds developed specifically for indoor farming have been a ‘missing link’ to vertical farming achieving its full potential,” said Daniel Malechuk, CEO of Kalera.

“Together with Vindara, we are ushering in a new era of agricultural advancements that will increase production yields and produce unique crop varieties customised for the needs of our discerning customers around the globe,” he added.

The deal will see Jade Stinson continue in her existing role as co-founder and president of Vindara. “With Kalera’s commitment to R&D and improving the yield, variety and characteristics of its produce, we will be able to better leverage our ability to develop customised seeds for indoor growers faster than any other seed provider,” she said.

The transaction will reportedly enable Vindara to accelerate and expand its seed research and development programmes.

GoodLeaf Farms Launches Aggressive Expansion Plans

NEWS PROVIDED BY

GoodLeaf Farms

McCain invests in a national network of vertical farms to bring tasty, local food to Canadians

GUELPH, ON, - With the closure of a successful new funding round, GoodLeaf Farms is embarking on an aggressive growth and expansion plan to build a national network of vertical farms that will bring fresh, delicious, nutritious and locally grown leafy greens to Canadians across the country.

Backed by a sizeable investment from McCain Foods Limited — which has increased its total investment in GoodLeaf to more than $65 million ­— GoodLeaf will bring its innovative and proprietary controlled-environment agriculture technology to more Canadian markets over the coming year, providing more Canadian consumers with year-round local food that is typically imported from the Southern United States or Mexico.

"From our start in Truro to our first commercial farm in Guelph, GoodLeaf has built a strong foundation for future growth," says Barry Murchie, Chief Executive Officer of GoodLeaf. "We want to be a global leader in vertical farming. Our first step to accomplishing that is ensuring we have a strong footprint in Canada, giving Canadians access to top quality, nutrient-dense, sustainably grown and pesticide-free leafy greens 365 days a year."

GoodLeaf opened its first commercial vertical farm in Guelph, Ont., in the fall of 2019. By the end of 2021, GoodLeaf is planning two more indoor vertical farms — one to serve the grocery and foodservice networks in Eastern Canada, and one for Western Canada.

The exact locations will be announced shortly.

"It is our intention to build farms that support the Canadian grocery store network, foodservice industry and consumers," says Mr Murchie. "We want to change what people are eating by providing a fresh, healthy and local alternative that, until now, hasn't been available in Canada. We are driving a new way to grow food, with disruptive technology that brings consumers leafy greens from their own backyard. This is a fundamental game-changer."

GoodLeaf's vertical farm grows to produce on hydroponic trays stacked in multiple horizontal levels. A proprietary system of specialized LED lights is engineered to emulate the spring sun, giving plants the light they crave to maximize photosynthesis. The indoor controlled environment is almost clinical, meaning there are no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides used. It is also immune to weather extremes, such as summer droughts or late spring frosts that can be lethal to crops.

Furthermore, having a local source of year-round food is vital to Canada's food security and sovereignty, concerns that were in the spotlight at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as shoppers were faced with rapidly dwindling supplies on grocery store shelves.

At its 45,000-square-foot Guelph farm, every day GoodLeaf is harvesting microgreens (Spicy Mustard Medley, Asian Blend, Micro Arugula, Micro Radish and Pea Shoots) and baby greens (Ontario Baby Kale, Ontario Baby Arugula and Ontario Spring Mix) for Ontario grocery stores, ensuring a local supply of fresh, nutrient-dense leafy greens all year long.

GoodLeaf produce is exceptional in a salad, as a topping for burgers and sandwiches, as a kick of nutrients in a smoothie or as an ingredient to elevate your favourite dish.

Follow GoodLeaf Farms on Instagram @goodleaffarms and Like it on Facebook at /GoodLeafFarms.

About GoodLeaf Farms:

With a passion for delicious, nutrient-rich greens, GoodLeaf was founded in Truro, NS, in 2011. Using innovative technology and leveraging multi-level vertical farming, GoodLeaf has created a controlled and efficient indoor farm that can grow fresh produce anywhere in the world, 365 days of the year. The system combines innovations in LED lighting with leading-edge hydroponic techniques to produce sustainable, safe, pesticide-free, nutrient-dense leafy greens. GoodLeaf has ongoing R&D Programs in collaboration with the University of Guelph, Dalhousie University and Acadia University.

Learn more at goodleaffarms.com.

About McCain Foods (Canada)

McCain Foods (Canada) is the Canadian division of McCain Foods Limited, an international leader in the frozen food industry. McCain Foods is the world's largest manufacturer of frozen potato specialities, and also produces other quality products such as appetizers, vegetables and desserts that can be found in restaurants and retail stores in more than 160 countries around the world. In Canada, the company has eight production facilities with approximately 2,400 employees and, in addition to its famous French fries and potato specialities, makes frozen desserts, snacks and appetizers.

SOURCE GoodLeaf Farms

For further information: Michelle Hann, Senior Consultant, Digital and Communications, Enterprise Canada, mhann@enterprisecanada.com, 613-716-2118

Little Leaf Farms Raises $90M to Grow Its Greenhouse Network

by Jennifer Marston

Image from: Little Leaf Farms

Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms has raised $90 million in a debt and equity financing round to expand its network of hydroponic greenhouses on the East Coast. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital as well as founding investors Bill Helman and Pilot House Associates. Bank of America also participated.

Little Leaf Farms says the capital is “earmarked” to build new greenhouse sites along the East Coast, where its lettuce is currently available in about 2,500 stores. 

The company already operates one 10-acre greenhouse in Devins, Massachusetts. Its facility grows leafy greens using hydroponics and a mixture of sunlight supplemented by LED-powered grow lights. Rainwater captured from the facility’s roof provides most of the water used on the farm. 

According to a press release, Little Leaf Farms has doubled its retail sales to $38 million since 2019. And last year, the company bought180 acres of land in Pennsylvania on which to build an additional facility. Still another greenhouse, slated for North Carolina, will serve the Southeast region of the U.S. 

Little Leaf Farms joins the likes of Revol Greens, Gotham Greens, AppHarvest, and others in bringing local(ish) greens to a greater percentage of the population. These facilities generally pack and ship their greens on the day of or day after harvesting, and only supply retailers within a certain radius. Little Leaf Farms, for example, currently servers only parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. 

The list of regions the company serves will no doubt lengthen as the company builds up its greenhouse network in the coming months.

Indoor Farming Gains Ground Amid Pandemic, Climate Challenges

Investors say urban farming can boost food security despite rising inflation, trade tensions and global food shortages.

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

Investors used to brush off Amin Jadavji’s pitch to buy Elevate Farms’ vertical growing technology and produce stacks of leafy greens indoors with artificial light.

“They would say, ‘This is great, but it sounds like a science experiment,'” said Jadavji, CEO of Toronto, Canada-based Elevate.

Now, indoor farms are positioning themselves as one of the solutions to coronavirus pandemic-induced disruptions to the harvesting, shipping, and sale of food.

“It’s helped us change the narrative,” said Jadavji, whose company runs a vertical farm in Ontario, and is building others in New York and New Zealand.

Proponents, including the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), say urban farming increases food security at a time of rising inflation and limited global supplies. North American produce output is concentrated in Mexico and the US southwest, including California, which is prone to wildfires and other severe weather.

Climate-change concerns are also accelerating investments, including by agribusiness giant Bayer AG, into multi-storey vertical farms or greenhouses the size of 50 football fields.

They are enabling small North American companies like Elevate to bolster indoor production and compete with established players BrightFarms, AeroFarms and Plenty, backed by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos.

But critics question the environmental cost of indoor farms’ high power requirements.

Vertical farms grow leafy greens indoors in stacked layers or on walls of foliage inside of warehouses or shipping containers. They rely on artificial light, temperature control and growing systems with minimal soil that involve water or mist, instead of the vast tracts of land in traditional agriculture.

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

Greenhouses can harness the sun’s rays and have lower power requirements. Well-established in Asia and Europe, greenhouses are expanding in North America, using greater automation.

Investments in global indoor farms totalled a record-high $500m in 2020, AgFunder research head Louisa Burwood-Taylor said.

The average investment last year rose sharply, as large players including BrightFarms and Plenty raised fresh capital, she said.

A big funding acceleration lies ahead, after pandemic food disruptions – such as infections among migrant workers that harvest North American produce – raised concerns about supply disruptions, said Joe Crotty, director of corporate finance at accounting firm KPMG, which advises vertical farms and provides investment banking services.

“The real ramp-up is the next three to five years,” Crotty said.

Vegetables grown in vertical farms or greenhouses are still just a fraction of overall production. US sales of food crops grown under cover, including tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, amounted to 358 million kilogrammes (790 million pounds) in 2019, up 50 percent from 2014, according to the USDA.

California’s outdoor head lettuce production alone was nearly four times larger, at 1.3 billion kg (2.9 billion pounds).

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

The USDA is seeking members for a new urban agriculture advisory committee to encourage indoor and other emerging farm practices.

Plant Breeding Moves Indoors

Bayer, one of the world’s biggest seed developers, aims to provide the plant technology to expand vertical agriculture. In August, it teamed with Singapore sovereign fund Temasek to create Unfold, a California-based company, with $30m in seed money.

Unfold says it is the first company focused on designing seeds for indoor lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, spinach and cucumbers, using Bayer germplasm, a plant’s genetic material, said Chief Executive John Purcell.

Their advances may include, for example, more compact plants and an increased breeding focus on quality, Purcell said.

Unfold hopes to make its first sales by early 2022, targeting existing farms, and startups in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

Greenhouses are also expanding, touting higher yields than open-field farming.

AppHarvest, which grows tomatoes in a 60-acre greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, broke ground on two more in the state last year. The company aims to operate 12 facilities by 2025.

Its greenhouses are positioned to reach 70 percent of the US population within a day’s drive, giving them a transportation edge over the southwest produce industry, said Chief Executive Jonathan Webb.

“We’re looking to rip the produce industry out of California and Mexico and bring it over here,” Webb said.

Projected global population growth will require a large increase in food production, a tough proposition outdoors given frequent disasters and severe weather, he said.

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

New York-based BrightFarms, which runs four greenhouses, positions them near major US cities, said Chief Executive Steve Platt. The company, whose customers include grocers Kroger and Walmart, plans to open its two largest farms this year, in North Carolina and Massachusetts.

Platt expects that within a decade, half of all leafy greens in the US will come from indoor farms, up from less than 10 percent currently.

“It’s a whole wave moving in this direction because the system we have today isn’t set up to feed people across the country,” he said.

‘Crazy, Crazy Things’

But Stan Cox, research scholar for non-profit The Land Institute, is sceptical of vertical farms. They depend on grocery store premiums to offset higher electricity costs for lighting and temperature control, he said.

“The whole reason we have agriculture is to harvest sunlight that’s hitting the earth every day,” he said. “We can get it for free.”

Bruce Bugbee, a professor of environmental plant physiology at Utah State University, has studied space farming for NASA. But he finds power-intensive vertical farming on Earth far-fetched.

“Venture capital goes into all kinds of crazy, crazy things and this is another thing on the list.”

Bugbee estimates that vertical farms use 10 times the energy to produce food as outdoor farms, even factoring in the fuel to truck conventional produce across the country from California.

AeroFarms, operator of one of the world’s largest vertical farms, based in a former New Jersey steel mill, says comparing energy use with outdoor agriculture is not straightforward. Produce that ships long distances has a higher spoilage rate and many outdoor produce farms use irrigated water and pesticides, said Chief Executive Officer David Rosenberg.

Vertical farmers tout other environmental benefits.

Elevate uses a closed-loop system to water plants automatically, collect moisture that plants emit and then re-water them with it. Such a system requires two percent of the water used on an outdoor romaine lettuce operation, Jadavji said. The company uses no pesticides.

“I think we’re solving a problem,” he said.

Agritech: Precision Farming With AI, IoT and 5G

Image from: Photo by Mohd Izwan Mohd Nazam/The Edge

For a company that grows and delivers vegetables, Boomgrow Productions Sdn Bhd’s office is nothing like a farm, or even a vertical farm.

Where farms are bedecked with wheelbarrows, spades and hoes, Boomgrow’s floor plan is akin to a co-working space with a communal island table, several cubicles, comfortable armchairs, a cosy hanging rattan chair and a glass-walled conference room in the middle.

At a corner, propped up along a walkway leading to a rectangular chamber fitted with grow lights, are rows of support stilts with hydroponic planters developed in-house and an agricultural technologist perched on a chair, perusing data. “This is where some of the R&D work happens,” says Jay Dasen, co-founder of the agritech start-up.

But there is a larger farm where most of the work behind this high-tech initiative is executed. Located a stone’s throw from the city centre in Ampang is a 40ft repurposed shipping container outfitted with perception technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that mimic the ideal environment to produce more than 50,000kg of vegetables a year.

Stacked in vertical layers, Boomgrow’s vegetables are grown under artificial lights with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to detect everything from leaf discolouration to nitrate composition. This is coupled with AI and machine learning algorithms.

Boomgrow is the country’s first 5G-connected vertical farm. With the low latency and larger bandwidth technology, the start-up is able to monitor production in real time as well as maintain key para­meters, such as temperature and humidity, to ensure optimal growth conditions.

When Jay and her co-founders, K Muralidesan and Shan Palani, embarked on this initiative six years ago, Boomgrow was nowhere near what it is today.

The three founders got together hoping to do their part in building a more sustainable future. “I’ve spent years advising small and large companies on sustainability, environmental and social governance disclosures. I even embarked on a doctorate in sustainability disclosure and governance,” says Jay.

“But I felt a deep sense of disconnect because while I saw companies evolving in terms of policies, processes and procedures towards sustainability, the people in those organisations were not transforming. Sustainability is almost like this white noise in the background. We know it’s important and we know it needs to be done, but we don’t really know how to integrate it into our lives.

“That disconnect really troubled me. When we started Boomgrow, it wasn’t a linear journey. Boomgrow is something that came out of meaningful conversations and many years of research.”

Shan, on the other hand, was an architect who developed a taste for sustainable designs when he was designing modular structures with minimal impact on their surroundings between regular projects. “It was great doing that kind of work. But I was getting very dissatisfied because the projects were customer-driven, which meant I would end up having debates about trivial stuff such as the colour of wall tiles,” he says.

As for Murali, the impetus to start Boomgrow came from having lived overseas — while working in capital markets and financial services — where quality and nutritious produce was easily available.

Ultimately, they concluded that the best way to work towards their shared sustainability goals was to address the imminent problem of food shortage.

“By 2050, the world’s population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion people, two-thirds of whom will be in Asia-Pacific. Feeding all those people will definitely be a huge challenge,” says Jay. 

“The current agricultural practice is not built for resilience, but efficiency. So, when you think of farming, you think of vast tracts of land located far away from where you live or shop.

“The only way we could reimagine or rethink that was to make sure the food is located closer to consumers, with a hyperlocal strategy that is traceable and transparent, and also free of pesticides.”

Having little experience in growing anything, it took them a while to figure out the best mechanism to achieve their goal. “After we started working on prototypes, we realised that the tropics are not designed for certain types of farming,” says Jay. 

“And then, there is the problem of harmful chemicals and pesticides everywhere, which has become a necessity for farmers to protect their crops because of the unpredictable climate. We went through many iterations … when we started, we used to farm in little boxes, but that didn’t quite work out.”

They explored different methodologies, from hydroponics to aquaponics, and even started growing outdoors. But they lost a lot of crops when a heat wave struck.

That was when they started exploring more effective ways to farm. “How can we protect the farm from terrible torrential rains, plant 365 days a year and keep prices affordable? It took us five years to answer these questions,” says Jay.

Even though farmers all over the world currently produce more than enough food to feed everyone, 820 million people — roughly 11% of the global population — did not have enough to eat in 2018, according to the World Health Organization. Concurrently, food safety and quality concerns are rising, with more consumers opting for organically produced food as well as safe foods, out of fear of harmful synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, consumer demand for global organic fruit and vegetables was valued at US$19.16 billion in 2019 and is anticipated to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5% by 2026.

Meanwhile, the precision farming market was estimated to be US$7 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach US$12.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 12.7% between 2020 and 2025, states MarketsandMarkets Research Pte Ltd.

Malaysia currently imports RM1 billion worth of leafy vegetables from countries such as Australia, China and Japan. Sourcing good and safe food from local suppliers not only benefits the country from a food security standpoint but also improves Malaysia’s competitive advantage, says Jay.

Unlike organic farming — which is still a soil-based method — tech-enabled precision farming has the advantage of catering for increasing demand and optimum crop production with the limited resources available. Moreover, changing weather patterns due to global warming encourage the adoption of advanced farming technologies to enhance farm productivity and crop yield.

Boomgrow’s model does not require the acres of land that traditional farms need, Jay emphasises. With indoor farms, the company promises a year-round harvest, undisturbed by climate and which uses 95% less water, land and fuel to operate.

Traditional farming is back-breaking labour. But with precision technology, farmers can spend less time on the farm and more on doing other things to develop their business, she says.

Boomgrow has secured more than RM300,000 in funding via technology and innovation grants from SME Corporation Malaysia, PlaTCOM Ventures and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, and is on track to build the country’s largest indoor farms.

Image from: Boomgrow

The company got its chance to showcase the strength of its smart technology when Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) approached it to be a part of the telco’s Smart Agriculture cluster in Langkawi last October.

“5G makes it faster for us to process the multiple data streams that we need because we collect data for machine learning, and then AI helps us to make decisions faster,” Jay explains.

“We manage the farm using machines to study inputs like water and electricity and even measure humidity. All the farm’s produce is lab-tested and we can keep our promise that there are no pesticides, herbicides or any preserving chemicals. We follow the food safety standards set by the EU, where nitrate accumulation in plant tissues is a big issue.”

With TM’s 5G technology and Boomgrow’s patent-pending technology, the latter is able to grow vegetables like the staple Asian greens and highland crops such as butterhead and romaine lettuce as well as kale and mint. While the company is able to grow more than 30 varieties of leafy greens, it has decided to stick to a selection of crops that is most in demand to reduce waste, says Jay.

As it stands, shipping containers are the best fit for the company’s current endeavour as containerised modular farms are the simplest means of bringing better food to local communities. However, it is also developing a blueprint to house farms in buildings, she says.

Since the showcase, Boomgrow has started to supply its crops to various hotels in Langkawi. It rolled out its e-commerce platform last year after the Movement Control Order was imposed. 

“On our website, we promise to deliver the greens within six hours of harvest. But actually, you could get them way earlier. We harvest the morning after the orders come in and the vegetables are delivered on the same day,” says Jay.

Being mindful of Boomgrow’s carbon footprint, orders are organised and scheduled according to consumers’ localities, she points out. “We don’t want our delivery partners zipping everywhere, so we stagger the orders based on where consumers live. 

“For example, all deliveries to Petaling Jaya happen on Thursdays, but the vegetables are harvested that morning. They are not harvested a week before, three days before or the night before. This is what it means to be hyperlocal. We want to deliver produce at its freshest and most nutritious state.”

Plans to expand regionally are also underway, once Boomgrow’s fundraising exercise is complete, says Jay. “Most probably, this will only happen when the Covid-19 pandemic ends.”

To gain the knowledge they have today, the team had to “unlearn” everything they knew and take up new skills to figure what would work best for their business, says Jay. “All this wouldn’t have been possible if we had not experimented with smart cameras to monitor the condition of our produce,” she laughs.

Where Vertical Farming and Affordable Housing Can Grow Together

Some vertical farms grow greens in old warehouses, former steel mills, or other sites set apart from the heart of cities. But a new series of projects will build multistory greenhouses directly inside affordable housing developments.

“Bringing the farm back to the city center can have a lot of benefits,” says Nona Yehia, CEO of Vertical Harvest, a company that will soon break ground on a new building in Westbrook, ME, that combines a vertical farm with affordable housing. Similar developments will follow in Chicago and in Philadelphia, where a farm-plus-housing will be built in the Tioga District, an opportunity zone.

Inside each building, the ground level will offer community access, while the greenhouse fills the second, third, and fourth floors, covering 70,000 square feet and growing around a million pounds of produce a year. (The amount of housing varies by site; in Maine, there will be only 15 units of housing, though the project will create 50 new jobs.)

In Chicago, there may be a community kitchen on the first level. In each location, residents will be able to buy fresh produce on-site; Vertical Harvest also plans to let others in the neighborhood buy greens directly from the farm. While it will sell to supermarkets, restaurants, hospitals, and other large customers, it also plans to subsidize 10% to 15% of its harvest for local food pantries and other community organizations.

“By creating a large-scale farm in a food desert, we are creating a large source of healthy, locally grown food 365 days a year,” Yehia says.

Vertical Farming ‘At a Crossroads’

Building the right business model to balance resource usage with socio-economic conditions is crucial to capturing new markets, say speakers ahead of Agri-TechE event

Image from: Fruitnet

Although growing crops all year round with Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) has been proposed as a method to localize food production and increase resilience against extreme climate events, the efficiency and limitations of this strategy need to be evaluated for each location. 

That is the conclusion of research by Luuk Graamans of Wageningen University & Research, a speaker at the upcoming Agri-TechE event on CEA, which takes place on 25 February.

His research shows that integration with urban energy infrastructure can make vertical farms more viable. Graamans’ research around the modelling of vertical farms shows that these systems are able to achieve higher resource use efficiencies, compared to more traditional food production, except when it comes to electricity. 

Vertical farms, therefore, need to offer additional benefits to offset this increased energy use, Graamans said. One example his team has investigated is whether vertical farms could also provide heat.

“We investigated if vertical farms could provide not just food for people living in densely populated areas and also heat their homes using waste heat. We found that CEA can contribute to stabilizing the increasingly complex energy grid.”

Diversification

This balance between complex factors both within the growing environment and wider socio-economic conditions means that the rapidly growing CEA industry is beginning to diversify with different business models emerging.

Jack Farmer is CSO at vertical producer LettUs Grow, which recently launched its Drop & Grow growing units, offering a complete farming solution in a shipping container. 

He believes everyone in the vertical farming space is going to hit a crossroads. “Vertical farming, with its focus on higher value and higher density crops, is effectively a subset of the broader horticultural sector,” he said. 

"All the players in the vertical farming space are facing a choice – to scale vertically and try to capture as much value in that specific space, or to diversify and take their technology expertise broader.”

LettUs Grow is focussed on being the leading technology provider in containerised farming, and its smaller ‘Drop & Grow: 24’ container is mainly focussed on people entering the horticultural space.

Opportunities in retail

“This year is looking really exciting,” he said. “Supermarkets are investing to ensure a sustainable source of food production in the UK, which is what CEA provides. We’re also seeing a growth in ‘experiential’ food and retail and that’s also where we see our Drop & Grow container farm fitting in.”

Kate Hofman, CEO, GrowUp agrees. The company launched the UK’s first commercial-scale vertical farm in 2014.

“It will be really interesting to see how the foodservice world recovers after lockdown – the rough numbers are that supermarket trade was up at least 11 per cent in the last year – so retail still looks like a really good direction to go in. 

“If we want to have an impact on the food system in the UK and change it for the better, we’re committed to partnering with those big retailers to help them deliver on their sustainability and values-driven goals.

“Our focus is very much as a salad grower that grows a fantastic product that everyone will want to buy. And we’re focussed on bringing down the cost of sustainable food, which means doing it at a big enough scale to gain the economies of production that are needed to be able to sell at everyday prices.”

Making the Numbers Add Up

The economics are an important part of the discussion. Recent investment in the sector has come from the Middle East, and other locations, where abundant solar power and scarce resources are driving interest in CEA. Graamans’ research has revealed a number of scenarios where CEA has a strong business case.

For the UK, CEA should be seen as a continuum from glasshouses to vertical farming, he believes. “Greenhouses can incorporate the technologies from vertical farms to increase climate control and to enhance their performance under specific climates."

It is this aspect that is grabbing the attention of conventional fresh produce growers in open field and covered crop production.  

A Blended Approach

James Green, director of agriculture at G’s, thinks combining different growing methods is the way forward. “There’s a balance in all of these systems between energy costs for lighting, energy costs for cooling, costs of nutrient supply, and then transportation and the supply and demand. At the end of the day, sunshine is pretty cheap and it comes up every day.

“I think a blended approach, where you’re getting as much benefit as you can from nature but you’re supplementing it and controlling the growth conditions, is what we are aiming for, rather than the fully artificially lit ‘vertical farming’.”

Graamans, Farmer and Hofman will join a discussion with conventional vegetable producers, vertical farmers and technology providers at the Agri-TechE event ‘Controlled Environment Agriculture is growing up’ on 25 February 2021.

How This Vertical Farm Grows 80,000 Pounds of Produce per Week

Bowery Farming uses technology to prioritize accessibility and sustainability in their produce growing operations

To some, the pristine growing conditions and perceived mechanical interference of a vertical farm can seem unnatural, but at Bowery Farming “interference” is actually not the goal at all. “We don’t really think about how people are involved in the growing process, but how to take people out of the growing process” says chief science officer Henry Sztul. “Our goal is actually to have as few people walking around our plants as possible.”

Bowery Farming is a network of vertical farms working to reengineer the growing process. Using a system of light and watering technology, Bowery is able to use 95 percent less water than a traditional outdoor farm, zero pesticides and chemicals, and grow food that tastes as good as anyone else’s. 

Bowery Farming uses vertical farm-specific seeds that are optimized for flavor instead of insect resistance and durability. Seeds are mechanically pressed into trays of soil, and sent out into growing positions, or racks within the building that have their own lighting and watering systems. Each tray gets its own QR code so that they can be monitored and assigned a customized plan for water and light until they’re ready to be harvested.

Irving Fain, Bowery Farming’s founder and CEO contemplates the prediction from the United Nations that 70 to 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in and around cities in the next 30 years. “Figuring out ‘how do you feed and how do you provide fresh food to urban environments both more efficiently as well as more sustainably?’ is a very important question today, and an even more important question in the years to come.”

Indoor Farming Company With Backing From Ubben Aims to Solve The Problems With America’s Produce

Image from: AppHarvest

Company: AppHarvest Inc. (APPH)

The agriculture technology company focuses on building an indoor farm in Appalachia. The company combines agricultural techniques with cutting-edge technology and including access for all to nutritious food, farming, and building a homegrown food supply. The company operates a 60-acre controlled environment, agriculture facility in Morehead, Kentucky, which grows juicy beefsteak tomatoes and tomatoes on the vine. It also operates a 60-acre indoor farm, outside Richmond, Kentucky, where it cultivates fresh fruits and veggies.

The company’s technological systems monitor the pollination across all 68 bays and 684 rows of plants. AppHarvest is only the fourth U.S. public Certified B corporation. A B corporation is a company that has (1) achieved a high standard of social and environmental performance as measured by the B Impact Assessment, (2) verified their scores through transparency requirements, and (3) made a legal commitment to consider all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Any company can apply to be one.

Stock Market Value: $3.3 billion ($33.26 per share)

Image from: CNBC

Activist:

Inclusive Capital

Percentage Ownership:  

12.05%

Average Cost: 

n/a

Activist Commentary: 

Inclusive Capital Partners was formed in 2020 by ValueAct founder Jeff Ubben, to leverage capitalism and governance in pursuit of a healthy planet and the health of its inhabitants. The firm seeks long-term shareholder value through active partnership with companies whose core businesses contribute solutions to this pursuit. Inclusive is a returns driven fund with a focus on environmental and social investing.

Their primary focus is on environmental and social value creation, which leads to shareholder value creation. It is the successor to the ValueAct Spring Fund, which was launched in January 2018 and merged into Inclusive in 2020.

Inclusive is building a huge network and has accessed experts in industries such as energy, electrification, water, agriculture, food production, particulates, education and human rights. Just like ValueAct’s constructive, patient investment style, Inclusive will seek to earn the trust of managers, board members and institutional investors.

Jeff Ubben serves as the portfolio manager and Eva Zlotnicka serves as vice president. Eva has a pre-existing relationship with ValueAct through their interactions with Morgan Stanley, where she served as a VP and U.S. lead for the Global Sustainability Research Team. At Morgan Stanley, she worked to help address and raise awareness of environmental and social issues both inside and outside of corporations.

What’s Happening:

Jeff Ubben was appointed to the company’s Board in connection with the company’s business combination with Novus Capital.

Behind the Scenes:

This was initially an investment of ValueAct Spring Fund, which was converted into Inclusive Capital in 2020. Jeff Ubben first met AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb in 2017 and has been involved with the company since the 2018 Series A round, working with Webb to put the management team together and develop a strong balance sheet. The company went public on February 1, 2021 through a $100 million SPAC transaction and a $375 million PIPE investment. Jeff Ubben is on the board where he can continue to help the company execute.

AppHarvest plans on having 12 facilities by 2025. The goal here is to make Kentucky the Netherlands of North America. The Netherlands (at 16,000 square miles) is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world, using greenhouse technology to feed two-thirds of all of Europe. In comparison, the state of Kentucky is 40,000 square miles and the US is 3.8 million square miles. AppHarvest’s motivation is first and foremost to benefit society, but if successful would have extraordinary financial returns as well.

As of 2018, 69% of fresh vine crops in the U.S. were imported, mostly from Mexico. These crops are pesticide-laden and grown using labor practices not up to U.S. standards. Moreover, they sit at the border for days and are driven 2,000+ miles to their destination, using tons of diesel fuel and resulting in less fresh produce. AppHarvest produces crops with no pesticides with greater nutrient density, and from their central location can reach 70% of the U.S. population in one day resulting in 80% less diesel fuel and much lower emissions. However, the larger environmental and economic benefit is in how the crops are grown — using 90% less water and yielding thirty times more per acre. 

Moreover, AppHarvest’s resources are nature based – the greenhouse structure allows them to use 12 hours of sunlight per day and they collect the heavy Kentucky rainfall for their system resulting in a much less adverse effect on the water supply while greatly decreasing their cost of production by not having to pay for water. The greenhouse system also eliminates any weather or seasonal constraints, allowing the company to grow more efficiently 365 days per year.

While the company has no historic revenue, they just made their first delivery of beefsteak tomatoes on January 19, 2021, to customers that include Walmart, Kroger and Publix

Yasai To Establish First Zürich Vertical Farm, Strategic Partnership Announced

Image from: Urban Ag News

iFarm with Yasai AG (Switzerland) and Logiqs B.V. (Netherlands) are proud to announce the beginning of a long-term cooperation.  

With the launch of the first vertical farm project in Zurich, Yasai AG announced the signing of a strategic agreement with equipment and tech suppliers. The company involved Logiqs and iFarm as technology partners in the construction of a pilot facility, with 673 sq. m of growing area and with a design capacity of 20 tons of fresh herbs per year.  

The Dutch company Logiqs will act as a supplier of automated shelving systems and grow lights. iFarm will supply the nutrient solution management system, climate control equipment, and the Growtune software platform which enables flow chart implementation and control over production conditions and processes. Going forward, the partners plan to scale up the experience of rapidly constructing an automated, compact, high-performance vertical farm, gained in a Swiss project, across the globe.

Image from: Urban Ag News

Mark Essam Zahran (co-founder Yasai):

The project will not just be limited to the testing and fine-tuning of state-of-the-art innovative solutions.  We expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale industrial vertical farming in smart cities and showcase the incredible benefits of a circular economy. A plantation in the largest Swiss city, one of the most expensive cities in the world, will help us assess the economic prospects and give other European cities an example of how to produce an abundant yield without harming the planet, plants, and people.

Gert-Jan van Staalduinen (owner Logiqs):

The Swiss project opens up interesting prospects for us. We expect a fruitful collaboration with Yasai experts and a beneficial exchange of best practices with iFarm. With our vast experience in implementing automation and logistics systems on farms, we will be able to build a technologically advanced farm in the very heart of Europe. 

Kirill Zelenski (CEO iFarm Europe):

We appreciate how meticulous and scrupulous Yasai is and are impressed by their passion and drive. We are just as inspired by the prospect of working with seasoned professionals from Logiqs. We hope that our software technologies will perfectly complement their hardware and the project as a whole will become a lasting benchmark for the industry and will serve as the beginning of a long-term cooperation.