Watch Interviews With experts. View All The Materials From The Seventh International Forum on Food and Nutrition

Watch Interviews With experts. View All The Materials From The Seventh International Forum on Food and Nutrition

Following the 7th International Forum on Food and Nutrition, the BCFN Foundation has published interviews with the event’s experts. Watch online to learn about their reflections and analyses on the work completed and the challenges ahead to create new spaces for discussion and detailed study.

BCFN would also like to take this opportunity to wish you the best in the New Year and invite you to discover the Foundation’s projects for a 2017 full of initiatives aimed at promoting sustainability for food and the environment.

View all the materials from the seventh International Forum on Food and Nutrition: videos of presentations, in-depth explorations and documentation.

Are These Startups The Future of Food Tech?

Are These Startups The Future of Food Tech?

Cheap and accurate weather forecasting and indoor LED farms were just some of the offerings at the Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm

Wednesday 21 December 2016 11.06 GMT

he ability to forecast tomorrow’s weather is something farmers have at their fingertips in many parts of the world, but in some regions weather forecasting is much trickier.

“In the tropics, weather processes are faster and up to a thousand times smaller than up here,” says Liisa Petrykowska, managing director of Ignitia, a Stockholm-based startup. “The weather forecasting systems developed by western governments haven’t focused on the tropics.”

Existing next-day forecasts are accurate less than half the time, she says, making them next-to-useless for farmers. Ignitia has built its own atmospheric models to deliver forecasts that are right up to 85% of the time, and sends them out as simple text messages costing just 4 cents (2p) a day.

“Many farmers were sceptical at first,” says Petrykowska, “But we quickly built up trust. Now 90% of Ghanaian farmers who receive them say the forecasts have helped them to make the correct decisions about planting, sowing, spraying and transportation.”

Indoor LED farms

Ignitia was one of a number of food tech startups that gathered in Stockholm last week for the Future of Food, an event organised by the Nobel Foundation. The startups believe applying technologies such as machine learning, advanced materials and open-source practices can revolutionise food production.

“What happens in the next 50 years will determine what happens to society over the next 10,000,” Johan Rockström, professor of environmental science at Stockholm University, told the conference. “Food is the deciding factor. Food is the primary cause behind loss of diversity, the largest user of fresh water, and is responsible for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. If we get it right on food, we are likely to get it right for planet Earth.”

Caleb Harper, director of Open Agriculture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks sensor-controlled hydroponic and aeroponic growing systems are part of the answer. “We are slaves to climate in agriculture. But what if we could give every country access to good weather?” he said.

In his lab, plants grow under LED lights and the watchful gaze of dozens of sensors – collecting more than 3m data points for every plant. Harper claims his crops grow five times faster than they would outdoors, and need 90% less water while doing so. Everything his lab discovers is then made freely available through open source hardware and software websites. “The open food movement gives access to biology, in the same way that HTML gave us access to the internet,” says Harper.

Fish farms and reuseable chill bags

Aside from weather, another big topic at the event was the shift away from raising animals for meat, which is responsible for a disproportionate share of the land, water and energy used in food production. “Americans eat four times as much beef as all seafood combined, but aquaculture is emerging as a possible solution,” says Peter Tyedmers of Dalhousie University in Canada.

He has been evaluating new, floating semi-closed fish farming tanksthat can recycle fish waste as fertiliser and avoid contaminating nearby water systems. One drawback is that they need more energy than traditional open-water farms, meaning they might increase carbon emissions even as they reduce pollution.

Tyedmers also warns that fish food should be sourced from low-impact agricultural crops rather than other marine organisms. “Aquaculture is not a panacea but it can be a key wedge in moving away from land-fed livestock to the sea,” he says.

Food technology is also giving us solutions at home. As more people use online grocery or meal services, there has been a growing demand for refrigerated lorries, together with expensive Styrofoam boxes and gel packs to keep food hot or cold on that last mile.

The Food Climate Research Network estimates around half a percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from mobile refrigeration units moving chilled food around the country. iFoodbag, another Stockholm startup, aims to replace traditional delivery methods with reusable, recyclable bags made from laminated paper.

The bag can keep chilled groceries from becoming dangerously warm for around five hours, which its makers think is long enough to use a normal van (or presumably a drone, in the future) for delivery. Adding a frozen gel pack extends the time to eight hours, and the bag can be reused up to seven times.

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Vertical Farming Market Worth US$ 6 Billion by 2022

12-21-2016 01:07 PM CET - Business, Economy, Finances, Banking & Insurance

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Vertical Farming Market Worth US$ 6 Billion by 2022

Press release from: (MRE) Market Research Engine 

Florida, December 20: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled “Vertical Farming Market by Growth Mechanism, Functional Mechanism and by Geography - Global Forecast to 2022”.

Vertical Farming is the future of modern day agriculture which is completely done in indoor agriculture labs. The vertical Farming market is expected to cross USD 6 Billion by 2022.

Browse full report here - www.marketresearchengine.com/reportdetails/vertical-farmi...

Vertical farming is an urban farming method where plant cultivation is carried out in multi storied building greenhouses using hydroponics or acquaponics growth mechanism. The vertical farming market will include those companies which are engaged in providing food by using vertical farming method and also the companies which provide various infrastructural services and equipment required for vertical farming. One of the main points is providing quality food with minimum use of pesticides is that these food products can be consumed by critically ill patients and by people having dermatological problems.

The report segments the global vertical farming market on the basis of functional device, growth mechanism and geography. The report also gives the detail vertical farming market by crop types with more emphasis on key vegetables and fruits produced in vertical farms.

How Vertical Farming is basically done?

Here plants are grown hydroponically, or without soil, nourished instead by the recycling of a nutrient-rich water solution. Some such farms rely on aeroponics, where the water solution is misted onto the plants' roots. The farms are typically several stories tall, allowing for crops to be stacked in an enclosed space. Photosynthesis is brought about by artificial light, and sometimes augmented by natural light, like in a greenhouse.

The primary reason of adoption of vertical farming technology as it will help to increase the crop production without increasing additional land area. This method will not use traditional farming methods rather new cultivation methods are used like hydroponics or acquaponics. 

Hydroponics is most widely used for vertical farming.

The main driving factors for vertical farming are high quality of food with no use of pesticides and also no crop failures due to changing weather conditions.

The main players in the vertical farming are Green Sense Farms, Sky Greens, Indore Harvest Corporation, MoFlo Aeroponics and Everlight Electronics.

Download Free Sample Report: www.marketresearchengine.com/requestsample/vertical-farmi...

Who Should Buy this Report?

• Technology Providers
• Technology Investors
• Technology Standards Organizations
• Modern Agricultural Forums, Alliances, and Associations
• Government Agencies
• Venture Capitalists/Investors
• Private Firms
• Analysts and strategic business planners, and others.

Segmentation of this Report:

By Growth Mechanism

• Aeroponics
• Hydroponics
• Others

By Functional Mechanism

• Photosynthesis Process/Lighting
• Hydroponic Components
• Climate Control
• Sensors

By Geography

• North America
• Europe
• Asia-Pacific
• Rest of the World (ROW)

About MarketResearchEngine.com

Market Research Engine is a global market research and consulting organization. We provide market intelligence in emerging healthcare technologies, niche technologies and markets. Our market analysis powered by rigorous methodology and quality metrics provide information and forecasts across emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models. Our deep focus on industry verticals and country reports help our clients to identify opportunities and develop business strategies.

Media Contact

Company Name: Market Research Engine
Contact Person: John Bay
Email: john@marketresearchengine.com
Phone: +1-855-984-1862, +91-860-565-7204
Country: United States
Website: www.marketresearchengine.com/

Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States

Affinor Growers Updates on License Holders, Quebec Property, and THC BioMed Equipment Shipment

Affinor Growers Updates on License Holders, Quebec Property, and THC BioMed Equipment Shipment

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Dec. 20, 2016) - Affinor Growers (CSE:AFI)(CSE:AFI.CN)(FRANKFURT:1AF)(OTCQB:RSSFF) ("Affinor" or the "Corporation), a diversified agriculture and biotechnology company with proprietary vertical farming systems, would like to update shareholders on the progress with several license holders, the THC BioMed equipment shipment and property in Quebec.

License Holders Making Progress

Affinor is pleased to announce the license holder, Vertical Designs Ltd, located in Abbotsford BC has purchased 10 acres of agriculture land, received permits to build from the city, broke ground this month and has recently signed an agreement with Discovery Organics to purchase and distribute all strawberries produced by the facility. Vertical Designs Ltd. is planning to increase the total amount of towers to 36 in the initial build out, increasing Affinor's revenue on equipment sales and royalties. An additional 60,000 square feet of greenhouse over several phases is also being planned to ramp up production when needed to meet local demand roughly, adding another 200 towers when complete. Affinor is a 10% shareholder of Vertical Designs BC Ltd., and will benefit from profits, equipment sales, royalties and have a showcase facility available to sell additional license agreements.

Affinor is also pleased to announce that the license holder in Springfield Tennessee has recently closed on a property to build a greenhouse vertical farming facility. Affinor is working closely with them on planning, design and concepts to help with the next stage of permitting.

THC BioMed Equipment Shipment

Affinor is pleased to announce the equipment to grow and trial cannabis with THC BioMed located in Kelowna BC has been fabricated, finished and ready to be shipped. THC BioMed has requested to delay the shipment until January 2017 in order to complete various ongoing projects. The agreement between the companies, as outlined in Affinor's news release dated April 4 2016, is in good standing and they remain excited to use the technology in early 2017.

Quebec Property

Affinor would like to announce that it has sold the property in Quebec. Proceeds will be used to help further the company development and general administration.

About Affinor Growers Inc.

Affinor Growers is a publicly traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol ("AFI"). Affinor is focused on growing high quality crops such as romaine lettuce, spinach, strawberries using its vertical farming techniques. Affinor is committed to becoming a pre-eminent supplier and grower, using exclusive vertical farming techniques.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

AFFINOR GROWERS INC.

- Jarrett Malnarick, President & CEO

The CSE has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This News Release contains forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "project", "should", "believe" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this News Release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Company's disclosure documents which can be found under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com. This News Release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Artificial Trees and Vertical Farms Helping Turn Europe’s Cities Green

Artificial Trees and Vertical Farms Helping Turn Europe’s Cities Green

20 December 2016

KEY THEME: OPEN INNOVATION

Moss-covered boards that absorb city pollution and warehouses where fish and LED-lit lettuce grow side-by-side are helping to reshape the way that urban Europeans live their lives.

People in Europe are increasingly living in dense urban spaces where pollution is worsened by the exhaust fumes of lorries that must haul fresh food from the remote countryside, and where overwork means people rush in and out of their homes and can leave their central heating systems burning through gas.

It’s problems such as these that today’s entrepreneurs have turned their attention to. The result is companies like Germany-based Tado, that has developed a thermostat that taps into the weather forecast, Green City Solutions, that is creating an artificial tree to mop up particulate pollution, and GrowUp Urban Farms, that runs a so-called vertical farm in a warehouse in London.

‘We use 90 % less water than traditional agriculture,’ explained Tom Webster, co-founder of GrowUp Urban Farms.

The company received its initial funding from the EU’s European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT). The EIT distributed the funding through Climate-KIC, a so-called Knowledge and Innovation Community set up to help businesses develop and to train entrepreneurs.

The Issue

More Europeans live in cities than suburbs, towns and villages, yet one in five city dwellers are directly affected by pollution, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical arm.

As Europe moves to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, technology that can improve the lives of city dwellers sustainably will become increasingly important.

In a vertical farm, crops are stacked on plastic benches up to 10 levels high and illuminated by LED lighting. They are irrigated by the run-off from fish farms.

The idea is to place them in industrial warehouses close to where people live.

‘Agriculture is an industrial process the way that it is carried out globally, and the reality of it is that the current industrial process is not climate-change resilient,’ said Webster. ‘What we’re offering is a new solution which is more energy efficient and more resilient to climate change.’

It also means salad from an urban farm is fresher than salad grown in remote fields as it can be chilled immediately after being harvested, while on rural farms it has to be transported to a packing facility first.

‘By reducing the supply chain, the time it takes to get to consumers, you’re giving them more nutritious food,’ said Webster, who is also in the process of planning a site 10 times bigger than his current 600-square-metre site on the eastern edge of London.

New economy

It’s the kind of growth story that can be heard throughout this new economy of high-tech companies creating businesses that can help Europe rein back greenhouse gas emissions and improve the lives of city dwellers.

‘In Germany we have 45 % market share,’ explained Christian Deilmann, the founder and chief executive of Climate-KIC-funded Tado, a maker of a home thermostat that connects to the internet for weather updates and tracks your movements using your smartphone so it can turn on the radiators when you’re on your way home.

Heating accounts for around two-thirds of the energy used in a typical home in northern Europe, and the company claims that by using its intelligent thermostat, people can cut these costs by up to 31 % by ensuring that the boiler is only running when necessary.

‘In the future we are 100 % convinced that every home but also every building … will be heated and cooled in an intelligent way,’ said Deilmann.

Their objective is to get around 30 % of this increased market across Europe, and Deilmann hopes this will mean significant growth for the company.

‘What we’re offering is a new solution which is more energy efficient and more resilient to climate change.’

Tom Webster, Co-founder, GrowUp Urban Farms

‘Hopefully we will bring the company to the stock market,’ he said. ‘What E.ON and EDF are today, we want to become in the future.’

While they are at an earlier stage, Germany-based Green City Solutions is also getting ready for a growth phase as it develops its CITYTREE technology to filter pollution from the air on city streets.

With the help of Climate-KIC, the company has teamed up with the north Italian city of Modena to run a pilot project next year to put six CITYTREEs onto a city street.

The vertical flat-panelled device combines moss and wireless technology. It controls the humidity around the moss, which then acts as a filter, taking pollution particles out of the air.

After developing the CITYTREE, the company plans to improve the technology so that it is scaled back to just the plant and the equipment needed to supply it with the right nutrients and the correct amount of water. Once this work is complete, then it will be able to be used on existing surfaces around cities to clean the air.

‘You could apply that to every surface, every pre-existing installation, every infrastructure,’ said co-founder Zhengliang Wu. ‘You maybe even could mount it to public transportation.’

This Software Engineer Sold His Company to Start a Vertical Hydroponic Farm in Goa

This Software Engineer Sold His Company to Start a Vertical Hydroponic Farm in Goa

 Tanaya Singh

December 20, 2016

“You are what you eat,” they say. And that’s what Ajay Naik, a Goa-based hydroponic farmer, believes in. After quitting his job and giving up his company, this software engineer decided to help farmers across India learn about hydroponics and the use of technology in agriculture.

“For several years I have been noticing that many farmers’ children prefer to go for an MBA or engineering degree these days instead of taking up farming. This is because agriculture is not always lucrative. But then, not many of us are focusing on the root of the system we live in – that is good quality food. Only when you have healthy food can you have a healthy country,” says Ajay Naik, a Goa-based software engineer-turned hydroponic farmer. In times like these when the younger generation of farmers choose to opt for anything but agriculture, the case of Ajay would seem to be a paradox of sorts. The 32-year-old has turned to hydroponic farming in an attempt to grow quality food  because a lot of vegetables and fruits supplied to markets today are grown using harmful chemicals that are detrimental to health.

He believes that the right use of technology can improve a field’s produce but the problem is that Indian farmers are already struggling with finances and are reluctant to take risks “They fear that if their investment in technology does not work out, it may lead to huge losses,” he says. Ajay wants to change the equation by taking technology to as many farmers as he can. And that is where hydroponics comes into the picture.

Hydroponics is the process of growing plants in water with added nutrients without the use of soil.

What attracted Ajay towards this form of agriculture is that it limits the use of chemicals. After initial research he came to know about a person in Pune who has a doctorate in plant nutrition and manages a hydroponic farm. Ajay met him, saw his farms and learned as much as he could.

You may also like: Home Gardens That Require Very Little Space & Time – All You Need to Know About Vertical Gardening!

“It was inspiring and motivated me to start a farm of my own as well. The fact that hydroponics involves technology, like developing a system for automatic circulation of water, controlling the parameters of temperature, humidity, etc. made me like it even more. I have been working in the IT industry for the past 10 years and I understand these things. In fact, it would have been difficult for me to understand traditional forms of agriculture,” he says.

Fully equipped with the required knowledge, Ajay started his farm two months ago in Karaswada, Goa. With a team of six people, he now grows exotic vegetables like lettuce and salad greens using the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT). This is a hydroponic technique in which a shallow stream of water containing nutrients for plant growth circulates past the bare roots of plants in watertight cylindrical tubes also called channels. The water flows from one end and is re-circulated into the system from the other end, thus reducing water consumption by 80% when compared to traditional farming.

Since there is no soil involved in the process, there is no need for pesticides. Ajay has set up his system in a vertical farming model with racks that have seven levels to save space.

He claims that this is Goa’s first vertical hydroponics farm, which occupies an area of 150 square metres. “I grow three tonnes of lettuce every month. The farm is set up in a controlled environment that enables me to grow exotic vegetables all-year-round without being dependent on the weather,” he says. In addition, he is now trying to convince other farmers to adopt this technology. “I have already started showing the technique to farmers in vegetable expositions conducted by the agriculture department in different places in Goa. The department is also keen on collaborating with me so they can take it to more farmers,” he says. Other than this, he sells his produce to local vendors and also in supermarkets. “I am planning to grow bell pepper, cucumber and strawberries too. In the future, I would also like to shift to other hydroponics techniques and increase the produce,” he adds.

Originally from Karnataka, Ajay came to Goa to work with a software company, which he quit in 2011 to start his own enterprise to develop mobile applications.

He then sold his company this year and used his savings to start this farm. He also received help from two investors. While the initial cost of setting up the farm is high, Ajay feels that he will be able to recover it over a period of time with hydroponics farming because of the high turnover.

“Producing food nowadays is becoming a real challenge. With the increasing population, water scarcity, and the ecological impact of transportation, hydroponics is the best choice for commercial as well as home-based farming. Among many advantages, hydroponics allows you to produce more (20 to 30%) high-quality vegetables and fruits, save on water and nutrient consumption, and grow fresh food everywhere – including sterile and unproductive lands, or in big cities and capitals. It helps cutting down on expensive intermediaries and shipping costs,” he concludes.

You can contact Ajay by writing to him at ajay20naik@gmail.com

Massive Rooftop Farm In Tel Aviv Grows 10,000 Heads of Lettuce Every Month

Massive Rooftop Farm In Tel Aviv Grows 10,000 Heads of Lettuce Every Month

On top of a shopping mall in Israel, a sprawling rooftop farm produces fresh vegetables and greens for thousands of local residents. Tel Aviv’s Green in the City program helped set up the urban farm in the heart of the city over a year ago. While the roof of a mall may seem like an unlikely place to cultivate nutritious veggies, it actually makes a lot of sense, since the shopping center is a central meeting place with tons of foot traffic.

The rooftop farm grows atop the Dizengoff Center, a large concrete shopping center built in the 1970s. Inside the mall, a produce stand greets visitors with a lush display of freshly harvested vegetables grown upstairs in the rooftop farm. The small stand operates on the honor system and is so popular that its inventory has to be restocked four times a day to keep up with customers’ demands.

Related: World’s largest rooftop farm sprouts 10 million pesticide-free crops each year

Tel Aviv’s urban rooftop farm does more than just grow vegetables to sell. In addition to its two greenhouses with more than 8,000 square feet of growing space, the farm features an educational space where farmers teach public classes on urban farming and cooking. The group also sells hydroponic kits and helps people learn how to grow their own food at home.

The farm’s output is impressive. Every month year-round, 10,000 heads of lettuce are harvested and the rooftop farm also grows 17 different varieties of greens and herbs. All of the crops are grown hydroponically, either on horizontal or vertical setups. “People are used to lettuce tasting a certain way, after it’s been sitting in a bag in the refrigerator for a week,” farm director Mendi Falk told the Times of Israel. “With hydroponics, the lettuce is harvested just 15 minutes earlier. It has a different taste.”

IoT and Agriculture: A Natural Combination

IoT and Agriculture: A Natural Combination

Solid examples of IoT applicability are sometimes hard to articulate. But agriculture provides a use case that is quite concrete, even if in rural environments.

By Andrew Brust for Big on Data | December 16, 2016 -- 20:14 GMT (20:14 GMT) | Topic: Big Data Analytics

We all know that the Internet of Things (IoT) represents game-changing transformation in the industrial application of technology...or at least we think we do. Perhaps more accurately, we sense that denying IoT's significance would be foolishly contrarian. And while we might have an innate sense of why IoT is so important, we also might come up short when pressed to describe specific applications of IoT technology.

That's why I love learning about real use cases, especially ones that veer off the path of domains like preventive maintenance, which are almost cliché. Recently, I had the chance to learn of one such IoT application. It's rich, complex and it satisfyingly broadened how I think about IoT. Specifically, I spoke with the Daniel Koppel, Co-Founder and CEO of Israeli company Prospera, which focuses on the application of IoT in agriculture.

The use case
Prospera, a company founded about 2 years ago by a team of computer scientists and agronomists, has built some very interesting technology that centers around monitoring crop growth, in order to optimize it. While farmers have long had some data -- like weather readings and low-resolution satellite images -- available to them, it turns out not to be enough. And even if it were, weather data from a government weather station -- which might be 30km away from the actual growing area -- doesn't deliver the "hyper-local" climate data that is crucial.

When you grow in volume, though, the geographic dispersal of your farmland makes it difficult to go around and collect that data manually -- and the rural settings for that farmland make the electrical and network connectivity, that had been necessary to collect that data, hard to come by.

It's different now
But now low-cost sensors can obtain temperature and humidity data; and low-cost cameras can measure light/radiation and gather valuable images. The devices can communicate over WiFi or 3G mobile data technology and can often run on solar power. This approach has been making technology with great efficacy in indoor agriculture, increasingly applicable in outdoor settings too.

Prospera does not view itself as a sensor company though, but rather as a data company. And not just one that helps customers collect data and act on it, but one that builds data intelligence and thus domain expertise.

In other words, there is an element of crowd-sourcing here: although granular data is kept private, all data (which, in aggregate, amounts to hundreds of thousands of readings per day) benefits the construction, testing and accuracy of predictive models. These models help track the correlation between specific values in the collected data, crop growth and output. Understanding those correlations, and making predictions based upon them, is where Prospera hits its value proposition sweet spot.

The vision thing
Beyond predictive applications, there are prescriptive applications too. Computer vision/imaging has serious applicability in this domain, as the capture of images combined with pattern recognition technology can help detect crop disease and, on an automated basis, dispatch personnel to address it. It can also help alert farmers to where they need to prune and harvest. So not only is the data collection made more economical, but the methodical analysis of the collected data, and the dispatch of responsive action, is made more feasible and economical as well.

While expense was once an issue, Prospera's Koppel says that "sensors are commodities" now. In fact, the company says that three conditions in the market have combined to make its technology so effective and efficacious: the neural network technology behind the machine learning has become much better; the sensor hardware has become much cheaper and, because of greater mainstream appreciation for Big Data and machine learning, market readiness has crossed the chasm too.

Why Israel?
Israel is a high-tech country, well-populated with venture-funded tech startups. Top-notch technical universities like Technion and Hebrew University (Koppel's alma mater), as well as byproducts of, and veterans from, tech research in the country's defense forces, provide much of the raw material for such commercial, entrepreneurial activity.

Israel also has a history as an agricultural society, centered around Kibbutzim and Moshavs, both of which are collective agricultural settlements, the former sometimes likened to communes. Further, because much of Israel is desert, irrigation techniques and other technological optimizations have been part of its agricultural approach since the country's founding.

Put all of this together and you have a place that, industrially and culturally, is predisposed to growing its crops in a scientifically-influenced fashion.

How far beyond?
While kibbutzim and moshavs in Israel have served as test labs for Prospera's technology, the company has customers who have deployed the technology in Europe and Mexico. The US is next -- and for some customers there, Prospera expects to collect data not just from stationary sensors over terrestrial wireless data connections, but via drone and over Satellite data links as well.

Some current customers implement Prospera's technology in parts of their farms, to compare data-driven farming with those of more traditional methods, and results have been good. Prospera says that customers have used the company's technology to discover problems in irrigation, ward off disease and reduce yield volatility.

Prospera's technology has even allowed farmers to make course corrections in their growing techniques, in order to maximize output in the current growing cycle, and not just apply lessons learned to the next cycle.

All roads lead to analytics
As fascinating and as far-flung as Prospera's IoT use case may seem to some of us, it ultimately comes back to the mainstream of BI and Big Data: collecting data and analyzing it. In fact, Prospera's software delivers rather familiar-looking dashboards on computers and mobile devices, just like the technology with which we may be more familiar.

Ultimately, that may be the most valuable lesson of all. The stuff we already know -- the OLAP cubes, the MapReduce jobs, the streaming data processing and the D3 visualizations -- can be thought of and implemented in very specific and very impressive industrial use cases. The technologies needn't be relegated to isolated discussions of their own rigors. In fact, when we think of the technology in applied capacities, we provide a lot more value, and we help Big Data and IoT move past their hype cycle quasi-paralysis.

We need more companies like Prospera, that combine tech with domain expertise, cultural idiosyncrasies and a lot of imagination. That's how this field will get to the next level. The value of vision goes beyond data captured from image sensors.

Farm In The City

Farm In The City

BY ZULIANTIE DZUL - 17 DECEMBER 2016

Malaysia ventures into indoor farming to inspire more urbanites to grow their own food, writes Zuliantie Dzul

“I AM a city farmer,” read the words in black and striking green on the black T-shirt worn by the youth who greets me at the door of the second-floor office in Sri Kembangan, Selangor.

Walking in, I spot brown boxes of fertilizers neatly placed on the shelf across the door. Stacks of PVC pipes are on the concrete floor next to the shelf. The air inside is a little stuffy as the office had just recently opened for business.

The young man introduces himself as Jayden Koay, one of the founders of CityFarm Malaysia, a newly-founded organisation with the objective to inspire more people to become city farmers with the ability to grow locally from anywhere for a more sustainable future of food production. CityFarm Malaysia serves as a one-stop-centre to kick start your farming journey, supplying parts such as piping and products such as fertiliser and germination sponge. The sight of vegetables behind a closed wooden door and a glass panel catches my eyes. The affable

The sight of vegetables behind a closed wooden door and a glass panel catches my eyes. The affable Koay takes me inside the room, a vertical farm of lettuce, where slabs of leafy greens of different stages — from seedlings to ready-to-harvest — take up most of the 42sq m space. After a quick tour of the “farm”, we return to the office where we’re soon joined by Looi Choon Beng and Johanson Chew, the other co-founders of CityFarm Malaysia.

CityFarm Malaysia ventures into indoor farming to inspire more urbanites to grow their own food. Pix by Owee Ah Chun

HYDROPONIC IS BACK

The United Nation predicts that the world’s population will grow to 9.6 billion by 2050. 70 per cent of people will live in the cities and 70 per cent more food will be required to feed them. Yet, 80 per cent of cultivated land is already in use. Moreover, extreme weather patterns and devastated crops will create higher food prices, and consumers will become more conscious of how their foods are produced.

As the population rises, more cities will be developed. In the long run, we can no longer depend on food supplies from outside. And it is this very knowledge that drives the team of five to venture into indoor farming to cater to the rapid growth in consumer demand for affordable, high-quality, locally produced crop in any climate.

“We need sustainable supply. There won’t be enough land,” begins Koay.

Hydroponic is one of the basic farming methods which took the country by storm decades ago. Progression of hydroponic technology makes soilless farming possible within the urban household and this is the key to address food supply issue, where everyone can be a city farmer and part of the food supply process. “Soon after that, many other methods were engineered,” adds Koay.

For example, the farmers in Cameron Highlands are using the nutrient film technique, wherein a very shallow stream of water containing all the dissolved nutrients required for plant growth is re-circulated past the bare roots of plants in a watertight gully, also known as channels. There’s also the technology to replace sunlight with LED lights so your farm can be cultivated indoors.

Farming within the city can help reduce carbon foot print where transportation can be optimised. “The vegetables we buy from the markets travel about 300km to reach consumers in the city. The travelling produces carbon dioxide and petrol is needed to transport the fresh produces. What we do here is indoors and in the city. It’s already close to consumers,” explains Koay.

CITY FARM MADE POSSIBLE

Urban farming isn’t really an alien concept. It’s fast growing in popularity around the world. Across the Causeway, our neighbour Singapore has its own campaign. The scarcity of land in the city has prompted the Edible Garden City to promote the Grow Your Own Food movement. The hope is that — as stated in their website — people would grow edibles on all the under-utilised spaces such as rooftops and sidewalks.

“We do foodscaping. Our gardens work doubly hard to be both productive and pretty. We use herbs, vegetables and fruit trees to create a landscape that you can munch on.”

In addition, Edible Garden City supplies fresh produce and conducts workshops on farming-related topics. While focusing on the community, the company also seeds the knowledge of food growing in schools. “We believe that children are more likely to eat the greens that they grow,” it states.

The awareness of urban farming in the country, however, remains relatively low. This is why CityFarm Malaysia aims to play a part in the movement by creating simple and affordable farming system in cities.

“Our farming method is suitable for high rise buildings, with small balconies. We can customise the design for you, whether you want it on your balcony or mount it on your wall,” shares Koay.

The City Balcony Hydroponic set with a dimension of 1.5m by 60cm by 60cm is a simple and easy to use PVC system which includes 20 or 30 plants capacity, nutrient tank, nutrient pump, fittings and net pots. It’s suitable for city growers as it doesn’t require frequent supervision. It’s also affordable.

“Based on our climate, you can breed local vegetables and will have no problem growing them here. You can have lettuce, kale, choy sum, pak choy and herbs,” says Koay.

If you live in a small apartment with just one window, the City Window Farm is the best setup for growing vegetables.

Koay says: “City Window Farm is a basic hydroponic starter pack, all in one box. You can master that first. Just put near your window.” “Don’t worry, it comes with a manual,” Looi chips in.

Besides providing farming equipment, the team also organises classes, training, exhibitions and talks in public and in schools. So far, they have visited three schools in the Klang Valley. “We want to teach students about urban farming so when they go home, they can share their knowledge with their parents,” explains Koay.  

THE A-TEAM The self-taught trio and two others behind the set-up are graduates of the Multimedia University in Cyberjaya. It was through clubs and student activities that they met as they were all on different programmes.

“It all started as a hobby about two years ago,” shares 28-year-old Chew, who’s a freelance software engineer. “I saw this urban farming concept on TV. It’s big in the US and Europe, and I was interested. So I bought a plant and put it in a small corner in Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre, where he worked. Soon after that, Koay decided to join as well.”

Discussions followed soon after and eventually, the idea became a reality and CityFarm Malaysia was born.

IT management consultant Looi says: “I want to be able to do something impactful but also something that can still feed my family.”

Koay, 27, from Terengganu, concurs: “Yes, we need to do something influential and make a difference. I was in the Oil & Gas industry before but I resigned to do this. But I still have a few other businesses.”

Their green hearts don’t just stop at CityFarm. They also practice green living as well. Looi and Koay confide that they use less plastic bags and polystyrene now while Chew plans to get an electric car for himself.

So what’s next?

Education. According to the team, they want to train the next generation on the importance of farming and how we can play a part to make the world a better place by growing food that is healthy, clean and fresh.

Koay concludes: “We want to start ahead and now it’s the time. There are only five of us and we can’t possibly reach the whole country by ourselves. Everyone should play a part for this kind of effort.”

Details at cityfarm.my and www.facebook.com/CityFarmMalaysia

Read More : http://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/12/197593/farm-city

How Antibiotic-Tainted Seafood From China Ends Up on Your Table

How Antibiotic-Tainted Seafood From China Ends Up on Your Table

You might want to pass on the shrimp cocktail.

by, Jason Gale, Lydia Mulvany, and Monte Reel

December 15, 2016, 10:00 AM GMT+1

From Subscribe Reprints

From the air, the Pearl River Delta in southern China’s Guangdong province resembles a mass of human cells under a microscope. Hundreds of thousands of tiny rectangular blocks, all of them shades of green, are clustered between cities and waterways. Livestock pens are scattered among the thousands of seafood farms that form the heart of the country’s aquaculture industry, the largest in the world.

Beside one of those fish farms near Zhaoqing, on a muggy day in June, a farmhand wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat hoses down the cement floor of a piggery where white and roan hogs sniff and snort. The dirty water from the pens flows into a metal pipe, which empties directly into a pond shared by dozens of geese. As the yellowish-brown water splashes from the pipe, tilapia flap and jump, hungry for an afternoon feeding.

Chinese agriculture has thrived for thousands of years on this kind of recycling—the nutrients that fatten the pigs and geese also feed the fish. But the introduction of antibiotics into animal feed has transformed ecological efficiency into a threat to global public health.

“We cannot trace if the shrimp is coming from ­Thailand or from China or from other countries. We cannot trace”

At another farm, in Jiangmen, a farmer scatters a scoop of grain to rouse her slumbering swine, penned on the edge of a pond with 20,000 Mandarin fish. The feed contains three kinds of antibiotics, including colistin, which in humans is considered an antibiotic of last resort. Colistin is banned for swine use in the U.S., but until November, when the Chinese government finally clamped down, it was used extensively in animal feed in China. Vials and containers for nine other antibiotics lie around the 20-sow piggery—on shelves, in shopping bags, and atop trash piles. Seven of those drugs have been deemed critically important for human medicine by the World Health Organization.

The overuse of antibiotics has transformed what had been a hypothetical menace into a clear and present one: superbugs, bacteria that are highly resistant to antibiotics. By British government estimates, about 700,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections worldwide. If trends continue, that number is expected to soar to 10 million a year globally by 2050—more people than currently die from cancer.

In November 2015 scientists reported the discovery of a colistin-resistant gene in China that can turn a dozen or more types of bacteria into superbugs. Since then the gene has been found in patients, food, and environmental samples in more than 20 countries, including at least four patients in the U.S. Food, it now appears, can be a crucial vector. “People eating their shrimp cocktails and paella may be getting more than they bargained for,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, a professor of microbiology and an infectious diseases physician at New York University Langone Medical Center who chairs President Barack Obama’s advisory panel for combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. “The penetration of antibiotics through the food chain is a big problem.”

Included in the new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 19-Dec. 25, 2016. Subscribe now.

Photographer: Jamie Chung for Bloomberg Businessweek; Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero; Typography: Simon Abranowicz

Research has found that as much as 90 percent of the antibiotics administered to pigs pass undegraded through their urine and feces. This has a direct impact on farmed seafood. The waste from the pigpens at the Jiangmen farm flowing into the ponds, for example, exposes the fish to almost the same doses of medicine the livestock get—and that’s in addition to the antibiotics added to the water to prevent and treat aquatic disease outbreaks. The fish pond drains into a canal connected to the West River, which eventually empties into the Pearl River estuary, on which sit Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macau. The estuary receives 193 metric tons (213 tons) of antibiotics a year, Chinese scientists estimated in 2013.

The $90 billion aquaculture trade accounts for almost half of all seafood harvested or caught, according to the United Nations. China supplies almost 60 percent of the global total and is the biggest exporter. U.S. food regulators have known about the country’s antibiotic problem for more than a decade. The Food and Drug Administration intensified its monitoring of imported farm-raised seafood from China in the fall of 2006 and found a quarter of the samples tested contained residues of unapproved drugs and unsafe food additives. The following June an import alert was applied to all farm-raised shrimp and several other kinds of seafood from China, allowing the agency to detain the products at port until each shipment is proved, through laboratory analysis, to be untainted.

But antibiotic-contaminated seafood keeps turning up at U.S. ports, as well as in restaurants and grocery stores. That’s because the distribution networks that move the seafood around the world are often as murky as the waters in which the fish are raised. Federal agencies trying to protect public health face multiple adversaries: microbes rapidly evolving to defeat antibiotics and shadowy seafood companies that quickly adapt to health regulations to circumvent them, moving dirty seafood around the world in much the same way criminal organizations launder dirty money.

The Chinese government is well aware that the use of antibiotics has gotten out of hand. In 2011 it initiated a campaign to reduce antibiotic use in humans, and since then the sale of antibiotics in Shanghai has fallen 31 percent. As last month’s ban on colistin suggests, there’s a new seriousness about antibiotic use in agricultural production as well. Nevertheless, China’s rates of drug resistance remain among the highest in the world. Surveys across the country have found 42 percent to 83 percent of healthy people carry in their bowels bacteria that produce extended-spectrum beta-lactamases, or ESBLs, which create reservoirs of potential pathogens that can destroy penicillin and most of its variants. The aquaculture products sold in Shanghai teem with bacteria that can’t be killed by common antibiotics. In almost a third of random seafood samples collected in Shanghai from 2006 to 2011, researchers found salmonella, a major cause of gastroenteritis in people. A closer examination of the germs showed that 43 percent of the samples harbored multidrug-resistant strains of bacteria.

Over the past year, scientists have tracked the spread of colistin-resistant bacteria throughout Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. In May the first report of an American infected with a colistin-resistant superbug was announced. More U.S. cases were reported in June and July. By August researchers were announcing that American patients had been infected with a strain of bacteria that had developed resistance to colistin and carbapenems, another type of antibiotic often used to treat patients in hospitals with multidrug-resistant infections.

Medicine packaging at a pig farm in Guangdong.

Photographer: Forbes Conrad for Bloomberg Businessweek

Initially, the resistant bacteria from breeding grounds such as China were believed to spread mostly by international travel. Michael Mulvey, head of antimicrobial resistance at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was among the first to realize that seafood could also be a vector. In 2015, Mulvey’s lab secured funding for a study that enabled him and his colleagues to run a test for carbapenem-resistant bacteria on 1,328 samples of seafood collected from Canadian retail outlets from 2011 to 2015. Eight, or 0.6 percent, tested positive; all came from Southeast Asia. The findings meant that some of the planet’s most difficult-to-treat bacteria could be lingering in people’s refrigerators or on their kitchen countertops. “We are trying to make the case right now that it’s there, it’s in our seafood,” Mulvey says.

Since the early 1990s, the average amount of shrimp Americans eat annually has doubled, turning what was once a specialty dish into the country’s single most popular seafood. As recently as the 1980s, most of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. was raised domestically, primarily off the Gulf Coast. From 1990 to 2006, shrimp import volumes doubled. They’ve since leveled out at roughly 1.3 billion pounds annually, and today about 90 percent of the shrimp eaten in America comes from abroad. China’s share of imports touched an 11-year high in 2003 at 16 percent of the market. (It’s now 5.6 percent.) In 2004, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a 112 percent tariff on Chinese shrimp, effective 2005—a response to complaints of domestic producers that insisted Chinese suppliers were selling seafood below market prices. In 2007 came the import alert.

Malaysia jumped in to pick up the slack. In 2004 imports of Malaysian shrimp rose tenfold, according to U.S. government figures. They remained elevated for a decade, peaking at about 5 percent of the market in 2008 and 2011.

There’s reason to doubt that all that Malaysian shrimp is Malaysian. Ronnie Tan, vice president of Blue Archipelago, Malaysia’s largest seafood producer, says that depending on the year either three or four shrimp producers—including his own company—operate in the country. Malaysia produced about 32,000 tons of shrimp in 2015, he says; about 18,000 tons were consumed domestically, and about 12,000 tons went to Singapore. That would leave little legitimate Malaysian shrimp to go to the rest of the world. Yet according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, imports from Malaysia during the past decade have exceeded 20,000 tons a year on average.

It’s a mystery that may be explained, at least partially, by examining the business practices of Jun Yang, a Chinese-born entrepreneur based in Texas. Homeland Security Investigations, a part of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, first knew him as a honey broker. The agency arrested him in 2012 (then unarrested him so that he could cooperate with the investigation, then arrested him again) and charged him with making false claims about the honey he was selling. It was harvested in China but was passed through Malaysia, where it acquired Malaysian certificates of origin. This illegal transshipping, as the maneuver is called, allowed him to avoid paying almost $38 million in antidumping duties. The investigators untangled a network of shell companies that seemed designed solely to deceive U.S. regulators. In November 2013, Yang was convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison.

A worker on the Datianlang farm sets out to feed the fish.

Photographer: Forbes Conrad for Bloomberg Businessweek

The investigators also determined that Yang’s main business wasn’t honey—it was seafood. His company brokered shrimp for a Houston company called American Fisheries. At the time of Yang’s first arrest, some of the shipments were still in cold-storage facilities. The feds required him, as part of his cooperation, to send samples to a laboratory for analysis. Five shipments tested positive for nitrofurans, a class of antibiotics banned in the U.S. Those tainted shrimp were eventually destroyed. All the tainted shipments had been labeled as products of Malaysia.

Despite Yang’s cooperation with the government in the shrimp investigation, his information wasn’t used to make a case. But American Fisheries itself may have provided a way to track the apparent transshipping scheme. In May 2013, American Fisheries sued Yang, saying it had received only $6.1 million of the $12.1 million Yang owed it for 74 shipments of shrimp, weighing as much as 28,000 kilograms (62,000 pounds) each, from June 2011 to January 2012. That case, still pending in Texas, as well as Yang’s countersuit against American Fisheries, has uncovered a trove of documents that detail how a Shanghai-based company hatched a plan to get its Chinese-farmed shrimp into America.

In 2005, about nine months after the U.S. antidumping tariffs on Chinese shrimp went into effect, a group of seafood executives gathered in a Shanghai conference room. Many knew one another from when they’d all worked for Shanghai Fisheries, a large company overseen by the government. The executives agreed to create a venture that would focus primarily on exporting shrimp to the U.S., despite the new tariff. They would finance and control the company from China, but it would be incorporated in Texas. That was the beginning of American Fisheries.

Some of the same executives also controlled a Shanghai Fisheries subsidiary called Guangzhou Lingshan, a seafood packing plant in the Pearl River Delta, and the plant was buying shrimp. By 2006 the company had purchased 3,000 tons of it from farmers around the town of Da’ao, according to local newspaper reports.

Guangzhou Lingshan built a lab inside the complex to test the quality of its shrimp, and the facility was considered one of the best in the region. Even so, former executives with the company say shrimp tainted with antibiotic traces made it into the company’s stock. “You know what China was like,” says Lv Wei, who worked for Guangzhou Lingshan in the trade department for nine years before leaving in 2013. Almost two-thirds of the shrimp that went through the packing facility ended up with American Fisheries, she says. “They all went through Malaysia.” Shanghai Fisheries declined to comment on Guangzhou Lingshan.

No paperwork connected to those 2011 and 2012 shipments of Malaysian-labeled shrimp indicated they might have originated in China. The certificates of origin were signed by officials at the Penang Malay Chamber of Commerce. On a day in August, a man named Mohd Noordin Ismail sits at a desk in the reception room of the chamber’s offices in the seaside district of George Town. Bespectacled and wearing chunky gold rings on his fingers, Mohd Noordin has a foot-high stack of documents teetering in front of him. He says he’s worked at the chamber of commerce for 40 years, and his duties include signing certificates of origin for products produced in Malaysia and then exported. The certification process, as he describes it, is built on trust. He’s presented with documents provided by exporters, and he rubber-stamps the certificates under the assumption that the documents are genuine and correct. He doesn’t verify their authenticity.

“We cannot trace if the shrimp is coming from Thailand or from China or from other countries,” Mohd Noordin says. “We cannot trace.”

The documents that bear his signature indicate the shrimp sent to American Fisheries was farmed at two Malaysian aquaculture facilities, Chai Kee Aquatic and Aiman Aquatic. But none of the addresses listed on those forms correspond to an aquaculture facility or to a place where shrimp could have been raised. On two separate import documents, the same address is listed as the harvesting site for both Chai Kee and Aiman Aquatic. That address corresponds to a long block of gated residential compounds. No ponds are visible on any of the properties. A woman who answers the door at one of the houses says her son was in the seafood business, but she says no aquaculture facilities could be found on her property or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Another address listed on the documents for Chai Kee doesn’t appear on Google Maps, and neither the local police nor officials at the post office can locate the street named on the forms.

Antibiotic medicines at a veterinary pharmacy in Jiangmen.

Photographer: Forbes Conrad for Bloomberg Businessweek

Mohd Noordin says it’s possible the certificates of origin and his signature could have been forgeries and that the forms never passed his desk. Malaysia’s shrimp industry is relatively small, but he says he’d never heard of either Chai Kee or Aiman. Since 2008, when the European Union temporarily banned imports from the country after several shipments tested positive for antibiotic residues and heavy metal content, only a few companies legitimately export shrimp to America, according to Mohd Noordin and others in the industry. Tan of Blue Archipelago says that while he has no direct evidence of transshipping activities, it’s commonly speculated by seafood producers in Malaysia that Chinese producers use Malaysian companies—both legitimate producers and shell companies that exist only on paper—to sneak their shrimp into the U.S.

The American Fisheries court documents suggest the company and its various distributors carefully monitored the status of the shrimp shipments it brought into the U.S. and communicated via e-mail and telephone. Once the shrimp was on a ship bound for America, ownership of the shipment was transferred to a U.S.-registered company called YZ Marine. On paper, the company doesn’t seem connected to American Fisheries and its executives in Shanghai. But the court documents show that Feng Shao, president of American Fisheries, had access to YZ Marine’s bank account and wrote a number of checks on it.

Lawyers for American Fisheries didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, but in court documents related to the Yang suit they’ve denied the company illegally transshipped goods via Malaysia. They’ve acknowledged, however, that the company was fully financed and staffed via China and that its employees worked in Texas on three-month rotations because they lacked long-term U.S. work visas. Court records also show that when one shipment of Malaysian-labeled shrimp arrived in the U.S. at a lighter weight than anticipated, a member of the American Fisheries staff checked with Guangzhou Lingshan—the facility in the Pearl River Delta—to ask if there had been a packing mistake.

The groups lobbying hardest for intensified scrutiny of imported shrimp and fish are, unsurprisingly, the American producers of seafood. The Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade organization of U.S. shrimp producers, says the U.S. market is awash in fraudulently labeled and unsafe seafood. “What we have learned is that there are well-developed channels for getting massive amounts of food and other consumer goods into this market while evading U.S. laws,” says John Williams, the organization’s executive director.

Critics of increased inspection say it would cause gridlock at U.S. ports. “Think of all the trucks going by on an interstate, and you have a cop pulling people over for speeding,” says Peter Quinter, a customs and international trade lawyer in Miami. “You can’t pull everyone over. … Hiring more FDA officers is not the answer; it’s like shutting down the highway.”

Arguments of that nature didn’t stop the U.S. catfish industry from successfully pushing for more oversight on imports, a move that could provide a model for shrimp companies. For years the catfish industry argued that the FDA’s testing protocol, which analyzes only 1 percent to 2 percent of incoming seafood, didn’t adequately protect consumers. With the help of allies in Congress, catfish farmers got the USDA to take over import inspections from the FDA. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, which will inspect all catfish imports by September 2017, began conducting preliminary, noncomprehensive inspections this spring, and proponents are thrilled by a slew of recent enforcement actions.

Aquaculture farms in Datianlang.

Photographer: Forbes Conrad for Bloomberg Businessweek

In April the FDA issued an import alert that said its district offices could detain and test all imports of shrimp and prawns from Peninsular Malaysia, a region that includes Penang. Malaysia’s Ministry of Health responded by announcing that it would tighten controls at processing plants and assume the authority to issue certificates of origin from chambers of commerce. The U.S. in the past year has started at least two investigations involving Chinese shrimp producers suspected of shipping their seafood through Malaysia, according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who is familiar with the investigations. Both probes are ongoing.

The FDA alert has virtually halted Malaysian shrimp imports. But that doesn’t mean tainted Chinese shrimp aren’t making it into the U.S. Industry and trade experts say many companies transship Chinese shrimp by following the American Fisheries model, each of them creating disposable import companies that can simply fold, or reincorporate under another name, at the first sign of regulatory scrutiny. Over the years, when Malaysian shrimp exporters were added to the FDA’s “red list”—meaning their shipments would have to be stopped at U.S. ports—the companies didn’t try to clear their names, as companies from other countries did, says Nathan Rickard, an attorney specializing in international trade whose clients include the Southern Shrimp Alliance. They just incorporated new entities with new names to do the same work.

It appears now that dirty shrimp is being routed through different countries. One that might be taking Malaysia’s place as an international transshipping hub is Ecuador, domestic shrimp producers say.

“The import alert was a huge step forward to prevent contaminated shrimp from getting to U.S. consumers, but we have also seen significant shifts in trade patterns indicating new routes and methods for getting bad shrimp into the U.S. market,” says Williams, of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “As long as there are distributors, retailers, and restaurants that, provided that the price is low, do not know and do not care where their shrimp is coming from, we expect to see shrimp-trade fraud.”

A recent case illustrates the domestic producers’ concerns. Ocean Rancho, a company based in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., has imported Malaysian shrimp. The company was formed by a man named Kai Hua Tan, an employee of a shrimp-farming company in mainland China called Zhanjiang Newpro Foods. Tan also has links to Tasty Goody Chinese Fast Food, a chain of 11 restaurants in California. In November 2014 the U.S. Department of Commerce said it had obtained documents showing that Zhanjiang Newpro had evaded tariffs using a transshipping scheme. When the company refused to answer questions about its operations during a review, the department imposed antidumping penalties. Ocean Rancho declared bankruptcy and dissolved, citing about $1.6 million in duties owed to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (Tan didn’t respond to voicemails left at his listed phone number, or to phone calls and e-mails to Tasty Goody.)

Around the same time, a new company, Mita Group, formed. It has the same address and phone number Ocean Rancho used on shipping documents. No one answering the phone there would speak with a reporter. Last year, Mita Group imported at least 700,000 pounds of shrimp—from Ecuador. 
 
—With Wenxin Fan and Pooi Koon Chong

Smart Cultivation Platform Facilitates Indoor Farming

Smart Cultivation Platform Facilitates Indoor Farming

December 13, 2016

Credit: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Researchers in Hong Kong have developed the Smart Indoor Cultivation Platform that can be set up in urban buildings and save water consumption by 95% compared with conventional methods.

To facilitate indoor farming, a research team comprising Prof. Michael Tse, Dr Martin Chow, Dr Loo Ka-hong and Dr Lai Yuk-ming at the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering developed the Smart Indoor Cultivation Platform. It adopted novel technologies including effective photosynthetic-active-radiation lighting system, hydroponic and aeroponic irrigation systems, network sensing and novel environmental control system for optimising growth profiles.

Under this system, the programmable photoperiod and light intensity with specific wavelengths in the lighting system can accelerate the growth of the plants. The sensors and automatic control system can optimise the growth environment for different plant species. This computerised way of managing the cultivation process also helps develop optimal growthprofiles. Through automatic data collection and analysis, the best cultivation methods for plants can be determined.

Compared with conventional method, this system can reduce water consumption by 95% and can be set up in urban buildings. This can encourage city dwellers to plant indoors to maintain sustainable and stable food supply.

Dr Lai Yuk-ming earlier won a silver medal at the 2016 International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada (iCAN 2016) with this invention.

 Explore further: Effects of spectral quality, intensity of LEDs

Provided by: Hong Kong Polytechnic University 

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-smart-cultivation-platform-indoor-farming.html#jCp

Vertical Farming Market 2016 - Global Industry Demand, Research, Trends and Forecasts to 2021

victor walsh

Market Analyst, Intense Research

Vertical Farming Market 2016 - Global Industry Demand, Research, Trends and Forecasts to 2021

• Posted on December 14, 2016

Prime agricultural land can be scarce and expensive. With worldwide population growth, the demand for both more food and more land to grow food is ever increasing. One solution to our need for more space is vertical farming, involves growing crops in controlled indoor environments, with precise light, nutrients, and temperatures. In vertical farming, growing plants are stacked in layers that may reach several stories tall.

Scope of the Report:

This report focuses on the Vertical Farming in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.

Request a Brochure of This Report, here @ http://www.marketresearchstore.com/report/global-vertical-farming-market-by-manufacturers-regions-type-84569#RequestSample

Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers

AeroFarms

Gotham Greens

Bright Farms

Vertical Harvest

Home Town Farms

Infinite Harvest

Lufa Farms

Beijing IEDA Protected Horticulture

FarmedHere

Garden Fresh Farms

Metro Farms

Green Sense Farms

Mirai

Green Spirit Farms

Indoor Harvest

Sky Vegetables

Sundrop Farms

Ecopia Farms

Alegria Fresh

TruLeaf

Farmbox

Greener Roots Farm

Uriah's Urban Farms

Urban Crops

Sky Greens

GreenLand

SCATIL

Agro Strategies

Metropolis Farms

Harvest Urban Farms

UrbanFarmers

Atlantic Beach Urban Farms

Kingpeng

Podponics

Urban Barns

CityFarm

Brooklyn Grange

Plantagon

Spread

Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers

North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)

Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)

Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)

South America, Middle East and Africa

Free Inquiry For Buying This Premium Report, heret @ http://www.marketresearchstore.com/report/global-vertical-farming-market-by-manufacturers-regions-type-84569#InquiryForBuying

Market Segment by Type, covers

Lighting

Hydroponic Component

Climate Control

Sensors

Market Segment by Applications, can be divided into

Application 1

Application 2

Application 3

There are 13 Chapters to deeply display the global Vertical Farming market.

Chapter 1, to describe Vertical Farming Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;
Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Vertical Farming, with sales, revenue, and price of Vertical Farming, in 2015 and 2016;
Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2015 and 2016;
Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Vertical Farming, for each region, from 2011 to 2016;
Chapter 5, 6, 7 and 8, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;
Chapter 9 and 10, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2011 to 2016;
Chapter 11, Vertical Farming market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2016 to 2021;
Chapter 12 and 13, to describe Vertical Farming sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, appendix and data source.

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Lessons from Japan: What the Western Indoor Ag Industry Can Learn from the East

Lessons from Japan: What the Western Indoor Ag Industry Can Learn from the East

DECEMBER 13, 2016 PIETER DE SMEDT

Editor’s Note: Pieter De Smedt is the US country manager for Urban Crops, a global indoor farming group building fully robotized vertical plant factories. Urban Crops recently opened its regional headquarters in Miami, Florida, and is in the process of hiring new sales agents for the North American region. If you are interested in applying, email Pieter here.

It is well known in indoor agriculture circles that Japan has more experience with indoor farming than the US and Europe, and its plant factories are more advanced.  Here De Smedt offers his key takeaways from an event bringing the industry from both sides of the world together.

The East Meets West: Joining Forces in Ag Tech & Controlled Environment Ag event took place in Salinas, California a couple of weeks ago. It offered a day of insightful presentations by a number of Japanese and US-based companies and organizations. The main goal was the exchange of information on the current state and future direction of the indoor agriculture industry in each geography. Equally insightful were the different networking opportunities in between sessions – it is not every day one gets the chance to exchange thoughts with people in your industry from the other side of the globe.

Here are my four key takeaways from the event:

1. Data trumps dreams

When looking back at the overall event and the presentations made by the Japanese companies and organizations, the most striking comparison between Japanese indoor agriculture operations and their US counterparts was their use of data. Japan’s indoor ag practitioners are much more data driven than the typically more visionary and – let us be honest – dreamy, story-telling tone of their US peers.

This focus on data applies at the level of the plant factories themselves, i.e. the technical, biological, and financial efficiency of any given plant factory is analyzed by looking at big data and crunching the relevant numbers. Progress is achieved through decisions made as a result of this analysis. The cloud-based program SabaiX by PlantX exemplifies this (http://www.plantx.co.jp/index-eng.html) with increased yields as a result. The same applies for Dr. Toyoki Kozai of Chiba University in Japan, known as the “Father of the Modern Plant Factory” who presented his new book “LED Lighting for Urban Agriculture” at the event.

There was a little less excitement about the data presented on the performance of Japanese plant factories: 42% of the indoor plant factories were in the red, 33% break-even, and only 25% were generating some level of profit. The reasons for these sobering performance figures range from excessive capital expenditure and operating expenditure, inefficient production processes, a poorly constructed business plan that fails to capture enough margin by selling to the wrong parties, and so on.

We can assume that similar figures and the underlying drivers would emerge in the US market as well. This is typical of any innovative industry that is drawing in some over excited capital. In the mid- to long-term, the suppliers and growers that will survive will be those who can set up the right infrastructure combined with a correct production process integrated in an efficient sales plan. This has also become apparent at Urban Crops, where we assist our clients in doing just that by looking at their requirements and delivering a design feasibility study that pairs the best and most cost-effective system while giving a clear overview of the required investment and operating costs.

2. Automation will have an increasing role to play

The Japanese data presented by Factory 808 (a Japanese vertical farm) demonstrated that labor accounted for one-third of their operating costs. The total cost is even higher when indirect employee-related costs are taken into account such as training, disinfecting chambers, food safety issues, real estate requirements, and so on. This confirmed Urban Crops’ thesis that for larger scale production facilities, investing in the robotization of your plant factory has a variety of benefits to offer.

3. The large outdoor farming businesses are rearing their heads

Although they have no doubt been following the developments close-up, this was one of the first times that I saw a proportionately large number of open field farming companies attend an event with an exclusively indoor ag focus. Rocket Farms, Del Cabo, Church Brothers, and others were present in the crowd. On the one hand, this can be explained by the location of the event in the heart of the salad bowl, Salinas, California. Nevertheless, it seemed to imply that these companies are looking to diversify their production methods and – perhaps even more importantly – locations. Could we start to see California-based farming groups setting up indoor grow facilities near some of their larger markets?

4. Looking beyond food production

A lot of the incumbents in the indoor ag market are currently focused on leafy greens production and other food. That’s because, to a large extent, the marketability of indoor ag and relatively high prices offered for local food is driving the industry.

Valuable as that may be – considering the early stage of the industry – Dr. Don Wilkerson reminded us that there are other high value, per pound crops that we ought to look at. His company iBio CMO produces a range of crops for the nutraceutical sector. Although somewhat less romantic than urban local food production, the impact on sustainability as well as the economics is equally, if not even more, impressive.

We have noticed this with our customers as well. Urban Crops has a selection of growth recipes for 160 plant varieties. We continue to expand this selection based on our own assessment of the market as well as requests from our customers to grow new kinds in their systems. Engineering and biological flexibility is, therefore, key.

The East Meets West: Joining Forces in Ag Tech & Controlled Environment Ag event demonstrated that we must continue to go beyond our own borders and stay in tune with developments in all parts of the world if we want to stay relevant.

A global industry requires a global understanding.

International Congress on Controlled Environment Agriculture (ICCEA) Announces Next Event

International Congress on Controlled Environment Agriculture (ICCEA) Announces Next Event

Following the 2015 first-of-its-kind educational event focused on the science and techniques used in successfully operating a controlled environment agriculture facility, the Foundation for the Development of Controlled Environment Agriculture (FDCEA) announces they will once again host the International Congress on Controlled Environment Agriculture (ICCEA) in Panama City, Panama in May, 2017.

According to David Proenza, one of the FDCEA Founders and a pioneer of the vertical farming movement, he believes the time has come for greatly improving the technology and knowledge behind the way we grow and produce food crops.  He states, “Growing parameters such as soil temperature, humidity, air temperature and flow, CO2 and nutrient distribution can be enhanced through the intelligent use of technology: hardware, software, wireless sensors, LED lighting and through ever-developing, disciplined science.”  The end results are better quality; clean, nutritious and safer foods all derived from a protected environment and enhanced food production.

As a current “traditional” farmer of watermelons he goes on to say, “Traditional methods of agriculture are burdened by numerous obstacles and difficulties, most of which can be solved by growing through the use of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) and by applying “Ag Tech” to either greenhouses or indoor, vertical farms.”

According to Chris Higgins, co-Founder of the FDCEA and owner of Urban Ag News, “The FDCEA has organized the ICCEA to inspire all interested parties to innovate and collaborate.”

The ICCEA 2017 is an event where attendees will have the opportunity to learn from renowned experts in the applied fields of science, agriculture, horticulture, lighting, robotics and (Ag) engineering. The FDCEA seeks to make CEA (whether greenhouse, vertical farm, or other) the answer to the future of agriculture with a primary focus on the creation of sustainable and profitable agriculture businesses.

The theme of ICCEA 2017 is “Using Science and the Market to Build a Successful Controlled Environment Agriculture Business”.  It will be held on May 17, 18 and 19 in Panama City, Panama.

For additional information on this event, please visit one of the following:

To register for specific information on attending or exhibiting at ICCEA2017, visit ICCEA Panama athttp://icceapanama.org/about/

To get more information on the Foundation for the Development of Controlled Environment Agriculture, visit their website at http://www.fdcea.com/

For continual updates on this event as well as others, visit Urban Ag News (http://urbanagnews.com/) and register for their newsletter and eMagazine (http://urbanagnews.com/subscribe/).

Remember global food safety and security depends on our ability to evolve and look beyond traditional agriculture. See you in Panama in 2017!

Asia Digs Deep To Upgrade Its Agriculture

Asia Digs Deep To Upgrade Its Agriculture

Perfect storm of population growth and climate change spurs farming innovation

TADANORI YOSHIDA, Nikkei senior staff writer

Consider it a wake-up call from nature. Asian crops were devastated by a severe drought this year, highlighting the urgent need to stabilize farm output and brace for the consequences of climate change. And with the region's population projected to continue growing over the long term, this is no easy task.

The good news is that answers are starting to emerge. Agribusinesses are harnessing information technology. Organic farms and so-called plant factories are becoming hothouses for innovation. International investors are keen to water the seeds.

This week, we head out into the fields -- and some cutting-edge facilities -- to glimpse the future of Asian farming.

TOKYO Even the most technologically advanced indoor farm starts with a very basic problem. When you take sunlight out of the equation you gain more control, but you also lose a whole lot of free energy.

The bankruptcy of a Japanese farming venture in 2015 highlighted this dilemma. The factory had been touted in the media as the future of farming. Partly due to power costs, however, its break-even price was simply too high compared with conventional farms.

Still, the bankruptcy does not mean the hype was baseless. Under new ownership, the factory is becoming a viable business by finding buyers who are willing to pay a premium for high-quality produce. Similar indoor farming ventures are adding value by growing vegetables rich in specific nutrients.

And then there is Spread, which is taking a different approach. It wants to win in the mass market -- in supermarkets -- and that means competing against veggies grown in the field.

Spread's secret? Volume. The company packs a lot of lettuce into its 3,000-sq.-meter factory in western Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital. The heads grow on rows upon rows of shelves under fluorescent lights. The factory has the capacity to ship 21,000 of them per day -- enough to make the lettuce profitable even if it sells for 198 yen ($1.79). The average price in Tokyo as of November was 251 yen, according to Numbeo, which tracks the cost of living in big cities.

The facility, which started operating in 2008, was stuck in the red for the first five years. But efficiency improvements lifted it into the black in the year ended March 2014. Shinji Inada, Spread's CEO, explained that putting the hardware in place is only half the battle. "It is up to the staff to adapt to the environment," he said. "Once the business becomes profitable, profit is generally stable."

Just because the lettuce grows indoors does not mean the weather is a complete nonfactor. Air conditioning must be set up to keep the temperature steady for all four seasons. Even then, there are changes in humidity. So it takes time to determine how to manage all the variables, including the light and carbon dioxide essential for photosynthesis.

All this is part of Spread's plan to live up to its name. The company is building expertise for a new factory in Kansai Science City, a research hub that straddles the prefectures of Kyoto, Osaka and Nara. The plant, now under construction, will use artificial intelligence to automate tasks like sowing seeds, replanting and harvesting. The new facility is expected to be completed in 2017.

Whether by growing crops indoors or other means, Asia needs to boost yields and mitigate extreme weather. Consumption in big markets like China and India is likely to continue growing steadily.

"Asia cannot produce enough to support itself," the Netherlands' Rabobank wrote in its "Asia-Pacific: agricultural perspectives" report. The bank noted that "limited arable land, inadequate water and poor resource management" are constraining production.

That is at the best of times. This year, vast swaths of Asia were hit by drought linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon, resulting in massive crop failures.

RESILIENT RICE To feed itself, Asia needs solutions, and Singapore's Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory aims to provide some.

The nonprofit research institute is funded by Temasek Trust -- the philanthropic arm of sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings. TLL, as the lab is known, spent eight years developing Temasek Rice, a resilient breed capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions and producing higher yields.

Temasek Rice was created using a modern technique known as marker-assisted selection. This allows scientists to zero in on desired traits and breed new, improved crops. Yin Zhongchao, TLL's senior principal investigator, said this type of breeding can enhance food security by increasing production "in a more efficient and sustainable manner."

Since land is limited in Singapore, TLL's rice is being grown in Indonesia, and the lab wants to partner with more companies to boost production.

The 2008 global food crisis was a key motivator behind the Temasek Rice project. Rising oil prices and severe weather sent food prices soaring. In developing countries, domestic rice prices climbed as much as 90% between the third quarter of 2007 and the same period of 2008, according to the FAO.

Peter Chia, TLL's chief operating officer, said the crisis showed "how vulnerable rice cultivation could be as a result of climate change."

"As agriculture becomes more knowledge intensive," he added, "our role in agriculture is not limited to production but using science, innovation and technology to create a positive impact across the whole value chain."

Thanks to the spread of mobile communications, farmers have quite a bit of knowledge at their fingertips. Even without souped-up seeds, detailed weather data and other information can help them to cope with climate change -- and other threats that come their way.

This past January, Vietnamese state telecom company VinaPhone started a service called Nong Thon Xanh, or Green Country. Basically, it turns mobile phones into farm assistants.

Through a social network, farmers can subscribe to three packages. For 10,000 dong (45 cents) per month, they get access to an agricultural warning package that includes a range of information: weather forecasts, prices, plant disease alerts, guidelines on relevant state policies, advisories on abnormal conditions affecting agriculture and so on. Coffee and rice packages, available for 31 cents and 22 cents a week respectively, offer tailored guidance to help farmers prevent diseases from wiping out their crops.

With a local partner, AgriMedia, VinaPhone has set up automated weather stations across the country. AgriMedia, in turn, has partnered with Japan's Weathernews in an effort to improve its forecasts.

VinaPhone's next step will be to build a call center, where agriculture experts will be on hand to answer questions from farmers. It also plans to expand the advice to cover gum trees, pepper and cashews.

In Indonesia, startup 8Villages provides similar services.

The advent of the internet of things -- the ever-growing web of connected gadgetry -- is bringing further big changes to the field. Japanese companies Kubota and NTT group have allied to develop automated agricultural machinery that taps big data. They envision a system that analyzes crop conditions and issues the machines instructions, be it to harvest vegetables or spray pesticides.

Singaporean startup Garuda Robotics is using drones to help Southeast Asian farmers increase yields.

The company's fully autonomous drone features a powerful built-in camera along with advanced sensors for detecting biomass and measuring temperatures. When it zooms over an oil palm plantation, it generates data including aerial maps and 3-D land contour models. This data is fed through an artificial intelligence system, which generates a report on tree health and land optimization.

This way, farmers can allocate fertilizer and other resources to the areas that need the most care, reducing costs and waste.

"It is difficult to use traditional methods, like getting people to count the number of trees, and get accurate data," said Mark Yong, Garuda Robotics' founder and CEO. "A 100,000 hectare [plantation] could have about 1 million trees."

Precision, he stressed, makes all the difference. "The problem with agriculture is variation such as weather, rainfall, soil quality and fertilizer. So there is a need to capture accurate data and find out what is happening on the plantation."

The Philippines has a new tool of its own for keeping tabs on farms -- a microsatellite. The launch of the craft in March marked not only the country's first foray into space but also a big upgrade for its relatively underdeveloped agricultural sector.

The government is using the satellite, the Diwata-1, to survey farmland and vegetation. Data and images are delivered daily to a ground station called the Philippine Earth Data Resources and Observation Center. With this and other information, experts at the center can advise farmers on the prevalence of pests and estimate rice yields. This can help the government decide whether to import rice or source it locally.

Researchers at the University of the Philippines are also using the data in studies on "smart agriculture." The satellite is expected to orbit for 18-20 months before its twin, the Diwata-2, is launched. The government has earmarked a total of 840 million pesos ($16.88 million) for the two satellites and the ground station.

From a consumer's perspective, of course, crop yields are not the only concern. Asia's rising middle class is wary of residual pesticides or other contaminants on vegetables grown in China and elsewhere. People want to know the food they are eating is safe, and to an extent, they are willing to pay more for that peace of mind.

It should not be surprising, then, that organic farming is booming across the region. And as it turns out, organic techniques may have some advantages when it comes to growing tasty veggies capable of withstanding harsh weather.

SCIENCE OVER INTUITION This brings us back to Japan. In August, some 20 farmers from around the country gathered in the city of Chiba, near Tokyo, for a workshop. The classroom was a vinyl greenhouse. "I'm going to teach you scientific techniques for organic farming," said the lecturer, consultant Masaaki Koiwai, who crisscrosses the country touting organic agriculture as a way to improve yields and quality.

There is a tendency to assume that farmers -- particularly organic farmers -- rely on intuition developed over years of experience. But Koiwai assured his students it does not have to be that way. He talked about spinach farmers who had taken his advice. The spinach they produced had higher sugar content than a melon. How was this possible? They sprinkled a little something extra on the field: powdered bamboo, which happens to be full of carbohydrates.

Koiwai's approach centers on the idea of "complementing photosynthesis." The conventional wisdom used to be that plants absorb only inorganic substances, but recent studies have shown they can also take in organic ones with much larger molecular structures. Based on this, Koiwai argues that effective use of organic fertilizers can pay dividends. Even if extreme weather slows carbohydrate production, for instance, plants can continue to grow steadily if they can soak up the nutrients through their roots.

A company that analyzes vegetables found that Koiwai-taught farmers tended to produce crops with much more sugar and vitamin C than average. There was no significant difference, however, between vegetables from other organic farmers and ones grown with chemical fertilizers. This suggests organic farming is only as good as the science behind it.

Over in Indonesia, a startup called iGrow is giving even city dwellers the opportunity to get into organic farming. The company pitches its concept as "playing FarmVille in real life," referring to a popular online game. The service allows customers to invest in small organic farms, choosing what they want to grow and where they want to grow it.

As of August, iGrow said it had partnered with 2,000 farmers and 7,000 small-scale investors, who invest anywhere from $110 to $1,100 each. The operation is cultivating more than 1,000 hectares of land, a third of which has already produced harvests. The founders said they are exploring expansion outside Indonesia, and mentioned Turkey and Japan as possibilities.

There is no denying that Asia faces huge agricultural challenges. But there is reason for optimism, too.

Big companies outside the region also see opportunity in meeting Asia's agricultural needs. Bayer, the German chemical and pharmaceutical maker, is developing new agrochemicals for rice and is looking to create tailored products for Asia, such as flood-resistant rice strains.

A mix of cooperation and competition between governments, corporations, startups and investors may just be a recipe for agricultural sustainability.

Nikkei staff writers Justina Lee in Singapore, Erwida Maulia in Jakarta, Kim Dung Tong in Ho Chi Minh City and Cliff Venzon in Manila contributed to this article.

Arcturus Announces 25,000-Sq Ft $5 Million "LED" Vertical Farming Project

Arcturus Announces 25,000-Sq Ft $5 Million "LED" Vertical Farming Project

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc. 

Dec 08, 2016, 08:00 ET

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, December 8, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc. (the "Company" or "Arcturus") (OTCQB: AGSTF) (CSE: AGS.CN) is pleased to announce that it has partnered with CBO Financial, Inc. ("CBO") for the development and operation of a major "LED" vertical farm project in Baltimore, Maryland. Arcturus is also pleased to announce that it has concurrently signed a Letter of Intent ("LOI") to lease 25,000-sq ft of commercial shell space from Volunteers of America Chesapeake to accommodate the Baltimore farm.

Volunteers of America Chesapeake ("VOAC"), one of the largest and most respected nonprofits in the region, owns a building in Baltimore, MD that will undergo additional improvements to accommodate Arcturus' Controlled Environment Agriculture ("CEA") technology, which uses LED lights to grow plants on vertically stacked levels. As a partner in this indoor farm, VOAC has agreed to contribute generous rent concessions to Arcturus.  The farm will be co-located in a residential reentry center, which helps ex-offenders reenter society and the workforce after serving federal prison sentences. The farm will provide job training and therapeutic opportunities for VOAC's residents. Arcturus, CBO and VOAC intend to use this Baltimore model to expand the Company's CEA technology and training and therapeutic programs developed by VOAC into other markets throughout the United States.

Arcturus previously announced that CBO would act as the Company's financial advisor with respect to New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) for certain vertical farming projects. As part of this Baltimore farm transaction, CBO Financial will be arranging for $5,000,000 in NMTC based financing. CBO will also plan, co-finance, and perform day-to-day operations at the farm, and Arcturus will provide the system design, off-take agreements, co-finance, and offer ongoing O&M support.  The Baltimore Farm is expected to be a showcase for Arcturus' LED horticulture lighting technology and the first of many projects that CBO and the Company will work on together in collaboration with Volunteers of America Chesapeake.

The NMTC program is a $65 billion federal program designed to incentivize private investment in low-income communities. NMTCs are provided to financial institutions in exchange for equity investments that eligible businesses can use to subsidize project development costs. CBO Financial helps driven organizations, such as Arcturus, to finance facilities that will provide goods and services that benefit populations in need and revitalize communities.

"We are pleased to have partnered with CBO Financial and Volunteers of America Chesapeake on this project and believe that its success will be a bellwether for public private partnerships within the urban farming industry," says Mr. William Gildea, Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc.'s CEO and Chairman. "With Volunteers of America Chesapeake's diversified real estate holdings, CBO Financial's experience in community development and expertise in navigating the NMTC process and Arcturus's CEA technology, this is a perfect partnership. Our goal was always to create impactful social and corporate programs that are mutually beneficial for all involved, from the community, to the company and our shareholders. Partnering with Volunteers of America Chesapeake and CBO Financial puts us in the position to achieve that goal. We hope this is the first of many joint-projects for our companies."

"We are delighted to be involved with this project, which produces fresh food and quality jobs in a low income community and provides job training and therapy opportunities for VOAC residents. We expect this to be a prototype for future, profitable commercial scale projects that include social service oriented job training and therapeutic programs," says Craig Stanley, CEO of CBO Financial.

"Volunteers of America Chesapeake has been supporting and providing resources for the ex-offender community for over 35 years in Baltimore, Maryland," says Russell Snyder, CEO of VOAC.  "We are committed to help the residents of our residential reentry center gain job skills and employment opportunities through social enterprise opportunities like vertical farming and we are pleased to partner with Arcturus and CBO Financial in this innovative project."

For further information, contact William Gildea, Director, at 617.834.9467.

On behalf of the Board,

Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc.  

William Gildea, CEO & Chairman

About Arcturus 

The Company's business model includes developing and acquiring technologies that will position it as a leader in the evolution of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) for the global production of various types of plants. Arcturus provides scalable, indoor CEA systems that utilize minimal land, water and energy regardless of climate, location or time of year and are customized to grow an abundance of crops close to consumers, therefore minimizing food miles and its impact to the environment. The Company holds an exclusive, worldwide license to use a patented vertical farming technology that, when compared to traditional plant production methods, generate yields up to 10 times greater per square foot of land.  The contained system provides many other benefits including seed to sale security, scalability, consistency due to year-round production, cost control, product safety and purity by eliminating environmental variability.

The Company is also in the business of designing and distributing LED lighting solutions utilizing the COB and MCOB technology. The Company is focused on delivering cost efficient lighting to North America via advanced e-commerce sites the Company owns and operates. LEDCanada.com which caters to B2B customers is a supplier of the newest and highest demand LED solutions. The Company also owns and operates COBGrowlights.com which caters to both large and small agriculture green houses and controlled cultivation centers.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts
responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not in any way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.  

This news release may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking.  Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.  Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration successes, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions.  There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties.  We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under the applicable laws. 

For further information, contact William Gildea, Director, at +1-617-834-9467.

SOURCE Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc.

The BCFN Foundation Presents The Food Sustainability Index in Brussels

The BCFN Foundation Presents The Food Sustainability Index in Brussels

This afternoon the BCFN Foundation will be at the seat of the European Parliament in Brussels to present the Food Sustainability Index, developed in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The Food Sustainability Index examines data relating to 25 countries and 16 cities, by means of a white paper, a city monitor, a series of infographics and a digital hub.

The aim is to promote better information on the global food paradoxes, in relation to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. An opportunity to discuss food waste, sustainable agriculture and nutrition challenges while highlighting best practices and concrete solutions which can help to reset the relationship between food, people and the planet.

Contributors

Luca Virginio - Vice Chairman, BCFN Foundation
Irene Mia - Economist Intelligence Unit
Angelo Riccaboni - Member of the Leadership Council of the UN SDSN, Coordinator of SDSN Mediterranean and BCFN Advisory Board member
Sirpa Pietikäinen - European People’s Party (EPP), Finland
Francesca Allievi – BCFN researcher and President of BCFN Alumni Association

Jacques Vandenschrik - European Federation of Food Banks
Angélique Delahaye - EPP, France

Matthias Meissner - WWF, Germany
Katarzyna Dembska - BCFN Researcher
Roberto Bertollini - Robert Bosch Academy

Affinor Growers Installs Second Tower at the Agriculture Research Demonstration Greenhouse BioPod Initiative

Affinor Growers Installs Second Tower at the Agriculture Research Demonstration Greenhouse BioPod Initiative

Vancouver (Canada), December 6, 2016 - Affinor Growers (CSE:AFI, OTC:RSSFF, Frankfurt:1AF) ("Affinor" or the “Corporation), is pleased to announce it has installed the second vertical growing tower with the University of the Fraser Valley Agriculture Training and Research Demonstration Greenhouse at the John Volken Academy in Surrey, British Columbia. The four level automated tower will allow Affinor Growers to continue to demonstrate and validate various crop models, and continue selling license agreements.

The tower will be planted with strawberries in January 2017 and holds 265 plants in a little over 100 square feet. The new equipment will double the production of the first tower installed last April 2016 and more than triples the production per square meter when compared to the traditional soil beds within the same greenhouse. The nature of the install is to continue to grow and confirm yields and viability of the technology with commercial plant density conditions.

Jarrett Malnarick, President and CEO"Affinor is excited with our on-going work at the UFV BC Agriculture Center of Excellence and continuing our relationship for agri-tech innovation and research to validate agriculture crop models for our technology while providing valuable agriculture skills training opportunities."

For More Information, please contact:

Jarrett Malnarick, President and CEO
604.837.8688
jarrett@affinorgrowers.com

About Affinor Growers Inc.

Affinor Growers is a publicly traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol ("AFI"). Affinor is focused on growing high quality crops such as romaine lettuce, spinach, strawberries using its vertical farming techniques. Affinor is committed to becoming a pre-eminent supplier and grower, using exclusive vertical farming techniques.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

AFFINOR GROWERS INC.

"Jarrett Malnarick"

President & CEO

The CSE has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This News Release contains forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "project", "should", "believe" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this News Release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Company's disclosure documents which can be found under the Company's profile onwww.sedar.com. This News Release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Feed The World? The Farm Without Any Soil

Feed The World? The Farm Without Any Soil

THE CHRONICLE HERALD 
Published December 5, 2016 - 8:59pm
Last Updated December 5, 2016 - 9:09pm

Loblaws backing retail test run for TruLeaf, Truro’s innovative indoor farmer

Bible Hill-based TruLeaf Sustainable Agriculture has started retailing its innovative, indoor-grown greens — partnering with Loblaws-owned grocer Dominion to distribute via that chain’s 11 Newfoundland stores.

Gregg Curwin, TruLeaf’s founder, president and chief executive officer, told The Chronicle Herald that Dominion began selling five TruLeaf products in October under TruLeaf’s GoodLeaf Farms brand.

Curwin said a five-ounce “clamshell” container of baby greens was selling for $4.99, about the same price as the regular Californian-grown premium-priced organic produce that currently comprises 90 per cent of all of Canada’s supply.

Curwin said the deal — to his knowledge the first time Loblaws had sold products made using hydroponics — was a pilot for launching across other markets including, initially, Atlantic Canada and the Greater Toronto Area.

He said Loblaws provided valuable advice relating to TruLeaf’s development.

Leading up to the big deal

The Dominion deal followed an April agreement with Gordon Food Service to sell into Nova Scotian restaurants and food service businesses for the first time, he said.

In October, the Truro and Colchester Chamber of Commerce recognized the 27-employee TruLeaf with an innovation award, while the previous month saw the Delta Management Group present a national Clean50 award to TruLeaf for developing and scaling its “smart plant” system.

Curwin said TruLeaf was on track to tap Greater Toronto Area consumers by opening there in late 2017. That facility would be about three times larger and more productive than the company’s existing 4,000-square-foot operation that produces 150,000-200,000 lbs. of greens annually. (See Chronicle Herald, Oct. 17.)

Going inside, getting vertical

To date, five-year-old TruLeaf has landed $2.5 million in financing, most of it from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and Crown capital agency Innovacorp, Curwin confirmed. The company’s private investors included vintner and former grocer Pete Luckett, as well as former Ocean Nutrition CEO Martin Jamieson, he said.

Curwin said TruLeaf’s products can’t be labelled as organic in Canada because they’re grown hydroponically. But he said pesticide-free and sustainably-based TruLeaf is going after the same consumers who bought organic produce.

He said TruLeaf plans to license the technology globally in “a few” years, following “significant” interest during the past two years.

Curwin said growing vertically indoors, rather than horizontally in fields, makes sense in a world marked by food insecurity, overpopulation, overcrowding, and environment-related risks such as climate change. TruLeaf’s model also allows food to be brought closer to consumers, he said.

TruLeaf’s Facebook page says it wants to “enable every community to grow the world’s healthiest food locally and sustainably.”

New Brunswick-raised Curwin studied at Saint Mary’s University before working for two decades in health care. He became intrigued with indoor farming after seeing a picture of a Japanese multi-level farm.

He said TruLeaf has been supported and advised by Dalhousie University’s Truro-based Faculty of Agriculture as well as provincially funded agricultural incubator Perennia and the National Research Council.

The science bit: TruLeaf’s tech

Using its trademarked but unpatented Smart Plant System, TruLeaf quadruples the amount of space available for farming by growing its plants on 10 levels. A fine-tuned LED array provides “sunlight.”

Excess water and humidity in the air is reclaimed to boost efficiencies, allowing the system to grow easily-transportable leafy greens with 90 per cent less water and less effluent and other waste — while yielding approximately 30 times as much food per square foot as a traditional farm, the company says.

Startup To Grow Fresh 'Super-Local' Food Out Of Recycled Shipping Containers In Paris

Startup To Grow Fresh 'Super-Local' Food Out Of Recycled Shipping Containers In Paris

Kimberley Mok (@kimberleymok)
Science / Sustainable Agriculture
December 5, 2016

Increasing urbanization, the huge carbon impact of conventionally grown produce, climate change and the resulting rise in food prices has prompted many people to look for other solutions to feed our growing cities. Some are turning to rooftop farms, while at home, families are trying out aquaponics, hydroponics and permaculture as a way to sustain themselves.

Entrepreneurs are getting in on the action too: French startup Agricool proposes urban agriculture done hydroponically, out of recycled shipping containers they are calling "cooltainers", to produce food that is "super-local with zero pesticide, zero preservative, zero GMO". The company was founded in 2015 by Gonzague Gru and Guillaume Fourdinier, sons of farmers who grew up eating farm-fresh fruits and vegetables. When they moved to Paris a few years ago, they were unable to find produce with the same fresh taste, and decided to start a company that would literally bring the farm into the city.

They say:

As existing solutions were not capable of delivering perfect food, we decided to delete all certitudes, and think out of the box. To get good fruits and vegetables in town, we need to farm in town. That’s the only solution. The problem is that we lack space. Our roofs and balconies aren’t sufficient to feed millions of city dwellers with fresh and local produce. After months of research, we found out the way to grow the equivalent of 4000m2 (1 acre) in a 30m2 (0.007 acre) recycled container.

According to the company, cooltainers will be modified so that the growing conditions is optimized. Water, lighting, and air will be regulated in order to create an environment that is estimated to be 120 times more productive than the same square footage of land, and powered by renewable energy sources. No pesticides will be used, and water usage will be reduced by 90 percent.

The company has just finished developing a cooltainer that is designed to scale p, so that it can be placed anywhere in the city. They recently garnered $4.3 million in funding, and are now planning to deploy 75 cooltainers that will produce 91 tons of strawberries -- their first test crop -- in 2017. While this isn't the first shipping container farm we've seen, it is yet another thought-provoking example of how our food security issues might be addressed by a bit of unconventional thinking that will change the conventional image of what farming entails. This may very well be the future of urban farming, or at least one piece of the puzzle. For more information, visit Agricool.