Loan Approved For SB Indoor Farming Project

Loan Approved For SB Indoor Farming Project

By Mark Peterson | 

Posted: Thu 5:25 PM, Feb 23, 2017  | 

Updated: Thu 6:37 PM, Feb 23, 2017

This could be the year indoor farming comes to inner city South Bend.

Planning for a vertical farm began back in 2015.

Earlier this week, an $800,000 loan was conditionally approved for the project (from the City of South Bend’s Industrial Revolving Loan Fund) while a recent Crowdfunding campaign raised $640,000. That puts the for-profit company called Green Sense that much closer to breaking ground on a facility that would be located on the Ivy Tech Campus.

“They're going to have a partnerships with Ivy Tech where they can bring students who have an interest in agriculture into the building into their process train them have them be able to have an educational opportunity there to learn how this all works,” said Acting Director of South Bend’s Community Investment Department, Brian Pawlowski. “There's some private side financing that needs to happen that'll be on the order of an additional two or so million dollars for the entirety of the project to go up but once that's all in place I would anticipate maybe sometime around this summer or so, they could potentially start construction at that point.”

At the vertical farm, leafy greens would be grown indoors, 365 days a year, hydroponically, using artificial light. “You know rain, wind, snow, shine whatever it may be, they can get the job done and they can really cater their produce to what the market demand is,” said Pawlowski.

Green Sense is a for-profit company that would pay for the project—Ivy Tech would essentially be getting a lab for free.

The first vertical farm Green Sense built was in Portage, Indiana…the last was in China. 

9 Reasons Why Vertical Farms Fail

9 Reasons Why Vertical Farms Fail

by Chris Michael | Feb 20, 2017 | Farm & Business Planning | 0 comments

First annual “Aglanta” event shines light on “shuttered” farms

This weekend 200+ urban farmers, policy makers, industry professionals, and good food advocates gathered in Atlanta, Georgia for the first annual “Aglanta” conference.

A highly promoted and anticipated segment of the event featured a unique panel titled: “An Examination of Shuttered Vertical Farming Facilities.”

The panel, hosted by industry commentator blog Agritecture provided a platform for three unique case studies with one overlapping theme: Tales of why vertical farms failed.

Watch the full panel discussion here >>

The panelists, including Paul Hardej, Co-Founder of FarmedHere, Mike Nasseri, Harvest Supervisor atLocalGarden, and Matt Liotta, CEO of PodPonics, took turns weighing in on several questions selected and facilitated by Agritecture’s Community Manager Andrew Blume, who moderated the event.

In this post, we’ll examine each panelist’s perspective to provide a detailed summary of the top 9 reasons each of these vertical farms ultimately failed.

1) Location, location, location.

Whether you’re talking about buying a house or building a vertical farm, choosing the right location iscritical.

After all, the whole reason you’re building a vertical farm is to grow crops closer to market and meet thedemand for fresher food. If demand doesn’t exist, then Poof! There goes your business feasibility.

On the other hand, imagine that you do have fantastic demand for local food. That advantage is often eclipsed by the inability for local farmers to start farms in or around where people actually live. Several obstacles stand in the way of urban farmers when tradition soil-based farming is impossible because of…

• … high cost of land.
• … poor soil quality.
• … inherent risk of uncontrollable factors.

Amplifying these disadvantages of urban farmers are the facts that unlike giant established and well-funded farms, the little guys can’t always afford the levels of insurance, permits, and “Plan Bs” to protect themselves from that risk.

Vertical farmers, however, have the unique ability to sideline these constraints by leveraging high density growing technology and taking control of their growing environment.

That said, just because the technology and techniques exist to grow food anywhere, the aspiring vertical farmer still has many questions to answer in order to get the location recipe just right.

Location question #1: What am I growing and for whom?

This is the most fundamental question for all startup farmers to ask, regardless of their growing technique.

Although we’ve said this for years, it’s worth repeating once more: 
If you can’t sell it, you shouldn’t grow it.

Whether you win or lose in your commercial farming venture comes down to being able to sell your produce, not just grow it.

So before you ever put down roots, it’s critical you do your market research to find out what your markets can’t get or needs more of, who your customers will be, and the potential prices you could charge.

Doing so will either save you a lot of money and heartache by telling you your idea isn’t worth pursuing or give you the green light on your farm planning journey.

Location question #2: What’s my distribution plan?

In addition to matching your crop(s) to market demand, it’s important to understand how you’ll physically get your produce from your facility to your customers.

Doing so requires that you know who your end customers are and keep your farm location as close to them as possible.

If you’re selling direct to consumer through a CSA (community supported agriculture) for example, your farm should be located as close to the community you’re serving as possible.

If you’re selling specifically to restaurants, you want your farm close to the restaurant(s) you’re serving.

If you’re selling direct to grocery stores… you get the point.

However, one exception here is if you decide to sell to these customers through a wholesaler or distribution partner, as was the case of PodPonics’s first farm.

Even though their farm was growing for local restaurants, they chose to do so through a distribution middleman which took his product across town to their warehouse only to return to the restaurants down the street.

This logistical oversight made Liotta change this thinking about farm locations. Instead of establishing a farm near the end consumer, he opted instead to set up their operations closer to their distribution partners.

“It’s about being at the point of distribution, not at the point of consumption.” — Matt Liotta, PodPonics

For new farmers, the lesson here is about knowing not only who you want to see consuming your food, but also how they’ll get it. For PodPonics, once they grew large enough and began selling through a distribution partner, the middleman essentially became their customer.

Location question #3: Will my building meet my farm’s needs?

Once you’ve nailed down the proximity to market question, it’s time to start searching for the right facility in the geographic area you’ve selected.

Indoor controlled environment farms often require substantial amounts of power and the fact is not all buildings are equipped with the type of electricity at the capacity these facilities require to operate.

When searching for a facility, it helps to know exactly what type of equipment you’re using and the energy requirements of each.

Before making a decision on a building, you must know how much power you’ll need to support your growing equipment, lighting, pumps, HVAC, automation equipment, dehumidifiers, fans, computers, etc. Growers serious about scaling up should also consider any increases in power requirements for future expansions.

Depending on the equipment you choose, should be paired with a qualified rep that can help you identify not only the best equipment t0 meet your farming goals, but also work with you to identify your electrical loads.

Having these exact numbers will allow you to seek out a building with the proper electrical capacity to make your farm work the way it should.

The bottom line: Both your geographical location and the physical space where you decide to install your vertical farm should be carefully considered. Your business will not get off the ground or go very far without a good location.

Looking to dive deeper? This video will walk you through some of the considerations for the proper indoor farm facility.

2) Choose a pricing strategy based on value.

One of the most important coaching conversations we have with our growers is about how they should price their products.

It’s a common instinct for new farmers to simply survey the prices on grocery store shelves and price their product to compete.

And Matt Liotta of Podponics shared that same gut instinct.

“We got into the market trying to compete with the California growers so we priced our product exactly the same as them… Our focus was to try and sell at the same price as everyone else, and try and lower the cost of producing it,” Liotta said.

But that’s fundamentally the wrong approach and Liotta admits it cost Podponics a lot of profit margin on their produce.

When we tell our farmers they should actually avoid competing with conventional growers, they often give us a confused look.

They forget that their product has significantly fewer “unknowns” to it and customers perceive local products as a fresher, more trustworthy option.

Their produce was not grown in some unknown field using unknown chemicals handled by unknownpeople and shipped for hundreds if not thousands of miles to sit on the shelves for an unknown amount of time.

Today’s consumers have even been shown to shell out more for the increased benefits of quality, transparency, and peace of mind.

It’s a fundamentally better product and it should be priced accordingly.

It’s important to remember that pricing is as much about customer perception as it is about profit margins. Both must be considered and play into how a local farmer communicates their value proposition through branding marketing.

The bottom line: Your pricing should match the quality of your product, not the status quo. With the right system and distribution strategy, the local product you produce should be better than anything else on the shelves and it should be priced to reflect the increase in value.

By growing and selling locally, our farmers are delivering a fundamentally different product, one that eliminates the unknowns and gives customers peace of mind.

3) Focus on trying to do one thing well.

A common pitfall of many vertical farms is attempting to do too many things at once. They want to grow food for market while productizing and selling the technology they’re using to grow their food.

The lesson may seem to only apply to bigger farms, but we’ve seen this time and time again with small producers too, albeit in different ways.

Know your “why”.

New farmers must understand they have only one goal:

Sell good food. Everything else comes second.

The more time, attention, and money you spend trying to productize the system you’re growing with, the less time you have to delight your customers with fresh, local food.

The same goes with decisions about which equipment to use to accomplish this goal.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen dozens of hard-working farmers invest their time, energy, and financial resources into half-baked ideas that ultimately fail, taking their money and dreams of starting a farm down at the same time.

Despite flamboyant claims about “plant sites” or some unfathomable acreage equivalent, choosing to use unproven technology is another way new farmers lose focus on what’s important: Their ability to grow and sell food.

The bottom line: Farmers can either grow food or develop technology- not both. Attempting to do both, as shown by all three panelists, ends poorly. Farmers who waste time on unproven systems or tinkering with their own tech instead of acquiring customers will ultimately end up out of business due to losing sight of their core objective: Selling food.

4) Labor is always your biggest cost.

We’ve said it a thousand times: Don’t overlook your labor costs!

Reflecting on their own “shuttered” operations, each of the three panelists echoed this warning about labor with gusto.

Matt Liotta of Podponics event went as far to say that “People are the problem,” when describing the challenges of balancing operating expenses and proper farm management.

All three panelists experienced similar challenges when discussing the workers on their respective farms. While the wages ranged were relatively low (ranging from $9-$15/hr), the costs added up quickly when paired with the growing techniques in use.

Many of the failed farms in question ignored ergonomics and were the opposite of efficient for humans to be working in. Multi-layered systems with grow beds reaching to the ceiling meant that farmhands had to travel up and down on a scissor lift to perform basic farm operations like planting, inspections, maintenance, and harvesting.

An excerpt from “The 4 Factors of Vertical Farming Success” warning would-be vertical farmers about system configurations increase the cost and complexity of performing basic farm tasks.

And don’t get the panelists started on scissor lifts…

The mere mention of the word sparked a heated conversation ragging on the clunky, expensive, and unclean nature of the machine.

“Scissor lifts are not an ideal solution, stated Mike Nasseri, Harvest Supervisor a Local Garden, a mechanically complex Vancouver-based farm that declared bankruptcyback in 2014. “Don’t use scissor lifts. Find another solution, please.”

Adding to that, Matt Liotta chimed in: “It’s very telling that Aerofarms, the big farm in the news right now is using scissor lifts,” citing the operational constraints of the world’s largest indoor farm. “Absolutely don’t use scissor lifts,” he said.

Of course, if you’ve talked to our team in the last 4 or 5 years, you’ve probably been steered away from these dangerous machines and the inefficient systems that require their use for everyday operations.

We’re much more fond of systems that enable growers to spend less time going up and down on a scissor lift, and more time working with their plants or getting more customers.

But won’t automation solve a lot of the farm labor issues?

Maybe, but probably not. At least not for the majority of small producers.

The fact is automation equipment requires massive capital investments to build and then requires highly skilled labor to operate and maintain it over time — both of which are in short supply at most local farms.

And why rely on automation to make your farm economically viable? That’s a question that tends to stump those obsessed with minimizing the cost of human labor. But perhaps there’s something to it…

Instead of asking how can we lower our operating expenses of performing farm tasks, we should be asking: how can we design a system that doesn’t need automation to function economically?

The bottom line: As a farmer, you need to implement a system that reduces labor costs and does not require you to install and maintain expensive automation technology to be economically viable.

“Don’t use scissor lifts. Find another solution, please.”  — Mike Nasseri

5) Quality farm labor requires quality farm education.

To make the labor equation work, local farmers need a reliable, capable workforce to help them with daily tasks like planting, harvesting, and packaging.

One of the most fiery points made during the entire panel occurred when Matt Liotta discussed his experiences with low-wage labor citing examples of disgruntled farmhands missing work because of court dates and sabotaging the system’s nutrient solution out of frustration. He and Hardej made it very clear that finding and developing quality farm laborer is critical to operating a farm with as few hiccups as possible.

But finding capable labor to make a local farm work is a difficult task, especially if you as the farmer aren’t exactly an expert yourself.

Things like how to grow hydroponically, how to find customers, and how to manage your farm business are all areas that most farmers need help with.

That’s part of the reason why we createdUpstart Universityover two years ago.

At that time, we had been working with farmers long enough to know that there were some significant, yet common gaps in the knowledge of both our farmers and their workers.

The courses we began creating back then are now helping over 1,200 students learn how to plan, launch and operate a modern farm every month for the price of a few coffees each month.

The bottom line: It should be clear by now that labor poses a significant challenges for local farmers and hiring workers without the knowledge they need to succeed will only pour fuel on the fire. To continue growing at the trajectory it’s currently on, the indoor/vertical farming industry will need even more accessible education opportunities for training and developing their farm laborers as well as business managers.

6) Treat your farm like process.

One of the biggest arguments we made in the 4 Factors of Vertical Farm Success (a free ebook), was the importance of creating an efficient farm layout and workflow. The same sentiment was echoed throughout the presentation by all three panelists.

Treating the farm like a manufacturing process, as opposed to an art form, means that you’re treating it like an optimization problem.

In today’s technology-based modern farming world, we all know that production is not the problem.

Growing in controlled environments and providing proper plant nutrition allows modern farmers to produce crops with astounding consistency and quality.

The real issue these three farmers faced was not “Can we grow it?” but “How do we run the growing operation efficiently and minimize cost?”

These are two fundamentally different questions with the second incorporating the complexity of humans working on the farm.

An excerpt from “The 4 Factors of Vertical Farming Success” on the importance of treating your farm like a manufacturing process to increase labor efficiency.

As mentioned above, the conventional way of “vertical farming” that uses stacked layers puts farm owners and their laborers at the mercy of expensive and dangerous scissor lifts in order to access their crops.

These types of production methods are totally inefficient because of the time spent traveling up and down aisles and between layers to do everything from the initial planting all the way to the harvest, and everything in between. Such complicated workflows reduce efficiency and increase labor costs,

When asked what he would do differently the next time around, Paul Hardej of FarmedHere said he would avoid building such a tall system that requires lifts to provide basic access.

Instead, he would think about any future vertical farm as first and foremost a “manufacturing and production process.”

The bottom line: When evaluating farm equipment options, it’s important to see past production. Every system can grow crops, but not every system can optimize your workflows and maximize labor efficiencies. We discuss this idea in much more detail in the 4 Factors of Vertical Farm Success.

7) Data is useless unless you can put it to work.

There seems to be an entire subset of the rapidly growing AgTech industry that is straight-up batty over data. And rightly so.

The proliferation of sensors and cameras to glean ever more data from a controlled environment farming operation is opening up new doors for improving yields and process.

The problem, however, comes with an obsession of collecting data without an intended use or without the hardware behind it to leverage it effectively.

What’s more is that these types of data collection systems require significant amounts of capital and time to deploy, time and money that most local farmers don’t have.

Data helps inform decisions, but don’t bet the farm on it.

Data is actually the one area that granted each of these “shuttered farms” some hope.

Podponics, for example, used data to analyze and augment their production technique for lettuce to reduce labor time during the harvest.

FarmedHere also leveraged data systems to collect and provide helpful insights to improve their farm’s yields.

Both farms stated that while new technology can certainly be used to the advantage of a new farmer, data and tech alone won’t save you. It’s up to the grower to find a system that produces the yields they need at the cost they can afford to sell to the customers they’ve found that are demanding it. And right now, no single data-driven growing solution can remove the farmer from this set of skills.

The bottom line: Local farmers should not rely on data to save them from an inefficient farm setup or their inability to sell their crops. Data can amplify and accelerate a farmer’s production and sales, but only if they have the infrastructure in place to use if effectively.

8) Is Organic dead yet?

For a long time, our team has been coaching farmers to reconsider the cost of an Organic certification and instead spend that time and money working to form real relationships with customers.

Why? It’s not that we don’t see the value in the certification on it’s own, we just have yet to meet a customer who wants organic food.

What customers really want is transparency and to trust that the food they buy and consume is safe, nutritious, and grow in ways they can support.

They don’t want a label, they want certainty. We’ve been given a label as a proxy but what we wanted was trust and security.

Buying from a local farmer gives them greater feelings of security because they can visit their farm and shake their hand.

That’s part of the reason why Liotta stated that “local is worth more than organic.”

This statement promptly triggered another back and forth between the Podponics CEO and the FarmedHere Founder as they discussed everything from consumer perceptions to pesticide use.

And yet, Hardej, who helped FarmedHere become the first Organic-certified aquaponic farms in the U.S.,— a feat that demands the respect and gratitude from anyone in the modern farming movement — had a different opinion on the value to consumers. He knows first hand that consumers want to buy brands they feel are the healthiest and safest option and that often means organic.

In the end, however, he too conceded that “local is the new organic.”

The bottom line: Consumers have lost trust in the conventional ways of growing food and labels like organic are a poor and increasingly confusing substitute for true transparent farmer-consumer relationship. This type of trust and transparency is only truly available with local options.

9) Greenhouse vs. indoor? Aquaponics vs. hydroponics? It’s not that simple.

Towards the end of the panel, there was some discussion about production techniques and facility types and which was the best for modern growers.

The table was divided along the typical lines of aquaponics vs. hydroponics with arguments lobbed in each direction about which was a viable commercial technique when aiming for profitable production.

There was also some discussion about the marginal cost of producing food in a greenhouse vs. an indoor facility, with the bias towards indoor, highly controlled production.

From our experience, however, getting into a philosophical discussion along each of these battle lines doesn’t end up going anywhere.

There will always be those outspokenindividuals who prefer one over the other and don’t hesitate to tell you which one youshould choose for your farm.

But the important thing to remember is that every situation, every location, and every local market is unique and so should be approach when making these two fundamental decisions.

As a new startup farmer, it’s your responsibility to evaluate your unique situation objectively. That includes your climate, your initial investment, your desired level of operating complexity (aquaponics, of course, being slightly more complex production technique), the cost of electricity in your area, your market’s sensitivities about price and preferences, etc.

Our team has helped hundreds of farmers make this decision through an advanced costs/conditions calculator and we can help you too if you need more than just a talking head for guidance. We even have a free webinar that helps walk you through this exact question.

The bottom line: Everyone has their own answer to these two questions. To establish a successful farm, you must eliminate subjectivity from the decision and evaluate all your variables carefully to avoid choosing a technique or facility that reduces your ability to flourish.

Conclusion: The future is bright for vertical farming

If you’ve been paying attention to the vertical farming industry over the last few years, you know that it’sjust starting to take off.

There are new companies emerging every day promising to deliver new solutions in every subcategory from growing equipment, lighting technology, climate controls, data, sensors, automation, consulting, and much more.

If one thing is clear from this post, it’s that we’re all still learning. That’s the beauty of fast-growth, nascent industries.

Vertical farming, in a lot of ways, is the next frontier of agriculture.

It’s one of the most promising ways to get fresh food into our cities and food-insecure places like Alaska and other often overlooked food deserts.

By exerting more control over the growing environment, making better use of our resources, and implementing smart, labor-efficient growing technology, I believe we’ll see some tremendous strides made toward greater access to better food for anyone who wants it.

I personally want to thank the three panelists involved in the Aglanta event for their courage, selflessness, and willingness to talk about what are undoubtedly painful outcomes to ideas they invested much of their lives pursuing.

It’s through collaborative forces that we’ll be able to keep pushing the boundaries of what vertical farming is and how it can help us achieve amazing things.

Ready to get started in vertical farming?

Here are few places to start:

Upstart University & The Upstart University Blog — As mentioned above, this is an online learning platform for aspiring modern farmers who are serious about starting their own farming business. The courses are all super accessible and we add new material every month. It’s seriously the best (and cost effective!) investment you can make if you’re ready to move from idea to business. Join over 1,200 students for $9.99/mo or just start by reading our helpful blog posts for free.

“Hydroponic Food Production” by Howard Resh — This is a great guide for serious hydroponic growers. Resh wrote the book on hydroponic farming (literally) and you’d be wise to pick up a copy for those tricky soil-less growing questions.

Bright Agrotech’s eBooks (some free, some paid) — Over the last 5 years, our organization has worked with hundreds of modern farmers starting and scaling vertical farms. In the process, we’ve identified some of their toughest challenges and created high-quality ebooks, guides, and even workshops to help them find solutions. We’ve got guides on business planning, post-harvest produce handling, and full crop guides that tell you what specific crops need to grow successfully in hydroponic systems. Again, these resources are not for the average hobbyist just looking for low-quality, anecdotal info on the internet. These are for serious growers that are seeking real results.

Over 300+ free videos on YouTube — If you’re looking for answers to specific questions or more insight into what makes farms using ZipGrow technology work, you can swing over to our YouTube channel where you’ll find over 5 years worth of dedicated modern farming content. We started the channel way back in 2011 because we were sick of all the BS out there in the aquaponic growing niche and we decided to do something about it. Over 5 years later, we continue to push out 2–3 videos per week on topics ranging from indoor farming, LED lighting technology, quick tips from real farmers, and much more. Check it out and hit subscribe if you find these helpful.

Urban Farming Insider: Indoor Urban Farming Tips from Ally Monk, CEO and Co-Founder of Motorleaf

Urban Farming Insider: Indoor Urban Farming Tips from Ally Monk, CEO and Co-Founder of Motorleaf

Ally Monk and Ramen Dutta co-founded  Motorleaf, an indoor hydroponic and greenhouse automation startup in 2015, when Ramen made the first working prototype (image of a current product below). CEO Ally shared with us the history of Motorleaf, the role of Artificial Intelligence in Urban Farming, and tips for indoor urban farming beginners. 

Most importantly, Motorleaf is now live on Kickstarter! If you find this article interesting, check out their kickstarter page!

Sections Covered: 

- The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Urban Farming
- The typical scale of indoor farmers in acreage
- How the components of the Motorleaf system help indoor urban farmers
- Tips to Improve Indoor Growing: Conclusions from the Motorleaf Data
- How to design a "blueprint" for your urban farming system
- Rapid Fire Questions

Introduction

UV:Can you talk about, for people who don't know the background of Motorleaf and how it started, the cofounders, kind of what the founding principles were, that kind of thing?

Ally: Well the background to how Motorleaf started really starts with my co-founder Ramen Dutta, and he had an education at McGill university in agricultural engineering, so he always had an interest and a passion for agriculture, and he's been growing indoors since he was a kid basically. 

He left university and for the better part of 15 years he was at an IT company, he was still growing indoors, but one of the recurring problems whenever he wanted to go away (from his indoor growing operation), he'd either have to find somebody who really knew his system to look after it while he was gone or he had to basically expect is crops to do really badly while he was away or die. 

So that had a pretty big impact, because if he would go on vacation for as long as he wanted, all of his crops would die. 

So Ramen went online and thought there should be some sort of solution, like one on a smart phone, like Google, Nest, for example, something like that, but for his (indoor growing) system, but he couldn't find one. 

So he basically started hacking together the first version of Motorleaf back in 2015, and shortly thereafter, we started working in the same co-working space, and started showing it to some other people, and they said "Wow, build me one!", and at that point we decided to try to bring it to market, and our ambition wasn't particularly grand, it was, "can we bring it to market and make enough money to just sort of supplement our income" was really as much as we wanted to do.

Then we went to the Indoor AgCon conference in Las Vegas, in late 2015, and we spoke to Mike Betts, who is the director of investment for AgFunder, and he said he liked what we were building and encouraged us to not just try to reach market but start a proper business and get going. 

Then next, by luck almost, we applied to the Founder Fuel accelerator program in Montreal, and unbeknownst to us, the theme of the cohort that they were starting was Artificial Intelligence, and they were really one of the first groups of people to start speaking to us, really it was the first moment when a 3rd party looked at what we were building and really started to look into the size of the market, and said "Hey guys, what you're building has bigger applications than what you were first thinking about", and we finished founder fuel in July of 2016. 

From that point forward we decided we would really need some funding to accelerate the business, and that's what we've been doing since then.

UV: It's just you two co-founders right?

Ally: Yep, Ramen and myself are the co-founders and and including some of the part time people that work with us we're at 10 or 12 people right now.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Urban Farming

UV:  Why does agriculture need AI? Are there more simple solutions that can get most of the problem solved? What's the key difference here?

Ally: 
There's a few really key differences.

When Ramen was looking online for a system he really wanted something that was wireless and scalable so that he could access his data, looking at his growth. 

He wanted a true online and offline system that could talk to the AI side of things, even if you set things on a timer, or as an example, you set things to keep your pH at a certain level, that doesn't take into any consideration data that your plants might be emitting that you could capture that could tell you that they actually need something to change immediately. 

Maybe that data will tell you, based on all kinds of different variants, if you set or change something now, something bad will happen if you continue as you are.

Really, In a way, one of the definitions of AI is that it's able to do something that no human can do manually, so a very simple example would be that with our system, every four seconds you're testing your pH level.

Now, you could say that a human could do that every four seconds, do that test every four seconds, but through machine learning, could a human predict a very complex algorithm based on thousands and thousands of data points every single day?

Probably not. People need indoor agriculture to start getting smart because it's not a place with (this type of) technology, we're giving them shortcuts and answers that otherwise would take a hell of a long time to figure out.

The typical scale of indoor farmers in acreage

UV: For the people you're working with the actual customers, can you talk about their scale? For someone who is just starting out and thinking about starting a system like this themselves, what are the square meters or square feet that their working with and what is the range there?

Ally: One of the best things that Ramen did in the early days is that we had this one prototype that was the first big unit, it had everything, it was the first prototype, and it was very expensive to produce. 

But he, by design, opted to include all the components, and by connecting them wirelessly by the radio, it enabled you to add on more and more (components), it enabled anyone to grow and use our system from the size of a closet up to 5 acres, and that's simply using one, main control, which is the "heart" unit, and from there you can add on other pieces and start monitoring and controlling everything else that you might need.

How the components of the Motorleaf system help indoor urban farmers

UV: Is that as simple as sticking a sensor in the soil or growing medium? What does the hardware look like?

Ally: The four units that we currently have on the market (The "Droplet", "Driplet" , "Powerleaf", and "Heart") (we have more coming out soon), cover the different aspects. 

If you want to break it down into 2 categories, they are:

1) monitoring, and
2) automation. 

So on the monitoring side of things, the "heart" has the hard drive inside of it, it allows for the alerts and communicators with the web tool, you can have a view of your indoor growing, you can also monitor motion for security, and every 4 seconds it's monitoring your air temperature, your humidity, and things like that, so that's the first unit.

The second unit is called the droplet, and every 3 or 4 seconds it is monitoring your water level, water temperature, your pH level, and your nutrient level, so that's four different things being monitored every four seconds near your reservoir tank (compatible with both soil and hydroponic style growing). 

The next unit we have is the driplet. The driplet can deliver pH up, pH down, nutrient A, nutrient B, depending what the grower has determined to be the optimal one, the optimal application of nutrients that it needs. '

UV: I'm assuming the load the nutrients physically at the growing site? They can add the actual physical nutrient or buffer or whatever they're doing right?

Ally: Yes the driplet basically sucks up, pH up pH down, Nutrient A, Nutrient B, from whatever containers they want to use and then it pumps it into the reservoir tank and that allows the readings that the droplet gets. 

The last unit does a lot of things, and it is the "Power Leaf", and with the Powerleaf you can connect any 2 pieces of crop equipment, as an example, a humidifier or a de-humidifier, but based on what the sensors from either the heart or the droplet are telling you, you can turn things on or off automatically, so for example, using data from the water reservoir tank could be "hey my tank is down to the last 20%, I'm going to have to turn on my reservoir".

UV: You can customize solutions using the (4th) Powerleaf component, and make your own custom whatever it is that you want to do?

Ally: Exactly, you might just want to buy one powerleaf you may want to buy 100 of them.

Tips to Improve Indoor Growing: Conclusions from the Motorleaf Data

UV: Getting to the conclusions that you can draw from getting access to this data, based off of the data that you're collecting, if you had to summarize a couple ways that people using your system or people not using your system to really quickly improve how they're growing, what would those, say, three things be?

Ally: People don't know, and perhaps don't even record how much time they spend manually doing anything, if you're talking about a commercial grower, they're running a business. 

So there's the growing aspect and the running the business aspect, so what we've found is that you can 70% of the time that someone is likely being paid by using our system. That includes adjusting the pH and all the rest of it. 

The data is allowing people to understand what has happened, during their grow. So we also, have time lapse video, you see your whole grow as like a movie, but instead of seeing just eventually what happened, you can see, on this day, this happened, on that day what happened that made my plants droop, my pH suddenly collapsed, did my lights not come on properly?

Imagine being able to go back in time and look in detail at everything that happened during that grow that's a really useful tool. 

Not only just looking back, imagine if you had a fantastic grow that you want to replicate, look back, see exactly what your settings were, then replicate that for the next grow.

UV: So to make sure I understand correctly, one of the things that you've noticed or one of the mistakes you think people make is not properly accounting for the time they spend manually working and also they don't pay enough attention to past results that have been good or bad, and trying to avoid or replicate those results. 

Ally: Yes. Also just the manner in which they record those good results. How many people do you know who literally write things down on scraps of paper and then say "I just lost it that was three months ago where did I put it?".  

Imagine having one place where all of your data is clean. It's data that is very accurate as well it's not like "oh I had a quick look at the temperature gauge it looked around 20 degrees Celsius" but now you actually have hard data that is indisputable.

How to design a "blueprint" for your urban farming system

UV: A lot of people ask us about a word, it comes up a lot, that is "blueprint". The essential components for a system, can you talk about the core components and what a blueprint might look like (for indoor urban farming)?

Ally: We've designed everything to be system agnostic, anybody that's using anything in any manner can use us. 

But what we've found that comes up again and again when we're being asked, "Is it going to work with X", "Is it going to work with Y", is are they soil based or are they using a hydroponic type of system or aeroponics. 

The most important thing I think is are people using a water reservoir tank with the pH and nutrients directly (hydroponic) versus someone who is (growing in soil). 

Lighting is also incredibly important, we're talking with many manufacturers who are very interested in knowing how effective their lights are and capturing data while the grow is happening. 

Having enough light and the right kind of light is really important more and more for people. 

The grow medium, we know that people want to test, as an example clay pellets for one grow and coco for the next one, so understanding what is the grow medium for the crop you're using. 

Everything is a recipe. If you're making a cake (for example), your ingredients (can be different), using one type of flour vs another type of flour, tastes completely different. 

Some people need to figure out, "What is my ideal set of ingredients for my set up", and then stick to it if they're happy with it. 

That's where comparing the data really helps, because if you have a record of exactly what you're doing and have been doing you know what works and what doesn't work and what exactly changed, and know, "what we're the things that worked?".

Rapid Fire Questions

UV: Rapid fire questions: What's your favorite fruit or vegetable?
 
Ally: Strawberries because they should be grown in every land and we hope to do that. Favorite vegetable would probably be...probably a carrot. 

UV: What's the most common crop you see your customers growing?

Ally: We don't ask, based off the information that we do have, I would say that it is probably a split between micro greens and leafy greens. 

UV: What's a good book that you've read, about agriculture or urban farming that you would suggest to somebody who is just starting out? It doesn't have to be about urban Ag it can be any kind of book. 

Ally: I would say the one that resonates with me, because everyone in agriculture has to be patient and philosophical about things, is a book of quotes from Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh has a good outlook on life. 

UV: What's the biggest or moist surprising things you've learned in your Motorleaf journey?

Ally: How hard it is to build hardware, it is not a joke. It's like you have to start 2 different companies at the same time. Most people don't appreciate how big of a challenge it is to get hardware to market. 

UV: How many times harder is the hardware than the software? 

Ally: I would say it's probably 10x as hard. If we start talking about artificial intelligence and making that work, which is a whole other part, that is 20x harder.

UV: Last one I have is what can you tell us about your launch, what are the details, what's the website people go to, what's the pricing, any other relevant information?

Ally: We've been in beta since the summer of 2016, publically launch on Kickstarter Feb 21st, and the best place to find that information is Motorleaf.com, you'll find links to the Kickstarter on that page, also if you sign up for our newsletter on our website, under the contact box area, you will automatically get emailed the early bird special!

UV: What is your policy on data ownership?

Ally: I want to be clear that people don't have to share data with us, there's always a question around who owns the data, so we have an offline and an online mode that people can use that will (provide the option of private data).

Thanks Ally!

The Powerleaf by Motorleaf, one of 4 product components currently available to indoor urban farmers. Courtesy of Motorleaf

Ever Thought of Growing What You Eat? These Chennai-Based NIT Grads Are Enabling Urban Indoor Farmers To Do Just That

Ever Thought of Growing What You Eat? These Chennai-Based NIT Grads Are Enabling Urban Indoor Farmers To Do Just That

SINDHU MV

22 FEBRUARY 2017
This announcement is sponsored by Tissot

When Deepak Srinivasan and Ashish Khan were studying at NIT Trichy, they were driven by a passion to solve some of the most basic problems the world faces today. Life, though, had other plans for them after they graduated. Deepak, a chemical engineer, worked as a product analyst and Ashish, a mechanical engineer, as a design engineer. The idea of creating something that would have immense impact remained. The duo – friends for over six years – experimented with various ideas before deciding to collaborate with a group of friends on a DIY project to localise food production.

Eventually, Deepak and Ashish narrowed this down to explore the possibilities offered by aquaponics, and began developing a prototype. Aquaponics is a system of aquaculture in which the waste produced by farmed fish or other aquatic creatures supplies the nutrients for plants grown hydroponically, which in turn purify the water.

Nine months down the line, in March 2016, they quit their jobs to begin their entrepreneurial journey, and launched their startup – Crofters. The startup’s flagship device is an intelligent, self-cleaning, indoor aquaponics ecosystem that helps to grow completely organic food even from inside a living room.

Deepak says, “Crofters helps people farm their fresh, healthy food in a sustainable manner. We are making urban indoor farming a reality for a lot of passionate gardeners living in houses without a backyard or a terrace of their own.”

This innovation won them the Tissot's Signature Innovators Club award for January 2017.

The young entrepreneurs are very upbeat about their product and the impact it is likely to create. In Deepak’s words, “We are innovating mankind’s oldest industry –  agriculture, by combining it with the power of technology. Through our product, we feel we are making it practical for people to grow what they eat.”

‘Grow light’ an integral component of Crofters’ journey

Crofters has created hardware and software that integrates with a device and enables people to grow their own food. It took them six months of prototyping to develop their first product and another three months to make it ready for the early adopters.

Together, with 15 early adopters, who are beta testing the product, Crofters is gathering and incorporating user feedback to make the product market-ready. Deepak says, “We are aiming to launch the product by the end of February 2017.”

The product’s greatest strength is their LED grow light technology, which has been developed in-house. The co-founders say that this technology will help to convert indoor farming areas in urban living spaces into farms and reduce water consumption by 80 percent, paving the way for practical vertical farming making optimal use of available spaces. “The grow light technology and the product design makes farming possible in areas previously considered unsuitable for farming. These are our unique strengths,” says 23-year old Deepak.

While the LED grow light is one of their key product highlights, a few months ago, in the prototyping phase, it was the biggest challenge for the team. Ashish says, “Initially, we found it challenging to develop world-class LED grow lights that mimic sunlight for efficient growth of plants indoors. Through our continuous R&D, we now have created grow lights that use only the red and blue spectra to mimic sunlight in an efficient manner.”

A year that could define Crofters’ market success

The Crofters team comprises six members, who work on automation, design, and engineering. As far as the co-founders’ key responsibilities are concerned, Deepak handles operations and management, while Ashish handles product development.

As the Crofters team continues to fine-tune the product for its market launch, they are seeing regular visitors at their office in Chennai, who are all keen to experience the product. Deepak spends his afternoons in client meetings and interacting with suppliers for sourcing raw materials, followed by product deliveries in the evenings.

Crofters’ products are currently only available online with door-to-door delivery and service. They also have a consumables model where people order add-ons and additional accessories regularly. In the past three months, since the launch of their early adopter programme, apart from successfully onboarding 15 early adopters, they have been getting queries from across the globe. Deepak says, “We are hoping to have at least 200 clients in the next six months and make the product globally shippable by the end of the year.”

Sharing details of their marketing, sales, and product development plan, Ashish says, “We are currently partnering with online distributors to make our product available on other online platforms as well. We are also coming up with a series of products available at various price ranges to help us increase the reach. And, the option to buy add-ons from our own online platform will enable to push up our revenues.” As a near long-term plan, Crofters is also looking at collecting system data that will help them scale for larger urban farms. “In the next two years, Crofters will be launching large-scale urban farm products to make fresh healthy food locally available.”

Talking about the growth potential for Crofters, Deepak says, “Vertical farming is expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2020.The factors driving the growth of the vertical farming market include the demand for high-quality food with no use of pesticides, less dependency on the weather for production, a growing urban population, and interest in farming with reduced negative environmental impact, among others. And Crofters fits in beautifully here.”

He adds, “While the concept of indoor farming, be it small scale or large scale, is yet to catch up in India, we are seeing a lot of conversations around it. And soon, the conversations will convert into interest and thereby demand for a product like ours.”

Making indoor farming simple

Among the many things that make the Crofters team happy is seeing their customers happy. Narrating a customer story that the team considers has been part of Crofters journey, says Ashish. “When we were designing the Crofters Ecosystem, one of our friends gifted our ecosystem to his dad, Shanmugam, who after retiring, was exploring indoor farming but facing difficulties with conventional methods.” Ashish calls Shanmugam ‘a dream customer any startup would want’, because, “he was patient and understanding, kept answering the questions that the Crofter’s team were continually seeking to improve their ecosystem.” And, in the past five months, Shanmugam has been successfully growing various leafy greens and herbs using Crofters’ product. “For him and his family, the Ecosystem has become part of their life. He spends his evening around the Ecosystem enjoying nature right inside his home. This is a highlight for us,” says Ashish.

Delving on the role of innovation for Crofters, Ashish says, “We have built an intelligent, self-cleaning, aquaponics systems that helps people grow completely organic food in the comfort of their homes. We have combined nature and technology to build intelligent systems with a mobile app and sensor units that help control and monitor all ecosystem parameters remotely. And all this comes with zero-maintenance. Innovation plays a major role; in fact, innovation forms the core of our business.”

The two youngsters feel every inch of their effort has been worthwhile. “The idea that we will empower people to grow their own food is exciting. The idea motivates us to keep going.”

He explains that people have been able to grow varieties of leafy greens, herbs, and other small plants for their consumption in an effortless manner, which previously was a cumbersome process. “We have bought food home again,” gleams the young entrepreneur. “Products like ours will play a role in shaping the lifestyle of the generations to come and take notice of the quality of food we eat.”

This Startup Wants M'sian Urbanites To Get Down And Dirty With Indoor Farming

This Startup Wants M'sian Urbanites To Get Down And Dirty With Indoor Farming

Ellia Pikri

The idea of farming, even just growing vegetables to feed your own family is seen as something that is done in the countryside by humble farmers and to some urbanites, embodies unrewarding physical labour.

This is the stigma that CityFarm team Jayden Koay, Johanson Chew and Looi Choon Beng are fighting to dispel in their startup journey.

Johanson was the first among the team to wet his toes in urban farming, but eventually all three of them were building their own farms in 2015.

“Initially, there was a challenge where it was difficult to find hydroponics equipment and supplies,” said Jayden. “This triggered us to form an entity to help all urban farming enthusiasts.”

“We soon realised that there is a bigger purpose behind urban farming. Soon there will be food source crisis due to rising population, pollution and climate change.”

Now aware of the environmental impact that urban farming could have in helping the populations in the future, the team were determined to take action. So over one casual teh tarik session between the three friends and urban farmers, they decided to join forces and form an urban farming business, which led to CityFarm’s launch in July last year.

Urban farming technology, especially Hydroponics (the process of growing plants without soil, usually in water) is not a new concept to Malaysia from an agricultural standpoint, but what sets CityFarm apart as an urban farming concept is that they are making it convenient for the individual layman to start growing their own crops indoors.

Rising Populations Pose A Starvation Danger

It is hard to imagine this now in an era where obesity is an issue inflicting more than just first world countries, but as the population continues to grow exponentially over the years, current agricultural practices might not be enough to supply food for everyone.

The world population is projected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, and in Malaysia, 60% of the population will be living in urban areas, and will continue to rise with growth and rapid urbanisation. Cities grow ever-packed with people, and space is becoming an ever valuable commodity.

According to Cityfarm, “80% of cultivated land is already in use. Moreover, extreme weather patterns and devastated crops create higher food prices, and consumers become more conscious on how their foods are produced now.”

This is where urban agriculture comes in, to utilise the ever-valuable space.

“We are seeing increasing interest of the market in this field.” said Johanson. “In light of a recently banned pesticide found in local vegetables and flooding, the public is getting more health and environmentally conscious. Urbanisation is inevitable and we estimate interest in urban farming will keep going up. We intend keep this trend going by studying strategies used other countries where urban farming is more mature like US and Japan.”

“Urban farming is still considered as infant stage in Malaysia where market adoption rate will be relatively low due to low awareness. Hence, we have series of go-to-market strategies that focus on public awareness, e.g. classes for students and public and exhibitions.” said Looi Choon Beng.

For those who are interested in picking up urban farming, the listing of products available on the CityFarm website may seem daunting for the beginner. The team understands that this is a budding concept in Malaysia and offers classes to help Malaysians pick up the hobby.

Currently available is a hydroponics farming course with a free farm set for RM349.90, but for any corporates or even individuals who want to see how its done, CityFarm offers a tour of their farm, which, according to Johanson, “is where we give our customers tours and see our product in use”.

And while CityFarm is not yet a year into launch, they are currently into rapid expansion mode which, according to Johanson, refers to:

• Efforts on public awareness (classes and exhibitions)
• Enrichment of product catalog (new products)
• Partnership with developers on eco projects
• Build and operate farm with strategic partners
• Physical store expansion

So since urban farming, is as the team describes, “in its infancy in Malaysia,” how are they doing in terms of sales? To this, Looi Choon Beng says that “Our SEO and SEM has been very successful so far. The overwhelming majority of conversions are coming from these channels and we are seeing on average a 20% increase in revenue every month since we started.”

CityFarm is not an SME exactly, but the team has big ideas to help Malaysia catch up with first-world countries like Japan and USA. Getting Malaysians to pick up a new habit such as this might be tough for the team, so they’re expending a lot of effort into public education to increase the absorption rate of urban farming among the locals.

Urban Farming Insider: With Glenn Behrman, Founder CEA Advisers, The Plant Shed, and Greentech Agro

Urban Farming Insider: With Glenn Behrman, Founder CEA Advisers, The Plant Shed, and Greentech Agro

Glenn Behrman first started the Plant Shed in the 1970's, and has been involved with urban agriculture for over 40 years. We caught up with Glenn to discuss many topics, including his personal story, container farming versus vertical farming, and what is wrong with today's perception of urban farming.

UV:                       
Can you tell us a little bit about CEA Advisors and what you guys are working on now and how you got started? What is your background in the urban farming industry?

Glenn:
My career started in the foliage industry in the early '70s. When I first started there was no such thing as a real foliage industry. It was houseplants but (at the time) there was no such thing as houseplants. You know what I mean? There was no Home Depots and no aquaculture and no LED lights. There was no real marketing channel. It was a fragmented industry.

It was ripe for disruption. When I went into it, I had no experience and no real insight. I had nothing. I had no money. I had no education. I just knew it was a good idea and I just spent the next 25 years putting one foot in front of the other and building up a business that was a very substantial business that was one of the first real category killers before the term really existed. 

The houseplant industry: A precursor to urban farming

UV:                   
That company (that dealt houseplants) was different than CEA Advisors? Did it have a different name?

Glenn:                  
Yeah, that was called The Plant Shed. It was in New York City. It was nine stores. I had an import division. I started traveling to the Philippines and Thailand and China back in the '70s and importing various lawn and garden products for sale in my own
stores. 

The last store that I had in New York City, before I retired and sold the business, was 21,000 square feet. It was in a location that now could probably be, and I'm not exaggerating, now in New York City, would probably be $100,000 per month to rent. 

UV:                 
These were primarily nonedible plants though, right?

Glenn:                  
Yeah, just houseplants, just ornamental plants for beautifying people's homes. It's funny because I kind of remember the first day, or the first time after Home Depot entered the market ... I remember for the first time telling somebody, "Look (now) plants are basically disposable."  You put something in this corner in your living room and it looks beautiful for six months, and then it could die so you throw it away and you buy a new one.  

You know what I mean? The whole industry, it went from a beautiful to ... It went from a living thing to a piece of furniture.

Glenn:                  
(Eventually) we started importing orchids from Thailand. We built a big nursery and a big plant brokerage business there. Then in 1994, I just sold everything and moved to Thailand.

UV: 
What was the thinking behind that?

Glenn:
I just had enough. I had enough money. I had enough.Things were changing. Ikea was in the plant business. Home Depot was doing a big job. Rents in New York City were unbelievable. It wasn't fun anymore. 

The Early Days of Urban Farming

UV:                 
How did you move from the foliage, as you say, to the more edible type stuff?

Glenn:   
What happened was, while I was living in Thailand I became the landscape project manager for a casino project in Vietnam. It was a 500 acre site that was just sand. It had to be completely landscaped as a five star hotel. 

As that project was coming to a close, I went to China to Hortiflorexpo, which is an event that's held every year in China. You know, like a horticulture exposition. 
               
On my way back I read about a company in Holland that was starting to do research on indoor farming, using LED lighting, climate control and all that kind of stuff. I immediately went to Holland to meet with those people.

After we met I immediately tried to buy the U.S. rights to that company.

After seeing their technology. The seed for indoor farming was planted in my head. I went back home to Thailand. We had a big home and a farm and all that there. I told my wife, "You know what, we're moving back to America. I am going to get involved
with this new technology- take everything that I've learned and everything that
I've done and all the connections that I have, and I'm going to pursue this." That's what I did.

The beginning of GreenTech Agro

UV:
Did you start a new company at point, back in the States?

Glenn:                  
We started a new company called GreenTech Agro.

UV: 
Okay, and then you eventually sold that company and then started CEA Advisors or is that company still around?

Glenn:                  
That company's still around. It's kind of dormant now. It's not doing anything one way or another. I had a partner in that company, he was just a silent partner.

Eventually I bought out the partner and started CEA Advisors, used it to pursue the highest and best use for vertical farming, rather than to concentrate on the Growtainer concept. In other words, I felt that containers and indoor farming had a lot more potential than just container farming.

Vertical Farming vs Container Farming

UV: You saw more potential in the vertical stacking inside of the container as opposed to just growing one level in the container? Why?

Glenn: No, in other words, what I am trying to say is, the first few years was spent strictly growing in containers and developing a system to grow in containers.

As I started to work out the problems associated with container growing, or container based production, I started realizing that this was not really the highest and best use for (controlled atmosphere) technology.

Problems With Urban Farming Container Growing

UV: What are some of those problems (with container growing)? 

Glenn: Well, air circulation, humidity, climate control, an effective irrigation system. A container is not the best.  For example, it's 10 feet high. 

How many vertical levels can you put in there? How much production can
you put in there really without crowding the plants? There are some people,
they advertise that they can grow 45 plants per square foot. 

Glenn:  That's fantasy. This business, so much of it is hype. So much of it is bad information to people that don't know any better. It's difficult to really tell the truth,
whether it is good for you or not. People believe what they want to believe.

Understanding "plants per square foot" based off plant type

UV: 
Does the plants per square foot ... Does that change based off of the type of plant? Are you talking about a best case scenario?

Glenn:
Well of course. You could sprout seeds at 45 seeds per square foot. You can't grow plants at 45 plants per square foot. A head of lettuce, for example, as it grows, it needs more space. 

Glenn: 
If I wanted to promote an untrue economic model, I would turn around and say, there are 216 seed cell trays that are 1.5 square feet, and tell people they can grow a hundred plants per square foot. 

UV: 
That's not even close?

Glenn:                 
It's not true. It's not true and it's not real and it's not economic. It's not based on any integrity. In other words it's based on just feeding. It's telling people what they want to hear.

Reliable urban farming brands to know

UV:            
What are some of the brands in the industry as far as lighting or fertilizer or what not, that you view as, they've been high quality for a long time? 

They're dependable. Somebody wants to get a top-notch system and get
really great lights. What are some of the companies they should be looking at?

Glenn:
It's not necessarily that ... In other words the criteria for let's say lighting, for example, which is a very very crowded market. First of all, the lighting is only ... All of the components are really based on what crop you want to produce, or what your
economic model is, or what your business model is. 

In other words, listen I think Philips makes a good light for certain applications. I think Heliospectra makes a good light for certain applications. I think even Fluence ... I know it's Fluence, they make a good light. Every light is got to be matched through
the crop that you're trying to produce. Every fertilizer, in other words ... The whole key to successful vertical farming is about balance. It's not about any one particular product. It's that all the products work together and in conjunction with each other.

Knowing Variety and Desired Characteristics Before Growing

UV:
How do you go about finding that balance? For example, loose leaf lettuce, how would you view that balance?

What would be some of the best components for those, just because I know that's
a pretty popular crop?

Glenn:
Again, you're talking about lettuce. Are you talking about full heads? Are you talking about cut-leaf? Are you talking about ... You know what I mean? In other words there's so many ...

Listen, I get calls from people and they tell me, "Well I want to grow
lettuce." I'm like, "Okay, great." I then have ten more questions to ask them. In other words, lettuce is not generic. Lettuce is ... There's a hundred different varieties. 

Are you growing something that's green? Are you growing something that's got red in it? Is the color important? Is the weight important? Do you have a post harvest facility? It's not all that simple. Everybody thinks it's that simple. It's not.

What Urban Farming Beginners Should Think About Before Growing:

UV:                        
Those are some of the considerations that people should be thinking about- some of the stuff that you just mentioned like the color, the weight, the facility after, the post harvest facility. Are there any other things that ... 

Glenn:                  
Who's your customer, in other words, your packaging costs? Are you selling to restaurants? Are you selling to ... Listen the container, a 40 foot container is too big for a farmers market and too small for a supermarket.

UV:      
Right, so that's more of a restaurant type fit, is what you're saying, or that's not what you're saying.  

Glenn:       
Right but then a 40 foot container could sell to a restaurant is a recipe for disaster. 

UV:                        
Why is that?

Glenn:                  
An economic disaster because you're never ... They're never going to consume everything you produce. 

UV:                        
Then they'll presumably ... You're saying that they may order from you every week, but the size of the order will be different.

Glenn:                  
Yeah, well of course. In other words, you're producing every day. You know what I mean? I feel bad for some of these people that have no business model. They're going to be under constant pressure to sell what they've created.

Understanding your urban farming business model:

UV:                 
How do you at least start? Obviously it may be a complicated total solution, but how do you at least start to address the bread and butter of the business model. What do you view as the fundamentals of that, addressing some of the problems we've been
talking about?

There might be a mismatch between demand and your supply. Managing the unit cost, how do you really look at that, just at least to get started? I know there's a lot of intricate details. 

Glenn: This is a business just like any other business. You follow me? You really have to do your homework. The truth of the matter is that, again you are dealing with a market that doesn't ... They have good intentions. 

You know what I mean. They don't realize how complicated it really is. 

UV: You're talking about the buyers?

Glenn: 
I'm talking about the growers, the customers, the indoor farm ... The Facebook ... The farmers that learned about this from social media. Learned about this from talking to their friends. They have an interest in pursuing this type of business model. 

UV: 
You're talking about people who
are actually growing the stuff or trying to.

Glenn: 
Not growing it, but trying to.

UV: 
Yeah, okay. You're saying they have good intentions but ...

Glenn: They don't realize how complicated of a process that it really is. In other words, let me tell you something. I'll give you an example. This is just my own opinion okay?

The Flaw of Remotely Monitoring Farms

Glenn:                  
People promote the idea that their farms can be remotely monitored. I don't think that you should run your business from Starbucks. 

 You follow me? I think that in order to be a farmer, you need to get up in the morning and go to your farm - whether it's in a container or a greenhouse or a warehouse or wherever it is.

You need to get yourself up to a level where you have a checklist every day of things that you do, and you do every one of those things. You follow me - so that you get to a point where in the first minute you walk in and you look around, you know what's going on. You follow me? A latte, and adjusting your humidity is nonsense.  

UV:
Right. The issue with that is, from what I'm getting from what you're saying is, it may not all happen in one day, but slowly but surely you will get out of touch with what's going on.

Glenn:
You will get out of touch or get in touch. In other words if you understand that you're not ... Listen this is not a technology business. This is food production. 

You follow me? That's really the bottom line. You need to put it in the right perspective and approach it for what it really is.

The Value of Data in Urban Farming

UV:                
What do you think of the whole argument about collecting data on growing? A lot
of these companies that will, like as you mentioned, allow you to monitor stuff
remotely, will say there's a lot of value in the data of the growing and how
that they can use that data to make improvements in the future. How do you view
the value of that? Do you agree with that? Do you disagree with that? Do you
think that's a similar concept to ... It clashes with the idea of going every
day, or what do you think of the data aspect? 


Glenn:                  
Honestly I haven't figured
that one out yet, for an honest answer. I don't know. I guess maybe as an old
timer in this industry, I look at things in a more traditional sense. I don't
feel that ... You know what I mean? I think that business should be run in a
cash flow positive manner. 

Glenn:                  
I see young people today who's
business model is getting funding. That's their destination. 

UV:                
You're talking about specifically in the space or just in general?

Glenn:                  
I think in general. I don't follow other spaces. You know what I mean? I got to tell you. Somebody said it the other day on a trip overseas. They said, "The one thing we see about you, and based on everything you're doing and saying, is that you live this
business." 

I'm involved with projects all over the world. I hear a lot of different perspectives. I speak to a lot of very intelligent people. I try to pay attention to everything that everyone says, take it seriously. Like I said, I pay attention to people, from young, old, in the business, not in the business. I try to compute it all, where it all fits in. I think that there's not enough focus on really building this as an industry.

Why Designing A Food System for 2050 in 2017 Is A Mistake

Glenn: 
It's (urban farming) too fragmented. It's being approached from too many different levels, in too many different ways. I think that people to some degree, have lost sight in the fact that this is food production. I'll give you an example. People talk about the
population explosion and feeding the world in 2050. 

Glenn:                  
I've got to tell you, my honest opinion is that ... First of all, we don't have any idea what people are going to be eating in 2050. There's a lot of technology involved with food production, meatless meat and egg-less eggs. There's a lot of stuff like that
going on. I believe that it's very possible that the solution to the food
crisis that's coming in 2050 ... They may not find the solution until 2049.  

UV:                
Yeah, that would not be surprising to me. 

Glenn:                  
I think that the issues that need to be focused on right now are the issues that need to be focused on right now. I wouldn't use that as a motivation for building a business.

Rapid Fire Questions

UV:              
A couple more short answer questions, rapid fire questions, what I like to call
them ... What are some specific crops that you see getting trendy? 

Do you see any trends and stuff that people are asking you about or stuff that's getting more popular with restaurants or what not?

Glenn:                  
That's really a question of creativity. You know what I mean. Edible flowers are interesting- different, unique, gourmet, smaller quantities of higher value, more unique products. It also depends on again, on your market, on your economics, on your ... In other words,  trendy is great. Can you make money with it? 

UV:
 (What about) Assuming that the trendy thing will touch a better margin or have higher demand?

Glenn:                
Again, you can grow the trendy item. Can you sell it? Can you grow the trendy item in a vertical farm? 

How much does it cost you to set up that facility to produce that product? You know
what I mean? This is all about business. It's all about economics. While something might be trendy, it may not be possible to produce in an efficient, profitable manner. 

UV:        
What's your favorite fruit or vegetable?

Glenn:                  
I don't know. What's my favorite vegetable? I would say spinach.

UV: 
Spinach? 

Glenn:
For growing or for eating?

UV:
I don't know, is it different?

Glenn:                  
Well growing ... Well for eating I like spinach because it's got a lot of different ways it can be prepared. 

My favorite food for eating is probably fresh mozzarella.  Very fresh mozzarella.

UV: 
Just by itself or ...

Glenn: 
Yeah. 

UV:
All right well what about for growing?

Glenn:
My favorite product for growing is got to be just anything unique and unusual. 

UV: 
Okay, what's one example.

Glenn: 
Minutina.

UV:
Minutina?

Glenn:                  
Yeah, minutina. 

UV:                 
What is ... I'm not familiar
with that. What is that?

Glenn:
 It's a green that originally comes from Europe. It's an addition to a salad, nice, crispy, delicious green that actually grows very well in an indoor environment.  

UV:                 
Like arugula?

Glenn:                  
No, it's not. It's like ... I don't even know how to describe it. Look it up. It's a really interesting product. It's pretty rare and not easily available. 

UV:                 
Okay, for sure. If people want to find out more about you or what you're working on now, what's the best place for them to go, just the website?

Glenn: Yeah, let them start at the website. The Growtainers' (Growtainers.com) website we keep up-to-date. 

UV: 
Thanks Glenn!

Why We Need Technology As The Key Ingredient In Our Food

Peter Diamandis, ContributorChairman XPRIZE

Why We Need Technology As The Key Ingredient In Our Food

02/17/2017 01:54 pm ET | Updated 15 hours ago

hen asked how food security and production can be improved in Africa, former Rwandan minister and current president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) Agnes Kaliba, had one simple answer: “Access to technologies.”

Ms. Kaliba is exactly right. We are sitting at the cusp of an explosion in exponential technologies, which can be the most critically important ingredients to improve the health and quality of life for all humanity.

The World Food Programme (WFP), the largest humanitarian organization in the world, estimates that some 795 million people do not have enough to eat to maintain their health. Additionally, we have faced an unprecedented number of large-scale emergencies — Syria, Iraq and the El Niño weather phenomenon in Southern Africa. Just last month, WFP stepped up support for tens of thousands of displaced Syrians returning home to the ruins of eastern Aleppo City, providing hot meals, ready-to-eat canned food and staple food items such as rice, beans, vegetable oil and lentils. Like Agnes Kaliba in Nairobi, WFP has resolved that technology will help most rapidly in providing better assistance in emergencies and achieve a world without hunger.

Singularity University (SU), which I co-founded with Ray Kurzweil in 2008, is a benefit organization focused on using exponential technologies to solve our Global Grand Challenges. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ertharin Cousin, the Executive Director of WFP, announced a new partnership with SU for a Global Impact Challenge for food.

Our Challenge is soliciting bold ideas from innovators around the world on how to create a sustainable supply of food after the onset of a crisis. In this way, we can help vulnerable families support their own households and reduce their dependence on external assistance. Entries can range from concepts to implemented innovations. Shortlisted winners will be invited to a bootcamp at the WFP Innovation Accelerator in Munich to flesh out their ideas with WFP innovators. One team will be selected to attend an all-expenses-paid, nine-week Global Solutions Program at Singularity University at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley.

Here are some examples of moonshot thinking – and how converging exponential technologies are already reinventing food:

• Vertical Farming: If 80% of our planet’s arable land is already in use, then let’s look up. The impact of technology in vertical farming is powerful. In addition to maximizing the use of land, we can use AI to control the exact frequency and duration of light and pH and nutrient levels of the water supply. Vertical farms using clean-room technologies avoid pesticides and herbicides, and the fossil fuels used for plowing, fertilizing, harvesting and food delivery. Vertical farms are immune to weather, with crops grown year-round. One acre of a vertical farm can produce 10x to 20x that of a traditional farm. And if roughly one-quarter of world’s food calories are lost or wasted in transportation, then let’s think local. The average American meal travels 1,500 miles before being consumed. Moreover, 70 percent of a food’s final retail price is the cost of transportation, storage and handling. These miles add up quickly. The vertical farming market was $1.1 billion in 2015, and projected to exceed $6 billion by 2022.

• Hydroponics and Aeroponics: Traditional agriculture uses 70 percent of the water on this planet. Hydroponics is 70 percent more efficient than traditional agriculture, and aeroponics is 70 percent more efficient than hydroponics. In times of war and natural disaster, there are no readily available food sources, so let’s think creatively on how we can grow food from — and in — the air.

• Bioprinting Meat: In 2016, it took 63 billion land animals to feed 7 billion humans. It’s a HUGE business. Land animals occupy one-third of the non-ice landmass, use 8% of our water supply and generate 18% of all greenhouse gases — more than all the cars in the world. Work is progressing on bioprinting (tissue engineering and 3D printing) to grow meat (beef, chicken and pork) and leathers in a lab. By bio-printing meat, we would be able to feed the world with 99% less land, 96% less water, 96% fewer greenhouse gases and 45% less energy.

• Shifting diets: Optimal health requires 10-20 percent of calories to come from protein. One example of innovative thinking comes from Africa, where farmers are installing fish ponds in home gardens, as the mud from the bottom of the pond also makes a great mineral-rich fertilizer. In the lab, scientists are investigating new biocrops.

This is just the beginning. If we are really serious about creating a vibrant ecosystem of sustainable food production, we need to be thinking exponentially and using technology to help create cost-efficient innovative solutions that can feed the world.

GE Lighting Horticultural LED Lights Are Specifically Designed for Controlled Environment Agriculture

GE Lighting Horticultural LED Lights Are Specifically Designed for Controlled Environment Agriculture

GE Lighting has introduced LED grow lights for use in greenhouses, vertical farms, tissue culture labs and growth chambers.

BEDFORD, TX (PRWEB) FEBRUARY 15, 2017

GE Lighting has been offering horticultural LED lights to the North American market since 2011.

“GE had been marketing horticultural LED lights in Japan prior to introducing them to the United States,” said Sharee Thornton, Product Manager at GE Lighting. “The reason for not introducing them sooner was the U.S. horticulture market was just starting to work with LEDs and GE was still developing the products specific to this market. We currently have three LED products that we are actively selling in the North American market and have additional products that are expected to come out during 2017. These would include interlighting and toplighting products.

“We have customers who operate vertical farms that are asking for a toplighting product. We are developing toplighting products for both vertical farms and for greenhouses.”

Horticultural LED grow lights

GE Arize Life
The primary application of the GE Arize Life LED light fixture is as a replacement for fluorescent lights typically found in tissue culture labs, growth chambers and testing labs. The fixture is available as a 2-, 4- and 8-foot light bar.

“This fixture has an integrated power supply, is IP66 rated and UL wet rated, which means it’s splash proof and easy to clean,” Thornton said. “If the fixture is used in a high moisture environment, it is easy to wipe clean. The operating temperature can be from 0ºC-40ºC (32ºF-104ºF). The fixtures can be daisy-chained from end to end or they can be daisy-chained with a jumper cable.”

Thornton said the Life fixture, which has a 5-year limited warranty, previously had a L80 of 36,000 hours. She stated GE has updated the fixture to a L90 of 36,000 hours.

“This means at 36,000 hours a grower will still have 90 percent of the fixture light intensity available,” she said. “Other fixtures on the market are at L70 at 35,000 or 25,000 hours. That means at either 35,000 or 25,000 hours a grower is going to get 70 percent of the light intensity. A grower would have to replace the fixture if he loses 25-30 percent of the light intensity. Within that time period at 90 percent a grower may not have to replace the GE light fixture depending on what he is growing.”

Thornton said replacement of the fixtures will depend on where they are used.

“If the fixtures are used in a vertical farm where they account for 100 percent of the supplemental light the plants are receiving, those are usually operated 16-18 hours per day,” she said. “The lights won’t be operating 24 hours because the plants have to have some time to rest. At a rate of 16 hours of light, seven days a week, the fixtures would run approximately 5,000 hours per year. The life expectancy of the fixtures would be around seven years.

“This is what we typically see with some of our other applications. That is why we are able to offer a longer life expectancy. GE has been doing this with its other products. We know how to mechanically and electronically put the products together and run them at a higher efficiency in order to get a longer life. For growers who are using the lights for propagation rather than for a vertical farm, the life expectancy could be even longer if the lights aren’t run as often or as long.”

GE Arize Lynk

Side-by-side the Lynk and Life light bar fixtures look identical. The GE Arize Lynk fixture is available as a 4- and 8-foot light bar with plans to release a 2-foot bar in 2017.

“The biggest difference between the two fixtures is the light intensity,” Thornton said. “The Lynk fixture can be used with vertical farms, in greenhouses, and growth chambers. Like the Life fixture, Lynk is IP66 rated and UL wet rated so it can be cleaned very easily. The Lynk fixtures can also be daisy chained from end-to-end. It has an independent driver so there is no additional driver required. There is also a plug so that it can be hot wired or it can be plugged in.”

Thornton said because the Lynk and Life fixtures are lightweight, weighing less than 5 pounds, they are easy to install with mounting clips.

“The mounting clips are attached with fasteners and then the fixtures are attached to the clips,” she said. “It is a very easy and fast installation. Hort Americas has done a video showing how easy the fixtures are to install.”

Thornton said GE offers similar light spectrums for both the Lynk and Life fixtures.

“We have a reproductive spectrum, a vegetative and a balance. It depends on the goals of the growers,” she said. “The purple light is the ideal light for photosynthesis. Some growers want all purple and then they will move the crop out to harvest it. Others want white light so that they don’t have to move the product around. A grower can have a balanced pink, a balanced purple and a balanced white.

“The reproductive spectrum with a higher red content is for the grower who wants to promote flowering and fruiting. The light spectrum for vegetative growth, which has a higher blue content, is for the grower looking at size or selling the product by the pound. If a grower really doesn’t know what light spectrum he wants or wants a spectrum for both reproductive and vegetative, he can choose the balanced spectrum of red and blue. The balance is the more common spectrum chosen because growers want both or don’t know and want to see what happens with the balanced spectrum. If the balanced spectrum doesn’t produce a beefy enough plant then the grower will look at the vegetative spectrum. Or if the plant didn’t flower or fruit as well as expected, then the grower would use the reproductive spectrum.”

Thornton said the Lynk fixture puts out about twice as much light as the Life fixture.

“A 4-foot reproductive Life fixture produces about 43.2 micromoles per second (μmol/s),” she said. “A 4-foot Lynk fixture produces 82.9 μmol/s. So it’s almost double. There would be a similar difference for the 8-foot fixtures too. An 8-foot reproductive Life fixture produces about 86.3 μmol/s and an 8-foot Lynk fixture is around 181.5 μmol/s.

“We have seen a lot of the 8-foot fixtures used in vertical farms. Because of the insulation and they are so easy to clean, it is a lot easier to install the 8-foot fixtures. A lot of the vertical racks have five 8-foot sections so it works out perfect for the 8-foot light fixtures.”

GE Arize™ Greenhouse Pro LED Flowering Lamp

The GE Arize Greenhouse Pro is for photoperiodic control. It is set up on a BR30 platform.

“This bulb’s main application is to primarily control photoperiod and flowering in greenhouses,” Thornton said. “The light intensity of this bulb is 17.8 μmol/s. It is not as intense as the Arize light bar fixtures, but for its application it is very competitive with similar bulbs on the market. Its life expectancy is L90 at 10,000 hours. It is 90 percent at 10,000 hours.

“We have some trials going on at Michigan State University and expect to have some results coming out this year so that we can help growers use this bulb efficiently.”

SGS Awards GLOBAL G.A.P. Quality Standard To Indoor Farming Company, INFARM

SGS AWARDS GLOBAL G.A.P. QUALITY STANDARD TO INDOOR FARMING COMPANY, INFARM

February 14, 2017

Berlin-based agricultural business INFARM has become the first indoor farming company to be awarded the GLOBALG.A.P. quality standard. SGS officially presented the GLOBALG.A.P. certificate at this year’s Fruit Logistica Trade Fair, in Berlin.

INFARM designs and installs vertical farms in urban areas, helping them become self-sufficient in their food production, while eliminating waste and reducing the impact on the environment. As part of this, INFARM has installed “in-store farms” inside two supermarkets – one in the METRO Cash & Carry, in Berlin, and the other in Makro, in Antwerp.

INFARM’s “in-store farms” grow an assortment of herbs, leafy greens and salads, using light, water and nutrient resources from within the self-contained growing environment. The plants are cultivated and harvested within the shop in which they are sold. This reduces transportation costs and the associated food-miles.

This award is an important step forward for INFARM. Many supermarkets require a valid GLOBALG.A.P. certificate from suppliers of agriculture, horticulture and aquaculture products before foodstuffs can be offered for sale. The presentation of the certificate at the Fruit Logistica Fair is an acknowledgement that INFARM is operating according to globally recognized good agricultural practices.

SGS, as the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company, has plenty of experience of auditing to the GLOBALG.A.P. standard but, as Betina Jahn from SGS explains:

Usually vegetable farms or orchards are audited according to GLOBALG.A.P. Therefore, we first had to adapt the test criteria for the in-store farm. Our experts worked closely with the standard authority, FoodPLUS, to produce a reliable testing process. This can now be applied to all future vertical farming company audits.

SGS Agriculture & Food Services

SGS provides a comprehensive range of services to help manage risk, safeguard consumers, ensure correct storage and transportation, ensure quality and safety throughout the supply chain, and confirm compliance with complex legislation. Learn more about SGS’s Agriculture & Food Services.

For further information, please contact:

Betina Jahn
Head of Innovative Product Management
t: +49 4473 9439 0

Robots Meet Indoor Farming

FEBRUARY 13, 2017 BY MARCIN

Robots Meet Indoor Farming

The goal: to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day initially using LED lighting and hydroponic technologyIn a 47,300-square-foot facility near Kyoto, SPREAD, an agriculture technology company, is creating a massive, automated, indoor „vertical farm”—and the special ingredient is the use of robots. The goal: to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day initially using LED lighting and hydroponic technology, a method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent, and with produce on multiple rows of shelving, stacked one on top of the other.

But robotic systems will do much of the work growing and producing the crops, from watering to harvesting. „The farm will be as robotically automated as possible,” says Frank Tobe, editor of The Robot Report. For example, cranes will deliver seedlings to small robots, which will then transplant the sprouts to grow beds. The company expects the facility to be operational by mid-2017 and to construct and operate 20 new factories over the next five years, in addition to selling the system for others to use in their own facilities, according to Tobe.  

Robots and indoor farms

While SPREAD is billing its new facility as the world’s largestplant factory, around the world, an increasing number of other growers and technology companies are using indoor farms, also known as controlled environmental agriculture, rather than the conventional outdoor variety, to grow produce and other greenery. Although still in its infancy, in some cases, they’re experimenting with vertical indoor operations, relying on hydroponic or other non-soil based methods; in others, they’re applying advanced technology to greenhouses.

See also: The farm tech revolution

The key to efficiency, however, is the use of automation, especially robots, as a vital part of the system. The technology does repetitive, tedious tasks usually performed by humans, like constantly rotating containers to get the right amount of sun, for example, or placing items on a conveyer belt. „Robots are perfectly suited for this type of task,” says Tobe.

There are many advantages to robotic indoor systems, from the ability to grow food throughout the year, without being affected by weather variations, to a dramatically reduced use of water and lower labor costs. It’s also a more sustainable type of production that has the potential to boost locally grown, fresher produce.

„Our aim is to build robotic greenhouses in order to allow for cheaper, local and sustainable produce.. „ That’s the goal for Brandon Alexander, co-founder of Iron Ox, a Silicon Valley startup building a robotic environment for greenhouses growing lettuce and other leafy greens. He can’t reveal too many details, but, he says, „Our aim is to build robotic greenhouses in order to allow for cheaper, local and sustainable produce. The goal is fully automated crop production.”

Partial robotics

For now, most systems incorporate robots in part of the process, with other machines and human workers taking care of other aspects of production.

Take Egatic, a company in Odense, Denmark, that is developing a new system in partnership with a grower of herbs and small flowers to take items from a greenhouse to be packed and shipped. It uses a mix of robots, people and other automated equipment. For example, a conveyer belt transports herbs from the greenhouse to a packing area. Workers place herbs in boxes put together by what CEO Mars Nychel calls „erector machines”, but robots place the boxes onto pallets.

Only one person is needed on the assembly line, with a part-time employee supervising. The company will start testing out the new system this year, according to Nychel. Next step: adding flowers to the process.

Lettuce is not like a car                                 

Using robotics in indoor farming is complicated, however. Perhaps the thorniest problem is the variability of each, say, head of lettuce. „It’s not like you’re making a car and every item is the same,” says Alexander. Thus, robots must be programmed to be able to grab, remove and transplant things that are not exactly the same shape.

According to Nychel, his company has been working on a system since 2007 with a client that uses greenhouses to grow tomatoes. The goal is for robots to pick the tomatoes automatically. But the company has struggled with creating a robot able to pick the produce using a sufficiently gentle touch, as well as grab plants that aren’t a standard size. They’re also using vision systems to allow robots to discern whether each tomato is the right color to be picked.

He figures it should take another 18 months or so to finish the project. „It’s been quite a task,” he says. „But, there will be very high demand when it’s done.”   

Ultimately, robotic experts predict that robotic indoor farming systems won’t replace conventional methods. Instead, they’ll serve as supplements–enhancing agriculture grown the old-fashioned way with a more efficient, sustainable and weather-resistant method for producing crops.

The contents or opinions in this feature are independent and may not necessarily represent the views of Cisco. They are offered in an effort to encourage continuing conversations on a broad range of innovative technology subjects. We welcome your comments and engagement.

We welcome the re-use, republication, and distribution of „The Network” content. Please credit us with the following information: Used with the permission of http://thenetwork.cisco.com/.

Indoor Growing System Earns Innovation Award

Indoor Growing System Earns Innovation Award

14 February 2017, by Gavin McEwan

West Midlands-based urban growing specialist Hydrogarden has taken the Innovation Award at the EEF Future Manufacturing Awards.

Judges noted the company's drive to achieve sustainability and its ambition to become carbon-neutral through its vertical farming solution, V-Farm, and praised its innovative approach to engaging with a variety of customers.

V-farm is a fully controllable vertical farming concept, bespoke to the needs of the end user, whether growing on an urban rooftop, warehouse or even in space.

HydroGarden managing director Jonathan Aldridge said: "Manufacturers are amongst the most prolific and successful innovators in the UK, so to win this award is a great accomplishment and compliment to our team."

The company reported last year that interest in urban and enclosed growing systems was growing "even among old-school growers, some of whom are already seeing huge savings." 

The company has helped equip recent high-profile London urban agriculture ventures GrowUp, an aquaponics complex in a warehouse in Beckton; and Growing Underground, a subterranean hydroponic salad farm in Clapham.

The company has already equipped two farms in Singapore and one in Australia, growing micro-greens, herbs and salads and has developed growing protocols for around 20 crops including strawberries, pak choi and even rhubarb.

Key to this has been its own experimental Project Urban Grow facility at its base in Coventry. This trial version of the VydroFarm system occupies just 24sq m but has a growing area of 55sq m thanks to its five-storey NFT hydroponic growing system on three mobile racks, which can produce nearly 2,000 lettuces in 28 days.

It uses Valoya LED lighting including the Finnish manufacturer's full-spectrum model. 

Formerly the Engineering Employers Federation, EEF works to champion manufacturing and engineering in the UK and the EU.

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The Future of Agriculture Is Already Here

The Future of Agriculture Is Already Here

2/13/2017

A robot that grafts seedlings. Fleets of remote-controlled, self-regulating greenhouses. Organic rice that’s grown entirely by drones.

Even for those of us on the bleeding edge of U.S. farming trends, the coupling of technology and agriculture often exists on the outskirts of what seems fathomable — or even practical.

Sure, we’ve heard about agricultural drones in theory, but that still seems light years away. And indoor, vertical farms that grow plants aeroponically (without sunlight, water or soil)? Judging by the amount of media attention surrounding a soon-to-open aeroponics facility in New Jersey, the practice continues to hold a science fiction-like fascination.

In Japan, though, these kinds of agri-tech innovations are already readily employed — if not downright common — across the country.

At the 2016 Agri World Expo just outside of Tokyo, over 55,000 companies from across Japan and Southeast Asia have gathered to showcase the latest and greatest in farming technology — and I’m in the middle of it all. A veritable three ring circus of flashing flights, wheeling machinery and tiny bowls of free snacks, the event is something of a sensory overload, with enough newfangled bells and whistles confound any old-fashioned notions of where agriculture is headed.

Rural populations across Japan have been in decline for decades, with younger generations casting off the countryside for the lure of city lights and leaving aging farmers with no other choice than to simply watch their land — and craft — whither. Instead, as urban populations have boomed, Japan has seen a massive push towards metropolis-adjacent indoor farming and other forms of argi-tech that can exist within high-density communities. Growing crops so close to the people who will eat them, advocates suggest, means that they are both fresher and healthier when they reach the consumer.

But the technological innovations on the horizon in Japan go far beyond LED-supported lettuce. Behemoth farm drones lay splayed out like metallic, aerial spiders at multiple booths, and salespeople tittered excitedly about how drone farming — especially when it comes to organic crops — means plants can flourish in a more stabilized, consistent fashion. Constant monitoring and an eagle-eye view, it seems, are key.

The rise of drone-based farming has also opened a new career path for many Japanese.

One of the surest signs that technology and agriculture are pairing off for the long-haul is the buy-in of Japan’s telecommunications giant, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (or NTT, for short). With an annual revenue of 11 trillion yen, NTT is the granddaddy of Japanese telephones, retaining their oligopolistic grip on landlines nationwide while constantly pivoting into new areas of information technology in order to keep up with younger, nimbler companies. Increasingly, this means investing in Artificial Intelligence for farmers.

“A lot of our community-based research and design goes into trying to help farmers through new inventions,” a company representative says as he hands me a tiny can of fresh vegetable juice. “We’re looking for ways to make farming more productive.”

At the Agri World Expo, NTT’s booth magnetizes crowds, as women in cow-print dresses mingle among drone-explainer videos, oohing and ahhing. The company’s piece de resistance, though, is Scarecrow: an adorable, teddy bear-sized “personal robot” with big, Disney princess eyes and an “S” emblazoned on its chest.

Scarecrow might be small, but its purpose is mighty: the robot has the ability to remotely control an entire farm. One input from the farmer, and Scarecrow can connect via satellite with plant-fertilizing drones, or operate farm machinery with a single instruction. Since it’s constantly getting feedback and input from the fields, the new technology has the potential to streamline farm operations while serving as a singular point of data retention and collection from season-to-season.

“New technologies are a lot more efficient,” says a representative of E-Minori, a fledgling company which uses sensors to alert farmers if their greenhouse conditions fall below peak standards. “In the past, farmers would only have their experiences and intuition to know if temperatures or humidity inside their greenhouses was off — and they can’t be there all the time. Now, it can be dealt with automatically.”

This also means ensuring that nature doesn’t have the chance to wreak havoc, either. Between plant-eating pests, see-sawing temperatures and the threat of natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes, farming that’s tightly controlled — and, yes, indoors — means that no matter what’s going on in the actual dirt, plants will continue to flourish inside their perfectly-regulated, safe bubbles.

“Indoor farming is the way of now, and the way of the future, because it’s not impacted by the temperature,” a man from Clean Farm — a soil-free, water-free aeroponics company that calls itself a “flexible plant factory” — notes. “It is completely isolated from the outside.”

And while, in the U.S., worries about the impact of hazardous materials on crops is a catch-all concern, in Japan, the impetus feels even more urgent in the wake of the 2011’s nuclear plant meltdown in FukushiRama, which resulted in the radioactive contamination of all farmland, groundwater and soil for hundreds of miles. In turn, the promise of disease-free, pollutant-free produce means that families are a natural target audience for the products from many agri-tech companies. Images of toddlers gleefully biting into a fistful of LED-supported spinach are littered across company advertising, and “safe eating” (which is a few standard deviations beyond the concept of organic-only “clean eating”) has become rhetorical dogma.

Larger profits are a major boon, too. Using indoor systems, farmers are able to tinker with seasonality by growing traditionally summer-only crops in the winter (and vice-versa) to sell for higher prices.

“In the wintertime, the sun sets at 5 p.m., which means growing conditions aren’t good,” the BioSun associate notes. “Using indoor systems, farmers can make produce grow faster — and sell faster — because the sunlight and seasons don’t matter, which means they can make more money.”

Still, there are perhaps a few kinks to work out.

After sampling some coriander grown using an indoor vertical system, a colleague of mine noted that while it tasted great, the plant — which is usually quite fragrant — had no smell.

The science behind this seems like a strange, and almost unsettling, development. How can an herb lose one of its most notable characteristics simply by being grown indoors? If LED farms cause such a dramatic shift in the actual chemical make-up of the plant through their modifications, it seems like a potentially slippery slope. Seeing the concern in my face, a company representative nervously brushed it off as a good thing, chalking up the fragrance-free herb to the fact that it lacked the acidity typical of plants grown in soil.

Reassurances aside, there’s no doubt in my mind that the company will soon be going back to the drawing board on this issue, figuring out yet another new way to use technology as both a progressive tool and problem-solver in the world of agriculture.

Read the article

Loudon Greenhouse Looks to Reimagine Farming With Automated Growing

By DAVID BROOKS
Monitor staff

Sunday, February 12, 2017

pecial clothing is often needed when you’re visiting a farm: Boots, gloves, hats, overalls, lab coats.

Lab coats?

“We wear lab coats in the greenhouse because this is where you could have the most contact with the plant material,” explained Henry Huntington, president and co-founder of the state’s most interesting new agricultural operation, the automated hydroponics greenhouse called Lef Farms in Loudon, as he helped a reporter and photographer put on protective garb – protective for the seedlings, not the people.

With coats, hairnets and gloves in place, Huntington and co-owner Bob LaDue pushed through the door from the operations center, where seven days a week machines carefully place tens of thousands of seeds into 40-foot trays modeled after rain gutters, and entered the 50,000-square-foot greenhouse that they hope will launch a bright new chapter in New Hampshire farming.

On this gray, snowy day, it is certainly bright in the literal sense, with hundreds of high-pressure sodium lights overhead going full blast to compensate for shortage of daylight coming through the glass.

“My goal is to make them think it’s June, every day. We’re feeding the plants photons,” said LaDue, who has been involved in greenhouse research and commercial operations for 20 years.

“We use as much natural light as possible since we don’t have to pay for that, and plan on about 80 percent of light coming from the sun over the course of the whole year,” he said. “Not on a day like today, though.”

A year’s production in less than a week

The bright lights in the vast open space gave the greenhouse the look of an airplane hangar, if you can imagine one with a floor that has been raised 5 feet and is made of salad greens.

How much salad greens? More than you can probably imagine.

LaDue said this 1 acre of hydroponics growing space will eventually produce 3,000 pounds of leafy greens, bagged and ready to be shipped to stores or restaurants, every 24 hours. After a few months of operation, Lef Farms (pronounced “leaf”) is running at about half speed as it tweaks the operation.

That’s a ton and a half daily of arugula, bok choy, mustard greens and lettuce, meaning that every day they expect to produce about one-third the annual production (depending on the crop) expected from an acre grown organically outdoors.

“We are very excited about it. This is the first large-scale farm of this kind designed for wholesale markets here in New Hampshire and the region,” said Lorraine Merrill, the state’s agricultural commissioner. “There have been proposals for this kind of production before that haven’t come to pass.”

Merrill said that indoor agriculture, with the promise of extending our growing season, can be an important part of the mix for state farming alongside traditional wholesale operations like dairy farms, smaller specialty farms, and direct-to-consumer sales via pick-your-own, farmers markets and community-supported agriculture projects.

“I really think one of the great strengths of New Hampshire agriculture is its diversity, and this adds to it. Diversity of types of crops and diversity of types of marketing channels – not putting all of our eggs in one basket,” she said.

The idea of farming indoors, with the aim of growing more produce on smaller plots that are closer to cities and can be harvested even during winter, is becoming realistic as technology improves. One Nashua family, for example, bought a “farm in a box” from the firm Boston Freight Farms and are raising greens for sale in a converted shipping container, with plants grown hydroponically (all the nutrients coming from water rather than soil) in rows of shelving, entirely dependent on light from LEDs.

Lef Farms isn’t quite that high-tech: It went with greenhouses and sodium lights for various cost and scale reasons. But this greenhouse is unlike any you’ve seen.

Greenhouse unlike most

Greenhouses have, of course, been part of New Hampshire agriculture for many decades. In fact, Huntington owns Pleasant View Gardens, which like Lef Farms has greenhouses built on a former gravel pit, where tons of flowers are grown a year. His experience there helped trigger the idea for Lef Farms.

“We have significant greenhouse productions of ornamental and flowering plants in New Hampshire, including D.S. Cole Growers and Pleasant View, two of the larger and most significant plant propagators in the country,” said Merrill.

What makes Lef Farms unusual is that it produces food crops and uses an extremely automated system that can plant, grow, harvest and bag the greens over a two-week growing cycle with little or no human labor.

Huntington and LaDue said this cuts labor costs – Lef Farms has a dozen full-time positions – and maximizes production. But they also say the precision of automation, in which the water used for hydroponics is fully recycled with its nutrients and fertilizers, reduces agricultural pollution from runoff compared to standard farms. The tightly controlled greenhouse, use of hydroponics and a fast growing cycle also greatly reduce the number of insect pests and the need for pesticides, as well as eliminating weeds and any resulting herbicides.

Whether it will be worth the reported $10 million investment remains to be seen. But they have plans to build several more greenhouses if all goes well, and they have town approval for up to 12 acres of operations.

Dirt put in gutters

Growing any crops starts with the soil. At Lef Farms, the soil has a brand name: Cornell Mix, developed at the university where LaDue did research for years. A mix of peat and vermiculite, it comes in 120-cubic-foot bales that double in size when decompressed and watered; specialized machinery from Finland distributes it carefully along the 40-foot-long gutters.

“A lot of the technology for this was developed in Scandinavian countries. They have so little light, the growing season is so short, and they’re trying to grow their own food; that has simulated their technology,” LaDue said.

Once loaded with this dirt, each gutter moves along a conveyer under a series of machines that drop in seeds; sometimes all of one species, sometimes a variety, although growing two species alongside each other is difficult, since they are harvested at the same time and thus must grow at the same rate, so that one species doesn’t shade out the other.

Each gutter then slides onto a huge pivoting arm that swivels and sends the chute through a hole in the wall into the greenhouse. This is done roughly 800 times every day – meaning that 800 other gutters are removed and harvested.

The gutter sits in darkness underneath the growing area for two days while the seeds germinate, before being pulled by on an enormous toothed belt up into the light. Over the next 14 to 19 days, depending on the crop, it will be pulled slowly from one end of the greenhouse to the other, roughly 300 feet, while the plants are fed by a constant stream of water containing a mix of micro- and macro-nutrients, made by blending various fertilizers.

“Bob’s kind of the mad scientist. He makes his own mixes,” Huntington said.

During this entire process, little to no human interaction will be required, although LaDue and others will be monitoring many factors – not just plants’ growth and health, but the building’s temperature, the total light as measured in moles (a unit you might remember from high school chemistry) of photons, its humidity and even its carbon dioxide level.

Even carbon dioxide must be balanced

That last factor is crucial, LaDue said. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and during the winter, when the greenhouse lacks natural airflow through the heavily screened windows, they would use up most of the CO2, stunting growth, if it weren’t replaced.

Lef Farms produces CO2 as a byproduct of the gas-fired heaters, and even produces more than natural levels to boost growth, which enables them to cut back on lighting, one of their biggest costs.

“Supplement CO2 is another avenue to reduce supplemental lighting – we’re always trying to turn these lights off,” LaDue said. On a winter’s day, byproduct from heat can “save five to six hours of supplemental lighting.”

Lighting has also been a source of irritation to neighbors, who have complained to town officials about the brightness of the glow at night from this new presence in town. Lef Farms has said it will improve its use of shades to reduce the excess.

Getting the plants cold fast

Eventually the plants make it to the far end of the greenhouse, where conveyors transfer them, plants still growing, directly into the cooler, which is larger than some warehouses. Only inside the cooler do they get “a haircut” from automated blades, with salad greens automatically sorted on conveyer belts and dropped into a machine that puts them inside plastic bags. That’s all without human help – at least in theory; LaDue said the system is still being tweaked.

Bringing plants into the cooler while they are still growing is a key to maintaining freshness, said LaDue, who compared it to traditional harvesting.

“On most operations, you get them cut, it goes into bins, people are mixing them by hand. That’s not good,” he said. “The faster you get them cold, the better.”

And that’s not counting the benefit of being closer to our tables and stores. “Alternative to West Coast-grown greens” is a phrase that shows up a lot in their promotional material. LaDue claims that this system gives Lef Farms greens sold to retailers “shelf life like they’ve never seen before,” justifying a premium price.

Plenty of people around the state and the region will be watching, both to see if that belief holds up and to see what it means about our ability to feed ourselves in New England.

“I would expect we will probably see further developments, variations on this theme – in lots of different ways,” said Merrill, the agriculture commissioner. “Farmers are creative and resourceful; they’re always finding ways to make technology work for them.”

(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)

Light glows inside the Lef Farms greenhouses in Loudon last week. Elodie Reed photos / Monitor staff

Bob LaDue walks between growing salad greens at Lef Farms in Loudon last week. Elodie Reed—Monitor staff » Buy this Image

Lef Farms Vice President Bob LaDue explains how the Loudon greenhouse operation grows baby greens year-round last week.

Lef Farms President Henry Huntington walks past one of the many boxes that controls the company’s automated hydroponic growing system.

The Vertical Farm: A Chat with Dickson D. Despommier, Ph.D.

The Vertical Farm: A Chat with Dickson D. Despommier, Ph.D.

February 10, 2017

by Sheila Shayon

By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will live in urban centers and that number will have increased by about 3 billion people in the interim – a big challenge and opportunity to feed. One emergent model is indoor farming, aka, vertical farming.

Columbia professor Dickson D. Despommier, Ph.D., (now emeritus) at Columbia University Medical School authored “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century,” published in 2010, and is credited with mainstreaming the term vertical farming.

At its most basic, the process refers to growing crops in vertically stacked beds in a controlled environment, without natural light or soil as Despommier describes here:

Sustainable Brands spoke with Despommier about the adoption of this model today.

“The idea has not been in the public domain for more than ten years,” he said. “It requires a heavy investment and creativity to invent the methods and to create social buy-in. It’s been quite rapid depending on how you define it. The idea smoldered in Japan for ten years and then Fukushima occurred and countries went ballistic as the people of Japan were not buying food grown there thinking it was contaminated.

“An indoor food industry was a solution and the Japanese government supported it. Indoor farming spread in the country and Toshiba and Panasonic were enlisted by the government of Japan to become leaders in indoor farming. These two giants had some downsizing in their own factories due to competition in other sectors that affected their ability to keep pace with the growth of electronics industry. Warehouses not being used were converted to indoor growing systems. Japan has embraced indoor/vertical farming.

“Singapore lacks land but is rich. They want to control food safety and sovereignty. Before urban farming there were no options. Panasonic has large indoor farms in Singapore and six others are being built to fulfill expanding demand.

“Taiwan has 50 vertical farms. They have little land to farm on a mountainous island with a tropical climate. Korea built and experimental farm in 2010 and the Mayor of Seoul announced in the last six months that every building can accommodate an addition for vertical farming. There are 30 million people in Seoul now and they’re importing foods but want to be in control.

“Here in the US, farmers in the Midwest have a winter problem and can’t deliver fresh greens as easily – fresh greens as in picked today – so what arrives is three weeks old and 40% is thrown out from refrigerators as it rots.

“There are 30 or so indoor farms centered around Chicago in abandoned warehouses – many no higher than a single story, single greenhouses – but they must be higher than one story to qualify as vertical farms. Companies like Sears, Kmart and Walmart who have such buildings can get tax breaks to repurpose them for farming but these stories don’t make the radar screen of the public, they don’t usually make the headlines.”

Despommier and his students figured out that a space like Floyd Bennett Field, former airport-turned-park on Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, could provide enough vegetables and rice to feed every person living in New York City in the year 2050 – along with medicinal plants, and herbs and spices for five different traditional cuisines.

SB asked is this an extensible model?

“Every situation for establishing an indoor farm is predicated on supply and demand,” Despommier said. “Most cities in the US north of the Mason Dixon - the weather division – are going to run out of fresh green vegetables in winter.

“It’s amazing how important they are to restaurants and even fast-food chains as accoutrements – it’s a huge output that needs a reliable source and from that perspective, every city has space but a different set of priorities. You have to be clever in dealing with real estate agents etc.”

“Empty warehouses are a prime target for the establishment – every Mayor has relics from industrial movements and habits developed by Kmart and Costco and Sears. Corporations overextended. Starbucks has gigantic warehouses out of reach of a city for property taxes, several thousand sq. feet, intergowing vegetables like tomatoes and green beans. They’re not hard to grow but you need demand.”

Since your book was published, what changes do you perceive in consumer and business attitudes towards sustainable agriculture?

“There’s been a gradual transition from the Currie and Ives view of farming of the 1910’s and 20’s and then the 30’s drought trashed the Midwest, followed by WWII – and then, as depicted in the “Grapes of Wrath,” a favorite book, what happened next was a generation displaced by climate change who moved to CA. How ironic that CA is in its seventh year of drought and even the weather coming isn’t going to help as it’s coming in the wrong place to solve the problem. The problem continues.

“Moving to dairy farms, out of CA’s total $70 billion agricultural initiative, half is dairy farming. Dairy farmers in Europe are growing food for cattle indoors. No bales of hay, real cow food, and they grow it on demand, enough to raise 300 head of dairy cattle on oats barley grain from plants that stand just six inches tall with a tangled root system – crops in trays – which is then inverted and the root system falls out and that cattle feed is the Häagen-Dazs or Jerry Garcia flavor for them, they love it.  You don’t need a lot of room and continuous growth for six weeks yields enough for 300 head of cattle.”

Despommier is hopeful we’ll get it right before we’ve exhausted the planet’s patience and resources but cautions, “humans are born with capacity to creativity and environmental destruction. We do it creatively, use our creativity in ways that damage the planet. Eventually the reality that what we’re doing with environmental encroachment will sink in.”

Today in the U.S., there are vertical farms in Seattle, Detroit, Houston, Brooklyn, Queens and near Chicago.

AeroFarms in Newark, New Jersey is one of the largest with a main crop of

baby salad greens, “vast armies of little watercresses, arugulas, and kales waiting to be harvested and sold. For more than a year, all the company’s commercial greens came from this vertical farm.”

“It’s still hovering at lever of industrial radar screens,” said Despommier, “but it’s a big industry waiting to happen – and the grow-light industry is huge, all that equipment, but it needs to be cobbled together.”

The building now leased by AeroFarms used to be Grammer, Dempsey & Hudson headquarters in 1929 when in an average year, the steel-supply company shipped about twenty thousand tons of steel. When the vertical farm there today is in full operation, soon, they expect to ship more than a thousand tons of greens each year.

Sheila Shayon, President of Third Eye Media, is a senior media executive with twenty five plus years in television and new media including expertise in programming, production, broadband, start-up models, creative and branding strategies, digital content and social networking. 

“First Commercial Vertical” Farm With LEDs To Be Built In Europe

“First Commercial Vertical” Farm With LEDs To Be Built In Europe

February 10, 2017

Netherlands-based fresh produce company Staay Food Group is building what is described as the first commercial vertical farm in Europe which uses LED lights to grow the crops. 

GreenPower LED horticultural lighting by electronics giant Philips will be used on the project.

The facility will serve “one of Europe’s biggest supermarket chains” and will be used for testing, and optimizing processes for future vertical farms, a release from the electronics company said.

The 900m2 indoor vertical farm will have over 3,000m2 of growing space and produce pesticide-free lettuce.

With upcoming stricter regulations on the residual pesticide levels in a bag or bowl of lettuce, retailers will need to provide exceedingly high quality, pesticide-free lettuce, Philips said.

Staay, Philips Lighting and vegetable breeder Rijk Zwaan collaborated and undertook intensive research over the past three years to determine the best combination of lettuce varieties and growth recipes to improve crop quality and yields.

Philips added having the right “growth recipe” prior to the start of operations at the vertical farm would help Staay achieve a faster return on investment.

“Our plant specialists at our Philips GrowWise research center in Eindhoven are testing seeds from a selection of the most suitable lettuce varieties, to define the best growth recipes and to optimize crop growth even before the farm is running,” Philips Lighting Horticulture LED Solutions managing director Udo van Slooten said.

Staay Food Group CEO Rien Panneman said producing lettuce for the fresh-cut segment indoors not only meant avoiding all pesticides, but also “a much lower bacterial count and therefore longer shelf life at the retailers.”

“With the lettuce being packaged at the same spot as where it is grown, we save on transport before distribution to retailers,” he said.

“Also, by avoiding weather fluctuations, we maintain an optimized and stable production environment to guarantee consistent and optimal product quality.”

Meanwhile, a representative from Rijk Zwaan said the tests the company was conducting within this project were enabling it to identify which varieties were optimal for growing in a vertical farm, and also which varieties offered the best taste and texture.

“It will help us with our continuous challenge to offer solutions for the growing world population,” marketing and business development manager Wim Grootscholten said.

“We believe that vertical farms will become increasingly important, because in the future we see more economic and environmental pressure to produce fruit and vegetables, such as lettuce, closer to where end-customers are located.”

The vertical farms in Europe, using LED-based lighting have so far been research centers or specialist producers serving restaurants.

The new Staay facility in Dronten will be the first in Europe to operate commercially, serving large-scale retail. The facility will start operations in the second half of 2017.

Philips’ GrowWise Center in the Netherlands is described as the largest research facility of its kind with a total growing surface of 234m2. Here, Philips Lighting’s researchers trial a variety of crops under different LED lighting and climate conditions to help determine their economic potential.

www.freshfruitportal.com

Crofters, A Startup Helping You Grow Completely Organic Food Right Inside A Living Room

Crofters, A Startup Helping You Grow Completely Organic Food Right Inside A Living Room

“Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.”

This belief brought Deepak Srinivasan a long way who now finds himself on the entrepreneurial path.

According to Deepak, “The industrialized farming methods based on fossil fuels are putting a huge amount of pressure on our planet. To come up with technically advanced systems that can enable farming in urban areas in a sustainable manner is the need of the hour. The food we eat is engineered to travel long distances and 50 percent of our food is wasted even before it reaches us. We need ways to produce healthy local food."

Deepak, with his co-founder Ashish Khan, started Crofters in March 2016, and they have come up with devices that will help people farm their fresh, healthy food in a sustainable manner. Crofters have developed India's first fully automatic indoor home farm.

They have built an intelligent, self-cleaning, indoor aquaponics ecosystem that helps grow completely organic food right inside a living room. It is for passionate gardeners living in crowded apartments without a backyard space or a terrace of their own.

A combo of nature and technology

They have built an intelligent WiFi-enabled mobile app and sensor unit which helps control and monitor all ecosystem parameters remotely. All this comes with zero maintenance. Users can use the system to grow vegetables, herbs, or small fruits. They are looking to gather data from its users to replicate the model on a large, commercial scale in the future.

How do they implement this?

They create hardware and software that enable people to grow their own fresh food. They have a series of products and solutions that will enable farming in places previously considered unsuitable for it. Their LED grow light technology will help in the indoor farming area to convert huge spaces in urban areas into farms. They claim that their technology will reduce water consumption by 80 percent and pave the way for vertical farming that will make more use of available space.

How did they choose the name of their company and what does it mean?

According to Ashish, “Crofter refers to someone who farms on a small piece of land, so we named our company Crofters as we are on a mission to make farming accessible to everyone on this planet."

Core service/product

They develop IoT-based indoor and outdoor farms based on the science of aquaponics. 

Monetization strategy

They have an online-only model for selling their products with doorstep delivery and service. They are into consumables model with income from the sales of accessories to the users through the marketplace. They are working towards setting up experience centres for experiencing the Crofters ecosystem in Bengaluru and Chennai. They will work with ed tech companies on a partnership basis by licensing of their product with a curriculum.

Funding status

They are bootstrapped and want to achieve some tangible traction before looking for funding.

The Future Of Food Will Be Skyscrapers Filled With Plants

The Future Of Food Will Be Skyscrapers Filled With Plants

DAN SEITZ 

02.08.17

Milan is full of unusual sights. As the most populous city in Italy, and its main financial and industrial center, it’s a riot of color and design. But amid the skyline is a building that even for Milan is strange: The Bosco Verticale, or Vertical Forest, a skyscraper encircled with trees, finished in 2014. The building was designed by acclaimed architect Stefano Boeri, and — if everyone from marijuana growers to Chinese investors get their way — will soon be as recognizable to urbanites as glass and steel towers are now.

Why? As cities expand, they destroy farmland, pump out smog, and fail to produce food. Parks, community gardens, and other green spaces can only do so much, and many foresee demand for food and the strain of climate change as an imminent danger. At the same time, we’re increasingly eager to know more about what we eat and where it’s coming from, and finding that information lacking. More and more people understand that everything we eat has a “footprint” and that the further your food travels, the more ecological damage it causes.

At the same time, as food-producing California faces water shortages that not even record precipitation can reverse, and climate change affects farmland across the world, shipping food from water-rich regions has become a vital necessity. Simply put, both consumer demand and environmental struggles mean that cities want their farms as close as possible to the populace, producing as much as possible (with as little water loss as possible), and while helping mitigate the pollution.

It’s a tall order. Literally.

Enter the vertical forest, like the afore mentioned building in Milan with more already in the works in Lausanne and Nanjing. The idea is simple: cities need more secure food supplies, more oxygen and to expand upward before gobbling up the land around them, so why not wrap skyscrapers in terraces that offer both, and build giant, towering farms that can feed thousands? The idea is undeniably ambitious, and so far, it’s little more than a proof of concept. But the concept works, and an unlikely industry is offering a path to expand it, thanks to a decision made thirty years ago.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan ordered law enforcement to begin helicopter flights that sprayed fields of marijuana with herbicide. The result? Marijuana operations began experimenting with hydroponics. Hydroponics are complex systems that allow farmers to grow plants indoors without soil. Instead, the plants are suspended in paper or mesh (or coconut husk) while a nutrient solution flows through the roots. Grow lights, powerful panels that turn out a replacement for sunlight, are used to offer the energy plants need to grow, with the result being an indoor, water-powered garden.

The hydroponics industry had plenty of other, more legal pioneers, such as the endless acres of Canadian hydroponics operations, but it was marijuana growers who worked on small, productive operations, and that expertise may be crucial to making vertical farms work.

Rick Byrd of PureAgro points out there are benefits well beyond just cutting down on fossil fuels: Vertical forests can deliver more than one harvest a year. As they’re indoors, there’s less of a pest problem, meaning less need for pesticides. And, with space at a premium, hydro operations can be build up, rather than having to grab for land.

These are expensive ideas, but marijuana — in the midst of a mega boom — means that growing operations can pioneer the technology, and then drive down the price to the point where you can grow anything with the same tech.

Byrd may find himself beaten to the punch by scientists, though. MIT recently debuted the Food Computer, an open-source system of computers and robotics that allows users to develop a “profile” for each plant they want to grow. Currently about the size of a shipping container, MIT’s team can see warehouse-sized facilities churning out specific types of food. With the robots doing the hard work, farming would be as simple as punching in the numbers and keeping an eye out for pests.

Hydroponics is not without its challenges. The nutrient solution, for example, is essentially pollution itself, and either needs to be reused or properly processed — although a well-run vertical farm offers better water management and control. Grow lights require enormous amounts of power, even with electron-sipping LED technology rapidly improving. And in a fit of irony, the plants outside these towers will need to be chosen carefully, as they might otherwise contribute to climate change.

But as a solution to a growing problem, vertical forests show that we should grow upward, not outward. Perhaps one day, the fields of the midwest will be filled with skyscrapers full of food, 50 stories tall, vastly increasing the available growing space.

Panasonic's First Indoor Farm Grows Over 80 Tons of Greens Per Year — Take A Look Inside

Panasonic's First Indoor Farm Grows Over 80 Tons of Greens Per Year — Take A Look Inside

• Leanna Garfield, Business Insider

Panasonic may be known for its consumer electronics, but the Japanese company is also venturing into indoor agriculture.

In 2014, Panasonic started growing leafy greens inside a warehouse in Singapore and selling them to local grocers and restaurants. At the time, the 2,670-square-foot farm produced just 3.6 tons of produce per year. The farm's square footage and output have both more than quadrupled since then, Alfred Tham, the assistant manager of Panasonic's Agriculture Business Division, tells Business Insider.

Panasonic's greens are all grown indoors year-round, with LEDs replacing sunlight. The growing beds are stacked to the ceiling in order to achieve a higher yield in the limited space.

Take a look inside.

Freight Farms Revolutionizing Farm-To-Fork System

By Patrick Lantrip

February 08, 2017

Usually the concept of farm-to-fork is designed to keep locally-grown produce out of shipping containers, but one company is working with local farmers to do just the opposite.

The Leafy Green Machine, developed by Boston-based Freight Farms, is a virtual farm-in-a-box that converts used shipping containers into year-round hydroponic farms, which can be monitored and controlled with your smartphone.

Each unit equates to a two-acre farm in terms of annual production, but is packed into a 40’ x 8’ x 9.5’ space and can be operated year-round regardless of geographic location or climate.

“It provides a pretty cool story thinking about these shipping containers that have previously transported cold goods across the globe and now they’re just in one place growing food,” Caroline Katsiroubas, Freight Farms marketing director said.

When its two founders, Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, started the company they were originally looking into urban rooftop farming and how to make it economically viable, but after about a year of research, they decided that it was a little bit too cost intensive and time intensive.

The plans were eventually altered for shipping containers and the first prototype was built in 2012.

“Now at this point we have over 100 farms located across the globe,” Katsiroubas said. “A lot of them are small business that have just started and they are selling to their local farmers market, local restaurants or are starting farm stands or CSAs.”

In addition the United States, Freight Farms has operations in Canada, Japan and parts of Europe.

“We’re hoping to be all across the globe soon, because there is a definitely a need from it everywhere,” Katsiroubas said.

However, she noted that the company plans of bring strategic with its growth as not spread itself too thin.

“Our first and foremost priority would be the success of our farmers,” she said.

In Savannah, Ga., Grant Anderson is one such farmer.

Anderson, who was raised by his grandparents in rural Georgia, has been around farming his whole life, but said he never saw it as a viable business model. Since his grandfather owned 90 acres of land and leased most of it out to local farmers, Anderson said he saw many of the farmers’ struggles first-hand.

“I saw what temperamental weather can do to a farmer’s production and their income stream,” Anderson said. “I never really thought it was a stable career path even though it is something that a lot of folks around me did.”

Anderson eventually went to Georgia Tech, and obtained a business degree with the hopes of one day starting his own company.

For six years Anderson worked in finance as an auditor and portfolio manager, before taking a corporate job with Equifax in Atlanta.

However, Anderson said he wasn’t happy with his career trajectory and eventually returned home after the birth of his son and took a job as an administrator with the local board of education.

Once day, Anderson read an article in CNN Money that would change his life about a Boston couple with no agriculture experience who became highly-successful urban farmers through Freight Farms.

“I thought that agriculture is a part of my life even though it’s not something that I actually chose for a career path,” Anderson said. “It just sparked a curiosity.”

Anderson said there were a lot of positives around the idea of local food production and the lack of local food producers.

“The more I looked into it the more interested I became,” he said. “With my background I felt like I could viably operate that business and I also enjoy the hands-on work of growing plants, which I do for my own family over the summer in our backyard.”

Though Anderson has only been container farming for only four months, he is already having success at the local farmer’s market and is now working to build a rapport with local chefs to grow his customer base.

“It’s not something that I think is really popular right out of the gate in South Georgia,” Anderson said. “A lot of people do local dirt farming, so that fact that I am farming is not really a novel idea, but getting people to understand that this is in a shipping container, we can do it year-round and we can grow it vertically up the walls – people are just dumbfounded when they look in these things.”.

Freight Farms converts refurbished shipping containers into hydroponic farms that yield as much produce in a year as two acres of land.  

Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman have helped farmers launch more than 100 container farms across the globe since they built the first Leafy Green Machine prototype in 2012.  

Vertical Farming: A High-Growth Trend

Vertical Farming: A High-Growth Trend

by Samuel Taube, Investment U Research TeamFriday, February 3, 2017

 Market Trends

Every year, Americans care more about where our food comes from. Organic food sales are growing by double-digit percentages annually. And the “eat local” movement is still picking up steam.

But if you live in a big metro area, how local or natural can you really eat? For years, the answer was “not very.” Then vertical farming started to enter the commercial mainstream.

As the name implies, vertical farming means using hydroponic technology, grow lights and other agricultural innovations to build multilevel indoor farms. It allows farmers to grow fresh organic produce in the middle of our ever-growing cities. And in many cases, it’s more efficient than traditional farming.

As demand for locally grown organic food continues to outstrip supply, vertical farming is poised to become a tremendous investment opportunity. In this piece, we’re looking at why - and how to get in early.

Why Vertical Farming Matters

There are two almost unstoppable trends propelling the growth of vertical farming. First, local organic food is getting more popular every year. Second, more people are moving to cities, suburbs and other areas that can’t support traditional agriculture.

As our Editor-in-Chief wrote over the holidays, organic food is quite scarce in our country. That’s not some kind of environmentalist statement. It’s a simple fact. We want more naturally grown stuff than we can produce right now.

That’s why the organic food business has experienced such consistent growth recently. Last year, for the first time ever, a solid 5% of the total food sales in America were organic.

Now, the above graph just shows the growing market for organic food. It wouldn’t be relevant to organic farming... if most people lived near farmland. But they don’t. Four out of five Americans live in an urban area... and that number is constantly going up.

As you can see from the graph below, the U.S. as a whole has never experienced de-urbanization in recent memory. The pace of migration to cities has slowed at times, but it’s never gone below zero.

Plus, American cities are geographically huge compared to those elsewhere in the world. Most major U.S. cities are surrounded by huge rings of suburbs. These can sprawl out for dozens or hundreds of miles.

That means that our city dwellers can get their food in one of two ways. They can load it up with preservatives and truck it in from faraway rural areas. Or they can grow it in the city with vertical farming.

At the moment, the former option still feeds most of America’s urban population. But the demand for fresh, local and organic produce is still growing. So will the necessity of vertical farming.

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It’s tough to find pure plays on vertical farming. That’s a common problem among emerging technologies. Not many S&P 500 companies are willing to bet everything on a new industry.

Fortunately, several food retailers and gardening companies have made big investments in urban agriculture. These companies offer investors indirect plays on vertical farming.

Whole Foods (Nasdaq: WFM) is a major buyer and financer of vertically farmed produce. Its Local Producer Loan Program has lent tens of millions of dollars to local farming projects. And for the last few years, many of those projects have been urban and indoors.

Then there’s Scotts Miracle-Gro (NYSE: SMG), perhaps the nation’s most prominent gardening supply company. Almost 10% of Scotts’ revenue comes from its hydroponic equipment division. That has given the company an important stake in two investing trends: marijuana production and vertical farming.

As you can see, these two vertical farming “brokers” have done quite well for themselves in the past year.

If you live in a city today, chances are that you’re eating food grown in a place you’ve never been - by people you’ll never meet. And if you’re into organic food, then you’re likely paying a pretty penny for the logistical cost of getting it into the city without preservatives.

But that may soon be changing. As the trends of urbanization and organic food continue to grow, city dwellers need a new way to feed themselves. In a few years, your apples might be grown a few blocks from your apartment. And if you invest in the right grocers and gardening companies today, then you can profit from this futuristic transition.