Gresham House, a UK alternative investment specialist, plans to boost its investment in vertical farms by 10 times over the next three to five years.
The investment will boost Gresham House’s total commitment to between £300 million and £500 million.
According to a story at Bloomberg.com, investor interest in vertical farms is on the rise. Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. invested in an Israeli-Dutch vertical farm startup called Future Crops in March. And BNP Paribas Asset Management and CPR Asset Management, a unit of Amundi SA, are considering potential investments.
Reports state the U.S. has more than 2,000 vertical farms. China is experimenting with innovative skyscraper designs, while Singapore is pushing vertical farming in an urban setting. In the Middle East and Africa, the market value of vertical farms is forecast to grow to $4.9 billion by 2029 from about $1 billion today, according to market research firm Data Bridge.
The race to be the biggest Every few months, companies launch news releases, claiming they are building the largest vertical farm in the world. Some examples over the past year: • Last October, Jones Food Company, based in the UK, opened its second vertical farm, at 148,000 sq. ft. – three times larger than its first vertical farm. The first harvesting was planned for this summer.
Photo: Jones Food Company
• In January, U.S.-based Upward Farms, an indoor aquaponic vertical farming company, announced it was building the world’s largest vertical farm in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, at 250,000 sq. ft. Upward Farms plans to construct through 2022, with production and sales for the U.S. Northeast beginning in early 2023.
Photo: Upward Farms
• This past July, Crop One Holdings and Emirates Flight Catering opened Emirates Crop One, what they say is “the world’s largest vertical farm.” The over 330,000-square-foot facility – dubbed ECO 1 – is located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates near Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central. It has the capacity to produce over two million pounds of leafy greens annually. ●
Photo: Emirates
Greens growing on stacked trays at ECO 1 vertical farm.
Freight Farms, a manufacturer of container farming, is partnering with The University of Arizona Biosphere 2 to explore new ways of growing food.
The endeavour is part of Biosphere 2's larger initiative to advance the understanding of natural and human-made ecosystems through integrated research to increase the resilience and sustainability of Earth systems and human quality of life.
Biosphere 2 (B2), a campus of the University of Arizona (UA), engages in environmental research, education and entrepreneurship leading to solutions for climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainable development, on Earth and beyond. The core research facility of the B2 campus is the world's largest indoor controlled environment for ecological and climate change research across multiple biomes.
Founded in 2012, Freight Farms debuted the first vertical hydroponic farm built inside an intermodal shipping container – the Leafy Green Machine – with the mission of democratizing and decentralizing the local production of fresh, healthy food. Since inception, Freight Farms has expanded its product offering and now claims it has the largest network of connected farms in the world, with global customers ranging from small business farmers to corporate, hospitality, retail, education and nonprofit sectors.
"At Freight Farms, we believe that a decentralized system of food production is essential to improving the resilience and security of food access globally," said Rick Vanzura, CEO of Freight Farms. "Growing hyper-local food year-round, by the community, for the community, is an important part of our collective future. This is why we make modular vertical farms that can be shipped and installed anywhere in the world, bringing the farm and the power of self-growing to communities of all kinds."
As the Freight Farms Greenery S container is being used by Biosphere 2 for research, it is also delivering fresh produce to the University of Arizona. In August, the first crop of lettuce grown in the container farm at Biosphere 2 was delivered to the University of Arizona Campus Pantry and the Impact of Southern Arizona community food bank. The crop included about 800 heads of red and green butter lettuce.
"We are excited to share our first crop to come out of the Freight Farms and Biosphere 2 collaboration," said John Adams, deputy director of Biosphere 2. "The Greenery S is the latest generation modular container farm that brings agriculture to a new dimension by growing and harvesting produce that is herbicide- and pesticide-free. This technology makes it possible to bring fresh food to an area where it might otherwise be impossible to grow and help to develop food systems for the future."
Freight Farms stated that vertical farming's ability to control environmental factors makes it critical for the future of food development. “These older, time-tested systems of growing, like hydroponics, are being re-imagined as new technologies – precision-controlled growing environments – allowing for year-round food production in hot deserts and frozen tundra alike,” they state in a news release. “These systems can be powered by clean energy and need only a few gallons of water daily, making them well-suited to withstand our rapidly changing world.
Freight Farms offerings includes Farmhand, its IoT farm automation software, that allows indoor farm operators to control temperature, lighting and other environmental variables in their farms by connecting to in-farm sensors, allowing both monitoring and controlling different indoor farming systems.
Freight Farmers operates in 34 countries on more than 520 farms, which now includes the team at Biosphere 2. ●
The Dutch-American team Koala was declared winner of the third edition of the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in Bleiswijk.
The team consisted of the start-up company Koidra and researchers from Cornell University. Team captain Kenneth Tran was also leading the winning team of the first edition. The winner was announced July 1 during a public live event at WUR Bleiswijk.
In this third edition of the competition, five international teams from around the world produced a lettuce crop using a fully autonomous algorithm. With the lowest feasible input of resources such as energy and CO2 and the production of a maximum of good quality heads of lettuce, they optimized the net profit.
Each team had a high-tech greenhouse compartment of Wageningen University & Research in Bleiswijk at its disposal to grow lettuce. The teams created their own AI algorithms that fully autonomously determined the set points for temperature, amount of daylight and artificial light, heating, CO2 concentration and cultivation-related parameters such as crop density, spacing moments and day of harvest. Next to standard greenhouse sensors, the teams had access to images from a Realsense 3D camera and specific sensors provided by the sponsors Sigrow and Ridder. Some teams added own sensors to deliver input for their algorithm.
Lettuce cv. ‘Lugano’ (RijkZwaan) was planted on 2 May. Teams had to grow lettuce with a target plant weight of 250 g. Also, the quality was judged: if plants were too small, had leaf tip burn or other deformations, they were classified as class B with a lower price or even unsellable class C. If plants were too large, teams wasted resources. The last team finished their crop on 17 June. The resource use (e.g., heating energy, electricity, CO2) was measured during the growing period and operational costs were calculated. Fixed costs depended on occupation of the greenhouse space and use of different installations (e.g., artificial light capacities). From these figures net profit was determined; the team with the highest net profit won the competition.
The teams’ AI algorithms were mounted on a virtual machine on a protected WUR server. Within this protected environment, the algorithms acquired data via a digital interface from LetsGrow and Azure Cloud. At the same time, the algorithms autonomously returned setpoints to the process computer (again through LetsGrow), which ultimately took the action on climate control in the experimental greenhouse. In a first cultivation cycle during February/March this year, each team could test their algorithm and procedure. The real challenge involved a second crop cycle during May/June. Teams could not access their algorithm any longer after start of the experiment but had to ask for permission in case they had to make urgent changes (bug fixes) in their algorithms. Access was charged, and costs were subtracted from the net profit. The winning team only accessed the virtual machine once to fix a little mistake.
The result Team Koala won the competition. Team captain Kenneth Tran also was leader of the winning team Sonoma in the first challenge with a net profit of €5.93 per m2 per crop cycle. The team consisted of the start-up company Koidra, which was founded after the first challenge, and researchers from Cornell University. Koala was also ranked first during the online challenge last summer and therefore got a wild card for the competition.
Koala's ambition is to advance greenhouse growing with an intelligent automation technology that is scalable across farms, crops, and even more broadly across process-based manufacturing industries. ●
Redwire Corporation, a company advancing the future of space infrastructure, announced it will be developing the only commercially owned and operated spaceflight-qualified plant growth platform capable of growing plants from seed to maturity in space.
Redwire Greenhouse, scheduled to launch to space no earlier than spring 2023, will be the first-ever commercially owned greenhouse installed on the International Space Station (ISS). Commercial agricultural technology company Dewey Scientific is expected to be Redwire’s customer for the inaugural flight.
“Redwire Greenhouse will expand opportunities for scientific discovery to improve crop production on Earth and enable critical research for crop production in space to benefit future long-duration human spaceflight,” said Dave Reed, Redwire Florida launch site operations director and greenhouse project manager. “Growing full crops in space will be critical to future space exploration missions as plants provide food, oxygen and water reclamation.”
The Redwire Greenhouse will provide a simple, scalable commercial solution for customers seeking to advance crop science from benchtop laboratory facilities to true production in space. Along with supporting long-term NASA exploration plans, the Redwire Greenhouse also will provide accessibility to institutional and commercial customers with various plant science and industrial research goals. Its 2023 in-space demonstration will validate the facility's concept of operations and evaluate its lighting, ventilation and leaf litter containment capabilities.
During the inaugural flight, Dewey Scientific will grow industrial hemp in the greenhouse for a gene expression study. The company collaborated with Redwire, contributing technical details about the 60-day experiment and describing its potential to demonstrate the capabilities of the facility, while advancing biomedical and biofuels research.
The Redwire Greenhouse will leverage already flight-qualified Redwire plant growth technology, including passive orbital nutrient delivery system (PONDS) devices developed in partnership with Tupperware Brands and currently operated by Redwire on the ISS. Larger, scalable versions of the greenhouse can be flown for customers with varying crop-growing requirements or alternate plant support systems. Besides PONDS, Redwire has managed plant investigations in the NASA-owned Advanced Plant Habitat since 2018. ●
Photo: NASA
