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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Modern Farmer

Gotham Greens Makes Moves Into New England With Another High-tech Vertical Farm

Brooklyn, NY-based agtech company Gotham Greens marked its first move into the New England region today with the grand opening and first harvest of a new high-tech farming facility in Providence, R.I.

The company said in a press release that its new 100,000 sq. ft. facility, formerly a General Electric lighting factory, will grow 6 million heads of lettuce annually. Gotham will supply those greens and herbs to retailers like Whole Foods, Star Market, and other regional grocery stores. 

Gotham, which was founded in 2009 and has raised $30.1 million to date, operates a network of greenhouses across the U.S. The company uses the hydroponic technique, which means crops grow in trays without soil and soak up nutrient-enriched water through their roots. Like a growing number of indoor farming operations, Gotham’s system is fairly automated, with software controlling the amount of light and nutrients crops receive as well as the temperature of the greenhouses. 

The Providence greenhouse had its ribbon-cutting ceremony today. The farm is Gotham’s first location in the New England area.

Gotham is just one of many companies who’ve lately announced large-scale indoor farming facilities that rely on high-tech systems to grow and harvest heads of lettuce. Though Plenty shelved its plans to build out a farm in the Seattle area, it did recently announce its intention for one in the middle of Los Angeles. Kalera broke ground on a massive facility outside Orlando, FL that will grow 5 million heads of lettuce annually. And this year, Square Roots partnered with Gordon Food Service to build vertical farms onsite at many of the latter’s North American distribution centers.

Gotham’s new facility joins its existing roster of farms, which includes three in the NYC area, two in the Midwest, and one in the Denver.

Farmshelf Gets Angel Investment From Singapore’s she1K, Liberty Produce Launches UK Vertical Farming Project

Angel network she1K has syndicated an early-stage investment in Farmshelf, according to an article published today on AgFunder News. Singapore-based she1K, which is known for its global female executive leadership, did not disclose financial terms of the deal. Farmshelf is the third company to join its portfolio 

Whereas many companies in the vertical farming space right now have massive indoor facilities aiming to produce millions of heads of leafy greens, Farmshelf differentiates itself by staying focused on smaller spaces like supermarkets, offices, hotels, and restaurants. Its bookcase-sized farm grows leafy greens and herbs using a combination of custom LEDs, sensors, and software that deliver water, nutrients, and the optimal amount of light needed for each crop. The system, which can simply be plugged into a wall and connected to WiFi, is already at a number of restaurants, hotels, and other spaces, including NYC chain Tender Greens, Marriott Marquis Times Square, and the Condé Nast offices. 

The Farmshelf system is currently available to businesses in parts of Texas and California, and will be available to customers “in most major markets” in 2020.

Farmshelf isn’t the only indoor farming initiative kicking off December with big news. Across the Atlantic, agtech company Liberty Produce has finally launched its vertical farming project that looks to improve both crop yield and operational costs for vertical farming through improved, more automated tech.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Liberty Produce has partnered with several entities for the project. While most were not disclosed, a major one is Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), a network of scientists, farmers, researchers, academics, and businesses developing new ways to use technology to improve the farming system in the UK. Work on the Liberty Produce project is being done at CHAP’s Fine Phenotyping Lab at Rothamsted Research in the UK, with experts experimenting with plants’ responses to different light intensities and studying the best LED “recipes” for crops.

“There’s lots we don’t know about growing plants in this artificial environment and we’re not giving them optimal conditions,” Liberty Produce founder Zeina Chapman told The Spoon earlier this year. “With lighting, there isn’t an option to control it in a way that maximizes plant growth. So we might be putting plants under stress.”

Liberty also wants to use more automation to make the concept of vertical farming easier for the anyone, something Farmshelf also appears to be striving for with its plug-in-and-go system.

It’s an admirable goal to strive for, especially if it can get more locally grown produce into the hands of more cafeterias, universities, local businesses, and, eventually, individual homes.

The test — and something we’ll hear more about in 2020 — will be whether the vertical farming industry can find a way to do this cost effectively. There’s plenty of hype right now around the promises of vertical farming. As to whether it can actually become an everyday reality for the everyman, the jury is still out.

Far Out, New Cosmic Crisp Apple Can Last a Year in Storage

Move over Honeycrisp, there’s a new varietal looking to be the apple of our eyes, reports The Guardian. The new Cosmic Crisp apple, shipped out to retailers over the weekend, was bred to have higher levels of sweetness and acidity, and can also be stored for more than a year, which could help in the fight against food waste.

The Cosmic Crisp was created by Washington State University’s frut-tree breeding program, and has been in development for three decades. The Guardian writes that the new apple isn’t a result of genetic modification, but rather through cross-hybidization:

The fruit, a cross between the Enterprise and Honeycrisp apple varieties, was bred to feature “naturally higher levels of acidity and sugar,” so much so that one can use less sugar while baking, researchers claim.

We haven’t tried one yet, but in addition to sounding delicious (and having an excellent name), the Cosmic Crisp has also been bred to be hearty, slow to brown when cut, and as mentioned, can last for more than a year in storage.

It’s that last point that caught our eye as the Cosmic Crisp, with such a lengthy shelf life, has the power to potentially fight food waste. In the United States alone, where 30 – 40 percent of our food supply goes to waste . If the Cosmic Crisps can last longer, that means fewer will need to be thrown out due to spoilage.

The team as Washington State University joins a number of other high-profile teams looking to make fruit last longer at the grocery store. Apeel, Hazel Technologies and StixFresh are all using different methods to extend the shelf life of produce.

If you want to taste a Cosmic Crisp apple right now, The Guardian says that 450,000 40lb boxes were shipped across the U.S. over this past weekend.

Kroger Partners with Infarm to Grow Greens in Grocery Stores

Kroger announced today that it has partnered with Berlin-based Infarm to install modular, indoor vertical farms in some of its grocery stores.

According to the press release, the deal will place Infarm units at 15 of Kroger’s QFC stores, starting with two locations this month in Bellevue and Kirkland, Washington.

Infarm creates high-tech pods that can be installed in locations like grocery stores or restaurants. These pods use a combination of hydroponics and cloud-connected software to monitor growing elements like light, air, nutrients, etc. Right now, Infarm units can grow leafy greens like lettuce and a variety of herbs.

The promise of indoor vertical farms like Infarm’s is reducing the environmental footprint of produce by eliminating the need for transportation. This proximity also translates to fresher food for the consumer as it’s picked on-site.

That all sounds great, but as my colleague Jenn Marston wrote recently, the promise of vertical farming has yet to pay off:

As an industry, vertical farming has yet to prove itself as an environmentally and economically efficient piece of the agriculture system, and along with the hype are more and more stories about complications or outright closures of vertical farms. Already, a company called FarmedHere shut down in 2017, Plantagon went bankrupt in March of 2019, and just recently, MIT halted work on its controversial Open Agriculture Initiative project after reportedly exaggerating results of its vertical farming experiments.

Those disappointments, however, were around larger scale vertical farms. Perhaps Infarm, with its smaller, in-store approach can succeed where others have failed.

Infarm continues to, well plow ahead. The company raised a $100 million Series B round earlier this year, and announced a partnership to bring its vertical farm pods to Marks and Spencer stores in the U.K.

Bellevue and Kirkland aren’t that far from The Spoon HQ, so you can expect one of us to make the trip and pick some in-store produce soon.

Plenty’s Plans to Shelve Its Seattle-area Operation Raises More Questions About Vertical Farming

Indoor agtech startup Plenty is shelving its plans for a Seattle-area vertical farming operation, according to an article published over the weekend on GeekWire.

Plenty, who also runs a facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, announced plans for a 100,000-square-foot vertical farm in Kent, Washington in 2017 — the same year the company nabbed a $200 million investment that included contributions from Softbank and Jeff Bezos. The Kent facility was supposed to grow 4.5 million pounds of greens annually using a combination of LEDs, sensors, and cameras inside a completely climate-controlled environment.

However, Christina Ra, Plenty’s senior director of integrated marketing, told GeekWire that the company’s farming facility, Tigris, was too tall to fit inside the Kent location and that Plenty had “ceased operations” there one year ago: “As a relatively lean company, we had to just make a decision about where we were going to put our focus and we felt like building Tigris, while also focusing on Seattle as a new and really important market, was something that we couldn’t do well,” Ra said.

Meanwhile, seven former Plenty employees recently spoke with Business Insider and highlighted problems inside the company that allegedly range from unsafe working conditions to the fact that “Plenty’s leadership had exaggerated the company’s capabilities on more than one occasion.”

Plenty will carry on with its planned location in the middle of Los Angeles, which the company recently announced, and it still operates a facility in the SF Bay Area. But as this news about the Seattle operation indicates, what Plenty (or any vertical farm startup) promises versus what it actually produces aren’t necessarily aligning right now.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that refrain around expectation versus reality in vertical farming is one we’re going to hear more in the near future. As an industry, vertical farming has yet to prove itself as an environmentally and economically efficient piece of the agriculture system, and along with the hype are more and more stories about complications or outright closures of vertical farms. Already, a company called FarmedHere shut down in 2017, Plantagon went bankrupt in March of 2019, and just recently, MIT halted work on its controversial Open Agriculture Initiative project after reportedly exaggerating results of its vertical farming experiments.

While it’s bad news pretty much anytime a company goes under, for vertical farming, it’s also good information to have. As Paul P.G. Gauthier, who started the now-shelved Princeton Vertical Farming Project, told The Spoon this year, we need the stories about what isn’t working (e.g., operational costs, failure to break even, etc.) as much as we need the success stories.

And we need those stories not just to give lessons on how to employ vertical farming more effectively but how much effort (and money) we should even be investing in it as the agricultural industry continues to look for alternative forms of farming.

Element Farms Unveils a High-tech Greenhouse Facility to Grow More Spinach Indoors

When it comes to leafy greens, spinach may get the superlative for Most Popular, but it’s also one of the most difficult to grow — especially indoors. So it’s no small accomplishment that indoor farming company Element Farms announced a 70,000 square foot greenhouse facility in New Jersey to grow spinach year-round using a combination of proprietary software and hydroponics.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Element Farms will begin operations at the new farm “in the coming weeks” and will produce “over half a million pounds each year of pesticide-free baby spinach” as well as a variety of other greens, arugula, beet greens, and pea shoots among them.

As Element cofounder and CEO Serdar Mizrakci explained earlier this year, spinach is tough to grow because it is prone to disease, particularly in high-density indoor environments. Element combats this by adding what Mizrakci calls “another layer of precision control” to the plants’ grow process. The company uses a combination of hydroponics along with a dynamic lighting algorithm that combines natural sunlight with high-capacity LEDs. Meanwhile, customized harvesting equipment automates and speeds up some of the grow process.

The new greenhouse facility will use similar automation for many day-to-day farming tasks. And according to the press release, the facility is the first of multiple greenhouse projects. Though Element hasn’t named specific locations for future, the company is currently looking at two other states as sites for future facilities.

The agricultural industry is grappling with both labor shortages and the fact that our soil is dying, so it’s not surprising that more and more companies are exploring the benefits (and challenges) of automated indoor farming. In August, Kalera broke ground on a massive vertical farm facility outside Orlando, FL that will automate many parts of the grow process. In the UK, Intelligent Growth Solutions recently raised an additional £1.6 million in funding for its “farm in a box” system, while Australian agtech company Vertical Farm Systems says it can take plants from seeding stage to fully grown in just 28 days with its automated system.

Element Farms, meanwhile, also emphasizes the “local” aspect of its business. The new facility will be on direct delivery routes to cities in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. In the coming months, the company plans to expand its PureSpinach products to more ShopRite stores in the Northeastern U.S.

Newsletter: How to Waste Less Food at Restaurants, Indoor Farming’s Data Problem

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Last Monday I started conducting a food waste audit at home to track the amount of edible food I throw out on a weekly basis. It was easy — at first. As of Thursday I was smugly patting myself on the back for having nary a piece of leftover kale in the trash. Then I went out to eat four times over the weekend, and come Monday was left with a fridge full of to-go containers I no longer even wanted.

I doubt I’m alone here.

While our need to curb the food waste problem at home is becoming increasingly apparent, restaurants also play a huge part in the 1.3 billion-ton issue. There are companies currently employing tech to fight the issue. Winnow, for example, just raised a $12 million Series B round for its connected scales that measure the amount of unused inventory that gets thrown out in high-volume kitchens. Other companies, notably LeanPath and Tenzo, offer similar solutions. But while offerings like these could go far in helping restaurants curb food waste in the back of house, they don’t yet address what to do about all the post-consumer food waste that piles up in restaurants — that is, the leftovers on our plates.

Recent moves from California might help. This week, I wrote about a newly formed law in the Golden State that will require limited-service restaurants to provide separate bins in the front of house into which consumers can throw their uneaten food, soiled paper, and other “organic waste.” Dubbed AB 827, the law is aimed at changing behaviors in terms of how consumers think about their food when they eat out. Having a server clear away a half-eaten meal can hide the issue; seeing your own hands scrape half a plate of Yaki-Udon into the trash is considerably more off-putting. If laws like AB 827 can help change our perception of food waste, and if other states enact similar moves, we might just be able to whittle that 1.3 billion-ton problem down.

Photo: yourlocal

YourLocal Redefines the Concept of Surplus Food
Alongside changing consumer behavior, restaurants curbing waste at the back-of-house level remains a vital part of keeping food out of the landfills. Measuring inventory a la Winnow is one way. Selling surplus meals at discount prices is another. This week, my colleague Catherine Lamb reminded us of the latter with her profile on a company called YourLocal.

YourLocal works with restaurants who have surplus food at the end of the day, making that food available for consumers to purchase via an app. Users download the YourLocal app, peruse available meals, then purchase them at heavily discounted prices.

There are many such food rescue companies in Europe, but, as Catherine points out, questions remain around how it will be received in the U.S. Part of YourLocal’s mission is “to shift the idea of what ‘surplus’ means by selling only high-quality foods, showing consumers that extra doesn’t necessarily mean second-rate.”

In other words, another consumer behavior to start changing when it comes to fighting food waste.

Image via OpenAg.

We Really, Really Need More Data on Indoor Farming’s Actual Success
Meanwhile, indoor farming is having a bit of a day of reckoning. This week, MIT halted work on much of its Open Agriculture Initiative following reports of academic dishonesty and environmental concerns.

OpenAg, as the project is often called, was developing high-tech containers for growing plants in fully controlled environments. Trouble is, that wasn’t really happening. OpenAg has gotten a lot of hype, but reports this week surfaced of containers not functioning properly, needing far more maintenance than anticipated, and, well, not really growing much in terms of plants.

The whole situation is less a saga about one project’s exaggerated claims and more a reminder of how little data we actually have on the true effectiveness of these tech-centric indoor farming techniques. What are the best crops for indoor production (hint: not root vegetables)? Where is the wastewater from these farms going? How energy efficient (or not) are grow containers that rely so heavily on LED lighting? So far, answers to these questions remain rather dim.

“A lot of the small companies have something to tell, and we should hear their story,” Paul P.G. Gauthier, formerly of the Princeton Vertical Farming project, told me last year. He was referring to the need for more data on the realities of indoor farming: what’s working, what isn’t, and whether the reality even comes close to the hype.

As the news from MIT this week suggests, more data would probably uncover some unwanted surprises about the success rate of indoor farms. But it’s also the key ingredient to figuring out the industry’s most productive place in our future food system.

MIT Halts Work on the Controversial Open Agriculture Initiative Food Project

MIT has closed down much of its Open Agriculture Initiative following allegations of academic dishonesty and improper dumping of wastewater, according to an article published in the NY Times. Late last week, MIT’s vice president of research, Maria Zuber, closed down all offsite work on the project, though she has allowed researchers to continue doing some design and document work.

The project, often simply referred to as “OpenAg,” is known for its food computers — small, high-tech containers meant to grow plants in controlled environments and without any soil. OpenAg also operated larger farms it called “food servers” in shipping containers housed outside the MIT campus in Middleton, Massachusetts.

Project leader Caleb Harper also had a vision that owners of these food computers would be able to share data on the perfect combinations of light, water, nutrient, and temperature levels with one another, creating a kind of open-source framework for high-tech indoor farming. “As an open source project, we believe the more Food Computers we all build, the more data we all have to play with, and the more we can radically alter the future of food,” states a page on the Open Ag site. 

Instead, the project has been tethered to controversy of late. The Media Lab in general has been under scrutiny since August due to its financial dealings with convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein. For OpenAg specifically, the trouble started in September of this year, when ProPublica and Boston radio station WBUR reported that OpenAg’s larger farms, housed in shipping containers near the town of Middleton, Massachusetts, were dumping wastewater underground that contained much higher levels of nitrogen than the legal limit in that state.

Most recently, the project is said to have exaggerated the results of its experiments. As the NYT reports, Harper “made exaggerated or false claims to the project’s corporate sponsors as well as in talks and interviews with the news media.”

Researchers on the project have also questioned the effectiveness of the food computers. For example, the food computers could not independently control conditions inside the boxes. One former special projects manager for Open Ag said she had to buy plants from the store for lab photo shoots and that some food computers sent to schools didn’t work.

In the meantime, the whole situation serves as a reminder of how little information we actually have about the true effectiveness of newer, tech-driven indoor farming methods. That’s not to say every company out there is claiming to be the future of farming while shopping at Home Depot’s garden center. But tech-enabled indoor farming remains surrounded by a number of questions around its cost, environmental impact, and long-term viability as an addition to agriculture.

Earlier this year, in a conversation with The Spoon, Paul P.G. Gauthier pointed out that we need more data on the realities of indoor farming in order to understand how much good it really contributes to the food system. His work at the now-shuttered Princeton Vertical Farming project was also studying indoor farming and releasing data on their experiments about what was and wasn’t working when it came to growing techniques and technology. “A lot of the small companies have something to tell, and we should hear their story,” he said.

Whether we hear more of OpenAg’s is yet-another question. For now, MIT has halted OpenAg activities “pending completion of ongoing assessments,” according to the NYT. There is no timeframe for when those assessments might be complete.

Plenty Announces a New Vertical Farm Facility in the Middle of Los Angeles

Vertical farming company Plenty announced plans today to build a new farm facility, this one in Southern California. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the new facility will be located in Los Angeles’ Compton neighborhood. Development is slated to begin later this year, and produce will be ready for market in late 2020.

This will be Plenty’s second vertical farm, following the company’s first San Francisco location, which is already in operation and sells greens at a number of local retailers as well as e-commerce grocery store Good Eggs.

The Los Angeles-based farm will be “approximately the size of a soccer field,” use less than 1 percent of the land and 5 percent of the water used in traditional agriculture, and, like other vertical farms, grow produce in a completely controlled environment without the use of pesticides. The new farm is also expected to create 50 new jobs, from growers to technicians to operations managers.

A huge part of Plenty’s mission for vertical farming is taste. Because vertical farming environments allow farmers to control every part of the grow process, elements like water, nutrients, air, and light from LEDs can be adjusted to best suit the needs of an individual crop. Plenty creates a “recipe” of these elements designed to bring as much flavor out of each plant as possible.

Once in operation, Plenty’s Los Angeles farm will grow kale, arugula, and other mixes of greens.

While vertical farming isn’t yet what you’d call commonplace, we’re seeing more of these large-scale operations ramping up for production around the U.S. AeroFarms, which runs a massive facility in New Jersey, raised $100 million in funding this past summer (and also supplies Singapore Airlines with greens). In the Orlando, FL area, Kalera is developing a vertical farm facility that is expected to grow 5 million heads of lettuce annually. Bowery, too, runs a massive facility in New Jersey that supplies greens to the New York area.

Right now, all these companies grapple with questions of how to make vertical farming economically feasible on a large enough scale to help feed significant portions of the population. We’re not there just yet. There are still questions as to how sustainable these farms really are, and no one’s yet figured out the right mix of plant science and money to grow more than just leafy greens. As Plenty and others continue fine-tuning and expanding their operations, they’ll hopefully provide more clues as to the most valuable role vertical farming can play in the future of agriculture.

London Is Getting Two New Vertical Farms Thanks to a Company Called Vertical Future

Food tech company Vertical Future plans to develop two new vertical farming sites in 2020 to serve restaurants and consumers in London, according to a recent AgFunder News interview with company cofounder Jamie Burrows. If all goes to plan, the new facilities will be in the area next March.

Vertical Future closed a £4 million (~$5 million) round earlier this month, with funds planned for supporting “the first phase of Vertical Future’s decade-long growth strategy,” according to a recent press release. That includes a 25x crop production increase as well as the build out of two so-called “ethical plant factories” planned for London’s Mayfair and London Fields areas. The company will also continue to develop its existing site in the city’s Deptford neighborhood.

Founded in 2016, Vertical Future has spent the last few years building out a proof of concept for growing micro-greens and micro-veggies indoors, using a combination of LED lighting, sensors, and software to grow produce in fully controlled environments without the need for pesticides or even soil. Like Square Roots, CropOne, and other companies in the space, Vertical Future’s focus is on “hyper-local food” production — that is, limiting production and distribution to much smaller geographic areas instead of shipping food across an entire country. And as is the case with a growing number of companies, more and more, being hyperlocal means serving urban areas.

“Foodtech can improve the sustainability of our food by transforming the way it is produced, increasing health-benefits and decreasing our carbon ‘foodprint’, and nowhere is this more essential than in urban areas,” Burrows told AgFunder News.

Vertical Future joins companies like Intelligent Growth Solutions and Liberty Produce in bringing more vertical farming initiatives to the UK. While based in Berlin, InFarm has also crossed the channel in recent months to set up shop in Marks and Spencer department stores in London.

Vertical Future focuses more on individual customers as well as eating establishments. In addition to a direct-to-consumer operation, the company works with over 100 restaurants, including Chop’d, Kaleido, and Mindful Chef. According to a recent press release, Vertical Future’s forthcoming London Fields and Mayfair factories will be able to produce enough greens to get that number past 1,000.

Gordon Food Service and Square Roots Launch First Onsite Vertical Farm

Gordon Food Service, one of North America’s largest food distributors, and Kimball Musk’s indoor farming company Square Roots have officially launched one of the latter’s vertical farms onsite at the Gordon headquarters in Wyoming, Michigan.

The announcement, which the two companies made yesterday, follows news from March that Gordon and Square Roots were working together. The aim of the partnership is to build Square Roots Farms at or near Gordon distribution centers across North America. Food grown on the vertical farms will be available to Gordon’s corporate clients as well as individuals who buy from the company’s e-commerce store.

Square Roots farms, which are built inside shipping containers, pack a lot of produce into a very small amount of real estate. Case in point: the new farm at the Gordon HQ will take up less than two acres and is projected to produce more than 50,000 pounds of herbs and greens each year. Square Roots does this by growing plants vertically on panels and using a recipe of LED lighting and hydroponics controlled via software. As with many vertical farms, there’s no soil involved in the process.

“As our network of farms gets larger, it also gets smarter. Cloud-connected farms and data-empowered farmers learn from each other, enabling Square Roots to replicate success from one location to another, seamlessly,” Square Roots wrote in a recent blog post.

The partnership with Gordon also allows Square Roots to expand its Next-Gen Farmer Training Program, a one-year, all-paid entrepreneurial-meets-agricultural program that teaches younger adults both the tech and agricultural aspects of indoor vertical farming, with heavy emphasis on the former. As Square Roots opens more farming locations at Gordon distribution centers across the continent, it will be able to enlist more farmers to the program to man those locations. The number of new farmers varies based on the size of each location. Gordon, meanwhile, operates 175 distribution centers across North America.

So far, the farm at headquarters is the only one announced for Gordon, though more are planned for the future.

Intelligent Growth Solutions Raises an Additional £1.6M for Its Automated Vertical Farm Solution

Scotland-based agtech and lighting solutions company Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) announced today a further raise of £1.6 million (~$2 million USD) in what’s the second and final close of its Series A round. Agtech investor Ospraie Ag Sciences contributed the bulk of the funding, with participation from Agfunder. This brings IGS’s total Series A funding and total funding overall to £7 million.

In June, IGS raised a £5.4 million Series A round for its “farm in a box” indoor vertical farming system, which uses patented IoT tech to automate many aspects of running a vertical farm, from loading and moving grow trays to adjusting water levels and lighting to monitoring overall crop health.

In particular, the IGS system promises to help vertical farming companies bring down energy costs associated with LED lighting, one of the most expensive parts of running an indoor vertical farm. On its website, IGS says it can increase LED efficiency by up to 50 percent versus other indoor grow environments. The company has two patents in this area, one granted and the other pending.

IGS’s farm, located outside Dundee, is also Scotland’s first commercial vertical farm, and investor Ospraie’s first venture into that country as well as into the indoor farming market.

IGS said in a press release it will use the funds to “expand its market presence” through global sales operations for its lighting system, which the company expects to deploy in early 2020.

IGS will face plenty of competition as it expands in the vertical farming space. In 2019 so far, an Australian company called Vertical Farm Systems raised $1 million for its automated indoor farming technology and Eco Convergence Group rebranded as Kalera and broke ground on a massive vertical farm outside Orlando, FL. As well, there’s been plenty of movement from commercial vertical farm heavyweights like New Jersey-based AeroFarms as well as new entrants like Fifth Season, who just announced a robot-powered farm this week.

IGS’s key differentiator right now is its lighting system. As it deploys its solution in the next year, we’ll see if that’s enough to keep it at the top of the ever-rising competition in the vertical farming market.