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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Revol Greens Raises $68M to Build Out High-Tech Greenhouses in the U.S.

Revol Greens announced today it has closed a $68 million funding round for its network of high-tech greenhouses the company says will eventually supply 33 million pounds of greens annually to the U.S. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this brings Revol’s total funding to $215 million.

The Minnesota-based company says it will use the new investment to launch its third facility, which is a 20-acre farm in Texas that could expand to 80 acres in the future. 

Revol is part of a new wave of companies marrying greenhouse growing with technology systems that allow food producers to grow crops year-round, in totally controlled environments. Its system uses closed-loop hydroponics and, when necessary, supplements natural sunlight with LEDs. It also collects data on plant growth to ensure crops have the correct levels of water and nutrients they need to grow.

As they’re based in Minnesota, the folks behind Revol are no strangers to the kind of extreme weather that makes growing crops outdoors impossible for parts of the year. But extreme weather is also a consequence of climate change, whether it’s fire, drought, or insect outbreaks, and it is becoming more widespread. In traditional agriculture, that could mean an increase in pests, flooding or heavy downpours that threaten crop yields, and increases in carbon dioxide that decrease the quality of products. 

Revol is not alone in merging the greenhouse with high tech to provide an alternative to traditional agriculture. AppHarvest is currently building out a massive greenhouse facility in Appalachia. The company recently raised $28 million. Iron Ox, which raised $20 million earlier this month, is bringing robotics to the greenhouse, and a company called Lufa has taken the greenhouse concept to rooftops in cities.

Getting greens closer to cities is also one of Revol’s goals. “High-tech greenhouses give us the ability to return to regional food systems with farms that produce our food near our communities,” David Chen, CEO of Equilibrium, said in today’s press release. “Regionalism gives us resiliency, food security, and addresses the threat of climate change to our food system. Greenhouses are the tech disruptor in a 10,000year-old agriculture sector.”

Revol CEO Mark Schulze added that by the end of 2021, the company will be “the world’s largest indoor lettuce producer.” 

The company’s first greenhouse launched in 2018 in its hometown of Owatonna, Minn., followed by a second facility in Tehachapi, Calif., which Revol is in the midst of building out.

Iron Ox Raises $20M Series B for More Robotic Greenhouses

Ag tech company Iron Ox, best known for its greenhouses powered by robotics and AI, announced this week it has raised a $20 million Series B round. The round was led by Pathbreak Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, At One Ventures, Crosslink Capital, , ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, and Tuesday Ventures. Iron Ox’s total funding to-date including this round is $45 million.   

In addition to the funding news, Iron Ox also announced a new farming facility in California, this one in Gilroy. Like the company’s first greenhouse, which is located in San Carlos and opened in 2018, the Gilroy facility will use a hydroponic grow system manned not by humans but by a large mobile machine equipped with robotic grippers. The machine plants, harvests, and moves the heavy grow trays around as needed, while machine learning and computer vision systems monitor plant growth. Humans aren’t completely out of the equation, though: the system still needs them to prune and inspect plants. 

Unlike many other indoor farming operations, Iron Ox does not use LED lights, but instead relies on good ol’ fashioned sunlight for plant growth. For now, the farms grow the standard mixture of leafy greens and herbs. The new Gilroy farm will sell these greens to Whole Foods and Bianchinis markets in California. 

Some of the benefits high-tech greenhouses like those of Iron Ox bring include more efficient use of space and the ability to serve customers (the ones that can afford Whole Foods, at least) locally. Iron Ox also says it uses less water than traditional farming as well as less energy. 

The company joins AppHarvest, Lufa Farms, and Gotham Greens in making recent headlines around new developments and investments in large-scale, high-tech greenhouse farming.

Lufa Farms Unveils the ‘World’s Largest Rooftop Greenhouse’

Lufa Farms hit a noteworthy milestone recently. The Montreal, Quebec-based agtech company opened its fourth and largest indoor farm, and is “the world’s largest rooftop farm” (h/t Modern Farmer).

For this new farm, which is located in the Saint-Laurent borough of Montreal, Lufa Farms says it has has doubled its production capacity for fresh vegetables, adding 163,800 square feet for a total of 300,000 square feet of growing space. 

The new facility started full production early in August of this year and, according to the official press release that came out at the end of last week, now yields 25,000 pounds of produce each week. The greenhouse grows 10 varieties of tomato and 3 varieties of eggplant.

Since its inception in 2009, Lufa has been fine-tuning its process around farming on commercial rooftops. That means it doesn’t use new any new farmland in order to grow crops, which is an important point in any discussion about sustainable farming. The greenhouses use an irrigation system that recirculates water and what it calls “the passive energy savings of simply being on an urban rooftop.” 

That urban setting also means produce is closer to the consumers buying it. To that end, Lufa has a subscription service that provides customers with a weekly basket of produce in addition to an online farmer’s market where the company sells its crops as well as food items from partner food producers. Users can either have their goods delivered to their own doorstep for a $5 fee or designate one of Lufa’s pickup points nearby. 

More and more urban greenhouses are cropping up as the food industry looks to supplement — though not necessarily replace — more traditional forms of agriculture. Gotham Greens is another notable player in this space, having recently opened its latest high-tech greenhouse, a 100,000 square-foot space in Baltimore earlier this year. Element farms uses the greenhouse format to grow spinach, and in Morehead, KY, AppHarvest is building out a massive facility that will provide produce and employment to the surrounding Appalachia area.

For its part, Lufa said it’s seen a surge in popularity for its own greens thanks to the pandemic. In response, Lufa launched a seven-day service, tripled its home delivery capacity, and added new local markets as well as team members. No one is sure what direction the pandemic will next turn in, though given its recent developments, Lufa seems well-poised to weather the uncertainty.

AppHarvest Raises $28M as it Builds Out a Massive Greenhouse in Appalachia

Ag tech company, AppHarvest, announced yesterday that it has raised a $28 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by J.D. Vance’s Narya Capital, with participation from Lupa Systems and Rise of the Rest among others. This brings the total amount raised by AppHarvest to $150 million.

AppHarvest is in the midst of building out the worlds largest greenhouse facility in Morehead, KY. When completed, it will be a 2.76 million-square foot indoor faming facility that will use hydroponics and vertical farming to grow 45 million pound of fresh produce a year. The greenhouse is scheduled to open this fall and will employ roughly 300 people.

AppHarvest’s facility is within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population, so it will be able to provide fresh produce to grocery stores in Appalachia, as well as surrounding states.

In June of this year, AppHarvest partnered with the State of Kentucky as well as the Dutch government and several universities. These partnerships were designed to create a series of research programs and develop the greenhouse as a “center of excellence” for agtech innovation.

AppHarvest isn’t the only indoor farming startup partnering with a local government. AeroFarms and the World Economic Forum partnered with the City of Jersey City and as my colleague, Jenn Marston wrote last week:

This is the first partnership between a city municipality and a vertical farming company in the U.S. Through it, AeroFarms will build 10 vertical farms in senior centers, schools, public housing, and municipal buildings around Jersey City. Collectively, the farms are expected to produce 19,000 pounds of vegetables annually, according to AeroFarms. Greens will be free of charge to residents, and the initiative also includes healthy eating workshops and quarterly health screenings.

Hopefully projects like AppHarvest and AeroFarms can use their tech platforms to help create a more equitable food system for everyone.

Kalera to Build the Largest Vertical Farm in Texas

Vertical farming company Kalera announced today that it will open a high-tech facility in Houston, Texas in the spring of 2021. According to today’s press release, this will be the largest vertical farming facility in the state.

The announcement follows recent news that Kalera is also opening a facility in Atlanta, Georgia in 2021. The company already operates one in its hometown of Orlando, Florida.

Over the last couple years, Kalera has made a name for itself supplying greens grown via vertical farms to the hospitality sector. As of the end of last year, the company’s HyCube system was supplying the Orlando World Center Mariott resort with greens, and had plans with several grocery retailers and restaurants. It opened a second facility in Orlando in March of this year.

Then, as so many narratives go these days, the pandemic hit, and it’s a little hard to service produce to restaurants that are closed down. So Kalera struck a deal with Publix to sell its greens at 165 of the grocery retailer’s stores. 

“We were very fortunate to be able to quickly pivot and focus more on the retail side and benefit from the slowdown.,” Kalera CEO Daniel Malechuk told me over the phone in April, at the time of this pivot. 

The company didn’t name grocery specifically in today’s release, but given the current situation in Texas around COVID-19, retail seems a more likely destination than restaurants for greens coming out of Kalera’s new facility. Once open, the new site will be able to service not only the Houston area but also Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and New Orleans. 

Kalera’s high-tech vertical farming system uses IoT, data analytics, AI-powered process automation and cleanroom technology in its facilities to monitor plant growth and create the optimal recipe of lights, nutrients, and water for crops. Right now, the company grows leafy greens, which Malechuk said in April take less time to transport. “Other produce and fruit is probably extremely cost prohibitive in dense urban settings and situations,” he said.

The last few weeks have seen a surge of news in vertical and indoor farming, both in commercial-scale farming and at-home devices. AppHarvest has partnered with the Dutch government to turn the Appalachian region of Kentucky into something of an indoor farming powerhouse. Farmshelf launched its first-ever at-home vertical farming until for consumers. And SinGrow, a Singapore-based company that actually is trying to grow more than leafy greens, is getting a lot of attention of late for its proprietary strawberries and vertical farming tech.

Kalera said in today’s release that the Houston facility is just one in a string of planned locations around the U.S. and the rest of the world.