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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

controlled environment farming

Babylon MicroFarms Closes $3M Seed Round

Virginia-based Babylon MicroFarms announced this week it has closed a $3 million round of seed funding to expand its controlled-environment farming business. The round was led by previous investors including the Center for Innovative Technology, and also included participation from new investors Hull Street Capital, Venture South, and the CAV Angels Group. 

The round comes on the heels of the company’s recent move to Richmond, Virginia, where the business will now be headquartered. Babylon MicroFarms was previously based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it was originally started as a University of Virginia project in 2016.

Over time, the company has evolved from producing table-top farming units to fully controlled grow systems it licenses out to foodservice businesses such as cafeterias in hospitals and senior living facilities. The controlled-environment farming units grow a variety of leafy greens and some flowers. Babylon Microfarms remotely monitors the hydroponic system so that foodservice operations need only harvest their crops when the plants are ready.

This model of licensing indoor farms to foodservice operations is one Babylon Microfarms shares with companies like Farm.One and Grönska. However, Babylon’s founders told me last year that the company isn’t “necessarily interested in the hardware aspect going forward.” Teaming up with a hardware manufacturer and providing expertise in software for indoor farms is one potential direction the company could pursue, though no mention of that was made in this week’s press release. 

For now, the company will focus on expanding the licesning of its farm units nationally. Speaking in this week’s press release, Babylon Microfarms CEO Alexander Olesen said that 2021 “is on track to be a year of accelerating growth and major market penetration” through the national distribution of its farms. The company also said that over the next 24 months, it will triple its workforce, exceeding original projections for 2022. 

Plenty Expands to More Stores in Northern California, Launches Text-a-Farmer Feature

Vertical farming company Plenty today announced an expansion to 17 more Safeway stores across Northern California, as well as a new tech feature that lets shoppers text Plenty’s farmers directly.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the Northern California expansion is part of the multi-year deal between Plenty and Safeway parent company Albertsons. Through that deal, leafy greens grown in Plenty’s controlled-environment vertical farming facility in the San Francisco Bay Area get shipped to Albertsons stores up and down California. The goal is to eventually get plenty’s produce into more than 430 Albertsons stores, including those under the Safeway and Vons brands.

Simultaneous to this expansion is the launch of what Plenty calls its Text-a-Farmer feature. The tool functions much like its name suggests. A sign in the grocery store’s produce section will display a number users can text questions to. Those questions can be about anything related to Plenty’s produce, from “How should I store my greens?” to “Is your packaging recyclable?” Plenty farmers answer the questions in real time via text with the customer.

The Text-a-Farmer feature will be available at stores selling Plenty’s produce. The idea is to give shoppers more information about their food while they are still in the store.

Commercial-scale vertical farming as a whole, meanwhile, continues to expand, raking in the investment dollars in the process. Bowery, based on the East Coast U.S., recently announced its most “technologically advanced” farm to date, while Orlando, Florida-based Kalera is building out facilities across the U.S., including Colorado and Texas. On the investment front, GoodLeaf just raised $65 million to expand across Canada, Stockholm, Sweden-based Urban Oasis raised $1.2 million, and Plenty itself nabbed $140 million. The latter happened this past October.

Around the time of that investment, Plenty also announced a partnership with Driscoll’s to grow strawberries via vertical farming. Plenty also operates a farm in Compton, California, to service southern parts of the state. 

Gotham Greens Heads West, Partners With University of California-Davis to Grow Better Greens

NYC-based Gotham Greens today announced its plans to expand its controlled ag operations to the West Coast with a 10-acre greenhouse in Solano County, California. The forthcoming facility will be located near the University of California-Davis, with whom Gotham will collaborate on future greenhouse research and innovation. 

Gotham, which currently operates greenhouses in New York, Illinois, Colorado, Rhode Island, and Maryland, raised $87 million at the end of 2020, part of which the company said would go towards expansion.

The California greenhouse is expected to open in 2021 and, like other Gotham facilities, will grow leafy greens that will then be sold to retailers and foodservice businesses. Having a facility on the West Coast will increase the number of potential customer for Gotham, which supplies its greens to local markets rather than shipping them across the country. Not including the California facility, Gotham’s farms serve about 40 states. Within those, the company has partnerships with Albertsons, Whole Foods, Target, and other major grocery retailers, as well as e-commerce deals with AmazonFresh, FreshDirect, and Peapod.

Gotham also uses a good deal of tech to control the various growing environments of its greenhouses (light, temperature, humidity), and to automate certain repetitive tasks. The partnership with UC Davis is partially meant to advance research and development in this area. “The new greenhouse facility enables opportunities for Gotham Greens and the University of California system to collaborate on research and innovation focused on advancing the science, workforce, technology and profitability of indoor agriculture globally,” Gotham said in a statement.

The company’s expansion comes at a time when tech-powered greenhouses are increasing in both size and numbers. Earlier this year, AppHarvest went public and Little Leaf Farms raised $90 million to expand its number of greenhouse. Revol Greens did the same in September of 2020 with a $68 million fundraise. Not all of these greenhouse operations share territory yet, but at the rate of these expansions, they may well do so in the near future.

Gotham Greens has raised a total of $130 million to date. 

Kalera Acquires Vindara to Optimize Seed Breeding for Indoor Vertical Farming

Vertical farming company Kalera announced this week it has acquired Vindara, a company developing seeds specifically for the indoor vertical farming environment and other controlled environment agriculture methods. With this acquisition, Kalera says it can increase both crop yield and the speed of growth cycles in its current and future facilities.

Kalera currently has two commercial-scale vertical farms in operation, both in Orlando, Florida. The company is also expanding rapidly, with new locations across the U.S. in the works. Facilities in Atlanta, Denver, and Houston are slated to open in 2021.

Typically, seeds for outdoor farming are bred to resist things like disease and pests. The drawback of that method is that plant flavor, texture, and nutritional profile is often sacrificed in the process. But in a fully controlled indoor grow environment like a vertical farm, pests are nonexistent and growers and systems have better control over monitoring the danger of plant diseases. 

That gives companies like Vindara an opportunity to produce seeds bred for flavor, color, nutritional content, and better overall quality. The company combines genomics, machine learning and computational biology with traditional breeding techniques to get its seeds, which are non-GMO and which Vindara says take 12 to 18 months to develop, rather than the standard five to seven years.

With the acquisition, Vindara will become a “fully owned subsidiary” of Kalera and operate out of the latter’s headquarters in Orlando. For Kalera, the acquisition brings the potential to develop its own plant varieties and increase the output of existing ones. Right now those are just leafy greens, though Kalera hinted at spinach and strawberries for the future. 

AppHarvest Expected to Go Public Next Week via SPAC

AppHarvest’s expectation to go public is fast becoming a reality. The controlled agriculture company announced today that it is expected to complete its merger with Novus Capital Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, which will enable it to start publicly trading on the Nasdaq on Feb. 1.

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), also called blank-check companies, often provide a faster IPO process for companies. AppHarvest first announced the deal with Novus just a few months ago, in Sept. 2020.

Since then, the four-year-old Morehead, Kentucky-based company has reached a few major milestones, including harvesting the first crop ever from its 60-acre indoor farm and starting construction on two additional farms in the Appalachian region. 

The company’s massive greenhouse facility runs off a mix of sensors, LED lighting, and hydroponics to grow produce 365 days per year. Because of the farm’s Eastern Kentucky location, abundant rainwater can be used to power the hydroponic system, minimizing resources used.

AppHarvest’s location also means it is within a day’s driving distance of about 70 percent of the U.S. population. This potentially vast reach combined with the growth possibilities an IPO can provide will help AppHarvest further realize its ambitions to make high-quality, pesticide-free produce available at a manageable price point to all Americans, not just the affluent ones.

The company sent its first shipment of beefsteak tomatoes to U.S. grocery stores last week. Meanwhile, AppHarvest said in a recent statement that it plans to construct more facilities across Kentucky and Central Appalachia, with the intent to be running 12 farms by 2025. The forthcoming IPO will undoubtedly aid in this process.

Vertical Field Signs Agreement to Bring Controlled Ag to the UAE

Israel-based ag tech company Vertical Field announced today that it has signed an agreement with Emirates Smart Solutions & Technologies (ESST), which develops high-tech agricultural projects around the Persian Gulf, to pilot vertical farms in the United Arab Emirates. The first farm will be installed as part of a research, development, and training center in Umm Al Quwain. 

Vertical Field grows leafy greens vertically inside shipping containers that are equipped with technology like sensors that can monitor climate control, lighting, and irrigation levels inside the farm. Data on those elements and others can be fed back to the growers via Vertical Field’s proprietary app, which allows for remote monitoring and management of crops.

Many companies nowadays take a similar approach to controlled-environment agriculture these days, with Freight Farms, Thrive, and Brick Street Farms being a few notable examples. Where Vertical Field differs from these companies is its choice to use geoponics — soil-based growing — rather than the more common hydroponic method. Instead of plants growing in towers through which water is circulated, Vertical Field farms are made up of what the company calls “living walls” (see image above). The company claims this geoponic method means lower initial and operating costs as well as more crop variety.

Whether with geoponics or hydroponics, controlled ag is an obvious concept to try out in the Persian Gulf region, which endures high temperatures, sparse rainfall, high winds, and other extreme weather conditions around the year. These conditions limit the amount of traditional agriculture production that can happen, which makes controlled-environment container farming an attractive alternative. Another notable development in this part of the world is the Abu Dhabi Investment Office’s recent multimillion-dollar investment in a few agtech companies to innovate on the concept farming in this particular climate.

The Vertical Fields pilot project with ESST will be the first step towards full-scale deployment of the farms across the UAE. Through the partnership, the Vertical Field farm will run as a pilot project that will provide produce to both commercial establishments and the private sector. One of the goals of the project is to determine which crops are most suitable for the local market. 

Eventually, the partnership is expected to expand and include farm deployments around the rest of the Gulf states. 

Controlled Ag Company AppHarvest’s First-Ever Crop Arrives at Grocery Stores This Week

Controlled environment farming company AppHarvest announced this week it has completed the first-ever harvest of its Morehead, Kentucky-based flagship indoor farm. The Beefsteak tomatoes harvested from the 60-acre farm will ship to grocery stores this week.

The Morehead, Kentucky indoor farm clocks in at about 2.76 million square feet, and AppHarvest says the facility is expected to produce about 45 million pounds of tomatoes annually. The farm uses a mix of sensors, LEDs, and other technologies to grow tomatoes inside a completely controlled environment. Unique among controlled ag operations, AppHarvest also runs almost entirely off rainwater, an element that Eastern Kentucky has in abundance. 

In addition to the Morehead facility, the company is also finishing construction on two more Kentucky farms: another 60-acre farm outside of Richmond and a 15-acre one for growing leafy greens in Berea. AppHarvest said in a statement that it plans to construct more facilities across Kentucky and Central Appalachia, with the intent to be running 12 farms by 2025.

The focus on Appalachia is a crucial part of AppHarvest’s expansion strategy as it builds out its high-tech greenhouses. Thanks to the continued decline of the coal mining industry, the region’s economy has been hit hard, to put it lightly. AppHarvest’s growing presence in Appalachia has already created jobs and livelihoods for residents of surrounding communities. “What we’re able to do here and how quickly we’re able to move and how much communities want us to be here on the ground, you can’t put that in a pitch deck or capture it in financial means,” AppHarvest’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Webb, told me last year.

The Morehead facility is also within a day’s driving distance of 70 percent of the U.S. population, which means AppHarvest’s tomatoes, and whatever else the company plans to grow in future, will reach an extremely wide audience.

To start, the newly harvested Beefsteak tomatoes will be available at select locations of national grocery chains like Kroger, Publix, Walmart, Food City, and Meijer. Tomatoes will be available in the produce section of these stores, cobranded with produce company Sunset Grown. AppHarvest said the tomatoes would be “comparable in price to standard tomatoes.”

The milestone comes just as AppHarvest, which raised $28 million in August 2020, plans to go public via a merger with a SPAC called Novus Capital Corp. 

Abandoned Spaces and Automation: What to Expect for Indoor Farming in 2021

Controlled-environment agriculture — also simply known as indoor farming — had a big year both in terms of activity and investment dollars. While once we might have questioned the sector’s economic viability and ability to actually feed a growing global population, a lot of those doubts have diminished and indoor ag in its many forms now has an important role in our future food system.

What that role is, however, will continue to evolve over time. Here are a few thoughts on how that will happen over the next 12 months. 

More automation.

Automation isn’t new to controlled-environment agriculture, but its presence as a part of indoor farming operations has increased over the last several months and will continue to in the next year.

In the context of controlled-environment farming, automation can refer to any kind of technology that removes manual human labor from the growing process. In some cases that includes robots that plant and harvest greens or move trays of produce around the farm. More often, though, automation refers to software that can calculate the optimal environmental temperature for each plant, know when plants need to be fed and harvested, and handle many other calculations that would otherwise require a person to have horticultural and technological (hardware and software) expertise.

Moving into 2021, we’ll definitely see a few more robots buzzing around the indoor farm. But the bulk of automation will be about software. 

More grocery store partnerships. 

Many large-scale indoor farms started out selling their leafy green wares to restaurants and hotels. The pandemic, of course, put a hold on that in 2020, and controlled-environment agriculture operations had to look elsewhere for customers. 

Enter the grocery store. From container farms at local markets to Kalera’s partnership with Publix stores across the U.S., more indoor farming companies are growing their greens either onsite at grocery stores or within throwing distance of them. 

This could in turn help bring the cost of greens grown on high-tech farms down, since the shipping and distribution steps will be less resource intensive in many cases and nonexistent in others. 

More underutilized space.

One of my favorite stories from 2020 was this one, about a company called Wilder Fields that turned an abandoned Target store in south Chicago into a massive indoor farm.

Many companies are constructing their own facilities from the ground up, while others stick to smaller scale container farms that are a bit more mobile. Finding existing space, such as an abandoned big box retailer, seems a logical middle ground, and one we’ll likely see more of as companies work to lower costs and keep their environmental footprint down.

Predictions pieces, of course, are always a bit of a crapshoot, and even if the above forecasts turn out to be true, they’ll be but a smattering of the activity that will happen for controlled-environment ag in 2021.

UbiQD’s Quantum Dot Tech Is an Electricity Free Lighting Option for Greenhouses

While costs are coming down for controlled environment agriculture, electricity remains one of the highest because it has to power the LEDs that provide the lighting formula for plant growth. But a materials science company called UbiQD wants to change that by replacing electricity with a more efficient means of lighting: quantum dots.

Quantum dots are semiconductor nanoparticles that can transport electrons. When exposed to UV lighting, these particles emit lights of various colors, and can be adjusted in size to emit a specific color. For example, larger particles emit redder wavelengths, while smaller ones shift to blue.

Via its UbiGro product, UbiQD uses a patented quantum dot technology to create a layer of lighting in greenhouses. Quantum dots are embedded into a film that is installed beneath a greenhouse cover. When illuminated by sunlight, the film converts shorter wavelengths (UV and blue) to longer ones (red/orange), the latter being the most photosynthetically efficient wavelengths.

Controlled environment farms require both red and blue lighting to enable plant growth, and standard LEDs installed in these farms emit one or the other in terms of color. Because UbiQD’s quantum dots can harness various wavelengths, growers can take better advantage of the full light spectrum, which recent studies suggest is advantageous for higher crop productivity and yield. For example, green light may also be necessary for better plant growth in the greenhouse, since it penetrates deeper into the plant canopy to promote photosynthesis.

In a recent interview with the company, AgFunder News noted that UbiQD’s tech “can achieve 10% to 20% higher yields than equivalent electrically powered systems with faster cycle times, reduced waste, and improved crop quality.”

Another big advantage to UbiQD’s product: it doesn’t require an external electricity source, which cuts down on the overall costs of running a controlled-environment greenhouse.

The company closed a $7 million Series A round earlier this month co-led by Scout Ventures and Keiretsu Forum. At the time of that announcement, UbiQD said it would use the new capital to continue scaling distribution of UbiGro, which is already used by “major international greenhouse operations” (company names were not disclosed). The funding will also go towards developing new products, including light recipes that could increase crop yield and productivity.

Since this technology requires actual sunlight, there are areas of controlled-environment agriculture, such as container farms, where it won’t be applicable. But for the greenhouse market, which is becoming increasingly essential to the indoor farming sector, the need for more energy efficient lighting sources offers a major opportunity for both UbiQD and quantum dot tech in the future of farming.

Gotham Greens Raises $87M for Its High-Tech Greenhouse Network

Indoor agriculture company Gotham Greens has raised $87 million in new equity and debt capital, according to a press release from the company. The fundraise includes Gotham Greens’ recent Series D round, which was led by Manna Tree with participation from The Silverman Group and existing investors, and brings the company’s total funding to $130 million.

Gotham Greens operates a network of high-tech greenhouses across the U.S. These controlled-environment farms use hydroponics as well as a good deal of automation software to grow leafy greens and herbs.

In today’s press release, Gotham Greens said it planned to use the new funds to expand to increase the operational capacity of its farms, develop new products, and expand to more locations around the U.S. The company currently operates its high-tech greenhouses in Brooklyn, Queens, and other areas of the country. Those locations collectively serve over 40 states, according to Gotham Greens. 

The newest additions to those farming locations include facilities in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as Chicago, Denver, and Baltimore, all of which Gotham Greens opened this year. The company said that through these new locations it has doubled its capacity. 

This latest fundraise comes at a time when controlled-environment ag companies are seeing more investment dollars flow their way than ever before, particularly when it comes to large-scale commercial farms like those of Gotham Greens. In August, AppHarvest raised $28 million for its own high-tech greenhouse network, news that was quickly followed by Plenty’s $140 million fundraise and BrightFarms’ $100 million Series E round. 

These investment dollars aren’t too surprising when you consider the many flaws in the food supply chain highlighted by the pandemic-induced disruptions earlier this year. Demand for more locally grown food is up, and it is expected to last long after COVID-19 is under control. 

At the same time, traditional agriculture’s environmental impact contributes to both climate change and global food security, according to the United Nations. Controlled-environment farms such as those of Gotham Greens, Plenty, and others are one solution to helping stave off some of the more catastrophic consequences of climate change by altering the way we produce and get our food.

Babylon Microfarms Bets on Automation for the Future of Vertical Farming

What started as a humble tabletop farm at the University of Virginia has since evolved into a major company to watch in the vertical farming space, particularly when it comes to the software piece of the process. Babylon Microfarms has over the last few years garnered quite a bit of attention for its controlled-environment farms the company now licenses to hospitals, cafeterias, and other other foodservice operations.

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia (though soon moving HQ to Richmond, VA) Babylon makes a “plug-and-play” system for hydroponic farming that automates much of the grow process and makes controlled-environment farming more accessible. The company raised a $2.3 million seed round in January of this year and, its current product is a standalone farming unit that grows leafy greens.

Of late, however, the bulk of founders Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith’s focus is on software: namely, using it to automate the growing process, which removes the more complicated aspects of vertical farming that would be off-putting to the average user. 

“Growing is a cumbersome experience for many,” Olesen explained to me over the phone this week. “Removing the friction of the user experience and combining that will some of the remote management [will make] smaller forms of vertical farming possible.”

Were the average person to try and build their own high-tech grow system, it would require significant expertise in horticulture, hardware infrastructure, and software development. To name just a few examples, that would include calculating one’s one LED light recipe (which takes the place of sunlight in controlled-environment ag), controlling the temperature of the farm, and understanding how much nutrient to feed each crop and when to do that. Everyday would require a certain amount of trial and error for every plant variety.

All of this makes for prohibitively high costs when it comes to commercial greenhouse production. Olesen noted that for controlled-environment farming to go mainstream, it has to be less technically complicated for the user.    

Babylon’s software is one solution addressing those complications. The company’s “seed-to-sale” system automatically dispenses the right amount of nutrients, light, and water for each crop, simultaneously collecting data on the plants so that the system can make adjustments as needed. The entire system can be controlled remotely via a mobile app.

Up to now, the company has drawn comparisons to the likes of Farmshelf, Farm.One, and InFarm, all companies that license a hardware-software farming combination out to foodservice and hospitality operations.

But Babylon’s founders told me they aren’t necessarily interested in the hardware aspect going forward. Smith says they would prefer something like teaming up with a hardware manufacturer that wants to make vertical farms but perhaps needs more expertise in software to complement their hardware capabilities. 

Such a scenario is actually on its way to becoming a reality. At CES this past year, hardware giant LG announced plans for a smart-farming appliance for the consumer kitchen. At the same time, GE Appliances showcased its Home Grown concept, which featured grow systems using hydroponics and soil-based methods. Prior to CES, Miele acquired Agrilution in another play for smart farms in the appliance space.

All of these hardware developments suggest great opportunity for the accompanying software. While many companies in the vertical farming space try to do both right now, Babylon’s future focus on being “an enabling company” that offers software and services may prove a wiser bid for the long term. Besides building out distribution of its own farms, Babylon is currently interested in working with other businesses, particularly those making hardware, that want to enter the vertical farming space.

There will be no one product that wins, Olesen said, adding that instead, it will be a combination of tools working together to make vertical farming more accessible to everyone.

Thrive Containers Officially Launches Its Controlled Environment Farming System

St. Petersburg, Florida-based Thrive Containers officially launched operations this week for its controlled-environment farming technology, a hardware-software system for growing produce out of shipping containers. The company’s first model, dubbed the Ohio Farm Container Model, is built for growing leafy greens, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Like other companies in the indoor ag space, Thrive builds its farms inside 40-foot-long shipping containers and grows plants vertically. Thrive uses the Flood and Drain hydroponic growing method for plants, which is exactly as it sounds. Plant roots are periodically “flooded” with nutrient-enriched water, which saturates the growth medium in which the plants sit. The nutrient solution is then drained, and the process is repeated, usually multiple times a day. 

Artemis’ (née Agrylist) provides the software to control those water cycles as well as the light “recipes” for the plants. Via a smartphone interface, growers can create planting schedules, control the climate inside the containers, track crop health, and detect food-safety issues.

Thrive is owned by Brick Street Farms, a company that recently partnered with Publix brand Greenwise to bring its container farms to grocery stores in Florida. Thrive hasn’t yet said if it plans to follow in its parent company’s steps and focus on grocery. Other potential use cases include bringing farms to schools, as Freight Farms has done, and locating them at food distribution centers, as Square Roots and Gordon Food Service have.

Thrive’s farms can currently grow a variety of lettuces and yield between about 5,000 and 12,000 pounds of greens annually, depending on the crop. Pricing for the Ohio starts at $127,500. For an additional cost, growers can add extra equipment like containers for cold storage and packing. Future models, including those designed to grow micro greens and cannabis, are listed on the company’s website, though specific release dates are yet to be revealed.