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fertilizer

November 7, 2022

Re-Nuble Aims to Use Food Waste To Make Indoor Agriculture More Sustainable

The role of indoor growing, ranging from small indoor vertical farms to large greenhouses, is vital to sustaining the world’s food supply. Controlled Environmental Agriculture is essential for growing crops in underused spaces, rooftops, and rows of vertical gardens. Seizing upon this vital resource, Tinia Pina, Founder & CEO of ReNuble, has taken up the challenge to help this idea scale. With a best-in-class nutrient and growing medium, Pina’s company has created organic compounds sourced from food waste for sterile, technology-driven hydroponic and soilless systems.

For the dynamic Pina, her vision for what became Re-Nuble started more than six years ago in the New York school system. “I also saw our outreach educational classes for this program were from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.,” she recalled in an interview with The Spoon. “I noticed what the kids were bringing for class for lunch, and those options were very processed. With that diet, you see a direct impact on their level of attention. And I felt, from a systemic perspective, that will immediately impact the type of productivity and retention of the information we’re teaching. So overall, I always felt that people with better access to nutrition are spending more time being able to be fully immersed and retaining the information. And they are calling less out of work with fewer sick days.”

The genesis of Re-Nuble’s solution, Pina goes on to explain, came from her observation of how food waste was disposed of. “At that time, New York was spending $77 million to export its food waste to China, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And that’s simply because we don’t have the composting infrastructure to handle it,” Pina said.” I wondered how we could make food waste a consistent alternative for conventional synthetic fertilizers by doing it for soils or hydroponic systems. So, we focused on using food waste as a viable alternative for chemical fertilizers in indoor grow environments.”

Specific to its product lines, Re-Nuble’s Head of Business Development & Strategy, Riyana Razalee, said in a company press release, “CEA is a large part of the future of farming, and so, we have to prioritize its role in decarbonization. Solutions need to address the gamut of the food supply chain, decarbonizing as many parts of it as possible. This vital issue is what our team is focused on”. The company states that for every acre of an indoor farm that uses Re-Nuble’s organic hydroponic nutrient, Away We Grow, the company can remove up to 5 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. That’s approximately one home’s energy use for a year.

In addition, its grow medium, ReNu Terra, supports the anti-peat movement. Companies, activists, and governments are demanding the reduction of drained peatlands. When farmed for agriculture needs, peat changes from a carbon sink to a greenhouse gas emitter, releasing approximately 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2e annually. This amounts to 0.4 billion gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for a year.

Pina said Re-Nuble has three customer segments now. First is the consumer market. Away We Grow could be part of a kit offered for an indoor growing system. “Consumers are eager to find more environmentally and people and animal-friendly solutions,” Re-Nuble’s CEO noted. The second segment is commercial farms such as Gotham Greens. The third, she said, is “disruptive farms.” For the last group, she stated, “There are severe supply shortages globally, and so there’s a lot of urgencies to find something that could be more sustainable, but even more importantly, something that they can afford.”

February 28, 2018

Teralytic Sensors Help Farmers Manage Their Fertilizing

“Nanofabrication” is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of farming or agriculture. But it’s how Teralytic builds a wireless sensor that detects nitrogen, phosphate and potassium (NPK) levels in soil to help farmers reduce waste and improve their yields.

The Teralytic sensor is a battery-powered, meter long device that farmers stick in the ground. Packed inside are 26 different sensors that measure the surrounding soil’s NPK levels, pH levels, soil moisture, temperature, and aeration, as well as the temperature and humidity above ground.

Once set, the sensors take a snapshot of soil conditions every fifteen minutes and use LoRa wireless technology to broadcast data back to a base station and through to an online analytics dashboard. Teralytic Founder and CEO Steven Ridder notes that technology has provided farmers with tons of data, and “The challenge for farmers is that too much information has confused them more than helped them.” Ridder says Teralytic’s stripped down dashboard has a more “farmer friendly interface.”

Armed with this data, farmers can be more efficient with their inputs (like fertilizer) and generate better crop yields. Optimizing fertilizer can also help farmers reduce cost and avoid over-fertilization, thus reducing excess fertilizer runoff and greenhouse gas release.

Teralytic sensors also measure soil moisture levels, which can help farmers with water management and prevent overwatering. Ridder says this improved moisture data can also help farmers make better-informed sales decisions. As he describes it, non-irrigated Midwest crops are planted in May and farmers typically check their soils in July. During that check, farmers may note that surface soil is dry. Historically, they wouldn’t be able to see that, down by the roots, moisture levels were actually fine. But because they didn’t have accurate data, Ridder says farmers had a tendency to panic about crop yields and settle for a lower locked in price before the harvest.

Each Teralytic sensor costs $100, plus a per acre charge. The number of sensors required depends on the type of crop grown. Ridder told me “Strawberries and avocados will need a sensor every 2.5 – 10 acres. Most grain crops will need a sensor every 30 – 50 acres. Cotton and canola need one every 50 – 70 acres.” The company has an online tool to help farmers determine the number of sensors needed.

Teralytic isn’t alone in bringing robust data to farms. Arable has developed the Mark sensor, which includes acoustic and spectrometer measuring, and can be sent placed in fields to assist with crop management.

What sets Teralytic apart, says Ridder, is his company’s focus on soil measurements and NPK. Teralytics says it offers “the world’s first wireless NPK sensor.” The company has eight Ph.D.’s developing the product, split between New York City and the UC Berkeley nanofabrication lab, who are creating the proprietary chipset that powers Teralytic’s sensors. They’re so secret that Ridder wouldn’t talk about them.

Teralytic launched a year and a half ago and raised a $2.25 million seed round in August of last year. It has conducted pilot projects in California and Ridder says they have 150 additional clients that want to conduct their own pilot programs starting in April. The company will officially debut on March 20th.

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