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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

greenhouse

Cox Enterprises Acquires High-Tech Greenhouse Grower BrightFarms

Cox Enterprises has acquired indoor farming company BrightFarms, the two companies announced today via press release. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The companies noted that the acquisition will be key to helping Cox Enterprises build out a “multibillion cleantech business” by 2030. 

Multi-industry conglomerate Cox is in the midst of expanding from its core lines of business (communications and automotive), hence its goals related to cleantech innovation. The company says it is currently investing in and/or acquiring “clean resource efficient businesses that provide sustainable energy, food, and water for the rapidly growing global population.”

Cox nabbed a majority stake in BrightFarms in 2020, though the two companies’ relationship goes back to 2018. Speaking in today’s press release, Steve Bradley, vice president of cleantech for Cox Enterprises, noted, “Over the years, our enthusiasm for BrightFarms and the opportunity to transform the industry has increased tremendously, which led us to want to play a larger role in what they’re doing.”  

BrightFarms operates a network of greenhouses that use hydroponics, natural sunlight, and a proprietary software system to grow leafy greens. The company announced its fifth greenhouse earlier this year and more recently said it would open an “innovation and research hub.” Ten percent of the company is now dedicated to developing “patented growing solutions to be used across BrightFarms entire network to improve crop yield, flavor, and other factors. The company says that by the end of the year, its leafy greens will be available at over 3,500 stores.

BrightFarms said joining Cox will allow it to scale more rapidly. As part of the acquisition, BrightFarms will grow its physical footprint from 15 acres of crop today to more than 140 by 2025. This growth will, the company says, let it reach roughly two-thirds of all U.S. consumers. Additionally, BrightFarms will build out multiple 30-acre greenhouses and increase the number of stores, restaurants, and food distributors it serves.

AppHarvest Gets $91M in New Financing for Its High-Tech Indoor Farms

AppHarvest this week announced a $91 million financing arrangement with Equillibrium Capital, according to Food Navigator, who broke the news. The money will go towards AppHarvest’s previously stated goal of building out 12 high-tech indoor farming facilities by 2025.

Equilibrium Capital’s $91 million figure is a construction loan that will support the building of AppHarvest’s forthcoming 60-acre facility in Richmond, Kentucky. The Richmond location is almost identical to the company’s 60-acre high-tech greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, which is already operational and shipping different varieties of tomato to grocery retailers within a day’s drive. 

Three more farms in Kentucky are already under construction, too: two 15-acre facilities that will grow leafy greens in Berea and Morehead, respectively, and a 30-acre facility in Somerset for growing strawberries. 

The farms use or will use a mix of hydroponics, sensors, supplemental LED lighting, automation and AI as well as natural inputs like sunlight and rainwater to grow produce. AppHarvest is also adding more technology to its operations. It acquired harvesting robot startup Root AI in April of this year for $60 million, and CTO Josh Lessing (formerly the CEO of Root AI) has said AppHarvest is investing in robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics. Its intelligent robot, Virgo, for example, is currently learning to manage crops and make decisions about growing decisions. All that tech, of course, means more data that has the potential to improve growing processes, crop yield, and food quality.

AppHarvest went public earlier this year via a SPAC merger with Novus Capital Corp for $475 million.

Wageningen University Launches the Third Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge

Netherlands-based Wageningen University is holding the third edition of its Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge, where international teams compete to grow crops in greenhouses using AI and automation. 

A first and second edition of the challenge grew cucumbers and tomatoes, respectively. For both of those crops, a level of autonomy was involved, though human intervention was still required during the grow process. The third edition, where teams will grow lettuce, differs in that participants must figure out how to grow their crops from seed using a fully automated algorithm.

Wageningen said in a post that the first and second editions of the challenge have shown “that artificial intelligence can potentially be superior to human intelligence, hence can potentially control indoor farming in the future. The goal of the third challenge will be fully automated control.”

Wageningen is one of Europe’s most well-known innovation centers when it comes to food, food tech, and food innovation. Scientists and researchers from here work on everything from alternative proteins to biodiversity initiatives to gene-editing technologies and, of course, greenhouse innovation.

One of the goals of the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge is to “connect the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and food production, create more knowledge, make this knowledge publicly available and thus contribute to the worldwide efforts of making our food systems more sustainable.”

Part 1 of the competition is an online challenge meant to test participants’ machine learning and computer vision skills, as well as attract talent from the realm of AI into the horticulture space. Part 1 is currently underway and will wrap on July 14 when a winner is chosen. Following that will be a 24-hour hackathon, which anyone can join, even if they did not participate in Part 1. Five teams will be selected from this session to go on to compete in Part 3, the actual greenhouse challenge.  

For the latter, each participating team will be assigned one compartment inside Wageningen’s high-tech greenhouse facility. All compartments are identical and have different actuators that control the grow conditions inside: heating and shading systems, lighting, water input, etc. Compartments are also equipped with sensors to measure temperature, CO2 levels, PAR light, pH and the electrical conductivity of fertigation water. Data from these sensors can be used to inform the algorithms to decide on the compartment’s control settings.  

Teams will be allowed to do a test cycle with a first crop before they must transition to growing the lettuce using fully autonomous algorithms “make choices with respect to the control settings, to remotely control crop growth.” 

Even without automation in play, lettuce is typically a more “hands off” crop than tomatoes or other vegetables. The competition seems not so much about automating indoor farm labor as it is about showing the public the benefits automation can bring in terms of growing plants faster and at higher yields without sacrificing quality. It will also produce more data, which experts have long agreed indoor farming needs more of. 

In the case of Wageningen’s challenge, the public will be able to follow crops’ growth along in real time via a website, and the datasets will eventually be released to the public. The winner of the competition will be the team with “the highest net profit in the end,” according to the challenge rules. 

 

BrightFarms Launches R&D Hub for Its Growing Network of Greenhouses

BrightFarms, which operates a network of greenhouses in the U.S., is launching an innovation and research hub at its Wilmington, Ohio headquarters, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. Dubbed BrightLabs, the research facility will build on BrightFarms’ existing work growing leafy greens in a greenhouse setting aided by tech.

The company calls BrightLabs “one of the most advanced biotechnology ventures in the indoor farming industry” and one that will develop ways to improve the flavor, texture and yield of plants the company grows in its five greenhouses. Tech experts along with microbiologists and plant scientists will join the BrightLabs team, which will be led by Matt Lingard, formerly a Bayer greenhouse scientist. Lingard has recently joined BrightFarms as the VP of Agriculture.

One of BrightFarms’ biggest achievements to date is that it’s mastered the notoriously difficult task of growing spinach in a greenhouse (or any indoor ag setting). Spinach is especially susceptible to a certain kind of water mold, presenting a challenge for greenhouse and indoor ag operations that rely on hydroponic systems. BrightFarms says it already has proprietary research on the process of growing spinach indoors, and, via BrightLabs, aims to double the production of that particular crop.

Another notable aspect of BrightLabs is that the hub will allocate significant energy to studying plant microbiome, the natural bacteria that influences plant health. The company says it can do this because the greenhouses are powered by sunlight and so there is not a need to spend abundant R&D dollars on artificial lighting solutions (e.g., LEDs). “So instead of spending R&D dollars on finding expensive and energy-intensive artificial lighting solutions, we can zero in on how to simply grow better plants,” BrightFarms CEO Steve Platt told The Spoon. He added that BrightLabs plant scientists are developing proprietary ecosystems that will optimize plant microbiome to help crops flourish. “By putting the microbiome to work, we can do more of what we do best: grow great lettuce,” he said.

A recent survey found that many growers plan to add more LEDs in the future as well as climate control systems, and post-harvest automation tech. Plant microbiome did not factor into the report, and BrightFarms is still rather unique in its decision to focus on that as a means of increasing and improving yield.

BrightFarms said that the launch of BrightLabs means 10 percent of the company is now dedicated to developing “patented growing solutions” that will be applied across the company’s network of greenhouses. As noted above, there are currently five such facilities, one each in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, North Carolina, and Virginia. The company says that by the end of the year, its leafy greens will be available at over 3,500 stores.

Survey: Indoor Ag to Expand, Add More Tech in 2021

Growers expect to add more technology to various forms of indoor farming for the rest of this year and into the next, according to indoor farm analytics company Artemis’ 2020 State of Indoor Farming report released yesterday.

The report, done in partnership with Startle, is based on a survey of 205 enterprise horticulture facilities, including those with high- and mid-tech greenhouses, indoor vertical farms, and container farms. Respondents answered a number of questions related to crop yields, labor, suppliers, and input. Underlying all of these things is the continued march of technology into the indoor farming space.

A commonly known point the report notes is that indoor ag typically requires more technology than traditional agriculture. For example, while glass greenhouses still use natural sunlight, the addition of LEDs can speed up the grow process for plants or provide more light in parts of the world where sunlight isn’t abundant. Meanwhile, more indoor ag companies these days are turning to tech that can help workers manage operations — an especially important point as farms get bigger and bigger.

To that end, survey respondents’ number one reason for implementing tech is “managing operations more efficiently” (39 percent of respondents). Lowering the cost of production (20 percent) and increasing yield (19 percent) were next. Getting better-quality crops, interacting with customers more effectively, and meeting food safety and compliance standards were also on the list.

In the next year, 19 percent of respondents said they plan to implement data and analytics, while 18 percent will add climate control systems and 17 percent will add labor tracking and cultivation management software. Following those items, growers plan to add more LEDs as well as post-harvest automation equipment and organic nutrients. Remote monitoring and automated scales for weight measurements were also mentioned.

The majority of growers, 73 percent, also plan to expand significantly over the next five years, with a combined expansion of 544 acres total. Mid-tech greenhouse companies — glass or polycarbonate greenhouses that use some tech but not “to the full extent possible” — will expand the most, at 206 acres, followed by container farms at 156 acres and indoor vertical farms at 84 acres.

Echoing this, numerous companies in the space have announced expansion plans in the last few months, from vertical farm company Kalera’s ongoing trek west across the U.S. to Square Roots’ expansion of its container farm network and a second 60-acre greenhouse from AppHarvest. In terms of acreage, greenhouses are likely to grow the most, since they typically don’t use vertical farming technology and often grow crops that require more space than the compact leafy greens that are so popular.  

And speaking of leafy greens, those along with herbs still account for almost half of all crops grown via indoor ag right now (26 percent and 20 percent, respectively). Microgreens (16 percent) are next, followed by tomatoes (10 percent). Other crops, such as strawberries, may become more prevalent as companies leverage new technologies and methods for growing indoors.

A Peek Inside AppHarvest’s 60-Acre High-Tech Greenhouse in Eastern Kentucky

Ag tech company AppHarvest may only be a few years old, but growth for both the operation and its tomato crops moves at a breakneck pace these days. After shipping its first harvest to stores in late January of this year, AppHarvest proceeded to go public at the start of February and has since broken ground on two more farms, acquired a robotics company, and announced it will soon grow leafy greens and strawberries in addition to tomatoes. 

And while it’s one thing to say the Morehead, Kentucky-based company operates a 60-acre (2.76 million square feet) greenhouse powered by tech and a deep sense of purpose, it’s another thing to actually stand inside the facility and see the future of agriculture changing before one’s very eyes.  

I had the honor of doing just that at the end of last week, when I drove up to Morehead, Kentucky and took a tour of the facility, which literally stretches into the Appalachian horizon as far as the eye can see. Here’s a look at what goes on inside:

Tomatoes grow in long rows like above. AppHarvest trains these Tomatoes on the Vine (TOVs) to grow in clusters of five.

The greenhouse relies primarily on sunlight for plants. Supplemental lighting, hanging above the plants, can be used when sunlight is weak or when the company wants to speed up the growing time of crops. At night, a sheet automatically unrolls to cover the roof so that surrounding neighbors are not disturbed by the lights.  

Tomato roots inside the growth media block. Since the entire greenhouse is hydroponic, no soil is used in the grow process.

Nutrient-enriched water is pumped to the plants via a hydroponic drip system that can deliver precise levels to plants as they need it. 

Autonomous carts shuttle cases of tomatoes to the packing room once the fruit is harvested. 

A high-level (literally) view of the tomato plants. AppHarvest grows about 800,000 plants at once in its 60-acre facility. A forthcoming farm in Richmond, Kentucky, will be almost identical in terms of layout and the amount it can grow.

Reservoirs and a UV filtration system for the facility’s water supply. AppHarvest relies solely on rainwater collected on the building’s roof. Water is pumped from a retention pond into this room before being delivered to plants via drip irrigation. 

The packing room, where tomatoes are assessed and made ready to ship to grocery stores and restaurants. AppHarvest ships to those within a day’s drive, which the company says is about 70 percent of the U.S. population.

As mentioned above, AppHarvest plans to open an almost-identical facility outside of Richmond, Kentucky, and a 15-acre farm in Berea for growing leafy greens. The company said it plans to have 12 farms up and running by 2025. 

The CEA sector as a whole, meanwhile, is currently getting more investment than ever before as companies build out different versions of indoor farms. Modular vertical farms, warehouse-sized vertical farms, at-home farms, vertical greenhouses, and massive operations like those of AppHarvest are all promising solutions that can exist alongside traditional agriculture. The consensus from my visit to AppHarvest last week is that in order to improve the food system and feed a growing global population, we’re going to need all those methods in the future. 

In the meantime, AppHarvest’s TOVs and Beefsteak tomatoes are available at Walmart, Kroger, and Meijer stores in certain parts of the U.S.

Q1 2021: AppHarvest Bets on Robots, Strawberries and More Data in the Greenhouse

Control ag company AppHarvest is adding more of both crop types and technologies to its budding greenhouse network, according to the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call this week. That includes strawberries, leafy greens, harvesting bots, and lots of data.

The company, which went public in February, is best known at this point for the 60-acre greenhouse facility it operates in Morehead, Kentucky, where it grows beefsteak tomatoes. AppHarvest sent out its first shipment of these tomatoes to grocery stores earlier this year. Customers now include Kroger and Wendy’s.

CEO Jonathan Webb said on the company’s earnings call this week that two more Kentucky greenhouses, one in Richmond and one in Berea, will be operational next year, and that with them, AppHarvest will start growing leafy greens and strawberries. Webb pointed out that while his company may have started with tomatoes — a fairly traditional crop when it comes to greenhouse growing — the eventual aim is to “grow the company into a trusted high-tech sustainable food company.”

As far as that tech goes, AppHarvest’s CTO Josh Lessing said on the investor call that the company is investing in “robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics.” To date, its biggest move has been the acquisition of Root AI, a startup best known for its crop-harvesting bot Virgo. (Lessing was the cofounder and CEO of Root AI before the acquisition.)

“Presently, we are training our intelligent robot Virgo to manage crops and inform growing decisions,” Lessing said on the call, adding that Virgo could eventually be configured to harvest multiple different crops, including delicate ones like strawberries — hence the company’s announcement to move into the realm of berry growing. 

As a crop, strawberries are highly suited to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) realm because they are extremely delicate, perishable, and normally require boatloads of pesticides when grown outside. Moving the grow process indoors, to a fully controlled environment, means better protection for crops from weather hazards, no pests and therefore no need for pesticides, and more consistent temperatures and humidity levels that can ensure better-tasting plants with a more robust nutritional profile. 

Given the amount of sunlight strawberries need for optimal growing, greenhouse settings are obvious candidates, since they rely largely on the sun with only supplemental LEDs. However, vertical farms, which use LEDs to mimic the sun’s light spectrum, are also now growing strawberries. Plenty, Oishii, and SinGrow are just a few of the names on that list. Whether one method will wind up superior to the other will (among other things) depend on what the end product tastes like as well as how much it costs to grow, sell, and buy.

For AppHarvest, though, the real win with technology will be not so much about the crops it can grow but the data Virgo and other tools can collect. That data can in turn get analyzed and turned into actions and insights applicable across the AppHarvest greenhouse network. “Granular plant level data from each fruit means we can learn exactly how to optimize quality, production, sales and logistics,” said Lessing. “This foundation will give us the opportunity to restructure the world’s food supply in order to mirror the hyper efficient e-commerce landscape.”

Along those lines, the company will expand beyond these first three facilities in the future. Two more projects will be announced this summer and are slated to be operational in late 2022. Webb said on this week’s call the company is on track to operate 12 greenhouses by 2025. By then, one imagines those facilities will grow a whole lot more than greens, strawberries, and tomatoes.

Iron Ox Breaks Ground on a New Robotic Farm in Texas

Iron Ox, a company best known for its robotic greenhouses, announced this week it had broken ground on a new facility, a 535,000 square-foot indoor farm in Lockhart, Texas. This is the third farm from Iron Ox, which is based in California and operates two other farms in that state. 

All Iron Ox farms are equipped with hydroponic grow systems as well as robotics, the latter being a mobile transport system that can move trays of produce as well as tend and harvest plants via a robotic grasper. Farms are semi-autonomous, with humans still needed to inspect plants and prune them.

The company says the forthcoming Lockhart farm will grow leafy greens, herbs, berries, and vine crops, and anticipates delivering its first harvest by the close of 2021. Select chefs and food retailers in Texas will be the first recipients of that harvest. The company says the new farm will serve several cities in the state thanks to its proximity to Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. The new farm will also create roughly 100 new jobs in the region. 

Constructions of high-tech greenhouses are happening all over the country right now, with Element Farms, AppHarvest, Little Leaf Farms, and others building or planning to build new facilities. Unlike vertical farms, these greenhouses still rely on sunlight (usually supplemented by some LEDs) as their primary source of lighting. And there’s plenty of sunlight to be had in Texas.

Technology like data-collecting sensors as well as AI systems are increasingly a part of these greenhouse operations, though robotic arms for harvesting crops are a little less common right now. However, AppHarvest recently acquired Root, which makes a crop-harvesting robot, suggesting a future for greenhouses that includes much more in the way of robotics. For its part, Iron Ox has said before that it would like its farms to one day be fully autonomous.

As with other high-tech greenhouse setups, automation in the Iron Ox farms helps to ensure consistency in the crops, better quality plants, and ultimately tasty veggies for consumers. 

Eden Green Technology Nabs $12M for Its Vertical Farm-Greenhouse Combo

Vertical farming company Eden Green Technology announced this week it has raised $12 million from existing investment partners and broken ground on a new greenhouse in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. The new farm is located news next to Eden’s R&D center, and will produce about 500 tons of leafy greens annually, the company said in a press release.

Eden’s approach to controlled-environment agriculture is unusual in that it combines elements of both vertical farming and greenhouse growing. While plants are powered by a vertical hydroponic vine system (see image above), the farm relies largely on the sun for light, rather replicating sunlight with LEDs, as most large-scale vertical farming companies do. Accompanying software, what the company calls its “micro-climate technology,” controls humidity and temperature levels for each plant. 

Besides building a farm in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, Eden also licenses its farms out as “turnkey” options for food producers, retailers and even whole cities. The 1.5-acre farms can grow a variety of leafy greens and herbs, strawberries, peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, among other produce types. Eden says each farm can yield between 11 and 13 harvests each year, depending on produce type. The company manages the construction of each farm as well as staff training and technology customization. 

The vertical farming industry is right now split between commercial-scale farms like Plenty and AeroFarms, and those companies like InFarm or Babylon Microfarms, which are more focused on selling or licensing their hardware and software to other companies.

Eden Green Technology sits somewhere between those two areas, since it produces its own greens but also sells its technology to other organizations. The company’s use of sunlight rather than LEDs is another factor that sets it apart in the vertical farming industry. 

The company said in this week’s press release that it plans to expand its partnerships beyond Texas, to new locations both domestically and internationally. So far, more than 20 of these partnerships are predicted to be in place by 2024.  

Little Leaf Farms Raises $90M to Grow Its Greenhouse Network

Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms has raised $90 million in a debt and equity financing round to expand its network of hydroponic greenhouses on the East Coast. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital as well as founding investors Bill Helman and Pilot House Associates. Bank of America also participated.

Little Leaf Farms says the capital is “earmarked” to build new greenhouse sites along the East Coast, where its lettuce is currently available in about 2,500 stores. 

The company already operates one 10-acre greenhouse in Devins, Massachusetts. Its facility grows leafy greens using hydroponics and a mixture of sunlight supplemented by LED-powered grow lights. Rainwater captured from the facility’s roof provides most of the water used on the farm. 

According to a press release, Little Leaf Farms has doubled its retail sales to $38 million since 2019. And last year, the company bought 180 acres of land in Pennsylvania on which to build an additional facility. Still another greenhouse, slated for North Carolina, will serve the Southeast region of the U.S. 

Little Leaf Farms joins the likes of Revol Greens, Gotham Greens, AppHarvest, and others in bringing local(ish) greens to a greater percentage of the population. These facilities generally pack and ship their greens on the day of or day after harvesting, and only supply retailers within a certain radius. Little Leaf Farms, for example, currently servers only parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. 

The list of regions the company serves will no doubt lengthen as the company builds up its greenhouse network in the coming months. 

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. 

iUNU Raises $7M Series A for Computer Vision Approach to Indoor Growing

IUNU, which builds computer vision and machine learning systems to add more precision to indoor farming, announced today that it has raised a $7 million Series A round of funding led by S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners.

IUNU (pronounced “yoo-noo”) makes Luna, a robotic system of cameras both fixed and mounted on rails that go on the ceilings of commercial greenhouses. Using these cameras, environmental sensors, computer vision and machine learning, iUNU can measure everything about plants being grown down to the growth rate of each individual plant. If Luna detects changes in the health of plants, it can alert growers so they can take action to improve product quality and yields.

The indoor agriculture space is certainly hot right now, and has seen downright frothy amounts of investment. BrightFarms raised a $100M Series E round in October, Plenty raised a $100M Series D round that same month, and Urban Oasis raised $1.2 million just last month. And just today, Gotham Greens raised $87 million for its high-tech greenhouses.

Beyond straight up fundraising, the indoor farming is also in the midst of a growth boom. AppHarvest is building out the world’s largest greenhouse in Kentucky, and YesHealth Group and Nordic Harvest are building “Europe’s largest” vertical farm.

It’s not hard to understand why there is so much going on in indoor ag right now. The population of our planet is expected to hit 11.2 billion by the end of the century, up from 7.7 billion in 2019. All of those people need to be fed, and more importantly, fed in a way that doesn’t exacerbate environmental problems. With its precision technology, and the ability to move food production closer to consumers, indoor farms hold the promise of creating a more equitable food system.

Unlike the other players mentioned above, iUNU is not a full-stack solution. It’s not in the business of growing its own greens. The Luna system can be used to help make existing greenhouses more productive and could presumably be built into these new indoor farms coming online.