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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

greenhouse

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.

Podcast: Meet Luna the Robotic Monitoring System for Greenhouses

Produce is grown across somewhere between 250 and 300 million square feet of commercial greenhouse space in the U.S.. That’s a whole lot of crops that need to be monitored to make sure they are watered, properly lit and healthy.

Thankfully, iUnu (pronounced “yoo-noo”) is here to help. The company makes Luna, a robot that scurries around on rails mounted to the ceilings of greenhouses. Using a variety of cameras, sensors and computer vision, Luna helps greenhouse growers better understand and manage the welfare of their crops to improve overall yield.

For this week’s Automat podcast, I sat down with iUnu Co-Founder and CEO, Adam Greenberg to learn more about the culture around greenhouse growing, and how Luna works to make it better. Listen to our conversation here, or better yet, subscribe to The Automat, to get a weekly dose of food-related robots and AI.