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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Liberty Produce

Liberty Produce Gets Grant to Further Develop CEA in Singapore

A team led by UK-based vertical farming company Liberty Produce has won £420,000 (~$588,000 USD) from the Innovate UK fund to help advance controlled-environment farming in Singapore, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Liberty Produce and Singapore-based LivFresh will jointly lead the Hybrid Advanced Research Vertical Farming Environment Systems and Technology (HARVEST) consortium, which will also include research partners Republic Polytechnic Singapore and the James Hutton Institute.

Liberty Produce will install its Liberator farming system, developed in the UK, at the LivFresh hydroponic farm in Singapore, where it will be integrated with existing greenhouse technology. The HARVEST team will then run trials of this combined system, with the goal being to eventually release a turn-key product for Singapore food growers to use domestically. 

Because of limited land, Singapore currently imports about 90 percent of its food. This dependence on outside sources, however, has proven itself problematic at certain times — like during a pandemic, when the global food supply chain gets disrupted. 

The Singaporean government’s 30×30 initiative aims to get 30 percent of the city-state’s food produced domestically by 2030. Controlled-environment farming, such as greenhouses and vertical farms, is a major part of that plan.  

Liberty Produce develops vertical farms that are modular and can therefore be customized to a specific farming operation’s needs. They are also smaller than the massive “plant factories” a la Plenty or AeroFarms. For instance, the Liberator 5000 is roughly the size of a shipping container, according to the company, while two other models are even smaller. This smaller geographic footprint is well-suited to a place like Singapore, which is mostly urban and, as mentioned above, is already dealing with very limited land.

Liberty Produce systems are 100 percent controlled, from the amount of water and nutrients fed to crops to humidity levels to the “recipes” of LED lights. The system can grow standard leafy greens but has also grown more challenging crops, like blueberries.

The project with LivFresh will last two years and support Singapore’s national strategy around the 30×30 goal.

Farmshelf Gets Angel Investment From Singapore’s she1K, Liberty Produce Launches UK Vertical Farming Project

Angel network she1K has syndicated an early-stage investment in Farmshelf, according to an article published today on AgFunder News. Singapore-based she1K, which is known for its global female executive leadership, did not disclose financial terms of the deal. Farmshelf is the third company to join its portfolio 

Whereas many companies in the vertical farming space right now have massive indoor facilities aiming to produce millions of heads of leafy greens, Farmshelf differentiates itself by staying focused on smaller spaces like supermarkets, offices, hotels, and restaurants. Its bookcase-sized farm grows leafy greens and herbs using a combination of custom LEDs, sensors, and software that deliver water, nutrients, and the optimal amount of light needed for each crop. The system, which can simply be plugged into a wall and connected to WiFi, is already at a number of restaurants, hotels, and other spaces, including NYC chain Tender Greens, Marriott Marquis Times Square, and the Condé Nast offices. 

The Farmshelf system is currently available to businesses in parts of Texas and California, and will be available to customers “in most major markets” in 2020.

Farmshelf isn’t the only indoor farming initiative kicking off December with big news. Across the Atlantic, agtech company Liberty Produce has finally launched its vertical farming project that looks to improve both crop yield and operational costs for vertical farming through improved, more automated tech.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Liberty Produce has partnered with several entities for the project. While most were not disclosed, a major one is Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), a network of scientists, farmers, researchers, academics, and businesses developing new ways to use technology to improve the farming system in the UK. Work on the Liberty Produce project is being done at CHAP’s Fine Phenotyping Lab at Rothamsted Research in the UK, with experts experimenting with plants’ responses to different light intensities and studying the best LED “recipes” for crops.

“There’s lots we don’t know about growing plants in this artificial environment and we’re not giving them optimal conditions,” Liberty Produce founder Zeina Chapman told The Spoon earlier this year. “With lighting, there isn’t an option to control it in a way that maximizes plant growth. So we might be putting plants under stress.”

Liberty also wants to use more automation to make the concept of vertical farming easier for the anyone, something Farmshelf also appears to be striving for with its plug-in-and-go system.

It’s an admirable goal to strive for, especially if it can get more locally grown produce into the hands of more cafeterias, universities, local businesses, and, eventually, individual homes.

The test — and something we’ll hear more about in 2020 — will be whether the vertical farming industry can find a way to do this cost effectively. There’s plenty of hype right now around the promises of vertical farming. As to whether it can actually become an everyday reality for the everyman, the jury is still out.

Intelligent Growth Solutions Raises £5.4M Series A Round for its Automated Vertical Farm

Dundee, Scotland-based vertical farming system Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) announced today it has raised a £5.4 million Series A funding round led by U.S.-based S2G Ventures, with participation from online venture capital firm AgFunder and the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB). The round accounts for IGS’ total funding to date.

As do an increasing number of vertical farming systems on the market today, IGS’ platform is a so-called plug-and-play system, meaning the user interfaces with software which automates much of the grow process for a variety of crops. (Admittedly, it’s still mostly leafy greens at this point.) IGS’ patented, IoT-enabled system includes dynamic LEDs that can automatically adjust themselves to suit crop needs, trays that are loaded and moved by machines, and the ability to water and monitor crops via software — all with the press of a button.

Here’s the farm in action:

Explore IGS' automated vertical farming system

The farm, which is located just outside the coastal city of Dundee, is Scotland’s first vertical farm in operation. According to the press release, the new funds will go towards creating more jobs at IGS in areas like software development, robotics, engineering, and automation. Some of the funds will also go towards product development and marketing.

Many companies are currently bringing versions of the automated vertical farm to the fold. Earlier this year an Australian agtech company simply called Vertical Farming Systems raised $1 million for its automated indoor farm system. Liberty Produce, based in the U.K., has a “one-stop-shop” vertical farm which anyone can operate, even those without a technical or agricultural background.

And that’s part of what’s at the center of these automated farming systems. By making it easier to plant, monitor, and harvest crops, vertical farming companies around the world are hoping to take some of the guesswork out of the process and in turn deliver more consistent crop yields and higher-quality greens, saving on time and labor costs in the process. Because of current limitations around scalability and the kinds of crops farmers can grow at scale, vertical farming won’t replace traditional agriculture anytime soon, but automated farms like those from IGS will play an important role in the future of farming, and we’ll see a lot more systems like this in the near future.

Agrylist Raises $8M Series A for Data-Driven Indoor Farming, Rebrands as Artemis

Artemis, formerly known as the indoor-farming company Agrylist, announced today an $8 million Series A round. According to a press release via email, the round was co-led by Astanor Ventures and Talis Capital, with participation from New York State’s Empire State Development Fund and iSelect Fund. The latter two companies are existing investors. The new funding round brings Artemis’ total funding to $11.75 million.

As well as raising new funds, the company has retired the Agrylist moniker and rebranded as Artemis. A new website and new corporate branding are slated for June 2019, according to the press announcement.

Artemis, which was founded in 2015 and is based in Brooklyn, NY, helps indoor farmers better manage the lifecycle of their crops through a proprietary system it refers to as an “enterprise cultivation management platform.” In one interface, which can integrate with existing software tools, the system will help farmers create planting schedules, control the indoor climate, track crop health, detect food-safety issues, and manage labor costs. The system also comes packaged with basic project-management capabilities like to-do lists and daily reminder features.

Increasingly, indoor farmers are turning to these kinds of “one-stop-shop” products to help them make large-scale indoor farming economically feasible and in doing so ensure more consistent production and higher crop yields. Some systems, like those from Liberty Produce and Freight Farms, also bundle hardware like LEDs and the actual grow panels into their end-to-end systems.

Artemis, for now at least, seems more focused on the data aspect of large-scale indoor farming. Gathering useful data on crops and farming operations can help companies not only better monitor crop health, but also help them measure productivity and labor costs, and ensure they’re in line with certain compliance standards.

Even more important, more data could tell us where indoor farming could stand to be more efficient, if indeed it’s efficient at all right now. As Paul P.G. Gauthier explained to me last year, the indoor farming industry tends to claim things that aren’t necessarily backed up by data at the moment. We need more information that can tell us, for example, how much water something like hydroponics actually uses, and where the waste water from those types of operations go.

These are no doubt questions Artemis is tackling, too, as it continues to build out its product. According to the company, the new funding will go towards expanding the Artemis team in product, marketing, engineering, and sales areas, as well as towards scaling sales.