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Editor’s Note: With the threat of a recession looming, vertical farmers are analyzing their business practices to stay afloat in a turbulent economy. This article discusses Infarm’s response to the recession and offers hope for the survival of verticalfarming businesses around the globe.
Written by: Djavid Amidi-Abraham September 13, 2023 Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) is a rapidly growing segment of the farming industry. Many investments come from venture capitalists who want to treat verticalfarming like a tech investment. Additionally, scalability potential is important to consider.
With over 20 years of experience working in all facets of agriculture, Agritecture’s Lead Agronomist, David Ceaser , adds that “many people think that verticalfarms are inherently safer than conventional farms regarding food safety - but this is not automatically the case. Here, technology plays a key role.
Urban Greens is a verticalfarming facility located in Sydney, Australia. With this urban surge, the importance of locally sourced produce becomes paramount, prompting a shift towards innovative and efficient solutions such as verticalfarming. So, what are the foremost farms currently growing in this region?
Editor’s Note: One main draw of Controlled Environment Agriculture, or CEA, is the ability to grow produce closer to urban centers where it will be consumed, thus shortening the supplychain for inhabitants of cities globally. Rural greenhouses can produce a wider selection of local fresh vegetables than urban verticalfarms.
As storms increase in intensity and cause greater damage and disruption, farmers not only face threats to their livelihoods, but food supplychains risk shortages, which can exacerbate social and health inequities.
Much like investors and policy stakeholders want to see the ROI or money flows for a business, policy or program, consumers want to be ensured that agricultural products they are buying are “clean”, “fresh” and of “quality”. Furthermore, a certification specifically for indoor farms does not exist.
Editor’s Note: Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) is one of the various solutions available to deal with the harmful effects of climate change and ensure food security for future generations. Contact david@agritecture.com for more information on how you can get a hold of our farm-planning software for your students.
Let’s take a look at what this means for agriculture. The increased globalization of the food system over the past 50 years has spread the false narrative to many governments and businesses that a one-size-fits-all conventional approach to agriculture is the solution to food insecurity. Let’s look at some examples.
A worker replants lettuce in a verticalfarm. Two workers inspect plants in a verticalfarm. Cold plasma technology has established uses in traditional outdoor agriculture, but its uses have not been explored in indoor agriculture until recently. Two people look at the crops in a verticalfarm.
For many, the answer is an increased focus on emerging agricultural technologies, such as controlled-environment agriculture. As agriculture moves towards automation, what technologies and best practices will lead the way? He also mentioned verticalfarming as a trend to watch in ag tech.
Credit: Farm One. “I I thought, wouldn’t it be great to use this new technology of verticalfarming to bring these kinds of interesting products to the market and grow them locally? Verticalfarming allows you to grow right next to where people consume the product, and allows you to grow very fresh crops year round.
And because they grow quickly with minimal resources—and without herbicides or pesticides—scientists point to their potential to help bolster nutritional security, hedge against disruptions in the food supplychain and even generate fresh produce on long-term space missions.
Anyone familiar with the CEA industry is aware of the critical importance of energy in running an indoor verticalfarm. Without consistent and reliable power, these farms can endure lower yields or even suffer a loss of crops, which translates to a loss of revenue. Could Microgrids be the Solution?
I spent a lot of time in India and became very familiar with the agriculture crisis that was going on there as well as the larger global climate crisis. In 2015, I started exploring different types of indoor farming, and it just clicked. HGS: I want to learn a little bit more about why you chose to farm in containers.
Credit: VerticalFarming Planet. For millions of Africans, decades of reliance on traditional farming techniques and poor policymaking have created vulnerabilities that are only worsened by the impacts of climate change and natural disasters. One of Africa's most prominent and perhaps persistent challenges is food security.
“My concern is that climate change is impacting agriculture and could well disrupt supplychains,” wrote Modern Farmer reader Taera Shuldberg. Since we’re a smaller city, we don’t necessarily have community organizations that are focused on urban agriculture, so we kind of have to do our own outreach,” says Wheeler.
Mark Brooks, FMC VENTURES Mark Brooks, Managing Director, FMC VENTURES: “My supervillain is ScorchedFarm, who exposes the vulnerabilities of modern agriculture in the face of climate change. The last 10 years have also shown that, despite being a 15,000 year-old industry, agriculture is still vulnerable to fads and fashion.
With painful disruptions caused by fluctuating demand, shipping bottlenecks, and labor shortages, supplychains are becoming a new topic of conversation at dinner tables across the country. In the US, large-scale agriculture is dominated by a small handful of companies, which are consolidating even further due to recent mega-mergers.
Photo courtesy of Voir Vert Fresh from the parking lot Despite these drawbacks, across North America, a handful of grocery stores are pioneering a new way of growing that puts hyper-local food at the forefront of the supplychain.
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