Harvesting data: Infarm’s commitment to the future of farming
Author: Guy Galonska, co-founder and CTO at Infarm
Humanity is facing one of the most significant challenges we've ever encountered. By 2050, the world's population is projected to increase by more than 35% to 9.7 billion people, and the vast majority will live in urban areas. According to Ernst van den Ende, Managing Director Plant Sciences Group of Wageningen University & Research, humanity must now produce more food in the next four decades than we have in the last eight millennia. In the face of anthropogenic climate change, we must find a way to increase food production while consuming fewer resources like land and water and reducing the overall carbon emissions of the food system.
Crop yields have increased significantly since the 1960s, and many people owe their lives to novel technological developments in agriculture over the past century. Unfortunately, our current food system is neither sustainable nor equitable, having increased production without heeding the potential ecological ramifications.
The results of this negligence are becoming more and more evident: global food and agricultural productions are significant drivers of climate change and the number one cause of deforestation, decreased biodiversity, and loss of topsoil. According to a report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, food systems account for 34% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Many actors will need to come together to remake the current food system, and I believe that advances in indoor vertical farming technology will play a significant part in the solution. Indoor vertical farming already enables us to grow food closer to where people live on a tiny footprint compared to traditional agriculture.
This offers many advantages: reducing the distance food travels to get to your plate, decreasing water use, and helping to preserve biodiversity. For example, Infarm's state-of-the-art modular farming units occupy a footprint of only 42 M2 and yield the crop equivalent of 10,000 M2 of farmland! These units use 95% less land and water than industrial farming, and do not require use of chemical pesticides. Farming on a far smaller footprint is key to reversing the dangerous conversion of our biosphere into use for agricultural production. It is critical we decouple our food production from pristine natural habitats. In the coming decades, I predict the rise of indoor vertical farming will facilitate the rewilding of land currently used to grow food, thereby restoring biodiversity and enabling biologic carbon sequestration.
Thanks to these clear benefits in terms of resource and land use efficiency—and the fact that the technology is rapidly advancing—the market size for vertical farming is projected to reach USD 7.3 billion by 2025 from USD 2.9 billion in 2020. This, however, is not the whole story.
Harvesting data along with our crops
Focusing solely on the environmental advantages vertical farming holds does not provide the whole picture. As practiced by Infarm, vertical farming presents an opportunity to understand crops better than ever and improve the affordability, availability, and resilience of harvests of indoor and perhaps even outdoor growers.
That's why I would argue that one of vertical farming's most fascinating and revolutionary aspects is the ability to unlock the secrets of plants we've been cultivating more or less in the same manner for millennia. In other words, contrary to what one might think, the road to feeding the world's population is paved not only with our plants but with the knowledge we acquire while growing them.
How do we do it?
The basis of Infarm's modular technology is connectivity. All of our farms +1,800 farms, currently in 11 countries on three continents globally, are cloud-connected to a central farming brain. Infarm has over 75 sensors in place on our large-scale next-generation farming units; Using these lab-grade sensors embedded in our farms, we gather more than 50,000 environmental, biological and machine data points during each plant's lifetime.
We transfer these massive amounts of data in real-time to our central cloud farming brain. This immensely valuable data allows us to continuously improve our growing recipes and improve the plants' nutritional values. We have already collected over 60 billion data points to improve operations and dramatically reduce our production costs, with an end goal to make our crops more accessible and affordable for consumers.
Here lies the true revolution of vertical farming. Because the knowledge we gain will have a tremendous effect on the agriculture industry at large, leading to yield and quality increase in all farming systems. To help feed the world's growing urban population, indoor vertical farming is going to have to step up. We will have to expand our produce basket and, at some point, start growing staple crops in vertical farming facilities using renewable energy and new plant breeding techniques.
Time to step up
Today, we know that yields for wheat grown in vertical farms would be several hundred times higher than yields in the field under optimal conditions. However, given the high energy costs for artificial lighting and capital costs, it is not yet possible to grow staple crops in vertical farming facilities and be competitive with current market prices. The main obstacle we need to overcome is that currently available commercial varieties of staple crops such as rice, teff, and wheat, are unsuitable for vertical farming.
Infarm is committed to the vertical farming revolution
To enter a new era of crop science, Infarm decided to team up with Wageningen University & Research (WUR), ranked number one in the fields of plant/animal science, environment/ecology, and agricultural sciences by U.S. News & World Report. WUR is widely regarded as the world's top agricultural research institution. As part of the new and exciting collaboration, Infarm will provide the University with the required funding and tools to advance crop science.
For a start, Infarm will cover the costs of two Ph.D. candidates for four years, as well as one Post-Doctoral researcher for three years, and one technician for three months spread throughout the project, in addition to research facilities, equipment, and other costs. We intend to partner with WUR on further significant projects for Infarm’s future as a major supplier of the world’s fresh produce, including how to grow fruiting crops, specifically tomatoes under continuous light, and improving the light use efficiency of crops using advanced plant breeding techniques. We commit to publishing the findings of these research projects in open access peer-reviewed journals. Therefore this multi-year commitment will not only benefit the vertical farming industry and academia but the entire agricultural sphere and consumers worldwide.
It's only the beginning
As a co-founder and CTO of a leading vertical farming company, I’ll be the first to admit that current vertical farming methods are far from perfect. Nonetheless, as we push the field's boundaries, it’s becoming evident that vertical farming will play a significant role in the agricultural space. We are on the brink of a new age of scientific discoveries that will provide us with the necessary tools to revolutionise the future of food production and nutrition. I am excited to launch the partnership with WUR and wish great success to the talented people who are about to participate. Your success is the entire human race's success.
In this Youtube video, CTO and co-founder Guy Galonska describes the modular technology behind Infarm's cloud-connected farming network.