Indoor Farming Challenges & Opportunities
amBX recently attended the GreenTech exhibition in Amsterdam; the event gathered together stakeholders from across the world involved in the indoor farming industry. Innovations, emerging technology, barriers, insights and opportunities were discussed across the 3-day event.
Some of our key takeaways are listed below.
Artificial Intelligence - The industry involves lots of manual tasks, and there is a lack of labour; staff turnover is also high. Therefore, AI and robotics combined can help to remove some of the reliance on people using logic to determine whether a crop is ripe and then pick and pack the crop to save growers time and cost. The AI will continue to learn over time, and the more data it has access to, the better it will perfect the conditions for different crops to grow.
Robotics - There is a lot of new tech on the market, but currently, much of it is catered for one type of crop. As individual types of crops grow differently, they require different methods to harvest; tech companies tend to work on one kind of crop at a time, perfecting their invention before rolling it out for other types of fruit/veg/flower. Hence, the technology is a high investment that could need to be repeated multiple times in a farm if the grower wants to achieve a level of automation and grow lots of different kinds of crops. This is currently not attainable for most growers.
Big Data - There is a need for common greenhouse ontology and data protocols that allow data across an indoor farm to be aggregated and sent to a central source. Currently, every farm has a different technical set-up; there are lots of data silos; the market is not advanced enough yet to have standardised practices, which makes integration problematic. There are some companies who aim to solve this; they can unify streams of data and send it to the cloud; this enables analytics and insights to be gained. AI can be overlayed to optimise environments to produce more for less.
Sustainability - Collectively, we need to bring down the price of crops grown in indoor farms for end consumers; in order to do this, operating costs must also reduce - less energy and less water.
Crops need to be able to grow from anywhere in the world to reduce transport emissions. Local for local is the ethos; there are many benefits to this, mainly the environmental aspect but also the ability to have high-quality, fresh food grown without pesticides. Brands such as M&S and Ikea have also started to enable this with innovative in-store solutions that empower consumers to easily access fresh crops at home.
Consistency - A grower can set a temperature in a space and monitor it using sensors and a dashboard that presents the data, but this isn't always accurate. The temperature can differ across the tray/bed. This means the crop grows at different rates. There is a need for standardisation in terms of the tech and tech designs and a deep understanding of the various factors that affect the growing environment.
Public Attitude - Plant-based diets support the move to a more sustainable world. The customer is now demanding more. Vertical Farms can overcome the issues of seasonality, freshness and quality. Vertical Farms allow sustainable produce to be grown all year round. However, some believe that the customer is not willing to pay the premium for this yet; others argue that younger generations will not accept if something is not sustainable and will therefore be willing to pay more to support this movement.
amBX's indoor farming system integrates lighting and various hardware in vertical farms, enabling powerful, granular management and data visualisation in vertical farms.
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