Tag: Food Security

Revolutionizing Agriculture: Indoor Vertical Farming With Pipp Horticulture | Planted Detroit Case Study

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on April 14, 2023. Posted in Blog, Exhibitor News.

Pipp Horticulture has quickly become an industry-leading Mobile Vertical Growing Solutions provider, with installations in over 2,500 grow rooms worldwide. Pipp’s Mobile Vertical Grow Racks allow cultivators to maximize production capability, reduce operating costs, and increase overall revenue per square foot by maximizing their cubic canopy footprint without increasing the square footprint of the room or building. Pipp takes pride in manufacturing all its products in the USA.

Although Pipp’s entry point into the horticulture industry was through the cannabis market, Pipp Horticulture is not limited to any specific cultivation or plant processing category.

Instead, the company looks forward to leveraging the knowledge and experience gained through the cannabis industry to develop solutions for all growers. Pipp sees tremendous growth ahead. Rooted in what indoor cultivation will mean to families, cities, and the world. The possibilities are limitless.

Photo courtesy of EE Berger/Planted Detroit

Over the years, Pipp has strategically acquired several industry leaders in the market to create a well-rounded cultivation solution. These companies include Greenhaus Industries, Vertical Air Solutions, GGS Structures, and the assets of Grow Glide. Each of these strategic acquisitions aims to provide purpose-built solutions to support all aspects of your grow facility. Through these acquisitions, Pipp has assembled a team of highly experienced cultivators.

Pipp experts work with the company’s engineers and designers to develop innovations built for the indoor vertical farming market. They also support Pipp customers before, during, and after installation. They offer expert advice and help educate the community on best practices for building and operating your indoor vertical farm.

Planted Detroit Case Study:

Planted Detroit, located in Detroit, Michigan, is a 20,000-square-foot warehouse with two grow rooms equipped with two types of LED lighting, two hydroponic systems, and a single database system for data collection and analysis. Their mission is to actively work to reduce food insecurity in their communities and come together to grow tastier, healthier, and more accessible greens sustainably.

Planted Detroit is moving ahead with Pipp Horticulture as its primary provider of racking systems due to its versatility which allowed Planted Detroit to add advanced ebb-and-flow hydroponic technology to the racking system.

Pipp engineers and installation experts worked with Planted Detroit to install mobile vertical grow racking systems that were clean and biosecure. The Pipp team helped implement a controlled environment agriculture (CEA) system to help better serve their community regardless of the season. Planted Detroit wants to ensure they grow only the best greens, monitoring every aspect of their environment.

After implementing Pipp’s mobile vertical grow racking systems, Planted Detroit can quickly access and tend to all their plants and grow 8x more. They cultivate their fresh greens on Pipp’s mechanical-assist carriages, holding eight tiers of plants while utilizing 3,000 ABS combination grow trays. Pipp then helped further increase the efficiency of Planted Detroit’s growing systems with our ELEVATE® Platform System to help maintain and care for all their plants on each grow level.

All photos courtesy of EE Berger/Planted Detroit

For more information visit Pipp Horticulture

Codi Whittaker of Primitive Greens inside one of their farms

The Indoor Farmer Who’s Using Freight Farms to Increase Food Security for the Cayman Islands

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on February 12, 2023. Posted in Blog, Exhibitor News.

In the Cayman Islands, Freight Farms and Primitive Greens are working to overturn the status quo of food supply.

With the Cayman Islands’ beauty comes a challenging food supply chain. The islands only produce about 1% of their own food, with the rest of the food they consume sourced from Jamaica, Honduras, and, largely, the United States. Relying on shipped produce results in precarious food security. To make matters worse, there are very few direct shipping lines from food-producing Caribbean islands to the Cayman Islands. With lengthy shipping routes, the fresh food that the Cayman Islands ultimately receives is no longer very fresh … and it’s also very pricey.

Enter Freight Farms’ vertical shipping container farms. Codi Whittaker, a young recent college grad, and business partner Kerry Lawrence purchased three container farms from Freight Farms to launch their business, Primitive Greens, with the goal of increasing the sustainability of life on the Cayman Islands.

A Lettuce Wall in Primitive Greens Freight Farm

The three Freight Farms allow Primitive Greens to defy the very things that make fresh food so scarce on the island: a lack of arable land, extreme weather which makes farming near-impossible, and those long shipping lines. Instead, Primitive Greens grows right near consumers, inside high-tech shipping containers right on Grand Cayman island. They work the container farms’ perfectly climate-controlled environment to their advantage to grow beautiful, coveted produce. This, they sell to grocery stores and restaurants on the island at a competitive price — offering island establishments and residents reasonably priced, long-lasting, quality produce.

To increase the sustainability of the business, Primitive Greens plans to install a solar and energy storage microgrid that will fuel the farms with 100% clean energy. Energy cost is up everywhere, and the Cayman Islands are not immune. Currently, Primitive Greens pays the equivalent of $0.40 USD per kilowatt hour of electricity — mostly from dirty diesel fuel offered by the local utility. (By comparison, the current average cost of energy in Los Angeles is about $0.26 USD per kilowatt hour.) The solar project, which features solar panels floating in the water of an old quarry, will not only make growing food more sustainable. It will also provide resiliency to the island, through power that is available 24/7 and independent of the electrical grid.

“We’re basically selling the community cheaper, healthier, more sustainable, locally grown food; we’re providing power for less than half the cost of diesel; we’re creating food security; we’re creating jobs; and we’re not clearing any land.” — Codi Whittaker, Co-Founder and Operator of Primitive Greens

Primitive Greens intends to send Freight Farms to each of the three Cayman Islands, to alleviate food security for the entire territory. Ultimately, they strive to be the providers of fresh produce for Cayman.

Primitive Greens was recently featured in a webinar hosted by Freight Farms on the potential for indoor farming in the Cayman Islands. Watch the conversation at https://www.freightfarms.com/visit-freight-farms/primitive-greens-live-webinar.

Freight Farms has seen incredible growth in the adoption of their technology in the Caribbean islands, many of which face challenges similar to the Cayman Islands’. From Turks and Caicos to the Bahamas, islanders are discovering the power of controlled environment agriculture to revolutionize food quality and access for themselves and their communities.

About Freight Farms:

Founded in 2012, Freight Farms debuted the first vertical hydroponic farm built inside an intermodal shipping container with the mission of democratizing and decentralizing the local production of fresh, healthy food. Since its inception, Freight Farms has refined its product offering to arrive at the Greenery™ S container farm. With global customers ranging from small business farmers to the corporate, hospitality, retail, education, and nonprofit sectors, Freight Farmers make up the largest network of connected farms in the world. AgTech Breakthrough named Freight Farms the 2022 “IoT Monitoring Solution of the Year” for its farmhand® IoT automation software.

To learn more, visit freightfarms.com or connect on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok.

‘Making Global Food Local’ | Q&A With Crop One CEO Craig Ratajczyk

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on December 14, 2022. Posted in Blog.

Last week Crop One announced the opening of its second U.S. farm, located in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, it partnered with Emirates Flight Catering to open the world’s largest vertical farm in Dubai. The company is also raising the bar in the plant science arena with its Plants First ™ approach, other innovations and truly putting its marketing phrase “Making Global Food Local” in action. Indoor Ag-Con is excited to welcome Crop One CEO Craig Ratajczyk to our growing speaker roster for the upcoming February 2023 edition. And, we had the chance to catch up Craig in this month’s CEO Q&A to learn more about the company’s exciting developments and plans.

Earlier this year, Crop One and its partner Emirates Flight Catering celebrated the opening of ECO 1 (Emirates Crop One), the world’s largest vertical farm in Dubai. Can you share a little about your mission and goals for this incredible new facility?

Given the arid land and climate, the UAE currently imports over 85% of its fresh produce, with over 30,000 tons of leafy greens imported each year. One of our goals is for ECO 1 to increase food security and food sovereignty in the region by providing sustainably-grown leafy greens to the UAE market. It’s a 330,000-square-foot facility, spanning three floors with an output of about 3 tons per day, and over one million plants being grown at any given time. Hydroponic cultivation uses up to 95% less water than traditional outdoor farming, which gets to another one of our goals for the new facility: to bring fresh, local produce to areas that might not otherwise have access to it given the harsh desert climate.

ECO 1 serves as a strong proof point for how additional vertical farms could be scaled and replicated around the globe, meeting consumer demand and providing food sovereignty to any region that needs it.

There’s a good bit of talk about innovation in the vertical farming arena these days. What is Crop One up to and what differentiates you from some of the other leaders in the marketplace today?

Crop One is leading the way when it comes to advances in plant science, and we’re particularly excited about a new plant-based protein that we’re researching alongside fellow industry experts. We are confident that this new innovation will open up additional market opportunities. We look forward to sharing more about this in the coming weeks.

During Indoor Ag-Con, you’ll be participating in our “Food Security Through CEA” panel. What is one of the key messages you hope to share during this session?

The threats to our global food security are steadily increasing — a rapidly growing global population (as you probably saw, we just surpassed the 8 billion mark), declining arable land, climate change and increasingly severe weather events, and continued supply chain disruptions. These conditions are endangering the food futures of people all over the world, particularly those in places where they might not have the infrastructure or resources needed to overcome new food challenges. One of the key messages I hope to share during the session is that with so many of these threats entirely out of our control, we must focus on new technologies that can overcome — not eliminate — these hurdles. While traditional outdoor agriculture may have worked for the last millennia, it’s not the solution to sustain us into the future.

Crop One sells its fresh, local produce to 30+ US retail stores under the FreshBox Farms brand. Your marketing for the brand highlights Crop One’s “ Plants First” ™ approach. What is that and why is an important part of your messaging?

Unlike other vertical farming companies, Crop One has a Plants First™approach, which recognizes that advances in technology and plant science are synergistic, so the main focus is how to effectively and efficiently grow plants in an artificial environment based on their biology. Only then do we automate the process. The Plants First approach takes a few factors into consideration including plant science, digital systems and innovation, operational efficiency and hardware, together all ensuring that we create the most nutritious and tasty product on the market.

What’s Next for Crop One – plans for expansion?

Excitingly, we just announced our second U.S. farm, located in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. The 316,000-square-foot facility allows us to reach up to 50 million consumers within a 200-mile radius across the tristate and Mid-Atlantic areas, including customers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This new farm will allow us to meet growing retailer demand, while also introducing new consumers across the tristate area to the benefits of hydroponically grown produce.

Learn more about Crop One by visiting the website.

And be sure to put Craig’s Indoor Ag-Con 2023 panel session on your schedule:

Food Security Through CEA
10 am – 10:50 AM PST | Monday, February 27
See Full Conference Schedule

Netled CEO Niko Kivioja: 5 Reasons Why Grocers Need Vertical Farming Partners

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on February 8, 2022. Posted in Exhibitor News.

Walmart recently announced a big bang in the US grocery trade landscape: its investment in vertical farming start-up Plenty. With this, the retail giant is taking a step toward making high-quality, pesticide-free produce more accessible and affordable for the consumer.

What do they know that you don’t? Why should every grocer be scouting for vertical farming partners now and not later?

The salad and fresh herb markets are growing

Size does matter, and the size of the market for salad and leafy greens in the U.S. and Canada is approximately $15 billion and growing. And it will continue to grow with an estimated CAGR of 8.2% from 2021 to 2028.

Similar growth is expected in the spice and herb market where in North America alone, it is projected to grow at a CAGR 7.2% (2020 to 2025).

That is a lot of money available for leafy greens, herbs, and spices if you can guarantee your yield and deliveries.

But therein lies the problem.

Food security

The COVID pandemic has shown us that the logistics involved in food transportation are extremely susceptible to disruption; perishable products in particular cannot be stored for long before the quality deteriorates to such an extent that they are no longer fit for sale.

The majority of the lettuces sold in North America are grown in California. So, if you buy a packaged lettuce in New York, it has probably already traveled 3000 miles. Any disruptions to this journey along the way only serve to weaken the quality of the product and its availability to the end customer.

In fact, over the past year, packaged leafy greens have been one of the top items missing from grocery shelves due to logistics and transportation challenges.

Vertical farming systems like Netled’s proprietary system Vera can ensure the availability of products due to their proximity to the store. A Vera system requires very little space and is significantly more efficient and reliable than traditional agricultural systems.

Vera systems produce:

5 times more crops per comparable growing area
15 times more per surface area compared to single-level high-efficiency year-round greenhouse growing.
100 times more crops per surface area compared to the yield for a normal single season in open-field agriculture.

Vertical farming systems also remove the risks that other forms of agriculture are susceptible to such as unpredictable weather, disease, and pests.

Food safety

The more stages there are in the food processing and distribution, the higher the chance of some form of contamination.

Fewer human contact points, precise control over irrigation, and the growing process result in less risk of contamination.

Every year in North America, 48 million foodborne illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3000 deaths are recorded. (CDC, 2013).

Bacteria and pathogen contamination in the production line almost always originates from the irrigation water used. Further risk of contamination comes from the washing of field-grown or greenhouse products after they are harvested.

Outdoor farming and most of the greenhouses perform triple-wash on the harvested plants in order to mitigate the contamination risk, as a post-harvest process.

Vera vertical farming systems are encapsulated in a precisely controlled environment where there is no contamination from external sources such as pests, fungi, or bacteria.

The Vera system uses 95% less fresh water for irrigation than open-field agriculture and the water it uses is captured from the plant respiration, purified, and fed back into the system ensuring no possibility of external contamination. The plants are not touched by humans during the growing process and therefore do not need to be washed after harvesting.

Harvesting and packaging can even be automated with robotics so that there is no physical contact with the plant at all.

Labor costs

All this automation not only ensures the minimum possible amount of contamination, but it also reduces labor costs.

Vera vertical farming systems are less labor intensive in both the growing and harvesting processes. The extremely high level of automation in irrigation, plant spacing, nutrient delivery, and lighting requires less labor resources. Harvesting and packing can also be automated to a high level with the help of AI and robotics, and if the vertical farm is situated in close proximity to the store, logistic, and transportation costs are also reduced dramatically.

Quality

Awareness and demand for healthy plant-based foods is growing. Salads are a good source of fiber, iron, calcium, potassium plus vitamins A, K, C, and E.

There are many factors that can affect the quality of the end product, not only in the processing stages of production, but also in the growing stage. Open-field growing is particularly susceptible to risk factors: extreme weather events such as torrential rain and drought, nutrient depletion and salination of the soil and the chemical fertilizers used to attempt to redress the balance, water infiltration rates, pesticides, herbicides, and chemical spraying to name a few.

Vertical farming systems operate in a precisely controlled environment where every last detail is planned, monitored, and controlled from seed to retail. There are no rainy days, no hot days, no pests or chemicals – everything is always just right

The Vera system is programmed according to the particular plant and the variables are adjusted so that it can grow to its own genetic maximum. This results in the highest possible quality with guaranteed results no matter what time of year or whatever the weather.

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In case you’d like to learn more about your potential future vertical farming partner, come and meet Netled CEO Niko Kivioja and the rest of the team at Indoor AgCon booth 1023!

Niko Kivioja will also join a panel conversation on Direct Controlled Environment Agriculture Farming in Grocery Stores, Hotels & Restaurants on Monday, Feb 28^th at 4:00 pm.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT NETLED AND ITS VERA TECHNOLOGY:

W: NETLED.FI

NETLED VIDEO RESOURCES:

Introduction to Vera vertical farm

Netled featured on Advancements TV Series aired on CNBC

Netled CEO Niko Kivioja interview Vertical Farming Podcast

Netled CEO Niko Kivioja interview Crop Talk Podcast

IGS Vertical Farming Buyers Guide Series

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on December 14, 2021. Posted in Exhibitor News.

IGS’ latest publication, ‘The Vertical Farming Buyers’ Guide Series,’ presents the latest, verifiable facts about our vertical farming system. Make an informed decision about whether vertical farming could form a profitable part of your business.

IGS split the series into the different areas you need to consider before setting up, expanding or diversifying your own vertical farming operation. The Buyers’ Guide Series comes in three parts:

IGS is a technology company that has combined farming and engineering expertise to create a vertical farming system that delivers grower benefits while also addressing the pressing challenges such as food security and sustainability.

Our Total Controlled Environment Agriculture vertical farming system allows customers to grow crops in a clean environment with zero pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, while supporting reductions in power and labour requirements.

To learn more about IGS, visit www.IntelligentGrowthSolutions.com