Balancing Tech and Automation in Controlled Environment Agriculture
Appropriate, Scalable Technology is the Missing Key to Profitable Vertical Farms
Produce Grower Vertical Thinking Column by Eric W. Stein, Ph.D., executive director at the Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture
Automation, robots, large language models (LLMs), sensor networks, IoT and AI dominate conversations today. The conventional wisdom is that tech equals innovation equals profits. But is that true? I would argue not necessarily.
Clayton Christensen painstakingly documented how one technology displaces another in his influential book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (1997). Examples include how flash memory displaced disk drives and inkjet printers displaced laser printers.
The conclusion? In most cases, simpler and cheaper technologies were the most disruptive to existing markets, not technologically superior ones. Why? Because high-tech often means more complexity, and more complexity means higher cost. Vertical farming has not fully learned this lesson and has been lured by the promise of adding tech.
What vertical farming needs is appropriate technology, not more technology. The concept of appropriate technology originated in Gandhi’s India in the 1930s. He advocated for small, local, low-tech solutions to help villages become self-reliant. This idea was fleshed out in E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful” (1973), in which he argues for technology that is appropriately scaled for human systems.
Put another way, indoor agriculture should not be defined by how much technology it uses, but by how it leverages appropriate technology to efficiently convert capital and energy into consistent, profitable yield.
The vertical farm technology trap
The problem with technology is that beyond a certain point, additional technological layers increase fragility faster than they increase performance. This is the trap that vertical farming finds itself in.
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.