Tag: precision agriculture

Netafim Partners with Vermillion Growers to Open State-of-the-Art Commercial Greenhouse In Central Canada

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on October 27, 2023. Posted in Blog.

Orbia’s Precision Agriculture business, Netafim (Indoor Ag-Con 2024 Exhibitor!) has partnered with Vermillion Growers to build a large-scale vegetable greenhouse in Manitoba, Canada. Gakon Netafim, the company’s commercial greenhouse project division, is a world-renowned leader in Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). The facility celebrated its grand opening on July 27, 2023, a significant milestone for Orbia, Vermillion Growers, and the local community.

Based in Dauphin, Vermillion Growers will begin growing tomatoes year-round across 10 acres, with plans to expand their production area and grow additional crops. Canada currently imports over 75% of its vegetables and 50% of its tomatoes. By reducing shipping time, customers can get fresh, higher-quality tomatoes at their local grocery stores, even in remote communities. By reducing transit time and the resulting spoilage, this exciting new development also cuts down on food waste.

Orbia Precision Agriculture Technology to Support Sustainable Practices

Gakon Netafim’s greenhouse solutions make it possible, and profitable, to meet consumers’ preferences for local produce that is grown sustainably.

The roof structure on the greenhouse will collect enough water to meet 50% of the entire facility’s irrigation needs. Additionally, the double-screen system minimizes light pollution and reduces the overall energy used by 50%. “The double-screen technology is optimal for controlling the climate in the greenhouse and allows for greater energy savings and efficiency,” says Ricky Elz, Greenhouse Key Account Project Manager at Gakon Netafim. “The blackout screens provide shading to crops and are essential to crop growth in the greenhouse.”

“Our partnership with Vermillion Growers is an exciting part of our Greenhouse Business and I’m excited for what comes next. All of us at Orbia are proud to play a role in positively impacting the many communities of Manitoba,” said Claude Corcos, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development at Orbia’s Precision Agriculture business, Netafim USA.

Economic Benefits and Community Impact

Since Vermillion Growers’ opening, it has hired 30 new full-time employees and will eventually bring over 200 jobs to the community. Vermillion has further partnered with Assiniboine Community College, a local college in Dauphin which will begin offering a Horticultural Production program this fall to provide education and training to those in the community who are interested in pursuing work in the field, including work at Vermillion Growers.

Notably, Vermillion Growers has provided job training and support to several workers who relocated from Ukraine to escape from conflict. Per Capita, Dauphin has one of the largest Ukrainian populations in Canada.

“The combination of world-class greenhouse technology and local expertise is why Vermillion invested in Gakon Netafim solutions,” says Maria Deschauer, managing director of Vermillion Growers. “We prioritize growing fresh produce, as well as healthy people and sustainable communities. All three are connected and we are thrilled for their support.”

About Netafim

Netafim, Orbia’s Precision Agriculture business, is the world’s largest irrigation company and a global leader in precision agriculture solutions committed to fight scarcity of food, water and land, for a sustainable future. Founded in 1965, Netafim pioneered the drip revolution, creating a paradigm shift toward precision irrigation. Today, specializing in end-to-end solutions from the water source to the root zone, Netafim delivers irrigation and greenhouse projects, as well as landscape and mining irrigation solutions supported by engineering, project management and financing services. Netafim is also leading the way in digital farming, irrigation and fertigation, integrating real-time monitoring, analysis and automated control into one state-of-the-art system. With 33 subsidiaries, 19 manufacturing plants, 2 recycling plants and more than 5000 employees worldwide, Netafim delivers innovative, tailor-made irrigation and fertigation solutions to millions of farmers, allowing smallholders to large-scale agricultural producers and investors, in over 110 countries, to grow more with less™.

About Orbia

Orbia is a company driven by a shared purpose: to advance life around the world. Orbia operates in the Polymer Solutions (Vestolit and Alphagary), Building and Infrastructure (Wavin), Precision Agriculture (Netafim), Connectivity Solutions (Dura-Line) and Fluorinated Solutions (Koura) sectors. The five Orbia business groups have a collective focus on expanding access to health and wellness, reinventing the future of cities and homes, ensuring food and water security, connecting communities to information and accelerating a circular economy with basic and advanced materials, specialty products and innovative solutions. Orbia has commercial activities in more than 110 countries and operations in over 50, with global headquarters in Boston, Mexico City, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv.

About Vermillion Growers
Vermillion Growers is the first large-scale vegetable greenhouse in Manitoba, Canada. Its mission is to grow high-quality produce, healthy people, and sustainable communities. The greenhouse is helping to bridge the gap in food production in Central Canada by producing fresh tomatoes year-round. Vermillion Growers utilizes industry-leading technology to operate an efficient and environmentally sustainable facility.

Tour An IGS Vertical Farm

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on August 3, 2021. Posted in Blog, Exhibitor News.

Vertical farming offers a progressive, modern way to complement traditional farming methods so that the planet can sustain an ever-increasing demand for food. As farmers and other growers put greater emphasis on sustainable food security and surety of supply chain, vertical farming is being recognised as an increasingly valuable way to diversify and drive efficiency.

Indoor Ag-Con Exhibitor IGS’ innovative approach has sustainability and environmental consideration at its core. The goal is to reduce the amount of energy required, providing economic and productivity benefits by reducing power and labour costs whilst growing consistently high-quality produce to demand at the point of consumption.

The precision-controlled IGS system has been designed specifically to address some of the core challenges facing the vertical farming sector including economic viability and energy consumption. This is widely considered as a fundamental component in overcoming the global food security challenges we face in a changing climate with a growing population.

At IGS, we have solved the top challenges facing vertical farming:

Power and labour costs: With our patented three-phase power and automation platform, we have significantly reduced energy and labour costs.
Water scarcity: Our closed-loop irrigation system reduces water consumption considerably compared to open field and greenhouse farming. Lettuce for example needs 1L of water in an IGS farm vs 20L in a greenhouse and 250L in a traditional field.
Productivity: Our patented HVAC and modular fertigation systems deliver greater uniformity and is up to 15x more efficient in yield/footprint over glasshouses and polytunnels.

The level of control, depth of data capture and the ongoing software development undertaken by IGS all combine to deliver a system capable of future-proofing global food supplies.

Interested in learning more about vertical farming through IGS? Click here to take a virtual tour of the IGS Crop Research Centre located at the James Hutton Institute – Scotland’s largest scientific research centre and one of the biggest in the United Kingdom.

Computer Vision Brings Clarity To Growers | Q & A With iUNU CEO Adam Greenberg

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on January 18, 2021. Posted in Blog.

Adam Greenberg founded iUNU (pronounced “you knew”) in 2013 to revolutionize the greenhouse industry by using machine vision technology. In less than eight years, he is well on the way.

The Seattle-based company’s LUNA AI platform uses computer vision to monitor crop growth. LUNA delivers a system of mobile and fixed cameras with high-definition imaging and environmental sensors that measure and record everything down to the real-time growth rate of each plant. The software combines computer vision and machine learning technologies to continuously build detailed models of individual plants, unique among millions, throughout the day. What’s more, LUNA helps growers manage this information so they can be more productive and efficient – automating tracking, helping scout, and refining forecasts & planning.

The industry has taken notice. iUNU & Adam have been recognized with a Medal of Excellence nomination from Greenhouse Grower, best new indoor growing technology from the United Fresh Produce Association, and Adam was recently named to GPN’s 40 Under 40 Class of 2020. Adam will also be joining our Indoor Ag-Conversations CEO panel this week (see story below), “AI & Robotics: What’s Economically Viable and Feasible For Indoor Farms Today.” Ahead of this program, Indoor Ag-Con had a chance to talk to Adam about his growing business and plans for the future.

Q. What makes LUNA different from other greenhouse | indoor grower AI platforms on the market today?

We play in that nebulous gray zone connecting between ERP companies and control systems, but we’re not competing with any of them. Everyone has their control system vendor. We’re striving to be the trusted machine vision vendor. To us, it’s less about competition and marketing and more about how and where we fit in when it comes to helping customers solve problems and drive value.

Growers spend a lot of time keeping track of plants with manual data collection – walking up and down rows, noting issues on an ipad, and putting flags down to mark problems. Given the scale some growers must deal with, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. Forecasting presents an even bigger challenge that oftentimes ends up as a combination of best guesses and constant fine-tuning. During planning, issuing a single change order can take up to a week as the team works though that excel document. We aim to solve all these challenges with the clarity that comes from a quantifiable, data-driven process that takes the guesswork out of growing.

Q. Looking at our Indoor Ag-Con audience — which includes greenhouse growers as well as indoor |vertical farm growers — does your technology meet the needs for all these environments?

Our platform is being used by growers in all indoor categories, including vertical, greenhouses and grow rooms. In fact, vertical farm inquiries are our number one area of interest – from large to small operations – followed by interest from commercial scale greenhouses. The issue is that vertical farming is, perhaps, one of the most NDA-covered categories – to the point that operations could be located right next door to one another and not even know it. As a result, we are not able to share examples of some of our clients and successes in this space.

Q. Cost is a key component to any indoor farm. Please share some idea of the cost spectrum when one considers the implementation of any AI technology system within an indoor farm.

LUNA is a SaaS model where clients make recurring payments. As the camera vision captures images while riding around the greenhouse/indoor farm, it sends those images to LUNA’s data collection point where it is translated onto an app the grower can access on a cellphone or laptop. There are multiple pixels per millimeter and each photo and every single pixel is collected and analyzed. That leads to recurring costs and ongoing analysis. The more passes the camera makes, the costs are adjusted accordingly. Each customer — and each order iUNU gets from these customers — is unique. The iUNU team essentially acts as a semi-autonomous horticultural consultant as we recommend the number of passes needed to meet a grower’s goals and needs. This can range from a single daily pass for a grower seeking to find problems with chlorosis or mildew up to 8-10 passes a day for that grower who is a voracious consumer of data.

When it comes to budgeting for AI technology, I think we can learn from other industries. We follow the process of manufacturing where between 4-5% of industrial process automation goes to software, which has gone up to 7-8% today. I encourage clients to dedicate 4-7% of their budget to those things that will help improve processes and scale up.

Q: What’s Next for iUNU

I’d say there are three key areas of focus for us:

—Helping scale the industry to meet demand: We want to offer tools that help growers do more with less. In North America, for example, the greenhouse fruit and vegetable market is growing more than 20 percent annually. As greenhouses expand, they face labor shortages and challenges. We are focusing on ways to make indoor growing operations more profitable and efficient.

–API: Companies that cannot work with other companies will be replaced by other companies. I think any company that does not offer API (Application Programming Interface) will lose. We must connect all growing and operating tools together for the benefit of the grower.

–Food Safety: We want to significantly contribute to the continued push for food safety through our data collection. Food safety has become increasingly important to both consumers and the FDA.

Q. When it comes to AI, what is keeping you up at night?

I think there’s a general misconception when it comes to AI. It’s really nothing more than a buzz word for statistical analysis. People do not always understand this and think AI is something to be afraid of. When companies say they sell AI, it’s like saying ‘I’m selling the Cloud’ or ‘I’m selling API.’ In reality, AI is simply commoditized statistical learning. There is just so much marketing noise in the sector that it’s often hard to find the signal. Hopefully within 5 years the signal will become more pronounced so people can really hear it and understand it.
There is a lot of opacity in the sector today. The focus needs to be on companies that drive value and truly focus on the customer needs. Show value to the industry, your happy customers will handle the rest for you.

To learn more about iUNU and LUNA, visit www.iunu.com