Tour An IGS Vertical Farm
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.
Adam Greenberg
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.
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.