The Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture Announces Partnership With Microclimates, Inc.
The Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture, a U.S. based company that supports the growth of the vertical farming and greenhouse industry, announced a partnership with Microclimates, a software development company that provides farms with a platform that offers monitoring, control, data analytics and automation to growers.
The new partnership is designed to assist growers from start-up to farm-build to continued operations. The Center brings its business planning, financial analysis, venture strategy and farm operations assessment expertise to the partnership. Microclimates brings its expertise in platform development and software solutions for lighting, climate, fertigation, irrigation, layered mapping and energy management to the partnership. Together they offer clients a robust set of solutions for indoor farm development and growth.
Eric W. Stein, Ph.D., founder and Executive Director of the Center of Excellence notes, “We are delighted to work with Neda Vaseghi and Loren West at Microclimates. They have built a robust and easy-to-use software platform that helps indoor growers to succeed. One of the challenges for growers is to operate a farm in an efficient and sustainable way in order to achieve profitability. Their solution provides a high level of monitoring, control, and automation at an affordable price point.”
Neda Vaseghi, CEO and co-founder of Microclimates says, “We are thrilled to be partnering with the Center of Excellence and Dr. Eric Stein. His unparalleled expertise in indoor agriculture, technology innovation, and sustainable practices perfectly complements our mission to revolutionize CEA. With Dr. Stein’s visionary leadership and our commitment to cutting-edge environmental automation, supported by integration of silos and hardware- agnostic approach, we are poised to unlock new possibilities and drive transformative impact in the agriculture industry. Together, we look forward to shaping a more efficient, sustainable, and resilient future for growers.”
About The Center: The Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture provides business expertise and analytical advisory services to investors, entrepreneurs, industry partners, and community organizers to de-risk the process of building sustainable and profitable indoor vertical farms and greenhouses. Services include strategy, due diligence, economic and technical feasibility analysis, market research and analysis, operations assessment, sustainable methods, training and development. The Center and its partners offer indoor farm design solutions based on sustainable architectural design and optimal operations management principles. As the first U.S.-based Center of Excellence dedicated to indoor farming, it promotes best practices, benchmarking, best in class solutions and research. The Center is located in the Philadelphia metro region.
About Microclimates, Inc. Microclimates is a software company that offers a platform for monitoring, control, automation, and data analytics for various aspects of controlled environment agriculture (CEA), including lighting, climate (HVAC), watering, nutrient dosing, energy monitoring, and maps. Its solution aims to address the current scenario where most CEA systems operate independently, functioning as isolated entities. The Microclimates platform seamlessly unifies monitoring & control systems, while providing a hardware- agnostic model. This integration provides users with a centralized software interface, simplifying management by reducing the number of controllers to oversee. Additionally, it brings about cost savings through labor reduction, mitigates risks associated with the use of multiple control systems, harmonizes data across various components, and facilitates informed, data-driven decision-making for operators.