Vertical Harvest

Vertical farming, like the Leafy Green Machine in the photo, makes growth of vegetables in very limited space with high efficiency possible. Image credit: Freight Farms

This Summer I spent a (short) one-week vacation in Jackson Hole, WY, and right in front of the hotel was a strange looking building, several stories high made of steel and glass, with illumination through the day and night in green, blue, magenta and yellow (look at the clip).

It piqued my curiosity and I found out it was a vertical harvest building, growing various vegetables in moving shelves that slowly went up and down the hight of the building with plants exposed to different light sources (with different wavelengths, colours).

Actually it is not the only one, but one of a growing trend to create structures where farming  fields are no longer horizontal but vertical. This creates controlled environment where plants can grow much more efficiently, recycling water and decreasing its volume to less than one/tenth. Because of the controlled environment there is basically no need tor insecticides and fertiliser can be kept to a minimum. Being subject to controlled light, 24 hours a day, they grow faster, further increasing the efficiency.

A number of start ups and scale ups are active in vertical harvest.

Freight Farms, a Boston -MA. company has created 40-square-foot containers (Leafy Green Machine) that can be easily deployed to have on site vertical harvest. They are climate conditioned, LED illuminated and provide hydroponic irrigation systems. Computers take care of the whole growing cycle from seeding to harvest.

Recently, Sept. 12th 2018, Freight Farms has unveiled Grown, a service that provides their Leafy Green Machine and all the assistance required through the whole life cycle for 5,000$ a month. The service is targeted to small communities, schools, companies that want to produce on site greens for fresh food.

According to Freight Farms, and to several start ups in this area, like Agrylist, Farmshelf and CropOne this is the way to go: decentralised agriculture for local production using minimum surface area and very low resources.

Clearly a quite different approach to agriculture, made possible by the convergence of several technologies that can be further improved in the next decade by genetic engineering.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.