A New Look At How Vertical Farming Can Help Decouple Food From Nature
One in every of NextFood’s instore farms sits in one in all Denmark’s largest hamburger chains. The shop has … [+]
Vertical farming permits a wholly new meals provide chain from farm to fork and from order to supply and bill.
The worldwide vertical farming market was valued at $3.47 billion in 2021 and is projected to succeed in $4.16 billion in 2022 and develop to $20.9 billing by 2029.
In response to Rasmus Bjerngaard, co-founder and CEO of NextFood, this new meals provide chain is environment friendly and remoted – it is decoupled from nature. “In different phrases, it doesn’t extract pure sources; no soil depletion, small water utilization, and no biosphere destruction or pollute nature; no water contamination and no pesticides.”
“When humanity was smaller, nature had the time to regenerate from our extraction and air pollution,” mentioned Bjerngaard. “Now that humanity has greater than seven billion folks and our agricultural strategies have intensified, nature can now not maintain us.”
Bjerngaard says there are two methods to deal with the issue of getting sufficient area to develop meals and protect nature.
“Decoupling meals and nature is about integrating meals manufacturing with nature like actual round /regenerative meals manufacturing,” mentioned Bjerngaard. “The opposite strategy is to decouple meals manufacturing from nature which we’re already beginning to see like cow-less meat, precision fermentation, and indoor agriculture, which is what vertical farming achieves.”
“In every their approach, these methods place pure stability on the forefront, countering the present meals system’s extraction and air pollution of pure sources,” mentioned Bjerngaard.
NextFood is a vertical farming startup in Denmark that builds the total know-how stack for vertical farming techniques at scale.
Bjerngaard says the corporate supplies your entire plant-based meals provide chain in a field.
“Our software program consists of and automates your entire course of from order by means of capability planning, IoT and sensor-based local weather management and monitoring,” mentioned Bjerngaard. “This additionally consists of AI imaginative and prescient to detect anomalies, knowledge assortment of 1000’s of each day knowledge factors, process administration like supply and invoicing.”
Bjerngaard says AI and automation are the keys to optimizing the principle operational prices in vertical farming. “It is yield versus gentle consumption and yield versus labor utilization.”
“Our {hardware} is agnostic, however we additionally make the {hardware} for local weather management, sensors, water administration, lights and robotic seeding,” mentioned Bjerngaard. “It’s not tough to make one thing develop, however it’s difficult to make a system that produces high-quality crops robustly and at aggressive manufacturing prices and CAPEX.”
“In-store develop techniques like those we now have at Sundown Boulevard’s eating places in Copenhagen and at Restaurant Folks within the Copenhagen Zoo, are necessary items of the meals provide chain,” mentioned Bjerngaard. “However the bigger scale farms like our KVH farm make the largest influence to decoupling meals and nature.”
