Funding from the Scottish government has been made available for the first vertical farm to be built on a Scottish education facility. Costing £500,000 to construct, the new farm will be built at SRUC’s King’s Buildings campus in Edinburgh next year to carry out research and education. The project, which has received a £200,000 grant from the Scottish Government, will be used in key research into plant and crop science and will also be used by students. The facility will grow nutrient-dense fruit and vegetables that have specific human health qualities. It will also analyse crop yield and growth rates with…
Author: Chris McCullough
Chris McCullough
Chris McCullough is a freelance multi-media journalist based in Northern Ireland and specialises in all aspects of agriculture. He has spent the past 18 years travelling the globe hunting for the best stories in food, farming and politics. He has reported extensively from overseas, mostly throughout Europe but also from USA, Canada, India, Australia and African countries on various topics. He has won a number of awards for his photos and journalism and is always on the lookout for his next exclusive.
Picking tomatoes can be costly and laborious especially when labour is in short supply but robotic help is now available. Japanese company inaho Inc has set up a subsidiary company inaho Europe BV with a base in the Netherlands, and has developed a new robot for harvesting snack tomatoes. The company’s goal is to devise robotic solutions to help boost agriculture production, it has previously launched an AI-equipped asparagus harvesting robot back in 2019. The European arm of the company officially started operations on April 1, 2021 and it has launched the tomato robotic harvester as its first product. The European…
A NEW version of the software app Skippy Scout has been launched and is ten times faster than its predecessor. Agriculture software specialist Drone Ag has just introduced the Skippy Scout version 2.5, which it says is a big step forward and will save a lot of time with field management. The original Skippy app could fly a drone to scout points in a field five times faster than traditional crop walking. However, the new 2.5 version has more functionality and is ten times faster, enabling users to cover up to 25 acres in just five minutes. Skippy Scout 2.5 offers…
With demand for more space travel rocketing NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) have set a challenge for companies to develop novel food production methods that will endure longer flights, potentially to Mars. Together the space agencies have launched their Deep Space Food Challenge. In phase 1 NASA has put up US$500,000 as a prize fund to teams from the US, whilst the CSA has allocated CAD$300,000 in prizes for Canadian teams. The goal of the mission is for the teams to create novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that require minimal inputs and maximise safe, nutritious, and palatable food outputs for long-duration…
