Author: Leah Zitter

Following the commercial success of their vertical farms in New Jersey, USA, AeroFarms® have announced plans to build a new 150,000 square foot indoor farm in Danville, Virginia. This new farm will be more than twice the size of their largest existing vertical farm in Newark (70,000 square feet). “At 150,000 square feet,” David Rosenberg, Co Founder & CEO of AeroFarms said, “our new farm more than doubles the size of our last major commercial farm in New Jersey and will help us meet the strong consumer demand for safely grown produce.” Speaking about the decision to build the new indoor farm…

Think of a world with nine billion people fifty years from now. We’ll need enough high-quality fresh produce and grain to feed everybody. In turn, we’ll need three times as many greenhouse growers and farm laborers as we have today. Unfortunately, reports show fewer and fewer farmers retain their lands and greenhouses each year as conditions get harder; costs of labor, material and production get more expensive; and larger farms dominate input and output. For hired laborers, in most parts of the world they receive minimum wage and in Western countries a willing source is becoming harder to find. Indeed…

Five months ago, computer scientists and horticulturists were invited to a one-of-a-kind competition to grow their own cherry tomatoes over the course of six months in the Wageningen University & Research (WUR) autonomous greenhouse (Bleiswijk, The Netherlands). The University gave them their own greenhouse compartments. Contestants had to supply their own sensors and cameras. Starting December (in the actual growing experiment), participants will grow their plants through coupling data from the greenhouse compartment with their own ICT/models/machine learning algorithms for controls, after which they send those control settings back to WUR’s greenhouse climate computer for WUR analysis of augmented yield production. The…