Lufa Farms, a company dedicated to creating a more direct and local food system, has announced the opening of its first indoor farm. Located in the Saint-Laurent borough of Montreal, Canada, the former Sears headquarters have been transformed into a unique urban food ecosystem that combines the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse, a distribution centre, and now a new indoor farm to feed thousands of customers each week. Featuring the Green Automation technology that is typically used in greenhouses, this urban farm is equipped with a single-level hydroponic growing system and a thousand energy-efficient LED lights. The site is designed to…
Author: Matt Peskett
Matt Peskett
Matt has worked in digital publishing and media for over two decades across the science, technology, food and agricultural sectors. With a lifelong passion for growing his own food, Matt also produces 300kg giant pumpkins for exhibition and volunteers with the Royal Horticultural Society. He has a sizeable horticultural social media presence and has been a finalist in the Garden Media Guild's blog of the year and social media awards. Matt also dabbles in start-up investment with companies like Small Robot Company, Drone Ag and RootWave.
They were already working together but now Siemens Netherlands and Infinite Acres, the technology company of 80 Acres Farms, are one step closer to building a vertical farming Field-Lab and Experience Centre in The Hague, featuring Siemens technology and services. The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in which they agreed to jointly open a multi-part research centre at Infinite Acres’ headquarters in The Hague. In this research centre, the companies will integrate Siemens’ state-of-the-art hardware and software with Infinite Acres’ operating platform and controlled environment growing technology, as well as learnings from Infinite Acres research and development…
DK-Bell Holding Company is a family investment office that seeks to make long-term, strategic investments in Food & Agritech and, more specifically, controlled environment agriculture (CEA). Now the Private investment firm has come to the rescue of North American vertical farming company Farm.One. In 2021, hydroponic indoor farming company Farm.One expanded to a 10,000 sq. ft. indoor facility in downtown Brooklyn to meet growing crop demand generated by hundreds of new members across New York City but in early 2022 it was not able to raise much-needed growth capital and had to close its Brooklyn farm. DK-Bell recognised the company…
Australasian based vertical farming business Greengrower has begun operations at its first farm in Hamilton, New Zealand with patented proprietary technology powered by Elevate Farms Inc. The Farm is the first of its kind in Australasia featuring a fully autonomous grow room with product already available at local grocery stores on the North Island, one of the two main islands of New Zealand. The Farm produces over 4,000 bags for retail distribution daily from its current site, with plans underway for further expansion of this capacity. Tom Schuyt, CEO of Greengrower, said “We are proud to bring sustainably…
Foresight Group, a sustainability-led alternative investment manager, has reached an agreement with Harvest London, a UK-based controlled environment agriculture company, to aid the expansion of the vertical farming industry. Founded in 2017 by Matt Chlebek and Chris Davies, Harvest London opened its first, proof-of-concept farm, in Walthamstow in 2018. After crowdfunding through Seedrs, the company opened its second farm in Leyton in late 2020. According to Sky News, the vertical farm start-up has successfully transformed a £500,000 loan received from the government’s Future Fund into equity shares. Harvest London is a B Corporation, having gone through a rigorous accreditation process…
Silvia Booij and Leonie Geerdinck, researchers at Signify Research in the Netherlands, have been testing LED light recipes in basil cultivation and they have reached an outcome matching similar experiments with other crops. As with previous light measuring studies conducted at Wageningen, using lettuce, tomato and spinach plants, white light does not add any value to Basil plants themselves. Indeed compared to red and blue light, white LEDs only increase energy consumption costs. This may come as no major surprise, in my own use of LED grow lights I found long ago that red and blue LED grow lights made…
Vertical farming company iFarm is constructing a high-tech vertical farm in the new and innovative community of Nuanu, Indonesia. Located on the Balinese coastline, Nuanu is a collaboration of creative minds living and working together to develop a sustainable ecosystem. iFarm and the Nuanu community are inviting architects to submit designs for the new futuristic farm, a core feature of Nuanu’s drive for functional green practices. The design of the facility should align with the eco-friendly biometric architecture style of Nuanu, whether it’s GreenZen or Naturatecture, with the winning design constructed on site. Launching at the end of 2023, the…
UP Vertical Farms has launched its inaugural vertical farming facility in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia (Canada). The start-up is owned by Fresh Green Farms, an agriculture technology company founded by brothers Bahram and Shahram Rashti. Partnering on the project is global fresh produce distributor Oppy, which will oversee sales and marketing. UP Vertical Farms is fully automated from seeding through to harvest. Using recycled CO² and proprietary lighting technology, leaves are grown to custom brix levels and flavour profiles while lasting 22+ days refrigerated. The greens are grown without soil and never touched by human hands, which means they are…
This week KETOS, Inc announced that the largest vertical farming company in the U.S, Bowery Farming, is expanding its use of KETOS to autonomously monitor water quality in real-time across its farm locations. Bowery builds smart indoor farms near cities, growing fresher, pesticide-free protected produce in precisely controlled environments, 365 days a year. The KETOS SHIELD solution supports Bowery’s process optimisation, eliminates lab costs related to manual water testing, and offers lab-accurate water quality data to support crop yield, while managing nutrient concentration and product quality. “Integrating the KETOS units into our farms enables us to maintain the highest quality of…
At Purdue University (Indiana, USA) researchers in the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture have designed two simple LED lighting strategies to increase yield and reduce energy costs for the vertical farming sector of indoor agriculture. The ‘close-canopy’ and ‘focused-lighting’ strategies developed by PhD candidate Fatemeh Sheibani and Professor Cary Mitchell, capitalise on LED lighting’s special properties. “Right now energy for lighting amounts to about 30% of total operational costs” says Professor Mitchell. Through their efforts the pair hope to decrease the production costs associated with lighting used in vertical farming. The work of Sheibani and Mitchell is part of…
