Latest news with #verticalfarming
Fast Company
27-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
This vertical farming startup is bringing fresh produce—and international competitors—to the Dubai desert
When Sky Kurtz set out to grow produce in the desert via vertical farming in 2016, laying the groundwork for what became Dubai-based ag-tech startup Pure Harvest Smart Farms, 'People thought we were crazy,' he says. 'I was fearful, I would never get off the ground.' But Kurtz's came at a time when the UAE was beginning to take the idea seriously and companies like Pure Harvest began cropping up. Over the past nine years, though, Pure Harvest Farms has become one of the sector's biggest players. It has raised more than $450 million in funding, according to market analysis company PitchBook, and grows an array of crops that includes tomatoes, green vegetables, and berries in temperature-controlled facilities. With farms strategically located throughout the UAE, the company boasts the capacity to produce over 12 million kilograms of crops annually. Despite the competition, Pure Harvest has distinguished itself as the dominant player in the country's indoor farming sector. Unlike other ag-tech companies which were designed for temperate climates, Pure Harvest developed technologies specifically built to withstand the harsh climates of the Middle East. Unlike other ag-tech companies that focus on niche produce and cater to premium markets, Pure Harvest sells a wide range of produce and supplies to major supermarket chains across the country. by 2026 whereas AeroFarms launched the world's largest indoor vertical farm in Abu Dhabi in 2023. The final deadline for Fast Company's Brands That Matter Awards is Friday, May 30, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Globe and Mail
20-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
How vertical farming can help Canada create a self-reliant food chain in an era of tariffs and climate change
This dry patch of land doesn't look like the kind of place where Canada's food future might take shape. On the edge of B.C's South Okanagan – home to one of the country's most arid and fragile ecosystems – a lone steel-sided building stands on the flattened site of the town's former lumber mill, which closed in 2007. Inside, under bright lights and a steady flow of filtered air, rows of lettuce grow in trays stacked 20 feet high. Workers dressed like astronauts carry trays of seeds and harvest greens destined for grocery stores across British Columbia. This is Avery Family Farms – a vertical lettuce farm built by Garry and Victoria Peters, a married couple whose family ties run deep in the region. They made their fortune in fine art and print reproduction, selling their business just before the 2008 financial crisis, after it topped $100-million in annual revenue. Today, through the farm's parent company, they invest in agritech as well as industrial and residential real estate. For OK Falls, as locals call it, the facility is a rare and hopeful sign of new industry in a community still shaken by lumber giant Weyerhaeuser's decision to move the mill about 100 kilometres east to Princeton, B.C. For Canada, Mr. Peters sees it as a working example of how the country might begin to rebuild self-reliance in an era defined by tariffs, climate instability and fragile supply chains. Mr. Peters said he understood the risks, but the idea had already taken hold. It started in the earliest days of the pandemic, when, like millions of Canadians, he watched grocery-store shelves empty overnight. At first, he imagined buying a barn, maybe raising some food for his family and neighbours. But the deeper he looked, the clearer it became that Canada's short growing season wasn't going to cut it. That led him to vertical farming – an idea he said quickly shifted from personal to national. Canada imports the vast majority of its lettuce, much of it trucked up from California and Arizona – states increasingly strained by drought, wildfires and tightening water restrictions. Mr. Peters sees that dependence as a risk that Canada hasn't taken seriously enough. 'We can't assume the shelves will always be full,' he said. Demand spiked almost overnight when U.S. President Donald Trump uttered the word 'tariff,' Mr. Peters said. Retailers, worried about the reliability of cross-border supply chains, began looking for Canadian-grown alternatives. Mr. Peters said the surge in orders was a wake-up call for his farm and the wider food industry about how quickly geopolitical tension can upend assumptions. Those same themes now sit at the centre of Prime Minister Mark Carney's economic plan. His platform includes targeted support for greenhouses, hydroponics and vertical farms, along with infrastructure and inspection reforms aimed at building a more resilient food system. Mr. Carney has framed the issue as both economic and sovereign – a way to protect Canadians from inflation, supply shocks and the consequences of a changing climate. This farm is a relatively small operation. But everything required to build it evokes some of Canada's deeper fault lines. It took the capital of a Canadian entrepreneur in a country where business investment still lags most of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It sells into a Canadian market disrupted by the breakdown of free trade with the United States. It creates jobs in a region where manufacturing has hollowed out. It offers a glimpse of what Canada's economy could be. But for now, it reveals just how fragile the vertical-farming model is. Even as Mr. Peters's facility produces thousands of heads of lettuce a day, the economics remain precarious: The constant flow of energy required to grow a perishable product in a desert-adjacent climate – the lights, climate systems and water controls – runs up a huge tab. Labour and training are expensive. Mr. Peters said it took five years and millions in private investment for the business to break even. Vertical farms are gaining traction across North America, but the high-profile bankruptcies of U.S. companies such as Plenty and Bowery Farming and have put the viability of the nascent industry under the spotlight. Both raised hundreds of millions in venture capital but couldn't sustain high operational costs with tight margins. In Canada, Ottawa-based Growcer says it is fielding calls from communities looking to secure local food production before the next shock hits. GoodLeaf, a Guelph, Ont.-based facility backed by McCain Foods, is expanding more cautiously, building upon its background in food production – a more deliberate process than the rapid pace of the tech-driven failures. That caution reflects the real economic pressures faced by vertical farms, and the need for better support if the industry is to scale, said Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph. Dr. Fraser, who advises Mr. Peters and other entrepreneurs, said vertical farming holds 'incredible' promise, but the model is fraught with economic, logistical and regulatory challenges. 'There's huge potential here – but getting from now to next requires derisking the space,' Dr. Fraser said in an interview, pointing to the wall of capital expenditures that are too steep for most entrepreneurs to climb. 'When you've got a $20-million CapEx and a massive burn rate, you've got to sell a lot of lettuce.' What's happening in Okanagan Falls is a case study in what Dr. Fraser calls the 'science-policy-society interface' – the space where research, regulation and risk collide. Dr. Fraser has watched more innovators emerge with bold ideas – and seen how quickly they run into structural barriers. He worries that Canada could repeat the mistakes of the tech sector, where early optimism around social media helped concentrate power in the hands of a few. 'If we don't get the policy and regulatory structures right, we risk building the agrifood version of Big Tech – powerful, narrow and not necessarily in the public interest,' he said. And the rapid pace at which the Silicon Valley efforts approached vertical farming ignored the fact the growing produce at scale is not the same as churning out microchips. 'You can't treat lettuce like an app,' he said. 'It's a living organism, and it needs to be grown by people who understand that.' Dr. Fraser and Dr. Lenore Newman at the University of Fraser Valley are co-directors of a five-year, $17-million federally funded platform called Sustainable Food Systems for Canada, which will train entrepreneurs. The program, which launches this year, is designed to help ventures such as Avery Farms scale up while ensuring the benefits are broadly distributed. 'We have a chance to flip the switch – to turn agriculture from a source of problems into a driver of solutions,' he said. 'But that only happens if the innovation is built on equity, sustainability and public good.' That kind of national ambition is on Mr. Peters' mind, too. He sees the land he bought around the farm – cleared and serviced but still empty – as the potential core of a light-industrial hub. Food processors, manufacturers and small-scale distributors could bring stable jobs to a community long dependent on seasonal work. With climate-controlled farming as the anchor, Mr. Peters said the model could be repeated in other parts of the country. But that would first require a manufacturing and skills base that could help build it. That's why he turned to Japan – a country with decades of experience in greenhouse engineering and closed-loop agriculture – to help design and equip his system. His staff was trained through a Japanese university and flew overseas to learn directly on site. 'We can't expect government to solve everything,' he said. 'Private business needs to step up. This is our country, too.' Mr. Peters was explaining the cost and time it took to meet strict food-safety regulations when the lights cut out and silence settled over the room. A moment later, it gave way to the sound of hurried footsteps – his daughter Rachelle, walkie-talkie to her ear, stepping in from the hallway. 'The power's out,' she said. Mr. Peters winced almost imperceptibly. 'That is the first time this has happened,' he said. But then the backup generator kicked in: a $400,000 expenditure required to avoid a total crop loss in moments just like this. 'If the power goes out for a day, you've got thousands and thousands of plants in trouble.' The outage turned out to be townwide – the first since the farm came online. But the generator did its job. And after 15 tense minutes, the lights returned. The building's full systems powered up. Ms. Peters returned, relieved. 'We're back,' she said. The lettuce would be fine. Mr. Peters knows a single farm won't change the country's food system. But he said it shows what's possible with investment. 'We could make a real difference. But we've got to stop looking for 20-per-cent returns before anyone's willing to invest,' he said. 'We need to build things that are good for Canada – things that last.'
Washington Post
13-05-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Small vertical farms pick up where Big Tech faltered
At a greenhouse in Mesa, Arizona, nine-foot towers of tomatoes and cucumbers and other assorted vegetables reach skyward, bathed in diffused natural light. 'We can grow 10 times the food using 90 to 98 percent less water,' True Garden founder Troy Albright says as he walks past rows of butter lettuce, basil and softball-size fennel bulbs grown in a vertical aeroponic environment that recirculates nutrient-filled water from a reservoir to seedlings above. In one month, his farm produces 15,000 pounds of leafy greens.
Fast Company
09-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
AeroFarms turned itself around after bankruptcy. Is it a sign that vertical farming can succeed?
After raising billions in funding, vertical farming companies have struggled. Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based startup backed by investors including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, filed for bankruptcy in March. Bowery, which was once valued at $2.3 billion, shut down last fall. Another startup, Fifth Season, shuttered its automated indoor farm in 2022. AeroFarms, a pioneer in the space, declared bankruptcy in 2023. The basic business model—growing crops like leafy greens indoors on tall vertical towers—hasn't proven that it can work. But AeroFarms, which raised an undisclosed amount of money after its bankruptcy and found a new CEO, has managed to turn itself around. The company has now been profitable for the last two quarters as it sells microgreens at retailers like Whole Foods and Costco. 'Despite the current skepticism, I think we've now demonstrated that vertical farming can be sustainable and profitable and deliver product at scale,' says Molly Montgomery, who became CEO of AeroFarms in September 2023. Before joining the company, Montgomery studied it at the request of investors who wanted to know if it could be a viable business. 'I was extremely skeptical about vertical farms because I had never seen a profitable business model yet,' says Montgomery. 'When they asked me, I was like, 'I'm not sure that a vertical farm can be profitable.'' Montgomery, who also serves as board director for NatureSweet, a leader in greenhouse-grown tomatoes, previously led Landec Corp., a company that contracted with outdoor growers throughout the U.S. and Mexico to make salad kits and other packaged vegetable products. But doing the due diligence on AeroFarms convinced her that it could actually succeed. She calculated that AeroFarms's technology could operate at the right production cost. And consumers liked the product, particularly its microgreens, tiny greens that are harvested when they're 4 days old. 'The missing ingredient was operational excellence,' she says. 'There wasn't enough experience in the company on how to run a vegetable production facility.' It was a tech company first, not a farming company. Montgomery's initial step was to focus: She shut down R&D facilities in New Jersey and Abu Dhabi, so all that was left was a 140,000-square-foot production facility in Virginia that had opened in 2022. Half of the staff was laid off. 'Everyone who was left was put on specific initiatives that I believed would enable us to get to farm profitability,' she says. She also hired employees with deep expertise in food production. The team went through several sprints on the basics, from food safety to training employees. Then it focused on operational issues like how to improve yield and how to maintain the robots that grow the crops. The company's automated system loads plants in the tall towers where they grow, monitors and harvests the crops, and packs up products for stores. (It runs 24/7 and has more than 2,000 spare parts, meaning that maintenance is a major task.) Montgomery also chose to focus on microgreens, which have better margins than traditional leafy greens. The company grows a variety of crops, from kale and cabbage to bok choy and spicy wasabi mustard. The young greens are more nutritious than fully grown versions of the same crops. It's not something that was ever readily available from traditional farms. When they're grown outside in soil (and often with pesticides), they have to be washed, which harms the dainty plants. 'As soon as you wash them, they begin to decay,' she says. 'So [they have] a very short shelf life. When you grow them aeroponically, we don't use any pesticides and we only spray the roots. So we do not need to wash them.' That means, she says, that AeroFarms's greens have a shelf life that lasts as long as 24 days. The company currently supplies around 70% of the retail market for microgreens, and is seeing demand for more. The company's tech may have some advantages compared to other approaches. It grows plants aeroponically, without soil and without submerging plants in standing water, so the whole system is lighter than some others, and more plants can be stacked vertically, making better use of floor space. Misting the roots with water and nutrients speeds up the plants' growth rate. Because the farms can be more productive than competitors, the company can use less energy per plant; energy is one of the biggest factors in the cost of running a vertical farm. If vertical farming can work, there could be clear benefits. Right now, most greens in the U.S. come from drought-prone regions like Arizona and California; vertical farms use 90% less water than growing outside. As climate change makes farming more difficult—especially because of extreme heat—indoor farming could theoretically help support the supply chain. And instead of shipping produce thousands of miles across the country, East Coast grocery stores could get more of it locally year-round. The industry is still nascent, and two profitable quarters aren't conclusive proof that vertical farming can succeed. Still, it's a sign of hope for a teetering field, and AeroFarms is once again planning for expansion.
BBC News
07-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Firm behind UK's biggest vertical farm goes bust
Firm behind UK's largest vertical farm goes bust The company behind the UK's biggest vertical farm has gone into administration and made 61 people redundant. The Jones Food Company ran indoor farms in Scunthorpe and Gloucestershire but has gone bust after failing to find new investors. Unless a new company takes over the running of its farms, they will close. A vertical farm can grow salad and herbs three times as fast as traditional outdoor agriculture thanks to special lights and a humid atmosphere. Grocery firm Ocado was a major shareholder in Jones Food but confirmed it did not want to grow its stake.
