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"More than three billion dollars have been lost just in California [in 2017]Brandon Alexander, co-founder of Iron Ox Robotic Farms, co-founder of Iron Ox Robotic Farms, tells Engadget that there are not enough people to do the sowing or harvesting operations. The average age of the farmer is 58 years old. One of the big problems just to undermine agriculture, is that there is simply not enough manpower. The problem worsens every year. "
Vertical farming involves stacking the plants on top of one another to grow them in a closed, controlled environment. Among the first imaginations of these agricultural towers, one can see a passage from 1909 to New York, Delirious New York, touting "the skyscraper as a utopian device for the production of an unlimited number of virgin sites in a region metropolitan ".
In the years that followed, vertical agriculture in the United States became a robust, albeit auxiliary, element of the national agricultural system. According to a report published by Agrilyst in 2017, about half of all indoor farms use hydroponic plants, another quarter prefers soil and the others use a hybrid system of both. Interestingly, about half of the indoor growing facilities in the United States (43%) are located in urban areas. The five main types of crops currently grown on these farms are leafy vegetables, tomatoes, flowers, micro-greens and herbs (yes, these herbs).
These varieties are mostly grown vertically because they respond well to indoor crops. According to 2016 USDA data, US farmers can extract 805 cwt (quintals or 100 pounds) per acre using conventional methods. They can give 10.59 pounds per square foot using vertical crops. Likewise, romaine lettuce yields 0.69 pounds per square foot using conventional methods, but can produce a whopping 8.71 pounds per square foot in vertical hydroponics.
Since these cropping systems are conducted indoors, with high production density and low footprint requirements, they can be installed in locations that would be unsuitable for conventional operations, almost anywhere. This reduces the amount of shipping and handling you need to go from the "field" to the countertop of your kitchen, resulting in fresher, healthier fruits and vegetables.
Even here in the United States, with California's massive agricultural production, products travel an average of about 3,000 km before reaching the store shelves, according to Bain & Co, a management consulting firm, s & # With Bloomberg Businessweek in 2017. Overall, America imports more than a third of its products. With the shorter journey from farm to table, growers will have the opportunity to choose plant varieties that enhance taste and flavor at the expense of shelf life and longevity. In addition, indoor growing significantly reduces the prevalence of parasites and tightly controlled environmental factors reduce the amount of water and nutrients needed up to 90%.
Although indoor crops are extremely effective once they are operational, the initial installation costs for these operations are quite high. As such, it takes these companies time to achieve profitability – seven years on average according to the Agrilyst study. Indoor growing facilities also face high energy costs related to the need for additional lighting between 9 and 16 hours a day. Fortunately, recent advances in LED lighting technology have resulted in a steady decline in energy consumption.
However, the workforce is by far the largest cost for indoor growth, accounting for between 50 and 80 percent of a company's expenses, according to Agrilyst. A number of startups are tackling this problem through their intensive use of automation technologies.
One of these companies is Plenty Unlimited Inc., headquartered in San Francisco. Plenty operates a 50,000 square foot growing room that can produce up to 2 million pounds of fresh lettuce annually. The company is able to achieve that through its liberal use of 7,500 infrared cameras and 35,000 environmental sensors that measure everything from temperature and humidity to air quality and environmental levels. CO2. All this information is then passed on to the "brain" of Plenty's AI, which regularly modifies these variables to improve growth rates and taste, depending on the current plant growth cycle.
The company made its public debut at the Outside Lands 2018 festival in August, offering participants samples of its products for three days. Plenty also plans to launch a box subscription service later this year, which will allow residents of the Bay Area to receive shipments of merchandise from the company directly to their homes. Eventually, the company hopes to open farms of similar size on the outskirts of more than 500 major metropolitan areas of the world.
Iron Ox goes even further in this production model by replacing human work with robotics in almost every aspect of the growth cycle. "We have designed our entire growth process with a robotic approach," Alexander said in a press release. "It does not just mean adding a robot to an existing process, but engineering everything, including our own hydroponics system, around our robots." This includes harvesting, seeding and plant inspection.
"What we have found is that the two most important costs of the farmhouse covered are labor and electricity," Alexander continued. "Thanks to our new system, we can do a lot of repetitive tasks more efficiently, but in the future we will use elements such as greenhouses where we can use the sun, which provides energy. free."
The company's growing modules, for example, are large bins capable of holding up to 200 kg of nutrient-balanced fluids in which plants grow and form the heart of the company's hydroponic system.
"We have laser cut, designed our own packaging system for [the modules] Alexander, explained Alexander, and even the pots in which the plants grow. It is this injection molded plastic intended for human consumption that we have developed to be both user-friendly for robots and allow for beautiful root growth. "
But rather than expecting human crews to carry the modules around Iron Ox's 1,000 square foot greenhouse in San Carlos, California, the company has designed a 1,000-pound robot called Angus to perform the task. lifting heavy loads.
"Angus' job is to sail autonomously in our greenhouse," explained Alexander. "Find one of these hydroponics modules, pick it up and bring it to our treatment area whenever an operation needs to take place." The Angus movements are controlled by a cloud-based system called by Alexander, "the brain," which monitors and coordinates actions throughout the growth cycle, from planting to harvesting.
Alexander points out that the process is similar to the one used by Amazon in its warehouses, where fleets of Kiva robots search product shelves and retrieve them for the workers to pack and ship. "Instead of storage and Harry Potter books, we have these growing modules that grow lettuce, basil, etc." And instead of bringing books to human workers, Angus provides these huge farming modules to a robotic arm.
This arm is not a mannequin, notice. It is equipped with a 3D camera that immediately analyzes each module placed in front of him to confirm "the state of reality," according to Alexander. "He uses this information to calculate such things as, how can I recover this plant without hurting the neighboring plant? With plants, these are not iPhones, they are not rigid objects, and you do not so can not deduce that is going to be 100 percent uniform ".
The arm is most often used to collect and transplant plants in more and more spacious bins. Unfortunately, some steps still require human contact. Iron Ox employs teams of people to "harvest, sow and pack because it's impossible to do it without damaging the crop," Alexander said. However, with less than one acre of space, the company is able to produce 26,000 product heads (out of more than a dozen varieties) a year.
"We do not just want to be a high-priced product that we can only get at the most upscale restaurant," concluded Alexander. "At the end of the day, we want to be in the Midwest Costcos."
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