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'Infarm' Startup Wants To Put a Farm In Every Grocery Store (techcrunch.com)
Infarm, a 40-plus person startup based in Berlin, imagines a future where every grocery store has its own farm packed with herbs, vegetables and fruit. "The plants themselves are being monitored by multiple sensors and fed by an internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system," reports TechCrunch. "Growing out from the center, the basil is at ascending stages of its life, with the most outer positioned ready for you, the customer, to harvest." From the report: The concept might not be entirely new -- Japan has been an early pioneer in vertical farming, where the lack of space for farming and very high demand from a large population has encouraged innovation -- but what potentially sets Infarm apart, including from other startups, is the modular approach and go-to-market strategy it is taking. This means that the company can do vertical farming on a small but infinitely expandable scale, and is seeing Infarm place farms not in offsite warehouses but in customer-facing city locations, such as grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls, and schools, enabling the end-customer to actually pick the produce themselves. In contrast, the Infarm system is chemical pesticide-free and can prioritize food grown for taste, color and nutritional value rather than shelf life or its ability to sustain mass production. Its indoor nature means it isn't restricted to seasonality either and by completely eliminating the distance between farmer and consumer, food doesn't get much fresher. When a new type of herb or plant is introduced, Infarm's plant experts and engineers create a recipe or algorithm for the produce type, factoring in nutrition, humidity, temperature, light intensity and spectrum, which is different from system to system depending on what is grown. The resulting combination of IoT, Big Data and cloud analytics is akin to "Farming-as-a-Service," whilst , space permitting, Infarm's modular approach affords the ability to keep adding more farming capacity in a not entirely dissimilar way to how cloud computing can be ramped up at the push of a button.
The employees at my local grocery store are mostly incapable not damaging packaged goods, and do not appear to possess sufficient brainpower or attention to detail to not stick a gallon of milk on top of a bunch of bananas. The chance of them successfully operating a vertical farm is somewhere between epsilon and zero.
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I wish that the term farm would stop being applied to what amount to gardens. A garden has to get pretty damn big and have a pretty big yield before the scale of farm as a term really applies.
I guess part of my distaste for the abuse of the term stems from smug, self-important people referring to their urban gardening experiments as farms. Great, you've got some plants growing and producing fruit and vegetables. Is the yield even enough to feed your household for a season? If it's not even adequate for subsistence then it may be difficult to call a farm.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
fed by an internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system
Ah yes, the allure of everything internet. As we've seen with the rock-solid security built into IoT, what could possibly go wrong? All that matters is it's on the internet.