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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.
There are tons of problems with the "vertical farm" concept. The economics of it make no sense at all. If you grow food in the city, and it takes 3 months to go from seed to harvest, you save shipping one box of produce into the city from the countryside. However, if you use that same space to house one family, you could have avoided 65 round-trip commutes from the suburbs. Meanwhile you are growing crops under electric lights rather than sunlight, and dumping agricultural waste into the sewer rather than recycling it into the soil. Using expensive urban real estate for "farming" is insane.
I have my doubts about this. The supermarket will be giving up a lot of floor space for just one or two items. I have a small hydroponic unit in my kitchen and I use it for lettuce instead of herbs. But when I start lettuce it takes three to four weeks for me to be able to pick leaves off. Even if the company has been able to shave that down to a couple of weeks that's a lot of trays of herbs sitting there not earning money for the store while a few trays are. I'm sure that the store would rather have the space devoted to something else that would be earring money.
Then the store will have to pay for extra electricity (lights and heating) and water. There will be extra staff time to take care of the unit and help people to have problems getting the produce themselves.
The company could have put in a unique refrigerator containing their picked herbs and opened a facility in each city (or offered the stores one in a region). I don't expect to see one of these "farm" in a store that I go to.