'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.

Comments

Grocery Store Employees

[slk]

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.

Re: Grocery Store Employees

[gerf]

Don't you realize how filthy aquatic farms are? I don't want one within 100m of my food.

Re: Grocery Store Employees

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Grocery Store Employees

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2017 and we still have these hate-filled xenophobic mysoginistic posts. Not funny. For shame.

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It's 2017 and we still have these humorless SJW twerps who have no ability to discern a joke ^

Re: Grocery Store Employees

[Gay Boner Sex]

ShanghaiBill,

Perhaps you have only been to large cities like Shanghai. Where I grew up in the greater NYC area, there was abandoned ghetto not too far from the densest population centers. If you knew a little better, many cities have skyscrapers in a small section and then single story housing/buildings surrounding as far as the eye can see. Many hydroponic crops grow much faster. 2x and sometimes 10x speed-ups can be accomplished, no problem. Leafy greens taking longer than a month? Big problem with how you're doing it. And the fertilizers going into the sewers, well, that was solved a long time ago. Do your homework, brother. It's a great industry to be in and by from. :)

--GBS

Re: Grocery Store Employees

[Rei]

Have to side with you, despite your username (although your notion of 2-10x "speedups" from hydroponics is... let's just say "optimistic" to be nice - and yes, I have plenty of experience with both hydroponics and growing crops under lights, and no, not that kind of crop ;) ). Lettuce and herbs don't take three months to grow; it's crops like grains and tomatoes that take that long. And for most of their life they're far smaller than their final size. Even if that wasn't the case, the GP's logic makes no sense. Are they seriously proposing to house a family in the amount of space that is taken up by a box of hydroponic lettuce?

For realistic numbers for herbs or greens - say, a 2,5m high unit taking up 2m of floor space with 8x 30cm-high rows, 1 month from planting to harvest, minimum growth media space of 8cm, maximum mature plant space of 50cm, average of say 20cm - and a wasted space fraction of say 20% - you get 80 plants (representing a couple cubic meters of total volume) per month, 2-3 mature plants per day. Filling up an entire tiny apartment's worth of space (say, 30 square meters) would yield 15 times that much.

If you want to talk crops that can actually take a few months from seed to harvest, tomatoes might be an example (and IMHO probably aren't a good idea, as they're more of an energy-intensive crop than herbs and greens - although not as bad as caloric crops like grains, tubers, etc). But in that case, while it may be 90 days to harvest, that's only 90 days to the start of harvesting. A tomato plant, kept properly, can stay productive for years - continuously. Of course, when you're talking long-lifespan continuous producers, having some sort of automated "farm" becomes less meaningful, all you really need is a proper grow tent setup.

I live in a place where hydroponics is a big thing (Iceland). And in the winter, it's almost entirely done under lights. But they don't do it in grocery stores in vertical farms, it's done under glass. The lettuce and herbs, for example, are planted in an automated system in little cheap plastic mini-pots filled with some sort of growth medium (peat?), and for "harvest" they just take the whole pot and put it in an open-ended plastic bag and ship it to stores. While I can't imagine a cheapo chain like Bónus changing that system, I could imagine a high-end one like Hagkaup having their own "in-store" growth system as a loss-leader. Or, for a US equivalent, something like Whole Foods.

Re: Grocery Store Employees

[Rei]

Well... as a general rule with hydroponics, most aren't really closed systems. You mix up a batch of concentrate, and from that mix up your initial solution. You then monitor solution level, EC and pH daily. Water is added to maintain solution level, concentrate is added to maintain EC, and acidic or basic nutrients (such as nitric acid or potassium hydroxide) are added to control pH. After a month to a couple months, the balance of individual nutrients in the solution is considered to be too out of whack to use, you drain it, and start over.

Note that if you want a fully closed-loop system, it's not an answer to measure the concentration of each nutrient individually in the solution (a much more difficult task than EC measurement) and add them each individually. Because the goal isn't to maintain nutrient levels in the solution at a constant amount, it's to maintain uptake levels in the plants at a proper amount. If you want that, you need to take periodic plant tissue samples and measure the nutrient concentrations in the plants, and adjust the solution based on whether they're too high or low. As a general rule, this only applies to macronutrients; you usually don't have to be too cautious with micronutrients. You just deliver them in rough proportion to the macronutrients and you're good.

For an "in-store farm", I'd almost certainly expect it to be based around periodic solution flushes. It's much simpler. That said, even when dumping your nutrient solution at regular intervals, the wastage is far lower than with conventional farming.

BTW, one of the nice things about hydroponics is that it makes biofortification easier. For example, plants don't need iodine - it's actually somewhat harmful to them. But while in small quantities in the solution it makes no difference to their growth rate, they incorporate significant amounts of it into their biomass, transforming foods that are traditionally iodine-devoid into valuable dietary sources of iodine. Growing under lights also lets you have some interesting effects. While controlling frequencies in the visible spectrum affects plant growth factors (for example, triggering early blossoming or delaying it for more leaf growth), the really neat stuff comes from UV; UV exposure causes plants to produce various "sunscreen" compounds (akin to how we tan with increased melanin production). This affects their colour, flavour, and nutrient composition. Even non-plants can benefit from this; mushrooms do not require light, but when exposed to UV during growth, many mushrooms change from being almost devoid in vitamin D to crazy-rich in it.

Abuse of the term, "farm"

[TWX]

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.

What could possibly go wrong?

[quonset]

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.

"infinitely expandable scale"

[Oligonicella]

I certainly hope the people who are actually trying to implement this understand math better than the summary writer.

Re:I have a startup

[DontBeAMoran]

No. It's Windows-based since it requires a backdoor.

Don't know if it will be successful

[CanadianMacFan]

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.