Bionic hydroponic
You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve been thinking a lot about farming — specifically what it might look like in the future. This is largely due to the recent publication of my Bowery Farming TC-1. It’s a 12,000-word feature that really took me down the vertical-farming rabbit hole.
As I allude to in the piece, there are still plenty of question marks around the technology. At the top of the list are profitability and sustainability. And I fear that the former might come at the expense of the latter. What does seem certain, however, is that — if the category is going to survive and thrive — robotics and automation will need to play a major role.
“The automation and robotic component is a key part of [the] scalability equation, tied into the farm,”
Bowery CEO Irving Fain
I was, however, able to glimpse one of the robots at their Kearny, New Jersey location, which is deployed to move produce trays from place to place. That’s a key part of the BoweryOS system, which — among other things — determines the optimal growing position for a given crop. Automation is also used in the harvesting process, which is performed on-site in order to reduce the steps between the farm and consumer.
Robotics makes a lot of sense for these sorts of indoor farms. They’re much more well-regimented than their more-traditional counterparts. The Bowery location I visited, for instance, was erected in a building that formerly housed a fulfillment center. And in a sense, creating automation for one isn’t entirely dissimilar to for a warehouse. Conditions like lighting are easily controlled and, for the most part, the primary goal is getting a payload from point A to point B.
Iron Ox is probably the best example of a robotics company taking on indoor farming. In fact, the company is working on fully automated indoor growing solutions. But fundamentally transforming agtech is going to take more than just the indoor and vertical forms that only represent a sliver of the overall puzzle. Something I learned researching that piece. The average age of a farmer in Japan is 67. The average farmer in the U.S. is only about 10 years younger.
Add to that a crisis filling seasonal jobs and it becomes clear why so many companies think the answer to these problems is automation. That’s obviously a more complicated task, but there are a number of companies looking to tackle it, from startups like Burro to big conglomerates like John Deere, which has acquired a number of robotics firms.
Bionic hydroponic
