Today's Edition
Jessi Amason (DUBAI)
In an era where farmers face the unprecedented challenge of unpredictable weather patterns and an increasing demand for food commensurate with the growing global population, innovative technological approaches to agriculture have stepped in to fill some of the gaps.
“Over the course of the next 30 years, more food needs to be grown by farmers that have been grown in the history of time,” said Andrew Lloyd, Deputy CEO and COO of agricultural technology company Intelligent Growth Solutions during his address at a panel held on the sidelines of COP28.
Growth Tower Features
In statements to Aletihad, Lloyd detailed some of the finer points of IGS’s fully automated vertical farming product.
Termed “Growth Towers”, the technology can grow any plant, anywhere in the world, under precisely controlled climactic conditions through each tower’s microclimate. “We believe that for vertical farming to truly make an impact on global food security, it has to be done at scale. Our systems have been designed to ensure that each vertical farming tower is independent from its neighbour, serving both to enhance biosecurity and to enable customers to operate and expand their operations simultaneously.
“Many components utilise off-the-shelf innovation from different industries, taking proven components and applying them into a farm environment. This increases the reliability of the technology, while adding almost no technical risk,” Lloyd said.
The innovative Growth Towers use “Growth Trays with Lights” as the primary growing platform, which serve not only as growing lights, but as a transport mechanism, hydroponics tray, and ventilation system.
“The system has been designed to minimise environmental impact, embedding circular economic principles and ensuring materials are sustainably sourced. Wherever possible, raw materials are from recycled sources. Parts can be easily replaced for customers across the globe as they come from commercial industries,” Lloyd said.
For example, the towers utilise a lift mechanism, which also moves trays, delivers water and nutrients, and inspects growth. The Towers use a central lift mechanism to move the trays, deliver water and nutrients through irrigation, and monitor plant growth through time-lapse photography in order to predict and monitor crop health, leading to less waste.
“Over recent years, instances of climate change-related extreme weather events have become increasingly more common, leaving growers vulnerable as their crops fail or are ruined prior to harvest. Our systems are designed to deliver consistency to farmers, removing their reliance on weather and putting the control firmly into their hands,” the COO noted.
IoT Enablement
The towers also make optimal use of machine automation, which calculates the perfect level of nutrition and water requirements for each plant, monitors growth, and conserves natural resources to the fullest extent possible.
“Simple operation is at the heart of IGS’ design. Industrial IoT-enablement allows automated system control and management via a web-based app. This removes humans from the growing environment, which is accessed via an airlock, making IGS systems highly resilient to invasion by pests and disease,” Lloyd said.
Nutrients and water are fed to the plants though “ebb and flood” hydroponics inside the trays, after which the dissolved solution is recycled back into the irrigation system of the entire tower, minimising water consumption and loss.
“Our system uses software ‘recipes’ to deliver the ideal conditions to a crop, and this is replicated wherever in the world that crop happens to be growing. This means high quality, fresh and nutritious produce with a guaranteed yield, allowing growers to make commitments to retailers and the end consumer. Produce can also be grown closer to the consumer, reducing reliance on global supply chains and helping to firm up food security for regions heavily reliant on imported goods,” Lloyd added.
Ventilated LED light strips on each tray provide illumination, mimicing the optimal level of sunlight for each crop. This feature allows different crops to be grown within the same unit, and maintains an optimal humidity level for plant growth.
The most innovative benefit of the towers are their CO₂ enhancement feature, which, coupled with the trays, means that plant yields are significantly larger and of higher quality, with crop yields occurring an average of 30%-50% faster than in traditional farming.
“The amount of CO2 delivered to our towers is adjusted in real time and is tailored to the needs of the plants. This means we can deliver the right quantity at each growth stage and for the specific trait we’re aiming to encourage,” Lloyd noted.
“Our systems operate using a closed-loop HVAC system, meaning that there is no CO2 vented into the atmosphere. The only CO2 leaving our farms in that contained within the plants. We encourage our customers to source CO2 using sustainable methods and supply chains, such as utilising waste CO2 from industrial process or using direct air capture technology to take CO2 from the external environment,” he added.
Energy Saving
In their mission to further global agricultural sustainability, the Growth Towers are also able to be powered from renewable, clean energy sources.
“As supplier of vertical faming technology rather than commercial growers, we always work closely with all our customers to identify the most sustainable sources of power for their operations. In the UAE, solar is a natural choice for many of our customers, while in other regions, wind or tidal energy sources might be better suited,” Lloyd shared.
“Our system has been designed to be the perfect consumer of every kWh of electricity to ensure we’re maximising efficiencies. This includes using low voltage three-phase power and only delivering the spectrum of light crops require at each phase of their growth cycle,” he added.
Work in the UAEIGS has partnered with the UAE as part of its Mangrove Initiative, which commits to growing and planting 100 million mangroves by 2030. During the panel session, Lloyd remarked that “there really is no way to do that in the wild at scale. If you want to do it at scale, you’re going to need to bring these things indoors. When you bring them indoors and give them perfect weather, they will grow three or four times faster than in the wild.”
Lloyd also remarked that despite the visually striking advanced technology of the Growth Towers, UAE farmers can find themselves right at home in the Growth Towers. “When you walk into one of our farms – whether it’s the demo site we’ve set up here in Dubai with our local partners for COP28, or our Crop Research Centre in Scotland – what always strikes me is how familiar the environment feels,” Lloyd told Aletihad.
Dubai GigaFarm Project
At COP28 on Wednesday, the company revealed that it was selected to be the vertical farming partner in a 900,000 square-foot “GigaFarm” project, announced in a major agreement signed between UAE-government-led initiative “Food Tech Valley” and ReFarmTM, a group of companies using technologies to develop decarbonised food security projects.
According to IGS CEO David Farquhar, the vertical farming towers will host a growing area of 87,000 square metres. The GigaFarm will be capable of recycling more than 50,000 tonnes of food waste and growing 2 billion plants each year.
Through the use of technology like IGS’s Growth Towers, the GigaFarm is capable of growing more than 3 million kilogrammes of produce annually, and will be able to replace 1% of the country’s fresh produce imports. The project is set to start construction in mid-2024 at Dubai’s Food Tech Valley, and is expected to be fully operational by 2026.
