For a company less than one year old, Liberty Produce has already taken some big strides along its path to make vertical farming a more scalable, economically feasible reality. Specifically, the UK-based agtech company hopes to not just grow food, but also create an end-to-end, automated vertical farm system that, according to founder Zeina Chapman, “anybody” could use.
On vertical farming in the UK, Chapman notes there are “really great things happening . . . but they’re all siloed.” In other words, LED companies aren’t talking to those who make HVAC systems, and thus the development of these products happens independent of one another. As technologies by themselves, they work, but when put together in one environment, are they creating the most energy- and resource-efficient way to grow the best crop yield?
It’s a question Liberty will address with its new project, the Future Farming Hub. For the £1.3 million (~$1,652,000 USD) project, Liberty will lead a consortium of 11 different partners, each focusing on a different capability of the vertical farm. Chapman wouldn’t name specific names over the phone, but she did note there were partners in Taiwan, where vertical farming is a huge industry, a major LED company, as well as companies working on sensors, nutrient delivery (for the plants), and the growbeds themselves. For the latter, a partner will redesign growbeds to reduce the amount of bacterial growth that can sometimes hinder plant growth or damage plants. Sensor technology, meanwhile, would immediately tip the grower off to there being a bacterial problem in the growbed. Read more