“Imagine a 1,500-acre farm. Now, imagine that fitting inside your favorite grocery store, growing up to 350x more. That’s efficient,” Plenty wrote on its website. Co-founder Nate Storey, in an interview with Forbes, said.
One of the oldest and most fundamental professions in the world is agriculture and farming and looking back, humanity has come a long way over the millennia in how we farm and grow crops with the evolution of various technologies. Over time, as the world population continues to grow and land becomes more scarce, people have realized the need to get creative and become more efficient in farming.
This also means using less land to produce more crops and increasing the productivity and yield of those farmed acres. Worldwide, agriculture is a US$5 trillion industry, and now the industry is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technologies to help yield healthier crops, control pests, monitor soil and growing conditions, organize data for farmers, help with the workload, and improve a wide range of agriculture-related tasks in the entire food supply chain.
In fact, we have reached a stage where robots and AI are starting to contribute more, at a faster clip to the agricultural landscape than anyone saw coming. More recently, promising vertical farming startups like Plenty AI have become known for pushing the boundaries of farming towards the sky, literally and figuratively.
San Francisco-based Plenty AI’s vertical farm produces 400 times more food per acre than a flat farm. The beauty of vertical farms is that they can be placed anywhere indoors, making them crucial in a time where farmable land is on the decline.
Read more at Techwire Asia (D. Kaur)