Taiwan is uniquely placed to benefit from the application of information technology to agriculture, enabling it to help provide food for an expanding global population.
After becoming a world leader in semiconductors and other electronic products, Taiwan is now looking to smart agriculture as its next vine to climb. The island aims to supply much of the world’s fruit and vegetables within the next 30 years.
This might seem rather unlikely until you consider that the future of farming is not land and labor but factories and robots. Furthermore, Taiwan already possesses in abundance the tools that tomorrow’s smart farmers will use, including solar and advanced light technology, chemicals, gene editing, drones, smart sensors, software, algorithms, data mining, and big data.
Many of these technologies are being put to use in a glittering new 14-story vertical farm at Copenhagen Markets in Denmark’s capital. The first phase of construction of the 7,000-square-meter facility finished in early December. It is one of Europe’s biggest and most efficient vertical farms and was built using a blueprint of patented technologies from Taiwan’s YesHealth Group.
The result of a partnership between YesHealth and Danish agritech startup Nordic Harvest, the farm looks like a fancy warehouse from the outside. The interior is fitted with rows upon rows and columns upon columns of trays containing leafy greens, growing under an intense battery of more than 20,000 smart LED lights. The plants are tended by engineers in lab coats and guided by software that processes over 5,000 individual data points to optimize plant health.