Yet while vertical farms have gained in popularity, they are also still very expensive. When compared to conventional farming, these farms necessitate the purchase of pricey equipment to aid human labor, a fact that, when paired with other economic pressures, has apparently led to an industry “littered with bankruptcies.”
One company hopes to change this dire picture. Enter Watney the robot. Watney was designed by start-up Seasony. The company, which was featured today at this year’s Alchemist Accelerator’s Demo Day, has sought to make the tech-farming trend more accessible by automating away some of the more difficult labor involved.
“By automating the production with robotics and remote monitoring, we can lower labor costs and offer solutions for food producers that is economically viable and environmentally sustainable,” the company claims on their website.
“We are doing for vertical farming what the integration of autonomous mobile robots did to amazon. We are able to decrease the costs of growing food in a vertical farm by alleviating the logistics pains of working from scissor lifts,” said Thomasen.
Thomasen, a mechanical engineer, and his two co-founders electrical engineer Servet Coskun and business specialist Erkan Tosti Taskiran, were inspired to create the business while brainstorming what it would take to sustain life in outer space (Watney the robot is named after Mark Watney, the astronaut in the movie The Martian, who, after being stranded on the Red Planet, fertilizes potatoes with his own poop to survive).