Edinburgh agritech business wins 'Agtech Breakthrough award'

AgTech Breakthrough, a market intelligence organization, today announced Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), the Edinburgh-headquartered agritech business, has been selected as winner of the “Vertical Farming Solution of the Year” award in the 2021 AgTech Breakthrough Awards program.

IGS delivers vertical farming technology that is designed to improve crop productivity – including yield, quality, and consistency – as well as driving down the cost of power and labor. 

“As the global population continues to grow, food production on a local level will be vital to supporting complex global supply chains. With our solution, operators are able to produce and deliver a fully automated vertical farm that uses up to 50% less power, 80% less labor, and 96% less water than traditional methods,” said David Farquhar, CEO of IGS.

“We are truly honored by this incredible accolade from AgTech Breakthrough. Especially as a relatively small company from Scotland, being among our global peers is a testament to the ingenuity and forward-thinking approach of our whole team. We will continue to go above and beyond into the future.”

Growth Trays solution
The solution’s Growth Trays with Lights (GTLs) allow for two to three times greater yields compared to a glasshouse environment. The systems are modular with pairs of towers so that a client can start out small and add modules as needed, making it highly scalable versus competitors. The IGS solution can also grow multiple crops within a tower by modulating the growing environment for each Growth Tray versus others which typically enable only mono-crops within a vertical farm.

IGS also leverages off-the-shelf hardware and technologies to drive down development costs of establishing a vertical farm, through to optimizing operations for significant ROI within 4-6 years on average.

“One of the biggest challenges our society is facing is growing food and feeding the world in a more sustainable way. Agtech is an exciting sector and vertical farming technology has a key role to play in developing solutions to this challenge while working in partnership with traditional farmers,” said Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director of AgTech Breakthrough Awards. “IGS is an innovative and forward-thinking company whose commitment to the future is making an impact in supporting globally sustainable food supply chains. Congratulations on being our choice for 'Vertical Farming Solution of the Year.'”

The mission of the annual AgTech Breakthrough Awards program is to conduct the industry’s most comprehensive analysis and evaluation of agricultural and food technology categories, including Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agricultural technologies, farm management, indoor farming, food quality, data analytics and many more. This year's program attracted more than 1,500 nominations from over 15 different countries throughout the world.