A New Look At How Vertical Farming Can Help Decouple Food From Nature

Consumer Tech A New Look At How Vertical Farming Can Help Decouple Food From Nature Jennifer Kite-Powell Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Nov 5, 2022, 04:11pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin One of NextFood’s instore farms sits in one of Denmark’s largest hamburger chains.

The store has . . .

[+] NextFood’s automatic in-store grow system in the restaurants. Crops are harvested after the consumer orders the sandwich. Nextfood Vertical farming enables an entirely new food supply chain from farm to fork and from order to delivery and invoice.

The global vertical farming market was valued at $3. 47 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $4. 16 billion in 2022 and grow to $20.

9 billing by 2029. According to Rasmus Bjerngaard, co-founder and CEO of NextFood , this new food supply chain is efficient and isolated – it’s decoupled from nature. “In other words, it does not extract natural resources; no soil depletion, small water usage, and no biosphere destruction or pollute nature; no water contamination and no pesticides.

” “When humanity was smaller, nature had the time to regenerate from our extraction and pollution,” said Bjerngaard. “Now that humanity has more than seven billion people and our agricultural methods have intensified, nature can no longer sustain us. ” Bjerngaard says there are two ways to address the problem of having enough space to grow food and preserve nature.

“Decoupling food and nature is about integrating food production with nature like real circular /regenerative food production,” said Bjerngaard. “The other approach is to decouple food production from nature which we are already starting to see like cow-less meat, precision fermentation, and indoor agriculture, which is what vertical farming achieves. ” “In each their way, these strategies place natural balance at the forefront, countering the current food system’s extraction and pollution of natural resources,” said Bjerngaard.

NextFood is a vertical farming startup in Denmark that builds the full technology stack for vertical farming systems at scale. MORE FOR YOU Why The Rock’s Social Media Muscle Made Him Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actor Saturday, November 5. Russia’s War On Ukraine: Daily News And Information From Ukraine Bill To Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent Now Stalled In Congress, Here’s Why Bjerngaard says the company provides the entire plant-based food supply chain in a box.

“Our software includes and automates the entire process from order through capacity planning, IoT and sensor-based climate control and monitoring,” said Bjerngaard. “This also includes AI vision to detect anomalies, data collection of thousands of daily data points, task management like delivery and invoicing. ” Bjerngaard says AI and automation are the keys to optimizing the main operational costs in vertical farming.

“It’s yield versus light consumption and yield versus labor usage. ” “Our hardware is agnostic, but we also make the hardware for climate control, sensors, water management, lights and robot seeding,” said Bjerngaard. “It is not difficult to make something grow, but it is challenging to make a system that produces high-quality crops robustly and at competitive production costs and CAPEX.

” “In-store grow systems like the ones we have at Sunset Boulevard’s restaurants in Copenhagen and at Restaurant Folk in the Copenhagen Zoo, are important pieces of the food supply chain,” said Bjerngaard. “But the larger scale farms like our KVH farm make the biggest impact to decoupling food and nature. ” Follow me on Twitter .

Jennifer Kite-Powell Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.