Why the world needs an open software platform for vertical farming
Old-school protectionism is preventing the industry from living up to it’s full potential
Vertical farming is all the rage. Tech blogs are bursting of it, venture capital firms stuff shady startups with insane amounts of cash, technical breakthroughs are expressed on a daily basis. Vertical farming is the future, right?
A little background
Fact is: We live in an increasingly urban world. Urbanization is happening so fast that in the year 2050, more than 6 billion people will be living in cities (out of a total 10 billion, according to the FAO).
To date, cities produce little more than waste, and about none of the food they consume. They are heavily dependent on remote production facilities. And if there is snow in Spain, you can’t buy courgette in London. Brave new world.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I know it’s always better to grow food using sunlight and, by the way, I totally agree. But only, if soil and sunlight are available where your farm is supposed to be built. Anyway, we believe we’ll need urban farming as an addition to traditional farming methods, not as a substitute.)
But there is hope on the horizon:
…and it comes in a broad range of colors: hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, dryponics, and so on. Lots of technology potentially turning vast concrete into flowering urban farms. The technology is there, most of it has been used for decades, for example in Greenhouses in the Netherlands. So why is urban farming still in its infancy? Why is it so hard to get started with vertical farming?
To cut to the chase: the industry is missing a common denominator. It is missing a catalyst to speed up development. It is missing an open software platform for vertical farming.
At the moment, the market looks a lot like this, different eco-systems from different manufacturers. All of the proprietary, all of them isolated from each other:
What would you do?
If you were to start your own vertical farm today, what would you do? Which equipment would you buy? Which software would you choose?
Level of complexity
If you’re just starting out, vertical farming can be overwhelming. You need to know your plants, your hardware as well as your software. And don’t get me started on the business side, if you plan on selling the produce.
Each situation is individually challenging. It starts with the premises: does your space feature daylight? Is it on a roof, in the basement, maybe just a wall? And it goes on with the purpose: Do you plan to sell the produce or consume it on your own? Is it a farming community? A social project? A hobby? Your job?
Let’s do the research
Here’s what I would do, to begin with: sit in front of my laptop and start researching. Let’s assume I want to setup a vertical hydroponic farm. It should be in the basement of my office and me and a group of coworkers should be able to maintain it. None of us is a trained professional, but we’ve got the drive and we’re hungry to learn. What would I google?
vertical farming equipment
The conservative road
You could turn to established players originating from greenhouse farming, companies like Autogrow, Argus or Bluelab. They sell awesome products, highly sophisticated climate computers, dosing systems and sensors with all the bells and whistles. And best of all: they even provide you with their own software for it. Win-win, right? Nope. These devices are expensive, complicated and proprietary. You would be faced with high up-front costs and a level of complexity far too high for most people.
affordable vertical farming equipment
The startup lane
So, what else? You might look for cheaper solutions and find startups like motörleaf in Canada, ZipGrow in the US, Fibonacci in Russia or Keisue in China. Some of these startups offer highly innovative stuff, which might solve some of your problems, but chances are, you’d still be on your own, pretty much.
cheap vertical farming equipment
Feeling adventurous?
What about building your farm from scratch? There must be a ton of hardware around, why not combine it yourself? Good luck, mate, because from here on out, you’re on your own. You would need to figure everything out yourself. Find the hardware, figure out the wiring, write your own software for it and test it, test it, test it.
Wait a minute, didn’t you want to be a farmer? Why would you write your own software?
What has farming got to do with software, anyway?
Well, a lot of urban farming is done soil-less, because there is no soil, to begin with. No soil, no buffers, so you’re better off automating irrigation and nutrition.
But there are a lot of things beyond automation that software can do for farmers. It can help improve yields, prevent pests and inform decisions for farmers. Software can transfer knowledge, provide guidance and remove a lot of the guesswork.
One platform to rule them all
The vertical farming software market looks a lot like the mobile OS market in the early 2000s. There was Symbian, Windows Phone, BlackberryOS, PalmOS and many, many more. Then, 2007, Apple releases iOS and OHA releases Android in 2008. But at first, Android wasn’t such a success story. So, what turned it into one?
My brother had a Windows Phone. He really tried to like it and stuck with it for a very long time. But eventually, he got so fed up because of Apps either not available at all, or no longer available for his OS. Segmentation of operating systems started to restrict his feature set. So he said “screw it” and went with Apple first, Android later.
The same will happen to the vertical farming market.
Utopia
There will be a new software platform that was not developed by a single hardware manufacturer. There will be one marketplace accepted by the majority of users, because it has the most third party plugins. There will be an industry standard for both data exchange as well as plug-and-plant hardware integration.
Friends with benefits
This platform is used by farmers, software developers and hardware manufacturers. All of them benefit, in a number of ways:
Benefits for the farmer
In an ideal world, a farmer would take care of a plant. Directly, there might even be some touching involved! Just kidding, but you might get the point. In our case, there is a lot of technology involved. This technology might help, but it shouldn’t get in the way. So we need to automate as much as possible, while maintaining a reasonable amount of control for the farmer.
The farmer also benefits from data, generated by himself and other farmers. This farming data is used to improve yields, prevent diseases and inform decisions. What kind of data is this?
The software platform monitors all the conditions inside the farm. These conditions describe, what the plant needs to grow. Combine these local conditions with all the other farms worldwide, you get a pretty great idea of the ideal growing conditions for a given species of plant. And no worries: all data is transmitted anonymized, as the plant is of interest, not the farmer.
Benefits for the developer
Software developers are not farmers. Yet, their skills can help the farmer grow plants, big time. But to write their magic algorithms, these developers need actual farming data. The platform gives them instant access to just that data.
For example: Using sensor data about CO2-levels, temperature, humidity and light intensity, one might be able to predict certain plant diseases of tomatoes way earlier than any farmer could (grey mould, true story by BOSCH). It took them forever to gather the data necessary to write that algorithm and then they had to built their own hardware product around it, it’s called Plantect.
Of course, the developer can sell his or her algorithm in the plugin store. It might even be just a niche thing, like the tomato-algorithm above, but this niche might be worth a lot to a certain audience. Third party development is absolutely crucial for the success of a platform, as stated above in the Android-analogy, so API-access needs to work like a charm.
Benefits for the hardware manufacturer
There’s a plethora of different hardware being made: components, devices, consumer products and even whole farms. But all of them would benefit from a mutual data exchange standard. We call it FDEX — Farming Data Exchange Standard. It defines how information is exchanged between components and systems (think HTML for the web, pretty much the same idea).
The more connected hardware gets, the more functionality is defined on a software-level. To make sure hardware “just works” is harder than before: Let’s assume an LED light was able to shift it’s spectrum according to plant growth. You would need software to drive that shift and it only makes sense to control it in conjunction with other hardware or the farmer’s input.
We imagine a world where every piece of hardware introduces itself, tells the system what capabilities it has and how it wants to be addressed. A temperature sensor, for example, might say: “Hi, I’m a sensor, I measure the temperature of ambient air and I’ll tell you the temperature in degree Fahrenheit. Please don’t talk to me, I can only talk, I won’t listen.”.
This platform, by the way, is called farmee. Nice to meet you.
