Free Republic

When the Unatego School District Board of Education voted to close the Otego Elementary School in February 2017, a committee formed to decide the fate of the building. In a 4-2 vote on Monday, Aug. 6, the board accepted an innovative farming proposal. AgZeit LLC has high hopes. The proposal bills the collaborative project as “a new way of doing business that will economically revitalize Otsego County and the Mohawk Valley Region and help New York State once again become the breadbasket for the entire northeast.” The Mohawk Valley Regional Economic Development Council prioritized agribusiness initiatives in its 2017 Progress...

The vegetables and fruits grown inside a Burlington, New Jersey greenhouse look completely ordinary. But Solomon Fried's crops are different. He goes to extreme lengths to make sure they are free of bugs. "You're always looking for insects, I would imagine? Yes, that's a 24-hour thing. They never sleep, so we have to be alert," Fried said. Fried is obsessed with bugs because his produce is sold in Brooklyn's ultra-orthodox community, and insects are not kosher. Jews who strictly observe religious dietary rules do not even want to eat them accidentally. "The problem is there are many insects that lodge...

By now, the images of shelves full of perfect greens in hulking warehouses, stacked floor to ceiling in sterile environs and illuminated by high-powered LED lights, have become familiar. Food futurists and industry leaders say these high-tech vertical farming operations are the future of agriculture — able to operate anywhere, virtually invincible against pests, pathogens, and poor weather, and producing local, fresh, high-quality, lower-carbon food year-round. That future seemed one step closer to reality last year when San Francisco-based indoor farming startup Plenty, which grows a variety of salad and leafy greens hydroponically (without soil) and uses artificial lighting in...

A new way to farm indoors using different wavelengths of light could boost the taste of fruits, salads and herbs, while also increasing food supply and nutritional value. Growing food inside brings many benefits to farmers by reducing the amount of land, fertilisers, energy and water needed to cultivate the plants. But it can come with a major drawback – produce grown indoors sometimes lacks the depth of flavour it would have if it was allowed to flourish and ripen outside. And it is the controlled environment of indoor farming itself that seems to be at least partly responsible. "A...

A British company says it can greatly extend the range of crops grown in indoor growing formats beyond the established leafy greens and herbs. Discussions on the potential of urban and indoor farming invariably mention the need to feed a growing global population, forecast to reach 10 billion by the middle of the century, against a backdrop of climate change and depleted land and other resources. But so far, for technical and economic reasons, the movement has largely targeted leafy greens and herbs — relatively high-value but low-mass, low-calorie crops. Indeed, one successful London grower specialises in "micro-salads" sought by...

•Bowery Farming is using robotics and software to raise crops in warehouses outside of big cities. •Jose Andres, Carla Hall and David Barber are among the star chefs who have invested in Bowery's indoor farming venture. •The U.N. projects that by 2050, food production will need to increase by about 60 percent to feed the growing global population....

If we built farms in space, they'd look nothing like the vast wheat fields of Kansas. But they just might look something like urban farms being used today—modular closed-loop hydroponic farms, actually. These compact, efficient grow houses could be the life-giving answer to keeping astronauts fed, a solution The Martian's Mark Watney could only dream of. The idea is less science fiction than you might think, too. Freight Farms, based in Boston, is trying to revolutionize the global food system with its Leafy Green Machines. These shipping containers filled with racks of planted crops, grow lights, and environmental control systems...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently announced Clearwater Organic Farms LLC, the nation’s largest hydroponic commercial greenhouse, will locate its operations in Monroe County. The company will build a 15 acre, 650,000 square foot facility at Eastman Business Park. It will produce locally grown, organic baby leaf greens year-round. The project will create 137 new full-time jobs in packaging, shipping, receiving and warehousing; 55 of those jobs are reserved for veterans or those who are underemployed. “The new Clearwater Organic Farms facility will drive innovation, create jobs for New Yorkers who need them most and bolster economic growth throughout the region,” Cuomo...

<p>On a rooftop in the Jewish-Arab Tel Aviv neighborhood of Jaffa, a former military technologist and an ex-journalist sit in a transparent bio-dome where their robot is busy learning how to grow food.</p> <p>Flux IoT’s Eddy, a robot measuring less than a foot tall and resembling a life buoy, is built with military-grade sensors and armed with image-processing technology.</p>

Indoor farming is a popular subject in the media, and a booming industry with new farmers joining the game every day. In fact, there are growing conferences held solely for indoor farmers, their suppliers, influencers, and resources. But many are still left with questions about the indoor farm. •Just what makes an indoor farm an indoor farm? •What makes indoor farming so popular? •What potential does indoor farming really have in the future? •How will I interact with indoor farms? Dr. Nate has an overview for you. What is indoor farming all about?(VIDEO-AT-LINK) What is indoor farming? Indoor farms take...

According to ganjapreneur Rick Byrd, the future of farming is tall, dirtless and local. Byrd’s vision of skyscraper farms to feed city dwellers begins with a much different kind of crop: marijuana. The 45-year-old is chief executive officer and founder of Pure Agrobusiness Inc., a company that sells equipment to grow legal cannabis, a market worth $6 billion in 2016 and expected to reach $50 billion by 2026, according to Cowen & Co. Because cannabis has higher profit margins than food, and pot is mostly grown inside, Byrd said he hopes the innovations perfected by PureAgro, with the help of...

For Randy King, the argument for indoor farming in Canada is just common sense. For one, Canada is a northern country with long winters. Two, during those long winters almost all fruit and vegetables in Canadian grocery stores are imported from Central America, Mexico or California. Three, wouldn’t it be better if Canadians grew their own fruits and veggies? “I think this is the way of the future for growing produce in northern regions,” said King, co-owner of West Grow Farms, a company with plans to build an indoor farm near Edmonton. “In order to gain food sovereignty, we need...

Consider it a wake-up call from nature. Asian crops were devastated by a severe drought this year, highlighting the urgent need to stabilise farm output and brace for the consequences of climate change. And with the region's population projected to continue growing over the long term, this is no easy task. The good news is that answers are starting to emerge. Agribusinesses are harnessing information technology. Organic farms and so-called plant factories are becoming hothouses for innovation. International investors are keen to water the seeds. This week, we head out into the fields — and some cutting-edge facilities — to...

FARMING will need to shift towards indoor vertical farms and precision techniques that could make use of drones. Just as important will be the planting of drought-resistant crops and even printing meat to secure food production globally. This is according to Ernst Janovsky, senior agricultural economist at Absa, who emphasised that technology will need to be incorporated into farming practices in order to keep up with costs and supply. Speaking at an Absa Agribusiness roundtable in Centurion on Tuesday, Janovsky said population growth would create more demand for food, water and land. By 2050, the global population is expected to...

The Association for Vertical Farming aims to create the first sustainability standard for towering indoor food systems From shipping containers-turned-micro farms to fruit-picking robots, the wide world of agriculture techis attracting attention and investor dollars as increasingly urgent concerns about food scarcity come into focus. Amid a wave of in-field technology, food data analytics and experimental urban agriculture, the particularly futuristic field of vertical farming is attracting entrants including industrial incumbents such as Fujitsu and upstarts such as AeroFarms, City Farm and Green Sense. As ag tech blooms, attracting a total $4.6 billion in investment during 2015, the nonprofit Association...

In an old warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, that once housed the state's biggest indoor paint ball arena, leafy green plants such as kale, arugula and watercress sprout from tall metal towers under bright lights. A local company named AeroFarms has built what it says is the world's largest indoor vertical farm, without the use of soil or sunlight. Its ambitious goal is to grow high-yielding crops via economical methods to provide locally sourced food to the community, protect the environment and ultimately even combat hunger worldwide. "We use about 95 percent less water to grow the plants, about 50...

The two events had nothing to do with one another, and yet they are inextricably linked. I am an inveterate coupon clipper and in the latest mailer from BJ's Wholesale Club (my big box savings store of choice) I noticed an eye-popping deal on LEDs--8 60 watt-equivalent bulbs from Sylvania for $19.99, or roughly $2.50 apiece. The next day, GE announced that it planned to stop manufacturing compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and focus instead on LEDs. The market never really took to CFLs, for understandable reasons noted in my household as well: Most of them could not be used with...

Indoor agriculture has definitely put down roots in the United States. Vegetable Growers News in 2015 cited a white paper released at the third annual Indoor Ag-Con that outlined 15 existing commercial-scale rooftop greenhouses and vertical farms in the U.S. Authors of the report, titled Indoor Crop Production: Feeding the Future, conceded that indoor farming will never replace conventional outdoor agriculture. "It will instead augment the food chain to create a diverse, distributed system more resilient to supply shocks and better prepared to meet the demands of a global population." Indoor agriculture typically entails growing produce with hydroponic and aeroponic...

Transcend Lighting, one of the more unconventional startups accepted into Y Combinator’s latest cohort, is launching out of beta today to bring its energy-saving LED lights to indoor farmers everywhere. Founder Brian Bennett, an optical engineer by training, invented the first Transcend prototype after his father challenged him to build some LED lights for the family farm in upstate New York. When the lights he designed were successful, Bennett entered a business plan competition at Columbia, won some money to continue developing the idea, and was accepted into Y Combinator’s Spring 2015 class. “Farms today, generally speaking, use high pressure...

When it comes to farming, there is no better time than now to get into the field. Thanks to technological advances ushered in by the green movement, farming has evolved from a traditional means to sustain a personal living to a science with the potential to feed millions. The Inquisitr previously reported on how technology-assisted farming has become a blessing to others. Former NFL football player, Jason Brown, watched DIY videos on Youtube to learn how to grow 46,000 pounds of sweet potatoes and 10,000 pounds of cucumbers, which he donated to pantries and kitchens. In Irvine, California, an entire...