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Vertical Farming Company Bowery Is Reimagining the Fresh Food Supply Chain

Consumers are coming face-to-face with one of the climate’s most significant impact on the environment – the food we eat. More frequent extreme weather events are disrupting agricultural production. Crop yields are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, droughts, floods, and pests, leading to reduced harvests and lower food availability, ultimately affecting the entire supply chain.

One solution to the growing uncertainties of food security is vertical farming. Through advancements in technology, robotics, and AI, we have the ability to develop, grow, and harvest crops vertically in warehouses.

I recently spoke with Irving Fain, the Founder and CEO of Bowery, the largest vertical farming company in the USA, about his journey into vertical farming and the innovative strategies his company employs to tackle food security challenges. Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation, where Irving shares insights into Bowery’s mission, the benefits of vertical farming, and the future of agriculture.

Christopher Marquis: Let’s start at the beginning, what was your inspiration for founding Bowery and in general your inspiration for pursuing vertical farming?

Irving Fain, the Founder and CEO of Bowery

Bowery

Irving Fain: I’m from a family of entrepreneurs. From a young age, I witnessed the excitement of building and creating and felt a strong connection to that path. From eight years old, I constantly was getting involved in side hustles and my own entrepreneurial endeavors; some were more successful than others. I started my post-grad career in investment banking and raising capital for late-stage companies – the type of companies I eventually wanted to start. I wanted to build something that addressed a complex societal challenge, but I hadn’t quite put my finger on what that “something” could be until I founded Bowery.

My first real exposure to the power of digital transformation started during my time at Clear Channel, where I was part of a small team helping an old-school radio company move into the digital age. While there, my team and I pushed the company to embrace the shift to mobile with the launch of the iHeartRadio app – a product I helped build and run. From there, I founded my first company, CrowdTwist, a loyalty and analytics SaaS provider for large brands like PepsiCo and Nestlé. There is nothing like actually building and running a company to teach you how hard and difficult the journey truly is. I never would have been able to build Bowery without this experience. We were fortunate to sell the company to Oracle in a great outcome for everyone.

Before founding Bowery, as I was thinking about what was next, I started exploring some of the most pressing and difficult problems facing the world today. I spent time on waste, recycling, plastics, and of course, the world of agriculture immediately attracted my attention. Agriculture is arguably the oldest and largest industry in the world, yet compared to other industries, it has had less focus on digitization. Transforming our agriculture and food system to work for the new climate realities we face today (and the ones that are coming tomorrow) felt like an urgent challenge. The more time I spent in this broader area, the more excited I got. While I started looking at the broader agricultural system, I was particularly interested in how to help rebuild the fresh food supply chain to be more sustainable and efficient. On top of the climate challenges, over the next 30 years, 70-80% of the world’s population is going to be living in and around cities. We must rethink how our agriculture supply chains, particularly in fresh, perishable foods, are going to function. Vertical farming and the broader controlled environmental agriculture (CEA) industry is an exciting step in this direction.

Marquis: How is vertical farming a more sustainable alternative to traditional agriculture?

Fain: For the last 10,000 years agriculture has been focused on solving for variables outside of our control like rain and weather. We’re flipping that equation on its head. We’re able to control the variables such as climate by growing crops in commercial-scale indoor farms, vertically stacked under lights that mimic the spectrum of the sun. Since our produce is grown independent of weather and seasonality, our smart farm environments are 140+ times more productive than traditional agriculture and grow food efficiently and reliably as a proven alternative to field-grown agriculture.

A key proposition to Bowery’s farms is our water use. As it stands, 70% of global freshwater goes to agriculture. That number is three times larger than 50 years ago and is rising fast as demand spikes with a growing population. We use 95% less water than traditional farming, and our farm network continues to decrease our water use as a result of successful water efficiency and recirculation strategies.

We’ve also improved energy efficiency by more than 40% since 2021 across all of our farms, and our entire network is powered with 100% renewable energy. And our work is never done; we’re constantly improving our technology and reporting new sustainability gains every year.

Marquis: Now that we have vertical farming and the technology to grow more sustainably, why do you think this approach hasn’t been widely adopted into the current food system?

Fain: Agriculture is undergoing a quiet technological revolution. Taking a step back from vertical farming alone, traditional farmers are looking to robotics and automation, while machine learning and artificial intelligence are now used to monitor soil, control pests, and improve overall yield. Drones, sensors, and satellite imaging systems all help farms manage crops more effectively with more information and knowledge than ever before.

Vertical farms and the technological advancement of traditional farming can and should coexist. There is work being done on a national scale to integrate these and other advances as a means to rethink how we grow, what we grow, and how we transport what we grow. This is about a portfolio of solutions and not one single technology or approach.

On a farm, growing successful crops is a matter of inputs: good seeds, light, water, and nutrients. So too with the wide-scale adoption of a new food paradigm. We need the right inputs to grow: great ideas, upfront capital, and a commitment at all levels of government to enable businesses to thrive. For a cutting-edge industry to flourish – to have a national and even a global impact – national investments in R&D, infrastructure, appropriate tax incentives, workforce training, and manufacturing are essential. However, existing federal programs are not well suited to help deploy innovative farming technologies whether they are used indoors or in the field. The federal government has a key role to play as an accelerator of innovation.

Technology can be used to reimagine the fresh food supply chain, and the broader movement of CEA is demonstrating this potential every day.

Marquis: Is there a difference in product quality and flavor of vertically-farmed produce?

Fain: Absolutely. Vertical farming gives us the ability to control and guarantee our product quality and output. At Bowery, we select our seeds for quality and taste, rather than yield and long-haul transportation. Most U.S. produce travels an average of six days and 1,500 to 2,000 miles to reach store shelves, only to arrive laced with chemicals and lacking in flavor and freshness. Nutrition is also compromised — up to 45% of the nutritional value of produce is lost during transport.

Since we can build our farms anywhere, (near the cities we serve year-round) we can harvest pesticide-free produce at peak freshness, and deliver to stores within a day or two, setting a new standard for quality, taste, and flavor that is unmatched by traditional agriculture. With the BoweryOS, our proprietary supply chain management system, we’re also able to collect real-time data on our crops to understand what environmental conditions each crop needs to thrive, optimizing for the attributes that matter most to our customers and consumers. Our produce is the purest expression of the seed; pesticide-free, reliable, consistent, and always fresh.

Marquis: Both food and tech are challenging industries. How do you handle market challenges and think about innovation?

Fain: I’d argue that it’s not easy being an entrepreneur and leader in any industry – but solving hard problems is always a worthy goal, especially when something like our food and agriculture system is at stake.

On handling market challenges, I believe that it’s important to be agile. Both a company and a market evolve over time. What is right at one moment or phase may no longer be right at another. I am a strong believer in continuous evaluation to adapt both products and processes in order to ensure growth.

Innovation is inherent in changing and evolving any system. The key is to maintain a balance of focus and intention while also innovating and re-evaluating your product, technology, and to some extent the strategy in front of you. Innovation has always been at Bowery’s core, however, we also maintain a healthy respect and appreciation for the industry we operate in and the incumbent knowledge and practices. It’s a mistake to assume that there’s nothing to learn from the past.

Overall, at Bowery, we’re reimagining the entire fresh food supply chain to be simpler, shorter, and safer and to provide more surety of supply. The traditional agriculture model and food supply chain are overloaded with middlemen and a multitude of steps before the product reaches the consumer, requiring enormous resources, time, distance, and producing substantial waste along the way. Bowery is providing a streamlined alternative.

Whether it’s automation in our farms or the BoweryOS which manages, monitors and maintains the entirety of our operations, we leverage technology to think about growing, but also downstream processing in a new way. This allows us not only to grow anywhere, but to grow our produce much closer to its final destination. Bowery is collapsing a complex supply chain into a single building – delivering fresh produce faster, more efficiently, and with much less waste. With materially better efficiency and drastically reduced food miles, the impact is surety of supply and a more sustainable, resilient supply chain; this is more important now than ever before as the changing climate continues to expose the vulnerabilities of a fragile food system.

Source: forbes.com

Groove Armada’s Andy Cato brings new life to Clarkson’s Farm

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Andy Cato tending to a regeneratively farmed field.

Aleks Phillips

BBC News

4 hours ago

As one half of Groove Armada, Andy Cato has been an electronic music star for nearly three decades. But he has never been asked for as many selfies as he has since appearing on the latest series of Jeremy Clarkson’s farming show.

He did not go on Clarkson’s Farm – which follows the presenter as he grapples with running his Oxfordshire farm – for renewed fame. Rather, his aim was to expose its audience to his passion: regenerative farming.

That is, moving towards a food system powered by biology rather than by chemistry, as he puts it.

Regenerative farming seeks to reverse the biodiversity loss that modern farming can cause with fertilisers and pesticides by changing how crops are managed.

On the hit Amazon Prime docu-series, Cato is invited onto Clarkson’s Diddly Squat farm – so named because it makes him very little money – to take over one of the fields and demonstrate these nature-driven methods.

The experiment was a success, and he has won over the former Top Gear presenter.

“We started filming the next series a month ago now, and he wants to expand the area where we’re embracing these techniques,” Cato tells the BBC. “So yeah, I think we got off to a good start.”

While modern farming practices allow for the same fields to be used year after year to produce enough crops to feed consumers, they can remove organic content from fields, meaning farmers must add chemical fertilisers to sustain their crops.

This can be costly for farmers and some scientists say it means the microbes and organic compounds that make healthy soil and nutrient-rich food are not necessarily being replenished, ultimately diminishing the ability of farmland to grow crops.

Regenerative farming aims to reintroduce microbes, nutrients and carbon back into the soil.

Some ways of doing this – which are already being taken up by farmers in the UK, India and elsewhere – include planting different crops side by side and sowing cover crops, which cover the soil in between harvests to retain its organic content.

In the latest series of Clarkson’s Farm, Cato oversees the planting of two crops, wheat and beans, in the same field, rather than the traditional single crop.

He says this is so the field can still be used to produce grain, with the beans providing some of the nitrogen needed to fertilise the soil.

Andy Cato laughing with Jeremy Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper on Diddly Squat farm in the Cotswolds, standing in front of a telehandler.

While this meant the yield of each was lower than if he had planted just one crop, Cato says this was compensated for by not having to pay for the 300kg of nitrogen usually needed to add artificially to the field.

Much of Clarkson’s Farm is devoted to showing how upfront costs – such as feed, energy and fertiliser – can make farming a risky and often unprofitable profession. The government estimates that these made up nearly 70% of farmers’ expenses in 2023.

The price of feed and fertiliser has also fluctuated dramatically in the past few years due to the war in Ukraine and energy price rises, while unpredictable weather has affected the quality – and therefore the value – of crops.

“To all of the traditional risk that farmers have been shouldering for decades, we’re now adding massive climatic volatility and massive price volatility – and it’s just not a reasonable ask,” Cato says. “We just can’t keep doing this, and farmers won’t keep doing this.”

Using fertilisers and pesticides can also be costly for the environment – as they can kill off native species and leach into waterways.

Cato says that he is currently running a pilot in which water companies pay farmers to adopt regenerative farming techniques, “because it’s a lot cheaper [for them] – keeping the nitrates and the pesticides out of the river than getting them out afterwards”.

But he admits the switch to regenerative farming can be challenging, as while it is “getting biology and nature to do more of the work… you’re replacing a largely prescribed set of fertilization and treatments with observation and reaction”.

Soil is tested regularly and the nutrients added to the field adjusted according to what it is lacking.

Putting this careful balance across in a TV show was “complicated and leads towards insomnia”, he says.

Joe Stanley, a regenerative farmer and member of the National Farmers’ Union environment forum, agrees that these techniques “require more attention to detail [and] probably more time and effort”.

There are other potential trade-offs. While modern agriculture uses machinery to minimise labour costs, he says regenerative farming would likely require a larger workforce – which could raise food prices. But Mr Stanley argues retailers could also absorb this cost.

“That’s one of the big problems of the transition to sustainable farming: how do we pay a fair price to the farmer for food which may be more expensive to produce?”

Mr Stanley says harvesting two different crops from the same field can produce a higher combined yield, but also creates the cost of then sorting those two crops – something Cato’s company covers.

Lizzie Sagoo of agricultural consultancy Adas, who specialises in soil and crops, says that while techniques like cover crops provide a “suite of benefits” including improved yields, this would likely be outweighed by the cost of cultivating a crop farmers cannot harvest – requiring a further financial incentive.

Cato also thinks that, despite the benefits of regenerative farming, the transition should not be put solely on farmers’ shoulders as “they’re absolutely at the financial edge already.”

The UK government currently offers farmers £129 per hectare of cover crops. And in May, Waitrose announced it would be offering financial assistance to farmers to convert, so its fresh produce was regeneratively farmed by 2035.

Andy Cato performs a DJ set to a large crowd at Glastonbury Festival in 2022.

So what inspired Cato to trade in his synthesizer for a muck spreader?

He says it began with reading an article about the environmental consequences of food production on the way back from a gig.

“It didn’t paint a pretty picture. And it ended with the line: ‘If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it.’ That line got me into buying books on self-sufficiency and trying to grow vegetables where we were living at the time in France.”

It was in France that he sold his publishing rights to establish his first farm using regenerative practices – despite having no background in agriculture.

This lack of farming heritage was picked up on by Kaleb Cooper, Diddly Squat’s local boy turned farm manager. In what Cato describes as “without question the line of the series”, the money-conscious Kaleb acerbically remarks: “Was you in a band? I can tell because you’ve left your tractor running at a pound per litre.”

Cato says it was ironic as, when he lived in France, he was the only one in the area who would turn his engine off.

“Because I’ve spent my life in noise, it drove me insane,” he explains. “So in France I was known [as] the annoying person who always turned their tractor off. But I got totally bested by Kaleb there, so I just need to wear that one.”

Cato moved back to the UK and now 110 farms across the two countries are part of his regenerative farming movement – though he sees the number growing as “one of the things that needs to be challenged in that is the assumption that business as usual is an option”.

The Global Environment Facility estimates that, due to a number of factors including farming practices, 95% of the world’s land could become degraded by 2050, making it unable to sustain crops at yields needed for consumption.

Experts have warned that without efforts to combat soil degradation, there would only be a limited number of harvests left.

But Cato remains hopeful that this is not a foregone conclusion.

“If you give nature half a chance, it comes roaring back,” he says. “When you see those plants poking their way through a crack in the pavement, you know it has immense power… The speed of recovery if we get these things right is really profound.”

‘Lazy’ gardening tip will see hydrangeas ‘thrive’

How often should I water my hydrangea?

As well as the right amount of sunlight, you should also ensure your hydrangea is getting enough water. This is especially true in the summer when the hot and sunny dats go on for longer.

Typically, hydrangeas should be watered between once and three times a week. In hotter weather, they may need a little extra hydration.

Make sure you are watering your hydrangeas at the base of the plant, rather than showering the leaves and flowers.

Source: express.co.uk