- The coolest and most challenging: pH, EC, and flow rate
The hardest part has been running everything on battery while maintaining accuracy and using LTE (2–4G) and not common LPWAN options like LoRa. I'm primarily a software guy, so the learning curve has been huge.
It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.
> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.
We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup.
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.
Funny story: I was rejected by YC last batch. But I get it- I thought they look for traction and what not, so I rather made the pitch video on a very specific aspect of Hexafarms- which is monitoring, since some people were willing to check it out. No doubt YC would reject it. On the other hand, Thiel Foundation reached out to me, but they had some drop out thing and what not which I was not able to fullfil (and after a while they also stopped reaching out too).
I actually graduated from college this year; and for personal reasons I've had to change countries; now I'm in another Master's program... ready to drop out anytime. The whole project has been dead for months once in a while! I'm more trying to leverage ML for optimizing things. I guess that's what modern farming is missing (not ML per se, but optimization).
I'm trying to raise some investment (or in the worst case bootstrap and risk everything in the next few months), then I will go crazy with the idea.
You'll have to buy my words- but taste wise (based on my surveys too) it's the 'best' they have had (mostly city dwellers I'm talking about).
Yes, you don't really need sunlight whatsoever. I was myself shocked until I recalled high school biology concept of genotype and phenotype i.e. the genetic structure that manifests itself given the right physical conditions (at least of plants.) As for the plants' nutrients, here's a classic- Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener's Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition, by Lowenfels. I was amazed to find how complex, yet simple plants are.
>It would be awesome if people living far from traditional agricultural areas could access fresh greens without insane transportation costs (both financial and environmental)
That's what actually got me started. A head of lettuce on average 1200 miles (https://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/608-319.pdf) and it is so disconnected from the site of consumption.
My vision is to have distributed farms (as opposed to conventional wisdom, i have found that smaller indoor farms will be more profitable) every eight blocks or so.
Not really- It's quite manual (as of now). I had to change my country almost three times since I started; so I'm rather focussing more on data, and training algorithms part to figure out the right parameters (and the farm is a just a testbed). One example would be to have a $5 camera for measuring growth than buying a $100 3D what not camera.
I'm growing the freshest lettuce, iron-rich kale, and a lot of other leafy greens!
While in college (CS & Math), I got heavily interested in growing food in the most efficient and healthiest way possible. I was a dreamer when I started so I thought more of how to grow 'earthly' produce on Mars, but then I realized that my own planet Earth is so massively underserved.
It's basically like this- I mastered growing leafy greens in indoor closed environmenet, then I tried to cover all the major physical and biological markers, then I try to optimize the most optimal levels of 5-6 variables (currently) that I can fully control and may produce the best phenotype- CO2, O2, Light, Nitrate, P, K. These parameters have their own sub definitions.
So far I have had great results. I am trying to raise investment so I can finally make it a reality. Check the numbers here: hexafarms.com (no fluff)
- CO2. Side note: I was surprised to find that most (all?) CO2 sensors used in closed plant production setups are not meant to operate below 400 ppm.
- Air temperature, pressure, relative humidity
- Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)
- Addons like: wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture and Electrical Conductivity (EC)
- The coolest and most challenging: pH, EC, and flow rate
The hardest part has been running everything on battery while maintaining accuracy and using LTE (2–4G) and not common LPWAN options like LoRa. I'm primarily a software guy, so the learning curve has been huge.