Sep 4, 2018
Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd (IGS), a Scottish-based agritech business, recently unveiled its first indoor vertical farming demonstration facility. Based at the James Hutton Institute, in Perthshire, Scotland, it is arguably the world’s most technically advanced indoor farm.
The IGS facility utilizes patented power and communications technologies to address the key challenges facing the indoor farming industry. Fundamental barriers such as cost of power and labour have inhibited the sector’s expansion to date, as well as the inability to produce consistent and quality produce at scale. The IGS technology has been designed to overcome these barriers and significantly lower the cost of production overall.
With global market growth predicted at 24 percent over the next three years, the opportunities for IGS are substantial, with over 95 percent of its technology solutions expected to be exported. IGS will not be producing crops for sale, but will be collaborating with growers, retailers and international organisations to deliver the hardware and software platforms to revolutionise indoor growing environments.
Scotland’s first vertical farm
David Farquhar, CEO of IGS commented: “The opportunity to unveil Scotland’s first vertical farm, and arguably the world’s most technically advanced indoor facility, is a hugely exciting one for the whole team. As a Scottish-founded and led team we have captured horticultural, engineering and software skills from within Scotland to make this business flourish.
“The global horticulture market is crying out for new approaches to enhancing food production in terms of yield, quality and consistency. It is also searching for ways to reduce power consumption and labour costs and our technology has been designed to fundamentally address this.
“Annual industry spend exceeds $10 billion with compound annual growth of 24 percent. We are well positioned to help our customers profitably expand their businesses on the back of this growth.”
The location of IGS’ first vertical farm at the James Hutton Institute, a world leading crop research facility, was deliberately chosen to enhance collaboration opportunities. Scientists and researchers at the Institute will be working with the team at IGS to better understand how growing under lights can impact different varieties of crop growth, as well as drive increased productivity.
Professor Colin Campbell, CEO of James Hutton Institute commented: “There have been fantastic synergies coming out of the combination of the IGS technologies and Hutton’s cutting-edge plant science and collaboration. There are genuine potential game-changing opportunities both for new and conventional horticultural and agricultural systems that can come from our collaboration.
Significant demand is already being realized
Approximately 150 jobs are expected to be created by 2021 in areas such as software, data, engineering, robotics and automation. Significant demand is already being realized among growers, retailers and national governments aiming to address food security issues and alternative methods of production in their regions.
Vertical farming offers huge reductions in water wastage, the elimination of the use of pesticides and a huge reduction in food miles. It allows produce to be grown locally and on demand, which could reduce fresh food waste by up to 90 percent.
The Scottish-led team at IGS has developed, patented and productized a breakthrough, IOT-enabled power and communications platform consisting of patented electrical, electronic and mechanical technologies. All this is managed by a SaaS & data platform using AI to deliver economic and operational benefits to indoor growing environments across the globe. This technical solution enables the reduction of energy usage by 50 percent and labour costs by 80 percent when compared with other indoor growing environments. It also can produce yields of up to 200 percent more than that of a traditional greenhouse.
IGS was established in 2013 as an indoor horticulture business with a vision to deliver commercial viability to the vertical farming model by improving productivity – yield, quality and consistency – whilst dramatically driving down the cost of power and labour through Total Controlled Environment Agriculture (TCEA).