Dec 12, 2022
Red and Green Butter Lettuce being grown in one of AmplifiedAg’s container farms. Credit: AmplifiedAg.
Written by: Sarah Jordan, Isabelle Dom, and Ricky Stephens
December 12, 2022
If you pay attention to what’s happening in the indoor farming sector, you may have seen the USDA’s recent investments in urban and controlled environment agriculture through its new CEA Center of Excellence. The research facility is comprised of 16 interconnected, technology-enabled, modular vertical farms, and it serves as the agency’s national hub for studying and testing numerous growing practices for a variety of fruits and vegetables, plant breeding and pathology, and energy efficiency practices.
What you may not know is that the company powering the CEA research innovation is the South Carolina-based agriculture technology company, AmplifiedAg. The company, which was founded in 2015 and has clients across the US, has developed a comprehensive platform for CEA that provides indoor farmers with software, embedded hardware systems, and fully enabled farms to manage their operations smoothly.
One of Amplified’s clients is Heron Farms, which utilizes the company’s software to run their indoor halophyte growing facility. Halophytes are salt-tolerant crops that grow in or around coastal areas, and Heron Farms has harnessed their power to become the world’s first vertical saltwater farm. They sell these crops as “sea beans,” a small, salty vegetable that is similar to seaweed.
Halophytes being grown in Heron Farms’s facility. Credit: AmplifiedAg.
Founder Sam Norton came up with the idea to start Heron Farms while looking for a solution to a number of significant climate change-related challenges, including rising sea levels, excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and conventional agriculture’s toll on freshwater resources. Heron Farms’ unique approach thus utilizes seawater - which makes up around 96% of the water present on Earth - to grow a nearly unheard of, but highly nutritious and flavorful, crop.
Heron Farms utilizes AmplifiedAg’s software, AmpEDGE™, for a number of reasons, but mainly because of its superior traceability and alert systems, which allow the farm to minimize risk and operate with maximum efficiency. Norton and his team need to be constantly monitoring the salinity, nutrient level, pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature of the water, as well as the amount of light reaching the crops and CO2 level in the air.
“It’s much easier to manage a farm when all of those parameters are recorded every few seconds and the data is searchable and can be graphically represented and analyzed,” according to Norton. With its user interface, AmpEDGE allows Heron Farms to monitor these parameters, helping the farm go from “3-4 harvests per year to 7.5 by managing those inputs to speed up plant growth.”
The dependability of the AmpEDGE alert system has also been key for the Heron team’s peace of mind. “The cost of integrating the alerts is dozens, maybe hundreds of times, cheaper than ruining your entire farm and [having to] wait seven weeks to get restarted.”
Founder Sam Norton tending to the halophytes grown in Heron Farms’s facility. Credit: AmplifiedAg.
According to Norton, “The ease of use, breadth of services, and willingness to modify the software to fit the unique needs of our farm led us to incorporate Amplified into every part of our farm.” Because of their success with the AmpEDGE software, they have been able to test out new halophytes and explore the future of agriculture.
Another farm that has thrived thanks to the help of AmplifiedAg is Outpost Agriculture. Founded by Colin McIntosh, a former Vertical Roots employee, this CEA nonprofit operates in remote areas of Alaska, aiming to increase food security and healthful food in highly remote areas. As he became more familiar with AmplifiedAg’s solutions through his time at Vertical Roots, McIntosh says that “by summer 2020 I was confident I had found the right company and people to partner with to attempt Outpost Ag, which is in many ways an emulation of Vertical Roots.” He partnered with AmplifiedAg for their research and development services, which helped Outpost Agriculture to begin their journey into the CEA world.
AmplifiedAg's vertical propagation system is designed for turnkey seedling cultivation to support R&D and crop production. Credit: AmplifiedAg.
Outpost Agriculture is currently “focusing our production on foods, like leafy greens, that are delicate, highly perishable and travel the poorest.” In their propagation pod, they also grow herbs, which are “very hard to find fresh in Alaska.” Eventually, they hope to expand production to include tomatoes, mushrooms, and other crops.
McIntosh believes that the secret to profitable CEA growth is in AmplifiedAg’s technology, which in his opinion is “designed to re-localize some types of food production at scale”. Given the thin margins in the food industry, scalability is of the utmost importance. McIntosh attributes his early success to the fact that AmplifiedAg “offers a collection of single function pods that can be assembled into substantial production facilities.”
McIntosh is deeply grateful for the help he received from AmplifiedAg during the planning and development stages of beginning Outpost Agriculture. Concerning the service he received from them, McIntosh said “they've been exceptional in their ongoing support. They are a full-service operation.”
Red and green butter lettuce, some of the offerings that Outpost Agriculture cultivates for distribution in Alaska. Credit: AmplifiedAg.
AmplifiedAg advised McIntosh on all aspects of planning and building the farm, and when the time came, they shipped 8 shipping containers to Alaska filled with all the supplies needed to get the farm up and running quickly. “Two of their builders flew out to meet the pods when they arrived, and spent about a month organizing and constructing the facility,” according to McIntosh, which was a huge benefit particularly for this solo entrepreneur.
The support that AmplifiedAg provides and their hands-on approach to farm development is especially helpful to startup farms and unique integrations looking to scale. Their combination of software, hardware, and R&D services have been vetted by industry professionals and proven in the market.
Again, Sam Norton provides his perspective: “AmplifiedAg software and hardware is going to be integrated into every farm that we make because it’s done so much for this farm.”
“From our collective experience as horticulturists, engineers, and technologists, at AmplifiedAg we have a deep understanding of what it takes to operate an indoor farm,” says Don Taylor, CEO of AmplifiedAg. “We have engineered what we believe to be one of the most versatile, scalable platforms for controlled environment agriculture. Our focus at AmplifiedAg is to enable the CEA food supply through indoor growers, traditional field farmers, and innovators. Whether it supports research, hyper-local and urban farm operations, or large-scale food supply; our mission is to enhance the adoption of sustainable agriculture across the United States and other regions of the world.”