Jun 13, 2022
Editor’s Note: The following information is derived from an interview between Agritecture and Lisanne Meulendijks, Kalera’s new Global R&D Director.
One company that grabbed headlines for leading the expansion of the vertical farming sector throughout 2021 was Kalera. In this transformational year, the company completed three acquisitions, increased their geographic footprint across three continents, and opened two new farms. These successes help affirm Kalera’s increased global leadership in the CEA field and have allowed the team to increase operating efficiency with new seed and plant technology capabilities.
This year is set to bring greater victories for the Kalera team. Their continued expansion path has recently been secured through a ten-year, $30 million Senior Secured Credit Facility with Farm Credit of Central Florida. And in June, Kalera and Agrico are expected to complete their announced merger, effectively taking Kalera to NASDAQ.
Their strategy for growth involves integrating cutting-edge technology - the Internet of Things, the Cloud, Big Data analytics, and AI - to focus on enhancing efficiency and sustainability through automation.
Kalera’s Global R&D Director, Lisanne Meulendijks, assessing plant health; image sourced from Kalera
Today, Kalera is pushing forward their commitment to innovation with the recent hire of Lisanne Meulendijks as their Global R&D Director. Agritecture interviewed Meulendijks to learn more about her journey to the role, and her takes on what the future has to hold for both Kalera and the CEA industry more broadly.
Meulendijks brings R&D experience with Dutch vertical farm Future Crops, and vertical farming expertise for agricultural business advisory Delphy. In her words: “I had the privilege to experience in the field that scaling up R&D results for vertical farms is easier said than done. You'll see that oftentimes, crop trials are happening over relatively small surfaces, but then scaling them up to multi-layer, high-tower production facilities can become quite tricky. I think my practical experience helps me now in guiding R&D for all these very large farms that Kalera is constructing or has constructed.”
Her academic background also makes her uniquely qualified for such a demanding position. Having studied bioscience engineering before she focused on CEA as a career path, she realized that her broad technical understanding of the various disciplines coming together in vertical farming was highly pertinent.
“I see my role as a translator, forming bridges between different fields of expertise. In vertical farming, so many different disciplines must come together to succeed. My expertise is in plant science, but in my daily work, I talk to the engineers, for example, who need to understand everything related to irrigation light and climate control, and all that. Together with the team, I then translate the plants’ needs into technical specifications. And the same goes for sales and marketing, business development, automation, robotics, etc. It all comes together in vertical farming. And each of those groups has their own language, their own way of thinking, and I need to be able to talk to all of them. This is what I have experienced over the past years and also what I like doing. ”
Kalera’s vertical farming in Kuwait; image sourced from Kalera
Meulendijks began working towards a Ph.D. in the field of agriculture, assessing farming practices to assist growers. But, she ultimately found that the disconnect between her largely theoretical background in the field and the need for practical knowledge was prohibitive. “My biggest personal struggle was that I was assisting farmers, trying to improve their practices, but without having farmed myself. I found that a challenge, as I had a lot of theoretical background, but not the growing experience. And so, I took the quite radical decision to quit and look for a job in which I could start growing crops while still seeking R&D fulfillment. And so, that's how I came into the industry, as an R&D agronomist, actually establishing the R&D of a commercial vertical farm, which was exactly what I was looking for.”
Now, with a front-row seat to R&D at one of the largest CEA companies in the world, Meulendijks has a unique perspective of the technologies pushing the industry forward.
And there’s one thing she’s watching very closely: the developing potential of sensing technology.
This coincides with an increased drive to understand microclimates around the crops, as opposed to merely controlling the ‘macro’-climate of a vertical farm. “The micro-climate is crop-specific and evolves over the crop cycle, so the interaction between the macro-climate and the climate directly around the crop is dynamic and still relatively unknown. It's a very complex interaction with biology, physics, and everything coming together. Hopefully, by understanding that interaction better, we can improve the optimal growth recipe to something which, maybe even on a daily basis, can give the plant exactly what it needs. To get there, we need to understand how the plant responds, and for this, we need the right sensors.”
Kalera’s Global R&D Director, Lisanne Meulendijks, assessing plant health; image sourced from Kalera
When asked what excites her most about working at Kalera, Meulendijks was unequivocal: she finds huge value in working in a team with such diverse personal and professional backgrounds.
“We’re literally bringing together people from across the globe, with all these cultural backgrounds. So we have such a wide diversity of cultures, but then we're really tethered by the interest in how to grow crops, and how to improve our production. For me, that’s really fulfilling. Our R&D team has people in the US, Germany, Kuwait, and Singapore, and then me in the Netherlands. We all speak the plant language, yet come from different backgrounds.”
This shared passion for a common goal also extends to Meulendijks’ hopes for the direction of the CEA industry as a whole. While our understanding of plant science is continuously developing, largely through the help of emerging technologies, in Meulendijks’ view, these developments can only be harnessed to their full potential if a culture of knowledge-sharing, or ‘coopetition’, is encouraged between stakeholders. This is how the Dutch greenhouse industry became so strong and I’m happy to see that something similar is happening in Singapore, where we are constructing our global R&D center and have valuable research partnerships with local institutions. Collaboration is strongly encouraged there by the local government.
With different growers facing many of the same challenges, she strongly believes that the industry will move forward quicker if different actors are willing to share information across the board, for everyone’s benefit.
Put simply, “if everyone shares, then everyone wins.”
In fact, she notes that vertical farming is particularly suited to industry-wide coopetition because of its inherent replicability and scalability.
Crops growing at one of Kalera’s vertical farming facilities; image sourced from Kalera
“It’s so unique to have the ability to have exactly the same growing conditions irrespective of the outside climates, right? That’s the uniqueness of vertical farming. But that’s also what makes learning on a global level possible. From a greenhouse perspective, for example, it’s very hard for a tomato grower in Spain to learn from a tomato grower in Norway. It’s all different challenges. But, in our case, it’s really scalable. ”
