iFarm is included into Indoor Agtech Landscape 2019

Chris Taylor, a senior consultant on The Mixing Bowl team, one of the landscape producers, noted that they included greenhouses as an indoor growing approach. At times, the conversation seems to be just limited to growing in buildings or containers, what they call "Sunless" or other broadly refer to as indoor, vertical or urban farming.

iFarm is in «Sunless production systems» category along with GrowStack, Light4Food, CityBlooms, CropOne, Intravision, TrueLeaf and others. 39 companies are included into the category. According to Maxim Chizhov, iFarm Chief Business Development Officer the situation shows that the market is rapidly developing and more players will appear in the nearest years.

«If we are speaking about the trends, the most important thing is that the walls come down between sunless and greenhouse approaches. Vendors are now selling offerings for both and growers are combining the two approaches», — is saying Michael Rose, a partner at The Mixing Bowl and one of the landscape producers.

The expert mentioned that the automation of crop work and harvesting, particularly for vine crops and berries, has been a continuing and unmet challenge. The growth habit and maintenance requirements of these crops makes for a difficult environment for a robot activity. Of course, the labor shortage is not going away, so expect continued effort in automation and robotics.

iFarm is nominated as the hottest AgTech startups of Russia. Valuer startup analysis platform tracked over 1000 companies and listed AgTech startups, which approach is completely change the future of food production. InFarm is the best project in Germany, Sencrop in France and Connecterra in the Netherlands.

«iFarm including into AgTech startups ration is the International market recognition of the company and the opportunity to make global contacts with new customers and partners», — told Maxim Chizhov.

InFarm German startup, included into Valeur list, is developing modular vertical farms for growing greens and vegetables that can be installed in a restaurant's kitchen, in canteens, trading halls and even in small stores.

Sensors created by Sencrop team monitor temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed at a farm and using special application inform a farmer about pests. They are used by 5000 farmers, foresters and winemakers around the world.

Connecterra, the Netherlands startup, is developing the platform for monitoring cow's health. The tracker collects information on a body temperature, sleep phases, walking speed and meals duration. Artificial Intelligence makes the data analyzes and notify about an animal possible illness before the symptoms become clear.

Chris Taylor believes technology has an important role in meeting challenges in sales, logistics and company profitability and he looks forward to seeing farmers and technologists collaborate on innovations in data capture and analytics, automation and predictive and autonomous control.

October 24, 2019