The Future of Farming
Bowery Farms vertical farm. Credit: Bowery Farms
Located in Nottingham, Maryland is Bowery Farming’s agricultural warehouse, a one-of-a-kind indoor farm growing plants like lettuce, kale, arugula, and basil at massive scales. Although this warehouse grows the same produce that its competitors do, its operations and approach to farming are unlike any other.
An OS for Plants
On traditional farms, you’ll find farmers with generations of experience, but on this farm floor you’ll find “farmers” with minimal agricultural experience. Bowery Farming is able to operate without a highly experienced workforce because its plants, machines, and employees are connected to a system: Bowery OS. Bowery OS, is a proprietary farm operating system that Henry Sztul, the company’s chief science officer, described as “custom-built software and hardware and AI that lets us either connect to various systems or manage the flow of material and operation in our farms.”
Rather than manually monitoring each plant and machine by hand, the OS consists of a multitude of sensors all connected to one another and set up with condition monitoring programs. Gone are the days of worrying about temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, and whether a plant has enough light. Traditionally farming is a grueling process, but the system easily aids farmers in tracking plant growth process and farm operations.
Robot Farmers? Yes.
Plants are automatically seeded and sent off by robotics to be organized in a vertical farm once germinated. Cameras and sensors using deep learning algorithms are able to monitor the grow room and provide alerts to a human resident agricultural expert regarding any issues that may arise. Bowery uses hydroponics as opposed to soil to grow their plants. As a result, the water used in the grow room is able to be recycled back into the grow room, which Bowery claims results in 90% less water usage than traditional farming. Robotic harvesters automatically trim plants, place them in bins with QR codes, and weigh them before sending all plants, aside from temperature-sensitive ones like basil, to a cold storage room after they are harvested. Just like the rest of the process, quality control and packaging are also automated.
Approximately 100,000 plant trays are grown in Bowery’s facility. According to Emerging Tech, Bowery hasn’t disclosed revenue, but the company has partnerships with grocers like Walmart, Giant, and Whole Foods and has raised over $646 million in funding to date. It plans to build two new facilities in the Atlanta, Georgia, and Dallas, Texas metro areas in Q1 2023.