Tasty strawberries grown indoors with the help of bees, robots and sunlight

Strawberries planted in vertical farming racks at Oishii's new 237,400-square-foot indoor Atmalas Farm. [+] New Jersey. The farm is located in a converted plastic warehouse adjacent to a 50-acre solar panel farm. Robots and bees are used alongside humans in the vertical farm to grow strawberries on the same amount of land.

Oishii

The global vertical farming market is valued at $5.6 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to more than $35 billion in eight years, by 2032. Due to spatial efficiency, year-round cultivation and harvest cycles, indoor farming is 170 times more productive than outdoor fields, producing 50-100 times more yield per square foot than traditional farming.

Luis Pablo Calvo Rios, food and agricultural management adviser and former vice president of manufacturing at Mexico's NatureSweet, says vertical farming is a great example of combining market need, opportunity and the use of technology.

“As we know, the benefits of vertical farming include being closer to the target market, being a closed loop that reduces the risk of crop pathogens, pests and diseases, and being able to scale from nursery to finished production to a wide range of crops and purposes,” Rios said. The technology in these systems is key to collecting, processing and controlling the production system, allowing farmers to focus on delivering the crops they really want.”

Cultivating strawberries indoors increases strawberry yield by 20 times

Each year, the world produces over 9 million tons of strawberries. China, the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Mexico, and Germany are the largest consumers of strawberries, accounting for 73% of global consumption. Americans eat an average of 4.85 pounds of fresh and frozen strawberries per year.

Earlier this year, US-based indoor vertical farming company Oishii opened a solar-powered vertical strawberry farm in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. The company raised $134 million in a Series B round in February 2024, bringing its total funding since 2016 to $189 million.

The new 237,400 square foot Amataras Farm was designed to increase strawberry yields by more than 20 times. The farm runs primarily on renewable energy, drawing power from an adjacent 50-acre solar field, and uses its own water purification system to recycle most of its water.

The company says the new farm is its most technologically advanced yet and is expected to grow 20 times as many strawberries for consumers on the East Coast.

Humans, bees and robots all under one roof: 60 billion data points tell the story of how robots can observe bees' behavior and adjust environmental variables

Amatelas Farm has a separate farm unit with 250 mobile racks, each with eight stacked cultivation levels that move in a 24-hour cycle from the warmth of the day to the coolness of the night.

The bees live in climate-controlled farms with expert growers who look after the bees' well-being.

“Our advanced climate-controlled farms recreate the perfect conditions for plants and bees to thrive, creating different lengths of day and night,” says Hiroki Koga, CEO and co-founder of Oishii. “With no storms or extreme weather conditions, every day is a perfect day for the bees!”

Koga says while most vertical farms grow crops on static, unmoving racks, Oishii's mobile structures automate the cultivation process, allowing bees, robots and humans to work on the same site.

A blended work environment blends automation, nature, and human ingenuity in the same place

He added that our bees behave just like they do in the wild, flying around in search of nectar, pollinating every single strawberry flower, then returning to their hive.

The company's proprietary robots collect more than 60 billion data points per year.

A tasty robot harvests indoor-grown strawberries.

Oishii

“On our farms, we have about 50 cutting-edge robots working alongside the bees and farmers,” Koga said. The company's proprietary robots use machine vision and learning to monitor the farms 24 hours a day, collecting up to 60 billion data points per year.

For example, the robot uses visual data of flowers to determine yield and plant health, Koga says. Combined with other environmental data, our AI calculates how much bee activity is needed that day to aid in pollination.

Improved pollination by honeybees

To address the challenges with bees, Kogi said they mapped all the environmental factors of their indoor and outdoor farms to create the perfect environment for bees to pollinate flowers naturally indoors.

Oishii has created an indoor environment that allows bees to pollinate at a rate of 90%.

Oishii

Koga points out that with this technology, the pollination success rate by honeybees has increased to over 95%, which is superior to the 60-70% rate used in conventional agriculture.

“This is a huge increase in efficiency compared to traditional agriculture, where optimizing pollination by bees is extremely difficult,” says Koga. The robot adjusts the farm's environmental variables in real time based on its observations, helping to grow the perfect berries, so they can be harvested at perfect ripeness.

“We also introduced automation, so that the plants move around the farm and come to the robots or humans when they are needed,” Koga says. This allowed them to store many more plants in the same amount of space, making production even more efficient.

Sustainable Agriculture

Koga says the new farm demonstrates the company's continuing commitment to sustainability.

“Not only is this a converted plastic warehouse, but our crops are primarily grown using solar power provided by a 50-acre field next door,” Koga says. Additionally, LED lights have reduced energy consumption per plant by 14 percent, and an innovative, state-of-the-art water purification system allows them to recycle a large portion of the water they use.

Oishii's new 240,000-square-foot indoor vertical Amaterasu Farm is housed within a renovated plastic building. [+] A factory with a 50-acre solar farm.

Oishii

Koga credits artificial intelligence with enabling Oishii Farm to gradually achieve greater efficiency in indicators such as pollination success rate and yield predictability.

“Until recently, our unique berry varieties could only be grown in the very specific Japanese growing climate conditions and only bore fruit seasonally during the winter,” Koga said.

“Now, we can grow fruits anywhere in the world at any time of the year using indoor vertical farming techniques that allow us to control every element of the environment – air, rain, heat, light – resulting in perfect, delicious fruits all year round,” he added.

The future of food production: Data science and robotics meet nature to expand the possibilities of agriculture

“I'm concerned that the current agricultural system is no longer sustainable, that production costs are soaring as resources become harder to obtain, and that the world's population is exploding,” Koga said. But he's more confident than ever about the future of vertical farming, which relies on far fewer resources.

Koga says he sees clear demand for vertically grown produce.

That's why it's sold out at Whole Foods, Fresh Direct and other retailers up and down the East Coast, and it's only going to help drive the industry forward over the next five, 10, 20 years, he said.

Delicious strawberries grown in mobile automated indoor vertical racks.

Oishii

When data science and robots are combined with nature, the possibilities are endless, Koga said.

Rios points out that working with technology can make it easier to manage farm operations in this complex world.

Rios said the digital age is providing growing opportunities for agriculture companies to significantly improve their performance — a sector that operates in a complex environment that includes pricing challenges, strict (thank goodness!) regulations to ensure quality and food safety from farm to consumer, foreign trade laws and changing weather patterns.

Rios added that when you have to produce year-round, there's a lot to think about and manage.

Rios believes that when you have thousands or millions of data points, it's not easy to get the right insights to make the right decisions. Technology is a powerful tool to manage operations. It can unleash the talent and creativity of growers while predicting yields and production quality, he said.

Koga says every aspect of the environment, from temperature to humidity to light spectrum, can be controlled at any time of the year, meaning produce grown in vertical farms is not subject to outdoor seasonality.

“We're very proud to have been able to demonstrate our capabilities by showing the world that not only does our technology work, but that we've been able to take berries from $50 per pack to $10 per pack in just five years,” Koga said. “We hope this gives everyone even more confidence in the incredible progress we'll be making over the next five years.”

Vertical farming technology is essential to solving one of the world's biggest problems: a collapsing agricultural system, Koga said. Vertical farming requires no pesticides, recycles most of the water it uses, and requires significantly less land.

Oishii grows its Omakase and Koyo strawberries in a pesticide-free vertical farming environment – the brands are Non-GMO Project Verified – and has also recently added Rub Tomato to its growing lineup.

Koga says vertical farming techniques can be used for more than just growing strawberries and tomatoes.

It's only a matter of time before produce grown in vertical farms becomes more affordable than conventionally grown produce, which continues to become more expensive, he added. This inflection point has already arrived in some parts of the world (e.g., the Middle East) and will spread quickly to other regions.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferkitepowell/2024/06/09/how-oishii-uses-bees-robots-and-solar-to-sustainably-grow-strawberries-indoors/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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