With the amount of farmable acreage seemingly shrinking all the time, access to fresh fruits and vegetables can be hard to come by. Small-scale produce can be prohibitively expensive, and cheaper options from far-flung corners of the globe carry a hidden environmental cost. But one well-funded startup called Plenty believes that its technology harbors the secret to bringing “backyard quality” produce to the masses, and hopes that its newest indoor growing facility in Kent, Washington, will prove it.
At just 100,000 square feet, Plenty’s new facility will be 99 percent smaller than a typical American farm. But Plenty’s goal is to optimize every inch of that available space for ideal cultivation. Fruits and vegetables grow on 20-foot-tall towers, bathed in LED lights and connected to a wealth of data-collecting microsensors.
In essence, Plenty applies the latest in machine learning technology and big data processing to the age-old wisdom of crop science, continually optimizing the climate to ensure ideal flavor and nutrition. The end result is a yield of up to 300 different variants of pesticide and GMO-free produce that far outpaces traditional agricultural methods, all while using a fraction of the water or energy.
CEO and cofounder Matt Barnard hopes the new facility serves as further proof that Plenty’s mission to sustainably feed a planet of 7.3 billion is viable: “Seattle will be home to our first full-scale farm and help set the standard by which our global farm network makes locally grown, backyard-quality produce accessible to everyone.” The facility will be staffed by a team of around 50 indoor farming engineers, organic growers, and operations experts to make certain that the technological and agricultural sides of the facility work in concert.
While the concept of eating produce grown inside on a tower might strike the farmer’s market crowd as puzzling, a recent $226 million funding round from Bezos Expeditions (whose founder is Jeff Bezos, current CEO of Amazon and among the richest people in the U.S.) and other VC firms suggests that there might just be a future in internet of things-driven agriculture. How ’bout them apples indeed.
