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Based in the Netherlands, blossoming agtech startup Source.ag has announced a $23 million Series A funding round to help grow its business, less than a year after its previous, $10 million round. The company assists commercial greenhouse crop growers adjust their growing conditions, optimize their resources and maximize their yields by using state-of-the-art AI models to predict how their plants will grow under different conditions. Food production is both energy and water-intensive (“fun” fact: agricultural irrigation uses 70% of water worldwide) and with the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, it strikes me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to use a bit less water to grow our food.
The company is taking a bet on greenhouse agriculture being a sustainable, local and climate-resilient food production method that can provide a tailored environment for each specific crop. Source.ag’s technology, then, aims to enable growers to make better-informed decisions about their crops and greenhouses to facilitate more sustainable harvests.
Source.ag’s seed funding was used primarily for R&D and to develop Source Track, a software platform to assist growers in operating their facilities. It has worked with hundreds of users over thousands of acres of high-tech greenhouses, making it ripe for expansion. The Series A funding, led by Astanor Ventures and including investments from Acre Venture Partners and several of the Netherlands’ leading greenhouse operators, will enable the development of two new products: Source Cultivate and Source Control.
“We will release several new products in the next 24 months, including Source Cultivate, which will give growers unprecedented predictive powers and the ability to leverage AI in finding optimal growing strategies,” explains Rien Kamman, Source.ag’s co-founder and CEO. “In essence, we’re giving growers a crystal ball in which they can see how external factors and strategic decisions will impact the development of their crops, including the associated resource usage, costs and returns. Based on this we support growers finding the growth strategy that is right for them.”
“One of our customers in France already used Source Cultivate to simulate different pruning and climate strategies for its tomato crops, getting instant feedback from our AI how different strategies would impact plant health, yield and profit over the whole season,” Kamman adds. “This enabled the grower to find the perfect growing strategy — tailored to his geographic location, resource prices, facility type and seed genetics.”
The largest global fresh vegetable sectors, for example tomatoes and bell peppers, have been Source.ag’s main focus to date, but its aim is to assist all growers, everywhere, to manage the best harvest possible.
“Source.ag’s goal is to give growers and farmers similar superpowers for growing their crops. Source.ag will be able to provide real-time advice on how to best grow crops, no matter what you grow or how you grow it,” says Kamman. “It’s mind-boggling that there are 3 billion people that do not have access to sufficient fresh produce.”
To the company’s founder, Source.ag is about the democratization of agricultural knowledge through AI, allowing the cultivation of fresh fruits and vegetables in the most efficient and sustainable way possible.
“I believe Source.ag is uniquely positioned to ‘bridge the gap’ between the digital world of AI and the real world of plants, growers and farming,” Kamman says. “We have deep experience in building applied AI, and we’ve been able to attract top talent who collaborate closely with the best growers in the world.”
Kamman and his co-founder, Ernst van Bruggen, had been building AI systems for large corporations for many years, but having grown up in the Netherlands — one of the largest fresh fruit and vegetable producers in Europe — the duo felt they would be able to apply their knowledge and skills to help farmers feed the world. They quit their jobs and founded Source.ag in early 2020 to hybridize tech and food.
For Kamman, Source.ag isn’t just a software vendor; he sees it as a long-term partner in a growing operation where the farmers are the heroes. If farming and tech might sound like strange bedfellows, Kamman is keen to point out how both growers and developers practice a craft and through this, they find common ground.
“I’ve found that craftsmen recognize, and easily connect with, other craftsmen — even outside their domain. It’s the love for the profession that is the connector, especially when combined with a humble curiosity in each other’s profession,” Kamman concludes. “It’s amazing to see our developers spend time in the greenhouse with the grower, learning from them firsthand what Source can build to help growers become even more successful.”
Source.ag raises $23M to raise the bar on raising crops with AI by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin.
Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistical hubs and currently operates over 8,000 locations across hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt place its shipping containers steps away from such customers as restaurants and grocery stores, without having to pay the astronomical rent of a commercial or industrial space in a downtown area.
Adapt opened its first shipping container in Austin and began deliveries to restaurants this week. Over the course of the next few years, the startup plans to expand to over 50 locations, including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami.
“Our model is to create hyper-local farms in densely populated urban areas to reduce the distance from farm to fork,” Jonathan Murray, Adapt AgTech’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch.
Adapt’s network of shipping container farms specializes in “aberrant gourmet mushrooms,” which are gourmet mushrooms that haven’t been available in North American retail until very recently. Think pink, yellow, blue and king oysters, chestnut mushrooms, and the trending lion’s mane.
“Mushrooms cater very, very well to container farming versus other crops like leafy greens because of the energy consumption,” continued Murray. “They don’t require a tremendous amount of light. It’s really just temperature and humidity.”
Adapt, which launched in February 2022, delivered its first farm in June last year to a location in Toronto. The company has been growing ever since and now has farms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax, Kingston and Austin. On February 17, Adapt says it will launch a partnership with Loblaws — Canada’s largest retailer — starting with two flagship stores in downtown Toronto, and then dozens more in Toronto and Ottawa before expanding elsewhere over the following months.
Adapt will also roll out with retail banners under Canadian grocery chains Sobeys and Pattison Food Group in 2023.
“By the end of 2023 we’ll be available in stores of at least three of the top five largest retailers in Canada from Halifax to Vancouver and in between, which combined represent over 3,500 stores,” said Murray.
Adapt recently closed a seed round with climate VC Congruent, and it will use the funds to expand its base and hire more support.
Image Credits: Adapt AgTech
Adapt AgTech designs and manufactures its shipping containers in Delta, British Columbia. Aside from the five containers operating today, Adapt recently started production on 16 more units and is aiming to deploy over 25 units over the next 12 months. Some of Adapt’s shipping containers are solar-powered with backup plugs, but for the purposes of a speedy U.S. launch, the startup will plug its shipping containers into the grid. The energy consumption, Murray said, is low — about 10 kilowatt hours per day.
The company’s distribution model is akin to a hub and spoke. Adapt uses a centralized hub in Kingston, Ontario, to do all of the lab work and colonize the substrate blocks — meaning it allows the mycelium, the root structure of the fungus, to grow on blocks of sawdust, spent coffee grounds or coconut coir. The startup then sends out the blocks to shipping containers, where the mushrooms can fruit close to customers. Murray says this allows Adapt to deliver mushrooms within a couple of hours of harvest, which not only means fresher fungi, but also longer-lasting mushrooms and reduced spoilage.
The startup deploys and operates the containers and also fulfills orders. An operator oversees everything from harvesting to managing orders to delivering mushrooms.
“All of our containers are currently operating essentially on one full-time farmer, so we’re enabling them to become what we like to call ‘farmtrepreneurs,'” said Murray. “So uncapped commissions, grow your territory as big as you can. We’ll add containers, we’ll grow your territories. This allows us to bring new and young people into farming as well, which is exciting.”
Murray also noted that existing mushroom farm operators have reached out to Adapt to flip their at-home businesses into Adapt farms.
The whole process allows the startup to stay vertically integrated, and thus save money on materials like substrate, which Adapt makes itself out of whatever is locally available. Adapt’s control over each farm also lets the company keep tabs on well-fruiting mushroom strains and propagate more of them, delivering even healthier margins to the company and a high-quality product that’s cheaper than what you’d get at the farmer’s market, said Murray.
From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
What is automation good for? Harvesting more broccoli than human laborers can, according to Upp, a Shropshire, U.K.-based agtech startup that’s using computer vision AI plus farm-sized proprietary machinery to expand crop yields.
Its pitch is not only that its specialist, AI-driven harvester will make it more efficient to pick a familiar crop but also that the process will reduce waste — by being able to extract more nutritious protein from a field of broccoli without needing an army of extra human workers to do it.
Upp says the smart machinery it’s developing will enable broccoli farmers to harvest more of the plant than they feasibly could using human field laborers because the AI-plus-tractor-tool combo will do it all: Fully automating the spotting, cutting, lifting and carrying, at a rate of up to 3km/h.
This AI-driven approach allows for farmers to “upcycle” the 80% of the broccoli plant (i.e extra stem and leaves) that’s normally left as waste on the field, per Upp, and sell that as a additional product that can be processed into a form it suggests is comparable to pea protein.
The startup’s concept system, which CEO and co-founder, David Whitewood, tells TechCrunch it’s been developing with help from technologists at the University of Lincoln, involves a tractor kitted out with a 3D camera and an on-board computer running a computer vision AI model that’s been trained to identify when broccoli heads are the right size for picking (with better-than-human accuracy, is the claim), along with a proprietary (patent pending) tractor-pulled cutting-and-harvesting tool.
“The job of harvesting broccoli is — firstly — you’ve got to recognize which heads are ready to be harvested. So we’ve been cooperating with the University of Lincoln’s agri products team who’ve been developing the machine learning and AI,” he explains. “We’ve been testing a whole bunch of cameras with them and dealing with the difficult problem of occlusion [where leaves may partly obscure the camera’s view of the broccoli head].
“They’ve using a depth-sensing camera with the 3D piece in it to determine the size of that head. Because we don’t cut every head — we only cut the ones at the right size as demanded by the supermarkets… That then says ‘cut’ and that sends a signal to our on-board computer and then we actuate our patented mechanism that grabs the plant — which would be the same as a human grasping the plant stem — and then a very sharp knife flies in and cuts it in a fraction of a second. And then the plant is lifted away.”
The extra edible plant matter harvested in this way isn’t intended for supermarket shelves — where the stringent cosmetics standards grocery retailers typically apply to their suppliers is a major contributor to food waste by refusing to stock less than perfect looking fruit and veg — rather the idea is for it to be processed into a protein- and nutrient-rich ingredient for selling to the food industry.
Upp envisages the dried broccoli protein being used in a range of products — from sports-style protein drinks to pre-prepared meals and baked goods.
The bits of the broccoli it’s targeting for upcycling are 30% protein by dried weight, per the startup’s website, and also packed with nutrients (vitamin A, B, C, E, K, calcium, iron, potassium, phosphorous, zinc) — as well as being high in fiber.
Upp does not appear to have had any trouble getting early interest from the food industry for the upcycled edible plant-protein — with Whitewood noting it already has a trio of industry partnerships inked (he can’t yet name names but says one is a global “functional drinks” giant; another is a big UK food brand; and the third is a specialist confectionary bakery).
“They’ve very interested in the health aspects of broccoli,” he goes on. “They’re interested in the fact that it’s clean and sustainable… So they’re excited, shall we say. I don’t think we’ve got a problem with a market for it — once we’ve got it off the field.”
On the processing piece, Upp is working with experts at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee to figure out how best “to recover the fractions from that plant that makes it suitable for the food industry primarily”, per Whitewood.
Zooming out, Upp is developing what it bills as a specialist “circular plant protein” business against a backdrop of growing demand for alternative, plant-based proteins as the food industry looks for ways to shrink its reliance on animal-derived proteins in order to reduce its carbon footprint — with global pressure on farmers and food companies to hit climate targets.
Hence the startup is projecting that its AI-harvested broccoli protein could grow into a multi billion-dollar market in the coming years.
On the marketing side it claims an added environmental upside — suggesting broccoli protein is cleaner than pea protein (being 4x less carbon intensive to produce), while also arguing it avoids the deforestation problem that’s tainted the reputation of soya crops. So the pitch is this is an even greener plant protein.
One potential PR wrinkle is there will inevitably be some (human) worker displacement as a result of automating the harvesting of broccoli.
Whitewood says the system replaces about seven field workers — but he notes that “warm bodies” are still needed in the pack house to package the broccoli products for retail. “Seven hard to get people,” he adds, sketching a picture of the gruelling work field laborers typically have to do and arguing these aren’t the kind of jobs anyone is going to miss. “Nobody wants to do this work. Even in China and India they’re struggling to get people to do this… It’s the 21st century and we’re still expecting people to do this. It’s just crazy.”
While the 2022-founded startup’s tech has been developed to the concept stage it’s gearing up for the next stage — to hone a robust technology that can be commercially deployed — with a series of “field-to-protein” pilots planned this year in the U.K., Spain and California.
It’s expecting to start commercial production (and generate its first revenues) in late 2024 — projecting revenues will exceed £50 million in its three pilot markets in 2027.
The business was established last year as a spinout from another U.K. agtech business called Earth Rover — where Whitewood had been CEO before moving over to Upp as a co-founder when they decided to separate into two distinct businesses.
Today the startup is announcing a £500,000 pre-seed investment from Elbow Beach Capital, a decarbonisation, sustainability and social impact investor, to fund the field trials — ahead of planned commercial deployment later next year.
Whitewood says the first commercial use of the tech will likely be in Spain or the UK, owing to seasonality, before Upp moves on to pitching California’s broccoli growers on automated crop yield optimization.
Why hasn’t anyone done thought about extracting more of the good stuff from broccoli plants before? Whitewood says people have been thinking about the potential to do this for over a decade but he suggest it’s just “really hard” — given the selective harvesting required, as well as the need to separate out the harvested crop, with part (the broccoli crown) going to supermarkets (to be sold fresh) and the rest requiring additional processing.
“It sounds simple — a lot of people have tried and a lot of people have failed,” he suggests. “It’s only since you’ve got a specialist harvester that can handle all the bulk that suddenly you can start to deal with the rest of it. You need automation — and it needs big automation. Little robots aren’t going to deal with crops of this scale, this bulk… You need farm-sized machinery.”
Upp wants to add more broccoli to the plant-protein mix using big automation by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
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