Growing the best plants possible with technology and innovation

As even a casual reader of the news knows, our world faces some very daunting challenges. Our climate is changing rapidly, and much of the planet is heating up and drying out. We are witnessing unprecedented droughts, wildfires, and threats to our food supply, along with deadly global pandemics. All the while, our population is growing, creating further stresses on our already over-stressed ecosystems.

That’s all the bad news, of course, but that’s not the full story. The good news is that while the challenges we face aren’t easily solved, there are solutions that can change the direction we are on. Some of these solutions are driven by technology and some by human behavior. Others may be driven by marketplace dynamics and by policymakers. 

AeroFarms, is on a bold mission to grow the best plants possible for the betterment of humanity, and we feel we can do our part to have a positive impact on the world.

AeroFarms is an award-winning indoor vertical farming company and Certified B Corporation that is transforming agriculture with people and planet in mind. Using the latest breakthroughs in vertical farming, artificial intelligence, and plant biology, we are fixing our broken food system and improving the way fresh produce is grown and distributed locally and globally.

To that end, we have built a proprietary agriculture platform to grow a wide array of products, delivering superior flavor, better quality and improved nutrition with new levels of traceability and food safety in our industry. The unique way we grow indoors creates the perfect conditions for healthy plants to thrive, allowing us to deliver the highest quality to our customers all year round, while using up to 95 percent less water and up to 99 percent less land than conventional farming, along with zero pesticides.

Thinking differently about farming

To carry out our mission, we think differently about all farming — from seed to package — and then put technology and innovation to work to push agriculture forward by growing more with less. In this role, we’re both farmers and technologists, harvesting not just crops but also data-driven insights.

The science, technology and innovation that underpin our proprietary growing platform allows us to drive commercial-scale production as we scale around the world.  And even better, we’re producing extremely tasty food along the way. Our customers love our leafy greens, which consistently win on quality, taste, and texture.

Our customers also love our forward-looking approach to agriculture. They don’t just want to know what they’re buying, but they care about where their food is coming from, how it is produced, and what effect the food production process has on the environment. They want sustainably grown food with zero pesticides that is produced locally — which is exactly what we strive to offer with our AeroFarms-branded products.

The power of partnerships

At AeroFarms, we recognize the limits on what we alone can do. To accomplish great things, and change the world as we know it, we work closely with likeminded individuals and organizations. That’s the case with our involvement with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) and many others

FFAR is a unique public-private partnership that facilitates collaboration among diverse stakeholders to identify research opportunities that help farmers adapt to challenges such as extreme weather, diminishing natural resources, and a growing global demand for crops. FFAR advances actionable science to develop tools, technologies, and information that benefits farmers, consumers and the environment that sustains us all.

In partnership with FFAR, AeroFarms is leading groundbreaking work in plant science and technology, specifically around phenotyping — rapidly testing and determining which specific environmental stressors affect the vital phytonutrients and volatiles in plants to create the most delicious and nutritious produce.

This is the next generation of food production, and we are excited to continue to learn how to produce measurable changes in growth and development, plant physiology, and biochemistry, as well as to identify and isolate key chemotypes to be able to understand how to optimize for taste and nutrition, along with color and yield, in the next generation of seeds.

All of this work is based on a foundation of rigorous science, where millions of data points capture every aspect that goes into growing food from seed to harvest. We do it all with the help of cutting-edge technologies like spectral imaging and machine vision driven by systems for edge computing and artificial intelligence, which is one of the reasons that we partner with technology companies, including Dell Technologies.

We look to Dell Technologies for a wide range of IT infrastructure to power our data-driven operations, including edge computing devices, rugged tables, network gear, and backend machine learning systems. We also benefit from Dell Technologies expert IT consulting services. It takes partnerships like these for AeroFarms to accomplish the great things we do.

And that’s the bottom line. With the innovative use of technology and the power of partnerships, AeroFarms is helping to push the world of agriculture forward to a far more sustainable level — and toward our goal of doing more with less to have a lifetime of impact.

To learn more

To learn about AeroFarms’ current commercial work developing the world’s largest and most technologically advanced aeroponic indoor vertical farm in Danville, Virginia, see the announcement on our next-generation Model 5 farm. Or to learn about our state-of-the-art R&D farm in Abu Dhabi, UAE, see the announcement on AeroFarms AgX.  And to learn more about AeroFarms’ partnership with Dell Technologies, see the customer story “A harvest full of insights.”

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