
Brief: Vertical farming company Oishii opens solar-powered facility to grow ’20x’ more strawberries to meet market demand
The Amatelas Farm will increase production of Oishii’s popular Koyo Berry.
The Amatelas Farm will increase production of Oishii’s popular Koyo Berry.
Israeli startup Brevel has opened a facility with the capacity to produce hundreds of tons of neutral-tasting, highly-functional algae protein it claims will ultimately be able to compete with pea and soy protein.
“I’m proud to look back on the differences compared to the R&D project that it was six years earlier.”
Berlin, Germany-based hexafarms just raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding to bring its AI and sensor tech to indoor growers in Europe.
Asparagopsis is one of the most promising tools in the enteric methane reduction toolkit, but there are challenges to growing it at scale and establishing tools to deliver a return on investment for farmers, says FutureFeed.
Neatleaf’s CEO and co-founder talks ag robotics, scaling a hardware startup, and why it started in cannabis.
“In 2016, I spoke to a lot of investors that said, ‘Why would anybody produce casein in plants when you can easily do it via precision fermentation?’ The same people are now coming back and saying, ‘Actually what you’re doing makes a lot of sense,'” says Alpine Bio founder Magi Richani.
The Maia Farms & Ecoation growing system for mycelium and fresh produce can make 700kg of food a year in a device the size of a wardrobe.
Industrial-scale insect farming is not for the faint-hearted. So what business models make sense, and who is going to fund the next wave of facilities?
Funding into Australian agrifoodtech startups fell 33% last year according to AgFunder data… But it could have been worse: global agrifoodtech funding fell 49% over the same period.
We caught up with FYTO to talk duckweed and manure management: “Manure is a great input because we’re growing probably the fastest nitrogen consumer on the planet.”
“In the first six years, we had more failures than successes,” says insect ag pioneer Kees Aarts.
“We have a very clear strategy that will allow us to establish a brand based on our quality,” says Oishii co-founder Hiroki Koga.
“Our first farm was profitable within a few months of opening, so we realized we might be onto something big,” says Gotham Greens founder and CEO.
Financial troubles along with a downturn in venture capital and demand for specialty mushrooms are behind Smallhold’s recent filing.
Insect breeding and rearing/processing require very different skillsets, claims FreezeM, which supplies insect farmers with neonates in a state of ‘suspended animation.’
The capital injection will also help advance work to develop Cavendish bananas engineered to resist the devastating fungal disease Fusarium wilt.
Industrial-scale insect farming is not for the faint-hearted. So what business models make sense, and who is going to fund the next wave of facilities?
Funding in Novel Farming Systems—an AgFunder category spanning indoor farming, insect ag, aquaculture, and algae production—fell off a cliff last year.
Coastal shrimp farming comes with a laundry list of problems. So how do you design an alternate system that can eliminate externalities that threaten coastal systems (extreme weather, disease) and still make a margin?