Startups are working on the automatic farm

It smells slightly sweet of earth and plants. Bouquets of Moroccan mint are lined up on a shelf in an industrial building on the outskirts of Amsterdam. According to the company PlantLab, it runs what is known as the largest vertical farm in Europe. “I prefer the American word for ‘indoor farming’,” says Eelco Ockers, the managing director of the company, which was founded in 2010. “They call it ‘controlled environment agriculture’.” That means farming in a controlled environment.

No organic label without sun

The most important product for PlantLab is the iceberg lettuce. This is grown, harvested, cut and sold in plastic bags. The most important customers currently include Picnic, a Dutch online supermarket that has a distribution center right next door, and a wholesaler that supplies restaurant chains.

In terms of price, PlantLab positions its products in the range of normal convenience salads. On a tour, Ockers says they can’t carry the organic label because the vegetables grow without the sun. His company does not use pesticides and uses 95 percent less water than traditional manufacturers.

Even without the label, Ockers considers the quality of its products to be superior and would therefore like to sell them at the higher organic prices in the medium term. He calls the brand he uses for his salads Plant Paradise. In contrast to traditional vegetable farmers, he can optimize all parameters outdoors or in greenhouses. It is never too dry, never too wet, never too windy, never too sunny for the plants in the production units.

These are each 25 meters long and 10 meters wide and spread over two floors. Around 8,000 of a possible 15,000 square meters are currently in use.

Full automation as a goal

Ockers opens the door of one of these units, which are also built identically at the other company locations. At the push of a button, it automatically rolls up like a garage door. The room is lined with crispita lettuce, the youngest plants at one end, almost ready for harvest at the far end.

The seeds planted by a machine are pushed into trays on one side. They then float on a nutrient-rich substrate and grow until they are ready for harvest after 16 days. So PlantLab can harvest this lettuce up to 23 times a year.

The violet-colored light is particularly eye-catching. In it, the green plants look as if they were black. Ockers is particularly proud of the lamps. Like most of the technology, his company developed it itself.

A test operation has been running on the upper floor since July, in which production and harvest are to be fully automated. That is not the case yet. Although Ockers says his salads all look identical, four men are busy in a refrigerated room on the ground floor, listening to loud music, searching green lettuce leaves in a large container for stems that are too long.

Uncompetitive for tomatoes and cucumbers

In total, PlantLab employs 120 people and is not yet profitable. That has to do with the extensive investments, says Ockers. Although the lettuce is sold at a profit, the volume sold is still rather low. The more automated production line is intended to reduce costs. Tomatoes and cucumbers can also be produced, but in both cases the market prices are so low that they cannot be produced profitably.

It also doesn’t help that energy costs have risen so much. One is hardly dependent on natural gas, like the Dutch farmers who grow their tomatoes in greenhouses. The company needs a lot of electricity for this. The costs are currently hurting, says Ockers. He will therefore have to raise the prices.

Vertical farming is like a decathlon for startups

This shows that vertical farming is an extremely complex undertaking. If you want to master it, you have to excel in many disciplines. It’s somewhat similar to a startup decathlon.

The disciplines include biology (optimizing plant growth), physics (creating light and atmosphere and keeping it constant), automation (sowing, tending and harvesting mechanically), business administration (manufacturing products with a competitive cost structure) and marketing (convincing the consumer of vegetables that never been in the sun).

Secret project of a married couple

The Dutch entrepreneur couple Gertjan and Lianne Meeuws have also been trying their hand at this “sport” for some time. They married in 1986 and founded their first company three years later. Today they run the company “Seven Steps To Heaven” in Eindhoven.

“After seventeen years of investing and making silly mistakes, we are ready to apply vertical farming everywhere,” says Gertjan Meeuws. However, the greatest challenge was not the mistakes themselves, but surviving them, learning from them and applying the lessons learned.

However, there is little to see when visiting Eindhoven. The experimental laboratory is empty, the plants have been cleared away. In the offices on the top floor of a former factory building belonging to the Dutch group Philips, not a single employee can be seen far and wide. Only plans hang on the walls, but Gertjan and Lianne Meeuws do not want to comment on them.

Your 80-person team is currently working in a secret location developing and installing the prototype for a large vertical farm. The Meeuws are convinced that they have found the right recipe, the optimal interaction of all disciplines to launch marketable products.

But they don’t want to reveal too much about that just yet.

Only produce for the local population

For this, the two describe what the optimal vertical farm looks like for them. This must cover at least 50,000 square meters. That would enable her to provide 80,000 people with 200 grams of vegetables, fruit and herbs every day. Their concept envisages that these plants will not produce for export, but only for the local population.

The factory would be housed in a warehouse maybe 20 meters high. Because for the Meeuws it is crucial that the cultivation areas are stacked on top of each other in 10 to 15 floors. This reduces the required floor space. The height and number of floors are also related to the costs, which vary depending on the lifts and transport systems required.

The cost calculation is crucial. Therefore, a system should be automated as much as possible. While this is now possible to a large extent for leafy vegetables such as salads, tomatoes, for example, still have to be picked by hand. But these processes are also facing increased robotization.

The yield per square meter and per layer in such a vertical farm is two to five times higher than in the best Dutch greenhouses. And the yield is expected to increase further in the coming years by using plants with genetic material optimized for cultivation under controlled conditions. “It has nothing to do with genetically modified organisms,” says Gertjan Meeuws, “that can be achieved with traditional breeding.”

Ultimately, the Meeuws couple want to take the already fairly efficient Dutch farming industry to a whole new level. His vision is that food for many people will be produced in a controlled environment using less water. Solar systems, for example, are supposed to supply the energy for this.

Feed more people in less space

By stacking the areas on top of each other and the overall lower space requirement, land should also be freed up for trees for climate protection. Instead of taking land away from nature for the benefit of mankind, the couple would like to give agricultural land back to nature.

“Vertical farming is an attractive solution to one day feeding ten billion people in the world without additional agricultural land and at the same time planting more forests for climate protection,” says Gertjan Meeuws.

Because vertical farming is now not only affordable, but also efficient in terms of energy consumption. It takes around six kilowatt hours of electricity to produce one kilogram of food in such a system. If it is right next to the distribution center of a supermarket chain and there is no need to transport it from the farm, the energy balance is quite acceptable, says Lianne Meeuws.

In addition, retailers and farms currently communicate little with each other. But if they worked together and the retail trade set precise specifications for production, the waste of fresh food could be reduced.

Common Roots

“We built an interior with these characteristics,” say the Meeuws. “It’s there, it’s huge, and it works.” But the two only want to present the farm when it is so robust that it can be used for many copies. Building a facility is easy. But if they serve as a template, every detail has to be perfect. They hope that the project will be completed in a year.

It remains to be seen whether the couple, who describe themselves as “crazy”, can realize their vision. There are still some challenges for PlantLab as well.

But that’s not the only thing that connects the two Dutch projects. They have common roots. Gertjan Meeuws was involved in the founding of PlantLab and was its Managing Director. But because of different ideas about the future of the project, the founders parted ways in 2014.

Switzerland as an interesting market

If PlantLab is successful, the company may one day come to Switzerland. “Switzerland is interesting,” says Ockers. “Prices are high and a lot of fresh vegetables are imported, including from the Netherlands. This is a good prerequisite for being successful with a vertical farm.» For example, PlantLab expanded into the Bahamas because all the vegetables there are imported, says Ockers.

Factors such as electricity prices, real estate costs and wage levels are also important. He could imagine a partnership with Migros and Coop.

So, while farmers in the Netherlands are currently fighting back against government plans to cut nitrogen emissions, startups in the Netherlands are already grappling with the next farming revolution.

His wife comes from a farming family, says Ockers. At first, people around her asked, slightly disconcerted, what exactly vertical farming was supposed to be. But now they are quite interested. He believes that traditional and new agriculture will be able to coexist.