With the abundance of clean energy fast approaching on the horizon, we at Excel Air Systems believe vertical farming will grow into a major contributor to urban food production over the next 20 years.

Benefits of Indoor Vertical Farming

• Grow reliably year around

• Smart growing capabilities unlocking incredible value

• Massively reduced water consumption

• Dramatically reduced land requirements

• Improved transportation footprint

Who

Going forward, we believe food production will affect every urban city. As we continue to push our standard of living higher, the expectation of fresh and healthy foods continues its ascent. When this demand is combined with increasingly long global transit times to bring together foods from all different locations and supply uncertainty due to changing weather patterns, it becomes clear that this is a problem worth solving.

What

Although technically it’s possible to recreate any environment and grow virtually any food there are obvious limitations when it comes to power, space and cost. Currently, there are a handful of efficient crops that are economically feasible with today’s available technology. These crops are currently, almost all varieties of microgreens, leafy greens, strawberries and tomatoes. There are dozens of crops on the verge of breakthroughs either through experimentation or genetically altered for vertical farming.

Where

The uniqueness of vertical farming today is it can be grown anywhere on planet earth. When you consider the consistent cost decline in renewable energies such as solar, wind and hydro coupled with rapid technological breakthroughs in battery storage and LEDs the opportunities are endless. Predominantly grid-connected warehouses that allow for tremendous scaling make the most sense from an overall cost efficiency point, almost all options are on the table.

When

We look at this horizon over the next decade or two but as of today, there are many companies that have built compelling businesses today selling into higher-end boutique grocery stores with many more starting to penetrate mid-market big-box grocers or direct to consumer.

Why

Food production has been and will always be a growing concern from several aspects such as; access to fresh and healthy foods as many nations continue to improve their standard of living, food independence as individual nations as we’ve seen supply chains be massively disrupted and unreliable, supplemental offerings to take some of the stress off the system while improving efficiency inputs through the entire ecosystem.

Challenges

There are many, the biggest two being energy consumption and capital expenditures. Compared to using the sun for free unlimited energy, powering LEDs and HVACD can be expensive in comparison. But where a sealed room can make up some of this lost efficiency is with data and consistency by means of maintaining perfect conditions to maximize yields and plant health 24 hours per day, allowing for meaningful gains in production.

Urban real estate can be massively more expensive compared to large plots of agricultural land but you need to consider the geographical proximity to the urban area and if you can count on Mother Nature to provide the ideal climate for 20+ years in the future which has proven to be very unreliable. One could argue that any building in a city centre would continue to gain value while a lot of farmland would need to be repurposed numerous times over the same horizon leading to a potential loss in value. This is just the beginning but when you start to itemize the most valuable attributes of our food supply, overwhelmingly access and reliability become more important than cost.

If we can solve at the high-end then like any technology it will start a trickle-down effect over time that then starts to feed the masses. When we look at the cost curves over these longer-term horizons we see technology costs dropping while food costs rise so the question really becomes in what year do we have cost parity with traditional farming? Consider the benefits.

Consistency

The single biggest issue for any producer is consistent yields on which the entire business model is based on. Utilizing technology allows us to provide ideal conditions 24 hours per day ensuring a known growth rate that can be replicated time and time again. This allows for the entire sales cycle from transport to stocked shelves to plan accordingly.

Quality

Providing perfect conditions to any living organism allows it to thrive and with it, the quality will maintain at its highest level. A high-quality fruit or vegetable will have a longer shelf life and provide the highest possible nutritional content.

Efficiency

As you maintain a consistent, high-quality plant the closed-loop allows for major efficiency gains. The efficiency of water is a major benefit where the freshwater fed can later be reclaimed in the form of transpiration/condensation and reused over and over again. Additional efficiencies such as plant density, power efficiencies and many other metrics can be continually pushed forward.

Access

Many crops are not available globally due to transit cost and/or seasonable availability. In sealed vertical farming you can grow any crop at any time. As this technology continues down the cost curve it will also bring the inclusion of fresh produce anywhere on planet earth or beyond regardless of wealth, culture or geography. Lastly, having urban farms in amongst the largest cities in the world will allow for on-demand, direct-to-consumer, magical experiences.

Genetic upgrades

As genomic sequencing continues to make incredible strides it allows us to better understand the inner workings of life. With these newly honed skills, we can purposefully create plants that are better suited for dense, vertical farming, increasing yields per cubic foot or even capturing more CO2. The standard life cycle in sealed environments can also be up to 20X faster meaning a lot more cycles can be grown and evolve much faster.

Data-Driven

With many more growth cycles than traditional farming, we can collect vast amounts of data allowing us to better understand each variety independently. Once we have these large data sets we can make tweaks to improve nutrient uptake, plant health, growth rate and even deep diving into the production of specific nutrients within each crop.

Versatility

Where some farms can take years or even decades to yield their best crops it means they can’t shift with demand very efficiently. With vertical farming a complete crop change can take place virtually on-demand providing elasticity in the food chain, removing unwanted massive priceswings that typically come with droughts, floods or many other natural or manmade issues.

Scalability

Vertical farming by nature is designed to utilize the 3D world vs. the traditional 2D flatness of agricultural land. With this exponential use, space unlocks incredible scalability not only by form factor but also in processes. This process will leave more land to be farmed as well or just be left as is; beautiful untouched earth.

How Can we Help?

Excel Air Systems has tremendous experience in sealed rooms for mission critical environments. We have continually designed and manufacture next generation environmental control systems for over 15 years. We’ve designed all types of growing facilities from micro chambers to GW facilities.

We have thoughtfully curated new products beyond our flagship Evolution Series A/C and Mass Dehumidification units in our lineup such as Fabric Ducts solutions for even airflow dispersion, the UV Air Purifier for treatment of molds, mildews and other pathogens, the CleanAir Filtration System to remove harsh smells and particulate in the air and our new CloudMaker Humidification System to maintain precision RH. All these products are designed to work together and push the limits of what is possible in a sealed environment.

Our dedicated staff believes strongly in education and providing answers to questions. We want your idea and business to not only be successful but thrive and set the new bar for other companies in the future, with the ability to design for a specific crop or a enact a flexible modular design.

3D design vs. 2D Design

For vertical farming to make the breakthroughs required for full scale adoption we need to become exponentially more efficient with space. Where traditional farming is very much seen as a 2D layout with fast farmlands stretching for millions of hectares with little care for it’s vertical requirements, indoor farms are the exact opposite. These next generation farms will need to use extremely small footprints of land but scale vertically to utilize as much volumetric space as possible. This requires the planner to think in 3D or m3 vs. m2. Utilizing space in this way brings with it many unique challenges when it comes to infrastructure, airflow design and efficiency of space. Excel Air Systems has tremendous knowledge on how to avoid major pitfalls while pushing your cubic efficiency to the limit of which will generally come down to the project being economically viable or not.

Curves vs. Peaks & Valleys

When we think about control environments we believe that precision is everything without understanding the ramifications. When we see growing plants become bigger and transpire at higher rates through their life cycle most often temperature and humidity are the key metrics to a successful crop. As relative humidity is a by product of not only what is happening at the plant level but directly correlated with temperature we can see fairly large swings occur from day to night and over a life cycle of the plant. This is where we see Peaks & Valleys on a data graph.

Frequently we see massive oversizing to eliminate downside risk to temperature at any point in the plant cycle as well as the time of year that can impact load capacities such as warming outdoor temperatures during the summer. The challenge to oversizing is you can have very short run cycles that will not extract optimal moisture as the system doesn’t run long enough to hit it’s full stride, additionally it’s more taxing on a system to constantly turn on and off and ultimately you can get large swings up and down in both temperature and humidity.

On top of all this you will also require a lot more investment in additional capacity you may never need including additional power infrastructure dedicated to this gear and finally this will more often than not be much less power efficiency than a system that continuously runs. To smooth or roll these data lines many engineers will add additional dehumidification equipment to fight these effects that once again compound the problem requiring more infrastructure and adding more heat to the space. The reasonable solution is to roll these data points by implementing small tweaks such as sunrise/sunset in their scheduling of lights along with several different setpoints going into day/night cycles along with sizing your gear appropriately eliminating many of these compounding effects previously described.

Although the general control may not be pinned much tighter than a few degrees in temperature and +/-5% humidity these effects will be welcomed by most crops slowing rolling in about out of it’s setpoint in a very natural cadence. Gradual oscillation and simplification will dramatically improve plant health along with a much clearer path to everyday operations in your facility.

Bigger Than Our Planet

Requirements for growing off Earth;

• Completely artificial habitats (lighting, temperature, nutrients)

• Space efficiency (The cost of weight to orbit and physical space is astronomical)

• Crop specific to the mission
  (Growing crops that can not only survive but provide astronauts with specific vitamins to thrive, pushing plant genomics to the limits)

• 100%* recyclability (*as close as possible such as water, soil, nutrients, power)

• Versatility (modular capabilities to change/update on demand)

• Microgravity (how will it effect air, nutrients, layout utilization)

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