Photo: Adobestock

This month I was asked to discuss how technology has improved my business and life and provide some tips for how you can better use technology to improve yours — even if it’s only small steps. I’d suspect that to most of you, technology feels like both a blessing and a curse at times. We’ve all had those moments, probably on a daily basis, when we’d like to throw whichever device isn’t working as promised out the window. I’m sure I’ve put on a few good technology temper tantrums for unlucky witnesses. Nevertheless, technology is the supporting structure of my business, and I can’t imagine working and growing without it.

Where do you fit?

As a technology user you may find yourself in one of the following common categories. Technophiles: You roll the dice as an early adopter (which essentially means you’re doing free beta testing for everyone else) and buy the latest tech when it’s released. Wait and See: You hang back a year or two and wait for us early adopters to work out the kinks for you, then dip your toes in. Cold, Dead Hands: You dig your heels in and hang on with white-knuckle force to the 15-year-old piece of software, equipment or website that you think is still working just fine for you. I’ll let you do some honest self-reflection about where you best fit.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each tech-user category, of course. As technology is a core part of my business, not just in how I use it for myself, but in how I help my clients grow, I tend to be a technophile/early adopter, and I push to try out new tech as early as it makes sense. Like it or not, to stay ahead in the marketplace, we must constantly learn how to use new tools.

Housekeeping

As a produce grower, you’re no doubt confronted with more emerging technology than you can keep track of. The boom in automation, hydroponics and grow lighting technology offers you many opportunities to take your operation to the next level. All that modern technology is great, but I often find that the technology companies in our industry can most quickly benefit from, is the technology that helps them get their house in order. Fundamental business tools that help you better organize your accounting, employees, and communications can reduce stress and improve productivity. Are you taking advantage of the technology tools that help you stay mobile, but simultaneously connected to your business operations?

The list of technology that helps me in my day-to-day business and life is a long one. But when I really started thinking about which tools help me the most, it’s hard to ignore the power of basics such as the combination of the internet and the smartphone. Building a website that is current, responsive, and puts your best business step forward is a non-negotiable these days — but the green industry is still lagging in this department. When it comes to business operations, I can run just about every aspect of my business online these days from my pocket-sized phone. Yet, in my dealings with industry members, I see a lot of untapped potential for using these tools to better manage and grow many aspects of their business. If you fall into the “wait and see” or “I’m still living in 1998” technology category, you may not be reaping the benefits of technology on the go.

Business on the go

While there are a lot of potential downsides to smartphones, they are powerful tools, and what they can do for you in your business is pretty amazing. Combine a smartphone with a few solid productivity and accounting apps and there’s little you can’t do directly from your phone. Email is of course tied to my phone, as are my personal and business banking apps; my business accounting and payroll platforms, my employee time clock, which links to payroll; and my project management software, through which I manage all my employees, contractors, and client project tasks (I use Asana, which I can tell you has been nothing less than a lifesaver). I can access all my business documents and files kept on cloud server platforms such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Asana — to name a few — and I can even work on and edit the files directly from my phone. I can run online meetings and webinars with apps such as GoToMeeting.

Stay connected

Not to mention, my phone serves as an excellent camera and video-capturing tool, which is essential for my work activities. I can stay connected to website activity and communications, and with a few targeted social media apps stay well-connected to my professional and personal networks. I even monitor and run my home irrigation system, which has wireless connectivity — and that of a few of my residential clients — directly from my phone, as I’m sure you can do with your environmental control systems. I even talk on it, now and then.  

I treat my website and my smartphone as high-powered tools that are integral to my business operations. I spend money to keep my website current, update to new software in real-time, and I regularly upgrade to newer devices and apps so I can stay as current as possible with my mobile business activities. The ROI is well worth the cost.

While it can be tough to keep pace with new technology tools, it’s necessary to at least try to keep up. Looking for a good starting place? Audit your internal company operations to see where you might be struggling with either client or employee communication issues or redundancies. Chances are, there’s an app for that.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, business and marketing strategy, product development and branding, and content creation for green industry companies. lesliehalleck.com

Photo: Adobestock

As technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) develop at a dizzying pace, the World Economic Forum claims the world is entering a “fourth industrial revolution.” Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, writes on the nonprofit’s site that this revolution “is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

Produce professionals at the forefront of greenhouse production and vertical farming technology realize this, and they seize the opportunity to utilize technological developments to garner investment, improve crop yields and maximize profits. Companies in the produce space offer technologies such as cameras and monitors that notify growers of pest and disease issues; robotic systems that sort, cut and label fruits and vegetables; and hydroponic channels that maximize space efficiency.

In this section, read about several innovative technologies and companies that are influencing the way the produce industry operates, beginning with a profile of indoor farm Plenty here. Next, read about vertical farms in the third part of the Urban Agriculture Series on here. Then read about how columnist Leslie F. Halleck uses technology in her life here. Additionally, you will find stories on automation in hydroponic systems (here), sensor technology (here), a smartphone app (here), produce labeling (here) and robotics (here).

The advancement over the past several decades of technological tools for controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has been nothing short of incredible. Techniques such as hydroponic growing have been around for much longer than that, but have become even more efficient and productive in recent years. In this issue, we’re honing in on several of these technological advancements, including vertical farms that allow growers to produce anywhere, automation that reduces labor needs, sensors that can tell you when a plant has pest, disease, water or nutrition issues, and much more.

Technology has also opened up the lines of communication with consumers. Growers can now reach potential customers directly via social media, email newsletters and their websites. However, growers must use these tools wisely. In contrast to 10 or 20 years ago, news of anything your company does or says — good or bad — can spread quickly online. For example, I recently received a newsletter from a produce company with a photo of a crop that didn’t look quite right. I don’t claim to be a plant specialist, but I do know a few, so I sent the newsletter off to a colleague. He confirmed that the pictured crop was suffering from either a nutritional disorder or perhaps a spider mite infestation; it was difficult to tell from the low-res photo alone, but there was certainly something wrong with it.

Now, as produce growing gurus, I’m sure you’re wondering, “How could they possibly allow a photo of an unhealthy plant to go out in a digital marketing campaign?” I thought about it, and surmised that the marketing person who created the email newsletter likely wasn’t a plant expert, either. As you continue to advance the technology within your greenhouse, be sure to also pay close attention to the technology that connects you with your customers outside the greenhouse, too.

Although these technologies can bring with them their own set of challenges, it’s an exciting time to be in the produce industry. Technological advancements have continued to develop and shift the way we think about what it means to be locally and sustainably grown, and how we connect with consumers. What new technology have you incorporated into your operation to make it more efficient and productive? What tools have helped you to communicate with consumers? What technology do you hope will become available in the future? Drop me a line at kvarga@gie.net and weigh in.

kvarga@gie.net | (216) 393-0290

Twitter: @Karen_GIE

When Plenty was founded in 2014 by CEO Matt Barnard and chief science officer Nate Storey, it was based on a core idea: Field agriculture was too unpredictable, and controlled environment, high-tech growing was a better way to supply quality food to a world that will need more of it in the years to come.

“There will be an increasing need, both for food in the world, as well as variability around the food supply,” Storey says. “We scaled up over the years. And as we’ve done that, the vision has of course not necessarily changed, but deepened, I would say, to include the idea that people don’t just need access to food, period, they need access to really good food.”

Plenty’s first farm — Storey calls it a container farm — was on the campus of a large technology company in San Francisco, and over time has grown to 100,000 square foot facilities. The business also evolved from its early days, when Barnard was using much of his own money to fund it and Storey splitting his time between his own startup — Bright Agrotech, based out of his previous home of Laramie, Wyoming — and Plenty, to receiving multimillion-dollar investments from investment groups that include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Masayoshi Son, the richest person in Japan with an estimated net worth of $23 billon, according to Forbes.

It was at this California-based tech company the heart of America’s currently booming tech industry, that Plenty found what worked and what didn’t in its system.

“[Starting there] basically give us time to learn, to understand the problems really clearly, and understand how indoor production can possibly solve the [problems] that we were identifying in the field,” Storey says.

How the system works

Plenty, which is currently based in San Francisco, is unlike most other vertical or container farms that grow plants on horizontally stacked shelves. Instead, Plenty uses tall poles to house the plants, which then grow out horizontally. Each pole is a few inches away from the next one, allowing crops to grow densely to the point where they essentially form a wall. The setup also allows excess heat from the lights to rise into the vented ceiling and excess water to drip down to the bottom of the plant towers and into a recyclable indoor stream, with space in front of the walls for workers to check on the plants’ health during the growing process. All of the water is then filtered and recycled back into the farm. As for harvesting, robots can handle at least part of it, but Plenty sees expertly trained human labor as a key part of its recipe.

Plenty, according to Storey, has benefited, and should continue to benefit, from the rapid evolution of growing technology.

“All of these things are dropping, precipitously, and it opens the doors for us to start leveraging that information, and those technologies, in ways that both drive costs out of our model, and make it feasible,” Storey says. “It’s true. A lot of folks who looked at this five, six years ago and said that that is not possible, they were right. It wasn’t possible that day. [It] wasn’t possible at that time, because the technology hadn’t evolved. No one — well, a few people predicted it — but very few people predicted the ways in which the economics of this business would change. And how fast it would change.”

What’s next?

The decreasing cost of technology also helps Plenty work towards another one of its goals: making its products more affordable.

“If our goal is just to produce a premium product we would be a much smaller business,” Storey says. “We would have to be content with being a smaller business. Our goal is, of course, to build a business that is global.”

A story published in Bloomberg indicated that Plenty has global ambitions and, with Son’s backing, has the financial means to expand. According to Bloomberg, Barnard has met with 15 governments on four different continents.

“It’s never going to replace the field by any means, but it’s going to become a really important part of our food production system,” Storey says. “[Our model] is stable, and it allows us to produce some of these high value horticultural products, closer and closer to people. And we just think that’s an important part of the experience, in a lot of different ways. In the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, I think we’re going to see our farms spring up all over the world. I think that people are going to be surprised at the diversity of crops that end up coming out of our farms.”

The diversity of crops is key to Plenty’s plans, which is why the company has a research and development division dedicated to developing genetics for its system because some seeds bred for field are not fit for any indoor growing system, much less one as advanced as Plenty’s. As that part of the business continues to develop, it allows the business to expand.

“We’re working both angles,” Storey says. “It’s important to us that we’re not just finding the appropriate environment for the crop. We want to grow, but we’re finding the appropriate crop and the appropriate environment. We’re kind of having this melding of both sides of the equation, and getting to the best possible place, as fast as possible.”