17 ms·

Plenty, Indoor Farming Startup, Raises $200M

157 points by stenlix 9y ago

Fricken 9y ago
SoftBank is on a rip, wow. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/timeline/index https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/t...
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  The country has negative interest rates. That money has to go to work somewhere.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ipsum2 9y ago
  SoftBank raised $100 billion (!!) for investment: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/20/softbank-vision-fund-first-close/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/20/softbank-vision-fund-first.... It's no wonder that SoftBank seems like it participates in many startup funding rounds. This seems like a bad idea - there are only so many good startups at any given moment to fund, so a lot of the money will go towards non-viable startups.
danblick 9y ago
I haven't heard of Plenty before. At first I thought they wanted to build indoor farms in cities, but I guess you could still build them someplace else (where real estate is fairly cheap) and make turnaround faster by taking advantage of indoor technology instead of using fields. [The articles mentions LocalGarden and FarmedHere, which I guess is where my impression came from.] Is that where they hope to make their money - getting consumers to pay for fresher food? Or else, can they grow better produce indoors? Just trying to understand their value proposition. Not long ago I was reading about a different thing called Farmbot. There's a discussion online about how much area you'd need to grow all your own food. They calculated something like 250 square meters using black beans. I was really impressed by how much space food production takes up. It's funny to think that just to survive, each of us living in a city depends on a big chunk of land somewhere else. https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot-grow/ https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot-grow...
- jv22222 9y ago
  A few things make this a good value prop: - It's much easier to grow plants inside because you don't have to worry about weird weather like frost or insects or fungus etc. - You can claim organic status and that puts you in a higher price bracket - You don't need to spend anywhere near as much on transportation so that saves you lots of cash - You can have much tighter control of supply/demand dynamics (for instance ship smaller batches) because of local proximity I'm sure there are more but those are the ones that spring to mind.
  - alexose 9y ago
    It's also possible to control a plant's life cycle, and harvest multiple times per year. On the other hand, it's rare that the economics favor artificial light. Until energy becomes truly cheap, farms are mostly better off with the big fusion reactor in the sky.
    - sand500 9y ago
      One advantage I heard is the lights in these vertical farms only emit the wavelengths plants absorb while solar panels absorb across all wavelengths
      - ajb 9y ago
        They try to make solar panels absorb across as broad a spectrum as possible, but they don't absorb everything by default. It's an ongoing research goal to add spectrum without increasing cost.
      - joshvm 9y ago
        Agriculture LEDs are designed to only emit 'growing' wavelengths. But the efficiency losses in converting sunlight to electricity via solar (20% typical) and from electricity to LED light (better, but not great) don't make it any better than growing in a glasshouse.
    - aninhumer 9y ago
zzmicier 9y ago
Farming startup that literally raises money is kinda fun.
- LogicX 9y ago
  Growing money on... leafy plants?
Osiris30 9y ago
See previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (1). As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens, but much harder for other plants. See this video [2] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)". A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead - correct link[3]). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw [3] https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787 https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787
- IkmoIkmo 9y ago
  This is absolutely crucial. I love indoor farming, I've built some hydroponics systems before, automated a bunch and spoke with my municipality about urban farming projects. But anyone who looks into it long enough finds that indoor-farming only works for leafy greens. Not because they're leafy greens, but because they're low-caloric plants. i.e. a whole head of lettuce is about 50 calories. No wonder you can grow it under artificial lighting in water. That works for a commercial solution: a (hyper) 'local' head of lettuce, produced without any pesticides, by turning a shop or office or otherwise urban environment into 'nature', is lovely and can (with some ignorance on the part of the customer) sell at a premium. But indoor farming still does nothing to impact our ecological footprint at any scale. Once you can produce our staple foods in a manner that's less energy intensive inside than outside, that'd be amazing. But I haven't ever seen anything like that proposed on a major scale.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    I don't think growing staples within cities will be economically viable within our lifetimes. As a general rule, agricultural land use orders itself around it's markets according to transportation. The more delicate the produce, the closer the producers must be to a city. There's even a (very simple, it's from the 19th century) model for this, which is the Von Thünen's model of land use. I wish I had some actual data easy at hand to show you, but this is more or less observable from history. Until active refrigeration, spoilage losses associated with the more delicate agricultural products pretty much put them outside of the reach of the majority of urban dwellers. If you wanted any sort of fresh dairy, fresh meat, fresh vegetables or fresh fruit in say, the early 19th century, you'd better live on a farm. So whereas a farmer might have had fresh milk, a city worker would have cheese, and instead of fresh meat, cured meat, and so on. But anyway, in short of the whole world becoming one huge city, it's unlikely that staples would ever be grown inside them.
patkai 9y ago
I am amazed and wish them luck, but it's almost impossible to imagine the economics of this. Whatever equation you write up there are at least two impossible factors: indoor land vs. outdoor "land" price is like 4000-10000 times higher, and growth time / logistics time is like 1000? I can imagine this in a fine restaurant though, picking a tomato in front of your eyes and chopping it, not too shabby!
- slfnflctd 9y ago
  As others here have pointed out, it undoubtedly only makes economic sense in a few niche scenarios right now. Premium hyper-local urban boutique veggies used in small quantities, or perhaps supplementing MREs in very remote, isolated military/industrial compounds (possibly including Mars?). However, if we were facing the specter of a global nuclear winter - or similar effects from a large asteroid impact, ground/water pollution, etc. - I think something would be worked out with regard to the 'cost of renting' large indoor spaces.
billyhoffman 9y ago
Since indoor farming is best for low caloric leafy greens, I assumed the long term strategy of these companies was based on the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. As in, grow leafy veggies or tomatoes in vertical, urban farms for now to work out the logistical and scale issues, then switch to substantially higher value crop as the political situation changes. Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  I can't believe I had to scroll all the way down here to find this comment. If true, then this is a variation of land banking, but I agree with you on how unstable the political picture is at the moment for pot legalization, hence making this business model a little dicey. However, I've yet to run across an explanation that squares the "they're positioning themselves for growing pot" hypothesis with the question, "why indoors?". If pot is legalized, why grow it more expensively indoors, when it can be another cash crop for far cheaper outdoors?
  - scardine 9y ago
    Because premium pot is "sinsemilla" (kept without seeds) in order to increase the psychoactive substance production. Sometimes pollination occurs even at indoor very controlled setups, good luck trying to grow sinsemilla in open field.
  - wcchandler 9y ago
    More control over the product. You can grow "clones" of a plant which effectively make them identical to each other but if one gets more light, more humidity, literally just about anything, it can alter the resulting trichomes and terpenes. By controlling more variables you can have a slightly more reliable product. And people can get very picky about their weed.
- ithinkinstereo 9y ago
  > Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride. I think it's too late for this to happen. As it turns out, people -- of all color, income, creed -- love weed and so culturally, it's become more and more acceptable.
jrapdx3 9y ago
The short article doesn't provide info about the technology to be used in "indoor farming", so I can't say too much about it. However based on past experience with growing crops under artificial light, I wonder if the investment makes sense. There are a number of issues that have to be addressed, the most urgent is providing enough light for plants to grow. Sunlight is very expensive to replicate with human-made light sources, the energy requirements are steep even with the most efficient illumination available. Indoor culture is still subject to "standard" problems like insects, plant diseases, nutrient and water supply requirements. These are handled routinely in growing "under glass" so probably nothing novel in it for indoor production. Except for human interplanetary travel, the applications for "indoor growing" are hard to imagine. It used to be people would grow cannabis indoors where doing so was illegal, the priced fetched for the product justified the expense of the operation. For food crops, who would pay the high cost that has to be charged just to break even? One year I successfully produced a small bounty of tomatoes in the dead of winter under artificial light. When all was done and said I calculated the 5cm tomatoes were worth about $25 each ($30 adjusted for inflation). Even with economies of scale and better technology, who would pay $10 or more for a mere tomato when it's readily available at a nearby grocery for a tenth the cost? If I'm somehow missing the boat, I'm sure someone will lend me a clue.
- thisone 9y ago
  What kind of light were you using? I currently use 5w LED grow lights for garden vegetable hydroponics. They are very cost effective. At about 12p/kwh, make it easy and say lights on for 10 hours a day, that would be 1 kwh every 20 days per light, so 12p per 20 days per light. From what I understand from people who need to also provide heat to their crops, what they save in electricity cost with LEDs, they end up spending in heating costs. So in some cases it can be a bit of a wash
  - jrapdx3 9y ago
    At the time I was using metal halide/HP sodium lamps. Not as efficient as LED to be sure (LED gives >1.5 times the output per watt) but at scale, even with LED, the energy input required remains substantial. LED does have advantages, e.g., easier to supply illumination at plant level, but indoor growing is still not a cheap or easy thing to accomplish.
cannonpr 9y ago
There was a question posted in the techcrunch comments section regarding Nitrogen fertiliser from natural gas being used heavily in vertical farms such as this. I understand thats the case for a lot of agriculture regardless. That having been the case, regardless of how 'green' these companies try to go, aren't they really just using fossil fuels en mass the same as everyone else ?
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  It's no different than shipping your product in plastic containers. Sure, there's a dead dinosaur somewhere up the supply chain but unless whatever your company's industrial process is is incredibly inefficient it's not a big deal.
  - schiffern 9y ago
    >Sure, there's [fossil fuels] somewhere up the supply chain but... it's not a big deal. It is if you want sustainable food production. An unsustainable system is by definition in the process of destroying itself. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to continue having food for generations to come.
avip 9y ago
There's no shortage in players in this space: Alterrus (built Vancouver's vertical farm, filed bankruptcy), infarm (Germany), aerofarms (US), growup (UK). There are lots of issues to settle with vertical farming. One is organic labelling, which is N/A for detached soil in most (all?) countries. They can't compete in the non-organic market. There's currently nothing "sustainable" or "ecologic" about these indoor farms. They are used to grow leisure low-calorie high price ingredients for hipsters.
- petra 9y ago
  Assuming they manage the convince a large player in the organic retail biz to play they can create some sort of a "label" and go from there. Not that big of an issue.
  - fredley 9y ago
    Big enough of an issue for everyone that's tried so far it seems.
  - avip 9y ago
    This is not how food labelling usually works. For the current state of hydroponics in the US: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to-weigh-in-on-whether-organic-farming-means-using-soil/#60724cf046be https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to-we...
    - exhilaration 9y ago
      The article says the USDA would make a decision on April 19th of this year but I can't find what that decision was. Do you know?
- gjem97 9y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering about the organic labelling. Also about the claim that there are "no pesticides or chemicals of any kind used in the cultivation of Plenty’s crops". Presumably they have to add nutrients to the water?
builtinbuffalo 9y ago
This smells like a long play on cannabis. As it becomes further legalized across the country the demand will grow for suppliers.
Jabanga 9y ago
Indoor farms makes sense to me as a dual-use house plant, i.e. if I'm going to have house plants, they may as well be edible.
justinzollars 9y ago
Their idea is very cool. their logo looks like a toilet paper brand.
inspctr_reality 9y ago
This round is likely to be a combination of equity, debt and non-dilutive capital like project finance -- and it is not the first 9-figure deal in indoor ag, just the first made public this way. Indoor ag is growing quickly and investor appetites are up. I am co-founder of a venture-backed indoor ag company. Here is a good summary of the "on the ground" view authored from the woman who runs Indoor Ag Con where Plenty presented a couple months ago: https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor-ag.html https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor-ag.html The calorie problem is true. You can't feed the world on leafy greens. Many startups are trying to combine aquaponics to provide protein with leafy greens. Those startups are not as far along as Plenty. Cannabis is great but the cost and price are both on an almost inevitable path to commodification. It's high-value now but it will not always be high value. Insects may be the greatest area for advancement in indoor ag. Insects can be used for protein, vitamins and nutrients and calories from fat concentrations. The real advantage is something analogous to alternative energy's advantages: distributed infrastructure with lower risk and lower volatility.

157 points by stenlix 9y ago

SoftBank is on a rip, wow. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/timeline/index https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/t...

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
The country has negative interest rates. That money has to go to work somewhere.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ipsum2 9y ago
SoftBank raised $100 billion (!!) for investment: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/20/softbank-vision-fund-first-close/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/20/softbank-vision-fund-first.... It's no wonder that SoftBank seems like it participates in many startup funding rounds. This seems like a bad idea - there are only so many good startups at any given moment to fund, so a lot of the money will go towards non-viable startups.

danblick 9y ago

I haven't heard of Plenty before. At first I thought they wanted to build indoor farms in cities, but I guess you could still build them someplace else (where real estate is fairly cheap) and make turnaround faster by taking advantage of indoor technology instead of using fields. [The articles mentions LocalGarden and FarmedHere, which I guess is where my impression came from.] Is that where they hope to make their money - getting consumers to pay for fresher food? Or else, can they grow better produce indoors? Just trying to understand their value proposition. Not long ago I was reading about a different thing called Farmbot. There's a discussion online about how much area you'd need to grow all your own food. They calculated something like 250 square meters using black beans. I was really impressed by how much space food production takes up. It's funny to think that just to survive, each of us living in a city depends on a big chunk of land somewhere else. https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot-grow/ https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot-grow...

jv22222 9y ago
A few things make this a good value prop: - It's much easier to grow plants inside because you don't have to worry about weird weather like frost or insects or fungus etc. - You can claim organic status and that puts you in a higher price bracket - You don't need to spend anywhere near as much on transportation so that saves you lots of cash - You can have much tighter control of supply/demand dynamics (for instance ship smaller batches) because of local proximity I'm sure there are more but those are the ones that spring to mind.
- alexose 9y ago
  It's also possible to control a plant's life cycle, and harvest multiple times per year. On the other hand, it's rare that the economics favor artificial light. Until energy becomes truly cheap, farms are mostly better off with the big fusion reactor in the sky.
  - sand500 9y ago
    One advantage I heard is the lights in these vertical farms only emit the wavelengths plants absorb while solar panels absorb across all wavelengths
    - ajb 9y ago
      They try to make solar panels absorb across as broad a spectrum as possible, but they don't absorb everything by default. It's an ongoing research goal to add spectrum without increasing cost.
    - joshvm 9y ago
      Agriculture LEDs are designed to only emit 'growing' wavelengths. But the efficiency losses in converting sunlight to electricity via solar (20% typical) and from electricity to LED light (better, but not great) don't make it any better than growing in a glasshouse.
  - aninhumer 9y ago

zzmicier 9y ago

Farming startup that literally raises money is kinda fun.

LogicX 9y ago
Growing money on... leafy plants?

Osiris30 9y ago

See previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (1). As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens, but much harder for other plants. See this video [2] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)". A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead - correct link[3]). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw [3] https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787 https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787

IkmoIkmo 9y ago
This is absolutely crucial. I love indoor farming, I've built some hydroponics systems before, automated a bunch and spoke with my municipality about urban farming projects. But anyone who looks into it long enough finds that indoor-farming only works for leafy greens. Not because they're leafy greens, but because they're low-caloric plants. i.e. a whole head of lettuce is about 50 calories. No wonder you can grow it under artificial lighting in water. That works for a commercial solution: a (hyper) 'local' head of lettuce, produced without any pesticides, by turning a shop or office or otherwise urban environment into 'nature', is lovely and can (with some ignorance on the part of the customer) sell at a premium. But indoor farming still does nothing to impact our ecological footprint at any scale. Once you can produce our staple foods in a manner that's less energy intensive inside than outside, that'd be amazing. But I haven't ever seen anything like that proposed on a major scale.
- tpeo 9y ago
  I don't think growing staples within cities will be economically viable within our lifetimes. As a general rule, agricultural land use orders itself around it's markets according to transportation. The more delicate the produce, the closer the producers must be to a city. There's even a (very simple, it's from the 19th century) model for this, which is the Von Thünen's model of land use. I wish I had some actual data easy at hand to show you, but this is more or less observable from history. Until active refrigeration, spoilage losses associated with the more delicate agricultural products pretty much put them outside of the reach of the majority of urban dwellers. If you wanted any sort of fresh dairy, fresh meat, fresh vegetables or fresh fruit in say, the early 19th century, you'd better live on a farm. So whereas a farmer might have had fresh milk, a city worker would have cheese, and instead of fresh meat, cured meat, and so on. But anyway, in short of the whole world becoming one huge city, it's unlikely that staples would ever be grown inside them.

patkai 9y ago

I am amazed and wish them luck, but it's almost impossible to imagine the economics of this. Whatever equation you write up there are at least two impossible factors: indoor land vs. outdoor "land" price is like 4000-10000 times higher, and growth time / logistics time is like 1000? I can imagine this in a fine restaurant though, picking a tomato in front of your eyes and chopping it, not too shabby!

slfnflctd 9y ago
As others here have pointed out, it undoubtedly only makes economic sense in a few niche scenarios right now. Premium hyper-local urban boutique veggies used in small quantities, or perhaps supplementing MREs in very remote, isolated military/industrial compounds (possibly including Mars?). However, if we were facing the specter of a global nuclear winter - or similar effects from a large asteroid impact, ground/water pollution, etc. - I think something would be worked out with regard to the 'cost of renting' large indoor spaces.

billyhoffman 9y ago

Since indoor farming is best for low caloric leafy greens, I assumed the long term strategy of these companies was based on the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. As in, grow leafy veggies or tomatoes in vertical, urban farms for now to work out the logistical and scale issues, then switch to substantially higher value crop as the political situation changes. Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride.

yourapostasy 9y ago
I can't believe I had to scroll all the way down here to find this comment. If true, then this is a variation of land banking, but I agree with you on how unstable the political picture is at the moment for pot legalization, hence making this business model a little dicey. However, I've yet to run across an explanation that squares the "they're positioning themselves for growing pot" hypothesis with the question, "why indoors?". If pot is legalized, why grow it more expensively indoors, when it can be another cash crop for far cheaper outdoors?
- scardine 9y ago
  Because premium pot is "sinsemilla" (kept without seeds) in order to increase the psychoactive substance production. Sometimes pollination occurs even at indoor very controlled setups, good luck trying to grow sinsemilla in open field.
- wcchandler 9y ago
  More control over the product. You can grow "clones" of a plant which effectively make them identical to each other but if one gets more light, more humidity, literally just about anything, it can alter the resulting trichomes and terpenes. By controlling more variables you can have a slightly more reliable product. And people can get very picky about their weed.
ithinkinstereo 9y ago
> Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride. I think it's too late for this to happen. As it turns out, people -- of all color, income, creed -- love weed and so culturally, it's become more and more acceptable.

jrapdx3 9y ago

The short article doesn't provide info about the technology to be used in "indoor farming", so I can't say too much about it. However based on past experience with growing crops under artificial light, I wonder if the investment makes sense. There are a number of issues that have to be addressed, the most urgent is providing enough light for plants to grow. Sunlight is very expensive to replicate with human-made light sources, the energy requirements are steep even with the most efficient illumination available. Indoor culture is still subject to "standard" problems like insects, plant diseases, nutrient and water supply requirements. These are handled routinely in growing "under glass" so probably nothing novel in it for indoor production. Except for human interplanetary travel, the applications for "indoor growing" are hard to imagine. It used to be people would grow cannabis indoors where doing so was illegal, the priced fetched for the product justified the expense of the operation. For food crops, who would pay the high cost that has to be charged just to break even? One year I successfully produced a small bounty of tomatoes in the dead of winter under artificial light. When all was done and said I calculated the 5cm tomatoes were worth about $25 each ($30 adjusted for inflation). Even with economies of scale and better technology, who would pay $10 or more for a mere tomato when it's readily available at a nearby grocery for a tenth the cost? If I'm somehow missing the boat, I'm sure someone will lend me a clue.

thisone 9y ago
What kind of light were you using? I currently use 5w LED grow lights for garden vegetable hydroponics. They are very cost effective. At about 12p/kwh, make it easy and say lights on for 10 hours a day, that would be 1 kwh every 20 days per light, so 12p per 20 days per light. From what I understand from people who need to also provide heat to their crops, what they save in electricity cost with LEDs, they end up spending in heating costs. So in some cases it can be a bit of a wash
- jrapdx3 9y ago
  At the time I was using metal halide/HP sodium lamps. Not as efficient as LED to be sure (LED gives >1.5 times the output per watt) but at scale, even with LED, the energy input required remains substantial. LED does have advantages, e.g., easier to supply illumination at plant level, but indoor growing is still not a cheap or easy thing to accomplish.

cannonpr 9y ago

There was a question posted in the techcrunch comments section regarding Nitrogen fertiliser from natural gas being used heavily in vertical farms such as this. I understand thats the case for a lot of agriculture regardless. That having been the case, regardless of how 'green' these companies try to go, aren't they really just using fossil fuels en mass the same as everyone else ?

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
It's no different than shipping your product in plastic containers. Sure, there's a dead dinosaur somewhere up the supply chain but unless whatever your company's industrial process is is incredibly inefficient it's not a big deal.
- schiffern 9y ago
  >Sure, there's [fossil fuels] somewhere up the supply chain but... it's not a big deal. It is if you want sustainable food production. An unsustainable system is by definition in the process of destroying itself. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to continue having food for generations to come.

avip 9y ago

There's no shortage in players in this space: Alterrus (built Vancouver's vertical farm, filed bankruptcy), infarm (Germany), aerofarms (US), growup (UK). There are lots of issues to settle with vertical farming. One is organic labelling, which is N/A for detached soil in most (all?) countries. They can't compete in the non-organic market. There's currently nothing "sustainable" or "ecologic" about these indoor farms. They are used to grow leisure low-calorie high price ingredients for hipsters.

petra 9y ago
Assuming they manage the convince a large player in the organic retail biz to play they can create some sort of a "label" and go from there. Not that big of an issue.
- fredley 9y ago
  Big enough of an issue for everyone that's tried so far it seems.
- avip 9y ago
  This is not how food labelling usually works. For the current state of hydroponics in the US: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to-weigh-in-on-whether-organic-farming-means-using-soil/#60724cf046be https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to-we...
  - exhilaration 9y ago
    The article says the USDA would make a decision on April 19th of this year but I can't find what that decision was. Do you know?
gjem97 9y ago
Yeah, I was wondering about the organic labelling. Also about the claim that there are "no pesticides or chemicals of any kind used in the cultivation of Plenty’s crops". Presumably they have to add nutrients to the water?

builtinbuffalo 9y ago

This smells like a long play on cannabis. As it becomes further legalized across the country the demand will grow for suppliers.

Jabanga 9y ago

Indoor farms makes sense to me as a dual-use house plant, i.e. if I'm going to have house plants, they may as well be edible.

justinzollars 9y ago

Their idea is very cool. their logo looks like a toilet paper brand.

inspctr_reality 9y ago

This round is likely to be a combination of equity, debt and non-dilutive capital like project finance -- and it is not the first 9-figure deal in indoor ag, just the first made public this way. Indoor ag is growing quickly and investor appetites are up. I am co-founder of a venture-backed indoor ag company. Here is a good summary of the "on the ground" view authored from the woman who runs Indoor Ag Con where Plenty presented a couple months ago: https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor-ag.html https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor-ag.html The calorie problem is true. You can't feed the world on leafy greens. Many startups are trying to combine aquaponics to provide protein with leafy greens. Those startups are not as far along as Plenty. Cannabis is great but the cost and price are both on an almost inevitable path to commodification. It's high-value now but it will not always be high value. Insects may be the greatest area for advancement in indoor ag. Insects can be used for protein, vitamins and nutrients and calories from fat concentrations. The real advantage is something analogous to alternative energy's advantages: distributed infrastructure with lower risk and lower volatility.