Wow, what a ride!
2009
Thanks to Simon the four of us, Ashley, Mick, Nick and John first get together - passionate about making a business out of designing and selling technology so that anybody can profitably grow really high-quality food anywhere in the world. “That should be easy, its only an engineering challenge, 2-3 years should see it done and dusted!!” we said.
So we set-off and built the SR series - a ferris wheel type system that took plants down to the water and then drip, drip, dripped their way up and around in the air all in the name of saving floor space.
2010
After 6 months of seeing how hard it really is to power LED lights while they go around in circles being dripped on, we moved on!
“Just put racks in a shipping container and they can go anywhere” we said, brilliant!! (Remember in 2010 this was truly ground-breaking stuff!!) So we did the CT Series – and it worked – mostly.
The big part of vertical farming so easily forgotten is not the glory and spectacle of all those lovely grow racks stacked up with LED lights, but the amazing amount of room you need to plant and harvest, then sort and pack all of the crop.
Then there is the cleaning – so much cleaning - and dumping of grow media and plant roots.
2011
A container full of plants is one thing – but when all the area for processing each little harvest is added in, suddenly the capital cost and the labour costs of doing everything manually inside a shipping container so that insects and weather don’t get in… it turns into a great idea for a not for-profit business!
2012
“So it has to be a warehouse, it’s so obvious!” we said. Well that has to be much easier – just big racks with lots of trays and LED lights right?. We called it the XT Series, designed it and put it in the middle of a rented warehouse, we just need to get some scissorlifts. a forklift and a few workers – and the profits will surely follow, what could go wrong?!!
2013
Short answer - lots of things! So many people were needed just to do one harvest - people on scissorlifts, people harvesting, washing trays, unloading old grow medium, reloading new grow medium, seeding, watering – and I did mention the cleaning, right? – it never stopped. The wages bill was higher than what we could sell the crop for.
And then there was the unstoppable magic of physics – hot air rises – any vertical growing rack loaded up with 50% efficient LED lights on every level will generate lots of heat – all going in one direction – up! The top 3 levels will then do a fair imitation of the Sahara Desert in summer – and nothing grows at all.
So you add more fans, more aircon - more always fixes everything!! It certainly makes the electricity bills bigger anyway. Unfortunately fancy-cut lettuce is still only selling for $6.50 a lb ($13.00 a kg) and wages are $25 an hour - so this isn't going to work either!
2014
So we finally come to the realisation that vertical farming has to be fully automated to remove the labour cost and it needs the smallest possible volume of air to keep the climate control power bill affordable. "Finally the breakthrough - less really is more!".
Lots of tricky aerospace type engineering followed - what is the exact air speed that moves the boundary layer on a baby spinach leaf? - and how do you get that air flow, temp[ertaure and humidty to happen evenly everywhere inside a big square box with 8 levels?
2015
So with help from new shareholders Billy, Bud and Gary we all reached for our wallets one more time and built our first small XA Series system – just one ‘climate cell’ and only the critical parts of the automation were all that we could squeeze into our rented warehouse space.
2016
Lots of testing and tweaking, growing test crops and selling them to get the harvesting and packaging right, constantly working on the Bioponic nutrients to get the nitrates out so we could make people healthy with good food.
Also at last we find a solution to how to use the same grow medium lots of times so we could stop throwing the farm out every time we harvest a crop!
It was all a success, great results all round and with an ROI in our local market that would stand up to any customer's business plan.
2017
Now we had the experience and the confidence to build our own building on the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia and fit it out with a complete 3 climate cell XA system – check out the video from 2018 if you havent already.
2018
And here we are, it took much longer than we could have imagined – and don’t even ask about the money!! But we made it. Now we watch as so many others are doing the same things we tried and we really hope they too will stick it out to be able to develop reliable and profitable systems like our XA Series automated warehouse system. With nearly 9 Billion people to feed every day – there is certainly no shortage of customers!
2019
After 5 years testing and development, Engineering is busy prototyping the new XF Series fully automated livestock fodder growing system. This cost-effective system will automatically deliver enough green fodder every day to feed 50+ cattle or over 3,000 chickens!
By applying our Bioponic microbiology learning to livestock feed we can produce a Barley Grass with higher metabolisable Energy than the grain it was grown from - this is a huge deal because livestock ranchers can finally feed their animals on grass all year round and get better weight gains and animal health.
2021
2022
2023
