Skip to main content

Upward and onward

The future is very much yet to be written about vertical farming. In many ways, the technology presents hope in the midst of rising food safety concerns, aging populations and potential environmental collapse. It’s also an intensely hard row to hoe, as it were. Early companies in the space are going to be the ones focused on driving down unit economics (hopefully) to a point where the technology makes sense from a price perspective.

But sometimes being early to a party means you’re among the first to leave. Last January, we covered what looked to be an important next step for Upward Farms, as the company announced plans to open a 250,000-square-foot farm in Northeastern, Pennsylvania early this year. The Brooklyn-based firm recently announced, however, that it has closed up shop.

“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex — as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matt La Rosa said in an open letter. “Our team faced these challenges head on, humbly asking ourselves, ‘If not me, who, and if not now, when?’ ”

Even in a thriving market, building this stuff is intensely difficult. After three years of economic and other challenges, one imagines that it becomes even harder to convince potential backers to stick out what is ultimately a long runway.

The startup is closing up its decade-long project, but the founders point at some potential silver lining. “While Upward Farms is closing its doors,” they note, “a small portion of our team will continue working to unleash the magic of the microbiome. In the coming months, we’ll have more to share.”

There are still plenty of big names in the space, including Bowery and AeroFarms. It probably shouldn’t be a big surprise that the herd is going to thin for a bit, until the path to success gets clearer. Meantime, perhaps the Upward team has valuable innovations it can share with a potential industry partner.

Upward and onward by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/C2tluPa
via https://ift.tt/XIqAkV8
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time, and why we do it at all

The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened. Afterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). Then, in the fall, the opposite happens. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy.  Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. And more consequential effects — for better or worse — may be involved as well (more on which in a minute). Changing our clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A speeding black hole is birthing baby stars across light years

Astronomers think they have discovered a supermassive black hole traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million mph — so fast it's not doing what it's notorious for: sucking light out of the universe. Quite the opposite, possibly. Rather than ripping stars to shreds and swallowing up every morsel, this black hole is believed to be fostering new star formation, leaving a trail of newborn stars stretching 200,000 light-years through space . Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomy professor at Yale University, said as the black hole rams into gas, it seems to trigger a narrow corridor of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool. How exactly it works, though, isn't known, said van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA 's Hubble Space Telescope accidentally. A paper on the findings was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . “What we’re seeing is the aftermath," he said in a statement . "Like the wake behind a ship, we’r...
Post a Comment
Read more