Rapid population growth and climate change’s impact on our ability to grow food represents a perfect storm. Tech has opportunities and responsibilities to address global problems: this may be the biggest. Over-packaged home deliveries or growing blueberries in Peru for consumption in Scotland are not sustainable responses.
Farming has huge ecological impacts; agritech is as old as mankind (cf. flint axes), but now artificial intelligence and IOT represent a new frontier - bringing new strengths and new vulnerabilities in equal measure.
We'll explore the surging investment and growth in the agritech sector, and the challenges (both unique and universal) facing tech company-builders in agritech. And looking forward, we'll address how vertical farming and next-gen agritech can overcome its limitations to become a new norm - and what we, as technologists, entrepreneurs and consumers, can do to drive positive change.
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Thank you very much. Would you raise your hands if you've eaten today? Would you keep your hand up if you have felt hungry in the last week? Would you keep your hand up if you ever thought you were going to die of hunger?
That's what we're going to try and talk about solving today. A large proportion of the world population is dying of hunger, although occasionally I think they are offered things that probably even they wouldn't really want to eat. That was in the lounge in Singapore last week.
So, I want to tell you a story. Brian and the team at Turing asked me to come here, not to pitch my business or anything, but to try to explain to everyone what the hell agri tech is. Twenty months ago, I didn't even know it was a thing.
Twenty months ago, I was very happily retired. I had actually found my vocation in life, which is doing nothing. But then, this agri tech thing found me, and I just frankly could not resist it. Because as a sector, we, in the broadest technology sense, have the ability to solve the single biggest problem facing our planet.
That is our ability to feed each other. The cake may be this big, but believe me, it is shrinking, whilst we continue to procreate. That is creating a perfect storm for us. I must confess, I spent several months persuading Brian that this would be potentially an interesting topic.
The guys at Turing were brilliant. They interacted with me until we actually developed something into what I believe is a really compelling story. So, looking forward, I want to focus on three major areas. What is agri tech? Why does it matter? How are we going to turn it into a business?
What is the investment case? What are the economics behind it? And finally, if we are really going to get this stuff mainstream, what does the tech sector need to do? And what can we do as consumers to try and help with that? It is a very big industry.
It employs a very large number of people. But, if you compare it to any other industrialised sector in the world, it is way lagging behind in terms of its modernisation. Plus, the very thing that makes farming difficult, climate change, farming is contributing to in an excessive way.
It is almost perverse. So, a wee bit about what IGS is. Founded in twenty thirteen by an entrepreneurial farmer, pioneer of baby vegetables, the one you get in things like the Tesco Finest range up in Aberdeenshire, wanted to find out if he could extend the growing season to twelve months of the year by using LED lights.
He teamed up with a professor at St Andrews, John Allen, an American who sadly has passed away. But John produced the first really commercially viable LED light. And yes, it turned out you could, on a tray this size, use LED lights to grow your food.
But we are talking industrial scale, and the history of this company so far has been an amazing set of innovations which has resulted in three families of patents and the ability now to produce food economically, sustainably and with a lot less energy, manpower and so on, at very high productivity.
When we talk about productivity in the food sector, they always talk about three words: yield, quality and consistency. That is what people want at the right price. One of the things I always tell journalists, and we have done a lot of publicity in the last twelve months, is having done thirty years in the tech sector, I have never seen a sub sector that has attracted more interest and ******** in equal measure.
Where we are right now, especially with vertical farming, is we are right at the start line. This is it here. Everything up to this point has been a rehearsal because pretty much all the technology that has been produced has gone down a cul de sac from which it is not going to reverse out.
We were on Al Jazeera for twenty four hours on UN World Food Day last September. We had twenty million hits on our media within a month. I personally have not seen anything like that. If you buy The Economist this Saturday, you will see that they have written up a nice piece about us.
We have just raised our Series A funding, or at least the first close of it, from the two most active agri tech investors in the world, S2G from Chicago and AgFunders from Silicon Valley. They scoured the entire world and put their money into Invergauri.
I did not know Invergowrie was a thing either twenty months ago, but it is absolutely beautiful. We are collocated with the James Hutton Institute, the old Scottish Crop Research Institute. Crop science is an absolutely vital part of making agri tech work and applying it to the growth of nutritious food.
We have one other product line, which is an IoT enabled power and comms platform that can deliver lighting, sensing and anything to any commercial building in the world. That is a very fundamental piece of physics. We use a different type of electricity. We also use that in our vertical farming system, which enables us to use IoT, AI and ML in a way that no other operation possibly can.
So, here is our wee vertical farm. I am going to show you a short video now. It lasts about ninety seconds. There is a whole bunch of call outs in it which really describe some of the key parts of the system. This is not CGI, was just a really sunny day.
We flew a drone round it. It is always sunny in Imbroccowrie. If we sell you something, we will sell you two towers. This one happens to have two modules, so it is four towers. LED flicker on single phase electricity. You have all seen it when you try and take pictures of things.
We have done away with it. It is really important. Every single light you can see there, and there are twenty one by nineteen strings of lights under each tray, lighting the one below and ventilating it. Every single node has an IP address, but there are no computers, there is not one inch of cabling in the entire system, and we have removed the capacitors from all of the drivers.
Those of you who understand that stuff will know that it is a major problem in the supply chain, because Tesla and the mobile phone companies are using them all up. We connect to our power and comms simply by touching. Nothing more than that.
We deliver low voltage electricity at about 45AC, which means that entire thing is safe to touch, which means that none of our installations require an electrician, which means that we have collapsed the cost of installation and maintenance. You can run the thing completely on robotics.
You do not need a human being inside the farm if you don't want one. It really depends on what they are trying to achieve in the local economy. If anybody would like to come and see it, the video is fine, but when you walk into that tower, it blows you away.
So, are we bothering? Producing food has major challenges, listed on the slide that you can see there. We are going to have to make some extremely difficult decisions. There are very big factors affecting our ability to feed ourselves, and the distribution of food throughout the world is extremely unfair.
So, we are going to have to make some really big choices in the next couple of decades if we are going to continue to manage to feed ourselves. So, just to demonstrate one thing to you, I am going to ask Sonia, up on stage, to perform a wee trick.
This is not my IP. Colin Campbell, who is the chief exec of James Hutton, this is his trick. I think it's awesome. Alright. Here are some of our problems. First of all, pretend this is the world. We're now going to cut it into four pieces.
I did sharpen it. We'll chuck that half away. We are going to chop three quarters of the world away, because it is oceans. Now, we are going to cut this bit in half, the land. Fantastic. Well done. Because that is desert, ice cap and mountains.
So, now we have got an eighth of the world left. We are going to cut it into four pieces. Chop that one in half, please. Well done. I am chucking that away because the climate is too hot. Am chucking that away because the climate is too cold.
Perfect. Pretend that is another quarter of that. And that lot is too stony and arid. So, could you peel that please? Give Sonia a big round of applause. That is what we have. In fact, the truth is, if this was a waxed apple, we would peel the wax off and that is the thickness of our topsoil.
That's all we have got to play with. That scares the hell out of me. So, we have all these big issues and guess what? Guess who is ******** the whole thing up and making it even worse? We are. The impact that is beginning to have is stuff that I never knew about.
The amazing thing about this story is what you learn. So, plants are beginning to flower at the wrong time of the year, which means that there are no pollinators to come out and spread the love. Actually, my garden said hundreds of bees this year, but put that to one side.
This is happening all over the place. Stuff to do with growing crops successfully is becoming more and more challenging. We have had some major flooding this year, even in Scotland. These problems, these unusual weather events, are becoming more unusual and they are having seriously damaging effects upon our crops.
At the same time, as we are procreating at an incredible speed. A huge amount of the earth's land is going to become untenable from an agriculture point of view very soon. A lot of people are fixing on two thousand and thirty, and the estimate is about eight point three or eight point four billion people by that stage.
Any climate change deniers in the audience? Oh, good. I probably don't need this slide, Mr Trump. Science is not a belief system. HIV causes AIDS. Smoking causes cancer. Greenhouse gases cause global warming. These are facts. They are not to be disputed. They are two really great books, if you have not read them.
These slides are going out afterwards. There are lots of links to really interesting stuff I did not know existed before. What is agri tech? If we know there is a big problem and we accept that there is a big problem of growing food and feeding ourselves, Agri tech is as old as mankind.
That's a flint axe from Orkney, right up to Dolly the Sheep and blah blah blah. As we think about agri tech, and some of these slides are from our investors AgFunder, so I am grateful to them, We divide it into stuff that happens in the lab, stuff that happens on the farm, stuff that happens at the distribution point and then at the point of consumption.
Where IGS works is in the ones I have highlighted there. The two yellow ones with our farms and the other one with our IoT enabled lighting system. But, as I said at the beginning, agriculture itself is contributing to this problem. After transport in Scotland, agriculture is the biggest polluter and is the slowest one to change.
We have got wonderful targets, and yes, we can close a coal fired power station and get a big gain from that. But we have really got to do something about agri as well as about transport. As you think about the food chain, apart from what happens in terms of microbiology the lab, this is really quite a useful way to think about it in terms of five phases.
As well as making it really hard for ourselves to grow food, guess how much of it we are throwing away? Everybody thinks meat is a really bad thing. Actually, the worst in terms of waste are roots, tubers, fruit and veg. We throw away almost half of the biomass that we produce.
Interestingly enough, if you compare the West with the developing world, the point at which we do most of the damage is slightly different. There is more of it done by the consumers in the wealthy West than in the East. But overall, if waste were a country, it would be the largest consumer of food in the world, at thirty three percent overall.
So, then we have to think about how much we are consuming. This is a league table of the intake of calories in the world. Top ten, bottom ten. You will see that our friends in the United States consume over twice as much every day as the bottom seven or eight countries by head of population.
Where is the UK? Twentieth, which is better than we usually do in Eurovision. Where are we now producing food? Let's make the problem even bigger. This is an amazing organisation called the CIAT. I'll show you the link in a minute. They have these fabulous interactive graphs in which you can see every different part of the world.
There is supposed to be a pointer here. Pointers on the table. Two devices. This one. Great. What do I do? Brilliant. I should have put my specs on. A whole bunch of different regions of the world and an indication of how much is being sent, but just look at the fact, it's nuts.
Everything is being sent all over the place. When you click on any of these things, it gives you an analysis of what North Western Europe trades with New Zealand and so on. Absolutely brilliant. I was in Sydney last week and discovered from a potential customer that all of the beef exported as Australian to South East Asia is actually butchered buffalo from India.
It's amazing. Why? The other big problem we have got is that most farming is tiny and therefore really hard to impact. Just look at that statistic up there. Seventy six percent of the farms in the world that are smaller than one hectare are in Asia.
In fact, fifty percent of all the farms in the world are less than half a hectare. It is absolutely incredible. Look that organisation up, the beautiful graphics and amazing information. When I was in Singapore, I spoke with the Singapore Food Agency. They have this thing called the Singapore Food Story.
In a place like Singapore, you can tell people what to do. So, thirty by thirty, we want to grow thirty per cent of our own food by two thousand and thirty. They have told the Singaporean people that this is what they are going to eat.
Ten per cent will be protein, twenty per cent will be fruit and veg that they will grow themselves. Where can totally controlled environment ag help with this story? In a whole bunch of different areas. As you learn more about it and think about it, you begin to realise what we can do to improve the whole thing.
Specific targets for Singapore include these three here. I am delighted to say that despite the fact that they have raised Singaporean dollar to do the R and D into the agri tech, we have got it. We have delivered all those targets already. So, am hoping we will be doing business with those guys fairly soon.
Can go beyond in terms of agri tech. We all know about the cannabis story. Big in Canada, getting big in the United States. One is cannabis, one is actually hemp, for slightly different things. But people wanting to grow hops, people wanting to grow tobacco, also for farmer reasons.
The moringa tree is one that will allow us to distill its bark in order to get biofuels. Boeing is putting a lot of money into this. It is still extremely inefficient, but people want to try growing these things inside. There are other applications of agri tech beyond food.
Of the big changes then, everyone said, say Singaporeans, where are going grow this thirty per cent? They say, inside. Okay, that's fine. The problem is that you can grow some things, mostly herbs and leafy greens, at an economic price, as was one of our customers in Sweden, but not a lot of stuff at the moment.
It is economically efficient, labour costs are far too high and energy costs are far too high in differing parts of the world. One of the things that you learn about this industry is that whilst there is a well defined set of issues, the subset of those that happens either in urban or rural and different climates and areas of the world changes.
People have been trying out vertical farming. It is the really trendy thing. The problem with vertical farming, or most designs, is that it's totally impractical. That is just pants. It needs an awful lot of automation to move things around. Most of them are monocultures, which is a really good way to grow bugs.
Power costs are incredibly high, and it's just hard to make a profit. Let's take a look at the business case and the tech case for agri tech. I'll do a quick run through the investment climate last year. It was fairly lively. There was a big increase in series A activity.
One of the problems though is that in China and in India, most of the investment has gone to the consumer end of the supply chain. In the United States, on the other hand, most of it has gone into the production and pre production end of the supply chain.
So, You will notice how it varies between the two, the deal sizes and so on, but it is a very healthy market and there is loads of investment available. We must have spoken to two hundred investors. Despite all the publicity, it took me from February last year to June this year to close my round.
It was seriously painful. The good news is that the deal volumes and activity are increasing the whole time, and there is a really good spread of where people are investing. We also wanted to look at not just the business case, but the technology case as well.
As we think about AI, ML, IoT and so on, the way that we start is that total controlled environment agriculture begins with the recipe of the weather. We will apply it, measure, learn and create a new one using our algorithms. It's fairly complicated stuff.
The weather is made up of light, wind and rain. That breaks down into a number of different things. Each one of these can go from zero to almost infinity. So, the maths behind calculating a given recipe of weather are extremely complex. We monitor what happens.
We monitor the status of the plants. We look at the status of the machine. We look at what we need to correct against our expectations. And we use the AI and ML to take us on to the next level. So, Here we have some early machine learning results, using Google images to project to a reasonable degree of accuracy how old things are, what state they are in, whether they are diseased or what.
We are now able to grow basil in two thirds of the time you can grow it in a glasshouse. Here is an eight second video of basil in one of our trays getting to harvest weight. It's really high quality. It makes absolutely brilliant pesto.
How else are we bringing IoT to farming? There's a whole range of things. People talk about Industry four point zero. We need to take a big leap to Agriculture four point zero. But the size of business that is available, if you want to get involved with this sector, is absolutely huge.
All IGS' products are platforms. They are platforms because we can use a lot of other people's tech. In a vertical farm, we have sixty component suppliers and we are always looking to work with people to up our game. The vertical farming market is huge.
It is growing very rapidly, especially in Asia. The reason being that there will be a thirty per cent increase in the number of cities over half a million people in Asia within the next few years. And, the global market is very large as well.
So, if you had never thought of agri tech before, I would give it a serious think. Finally, what must we do to make agri tech something like the norm? What must we do to get it more widely adopted? The first thing is we have to get the economics right.
There is a golden number of three pounds a kilo, or three dollars a pound, it doesn't quite translate anymore, as a target price for the farm gate that you produce. Let's take Basil again as an example. My local store in Stirling, that's what you pay per kilo when you go and buy your twenty five or thirty grams.
If you go to the Spitalfields market, you will pay that for organic for a kilo, you will pay that for non organic. If you are a big food producer, like you are making sandwiches or salads for Marks and Spencer's, you can negotiate a price something like that, that is non organic, fresh, non organic, frozen, and that is my farm gate price.
If you get agri tech right, you can produce crop at one tenth of the wholesale price in London. We are now doing it across an increasing number. The number of people and corporations starting to get really interested in this that have come and approached this, like analogue devices, thinking about Industry four point zero and all the different things you can do in order to make agri tech more efficient.
Same with OMRON. We use a lot of their sensors, robots, PLCs in our system. So, big opportunities, and that is some of the stuff we have shipped in the past to Michelin star restaurants: baby turnip, radishes, greens and so on. Because if you are in control of the weather, can make things extremely consistent and very high quality and you can control the taste and nutrition and colour and all that kind of stuff.
Another exciting thing we can do is go and revisit the germplasm. At the James Hutton, they have libraries of seed, libraries of tissue. This is twelve varieties of South American potatoes. Potatoes came from South America in the first place that nobody has used for one hundred years.
Now, if we are not doing pesticide growing outside at the behest of the climate, but we are in total control of things, we have the ability to start using these old varieties, which may have nutritional benefits, they may be tastier, they may actually be able to grow more efficiently.
So, it behoves us to go and look at this stuff, and we are starting to do some of that work with the James Hutton guys now. Another thing we can do going forward is put the farmer somewhere between the energy company and the consumer, or the supermarket.
You could give the supermarket control of what gets grown and when based upon the date in which the supermarket quantity to end up on the shelf. If suddenly the weather turns and we get a bad weekend, the supermarket can phone up and say stop it, and we can actually stop growing.
We can retard it for three or four days and get it ready for next week, or we can actually speed it up as well. We can do other really interesting things. I got this from the Government's Chief Scientific Officer, who happens to be a plant biology professor at Edinburgh Uni.
All plants grow inside them a sort of internal sunscreen. So, it's a sudden event when a cloud blocks the sun and then goes away again. That extreme change in light can damage and stress plants. They grow a protein that uses up about two per cent of all the energy they require in order to protect themselves from that event.
If we are in control of the weather, we don't do that event. Therefore, we can breed that protein requirement out of the plant and reduce our energy requirement to grow it by two percent. Imagine if we found another five of them. That would be absolutely fantastic news.
We would save so much energy. The other thing is you can give the electricity company control of when the lights get switched on and off. So, something like a car plant, where if you stop it halfway through a well, you have to throw the car away, we can switch the lights on and off as long as they get there eighteen hours a day, or whatever it is.
They do not care what the photoperiod is. Therefore, as the difference between the wholesale and retail price of electricity fluctuates, you give the electricity company control of your growing period and they will give you a tariff that you would not believe. We can do that kind of thing.
We can also think about server load balancing. You can treat a farm like this as a huge great battery, and we can store and release energy and electricity as we need it. We have talked about this stuff already. The other interesting thing is the notion that we can create a global marketplace for weather recipes.
What is the best way to grow baby heirloom tomatoes on the vine for a particular nutritional profile? If someone invents that and they are doing it in Japan, they are not going to do it in Brazil, they can trade that recipe. So, we believe there will be a very significant market for that data going forward.
We can also, as consumers, start to think about our dietary habits, which have changed absolutely incredibly. I could not believe that statistic there, following the rationing of World War II. But we can also think about how we eat and where we eat. I am getting sick and tired of some of the things I am seeing.
I just don't believe some of the things I am seeing. But there are some really wonderful, very positive things. The food sharing hub here, is some amazing stuff going on with people trading seed globally. That is a really inspiring but sad story. The chap died, but I will link to it because it is fairly amazing.
These were taken in Singapore, but the one that actually wins it for me is this is the back of the taxi that I followed to my hotel. Yes, that is what you are reading. Salmon from an ATM. Actually, it's a vending machine, but it's still nuts.
You go to a vending machine in the middle of the street in the heat in Singapore and you get a portion of frozen salmon. It's Norwegian salmon, so think how it's been bred. Whole thing is going crazy. We have the ability to make a massive difference.
