How our software unlocks consistency, efficiency, and flexibility for growers
To conclude our four-part series looking into our software, IGS’ Product Manager Vinca Russell outlines the core benefits it offers growers, from repeatability and precision, through to minimising labour requirements and lowering OpEx.
Vertical farming works best when it’s framed around the needs of the grower. We’ve engineered our software with this principle put first and foremost. The Growth Recipes we use to produce crops need to be repeatable, predictable, and reliable. The software should help to alleviate labour concerns and allow operators to focus more on high-value tasks, as well as lowering operational expenditure and opening the door for greater profitability. Perhaps most importantly, the software needs to facilitate integration between the vertical farming hardware and a wider agricultural operation (such as seedling lines, packaging, and harvesting areas), so that everything works in sync.
IGS Product Managers work across the whole range of software disciplines – software engineering, data engineering, IoT and platform. This allows a holistic appreciation of what IGS customers need from all the separate components that make up our technology. These needs have changed as we’ve seen customer operations look to scale, but the fundamentals remain the same.
Repeatable recipes yield success
Unlike more traditional methods of growing, vertical farming allows growers to repeat what works and get results, time and time again. Our software builds patterns, automating the entire growing process and ensuring that specific variables remain the same. In practice, this means that precisely the right amount of water, light spectra, and nutrient mix can be delivered repeatably, without any risk of human error.
Alongside repeatability comes a more accurate way to forecast growth cycles and delivery of crops. Growth Recipes have a fixed duration and the outcomes are always the same, so growers can accurately forecast when crops will be ready for harvest and what to expect. The software provides a single point of access for controlling and monitoring Growth Towers, giving visibility of every aspect of the growth process.
Thanks to this, growers are able to schedule in deliveries with offtakers with a high degree of certainty on when produce will be ready. The duration of the growing period – and therefore the day on which the produce will be ready – can also potentially be altered if required, which can help managing supply and demand. Our software lets operators tweak Growth Recipes in advance of production, altering environmental factors so they can cater for different demands and plan to speed up or slow down growth. This gives them flexibility, ultimately making them more desirable suppliers for offtakers.
Maximising productivity with iterative updates and smart data
To help ensure the software remains cutting edge, we release small updates with a high frequency. This incremental approach ensures that as we roll out software updates and improvements, a customer is able to continue operations and minimise any downtime, helping to maintain output.
Our software routinely collects and processes thousands of datapoints every single day, giving our team a holistic understanding of what is going on for specific sites. We’ll then proactively use this data to develop improved recipes and growing conditions to help our customers maximise their crop outputs, using concrete metrics to communicate the impact of any changes. By combining smart, agile software with large datasets, we help our customers continue to operate 24/7, 365 days a year.
Allowing growers to focus on higher-value tasks and minimise OpEx
The hardware that we manufacture is, on the surface, a complex piece of machinery, comprised of hundreds of moving parts designed by experts in their respective fields. Our software ensures you don’t need to be a specialist of any sort to work with the hardware. It makes complicated operations as easy as clicking a button, monitoring all the important factors so that you don’t have to.
We like to look at it as a layer that makes our technology accessible to anyone, developed by user interface and experience experts who are passionate about creating an accessible product that works smoothly and efficiently. Growers shouldn’t need to hire dozens of operators – instead, they can build a smaller team of skilled workers. This team can then use the software to deliver recipes for different use cases, alongside managing everyday site operations.
From an efficiency perspective, this all feeds into lowering everyday operational costs. The recipes themselves follow a similar approach. These are tailored to maximising resource usage, with the software working in tandem with the hardware to ensure the outcomes are automated and highly controlled. The software also provides energy estimates on all growth recipes it creates, allowing customers to build a comprehensive picture of cost, yield, and demand. This helps them to implement a business model which is as sustainable as it is profitable.
Smooth integration with a wider operation
As vertical farming has evolved, it’s increasingly clear that the technology itself is just one part of a wider puzzle in food production. With this in mind, we’ve made every effort to ensure that our software and hardware fit both into existing operations and new facilities using multiple technology providers. From a software perspective, this means having a secure public API layer that can be used by external systems to get them the information they need, or to issue instructions to our products as part of wider facility processes.
When operating at scale, our customers will be aiming to achieve a consistently high throughput. This can come with complex harvesting, transplanting, and packaging processes, so it’s crucial that our technology does not become a bottleneck in the wider facility. To help ensure smooth integration, we make sure that our technology behaves like any other piece of equipment when integrating with a manufacturing execution system (MES) or supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. This gives our customers flexibility, allowing them to choose exactly what’s right for their business with factory processes and the equipment surrounding our Growth Towers.
Embracing repeatability for long-term success
Our software is built to give IGS customers the consistency, precision, and control they need to grow great plants year-round. It facilitates repeatable Growth Recipes, taking advantage of large, high quality datasets to help deliver predictable cycles for a wide range of crops. Alongside this, we’ve worked to ensure our system integrates smoothly into a wider agricultural operation, helping to utilise the benefits of vertical farming in tandem with other methods of growing. This helps IGS customers embrace calculated, targeted growing, focusing on bigger picture tasks knowing that the software that glues everything together is in safe hands.
We’ve published a series of other blogs outlining the benefits our software brings from a user experience and data perspective, alongside other hot topics within vertical farming and agritech – browse them all.
