Vertical farming software success: putting grower needs first

How IGS’ Growth Tower Management System delivers traceability, scalability, and ultimately, profitability, for growers

For the first in a four-part series looking at our software and how it benefits IGS customers, our Principal Software Architect Greg Stevens walks through how our Growth Tower Management System (GTMS) is engineered, how it has evolved, and what the future holds.

Vertical farming technology works best when the technology is built with the grower in mind. Software is at the core of that, and we’ve kept this principle in mind right from the beginning when developing our Growth Tower Management System (or GTMS). This is important as it allows the software to slot in alongside other day-to-day operations on a farm, creating an approach based on years of industry knowledge and listening to grower feedback on the areas our software could help to improve.  

We’ve embedded grower and operator feedback at the core of the software, supported by years of collective experience across IGS. We’re also able to bring together crop scientists from our Crop Research Centre and engineers from other sites across Scotland, all of whom collaborate to ensure our software works well in a real-world environment for a wide range of users.

This user-centric approach has helped when developing a number of GTMS features designed to enable traceability, reduce complexity and bottlenecks, help with scalability, and minimise the need for any human intervention. These elements come together to enable growers to become more efficient, ultimately improving the bottom line for IGS customers across the world.

Enabling traceability and reducing complexity

Traceability helps the customer to keep track of every interaction a crop has, from the moment it is registered in the system, and throughout its entire life cycle in the Growth Towers. This includes everything from irrigation events and humidity levels, through to nutrient intake. It also logs any inspections which take place, and records when the crop is harvested and leaves the farm. We made traceability a priority from the outset, knowing that being able to track every aspect of the growth process would give growers confidence in the technology, as well as a crucial advantage on the competition. Whether actions are taken by a user, an external system, or GTMS itself, the software provides a full audit trail to give a holistic view of day-to-day operations.

This has all been designed to reduce complexity. The software must provide an intuitive interface which operators can use to track, record, and schedule – freeing up valuable time for operators to focus on higher-value tasks. This aspect was important to us while designing the software, allowing operators to focus on their jobs and not be held up by technology. We framed it around questions that we knew would come up in daily operations, like 'where does this crop need to go?' or 'what crops need to be harvested today?'. GTMS answers those questions before they even have time to be posed, taking away cognitive load and reducing complexities.  

Benefits of a modular software structure

Just like our hardware is modular in its design, GTMS is modular in its architecture. In practice, this simply means that it is made up of several components, all of which serve a different purpose and some of which may only be relevant for specific customers, such as those growing at scale. This is particularly true for IGS customers operating a ‘GigaFarm’ model, who may need advanced modules for automation and decision-making support.

We have one module where the system automatically selects growing locations for the operator. This is critical for large-scale operations which will be working with thousands of different Growth Jobs (the individual instances of recipes being converted into a set of commands that are then executed to control the lighting and fertigation scheduling on a specific Growth Tray with Lights). GTMS essentially allocates planning locations based on crop requirements and the growing conditions, eliminating the need to manually decide where to place each crop for optimal growth. Profit margins can be tight in horticulture and food production, so by automating this process, resource can be diverted elsewhere knowing that the scheduling is taken care of.

Software that prioritises business continuity

Our software engineers are passionate about the product, and always try to employ a 'grower-first' mindset by putting themselves in the operator’s shoes to understand the key challenges they face. We do this in everything from initial concept through to how we test changes to the product.

This approach uses established engineering practices, including 'ringed' deployments. Essentially, these involve releasing new features internally, where are then tested under real operating conditions. 'Ringed deployments' are an important step in getting new features ready for customer rollout, ensuring that there are no stumbling blocks and helping to maintain business continuity for IGS customers, all while carefully considering any risks.

We also create fully virtualised towers – digital replicas that behave exactly like real hardware (at least from a software perspective). This allows us to replicate hundreds of towers and see how the different modules and components interact without touching any physical equipment. Simulation is an essential safeguard both for learning how we can maximise customer uptime, and to enable us to facilitate maximal productivity for growers operating at scale.

Adapting and evolving GTMS

We’ve been working behind the scenes to make our software capable of meeting the scale of the GigaFarm model for some time now. These facilities are designed to handle tens of thousands of Growth Jobs each day, and this merited a fundamental shift in how IGS customers interact with our systems.

One of the fundamental challenges is decision making and planning around the Growth Jobs and harvests. When dealing with thousands of concurrent Growth Jobs, each requiring specific environmental conditions and timing, this becomes an incredibly onerous and difficult task for a human being (either individually or as part of a team) to manage. To help support this, we’ve engineered GTMS so that it can incorporate a high degree of automation. Tasks like tray placement, harvesting schedules, and workflow co-ordination are all handled by the software, meaning that operators only need to follow guided task lists, rather than making lots of individual decisions. This all works to reduce cognitive load, eliminating room for error and increasing consistency.

What the future holds

It’s an interesting time to be working in agritech, particularly when the rise of agentic AI is leading to bold claims from technology companies across this sector and beyond. We’ve been utilising machine learning for several years, primarily for tasks like image analysis. The next step is exploring how we use agentic AI to make key decisions for growers. Like anything new, the first step for how it works for our vertical farming technology is through internal testing.  

Agentic AI can be used to support engineers and customer service teams, working to diagnose any issues that pop up quickly and investigating possible causes in parallel, before presenting findings back to a human operator. This speeds up the troubleshooting process without compromising on stability. In time, we expect similar functionality in place for customers, working to identify bottlenecks, further optimise workflows, or adjust movement of Growth Trays when dealing with a large number of crops. Like anything, we’re taking a degree of caution when it comes to introducing agentic AI, conducting internal tests and ensuring we understand how this would actually benefit a customer before rolling anything out.

Cohesion through a passion for the product

The team here at IGS is passionate about creating a system which delivers continuous value to our customers and, critically, keeps us at the forefront of agritech. This is something that’s always front of mind from a software perspective, whether that’s creating an easily scalable, modular application, or putting in place measures designed to maximise uptime. As we move into large-scale deployments with GigaFarms in the USA and UAE, the coming years will be pivotal in how we iterate GTMS to meet modern day challenges. Knowing that we have an enthusiastic, skilled team which appreciates how the software will be used in a working environment will make meeting those challenges that little bit easier.

See how our software works in practice and the tangible benefits it offers growers – download one of our guides.