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Vertical farming isn’t new. Entrepreneurs have been growing salad greens indoors on stacked hydroponic beds for years (“All Aboard! Urban Farming Trend is Coming to a City Near You,” Trends Journal, 31 May 2017).
Now Utah’s Grōv Technologies aims to feed cattle the same way.
The beef industry is living in a world that has become less hospitable to livestock, with droughts lasting for years across the plains and the West, and soils depleted by decades of overgrazing.
However, with the typical American packing away more than 58 pounds of beef a year, according to research service Statista, we’re unlikely to trade our steaks for tofu.
So Grōv has found a way to feed cattle using a fraction of the land, a sliver of the time, and just 5 percent of the water typical grazing operations need to grow seeds into feed, and do it indoors in just seven days.
The centerpieces of the company’s 100-by-180-foot indoor farm are 10 pairs of towers, each more than 25 feet tall and containing two columns.
At the bottom of the first column, an automatic dispenser fills a two-foot square tray with wheat grass seed every four minutes. As they slowly journey to the top of the first column, the square’s seeds are bathed in water, fed a carefully selected balance of nutrients, and build a dense root mat.
Once a square joins others spiraling up to the top of the first column, it automatically is delivered into the second, where it begins a spiral journey back to the bottom. Along the way, the tray is nurtured under LED grow lights so efficient they’re cool to the touch.
After a week, the tray reaches the bottom of a tower’s second column, where a conveyor chucks the mat of wheatgrass, resembling a chunk of sod, onto another belt, which sends it to a truck for delivery.
Each of the 10 towers delivers 6,000 pounds of wheatgrass a day, the company reports.
At first, a Grōv truck took the grass a half-mile up the road to a dairy farm with 7,500 head.
Now the farm has moved its milking stations next to Grōv’s indoor farm to cut the delivery and travel time to near zero.
In addition to saving water, each of Grōv’s towers does the work of 34 to 50 acres of grazing land, the company says, as well as growing cattle feed with no pesticides, herbicides, or toxic runoff into rivers.
Grōv is working with Amazon Web Services’ machine learning algorithms to compile data it can use to tweak water, nutrient, and grow-light regimes so yields become more nutritious as well as more plentiful, reducing costs to bring Grōv’s technology closer to the budgets of smaller farms.
TRENDPOST: As we noted in our previous article cited above, increasingly erratic weather, spreading drought, and depleted soils will force more and more farming indoors. We believe that is even more likely now.
That’s been true for produce humans consume, but Grōv’s technology brings the trend to an entirely different agricultural sector.
Grōv’s breakthrough can not only make cattle feed healthier, but also cheaper by both reducing the amount of land a rancher needs to maintain to sustain a herd and by cutting the risk of losing a herd to drought.
Ultimately, the company’s technology can keep us in burgers that are not only more affordable but also in steady supply.
Grōv Technology’s indoor grass farm.
Credit: © 2021 Grōv Technologies
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