German vertical farming company Infarm has introduced a new high-capacity, automated, modular ‘Growing Centre’ – a cloud-connected local farm and distribution centre in one that can generate the crop-equivalent of up to a hectare of farmland, with up to 400 times more efficient food production than soil-based agriculture. 

A ‘Growing Centre’ consists of dozens of modular farming units, each standing between 10 and 18 meters high, occupying a 25 metre squared ground footprint and requiring six weeks to build, yielding the crop-equivalent of 10,000 m2 of farmland. 

Many food retailers are already taking part in Infarm’s farming network, including Empire Company Ltd (Safeway, Sobeys, ThriftyFoods), Whole Foods Markets, Marks & Spencer, Kroger, Kinokuniya, Aldi, Amazon, Auchan, Casino, E.Leclerc, Edeka, Intermarché, Irma, Kaufland, Metro, Migros, Selgros, Summit and in Germany, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Switzerland.

The large-scale Infarm Growing Centres integrate farming units that can each save up to 10,000,000 litres of water per year, compared to soil-based agriculture for similar crops, while contributing up to 40% energy savings over previous Infarm technologies.

By 2025 Infarm plans to establish 100 Growing Centres – equivalent to 1.5 million m2 of farmland and producing 450 million plants across its network, including expanding to new markets. This year, 15 Infarm Growing Centres are already planned or are under construction in urban centres including London, Paris, Copenhagen, Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle and Tokyo.

“Access to fresh, local and sustainable food is a growing challenge, as people shift towards cities and climate change accelerates,” said Erez Galonska, co-founder and CEO of Infarm. “Today we’re adding speed to scale with new technology that allows us to deploy a Growing Centre to any city in the world in a fraction of the time, space and capital investment of most large-scale farming solutions today. Both the farms and the software that powers them were designed to make fresh food more accessible for everyone, everywhere.”

“The entire Infarm network is connected to a central farming brain that gathers more than 50,000 growth, colour and spectral data points through a plant’s lifetime,” said Guy Galonska, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Infarm. “We’ve collected more than 300 billion data points throughout our farming network to date. These data enable us to perfect our growing recipes and improve yield, quality and nutritional value, while reducing the production price constantly.”