Artificial intelligence enters vertical greenhouses

Using artificial intelligence in running vertical greenhouses, to make productivity 400 times higher than that of traditional horizontal crops (with the same land occupied): this is the idea of ​​the Californian startup Plenty, which has already won 400 million funding. of dollars by investors such as Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.

To fulfill the dream of a new agricultural revolution, Plenty co-founder Nate Storey developed vertical greenhouses that occupy just 2 acres and produce as much as a 720-acre horizontal crop. Light, temperature and irrigation are controlled by robots equipped with artificial intelligence. Instead of the sun there are LED panels, which allow you to always have optimal conditions for plant growth; the water is recycled and the evaporated one is recaptured to avoid waste. The system is designed to use 99% less soil and 95% less water than traditional agriculture. The ultimate goal, as stated on the startup's website, is "to free agriculture from the constraints of weather, seasons, time, distances, pests, natural disasters and climate".