The company uses AI to help predict what impact changes to the plants’ care will have on their yield.
However, this style of farming has been criticised with a report commissioned by Defra in March 2023 saying it has a limited range of produce, mostly non-flowering, non-fruiting crops.
In a statement IAG said: “Historically, this has been a fair observation, with vertical farming primarily focused on herbs and leafy greens.
“However, the technology within the industry has advanced significantly. Today, soft fruits are being grown successfully in controlled environment systems, and protein crops are also becoming viable.”
The same report also found a large amount of electricity was required to run these systems.
IAG said: “…significant advances in LED grow lighting and environmental control systems have dramatically improved the efficiency of controlled environment agriculture in recent years, reducing the amount of electricity required per unit of crop produced.”
Phd student and plant scientist, Felix Trimmer, says AI will play an increasingly large role in farming.
“What we can do is model how the plants grow, adjust variables, and then we can train some machine-learning algorithms to basically tell us if we change one variable how will that affect the outcome and the yield,” he explained.
“We can use that to detect, almost in real-time, perhaps a disease maybe spreading and catch it very early, or catch where something may have gone wrong in the system to simplify our maintenance.
“Really the possibilities are endless in how we can use it.”
