Ingo Mueller, AgriFORCE Growing Systems’ CEO, is always on the go. Some weeks, he is in our head office in Vancouver, B.C; others, he is travelling to California, New York or several other states where AgriFORCE has business interests; or he is overseas, taking our message and our intellectual property for our proprietary facility design and automated growing system out to the world.
Notes from the CEO happen when Ingo sits down at his home office in West Vancouver to share his perspective on the world of AgTech, the AgriFORCE team, work/life balance, and his vision for creating positive change in the world.
We hope you enjoy our first post for March.
I had an interesting conversation with a colleague the other day and it has stuck with me. It was about food security and the growing interest in this area from a diverse range of sectors and industries. What we were discussing focused on climate change, extreme weather and the lack of arable land in many areas of the United States. It was mostly about the ability of farmers to meet the nutritional needs of the population in an environment that is changing at a speed that is difficult to keep pace with.
The global population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. There is enormous pressure on countries around the world to address elements that include the increase in population, declining access to arable land, and an increase in poor soil health. Not to mention that today’s agricultural methods tax the environment by using too much water and power because of outdated systems. In addition, climate change – which includes extreme weather – makes it difficult for farmers to produce the number of crops needed to feed a growing world population.
When we started AgriFORCE, we looked to the future to see what will be needed – not just what is needed today. We all know that the current way that agriculture works is decades behind where it needs to be. It’s time to change the paradigm. Just because things have always been done a certain way doesn’t mean they should stay that way. The agriculture industry requires full-blown change and – at AgriFORCE – we’re set to take the lead on this.
We have designed a pioneering facility and automated growing system that provides the ability to achieve industrial-scale indoor farming that is both environmentally sustainable and precisely controlled to create a near-perfect growing environment. And crops can be grown in extreme weather – hot or cold. This means that harvesting happens year-round, no matter what the season. The AgriFORCE intellectual property offers a clear solution to the problems that many agricultural verticals are facing today.
The AgriFORCE proprietary system offers a clean, self-contained environment, with limited human intervention because of the automated growing system. This provides an assurance of quality control for the daily harvest of the plants. The daily harvest provides higher crop yield while dramatically decreasing water and power requirements. Our system has a much lower environmental impact than traditional indoor growing and helps to reduce production costs.
It’s time for everyone in agriculture to look at how we can lessen our environmental footprint and how we can each contribute in a meaningful way to areas such as food security. The AgriFORCE team is dedicated to doing just this – and to working with others in the industry with a similar vision.