Scaling container farms with SAAS

Added on 06 March 2023

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Agritecture’s Founder and CEO, Henry Gordon-Smith, (HGS), spoke with Don Taylor, (DT), CEO of AmplifiedAg, about his experience in the CEA sector. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Transcribed and edited by: Sarah Jordan

HGS: Can you tell us about the founding story of AmplifiedAg? Specifically, how did you come up with the idea to begin the company? What problems are you trying to solve?

DT: I'm a software engineer by trade and have spent over 30 years developing cloud based platforms for health benefits, warehouse management, and widgets for other industries. Before founding AmplifiedAg, I spent the last 10 years or so of my career as the CTO of a SaaS company. I spent a lot of time in India and became very familiar with the agriculture crisis that was going on there as well as the larger global climate crisis.

In 2015, I started exploring different types of indoor farming, and it just clicked.

I understood the potential of indoor farming and the positive impact that it could have for our local food systems. From there, I spent probably a year researching various technologies and strategies for indoor ag, and I landed on the concept of using shipping containers.

AmplifiedAg CEO Don Taylor in an indoor farm growing butter lettuce.

We founded AmplifiedAg in 2016 and spent the first couple years building technology. We built a software platform, control system, and then a fully operating farm. From my experience of bringing new technologies to market, I knew we had to demonstrate the technology and also prove the concept working at scale. So, we decided to get into the retail space to prove the technology could effectively operate and grow produce to meet that type of demand and level of quality.

We’ve reached a point of optimization for the platform and the farms and have multiple years of at-scale farming expertise with our technology. Now, we’re focusing on enabling the next generation of vertical farming infrastructure for other operators.

HGS: I want to learn a little bit more about why you chose to farm in containers. Why are you choosing containers as your integration of choice?

DT: There is no other indoor farming environment that can be controlled to the degree of a container farm or be as easily deployable. Our mission is to modernize and localize agriculture by enabling farmers and communities. With that in mind, there needs to be a farming infrastructure that is easily accessible, flexible, and scalable, which is a big part of why we use shipping containers as our integration of choice.