Q&A: Amplified Ag's female leaders discuss the future of CEA

One company reflecting that growth is Amplified Ag. The Charleston, South Carolina-based CEA company tells AFN that 50% of its 140 team members and more than half of its leadership team identify as women.

Amplified Ag makes both container farming hardware as well as software to power a variety of indoor farms including greenhouses, container farms and vertical farms. The company was recently selected by the United States Department of Agriculture to be its preferred platform for doing research studies on CEA.

Vertical Roots is Amplified Ag's container farming brand and currently operates in three US cities, with plans for expansion across the Southeast US in over the next couple years.

Two of the women behind the company's current growth are director of operations Jackie Jones (JJ) and director of software development Rachel Downing (RD). Read on for AFN's recent conversation with them about the benefits of container farming, the future of CEA, and the expanding role women play in both.

AFN: How did you wind up working in CEA?

JJ: I always say I grew up at Nestlé — I spent quite a few years there. Nestlé was starting to partner with farmers and improve sustainability and that's where I really started having visibility into how traditional agriculture is going to become more and more at risk regarding soil, climate, etc. When I discovered Vertical Roots, I saw [it as] an opportunity to be at the forefront of this new agtech industry and really be able to change the way the world feeds itself. I had a really tangible skill when it comes to operations and manufacturing, and it was something I could apply to [the CEA] environment.

RD: I have been in the technology industry for 38 years. I spent 25 years with Piggly Wiggly here in South Carolina. Then I had the pleasure of going to work for our CEO Don Taylor, who at the time was CTO at another company. When he moved into Vertical Roots and AmplifiedAg, I continued to follow his company and the mission they had for our planet. This concept of growing food at the point of distribution and minimizing carbon emissions was inspirational. I felt compelled to move into this particular role here helping [Vertical Roots] to build out the enterprise software, and from my background in retail and being grocery retail, I understood that business.

AFN: Let's discuss the business. How does Amplified Ag stand out from other CEA companies?

RD: We're actually using our own technology, so if something isn't working we can fix it. We're more efficient with our electricity usage and are more efficient with the way that we use the water and we're more efficient with the nutrients. Everything that we're doing is improving the process of growing our products in our container farms. I really think we stand apart because we are users of our own technology. That allows us to evolve it and improve it.

JJ: We're a one-stop-shop. We have the benefit of being one team under the Amplified Ag umbrella. So we build out the software, we build out the hardware, and then on the Vertical Roots side, we partner within our own business for proof of concept, so we are the ones that are using it. We don't have to use external software to manage the farm, inventory, or to measure traceability.

RD: To Jackie's point, that has been also the major differentiator: the connectivity of the farm management and the operational management. Say you're placing a sales order, the software helps to tell the farmer what to plant when to plant in order to reach a certain sale versus only monitoring, you know, the water and the humidity and so forth. It's a very interesting challenge to have a perishable product that you need to prepare for weeks in advance of that order being placed.

AFN: Why container farming versus another indoor farming method?

JJ: [We chose] container farming because of the absolute control of the environment. A shipping container is only 320 square feet. You can control every nuance of that environment. The risk mitigation factor is unparalleled compared to large-scale vertical farms if the pathogen were to enter that farm.

There's also flexibility. Butter lettuce does not grow the same as another type of lettuce. And while you can grow all of these greens in one large space, to grow to the highest nutritional value, quality, and maturity requires the environment to be tailored specifically to that plant.

[Containers are also] incredibly capital efficient. So while we can sign a lease on a piece of land, we can have containers shipped and start the growing process within 30 days and then scale up that operation or move it if we so choose to.

RD: There's a key factor to that embedded technology that we have inside of that container farm that not only helps to monitor and address issues — dosing pH up or pH down or adding additional nutrients — it also has the ability to alert a farmer that there may be something that's off like temperature, or CO2 generation.

Being a small farm, you just have so much more control over what's happening in that environment. And then the risk to the crop is so much smaller. If the temperature gets too high, you're not going to lose the entire warehouse of product, you're gonna lose a single farm. Also another aspect of sustainability: these are shipping containers that are going to a landfill. So we're repurposing them and keeping them out of the landfill and making something useful out of them.

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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Source: Ag Funder News