December 7, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

Commercial greenhouse operators are tasked with steep challenges – to balance a wide range of conditions such as temperature, humidity, crop diseases, and pests, for example, while needing to produce a large, uniformly standard crop of fresh produce for buyers who await a future harvest.

It is not uncommon, however, for commercial greenhouse production facilities to see crop losses of as much as 25 percent due to inconsistencies, poor visibility, inaccurate data, human error, and inefficiency related to manual data collection.

Founded in 2013 in Seattle, Washington, and with offices in San Francisco and San Diego, iUNU’s comprehensive greenhouse management platform is able to harness computer vision to transform the way growers manage their operations.

The company’s platform, LUNA, uses a network of fixed and mobile cameras with high-definition and environmental sensors to connect producers and managers, facilities, and plants on one interface. By scanning entire greenhouse operations, LUNA is able to collect extremely granular data on every aspect of the growing process, including real-time growth rates and the health of each plant.

Using a combination of computer vision and machine learning, LUNA constructs detailed models of each plant, and is able to detect even the most minute changes in the health status of each. With this insight, LUNA delivers greater margins based on extremely precise crop monitoring, forecasting, and space and labor utilization, resulting in greater price leverage when selling crops.

“The LUNA system continues to attract greenhouse growers as a leading comprehensive greenhouse management platform,” said Cristina Rohr, principal at S2G Ventures. “We are delighted to partner with iUNU to support the company’s continued growth and long-term plans to make indoor growing operations more profitable and efficient.”

The production of fresh produce is a $1.2 trillion global industry. However, farmland for the production of specialty crops is increasingly under pressure. Between 2001 and 2016 11 million acres of farmland were fragmented or lost, according to the report, Farms Under Threat: The State of the States, issued by the American Farmland Trust. 

On a global scale, the world has lost a third of its arable land over the past 40 years to the effects of pollution or erosion at a rate that far outpaces the natural rate of soil replacement, according to a team at the Grantham Center for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield. The processes of agricultural production and heavy-handed use of fertilizers has eroded our soils at a pace that is 100 times faster than it is able to be naturally formed. 

However, when looking to solutions – once overlooked as a viable alternative to the growing issue of providing food for an ever-populous world – Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) has gained much traction as of late, especially since COVID-19 has highlighted the vulnerability of current ag supply chains.

The ability for CEA to offer more consistent yields and quality through a decentralized, transparent production and processing model using a fraction of the land and water and without synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, or fungicides on a year-round basis has resulted in the industry growing at a CAGR of 20-25 percent since 2007, according to the report Growing Beyond the Hype: Controlled Environment Agriculture by S2G Ventures.

Additionally, a shift toward CEA food production would enable researchers to breed food varieties for flavor, color, and nutritional profile with biodiversity in mind, instead of ability to withstand long supply routes.

But, as greenhouse operations expand to meet the demands of growth, producers are often faced with labor issues and rising costs of production – issues that technology such as LUNA can mitigate and manage. 

“Our communities are under-greenhoused. Rising consumer demand is accelerating the growth of the greenhouse industry, but the massive shortage of both growers and manual labor requires a scalable machine vision solution to further the supply,” said Adam Greenberg, CEO and founder,  iUNU. “We are proud to partner with S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners, as both firms share a passion for and expertise in agriculture investing, and support our vision to empower growers to do more with less.”

As of 2019 the LUNA platform exceeded more than 1 billion square-feet of greenhouse analysis, making it the most extensive knowledge base generated from imaging on the market. As each producer uses the platform, adding data, LUNA learns more and increases its volume, and its value.

“The iUNU team has translated their long experience in greenhouses into an exciting computer vision platform powered by machine learning which empowers growers with new tools and capabilities to see, predict and take action,” said Walter Robb, executive-in-resident, S2G Ventures. “Both the magic and the mystery of plants growing comes alive in and through LUNA.  Its advanced technology supports the optimization of yield, labor and product quality, ultimately providing the end customer both superior processes and product while improving the profitability for growers.”

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI Gazette. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.