In this episode of Lighting Up with Illumitex, host Daniel Litwin is back with Dennis Riling, vice president of business development for Illumitex, and Mark McDevitt, Senior Horticultural Scientist for Illumitex to discuss big agriculture, urban farming, and container farming.

Austin, Texas-based Illumitex, a digital horticulture solutions provider, has been providing unique lighting solutions for the horticulture industry since 2005. As conventional farming has faced a head-to-head match with urban farming of late, companies like Illumitex have come into the spotlight as growing, viable avenues for digital agriculture.

But is sheer scarcity and usability of land propelling this style of urban agriculture forward? The experts at Illumitex said yes, that’s a factor. Urban land is finding new homes in revitalized urban districts, shipping containers, and unused space.

“It’s even getting as clever as putting greenhouses on rooftop space, utilizing space that would not otherwise be used,” McDevitt said.

However, outside of land issues, the consumer movement for transparency and knowing where their food comes from is largely driving the trend.

“The demand from the consumer is really what drove urban and vertical farming and the technology to support that,” McDevitt said.

Before coming to Illumitex, Riling and McDevitt both worked as urban farmers themselves — designing growing systems, testing lighting, and producing and selling their leafy green produce, but they faced challenges being a small operation in a relatively new market.

“At the time, we had to do everything ourselves to make it work,” McDevitt said. “There really weren’t system companies to just buy the system from back then.”

Assistive AI and imaging tech is helping these operations grow to scale, Riling said.

“Growing plants, you have so many environmental variables, as well as growing variables such as insect and disease, so there’s a lot that can go wrong,” Riling said. “The more data, the better.”

Data is ultimately driving down the cost of raising food.

“With low margins on produce and labor one of the highest costs, anything that can be done to minimize those labor cost with the use of technology and automation just increases the viability of the business,” Riling said.

Since the turn of the millennium, digital technology has completely transformed retail, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and pretty much every industry within the global economy. Still, there is one industry that has been noticeably slow to adopt digital solutions – agriculture. But it looks like that is finally changing, and not just in conventional agriculture.

On today's podcast of Lighting Up with Illumitex, senior horticultural scientist Mark McDevitt and director of business development Dennis Riling [contributor page] shared their insights on how digital technology is disrupting the way greenhouse growers do business.

As McDevitt explained, specialty crops grown in greenhouse spaces have small margins and fickle demand. A crop can be popular one minute, and while it's still in the ground, it can fall out of favor with consumers.

Growers have short-term needs and must remain agile to respond to changing market conditions, which is why many have resisted investing in costly digital solutions that might not pay dividends until years later. According to Riling, "There's still a farmer mentality on where they'll invest their money for a return they might not see for five years."

But the challenges of operating large facilities at scale are driving growers to turn to digital tools like visual A.I. which can keep watch over acres of crops and help maintain consistency across multiple greenhouses. As McDevitt put it, "You can't be everywhere at every minute, but with a camera, it's very feasible to do that." He added that these scouting solutions put digital eyes on plants, lowering production costs, and giving growers the ability to identify problems that can ruin a yield before they even occur.

"Customers that use this technology are going to have a gross advantage over their competition," Riling said. This advantage is why McDevitt believes the industry is nearing an inflection point when it comes to adopting digital solutions. He believes that all growers will need to integrate digital tools into their operations to keep pace with competitors, making it an exciting time for everyone in the space.

Horticulture is a science. When dealing with living, breathing products like plants, people understand that differences in elements like soil, pesticides, and temperature can make all the difference in the health of finished plants. Light is also a keystone to photosynthesis, but the differences in not only the amount of light but the type of light a plant receives are as important as anything to its development.

Austin, Texas-based Illumitex, a digital horticulture solutions provider, has been providing unique lighting solutions for the horticulture industry since 2005, and with the recent boom in the cannabis industry, education of how to provide proper lighting to crops has never been relevant to more people.

On today's episode of Lighting Up, Illumitex Director of Horticulture Science, Yan Ren-Butcher, Ph.D. believes the influx of technology into the farming space has revolutionized the way people manage crops and introduced the industry to a new era of digital technology. Investment from tech giants has accelerated innovation in the industry, taking lighting from simple emitters of heat to data-driven solutions.

"We call it data capture, every 10 minutes, 24/7, to help [farmers] monitor their plant growth no matter if they are inside or outside of the growth facility,” Ren-Butcher said. “Definitely all these technologies we’re aiming to help the grower.”

Because of the delicate nature of plants, no farmer has gone through a season without waste. With new technology not only designed to produce healthier crops but also allow for constant monitoring, the industry may finally be moving to a place of real efficiency. It all starts with the right light.

We’ve heard time and time again about different industries digitizing and embracing digital technologies, but how come we haven’t heard much of this from the agricultural industry? To help us understand why and how Agriculture can catch up to the digital wave that’s hit everyone else, we’re joined by Jeff Bisberg, CEO of Illumitex . Illumitex is an American lighting manufacturer largely specializing in the production and development of LED lights for indoor farming and vertical farming. On this episode Jeff dives deep into why Agriculture needs to embrace digital technologies and data collection, why the field ranked dead last in digitization, how LED lighting in horticulture has evolved, and how we can best predict trends in the agriculture world.