Robotic warehouse farms will save the world: And Grov Technologies has a prototype that just might prove it.

• Author: Griffin, Elle

FOUR YEARS AGO, Ritch Wood was looking for a better way to grow plants. As the CEO of global skincare company Nu Skin, he ran into ingredient shortages every winter when fields went dormant--and when he moved grow operations to the equator he ran into water and land shortages, along with a host of quality control issues.

Nu Skin needed reliable, quality ingredients for their skincare products. But farming was too unpredictable an industry. "If there was a way to grow indoors," he thought, "and be able to do that 24 hours a day, 365 days a year-if we could guarantee that it was grown without any herbicides or pesticides and in a sustainable way that uses less water and land--that would be really helpful."

At the time, controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) was in its infancy and grow-light technology had yet to take a turn for the more affordable. When he learned of an agricultural system that promised to use a fraction of the land and water used by traditional agriculture methods and had the potential to make it more affordable, Wood made an investment.

Nu Skin paid $3 million for 70 percent of the company and rights to its IP--and Grov Technologies was born.

CONTROLLED-ENVIRONMENT AGRICULTURE IS ON THE RISE

The theory behind CEA is that by controlling the environment in which it grows, we can control everything about a plant and what it grows into by micro-tweaking one of a thousand different characteristics--including temperature, humidity, light duration, light wavelength, dissolved oxygen in the water, and carbon dioxide saturation in the air. By tweaking the growing cycle, we can control the caloric content as well as the nutrient content and density of the plant.

"What we've learned through controlled-environment agriculture," Benjamin Swan, co-founder and CEO at Sustenir in Singapore, once told National Geographic, "[is] we can actually emphasize certain characteristics of the plants. So, without using GMO, we can make our kale softer, we can actually make it sweet."

The theoretical use cases for this technology are endless--from being able to grow in places where water is scarce (like in much of Africa), or where water is overly abundant (like Hawaii), or in places where labor is scarce (like in parts of Asia), or even in places that have long winters (like Northern Europe). Theoretically, we could have grow towers in every town and feed the whole of it no matter its natural environment.

We could even grow those foods to those...