In a new article from TechRepublic, Ray Fernandez identifies several companies to watch as growers continue turning to technology to enhance their operations in 2023. 

Bowery Farming tops the list after establishing itself as the largest U.S. vertical farming company, according to Fernandez. 

“Bowery Farming’s vertical farming system employs automated storage and retrieval system technology to manage agriculture systems that are stored in trays up to 40 feet in their warehouses,” Fernandez says. “The company claims they can get 30 times the amount of crop from their spaces compared to conventional agriculture.

“An army of sensors, IoT and automated robotics are deployed through the entire lifecycle at Bowery Farming’s vertical farms. Crops grow in special palletized trays, which are transferred and monitored by technology. Sensors feeding the BoweryOS platform with light, temperature, humidity and data on specific needs for each species drive machine learning analytics for these high-density crop systems.”  

Trilogy Networks is another one to watch in the IoT-edge-cloud platform market. The company’s new partnership with Veea and Microclimates will enable them to combine their technologies and platforms into an all-in-one solution, Fernandez says.

“The new Trilogy platform gives farmers and enterprises a new way to collect, compute and protect data at the edge to improve operational efficiency and lower costs,” he says. “Veea provides a unified connectivity fabric that enables communications between the cloud, endpoints, edge and devices.

“Microclimates’ climate-controlled environment technology allows farmers to control the systems that monitor temperature, humidity, CO2, watering and ambient light.”

Advanced.Farm and Blue White Robotics occupy the robotics portion of Fernandez’s list.

“Advanced.Farm specializes in soft-safe food gripping technology, which has the precision and delicacy to manage the operation but is also rugged and resilient to withstand outdoor environmental factors and the execution of repeated tasks,” Fernandez says. “The company uses computer vision and machine learning to enable its robots to navigate fields and harvest fruit autonomously, with a capacity to run up to 24 hours a day.

“Blue White Robotics specializes in robotic kits that can transform any existing fleet of vehicles into robotic autonomous-platform-managed machines. They can also be programmed to run specific operations and tasks with little human intervention.”