An interview with Irving Fain, Brian Falther and David Golden, founders of Bowery Farming, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startup.

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Irving, Brian and David, the power-trio behind Bowery Farming, a farming company that combines the benefits of the best local farms with advances made possible by technology to grow produce you can feel good about eating. Let’s see what the founders had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Irving, Brian and David: Bowery began with the fundamental belief that technology applied at scale can solve difficult and important global problems. Food and agriculture sit at the nexus of so many global issues that we face today and will challenge us for the next 50+ years. We will need to grow more food in the next 30 years than we have in the last 10,000 with a dwindling set of resources and a degraded environment. Bowery’s indoor farms combine the benefits of the best local farms with advances made possible by technology to grow produce consumers can feel good about eating. At Bowery, our farms grow crops twice as fast as traditional farms, year-round as well as use 95%+ less water and completely eliminate the need for pesticides.

How is tech central to your business?

Irving, Brian and David: Bowery began with a desire to provide fresh food more efficiently and sustainably to urban environments, and a belief that technology is central to the solution. When developing our solution, promising trends in LED lighting, including declining costs and increases in efficiency, made indoor farming possible in a way it hadn’t been before. However, to make this system truly scalable, we believe it is important to leverage automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as the decline in cost of storing and processing data in concert with LED lighting. We designed our proprietary operating system, BoweryOS, as a confluence of all these innovations.

BoweryOS specifically monitors plants 24/7 and deploys machine learning to vast amounts of data from advanced vision systems and an extensive network of sensors throughout our farm. This provides complete visibility into every stage of plant growth and allows us to continuously monitor plant health and quality, providing each variety with exactly what it needs and nothing more. This also drastically reduces the risk of human error and waste in the growing and harvesting processes. This precision is part of what allows us to be 100+ times more productive on the same footprint of land.

We have built the most highly controllable, automated, farms in the world, and are able to scale our operation thoughtfully by tapping into 2+ years of data across multiple operations. This makes our system increasingly smarter, and in turn, very efficient. As we expand our network of farms, each new farm benefits from this collective intelligence and can communicate using Bowery’s software. From there, we can strengthen each farm’s capabilities to efficiently grow better-tasting produce and introduce new varieties to consumers everywhere.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Irving, Brian and David: According to the UN, our global population will grow to 9-10 billion people by 2050, and we need 70% more food in order to feed a population of that size. The result is a world in which the current food system must support the needs of an expanded population with a rapidly diminishing set of resources. We must find a way to do more with less – in order to grow the highest quality produce, consistently, and at a price at or below field-grown products, we need to leverage innovation in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as the decline in cost of LED lighting and storing/processing data. We’re reappropriating industrial space to grow crops indoors, closer to the point of consumption, at a rate that is 100+ times more productive per square foot of land than that of traditional agriculture.

Want to know more? Check out Bowery Farming’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Bowery Farming for ranking 2nd in the “Agtech” category of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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