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Bringing The Outside In – Innovating for Controlled Environment Agriculture
Tuesday 19th March 2019 @ 10:00 am - 4:00 pm

This event has passed – take a look at the latest event about Controlled Environment Agriculture here.
In association with the Association for Vertical Farming
Kindly sponsored by Innovate UK
Controlled Environment Agriculture aims to create the optimum growing conditions, allowing year-round cropping of a wide range of high value, fresh produce closer to the point of consumption.
Growing within a hygienic environment offers many benefits:
- Quality control – there is less requirement for plant protection chemicals, resulting in fewer residues in the products
- Tighter forecasting – production can be more closely aligned with market needs, thereby reducing waste
- Improved nutrition and taste – the growing medium can be tightly controlled to deliver high value crops
- Overcome seasonality – crops can be grown all year, enabling continuous cropping and also scope to grow exotics
- Improved productivity – vertical farming in industrial or retail units increases the growing area available for food production
- Plant production on non-agricultural land – closed environments can be used to grow ingredients for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and industrial applications
This one-day conference creates an opportunity to hear about new growing systems, the challenges, the business case and the experiences of early adopters.
- Hydroponics to grow crops use nutrients in water. Technologies include:
– a deep-water system which offers higher nutrient levels and good ventilation control to provide greater consistency in temperature.
– 3D hydroponic towers which combined with genomics improves quality traits and reduces cost of production - Vertical soilless growing systems that uses less water and maximise growing space available
- Aeroponics – a plant cultivation technique where the plant roots are exposed in the air while nutrient solution is delivered to them in the form of a fine mist.
- Aquaponic urban farm – which combines two well-established farming practices – aquaculture (farming fish) and hydroponics (growing plants in a nutrient solution without soil) in a recirculating system.
The challenges of implementing a controlled environment solution.
- G’s Fresh are assessing the feasibility of converting a large standard greenhouse facility
- GrowUp Urban Farms share the learnings of six years scaling up its production facilities and describe what is needed to integrate it into the supply chain.




Programme
10.00 Registration and coffee
10.30 Introduction
Lindsay Hargreaves, Managing Director, Frederick Hiam Ltd
10.40 Taking Intensive Hydroponic Crop Production to a New Level
Dr Paul Challinor, co-founder and CTO of the Jones Food Company
11.15 Technologies for Controlled Environment Food Production
A series of presentations of the development pipeline of new innovations for controlled environment agriculture and their potential for different markets.
David May, Senior Project Manager, Lincoln Institute for Agricultural Technologies
Shedding light on indoor farming
Adam Dixon, CEO, Phytoponics
Advanced cultivation technology for high wire protected edibles
Jason Hawkins-Row, CEO, Aponic
Meaningful core market diversification opportunities for UK farmers
Dan Hewitt, CEO, GroPod
Title TBC
12.15 Lunch
13.15 Bridging the Innovation Gap
Bringing ideas from proof-of-concept to commercial scale reality is a major challenge, often requiring capital investment, changes in process and practice and a compelling narrative, led by a credible team that gives confidence that the innovation will work. In this session we explore the challenges and enablers by which new CEA solutions can become mainstream.
Rhydian Beynon-Davies, Head of Novel Growing Systems, Stockbridge Technology Centre
A test-bed for new CEA innovations (TBC)
Chris Roberts, Head of Industrial Robotics, Cambridge Consultants
Make or Buy? The commercial and technical drivers for automation in vertical farming
Ande Gregson, Founder, Green Lab
Greens in a box: Nurturing early stage agritech ventures
Rob Wylie, Chairman, Cambridge Agritech
Investing in CEA businesses
14.30 Integrating Into the Supply Chain
What, if any, is the anticipated impact on CEA on the fresh produce supply chain? What is the potential for hyper-local, ultra-fresh produce to command a premium price? Or will a reduction in cold-chain logistics requirements bring prices down? How could large agri-business and smaller producers find their places in the supply chain, and what is the likely impact for consumers? What factors would influence the decision for growers to include CEA in their production systems?
Ben Barnes, Innovation and Research Associate, G’s Fresh
Title TBC
Kate Hofman, CEO, GrowUp Farms
Things we’ve learned from GrowingUp
Jaz Singh, CEO, Innovation Agri-Tech
The Green Revolution in CEA; Commercial Scale Aeroponics
15.30 The People Factor
The potential for CEA to generate products with increased nutritional benefits, altered flavours or to supply healthy nutritious food cheaply and quickly in disaster areas is significant. In this session we explore the opportunities for CEA on human physical and mental well-being through nutrition and flavour, as well as how crop production can be integrated in city and building design through creative architecture and planning.
Arnoud Witteveen, CTO, Saturn Bioponics
Title TBC
Tom Cox, former student, Leicester School of Architecture, De Montford University,
Designing buildings for vertical farming