Grōv Technologies, the maker of a method for growing plants indoors in controlled conditions called Olympus Tower Farm, announced today a collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc. to bring cloud-based machine learning to its operating system to streamline its processes.

Using AWS and machine learning, Olympus Tower’s operating system, known as Sowyer, will ensure the provision of quality real-time data from sensors across the farming network from sensors involving high-density animal feed, which has been tested and shown to improve dairy and beef cattle production.

AWS has been working with Grōv’s technology team to identify three types of data that need to be collected in order to maximize the output of the feed: environmental, operational and plant growth characteristics.

Environmental includes anything that affects plant growth directly such as light levels, temperature, humidity, moisture in the soil, insect activity, mold growth and other overall health indicators. Operational includes supply lines of water, seeds, seedlings and fertilizer. Finally, plant growth speaks for itself, with sensors relaying data regarding the height and girth of the plants.

These data points will be gathered by sensors throughout the tower structure, analyzed and streamed to through AWS IoT Core via AWS IoT Greengrass, while using AWS IoT Rules to route the ingested data and store the information.

Finally, the data set will use a suite of AWS tools including Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Glue and Amazon Redshift to build a machine learning pipeline that will fine-tune the growing protocols in near real-time using Amazon SageMaker.

“With a growing population, climate change, and economic uncertainty, farmers are being asked to do more with less and find innovative ways to overcome these challenges,” said Steve Lindsley, president of Grōv Technologies. “Our collaboration with AWS has helped us develop a data-driven vertical farming platform that’s economically viable and environmentally sustainable for large dairy and beef operations as well as smaller family farms.”

Using AWS, data is sent from sensors and monitoring happens throughout the entire growth process and follows the entire supply chain from seed to harvest. This provides a continuous feedback loop between the tower farm and the dairy/beef operator and allows the company to constantly improve nutritional value each harvest.

“Building AWS technology into the Sowyer OS combined with our science-based growing protocols gives us predictive insights into each harvest,” said Paul Whitlock, vice-president of operations at Grōv. “It allows us to provide farmers and ranchers with highly reliable, consistent, nutritious feed year-round.”

According to Grōv, controlled environment agriculture – the concept behind tower farms – take up far less space than sprawling farms and can be built near or within urban centers such as cities and require only 5% of the water used in traditional farming.

The company says tower farms are emerging as one of the most impactful technologies to help address global issues surrounding climate change, sustainability for food and feed production. This collaboration with AWS makes it even more efficient and profitable.

By putting farms within buildings, lowering water usage and placing farms near or within urban centers also lowers the amount of distance needed to move food from farm to table, which lowers fuel costs, food costs and shortens supply chain distances.

“AWS machine learning and computer vision is helping Grōv improve the operational effectiveness of its tower farms by converting sensor data to meaningful insights,” said Shez Partovi, worldwide lead for Healthcare, Life Sciences, Genomics and Agriculture at Amazon Web Services. “AWS and Grōv will continue to collaborate on innovative ways to improve the nutrition and yield of every harvest to meet the demands of global food security.”

Photo: Grōv Technologies