Food and the future of food production need help to meet the demands of a population expected to reach over 9 billion by 2050, requiring farmers to grow approximately 70% more food than they do now. Motivated by the promise of a burgeoning commercial indoor farming industry to support more resilient food systems, LATERAL.systems LLC (LATERAL) is an agricultural technology (AgTech) startup company offering a smart edge-based water quality and atmospheric condition monitoring system.
The LATERAL Edge Platform watches out for what can go wrong 24/7 with continuous monitoring that tracks current health conditions and data trends. Farmers can select monitoring set points from a catalog of Grow Profiles for a broad range of produce and fish commonly grown in commercial indoor farms, and they can add to the LATERAL catalog by creating Custom Grow Profiles for additional crops or by adjusting settings for any monitored parameter providing the flexibility to monitor any crop combination. As any monitored parameter approaches the top or bottom of a tolerance range, alert messages warn of an impending imbalance, and alarms warn of an actual imbalance. Each of these notifications is paired with a written list of mediation options to prompt quick-witted responses that reduce risks of damaged or lost crops and efficiently increase yields.
One of the fastest growing industries in the U.S., well-managed indoor farms reliably produce just-in-time harvests year-round to provide up to 400 times greater yields per acre than field agriculture using orders of magnitude less water and fertilizers. Everything grows faster indoors, but unfortunately, this includes imbalances that can cause physical crop damage and attract pathogens within hours of when problems start. Continuous automated monitoring provides the opportunity to detect early warning signals before problems get out of hand; waiting until physical damage is evident is often too late to save the value of a crop. Yet, most indoor farmers manually monitor just once a week, making it difficult, if not impossible, to detect and correct imbalances in time to prevent damaged food we simply cannot afford to waste.
The problems LATERAL is seeking to address are not hypothetical future issues. While around 13.5 million Americans routinely experience food insecurity today, each year, an estimated 31% of food produced in the U.S and 2,866 billion pounds worldwide never makes it from the farm to markets, wasting one-third of total food production by volume due to factors such as labor costs and availability and consumer expectations for products that meet high aesthetic and safety standards.
Modern advancements in smart monitoring solutions have demonstrated an ability to advance sustainable transformation at the scale and speed needed to make a positive difference to reduce waste, increase yields, and support food security. Simply put, the more automated the indoor growing system, the higher the farm's gross margin, and the more healthy, fresh foods make it from the farm to the table. For this reason, the global AgTech analytics market size is expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2023 to $2.5 billion USD by 2026. Unfortunately, equitable access to automated monitoring tech has been slow to materialize given that virtually all currently available solutions tuned for indoor farms are cloud-based, and an estimated 45–50% of U.S. farms lack reliable high-speed internet connectivity.
LATERAL has defined a clear path to advance state-of-the-art technology with an edge-based modular, interoperable sensor hardware and software solution that locates sensor data collection, storage, and analytics to where data is gathered. This edge solution not only has the potential to democratize access to automated monitoring and data analytics insights, but it also reduces hefty cloud-based data storage costs, eliminates data latency that can delay early warnings, and ensures watertight data security. With only a tiny handful of direct competitors in the Indoor AgTech monitoring arena, most of whom offer cloud-based technology primarily tuned for cannabis hydroponics production, LATERAL is well positioned to capture a large global market segment with edge-based technology explicitly tuned for specialty crop food production.
LATERAL's solution also addresses adoption barriers related to a largely novice indoor farm workforce. Agricultural employment recruiting agencies report that approximately 60% of new indoor farm employees don't make it past the first 90 days on the job mainly because they tend to feel overwhelmed; they don't know how to interpret data signals or what to do to avoid or fix apparent problems. The LATERAL Edge Platform is designed to serve as a powerful means for developing both tactical and long-term strategic knowledge amongst the emerging indoor farming workforce, extending traditional on-farm mentorship tools to help train and retain workers.
Rather than ignoring monitoring data until something goes wrong, the LATERAL dashboard displays familiar iconography to provide quick health status overviews and then various types of graphs that show the direction of data trends to help farmers understand biological and physical inter-relationships as conditions shift. Intentionally scaffolding the presentation of increasingly complex graphics shows interactions that are otherwise difficult to detect without years of farming experience. Data views promote computational thinking involving decomposing higher-level problems into multiple, simpler problems. Once workers understand how to interpret patterns in datasets, they can abstract details to find patterns in similar problems and define steps to correct imbalances so that similar problems can be solved together.
LATERAL CEO Dr. Jennifer Wells points out, "We noticed that workers often experience brain freeze when alerts or alarms go off; they forget what they know about how to fix problems or worse, resist asking for help out of fear of looking incompetent. LATERAL's goal isn't to de-skill workers by doing the thinking for them. Our dashboard views show rather than tell workers what healthy looks like and how one problem can lead to another. Then, rather than telling workers what to do, we pair alerts and alarms with written mediation options to either remind farmers of responses to consider or prompt workers to think up a list of good questions to ask mentors about what to do and why. Repeating this process over time helps farm teams to have more intelligent, data-driven strategy sessions that build mental models for comparing treatment choices, for methodically observing responses to treatments, and for figuring out what healthy responses look like and what treatments work better than others in particular situations. Importantly, watching and discussing data trends also teaches workers what types of situations are likely to resolve on their own so they can avoid wasting costly supplies or labor."
LATERAL is founded by Dr. Jennifer Wells, CEO, and Edward Lisle, President and CTO. Combined, they have over 60 years of industry experience in science, research, and product creation that has shaped their approach to building LATERAL's continuous monitoring systems tuned for indoor growing environments. Together, they have formed a small team of dedicated engineers, scientists, and business strategists, all passionate about contributing to the successful adoption and acceleration of the indoor farming industry by providing data analytics that make the complicated job of farming a bit easier.
For those interested in learning more about LATERAL.systems efforts to deliver innovative AgTech data systems to support the wide-scale growth of the indoor farming industry; please visit lateral.systems to learn more.
Join the Conversation