Business Lab

In many areas of the world, environmental conditions are not conducive to traditional farming. As a result, these countries are food dependent. They rely on imported food, which is subject to supply chain issues and nutrient loss during transportation. A company in the United Arab Emirates called Smart Acres is looking to change all that through hydroponic vertical farming. “Living in a region with a lot of non-arable land and in arid conditions, we're not able to produce a lot of the crops needed for consumption for the nation. The UAE actually imports 90% of the food for consumption,” says Aphisith Phongsavanh, lead project manager of Smart Acres. Smart Acres is an indoor vertical hydroponic farm that grows pesticide-free leafy greens using 1/10 of the land and 90% less water than traditional farming. The Abu Dhabi-based farm grows 13 cycles of lettuce a year, yielding 20 times more food than traditional farming would on the same square meters of land. The Smart Acres farm consists of eight shipping contain