Veea, Trilogy Networks with Hurst Farms & Greenery announce the Commercial deployment of their Revolutionary Agriculture Infrastructure Platform for true Data-Driven Farming
Companies join with Microclimates to Deliver Advanced Precision Greenhouse Technology Solutions for Hurst Greenery, improving quality and yield, while reducing risk, costs, and environmental impacts
NEW YORK and BOULDER, Colo., MUKILTEO, Wash. and WESTBORO, Miss., Jan. 12, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Veea Inc., a leader in integrated smart edge connectivity, computing and security technologies for edge and cloud, and Trilogy Networks, provider of a revolutionary Edge Delivery Platform, today announced their end-to-end precision agriculture solution is now generally available. Trilogy Networks gives enterprises a new way to collect, compute, transport and protect data at the edge to improve operational efficiency and lower costs, while Veea provides a unified computing and communications fabric that enables any cloud to any endpoint and device at the edge.
Veea and Trilogy have partnered with Microclimates, an emerging company that specializes in all phases of data gathering and process control for climate-controlled environments, to package their combined precision agriculture solution with Microclimates's affordable, scalable universal control system that monitors temperature, humidity, CO2, watering and ambient light, which can include hundreds of sensors, with 24/7 monitoring and alerts.
The packaged solution has been implemented with forward-thinking Hurst Farms & Greenery, a Westboro, Missouri based business that operates 30 greenhouses, comprising 130,000 square feet under cultivation. Hurst also operates over 1,000 acres of corn and soybean crops.
Challenges for Greenhouse Operators
Before the advent of precision cultivation solutions, operators struggled with no uniform temperature measurement, no real-time information, and significant and rapidly risings costs to heat greenhouses during winter.
Humidity has been another significant challenge; with no ability to uniformly and consistently measure humidity, it has been extremely difficult to maintain humidity in a range that maximizes plant growth.
With Trilogy's award-winning FarmGrid™ solution, enabled by Veea and enhanced by Microclimates, operators of indoor cultivation and farming, especially for high-value crops, benefit from private enterprise wireless connectivity (including 5G), wireless controllers that can be programmed to turn heaters and vents off and on, based on rules, and readings from temperature sensors which instrument greenhouse environments and feed autonomous systems.
Microclimate's technology brings in a dashboard which gives users full control and allows them to set rules.
The Veea Platform, including indoor VHE-10 and outdoor VHH-10 VeeaHub models, provides farm-wide secure and meshed Wi-Fi and multi-protocol (Bluetooth, Zigby, & LoRa) IoT connectivity, which facilitates the collection of temperature and humidity data within the Greenhouses and provides the data to the Microclimates edge controller platform.
"Trilogy brought us a complete greenhouse automation solution, integrating Veea's edge and cloud computing and orchestration capabilities, and Microclimate's software and sensors system fully integrated, which simplified the initial implementation and ongoing monitoring and management," said Blake Hurst. "We quickly recognized savings and are now scaling up given the benefits – healthier plants, increased revenue, energy and water cost savings, and productivity gains given the automation and ability to remotely monitor and control all our greenhouses."
"Working together with the teams at Hurst Greenery, Veea and Microclimates has been a tremendous experience," said Venky Swaminathan, co-founder and CTO at Trilogy. "Converging wireless connectivity, cloud capability, device interactivity and data security into a digital experience is a team sport, and we couldn't have had a better team in place to imagine, engineer, deploy and scale this proven system. We look forward to supporting this generational, family business for years and decades to come, delivering long-term value through better business outcomes."
"Veea is honored to have contributed to this revolutionary solution," said Mark Tubinis, Chief Commercial Officer, Veea. "Together, we are unlocking significant, sustainable value through the digital transformation of greenhouse operations which is impacting the ability for businesses like Hurst Greenery to improve yields, assure quality, and operate profitably. With precision horticulture solutions, and with real time data leveraged along with automation to ensure predictable growth, farmers can do more for less, and grow their businesses even as they grow premium plants and produce. We look forward to partnering with this extraordinary assembly of companies to further advance the precision horticulture and agriculture industries."
"Our platform is ideal for this scenario," said Neda Vaseghi, CEO at Microclimates. "With modular and open software and sensor applications, we instrument the environmental automation for everything from lighting to irrigation, nutrient dosing, predictive alerting, and data-driven solutions. Given the global need for food security and safety, and the increasing importance of indoor farming, especially in the regions hardest-hit by climate change including droughts, floods, wildfires and more, this team has built and proven a repeatable solution that can make a world of difference in the years to come."
NOTES TO EDITORS
The World Bank recently stated, "The effects of climate change are impossible to ignore, particularly as record-breaking temperatures, tides and weather events wreak havoc across the globe. Worldwide, 12 million hectares of land valuable to agriculture are lost every year, and global agriculture production will need to increase by 70% to meet the demand of an expanding population. It's no surprise that we are seeing steady growth, investment and, most importantly, innovation in the agtech market, including the space industry."
The global precision agriculture market size is expected to grow from USD 9.02 billion in 2021 to USD 19.72 billion by 2028; it is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 11.8% from 2022 to 2028, according to Insight Partners.
About Veea
Veea® is redefining and simplifying secure edge computing in a way that improves application responsiveness, reduces bandwidth costs, and eliminates central cloud dependency. VeeaHub® Smart Computing Hubs™ integrate a full range of connectivity options, application processing power, and a full security stack to form an elastic edge computing platform with a dynamic connectivity and application mesh that can easily be deployed and centrally managed from the cloud. Veea Edge Services run across this application mesh to deliver secure remote access, IoT/IIoT/AIoT, and a wide range of smart applications. These elements along with a range of groundbreaking vertical-specific applications comprise the Veea Edge Platform, serving the needs of organizations across Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, Smart Cities, Smart Construction, Smart Farming, Smart Retail, and other industry verticals. Veea was formed in 2014 and is headquartered in New York City, with its engineering activities located in Bath, UK, and Iselin, New Jersey, USA, along with sales and support offices located at multiple locations throughout the US, France, South Korea, and Brazil. Veea was named by Gartner as a 2021 Cool Vendor in Edge Computing. For more information, visit https://www.veea.com/. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Trilogy
Trilogy is focused on digital transformation for agriculture, food security and sustainability. Trilogy launched FarmGrid™, a digital agri-food platform, to transform farming into a digital enterprise. The platform accelerates adoption of digital solutions by making available standardized digital infrastructure to a global ecosystem of innovative app developers.
Trilogy is on a mission to bring this digital infrastructure to 2.1 million farms in the US. Trilogy founded the Rural Cloud Initiative, a coalition of network operators and technology providers committed to promoting and accelerating the digital transformation of rural America. In conjunction with network operators and solution partners, Trilogy is utilizing its LinX™ virtual private network and ConEx service delivery platform to build a unified, distributed cloud capability on a single network fabric to cover 1.5 million square miles. To learn more, please visit https://ruralcloud.com/ or https://trilogynet.com/.
About Microclimates
At Microclimates™, our vision is to support the migration from outdoor agriculture to controlled environmental agriculture. Giving back to future generations and reimagining farming as a technology driven industry.
Microclimates provides a software solution for environmental automation that optimizes grow environments using unified control & harmonized data. Most controlled environment agriculture (CEA) systems operate in silos. They are independent from one another and oftentimes perform well on their own. To address this complexity, Microclimates integrates these systems for real time monitoring, data analysis and environmental automation on the edge. This combination empowers the user with a single user interface.
Over time, the data generated from the various silos are harmonized on one platform to continuously improve the operation and providing the foundation for effective AI. To learn more, please visit https://www.microclimates.com/
About Hurst Greenery
After graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Blake and Julie Hurst returned to Tarkio, Missouri to join Blake's father on the family farm. They lived in Tarkio for the first few years of their marriage where, in 1982, Blake built their first greenhouse which they opened for local retail business. Julie with help from their two daughters, Lee and Ann, ages 3 and 2 respectively grew bedding plants and later poinsettias.
In 1983, Blake, Julie and the girls moved to a farm 10 miles northeast of Tarkio near the small town of Westboro, Missouri. Blake built two greenhouses there, approximately 2,700 square feet in size and Hurst Greenery was ready for business. In 1986, their son, Ben was born and Julie added the first crop of mums to the operation. By 1988, Blake had built 2 more homemade greenhouses and Julie hired the first Hurst Greenery employees to help with the expanding business. At this time, Julie and Blake sold plants to the local grocery stores and nearby Earl May Garden Centers.
Since then, many more greenhouses have been built or replaced including two (2) gutter connect ranges. Hurst Greenery sells and delivers bedding plants, perennials, hanging baskets, patio pots and hardy hibiscus. Through direct delivery or distribution our customers are in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota and Nebraska.
Our delivery fleet started with Dodge pickups and horse trailers, which have mostly been retired. We now utilize box trucks and semis for delivery. Hurst Greenery has over 2 acres of greenhouse space and employs 12-15 people seasonally.
In addition to Blake and Julie, in 2002, daughter and son-in-law Lee and Ryan Harms joined the operation full-time, followed in 2011 by son-in-law Matt Schlueter.
Hurst Greenery continues to grow and adapt to an ever-changing industry.
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