Upward Farms Technical White Paper

We work in a variety of ways to help our portfolio companies succeed. Below is a Technical White Paper we wrote to assist Upward Farms, an indoor agriculture company, in describing to late stage investors the Company’s approach to engineering complex ecosystems for food production. Upward Farms is a Bioeconomy Fund 2 portfolio company.

As part of the analysis, we formulated multiple hypotheses about the future of the Company, its technology, and more generally about engineering complex, biodiverse ecosystems. Upward Farms is moving so quickly that many of the scientific & technical hypotheses that we proposed just months ago have already been confirmed and are now the basis of new products in development. Consequently, this document wound up serving not just as marketing material for Upward Farms, but also helped the team move faster on science, engineering, and commercialization.

Here a link to a PDF of the White Paper. And here are the Summary and Introduction:

Upward Farms Technical White Paper

Rob Carlson, PhD, Bioeconomy Capital

May, 2021

Summary: Upward Farms has overcome the economic barriers to scaling indoor vertical farms by innovating at the intersection of hardware, software, and ecosystem engineering. The Company focuses on mastering the management of biodiverse ecologies, which is the key to its existing competitive advantage and to its future potential. Quantitative field studies have conclusively demonstrated that diverse ecosystems are more productive and stable than monocultures, and that a key driver of these advantages is an appropriately complex microbiome. This complexity is eschewed by other vertical farms, in which inefficient crop monocultures are stabilized only through costly energy and chemical subsidies. In contrast, Upward Farms constructs resilient systems that utilize the complexity in biodiversity. The biological engine powering Upward Farms is integrated aquaculture, in which plants, fish, and, most importantly, diverse bacteria, together comprise a complex and self-regulating ecosystem. Upward Farms leverages automation, monitoring, and control systems to precisely quantify and predictively control the functional biodiversity of these complex farm environments to maximize production and stability. The innovation that results from embracing this complexity will become more important and valuable over time as ecosystem engineering becomes integral to increasing productivity across the economy.

Introduction

Upward Farms is an indoor agriculture company that has developed an extraordinarily efficient biomanufacturing system based on ecosystem engineering. Broadly writ, Upward Farms is a systems engineering company, where the system is composed of hardware, software, and wetware – i.e., sensors and automation, monitoring and control algorithms, and biology. The biological engine that makes this system possible is integrated aquaculture, in which plants, fish, and, most importantly, bacteria, comprise an ecosystem and exist in self-regulating nutrient loops. The combination of ecosystem engineering and mechanical engineering, coupled to automation and machine learning, yields an extremely productive manufacturing system, and one that benefits from rapidly falling costs across the constituent technologies. Taken together, Upward Farms operates at the nexus of the three techno-economic trends shaping 21st century industrial capacity: software, automation, and the engineering of biological systems.

There is impressive complexity in this vision, to be sure, but tools exist to manage this complexity. These tools were initially developed for the automotive, aviation, and consumer electronics industries, and they have already been adapted for use in biological engineering and manufacturing. In applying these tools to the entire problem of bioproduction, rather than to individual aspects, the Company is positioned to outcompete all comers.

Utilizing biodiversity, rather than minimizing it, is the Company’s most important innovation. Quantitative field studies have conclusively demonstrated that complex ecosystems are more productive and stable than monocultures. By embracing ecological complexity, and learning to engineer it, Upward Farms benefits from these natural processes in its indoor farms.

Aggregating these insights, it becomes clear that, far more than simply managing buildings to grow greens and fish, Upward Farms is a high technology company that will drive innovation at the intersection of hardware, software, and ecosystem engineering. The Company will produce not just food, but also intellectual property and proprietary practical knowledge with broad value. In what follows, I illustrate how all these pieces come together by using examples and analogies from other mature industries as well as emerging technologies developed and demonstrated by Bioeconomy Capital portfolio companies.

Over the longer term, we (Bioeconomy Capital) see an opportunity to make ecosystems engineering the basis of a general purpose bio-manufacturing foundry – a factory capable of renewably producing biological outputs (including drugs, chemicals, and materials) beyond the current goal of food. We see Upward Farms as critical infrastructure for the 21st century.

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