Two economists at MSU Product Center Food-Ag-Bio, Michigan State University, Chris Peterson and Simone Valle de Souza were presenting “Perspectives on the business strategy and economics of vertical agriculture”. Chris started out this month’s Café presentation by giving a strategic overview of indoor agriculture industry, followed by Simone’s proposed model-based optimization approach including crop yield model, market demand and costs. Simone emphasized the need of data usable for analyses. Increasing profitability by minimizing the costs alone does not seem to help establish profitable indoor ag industry, and so value proposition seems to be critical to feed into this optimization model. They are recruiting potential partners of indoor farms in this project. Indoor Ag Science Café is a monthly based open forum for indoor growers and scientists. Anyone is welcome to participate to better understand and support this emerging industry. The YouTube channel link is here to view all previous recordings.
