Malaysian startup has big plans with vertical growing towers

It all began because of an exceptionally dull class in financial reporting. Stuart Thomas was idly browsing Facebook when he came across an article on bigthink.com on the “Next 5 Trillion Dollar Industries”. One of the industries listed was vertical farming and Stuart found himself drawn to it because of its potential to impact both first world countries and impoverished nations. Thus the idea for Babylon Vertical Farms was born.

He recruited two of his friends, Joel, who now handles marketing and Abang who takes charge of operations and production. A little later, they were joined by Eshton who does the sales and Oliver who handles engineering and tech. Stuart himself is in charge of finance and strategy.

The team’s prototype vertical grow tower is a four tower module and each tower can be optimised to hold 12 plants as opposed to one plant otherwise grown horizontally.

According to the team, “Our solution is targeted to reducing harvest-to-plate time to less than six hours compared to the industry average of 18 hours. This can be achieved through the creation of an indoor vertical hydroponic farm located in the city.

Growing plants via this method allows the crop to be cultivated in a controlled environment, eliminates the use of pesticides and maximises water efficiency. As all elements within this facility is controlled and monitored closely, harvest per year can be increased.”

Read more at Vulcan Post