From a closet to five acres
The two entrepreneurs and residents of Sutton, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, were not professional farmers by any stretch of the imagination — but they were hobby growers in the middle of Quebec’s breadbasket.
Dutta, an agricultural engineer, programmer and tinkerer, put together his first prototype of the connected greenhouse’s central nervous system last November. He called it the HUB, short for “huge, ugly box.”
Fast forward to today, and Monk and Dutta’s company, Motorleaf — a name inspired by British rock ‘n’ roll band Motörhead — is filling orders, meeting with major company bigwigs and is closing in on a $1 million seed investment round.
Dutta’s original HUB was meant to be one piece of hardware to rule the greenhouse. But during the accelerator program, the design was revised and separated into four parts to create a modular, scalable approach.
The HUB is now called “the heart” — a piece of hardware that communicates with other elements of Motorleaf’s product suite, forming a wireless mesh network. The network, in turn, can monitor and control a couple dozen growing factors, including pH level, nutrients, humidity, temperature, lighting and reservoir water level.
Growers can then use a desktop or mobile app to remotely monitor and control growing conditions. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and machine learning components baked into the process can learn from the plants, self-correcting to eventually optimize a perfect nutrient and atmospheric cocktail for each crop.
Read more at the American Association of Vertical Farming