Siemens Digital Industries Software today announced that Nemo’s Garden, a startup focused on sustainable underwater cultivation of crops, has deployed Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio of software and services to shorten its innovation cycles and move more rapidly towards industrialization and scale.
Nemo’s Garden was founded in 2021 by Sergio Gamberini, President of Italian scuba diving equipment manufacturer, Ocean Reef Group, and his son, Luca Gamberini. Their team of engineers, divers and scientists have been working to prove the viability of cultivating herbs, fruit and vegetables underwater. Nemo’s Garden’s key innovation, a sub-aqua biosphere, is a unique type of underwater greenhouse, able to harness the positive environmental factors of the ocean – temperature stability, evaporative water generation, CO2 absorption, the abundance of oxygen and inherent protection from pests – to create an environment ideal for crop cultivation.
The team has not only successfully harvested a variety of crops from its prototype biospheres, but also discovered that plants grown in this environment are nutritionally richer than those grown traditionally. The next big hurdle in achieving their goal was to turn this prototype into a solution that could be deployed globally; however, they didn’t want to wait another 10 years to make that happen.
Harsh winters, short summers and initial seafloor-use permit limitations capped Nemo’s Garden to one growth cycle a year, which has meant only one innovation cycle per annum. Design changes, lengthy physical testing and heavy manual monitoring processes during the growth cycle led the Nemo’s Garden team to seek out ways to speed up their innovation and scale the operation. The team reached out to TekSea’s Matteo Cavalleroni for insight on how to leverage cutting edge technologies to achieve their goals. After the initial consultation, Siemens was invited to join the project, leveraging the Xcelerator portfolio of software and it’s services to help Nemo’s Garden get to the next stage of development and get ready for industrialization/commoditization.
Read the complete article at farmersreviewafrica.com.