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More sustainability in agriculture through robotics solutions

Unfortunately the project hasn't met our fundraising goal.
project summaryThanks to new technologies, entire harvesting processes can be simplified and made more efficient. As a result, natural and human resources are conserved and can be used more optimally. Support Organifarms with a donation of CHF 100.

Background

Population growth and the impacts of climate change are creating great challenges for the food system. Until 2050, food production requires an increase of at least 50% to feed the then 10 billion people on the planet. Current agricultural practices cannot do this in a sustainable way. Efficient food production often uses great amounts of water, fertilizers and pesticides. Indoor farming plays an important role in solving these problems by producing more food with fewer resources. Growing fruit and vegetables in greenhouses and vertical farms requires up to 95% less water, 90% less fertilizer and can (in the case of vertical farming) can completely refrain from the use of pesticides. However indoor farmers often struggle with finding enough harvesting workers and are challenged with high labor costs, which makes it difficult for them to grow crops sustainably AND profitably.
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Idea

To enable the profitable cultivation of fruit and vegetables in indoor farming systems, we develop robotic farming stations, which automate complex processes. Our farming stations automate the harvest, plant care, and pollination of labor-intensive crops. We work with a 3D-computer-vision system and develop a unique harvesting system that can reach high harvesting speed. First, we are specializing in the cultivation of strawberries with our first product automating the harvest and quality control, and later want to expand our product range to other varieties of fruit and vegetables and add additional functions. Our product makes it possible to reduce labor demand and therefore personnel costs and hereby cultivate these labor-intensive crops in indoor farming systems in a profitable way. Further, we are also planning a mobile application that can operate in a wider range of indoor farming environments. Our business model offers our customers low a low initial invest for buying our hardware, combined with a quarterly licensing fee for our software. Through this, our technology is easily accessible and our customers have a quick return on invest. Through our technology, we want to contribute to a sustainable agriculture that is in line with future food demands related to the growing population and can sustain the pressures of climate change.
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Implementation

We have already developed a prototype of the harvesting robot for strawberries and have been testing it in our laboratory environment. Before we can launch our product to the market, we now need to test it with pilot partners, implement the feedback and go through the certification process. To be able to travel to our partners and bring our technology there, as well as the modification of our system to fit our partner’s needs, we require CHF 5'000. This will enable us to get our product market ready to then support farmers who cannot find enough harvesting workers to harvest their berries.
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Initiators

All of this is realized by the Organifarms GmbH, which was founded by Dominik Feiden, Marian Bolz, Hannah Brown and Mario Schäfer in 2020. We are supported by a great team of software and mechanical engineers, crop scientists and in marketing and finance.
Together we want to shape the agriculture of tomorrow.
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Primary Partners