Pure Harvest Smart Farms (UAE), Al Dahra Agriculture (UAE), and PlanTFarm (Korea) partner to forge an innovative, low-cost vertical farming solution to produce animal feed anywhere
Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Pure Harvest), a leading sustainable technology-enabled agribusiness headquartered in the UAE, announced a new partnership with Al Dahra, a diversified global agribusiness that is a leader in the cultivation and production of animal feed, and PlanTFarm, a smart farming solutions provider, for a commercial-scale pilot scheme to bring the benefits of controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) to the animal feed industry, utilising a proprietary, fit-for-purpose, low-cost indoor farming solution.
The innovative smart farm utilises PlanTFarm’s cutting-edge, AI-powered vertical farm technology, engineered to reduce the capital intensity and energy consumption of the growing system to farm fresh, nutritious animal feed. The facility will be co-located within livestock farms to localize animal feed in Al Ain, UAE, using 95 per cent less water per kilogram versus traditional farming means. The collaboration aims to reduce the UAE’s import dependency by offering an economic, sustainable, and scalable localized farming solution. The pilot solution and commercial partnership have been under development since early 2022, and preliminary results show promise.
Sky Kurtz, CEO of Pure Harvest, commented: “Our region imports the lion’s share of its animal feed requirements to protect its endangered water resources – coming at a cost to food security, feed price volatility, and nutrition quality. Put simply, we don’t believe our region’s farmers should have to choose… and if we’re right, this solution is scalable to other water-scarce parts of the world.”
