About Sky Greens
Sky Greens is world’s first low carbon, hydraulic driven vertical farm. Using green urban solutions to achieve production of safe, fresh and delicious vegetables, using minimal land, water and energy resources. Sky Greens is the innovation hub of its holding company, Sky Urban Solutions Holding Pte Ltd, where continuous innovation in next generation of urban agriculture solutions take place.
Vision
Sky Greens endeavours to becoming the world leading solution provider for integrated, sustainable and green urban agriculture technology.
Mission
- To constantly provide improved agricultural solutions with minimal impact on land, water and energy resources through invention and innovation
- To help cities actualise food supply security and food safety targets
- To promote and enable seamless integration of low carbon footprint agriculture into urban living
How they started
Sky Greens is the innovator and builder of the world’s first low carbon hydraulic water-driven vertical farming system. This commitment towards innovative green urban solution marked the beginning of our journey in constantly re-inventing low carbon footprint agritech in fulfilling food supply security and food safety needs.
Ensuring food supply resilience is important to land-scarce city-states such as Singapore. Mr Jack Ng, Inventor and Founder of Sky Greens, has shown that the objective can be actualised by the creation of innovative green solutions such as a high-rise vertical farming system, to achieve significantly higher yields per unit area of land with minimal land, water and energy resources.
Jack started experimenting with various prototypes as early as 2009 in the backyard of his aluminium factory. A Research Collaborative Agreement was signed with the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) in April 2010 to formally structuralise cooperation. This people-private-public (3P) collaboration resulted in the development of multi-layer troughs in a rotating A-frame vertical structure using hydraulic and gravitational principals and the birth of the world’s first low carbon footprint vertical farming system. The system was first test-bedded with the production of tropical leafy vegetables and proved to be a resounding success. The results were announced and publicised on 28 Jan 2011, and commercial operation began in 2012.
Source: http://www.skygreens.com/about-skygreens/
Analysis:
The concept of vertical farming is a large trend in agriculture and may have the opportunity to change the trajectory of food production as a whole. This technology questions the current notion of what farming is. Current practices take up a lot of land and resources. Vertical farming offers a way to alleviate this strain by shifting production upward rather than outward. However, while this intervention offers avenues for increased production, questions may be posed about how that food is transported to its consumers. How does the food system look in this case? How may vertical farms disrupt current food systems? Emphasis needs to placed on multiple parts of food systems to ensure access is equitable and adequate. Currently, this intervention, while promising, only addresses the front end of the system.
