Aponix Exhibiting at GreenTech 2016 in Amsterdam – Summary

At this year’s GreenTech in Amsterdam aponix announced the start of the large series production. After 2 years of testing some very important improvements have been incorporated into the 1/6th part version 2.0. Parts will be available from September 2016. Many thanks to all the visitors!

Topics discussed:

• Since the vertical barrel shape is fairly new to the industry, there have been many inquiries about sets of barrels being used as attraction in various vertical-farming promotion activities – being promotion of own new VF products, for agricultural parks, exhibitions and making buildings and recreational areas more attractive. This is great, because it will help to spread the word about this kind of production component and at the same time will show to the end consumer that vertical farming is not only a way of more sustainable production of edible plants and the upcoming circular economy, but can also be beautiful at the same time.
• Research facilities have inquired about vertical barrels to be part of systems or general research in that field. This is great, we need more independent research done using the barrel in order to also have independent performance metrics apart from theoretical output just counting the available grow spaces per square meter or even cooler and more adequate for vertical farming count the productivity for available cubic meters in your production area.
• There has also been a strong demand for information on possible reseller and licensing agreements to resell aponix parts or even manufacture these parts to the individual price points of foreign markets. We are just starting to have enough capacity to satisfy the increasing demand. Please contact us for details.
• We found out, that larger corporations start to have their own urban farming departments. That is very encouraging news! Some of them started to produce a few lettuce heads, herbs and microgreens for their campus cantines and quickly developed into spreading production areas all over their campus area, developing into very attractive recreational areas also increasing communication and well-being among their employees. Some of them even give their excess produce to their employees. We are looking forward to seeing more of that, ideally using the compact vertical barrel solution of aponix.
• Larger existing operations using conventional NFTs have showed their interest for our new, more dense and vertical version. There have been many discussions about the potential changes mainly in labour intensity to operate the barrels instead of the lean processes established and well known around the space of conventional NFTs. In this case we always recommend: Try out a bunch of aponix vertical barrels like you would with any other innovation that potentially could get you a competitive edge and get confident about your individual processes yourself before writing a business plan.
• There have been many conversations with growers of special crops, who recognized the potential behind the aponix vertical barrel and liked the concept, but needed a special adapter for their crop or additional supplemental pieces of equipment around the barrel in order to start an individual test. Some of these might be very interesting special crop solutions that we might look closer into in the future. Inspired by that, we chose to set up our series tooling that way, the part molding the actual adapter details (being for example two 2-inch net pot inserts) are exchangeable! This will help us to test such new adapter ideas faster and much cheaper without actually rebuilding the whole existing tooling setup.
• We would like to thank all the experienced visitors who took the time to inquire about the various vertical solutions currently coming to the market and stepping up to our booth congratulating aponix that they are confident, the vertical barrel as a whole has a very high potential to prevail and even make it as one of the standards into conventional urban production facilities in the coming decades.

Please contact us any time for followups!