Grow-Tec launches world's first grow rooms for tomatoes and cucumbers achieving unprecedented yields

Grow-Tec is offering top-of-the-line breakthrough solutions in vertical vegetable farming in the controlled environment agriculture revolution.

The vertical farming company is solving problems within the farming industry by providing vegetable growers with automated, climate-controlled grow rooms. The rooms can be set up and ready for production in any climate year-round. Everything the vegetables need to grow is in the grow rooms as they are completely independent of any environmental or climate constraints.

Farmers are able to grow these types of vegetables due to Grow-Tecs' combination of innovative technology all working simultaneously together. The automation systems monitor and control the temperature as well as humidity in the air and regulate them to ensure an optimum growth environment for the tomato and cucumber plants. Their lighting systems are tailored and autonomously operated to ensure the healthiest and highest yield from the plants. Their fertigation systems are also completely autonomous.

Currently, Grow-Tec is setting up operations for cucumber and tomato farmers. Their cucumber grow rooms yield 800kg/m2 per year and by the end of the year, they project to get to over 1,000kg/m2. For tomatoes, they project to yield 800kg/m2 by the end of the year.

This is 10 to 20 times higher than the most advanced greenhouses. This is based on the knowledge the company gained by commissioning dozens of indoor installations for other crops in Israel and around the globe.

Grow-Tec’s rooms are enabling farmers to grow produce that’s unlike anything their competitors are able to grow. With Grow Tec’s rooms, farmers are able to grow fruity vegetables whereas other vertical farming systems are mostly only able to produce leafy vegetables.

Grow-tec’s rooms are set up with six tiers of racks per row in each room with the number of rows varying by room size. The rooms are facilities that could be installed inside a standard industrial structure such as a car park or any building big enough to hold the grow rooms.

By being able to set up installations anywhere in the world, Grow-Tec is helping to solve problems in traditional farming such as food security, climate change, and consumer demand for fresh locally sourced produce. While conventional farming faces declining crop yields, diminishing water supplies, low predictability of food supplies, and growing dependency on long-haul transportation, Grow-Tec is paving the way for a healthy and predictable farming industry.

As they progress Grow-Tec is working to improve the quality of plants through their genetics. This involves selecting varieties of plants that produce the best yields and quality. To do this they are working with some of the largest seed companies in the world to pick the best varieties at the point of origin. In addition to working on plant genetics, Grow-Tec has future plans to add robotics to their grow rooms. Currently, any labor done by the farmers is manual. By adding robotics the grow rooms will become vegetable-producing machines.

The company was formed in 2004 as a projects company focusing on greenhouse and indoor facilities and has expanded operations over the years to countries in Europe, Asia, and the USA they began transitioning into vertical indoor facilities in 2022 in the wake of their first external funding round.

“Some countries don't want to be entirely dependent on imports, and our solution enables them to grow locally and independently of anything else,” said Ilan Ofer, Chief Strategy Officer of the company. “You see such initiatives taking place in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, but most of them again are around leafy greens, and there's only so much lettuce the world can eat. we enable them to also grow tomatoes and cucumbers, or in other words, the whole salad in one facility.”