EPIC Technology Meeting on Photonics for AgriFood Industry – Enlightening the Future at DigiFoods

The EPIC Technology Meeting on Photonics for AgriFood Industry took place in Oslo, Norway on the 23rd-25th April 2024. Association of Vertical Farming (AVF) Chairwoman Christine Zimmermann-Lössl was invited and gave a Keynote speech on Vertical Farming and more about the AVF.

The event was an invaluable platform for AVF to contribute to knowledge exchange. It was an opportunity to share expert insights on vertical farming with photonic experts, researchers, and industry professionals. The three days were spent exploring together the innovative applications of photonics technologies in various aspects of agriculture and food production.

Synergies between Vertical Farming and Photonics

There are clearly synergies between vertical farming and photonics and the AVF will have exciting news and opportunities to share in the coming weeks. So watch this space for an update soon. 

@EPIC-European European Photonics Industry Consortium

Key Insights for AVF Members 

Christine shares her three key insights from the meeting for AVF members:

The photonic industry offers a lot of new technologies for Vertical Farming for measuring or fine tuning growing conditions for crops affecting:

• Food quality
• Nutritional content
• Ripening state of crops

Within the photonic industry, the trend for hand-held and smaller devices is a great step forward to making these technologies easier to implement and use in a vertical farming environment. 

The further integration and weaving of photonics technologies into vertical farming systems offers tremendous potential to revolutionise the way we produce food indoors using controlled environment agriculture. By harnessing tailored light and optics, vertical farmers can further tend to the factors that create:

• optimal growing environments
• increasing crop yields and nutrition and;
• contributing to the advance of the map for sustainable agriculture worldwide.