The Ag Innovation Showcase offers a platform to innovators across the agricultural value chain. Autogrow Systems is helping smallholder growers and family enterprises improve and expand their role in the industry. Darryn Keiller explains how by creating a knowledge base of best farming practice, we can automate climate, irrigation, and nutrient managements for any indoor crop. Registration is now open for the Ag Innovation Showcase 2017: visit www.agshowcase.com.

Darryn Keiller: There’s a lot of new people coming into the sector, especially in urban agriculture and in indoor. But they don’t always come with all the knowledge and experience that they need.

So we’ve got a new product called the RoomBoss which is a combined irrigation and controlled environment system. It’s designed for a single grow room, or a single greenhouse. They’re meant to be very much, plug and play, turnkey solutions. Very feature-rich, and designed with the internet of things, and with cloud delivered services, in mind.

So the idea is to aggregate all the data, and create a massive knowledge base of what the best practice is for growing different types of crops in different types of areas of the world, in different climate conditions. And then being able to anonymously share that information through that platform, so that people who don’t know how to do something can quickly find it out, or even more simply can just dial up, you know, I want to grow basil, and basically it’s pre-configured, and they just turn it on and it’s configured to grow basil.

So you don’t have to be a technology expert, you don’t have to be a plant expert. A lot of that stuff can be embedded in the technology. You just need to be able to interact with it in a way that’s natural to you, intuitive to you.

And so it’ll do all the climate configurations, all the irrigation, all the nutrient management for them.

I think making it simpler and easier to grow food is really the vision that we have. Autogrow wants to be involved in delivering that capability out to growers.