The best stock trading apps offer the ability to buy and sell shares of stocks and ETFs with no commissions. Online brokerage accounts and stock trading apps offer low-fees, trading tools, commission-free trades, and more. Bears would be right to point out that AppHarvest still has to compete with cheaper produce from Mexico, pushing back the potential of profitability for a while.You can start trading through a brokerage account with any online broker or traditional broker firm. And whilst AppHarvest's use of robotics is still in the early stages, this will be a critical factor to optimizing growth and reducing variable costs from labour. This sees soil and chemical pesticides replaced with LED lights and smart data. However, if AppHarvest can make its greenhouses work, then the company stands at the cusp of a highly likely movement to this more sustainable method of farming.Īs the world population increases, controlled environment agriculture will have a role to play in meeting global nutrition needs. There are also higher labour costs from a dependency on a more specialized workforce. It also uses more electricity than conventional farming which if not sourced from renewable energy like solar or wind would see these greenhouses have a high carbon footprint. This restricts the overall total addressable market. Firstly, it is limited in the type of crops that can be produced. There are some drawbacks to controlled environment agriculture. A significant driver of this has been their extensive use of greenhouses to grow chilies and tomatoes. To place the potential of AppHarvest in context, the second-largest agricultural exporting nation in the world is the Netherlands, a country smaller than West Virginia. There are other broader benefits like fewer food miles driven by producing food closer to where it is consumed and data-driven precision farming using robots. The end output is sustainable crop growth year-round, putting an end to the seasonality that has come to define conventional farming.ĪppHarvest also uses no chemical pesticides and naturally pollinates their more than 700,000 tomato plants through a 500 beehive network, each holding up to 125 bees and their queen. This sees AppHarvest combine three sources of light sunlight, efficient LEDs, and high-pressure sodium grow lights to take advantage of the sun whilst also being able to optimise photosynthesis at night or during cloudy days. The use of a greenhouse allows for a hybrid approach to growing tomatoes. AppHarvest's Controlled Environment Inputs And Outputs ( Source) This places much more stress on the currently unsustainable systems and further increases the use case for controlled environment farming. Hence, as the global population increases and much more of the world becomes richer, demand for food is set to rise exponentially. Currently, 70% of global freshwater is used for agriculture. This reduces the susceptibility of food supply to extreme weather events like droughts, it also prevents the depletion of groundwater aquifers. AppHarvest solves these shortcomings by using recycled rainwater stored in a large retention pond holding the equivalent of 75 Olympic size swimming pools. Conventional farming also requires a significant amount of fresh water and arable land, both of which are under siege from climate change. This has a devastating effect on aquatic ecosystems. For example, some large scale conventional farms use phosphorus-based fertilizers that can lead to toxic algae blooms from surface runoff. This is important for a planet experiencing widespread environmental degradation. It enables a future where humanity can feed itself with increasingly less farmland whilst safeguarding our environment. The ability to be able to control all growing conditions enables this innovative farming method to yield up to 30x more food per acre than conventional farming whilst using 90% less water. The most pertinent use case for controlled environment agriculture is that it enables materially higher crop yields with a fraction of the resources used in conventional farming. It might be easy to dismiss this as the mad rambling of an overzealous investment analyst, but the evidence is clear if you look beyond the collapsed stock price and broader deSPAC bloodbath. Controlled environment agriculture stands to fundamentally revolutionize the future of food and America's AppHarvest (APPH) stands at the vanguard of this shift. It is time to throw my hat into this ring. Justin Paget/DigitalVision via Getty ImagesĮvery once in a while an overzealous investment analyst or tech bro will declare a specific innovation as the future.
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