Indoor farming could usher in a dramatic shift in the way humans grow food, taking the natural and unpredictable processes of traditional farming and transitioning them to a process as tightly run as a Broadway play.

• The industry—also known as controlled-environment agriculture (CEA)—is set to skyrocket in the next four years.
• In 2021, the global indoor-farming industry was valued at $79.3 billion, with the potential to climb to $155.6 billion by 2026, per Pitchbook.

But, but, but...Despite its growth, there are structural challenges the industry needs to overcome before CEA can hold a candle to traditional farms.

• Challenges include hiring an adequate number of technical experts; securing the funds to build out massive warehouses and greenhouses; and paying to install and operate the expensive slate of tech—from automation hardware and software, to sensors, to tens of thousands of LED lights—needed to monitor and maintain crops.

But the biggest challenge could be energy consumption. Unlike traditional outdoor growing, which relies on the tried-and-true power of the sun, indoor farming is dependent on LED lighting. This is especially true for vertical farms in particular.

• Energy costs can run high, threatening profitability, and using fossil-fuel powered electricity can undermine the potential environmental benefits of vertical farming.

“A lot of these light companies are really making good strides with efficiency and driving down costs, which is a big component, probably the biggest component, of these companies becoming profitable,” Alex L. Frederick, senior emerging technology and venture capital analyst at Pitchbook, told Emerging Tech Brew.

Some major vertical farms say they’re adjusting their power mix to be more sustainable and efficient.

• New York-based Bowery Farming told us each of its growing operations runs on 100% renewable energy, including hydropower.
• Brooklyn-based Upward Farms’s new farm in Northeast Pennsylvania—which it claims will be the largest in the world when it opens in 2023—is expected to run on 100% renewable energy, the company said.

Big picture: Even still, per the 2021 CEA Census, 41% of CEA firms in the US surveyed said they don’t currently track data related to energy use. And, overall, 64% of respondents worldwide stated they don’t implement any “energy-efficiency strategies to minimize their energy consumption.”

Read the full piece here.—JM

You may not be able to buy cultivated meat in the US yet—or anywhere outside of Singapore, for that matter—but that’s not stopping investors from pouring money into the space.

What’s new: Upside Foods, which recently opened the largest cultivated-meat plant in North America, just announced a $400 million Series C. It’s the biggest-ever funding round for a cultivated-meat company, and it officially makes Upside a unicorn.

• Investors put over $2 billion into cultivated-meat companies across 2020 and 2021, per Crunchbase data.

Why it matters: Cultivated meat is a potential way to have our…meat…and eat it too—it could nearly zero out greenhouse-gas emissions from meat production and potentially help eliminate factory farming. But it’s unclear if it can be produced at scale in a safe, appealing, and economically viable way.

• “We’ve been de-risking it progressively for the last five and a half years, [but] there’s still more risk to investors and also to the field, which is, does this work at scale?” Upside Foods CEO and founder Uma Valeti told us in March. “And there is a chicken and egg problem there. Because unless you build it at scale, you can’t show it works.”

Bottom line: Upside wrote in its press release that its products will be available in the US later this year, “pending regulatory review,” and claimed regulatory approval is “on the horizon.”

But even if regulatory approval comes through this year, cultivated meat has to clear several hurdles in order to scale. Upside’s new funding will help with at least one of those: cost.

Read the full story here.—DM

Zipline is gearing up to launch Japan’s first long-distance commercial drone deliveries.

It’s the SF-based startup’s first foray into Asia. As part of the program, which debuted yesterday but officially kicks off in May, flights will carry hundreds of medical supplies to hospitals and pharmacies in Japan’s Gotō Islands. The flights are powered by a partnership with Toyota Tsusho Corporation, the Toyota Group’s trading arm.

Major player

Since its 2014 founding, Zipline has been steadily expanding the autonomous drone delivery market, especially overseas—delivering blood in Rwanda and Covid-19 vaccines in Ghana. So far, it has made more than 280,000 deliveries worldwide.

• For comparison, Alphabet-owned Wing passed the 200k delivery milestone last month.

It’s also a poster child for vertical integration: manufacturing its own drones and developing the end-to-end delivery process, including logistics software and takeoff-and-landing processes. As part of the partnership, Toyota Tsusho created a new subsidiary to manage the operations in Gotō including a warehouse and distribution center.

Zoom out: You could say Zipline had a very good 2021. Not only did the startup’s June funding round net $250 million at a $2.75 billion valuation, but it also inked autonomous delivery plans with Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, and three states in Nigeria, according to the company. Zipline also formalized a small-scale partnership with a Walmart in Arkansas.

Click here to view on-site.—HF

Stat: The world will need nearly 600 GWh of stationary-battery energy storage by the end of the decade in order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, per IEA estimates—up from ~60 GWh in 2021.

Quote: “Currently we see no signs of any weakening in our customer base. Zero. And even if demand weakens, there is a big gap between the demand and our capacity.”—Peter Wennink, CEO of semiconductor equipment supplier ASML said to analysts

Read: Not a bubble not a bubble not a bubble not a bub—wait, actually not a bubble?

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Scientists reverse engineered a fly’s eyeball for spotting drones.
• A Scottish hobbyist claims to have established Lidar evidence of Nessie.
• Someone trained an Amazon smart microwave using OpenAI’s GPT-3—and it got violent.
• A startup that makes products like alcohol from CO2 pulled from the atmosphere just raised $30 million.

The US’s first-ever offshore wind farm, which began operating in December 2016, has had no negative impact on fish, per a seven-year-long study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science in late March. In fact, black sea bass kinda liked it.

Why it matters: One of the biggest barriers offshore wind faces is concern about turbines’ effects on local fish populations. As Electrek points out, in 2021, Maine banned offshore wind in state waters due to concerns about the fishing and lobstering industries.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Batteries beyond EVs—everything you need to know about stationary storage
• Rate design could help the grid handle the electrification of everything
• A primer on synthetic data, which is gaining steam for AI

People have claimed sonar evidence of Nessie, but not lidar, to our knowledge.

*Also—we forgot to include the answer to Going Phishing last Friday, sorry about that. For those of you still wondering one week later...Tinder is not beta-testing a feature to send crypto to connections.