Agrilution

A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

Agrilution offers a complete product package, that enables you to grow a wide variety of leafy greens, microgreens and even strawberries - soil- and effortlessly, consisting of:

• a plug’n’play smart home appliance in the size of a dishwasher with optimized LED-lighting, climate control and automated watering (“plantCube”). The plantCube produces enough food to satisfy the daily demand of vegetables of two people - easily and fully automated.

• a software suite that consists of databases, API, App and a device operating system. The operating system guarantees optimal growing parameters for all licensed greens and the purchase of refill supplies via the App. Remote control of the plantCube allows data gathering and further improvements of both growing parameters and cross selling opportunities.

• a large variety of proprietary seed and substrate refill supplies including the optimal fertilizer for each specific plant (“seedbundles”).

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

Agriculture is responsible for most of our resource consumption. 70% of global water usage is due to activities in agriculture and CO2 emissions, expecially in meat production, is higher than in heavy industries. Further, land space is decreasing while global population numbers are steadily on the rise. Soon, there will not be enough space to cultivate food for everyone, which is why we need to reinvent the way we’re thinking about agriculture. Moreover, increasing use of pesticides and genetically modified organisms in food production will have unforseeable consequences on our health, which is why organic and natural production techniques gain momentum.

All these challenges are addressed by agrilution. If everybody was growing their own food at home, transportation costs would be limited, while also water usage would be decreased. This would heavily diminish CO2 emissions and waste of resources. Further, agrilution is all about vertical farming, because land use of traditional horizontal farming is increasingly missing. Also, no pesticides will be needed in the process in order to promote organic and biological farming which will be beneficial for the future health of our societies.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

While we outlined above why the company is addressing ethical challenges, the reason why we can be certain is a personal contact to the CEO. We know some of the team members and have been following the development of the company since 2013. We are sure that there is a greater vision behind the business idea and that it is not just merely about profits, but about contributing to a greater goal. This is underlined by the fact that agrilution founded the Association for Vertical Farming which globally promotes their goal of making agriculture less detrimental for the environment and ourselves. Of course this association also has business purposes with activities such as networking, technology exchange, etc., but overall it primarily serves the purpose of promoting the importance of rethinking agriculture.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

The technology to implement effective appliances for home-agriculture is still expensive and needs further research and development. Thus, it will become a challenge to reach a critical mass with the product in order to gain profits through consistent sales of seed mats. These challenges will be addressed by cooperating with established companies in order to make use of their operations and sophisticated infrastructures, while carrying them to a new way of groing food as the innovative startup that we are.

If technology is developed fully to offer adequate consumer prices, the challenge will be to produce and distribute with enough economies of scale and scope while differentiating our product and seed offerings in order to reach many different consumers from home to restaurant and farm use.