"The Crop Plan is Determined by the Customer, Not by a Guess We Made Months Earlier"

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Sep 8

DEFRA-backed platform ties crop scheduling to confirmed orders

Harvest London and Crate to Plate are trialling a platform designed to plan crop production from confirmed customer orders instead of forecasts, under a DEFRA-funded ADOPT project led by InnoPhyte Consulting. The deployment runs across Harvest London's Canada Water and Lea Bridge facilities and Crate to Plate's site in Canary Wharf. The approach, developed by Harvest London as the platform Ani, grew out of conversations with traditional farmers rather than other vertical growers.

Ani has been running at Harvest London since 2022, when the company built the software in-house to optimize its own production; the ADOPT project marks its first deployment at an external operator, with the demand-driven planning model as its new focus.

"Speculatively growing is very expensive in vertical farms. You're paying for the energy, the space and the inputs whether or not there's a customer at the end of it, so when you plant against a forecast, and that forecast is wrong, you're either throwing away perfectly good crop or falling short on an order," says Chris Davies, CEO of Harvest London. "We actually got this idea from speaking with traditional farmers, who were planning out a year-long crop plan built around the seasons. It struck us that we didn't need to work that way. In a vertical farm, we could have a crop plan that was determined by the customer instead."

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