Food Security and Energy Costs on the Agenda at the 5th GVF Show in Dubai

The Zayndu stand at GVF attracted esteemed visitors, including representatives from UAE’s Ministry for Environment and Climate Change. The main topic of conversation was how to grow the vertical farming sector and increase its productivity to improve the Gulf region’s food security.

Intent on discussing how its ActivatedAir^TM seed priming technology helps boost yields, the Zayndu team attended the 5^th GVF show in Dubai, held on September 10^th and 11^th.

The UAE has become a hotbed for controlled environment agriculture (CEA), growing indoors, in greenhouses or vertical farms. The sector is becoming increasingly vital to the region’s agricultural industry with the country’s Ministry for Climate Change and the Environment citing a critical development goal being the shift towards modern agricultural methods such as hydroponic, organic, vertical, and protected agriculture.

“Because of the climate, improving food self-sufficiency is mainly driven by vertical farms and greenhouses,” says Ollie Green, customer success manager for Zayndu. 

“We have found the adoption of sophisticated growing technology to be high because many facilities are new, and growers are looking to maximise output.”

Managing a controlled environment in a climate with extreme temperatures means energy is a significant cost to vertical farms in the Gulf. To alleviate this, growers actively sought solutions at GVF that increase yields using the same or less energy.

ActivatedAir^TM’s ability to increase seedling vigour and germination percentage, leading to bigger yields and shorter cycle times, seems ideally suited to growers in the region, says Robert Woods, business development manager for Zayndu.

“ActivatedAir^TM seed priming gets crops off to the best possible start,” says Robert.

“More consistent and quicker seedling emergence profoundly improves the financial performance of short and medium-cycle leafy salad crops grown by many of the visitors to the stand.

“It gives bigger yields using the existing growing time, or a grower can get the same yield in a shorter growing time, allowing more crop cycles per year. Either way, ActivatedAir^TM improves productivity by enabling a grower to produce more crop using the same fixed costs,” adds Robert.

Ollie believes adopting technology like ActivatedAir^TM could be an important step towards increasing the UAE’s food security.

“There’s a huge opportunity to expand the sector’s markets beyond the restaurants, hotels and cafés into retail,” he adds. “Time after time, growers deploying ActivatedAir^TM have increased output by up to 20%, enabling the existing facilities in the Gulf to further their output without additional capital outlay.” 

Zayndu is rapidly expanding its presence in the in the Gulf states, which it sees as a key market. Robert and Ollie encourage interested growers to contact the team via LinkedIn or the Zayndu website.