Energy-efficient lighting could help revolutionize farming, iUNU founders say
By Garrett Rudolph
For the Seattle-based team at iUNU, energy-efficient lighting isn’t just about saving growers money on their electricity bills. Co-founders Adam Greenberg and Kyle Rooney believe it’s about finding a way to feed the world’s ballooning population in the not-too-distant future.
“By 2020 it will be nearly impossible to feed the whole world from farming outdoors,” Greenberg, the company’s CEO, says. “That’s only five years away.”
Greenberg says exponential population growth, coupled by major water shortages, could force traditional outdoor farming to move indoors.
“The way you end world hunger is you grow food closer to where it’s needed most,” Greenberg says. “Enabling that radical change of growing food in greenhouses and indoors wherever it’s needed is part of what we do.”
Traditional outdoor farming means matching crops with the ideal growing climate, and therefore a tremendous amount of time, fuel and money spent in transportation. Nowhere is this more evident than an American supermarket, where one might find apples and cherries grown in Washington, avocados, grapes and almonds from California, corn from Illinois, oranges and grapefruits from Florida, lettuce from Arizona, potatoes from Idaho, broccoli from Texas and pears from Oregon.
“I look forward to the day where you have kiwi vines, you have grapes and melons and this local ecosystem that is cultivating everything people are consuming, and that can be crops that are normally not found in their region because of climate,” Rooney says. “It would be cool to be able to empower that. When you factor in transportation and time, a lot of fruits and vegetables aren’t as fresh, flavorful or nutritious as they could be.”
That concept may prove even more valuable outside the United States, where lack of resources and climate challenges make outdoor farming even more untenable.
However, the prohibitive cost of indoor farming comes largely from electricity, which was the driving force behind iUNU’s origins.
The company introduced its energy-efficient dual plasma lights in October 2014 with the goal of providing a high-output, full-spectrum light for the entire indoor agriculture industry. Plasma technology, Rooney says, mimics the way the sun creates light, using radio waves to excite and ionize gases inside tubes.
“The combination of optics, performance and spectrum is kind of our secret sauce,” he says.
Greenberg adds that the iUNU lighting system was developed to be modular, so it’s simple to replace individual components if a part malfunctions, as well as being easy to upgrade as the company introduces more advanced products.
“It’s like Legos,” Greenberg says. “You can just unplug something and plus something else back in to replace it. We don’t want people to have to buy a whole new fixture.”
While many lighting companies have aimed directly at the cannabis market, iUNU takes a fairly agnostic approach to marijuana.
“There are a lot of lighting companies out there that are focusing just on cannabis,” Greenberg says. “We have to maintain the stance that we’re better at growing everything.”
The majority of iUNU’s customers are cultivating greenhouse crops, such as tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, as well as lettuce, Greenberg says.
“It is an expensive lettuce light, but for leafy greens and lettuce we’re finding there’s a much different taste profile,” he says.
“The same things you’re seeing in food, where you’re increasing flavor, you’re increasing nutritional value, the smell and the aroma and the terpenes, all of that translates across a variety of crops,” Rooney adds.
At about $2,500 apiece, the iUNU dual plasmas do carry a steeper entry point than most HID and LED counterparts. The company is headquartered in Seattle, with its manufacturing facilities in nearby Auburn, Washington. It currently employs about 15 people.
“People always ask us, why aren’t you manufacturing in China?” Rooney says. “There are so many reasons not to manufacture in China. … We like to look at all the reasons we have to keep it here (in Seattle).”