SBIR-STTR Award

Lateral.Systems is an Agricultural Technology startup company. Our mission is to accelerate promising advancements in sustainable food production by offering modularized hardware and software computing capabilities for monitoring detecting and maintaining Novel Indoor Growing Farming Systems. Our Optimized Intelligence Platform will support data-driven agricultural efficiencies using novel edge solutions. Our platform will advance USDA strategic goal 2 maximizing the ability of American agricultural producers to prosper by accelerating controlled agricultural growing systems that protect plants against a biotic and biotic stresses (NIFA priorities Topic 8.13) and allow for precise control of use of water energy and plant phytochemical properties. The purpose of this feasibility study is to advance critical enabling features of our conceptual platform to the pilot pre-production phase. The research question is: What is the feasibility of extending an open-source software approach for productization of our "on-premise" edge solution that does not require internet services to bridge the digital divide for rural and urban farmers? To determine if the EdgeX software stack is robust enough for our platform we will develop open interfaces for a suite of sensors to enable and test the data flow and ensure modularity integrability and interchangeability of the individual components describe the operating principle of our computer aided intelligence programs and provide visualization of the data. We will also begin designing the Private Cloud database. Finally we will perform a gap analysis to determine if EdgeX is an effective solution approach to size the level of workforce required to commercialize our edge agriculture platform.

Food and the future of food production needs help. The mission of LATERAL.systems LLC (LATERAL) is to enable next generation farming by accelerating the intersection of promising modern technologies to advance sustainable and ethical production of food. A promising innovation for meeting increasing challenges to reliable sustainable food production are Novel Indoor Farming Systems. However indoor growing requires delicate balance. High labor costs associated with manually monitoring and responding to complex data signals cut into profit margins however failing to detect and respond to problems in a timely manner can be even more costly. A fully integrated modular approach for monitoring water quality and air conditions in indoor growing environments does not yet exist; currently indoor AgTech solutions do not provide an open platform approach to address handling open data due to proprietary application interfaces and closed data schemas to fuse disparate dataset sources. LATERAL is developing an interoperable hardware and software solution that synthesizes and interprets sensor readings to make data readily useful and secure. As timestamped reading scaptured at routine intervals from multiple sensors are fused local system analytics involving machine learning will monitor relationships to provide automated monitoring alerts and alarm sand message notifications with mediation options to enable users to anticipate and avert significant abiotic and biotic stresses. Importantly our innovation is edge based; farmers will not need reliable high speed internet data services to access on-premise round-the-clock monitoring. In Phase I we successfully validated an open-source framework to build our services on prototyped sensor arrays and data visualization features and enabled preliminary trends analysis. The Phase II research effort is focused on solidifying the architecture of our indoor farm monitoring solution advancing development of our edge platform to pilot stage for commercialization and conducting a technical field test program to advance critical enabling features of a conceptual platform for commercialization. Anticipated results are to enable interoperability of more sensor devices to reduce dependencies that create supply chain vulnerabilities advance our LATERAL Edge platform provisioning enable security measures advanced AI capabilities and user interface to pilot ready stage. Throughout field testing we will improve on message notification services and data visualization features working directly with farm stakeholders to ensure usability and correct interpretation of actionable data insights. The total available market is the $172 billion global indoor farming market; our serviceable addressable market is the indoor specialty crop market valued at USD $4.16 billion in 2022(Zion 2022). The $34 million aquaponics market is expected to grow to $65 million by 2028 and the hydroponics market worth $10.2 billion is forecasted to grow to $19.5 billion by 2026 (KDMarket Insights 2022). Thus LATERAL is moving into a large rapidly expanding market hungry for data insights to increase success. We plan to democratize access to AgTech Edge solution for the over 2.02 million farms in the U.S. (USDA 2021) that lack internet access on the farm starting with regions experiencing prolonged drought where producers are working to augment food production using indoor strategies that require as little as 5% of the water it takes to grow the same plants outdoors. Together we'll maximize farmers' success in growing more food with fewer resources and increase the competitiveness of American food producers.