New International Research Center Will Analyze the Shift to Indoor Farming
Urban Crop Solutions (UCS) and Dr. Rudi Pauwels are setting up a research center on indoor farming applications in southern Spain. Research at the center will focus on the impact of climate change on crops in Southern Europe, while working on optimizing nutrient content. For UCS, this new research center complements its existing research center in Belgium. Dr. Rudi Pauwels will also advise UCS on its plant molecular farming activities.
Urban Crop Solutions has been active in researching growing plants without sunlight, in its own designed and engineered indoor farms, since 2014. Many of these farms have been commissioned and installed globally. Past research activities at the headquarters in Belgium have already led to several new applications enabled by the company’s controlled environment growing techniques that offer solutions to the global challenges of food scarcity, and the production of plant-based ingredients and raw materials.
With Dr. Rudi Pauwels, who is world-renowned for his development of the world’s most widely used and successful AIDS inhibitors, and founder of several successful biotech companies, UCS will build a new research center near Málaga in southern Spain. This research center will work on the challenges brought about by global warming in southern European regions. In these regions, there is an opportunity and a need to rethink traditional farming practices, considering the increasing water shortages, and the advantages offered by modern agriculture. With consideration to calls that in the future, farms should focus more on the production of the most nutritious crops, UCS and Pauwels, have determined their joint mission as one that optimizes the nutrient content of crops, through their controlled environment agriculture techniques. The research center should be operational by early 2023. The studies will be led by Pauwels and Dr. Oscar Navarrete, Chief Plant Scientist at Urban Crop Solutions.
“With this initiative, I reconnect with the centuries-long agricultural tradition in my family. It was my grandfather and especially my father, a horticultural engineer, who passed onto me a lot of knowledge, and passion for this field in my childhood years,” Pauwels says. “Furthermore, I believe very strongly in plant molecular farming or plant-based production. UCS’s indoor farming techniques are highly important for the use of plants as an alternative and efficient carrier, for the production of molecules of interest for various pharmaceutical products such as vaccines.”
“We are very honored that a captain of the industry, of Dr Rudi Pauwels’ caliber, wants to work with us to turn the possibilities of indoor farming into concrete realizations. This proves that we have built up a lot of expertise over the past eight years and that we have installed the right business model,” says Frederic Bulcaen, Chairman and Co-Founder of Urban Crop Solutions.
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