Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) is on the rise. Although it produces < 1% of total global agricultural production, it dominates in certain products like tomatoes, cucumbers, cannabis, horticulture, leafy greens and herbs. It is ideally suited for these types of produce, in areas where there are constraints on arable land and water. A key advantage is year round production, and higher produce output in terms of yield/m² of land, using as much natural light as possible, and minimal quantities of water and pesticides. CEA accounted for ~$103B in 2025, expected to double by 2030, driven by a rise in urban food demand for organic, pesticide-free, climate resilient produce.
The drawback to this seemingly green initiative is the significant consumption of electricity – for maintaining optimal levels of humidity and temperature, operating water pumps to mist and water plants, and very importantly, LED based artificial lighting (in case sunlight is not available). CEA consumes ~10X more energy than traditional outdoor farming, and 10X less water/per lb of produce. Other challenges include capital costs to install warehouse-style indoor farms, and the supply and motivation of the labor force to work in demanding conditions.
Eternal.ag – We’re Building Resilience into Global Food Production
Based in Cologne, Germany, Eternal.ag, focuses on implementing autonomy in greenhouses to address the extreme labor shortage (especially in the developed world). It currently has 26 employees between Cologne and Bengaluru, India. Led by CEO Renji John, the company recently raised ~$10M from European investors to scale its autonomy solutions. Mr. John had previously founded Honest AgTech, based in the Netherlands – unfortunately, the timing was not right and it went bankrupt in 2023. Eternal.ag was established two years later to continue the mission – robots and physical AI to revolutionize greenhouse farming.
Figure 1 shows the harvesting robot developed by the company, operating in a tomato-growing greenhouse. The plant is grown using hydroponics (growing plants without soil, with the roots suspended directly in water-nutrient mixture, and supported by an inert, soil-free medium like coconut coir). The infant plants are sourced from local nurseries, and the planting itself is done by humans at this point. The robot is powered by an electric battery, and designed to work either by navigating on rails or on smooth concrete floors, with minimal or no re-design of the infrastructure. The robot has its own steering platform, which can move the robot freely in any direction (Figure 1), using sensors for perception and localization,
According to Mr. Renji, a fully autonomous harvesting robot is the key to improving the economics of a greenhouse. Human labor is in short supply given the harsh operating environments (43°C temperatures and high humidity). Cobots (cooperative robots) that operate with humans require six operators in a 10 hectare (25 acres, or ~1M ft²) greenhouse to operate 24×7, a cost of ~$250,000/year in developed economies. A single autonomous harvester robot does this for 22 hours/day, 365 days/year (the 3 hours/day is for re-charging the battery). A control system monitors the robots to ensure smooth operation, with a support team dispatched to handle problem situations.
The robot’s end effector is equipped with a blade that cuts the stem and places it into a storage basket, without handling (and damaging) the fruit. A disinfectant is used after a certain amount of stem cuts to ensure hygiene and prevent the spread of viruses. The plants can grow to heights of > 10 feet. During harvest time, the stems and fruits are lowered to a height of 6 feet (Eternal.ag’s robot is 6 feet tall). Figure 2 shows the robot arm and end effector.
Autonomy is achieved through training – first by creating a digital twin of the greenhouse layout to train the control and path planning modules of the AI software. Additional training is done by having the robot physically navigate through the greenhouse path, collecting localization (the robot needs to operate in a GPS denied environment) and obstacle data through its suite of cameras, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and ultrasonic sensors. Obstacle avoidance is critical, as is collecting visual data of plant health and lighting conditions (natural and artificial LED illumination) for correlations over time, to improve yield.
The current effort is optimized for tomatoes, which are ideally suited to hydroponic growth. Outdoor farming for this crop is seasonal in many climates, but demand is high throughout the year. Cucumbers and horticulture are also suited to hydroponic farming, and Eternal.ag plans to pursue this imminently. The business model is to deploy the robots in a customer’s greenhouse based on a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. The company generates its revenue based on the amount of produce it cuts – an arrangement that is a win-win situation for Eternal.ag and the greenhouse customer (obviously if done correctly, with minimal fruit damage or loss).
Mr. John is passionate about sustainable agriculture. “With a changing climate, reduction in available land and water, higher frequency of extreme weather and geopolitical instability, the season and location-independent nature of greenhouses allows us to produce quality fresh foods consistently. Labor shortages are the single biggest risk to this, making robotics and autonomy a viable way for growers to run predictable operations that yield consistently strong harvests and profits”.
Van Noord Growers
Eternal.ag publicly announced its first paying customer, a third generation family- owned greenhouse in the Netherlands. The country is a top cultivator and exporter of greenhouse tomatoes (Mexico, China, Canada, the United States and Spain are the other power-green houses in this space, with an annual market of ~$10B growing to ~$16B by 2030). Van Noord Growers is a 9 hectare (~25 acres) greenhouse operation, located in Zeeland, at the mouth of the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt river delta, bordering Holland and Belgium. Jeffry Van Noord is the third generation family co-owner of the company.
According to Mr. Van Noord, the Dutch are exceptional at water management, and greenhouse agriculture is part of this initiative, given that it consumes < 90% water relative to conventional agriculture. As an entrepreneur and business owner, he highlights three factors that are critical:
- The Labor Issue: is critical because it is difficult to motivate native Dutch residents to perform in the grueling greenhouse environments. Importing labor is a possibility, but the cost to house, transport and provide social services is high. Reducing the amount of labor is critical for profitability.
- Energy consumption: is high and can be expensive, however, this seems to be required for operating any greenhouse.
- Capital investments for constructing greenhouses is high. The key is to maximize produce yield/m², and focus on high margin products.
Solutions like Eternal.ag are attractive to address the labor issue. The fact that incremental capital expenditures to integrate their robots is minimal is also attractive. Van Noord has been working with a single Eternal.ag robot since September 2025, and is planning to deploy more over the coming months. Apart from tomatoes, the plan is to also use these for cucumbers and other similar fruit.
Jeffry Van Noord: “Inconsistent and declining labor impacts us financially and operationally, so we have been looking to start our transition to automation for some time. Quality of harvest was our number one initial criteria for an automated solution and it wasn’t until we saw Eternal.ag’s Harvester that we felt confident to take the step”.
Data Centers Are Calling
It turns out that almost all of the compute power consumed in modern day data centers is converted to heat. Water cooling is one of the solutions to manage this, and ensure that the compute, transmit and switching infrastructure does not overheat and fail. A 36 MW data center rejects waste heat equivalent to ~40,000 households. Normally, this hot water is simply disposed off into a larger body of water and recycled, which is a waste of energy. Given the energy intensive nature of greenhouse agriculture, it would be great if there was a way to use data center waste heat to grow food sustainably. Fortunately, smarter people than me have thought of this, a while ago. In 2008, Notre Dames Center for Research Computing (part of University of Notre Dame in Indiana, United States) proposed and pioneered exactly this concept.
By way of numbers, a 10 hectare (25 acres) greenhouse uses ~ 15MW of energy for lighting, pumps and heating the greenhouse to the requisite 43°C temperatures – an issue in cold weather geographies. The heat generated by a small-medium data center is adequate to provide the thermal energy to stabilize temperatures. The focus on data center waste heat utilization is gaining momentum in Europe (Sweden is a pioneer) and the U.S. (as usual, California is taking the lead).
Data center operators, who desperately need community and government buy-in are supporting this initiative. Solutions are being deployed in the Netherlands and other countries like Sweden for reducing greenhouse energy consumption. In a way, this solves problems for both entities – data centers and greenhouses which can now both claim the “green” mantle.
The Autonomy of Things (AoT®) has already made significant inroads in conventional, outdoor agriculture. It is exciting to see how this progress is making its way into the more niche areas of CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture). The drivers are similar – the need to address labor shortages and maximize returns on capital investments. It will be interesting to see whether these two industries start cross-leveraging the autonomy learnings and solutions going forward.
