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Tag: controlled environment agriculture

Pulaski startup aims to turn pollutants into profit

Where some people see pollutants, Steve Critchfield sees the potential for profit and to improve the environment.

As founder and president of Pulaski-based MOVA Technologies, Critchfield developed and patented a filter about the size of a refrigerator that captures selected air pollutants and breaks them into byproducts that can be sold and reused. It’s based on technology developed by the late Arthur Squires, a Virginia Tech professor who worked on the Manhattan Project.

MOVA started out aiming to get into the competitive market for developing carbon capture technology, but as its board and backers became impatient for returns, Critchfield says, the company pivoted to producing an ammonia-capture filter for the poultry industry, its first product launch.

Instead of exhausting highly soluble airborne ammonia from chicken waste into the air, where it can wind up polluting waterways through runoff, poultry farms can capture the ammonia with MOVA’s filters and turn it into fertilizer.

Following a successful pilot test with a poultry producer in Delaware this spring, MOVA is planning an early 2025 rollout for the ammonia-capture filters.

That’s not to say that MOVA is getting away from carbon capture, though. After completing a $2 million seed round in September and receiving about $500,000 in federal and state grants to develop and test its technology, MOVA announced in October it will collaborate on a carbon dioxide capture program with Pulaski-based Vegg Inc., a controlled environment agriculture startup for which Critchfield is the largest shareholder.

MOVA’s industrial-sized point-source filters will capture carbon dioxide from the air to feed plants that Vegg will grow at an indoor, vertical farm being established in Pulaski’s former Jefferson Elementary School building, which Vegg bought last year for $100,000.

“It’s like we’re just harvesting [carbon dioxide] and hooking the spigot up to the building,” says Vegg co-founder Luke Allison, also director of advancement and stockholder relations for MOVA.

MOVA’s innovation comes as Virginia moves toward its state mandate of net-zero carbon emissions from power generation by 2050.

Unlike carbon storage systems designed to indefinitely capture carbon emissions, MOVA’s filters are intended to recycle carbon dioxide for industrial uses, Critchfield says.

If the pilot with Vegg is successful, Critchfield sees possibilities for expanding beyond indoor farming into serving industries like bottling and brewing: “No more carbon dioxide will need to be created. That’s huge for global warming.” 

Freelance writer Paul Bergeron contributed to this story. 

Agriculture conference headed for Danville

A new conference for the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) industry will debut Oct. 25 at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (IALR) in Danville.

One goal behind the event, dubbed CEA Summit East, is “highlighting some of the CEA growth that’s happening in Virginia — and particularly in Southern Virginia,” according to organizer Kaylee South.

Sure to be a topic of discussion at the conference: New Jersey-based AeroFarms, which this year opened a 138,670-square-foot, $53 million vertical farm in Pittsylvania County. Located in Cane Creek Centre, a joint industrial park owned by the city of Danville and Pittsylvania County, the AeroFarms facility is expected to create more than 150 jobs and has been promoted as the world’s largest indoor vertical farm of its kind. Roger Buelow, chief technology officer for AeroFarms, is the keynote speaker for CEA Summit East.

The conference will be jointly run by the Controlled Environment Agriculture Innovation Center — a joint Virginia Tech-IALR center located on the IALR campus — and Indoor Ag-Con, a national CEA trade show and conference.

Additionally, organizers are hopeful the conference will spur more local economic development by encouraging networking between CEA farmers and researchers in the Eastern U.S. as well as economic development officials and real estate developers. 

“At the highest levels in the state, they’re interested in CEA,” says Scott Lowman, vice president of applied research at IALR.  “So, we feel like we’re doing our part to help bring everybody together.”

South, one of the conference’s organizers, is an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Plant and Environmental Sciences but is based at the Controlled Environment Agriculture Innovation Center in Danville. She expects the conference to attract about 250 attendees.

“I’m really excited to just meet people in the industry and have the chance to bring together industry and academia people,” she says.

Controlled environment agriculture refers to “growing agricultural products within enclosed environments where you’re regulating the environment for the specific agricultural products that you’re producing,” explains South.

It can be as simple as using hoop houses (hoops positioned over crops and covered by plastic) or as sophisticated as vertical farms, where plants are grown indoors, stacked vertically on shelves, improving food safety and requiring less water and pesticide.

Founded in 2002 as an economic development engine for Southern Virginia, the IALR houses research initiatives and provides workforce training and conference facilities.