CEA companies bring food production to the people

Four centuries after the advent of the agriculture industry in Virginia, the Commonwealth is again at the forefront of agricultural innovation.

Fugro, the world’s leading geo data specialist, will expand its Americas Center of Expertise for Offshore Wind in the City of Norfolk, creating 15 new jobs.

RICHMOND - Governor Terry McAuliffe announced today that Polykon Manufacturing LLC, a joint venture between Seppic, Inc. and Schülke Inc., will invest more than $60 million to establish a manufacturing operation in Virginia in Henrico County. Seppic and schülke are entities of Air Liquide Healthcare. Virginia successfully competed against Ohio for the project, which will create approximately 50 new jobs. The Governor met with senior company officials at the Seppic headquarters in Paris during his European Marketing Mission in June 2015.

Governor Glenn Youngkin today announced that Virginia is ranked No.1 in the U.S. for Customized Workforce Training in the 19th-annual Business Facilities State Rankings Report.

Any discussion about Virginia peanuts needs to start with a clarification between Virginia peanuts and Virginia Peanuts. The lowercase former refers to peanuts grown in the Commonwealth; the capitalized latter is one of four peanut cultivars grown in the United States. If you’ve ever cracked a peanut out of a shell at a baseball game, that was a Virginia Peanut.

Labor shortages have long been a challenge in agricultural operations, spurring innovative new ways of operating. Today’s farms rely as much on GPS-guided technology and artificial intelligence-driven automation as they do on manual labor. However, these changes have created their own hurdles by demanding new skills of today’s agricultural workforce. 

Virginia universities and research institutions are leading the way to improve controlled environment agriculture in the Commonwealth and spur nationwide agricultural development.

As traditional methods of harvesting oysters started flailing, a family business turned toward innovative aquaculture to rebound oyster populations. 

The most advanced Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) operations are fully automated systems that deliver the exact environmental conditions required by specific plants, including the optimum temperature, humidity, and light levels. CEA operations can grow large amounts of produce while using significantly less water and land and eliminating the need for certain pesticides and fertilizers. VEDP spoke with CEOs from major CEA companies on how technological advancements will affect the future of the agriculture industry in Virginia and beyond.