Hull agritech startup Gooddrop is looking to establish itself as the leading global player in the vertical farming of cotton, starting with an initial £1m investment and a three-year research partnership with the University of Nottingham.
“We have founded Gooddrop to provide the retail sector with an entirely manageable solution to issues of sustainability in cotton farming,” said Simon Wardle, CEO of Gooddrop.
“Gooddrop is a well-resourced Agtech startup in an excellent position to initiate the multi-phase approach we have adopted to launch the business. Our ambition is to enable the transformation of cotton production from field to indoor farming, producing a sustainable, profitable crop that can be fully utilised by agriculture, manufacturing and retail.”
Launched and backed by a partnership of Simon Wardle and Andres Perea, Gooddrop’s £1m launch investment will ensure its initial costs are met, including for research, manpower and capital expenditure.
“We will continue to invest in Gooddrop while encouraging private equity, including angel and venture capital, and local, regional and national funding bodies to invest in the business,” added Wardle.
Gooddrop’s main research partner is the University of Nottingham, which has the largest group of internationally recognised plant and crop scientists in the UK university sector. The team brings together a range of academic experience and expertise in delivering crop optimisation in controlled and field environments together with world leading research facilities related to germplasm, seed, crop and vertical farming development and hopes to fundamentally change for the better how cotton is grown, while seeking ways to improve the health of the planet and empowering people to do so.
Central to the research programme with the university has been the design, build, fitout and installation of six custom-made cotton research units. Converted from two ex-artic containers, these research, test growing labs and admin units have been manufactured by Cambridge HOK at Newport, East Yorkshire, transported to, and installed at, the University of Nottingham’s Sutton Bonington Campus in Leicestershire.
Erik Murchie, Professor of Applied Plant Physiology, School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham, added: “The idea here is to develop vertical farming concepts for cotton which is normally a field crop. This includes making the cotton more sustainable and to reduce inputs into cotton production and to develop means of growing it indoors. This will allow us to control temperature and humidity and light quality.”
Gooddrop’s vertical farming will significantly reduce the amount of land used for growing cotton while increasing yield so that cotton grown the Gooddrop way would use less than 0.4 per cent of the land currently used.
Wardle added: “All this readjustment of conventional in-field cotton agriculture will enable the farms to be rewilded making a significant contribution to the efforts of climate change reversal. With Gooddrop’s ability to reduce the land footprint it would be possible to rewild a land area similar to the size of Germany. The fallout of such vast rewilding would be hard to describe – with a massive positive impact on CO 2 sequestration, biodiversity promotion, reduced flooding, restoration of more natural rhythms in nature and, hopefully, help for the stabilisation of global temperatures.”
