Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** lateral.systems: edge based…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** lateral.systems: edge based indoor farming monitoring platformfood and the future of food production needs help. The mission of lateral.systems LLC (lateral) is to enable next generation farmingby accelerating the intersection of promising modern technologiesto advance sustainable andethical production of food. A promising innovation for meeting increasing challenges to reliable, sustainable food production are novel indoor farming systems. However, indoor growing requires delicate balance. High labor costs associated with manually monitoring and responding to complex data signals cut into profit margins, however failing to detect and respond to problems in a timely manner can be even more costly. A fully integrated modular approach for monitoring water quality and air conditions in indoor growing environments does not yet exist; currently, indoor agtech solutions do not provide an open platform approach to address handling open data due to proprietary application interfaces and closed data schemas to fuse disparate dataset sources.lateral is developing an interoperable hardware and software solution that synthesizes and interprets sensor readings to make data readily useful and secure. As time stamped readings captured at routine intervals from multiple sensors are fused, local system analytics involving machine learning will monitor relationships to provide automated monitoring, alerts, and alarms, and message notifications with mediation options to enable users to anticipate and avert significant abiotic and biotic stresses. Importantly, our innovation is edge based; farmers will not need reliable high speed internet data services to access on-premise round-the-clock monitoring. In phase i we successfully validated an open-source framework to build our services on, prototyped sensor arrays and data visualization features, and enabled preliminary trends analysis. The phase II research effort is focused on solidifying the architecture of our indoor farm monitoring solution, advancing development of our edge platform to pilot stage for commercialization, and conducting a technical field test program to advance critical enabling features of a conceptual platform for commercialization. Anticipated results are to enable interoperability of more sensor devices to reduce dependencies that create supply chain vulnerabilities, advance our lateral edge platform provisioning, enable security measures, advanced AI capabilities, and user interface to pilot ready stage. Throughout field testing, we will improve on message notification services and data visualization features working directly with farm stakeholders to ensure useability and correct interpretation of actionable data insights. The total available market is the $172 billion global indoor farming market; our serviceable addressable market is the indoor specialty crop market valued at USD $4.16 billion in 2022 (zion, 2022). The $34 million aquaponics market is expected to grow to $65 million by 2028,and the hydroponics market worth $10.2 billion is forecasted to grow to $19.5 billion by 2026 (KD market insights, 2022). Thus, lateral is moving into a large, rapidly expanding market hungry for data insights to increase success. We plan to democratize access to agtech edge solution for the over 2.02 million farms in the U.S. (USDA, 2021) that lack internet access on the farm starting with regions experiencing prolonged drought where producers are working to augment food production using indoor strategies that require as little as 5% of the water IT takes to grow the same plants outdoors. Together, we'LL maximize farmers' success in growing more food with fewer resources and increase the competitiveness of american food producers.