Max Lössl was nine when he and his family moved to Xi’an in northwestern China. His mother, who worked in rural development, often took him and his sister to remote villages near the Gobi Desert, where she helped local people dig wells and grow their own food.
Food was scarce. Sandstorms from Inner Mongolia blew so intensely that they often destroyed crops. It couldn’t have been more different from Munich, where Lössl was born.
"Some of the villages were a huge shock to me," he explains. "People lived in a clay hut built into the mountain, with no electricity and no running water. They barely had anything to eat. We sometimes slept there. It was the total opposite of what I had known.”
It was this experience – of hunger and abundance – that stoked his interest in developing sustainable forms of food production. Ultimately, it led him to develop agrilution, an agriculture tech start-up, and to co-found the Association for Vertical Farming, whose members now include global corporations such as Microsoft and IKEA.
“I wanted to reconnect people with food production, because we’re totally disconnected," he says. "The majority of us don’t know what plants look like in different growth phases, because we buy everything in supermarkets."
His main product is an automated soil-less farming device the size of a dishwasher. The unit has the growing surface of about 0.3 square metres and controls climate, light, water and the nutrition of the plant. It can produce different kinds of vegetables, herbs or fruits without soil, enough to feed a household of up to 4 people, depending on usage intensity. It reduces water consumption by up to 98 per cent and fertiliser usage by up to 60 per cent, while achieving 2-3 times faster growth rates compared with the traditional soil-based method.
Its users can access the online platform via a smartphone app to download profiles, which provide ideal growing environments for plants.
"The majority of us don’t know what plants look like in different growth phases, because we buy everything in supermarkets," Lössl says. "Industrialised food production has a focus on transportability, appearance and shelf life. We on the other hand are driven by providing people access to local, fresh, healthy produce year round with a focus on taste and nutritional value."
