en.Wedoany.com Reported - Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) consumes about ten times the energy of traditional open-field agriculture, while using only one-tenth the water per kilogram of food. Although this sector accounts for less than 1% of global agricultural output, it leads in the cultivation of specific crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and leafy greens. This model demonstrates applicability in regions with limited water and arable land, offering advantages including year-round continuous production, higher yields per square meter, optimized use of natural light, and minimal water and pesticide consumption.
In 2025, the CEA industry market size is approximately $103 billion (about 556.2 billion BRL), expected to double by 2030, driven primarily by urban demand for organic, pesticide-free, and climate-resilient food. However, high electricity consumption is a necessary cost for maintaining humidity and temperature levels, powering irrigation pumps, and running LED artificial lighting. Other barriers include the substantial initial investment required to build vertical farms and a shortage of labor willing to work under demanding conditions.
Eternal.ag, an agricultural technology company headquartered in Cologne, Germany, focuses on deploying autonomous systems in greenhouses to address labor shortages. The company, led by CEO Renji John, recently raised approximately $10 million (about 54 million BRL) from European investors to expand its technological solutions. John previously founded Honest AgTech in the Netherlands, which closed in 2023 due to market conditions. Eternal.ag, established two years later, continues projects applying robotics and physical artificial intelligence in greenhouse agriculture.
The harvesting robot developed by the company is designed for tomato greenhouses with hydroponic system structures, a technology that eliminates soil, with roots suspended in a solution of water and nutrients. Planting seedlings from local nurseries still relies on manual labor. The battery-powered robot moves along rails or smooth concrete surfaces, requiring minimal modification to existing infrastructure. The equipment has its own steering platform, enabling movement in any direction, and uses sensors for spatial awareness and localization. The fully autonomous harvesting robot operates 22 hours a day, 365 days a year, reserving 2 hours daily for battery charging. In a 10-hectare greenhouse, continuous operation using collaborative robots (cobots) requires 6 operators running non-stop, generating an annual cost of approximately $250,000 (about 1.35 million BRL) in developed countries. The robot's cutting mechanism features a blade that severs the stem and places the product into a storage basket, avoiding direct handling that could damage the fruit. After a certain number of cuts, a disinfection system is activated to ensure hygiene and prevent the spread of plant viruses. Since plant height can exceed 3 meters, stems and fruits are lowered to a height of 1.80 meters during harvesting, matching the height of the Eternal.ag robot.
The autonomy of the equipment is achieved through software training: first, a digital twin of the greenhouse structure is created to train the AI's control module and path planning; then, the robot physically navigates the aisles, collecting location data in GPS-denied environments and mapping obstacles using cameras, LiDAR sensors, and ultrasonic sensors. Obstacle avoidance, along with visual monitoring of plant health and natural and artificial lighting conditions, is also critical. This data is used to generate historical correlations and improve yields. The current system is optimized for tomato cultivation, a crop suitable for hydroponics that is seasonal in open-field production under most climates but has year-round market demand. The company plans to soon expand the technology to cucumbers and general horticultural crops. The business model is based on Robotics as a Service (RaaS), with Eternal.ag's revenue derived from the volume of harvested food. Eternal.ag announced its first commercial customer—Van Noord Growers, a third-generation family business in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands is one of the world's leading producers and exporters of greenhouse tomatoes, with a global annual market value of approximately $10 billion (about 54 billion BRL), expected to reach $16 billion (about 86.4 billion BRL) by 2030. Van Noord Growers' farm is located in the Zeeland region, in the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt delta, covering 9 hectares. Company co-owner Jeffry Van Noord noted that the greenhouse model saves over 90% of water compared to traditional agriculture, and the financial and operational impacts of labor shortages prompted the search for automation. Since September 2025, one Eternal.ag robot has been in operation, with plans to expand the fleet in the coming months, using the equipment for harvesting cucumbers and similar varieties.
Given the high energy demands of greenhouse agriculture, integrating waste heat from data processing centers has emerged as an alternative for sustainable food production. This pioneering concept was proposed in 2008 by the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA. The heat dissipated by a data infrastructure with a capacity of 36 megawatts is equivalent to the energy consumption of approximately 40,000 households. A 10-hectare greenhouse requires about 15 megawatts of energy to maintain lighting, pumps, and heating systems (with temperatures kept around 43°C). The heat generated by small to medium-sized data centers is sufficient to provide the thermal energy needed for a stable agricultural environment. This industrial symbiosis model is gradually emerging in Europe (pioneered by Sweden) and the United States (led by California). In Denmark, a new complex announced by Swedish developer WA3RM in partnership with digital infrastructure company atNorth will integrate a data processing campus with a vegetable-growing greenhouse, bringing sustainability benefits to both economic activities.
