The Zayndu stand at GVF attracted esteemed visitors, including representatives from UAE’s Ministry for Environment and Climate Change. The main topic of conversation was how to grow the vertical farming sector and increase its productivity to improve the Gulf region’s food security.

Intent on discussing how its ActivatedAirTM seed priming technology helps boost yields, the Zayndu team attended the 5th GVF show in Dubai, held on September 10th and 11th.

The UAE has become a hotbed for controlled environment agriculture (CEA), growing indoors, in greenhouses or vertical farms. The sector is becoming increasingly vital to the region's agricultural industry with the country's Ministry for Climate Change and the Environment citing a critical development goal being the shift towards modern agricultural methods such as hydroponic, organic, vertical, and protected agriculture.

"Because of the climate, improving food self-sufficiency is mainly driven by vertical farms and greenhouses," says Ollie Green, customer success manager for Zayndu.

"We have found the adoption of sophisticated growing technology to be high because many facilities are new, and growers are looking to maximise output."

Managing a controlled environment in a climate with extreme temperatures means energy is a significant cost to vertical farms in the Gulf. To alleviate this, growers actively sought solutions at GVF that increase yields using the same or less energy.

ActivatedAirTM's ability to increase seedling vigour and germination percentage, leading to bigger yields and shorter cycle times, seems ideally suited to growers in the region, says Robert Woods, business development manager for Zayndu.

"ActivatedAirTM seed priming gets crops off to the best possible start," says Robert.

"More consistent and quicker seedling emergence profoundly improves the financial performance of short and medium-cycle leafy salad crops grown by many of the visitors to the stand.

"It gives bigger yields using the existing growing time, or a grower can get the same yield in a shorter growing time, allowing more crop cycles per year. Either way, ActivatedAirTM improves productivity by enabling a grower to produce more crop using the same fixed costs," adds Robert.

Ollie believes adopting technology like ActivatedAirTM could be an important step towards increasing the UAE's food security.

"There's a huge opportunity to expand the sector's markets beyond the restaurants, hotels and cafés into retail," he adds. "Time after time, growers deploying ActivatedAirTM have increased output by up to 20%, enabling the existing facilities in the Gulf to further their output without additional capital outlay."

Zayndu is rapidly expanding its presence in the in the Gulf states, which it sees as a key market. Robert and Ollie encourage interested growers to contact the team via LinkedIn or the Zayndu website.



About Zayndu:
Zayndu's seed treatment and priming process harnesses cold plasma to create ActivatedAir™, the world's first application of this technology on seeds. It maximises profits for controlled-environment agriculture growers by increasing yields and speeding up growing cycles.

ActivatedAir™ eliminates seed-borne pathogens, stopping them from contaminating growing facilities and reducing seedling diseases like damping off. It also kick-starts the seed's metabolic processes, effectively priming it for sowing.

The idea for Zayndu came from collaborative work by Dr Felipe Iza's research group at Loughborough University and industrial partners - who identified a growing unmet need for sustainable seed treatments that delivered increased productivity and plant health.

To exploit this opportunity, Zayndu was formed in 2019, and Ralph Weir was brought in to head up the company as CEO. A proof of concept was tested and established, and now ActivatedAirTM is fully commercially available.

Presently, ActivatedAir™ is being used by some of the biggest and most sophisticated vertical farms in the world, as well as more traditional greenhouses. The most common crops are leafy greens and micro greens, but the team has experience with a wide range of crops beyond these.