Trella Technologies Founder Aja Atwood on Solving Food Insecurity

At Trella, we create energy-efficient and globally scalable solutions to problems unique to the indoor farming industry. To ensure the industry’s longevity for future generations, we’re diversifying the types of plants that can be grown indoors with sustainable, automated plant-training robotics.

I have an extensive background as a natural catastrophe risk engineer. I’ve seen the devastation caused by natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, etc. As we are witnessing, due to climate change and other global catastrophes such as war, agriculture has been compromised, and the risk of food and plant medicine insecurity has significantly increased. The need for year-round and consistent production has led to an increase in indoor farming techniques. However, due to height limitations, current indoor vertical farming techniques are limited to producing microgreens and shorter plants. But we must be able to grow what we want, where we want in order to meet the needs of all communities, regardless of geography and economy.

Trella was born from my own struggle to grow tall plants in a small basement. So I began a deep dive into researching the problem. Through this, I discovered the idea of training plants to grow horizontally. Also apparent was that the existing methods were all manual and labor-intensive. I reached out to my friend and fellow inventor, Andres “Dre” Chamorro III, and together, along with a dynamic and diverse team of individuals, we prototyped, built, and built again our patented plant-training solution.

A recent New York Times article mentioned the following regarding the vertical farming industry:

“…some scientists have doubts about the industry’s ability to scale and diversify given the limitations of current technology. Tomatoes take 60 percent more electricity to grow than lettuce, and strawberries take twice that amount.” 

With our tech, you can grow tall fruit-bearing plants in vertical space, plus reduce light power consumption substantially. We saw this coming back in 2016 and got to work. We now have a patented solution.

We’re looking forward to the further development of a feature we call AutoSync LED™. TrellaGro LST creates a controlled and even canopy, so you can further reduce light usage during the veg phase by keeping the lights closer to the canopy and “dimming down” LED lights. Trella’s AutoSync LED™ feature will also sync grow lights to come on as the plant grows horizontally and only when your plant truly needs it, substantially cutting down LED power consumption and operating costs.

We are the only patented and automated horizontal plant training solution that allows for the growth of tall plants in a tight, stacked space. Currently, vertical farmers handle this limitation in one of two ways: train the plants by hand using extensive pruning and trellising techniques (requires time and skill) or grow shorter plant varieties (which limits their product offering).

Now that we’ve identified a lucrative sales strategy and funnel, it’s time to scale it. We need to leverage and increase our sales and marketing capacity as well as our production capacity in order to service our customers and our research and development partners in a timely manner.

A lot of people look at our technology and see that it’s obviously great for the cannabis and hemp industry. It is indeed. But from day one, we always knew that there would be a more pressing need for our technology to be used for food production in order to combat global food shortages. And now, the world truly sees the need as well. This is bigger than cannabis, and it’s only the beginning for Trella.

Since we’re solving a global problem, we’re in need of global distribution. We’re positioning ourselves for a merger or acquisition by a larger agtech company with global distribution capabilities.

We can’t change the way people think or what they do. We only have control over ourselves. I’ve also had the opportunity to travel the world and learn about our history from a global perspective. I don’t accept the word “minority.” On a global level, we are not a minority. Furthermore, once you realize that the Nile River of ancient Egypt runs from the south to north, and that civilization developed in that same direction, it can become empowering to the point that you no longer concern yourself with the opinions of others.