Cotton Agtech Gooddrop invests £1m in launch and unveils research partnership with University of Nottingham

Agtech startup Gooddrop is looking to establish itself as the leading global player in the vertical farming of cotton, starting with an initial £1m investment and a three-year research partnership with the University of Nottingham. 

"We have founded Gooddrop to provide the retail sector with an entirely manageable solution to issues of sustainability in cotton farming," said Simon Wardle, CEO of Hull-based Gooddrop.

"Gooddrop is a well-resourced Agtech startup in an excellent position to initiate the multi-phase approach we have adopted to launch the business. Our ambition is to enable the transformation of cotton production from field to indoor farming, producing a sustainable, profitable crop that can be fully utilised by agriculture, manufacturing and retail."

Launched and backed by a partnership of Simon Wardle and Andres Perea, Gooddrop's £1m launch investment will ensure its initial costs are met, including for research, manpower and capital expenditure.

"We will continue to invest in Gooddrop while encouraging private equity, including angel and venture capital, and local, regional and national funding bodies to invest in the business," said Simon.

Gooddrop's main research partner is the University of Nottingham. 

"We have chosen to establish a research partnership with the University of Nottingham because it has the largest group of internationally recognised plant and crop scientists in the UK university sector," added Simon.

"Their team brings together a range of academic experience and expertise in delivering crop optimisation in controlled and field environments together with world leading research facilities related to germplasm, seed, crop and vertical farming development. Together we want to fundamentally change for the better how cotton is grown, while seeking ways to improve the health of our planet and empowering people to do so. 

"This is exactly the kind of practical, hands-on research and business focused environment we need as a launch pad for Gooddrop." added Simon, who is looking to establish Gooddrop as the leader in the development of indoor cotton farming.

"Our R&D work to date with the team at Nottingham has already identified the cotton varieties and the profiles of cotton suitable for indoor farming, while determining the cotton propagation strategy and breeding programme necessary for us to deliver our own Gooddrop cotton, optimised for growing indoors."

Central to the research programme with the university has been the design, build, fitout and installation of six custom-made cotton research units. Converted from two ex-artic containers, these research, test growing labs and admin units have been manufactured by Cambridge HOK at Newport, East Yorkshire, transported to, and installed at, the University of Nottingham’s Sutton Bonington Campus in Leicestershire.

"These research units are crucial to Gooddrop's development, as they will inform the final design criteria for the scale-up of an indoor cotton farm, which we will develop, design, and construct utilising data from the first micro-farm cotton harvest over the next two to three years.

“By growing our cotton indoors, we can protect our plants from the weather, pests and disease and without the need for chemicals or excessive water, providing the perfect lighting, temperature, humidity, airflow with the optimum amount of water and nutrients.”

Erik Murchie, Professor of Applied Plant Physiology, School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham, said: “The idea here is to develop vertical farming concepts for cotton which is normally a field crop. This includes making the cotton more sustainable and to reduce inputs into cotton production and to develop means of growing it indoors. This will allow us to control temperature and humidity and light quality.”

John Foulkes, Associate Professor in Crop Science, said: “The added value of this new unit is significant as it will allow us to manipulate the growing conditions of the cotton, manipulate the light and its wavelength in unique ways, to increase the water use efficiency, reducing the inputs and uptakes required to grow the cotton.”

For Simon, this is the realisation of a dream he has held for several years and stems from a commitment to helping to alleviate the problems inherent in modern day cotton farming and retail cotton use.

"The problems with the production of cotton as it stands are many and nefarious. Infield cotton is not only extremely bad for the environment, the production of infield cotton is also problematic and in some cases, unethical when it comes to human rights," he says. 

"As one of the most destructive crops on the planet, water consumption is a massive issue for cotton with large tracts of land left arid and unable to support growing. With about 2.6 per cent of the planet’s freshwater being used to grow the global supply of cotton, around 7,000 – 10,000 litres per single kilogram of cotton grown, and knowing that cotton grown the Gooddrop way should use around 95% less water than currently consumed for cotton typically grown in irrigated fields, we knew it was time to scale up and make the change.

"Gooddrop's vertical farming will also significantly reduce the amount of land used for growing cotton while increasing yield so that cotton grown the Gooddrop way would use less than 0.4 per cent of the land currently used. 

"All this readjustment of conventional in-field cotton agriculture will enable the farms to be rewilded making a significant contribution to the efforts of climate change reversal. With Gooddrop's ability to reduce the land footprint it would be possible to rewild a land area similar to the size of Germany. The fallout of such vast rewilding would be hard to describe - with a massive positive impact on CO2 sequestration, biodiversity promotion, reduced flooding, restoration of more natural rhythms in nature and, hopefully, help for the stabilisation of global temperatures.

"As cotton is, quite literally, something that is close to all of us, there is an ever-increasing desire on the part of customers to know, and pressure on retailers to show, its origins. The Gooddrop ace of the traceability of our cotton will help solve this conundrum of sourcing an ethical supply of cotton. 

"All of this means that now is absolutely the right time to be looking at a fundamental change in how cotton is grown, manufactured and sold. The rise of vertical farming, agricultural expertise, combined with our increased knowledge and expertise in the growing of cotton indoors has come as the world struggles to come to terms with the problems of cotton.

"Driven by these multiple incentives of Agtech availability, the problems of cotton production and Gooddrop's solutions to those problems put Gooddrop in a very strong position to leverage the opportunities, bridging sustainability and profitability. 

"Here at Gooddrop we believe we have the potential to be the global cotton market disruptor."