“Agriculture Should Be Planned and Produced Like Manufacturing”... AgUni Aims to Create a Smart Farm ‘New Normal’

[Korea Agricultural Technology Newspaper = Reporter Baek Cheol-hyun] There is a company with the ambition to transform agriculture from a primary industry into a “manufacturing-style industry” capable of planned production and mass production. It is AgTech startup ‘AgUni (CEO Kwon Mi-jin),’ now in its seventh year since founding.

Led by its proprietary advanced technology, the ‘Egg Dome,’ AgUni is overcoming the limitations of conventional glass greenhouses. By building a demand-driven mass production system for medicinal and specialty crops, the company is presenting a new paradigm and new normal for smart agriculture. We met with CEO Kwon Mi-jin to hear about the future of agriculture AgUni envisions and its global expansion strategy.

Pressure control in a fully enclosed environment… cuts annual operating costs by 80%

CEO Kwon, who graduated from the Department of Global Trade, helped her father supply vegetables to large supermarkets through his agricultural produce distribution business from her college days. Watching the business struggle at the time, Kwon explained the background behind her decision to start a business in the agricultural field she had naturally been exposed to, saying, “I thought I needed to secure a clear competitive edge in agriculture in order to help my father in a practical way.”
 

In the early stages, the company went through trial and error due to insufficient technical completeness, but it eventually completed the ‘Egg Dome’ technology for cultivating medicinal and specialty crops by advancing the air dome technology her father had originally developed for sports use into an agricultural application.

AgUni’s core infrastructure, the ‘Egg Dome,’ provides a fully enclosed environment on the level of a semiconductor clean room. Inside the Egg Dome, a spring-like climate is maintained all year round, and a dedicated filter room that completely blocks harmful gases keeps external gas inflow managed at nearly zero. It also automatically controls not only temperature, humidity, and air circulation, but even internal pressure. It uses natural light as-is rather than artificial LEDs, and its double-structure design also prevents condensation, a cause of pests and diseases. Because the internal environment can be controlled, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used at all.

In particular, the Egg Dome’s economics far surpass those of conventional glass greenhouses. Based on 1,000 pyeong, the annual operating cost of a glass greenhouse approaches about 10 million won, while the Egg Dome costs only around 1.5 million to 1.8 million won. 
The secret behind the Egg Dome’s dramatic reduction in power consumption lies in its use of “the temperature of the ground and water.” Rather than artificially “creating” cold or hot air by running air conditioners or boilers, the structure “delivers” temperatures that already exist in nature to where they are needed using only minimal electricity.
 

At the heart of this technology is a 100-meter-long “geothermal pipe” buried 5 meters underground. Outside air passes through the filter room and enters the Egg Dome through this geothermal pipe, while a thin “hydrothermal pipe (water pipe)” placed inside the geothermal pipe plays an effective role as a temperature regulator. The principle becomes even clearer in summer. While the outside is sweltering at over 30 degrees Celsius, the hydrothermal pipe deep underground maintains a cool temperature of around 15 degrees year-round.

The moment the hot outside air enters this narrow, long underground passage, the scientific principle that “heat always moves from a hotter place to a colder place” comes into play. As the hot air passes through the cool pipe, the heat in the air is naturally absorbed by the cold pipe wall. In particular, the narrowness of the passage is a masterstroke that boosts the cooling speed. Because the air collides more often and more densely with the cold wall surface, the rate at which it loses heat becomes much faster.

As a result, without turning on an air conditioner at all, once the stifling outdoor air simply passes through this underground passage, by the time it enters the greenhouse it has already transformed into a cool breeze as if the air conditioner were running at full blast. It is an overwhelming energy-saving technology completed through a combination of natural principles and structural ideas.

In addition, the company has linked this with a heat pump system that uses groundwater, whose temperature remains constant throughout the four seasons, as a heat source. Unlike conventional methods that relied solely on electricity, it uses cool groundwater for cooling in summer and relatively warm groundwater heat for heating in winter, thereby innovatively reducing the power consumption required to operate the greenhouse.

In addition, through its soil cultivation module, growth speed is 30% faster than in ordinary environments, while water use is reduced by 38%. Because the soil cultivation module uses prefabricated modules, crops are not planted only on a flat surface but are grown vertically, increasing production efficiency by about two times compared with conventional methods and maximizing productivity. In addition, because it improves air circulation in the soil and increases the soil’s ability to retain nutrients, nutrients are effectively maintained in the root environment, speeding up growth. And through a subsurface irrigation system that waters the soil directly, water evaporation and runoff can be prevented, reducing water use as well.

AgUni emphasized that these empirical data are reliable data thoroughly measured and recorded under the company’s standardized data collection manual, eco-friendly management system, and stable experimental environment, all of which have obtained international standard certifications including ISO 9001 (Quality Management System), ISO 14001 (Environmental Management System), and ISO 45001 (Occupational Health and Safety Management System).
 

Currently, the Egg Dome’s internal environment control is 100% automated, and the company has built a semi-automated system in which just two managers can handle cultivation and harvesting for a 1,000-pyeong facility. Furthermore, to achieve full automation, it is working with robotics specialist company ‘Tesoro’ to introduce robots into the production and cultivation processes.

Annual sales of about 4.4 billion won based on functional peppers… investment recovery possible within one year

Rather than ordinary crops such as lettuce and cabbage, AgUni has targeted medicinal and specialty crops with clear supply and demand. At Egg Dome No. 1 in Hwaseong, it is currently cultivating premium functional peppers that are excellent for blood sugar control and supplying them to Seoul Cosamart and other outlets. Functional peppers are traded at a higher unit price of 29,000 won per kilogram than products on the general market, and annual sales based on production volume amount to about 4.4 billion won.

Going forward, through contracts, the company plans to expand into high-value-added crops with clear corporate demand, such as medical cannabis, centella asiatica, and roses. It is also turning optimal cultivation data for each crop (SOP, standard operating procedures) into solutions so they can be directly applied by client companies and farms.

Although it varies by crop, output is at least 10 times and up to around 20 times greater than that of ordinary open-field farms or vinyl greenhouses on the same area. The reason for such a large difference in output is that the Egg Dome supports a customized three-dimensional structure 17 meters high and an environment that enables continuous harvesting more than four times a year.

In particular, in the case of medicinal crops, cultivation in open fields or vinyl greenhouses requires waiting five to six years due to continuous cropping damage, but the Egg Dome allows continuous cropping because the soil can be replaced through the soil cultivation module, resulting in roughly 10 times more output over a six-year production basis. And in the case of functional peppers (Hangbicho), continuous harvesting is possible for up to two years, whereas open fields and vinyl greenhouses face production difficulties every year due to seedling and planting costs and labor issues. Beyond this, there are also considerable overall differences in production conditions, including the fact that the cultivation environment is perfectly controlled.   

Based on 1,000 pyeong, construction cost per unit is in the range of 2 billion to 3 billion won, similar to a glass greenhouse, but the investment recovery period (ROI) is markedly shorter. For functional peppers, it is about three years, and for high-value rare crops, investment recovery is possible within one year. Compared with glass greenhouses, which generally take more than 10 years, the economics are highly favorable.

However, the Egg Dome is not currently eligible for government subsidy support. If this new-concept cultivation environment is recognized by the government as a “new normal,” subsidy support will become possible. Having already been recognized for its technological capabilities by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and selected as an ‘A-Ventures of the Month,’ an outstanding venture company certification, CEO Kwon plans to focus all efforts on securing government subsidies by the end of this year or, at the latest, in the first half of next year.

Targeting the U.S., Malaysia, and the Middle East... aiming squarely at the global carbon credit market and introducing ‘digital cultivation rights’

From the early days of its founding, AgUni completed the buildup needed to secure corporate value (valuation), including establishing a U.S. subsidiary with the global market in mind. In particular, it has proven the exclusivity and global applicability of Egg Dome technology worldwide by obtaining not only domestic patents but also a U.S. patent (USPTO), where technological barriers are high. The company believes now is the right time to enter the U.S., as it is a massive capital market and demand for large-scale smart infrastructure to respond to climate change is rapidly increasing.

In Malaysia, it has already signed an export contract with a major local contract farming company that supplies orchids to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. When local farmland is used for agricultural purposes, licensing procedures are omitted, making rapid construction possible as soon as funds come in. In the Middle East, the company is applying for sovereign wealth fund projects and coordinating budget ranges, through which it plans to build a large-scale smart farm cluster.

CEO Kwon said she approached the business not from the perspective of a farmer but from that of a “management and economics student,” based on demand-driven licensing and information capabilities, and is also designing a macro-level carbon credit business model through joint development with the Global Carbon Council.

The company is also pursuing a business linked to carbon credits generated by the Egg Dome, targeting steel companies and others that bear enormous carbon taxes. In reality, steel companies must shoulder large tax burdens due to carbon emissions. But because the Egg Dome itself operates on eco-friendly energy, adopting it can allow carbon credits to be recognized. In other words, if a company adopts the Egg Dome, it can gain a tax offset effect, while AgUni can have the crop-related profits recognized from the company that adopted the Egg Dome.

AgUni has also modularized and standardized the Egg Dome and introduced “digital cultivation rights,” granting rights to 1,000 pyeong even to investors without land. This is an investment method based on real-world assets (RWA), a concept of stably distributing profits from contract-grown crops and direct sales based on already secured strong demand channels and fixed prices. In particular, to ensure data transparency, it introduced a blockchain-based MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification) system, blocking internal data forgery and tampering and maximizing investment reliability.

“Aiming to become the Samsung Biologics of agriculture”... achieve listing and industrialization within five years

AgUni’s short-term goal is to increase the number of Egg Domes it operates itself to three to five units within one year and expand long-term B2B contracts. In the mid to long term, it aims to go public (IPO) within five years while building an ecosystem that closely connects education and finance based on agriculture.

CEO Kwon Mi-jin emphasized, “The fundamental problem in agriculture is not a lack of technology or the limits of training farmers, but a structural problem,” adding, “We must break away from the existing producer-centered structure and change the agricultural paradigm into a manufacturing form that enables demand-centered planned production.” She continued, expressing her bold ambition: “We will be reborn as the ‘Samsung Biologics of agriculture,’ supporting not only food security and climate change solutions but also the broad range of issues humanity faces, including healthcare, beauty, and the supply of raw materials for new drugs.”