With a $40 million joint venture and a new office in Dubai, Sonia Lo, the CEO of Crop One Holdings is fighting for what she calls digital distributed agriculture, an emerging industry-wide infrastructure that works with her company’s indoor, vertical, hydroponic farms that grow heirloom lettuces, arugula, spinach and herbs.

This concept builds upon the same concept as digital agriculture that uses sensors to control the light, nutrients, water and humidity. Here, the focus is on the distributed network, said Lo, CEO of Crop One Holdings, San Mateo, Calif. Crop One is a vertical farming holding company for two subsidiaries: FreshBox Farms, Millis, Mass., and a joint venture with Emirates Flight Catering, Dubai South, United Arab Emirates. The food produced in Massachusetts is sold under the FreshBox Farms brand.

Boston is the information technology hub, and the farms are the spokes. More U.S. farms are in the pipeline.

“We’re using the digital and network capabilities to assess what’s going on in the grow environment in each farm so we can optimize the growing environment, so that the farms are all run to a single standard,” Lo said. “But the growing, delivery and distribution of the end product — the food — all happens locally. Big packers centralize and manage that for all growers; we are vertically integrated, so we grow, pack and ship all by ourselves.”

True, vertical farming is a “fledgling industry” limited to mainly leafy greens and herbs, but that will change as technology improves and reduces in cost, she said.

Lo mentioned both the Haitz Law and Moore’s Law, both golden rules in technology, in which the cost of LED lighting and computers, respectively, exponentially drops each year while the light production and computer processing power, respectively, increases.LED is the light source for most vertical farms.

“Over the next 10 years, LED lighting will double in efficiency and half in cost. What that means is 10 years from now, the cost of running a vertical farm could be cut in half, all other things being equal,” Lo said.