Controlled-environment agriculture — also simply known as indoor farming — had a big year both in terms of activity and investment dollars. While once we might have questioned the sector’s economic viability and ability to actually feed a growing global population, a lot of those doubts have diminished and indoor ag in its many forms now has an important role in our future food system.
What that role is, however, will continue to evolve over time. Here are a few thoughts on how that will happen over the next 12 months.
More automation
Automation isn’t new to controlled-environment agriculture, but its presence as a part of indoor farming operations has increased over the last several months and will continue to in the next year.
In the context of controlled-environment farming, automation can refer to any kind of technology that removes manual human labor from the growing process. In some cases that includes robots that plant and harvest greens or move trays of produce around the farm. More often, though, automation refers to software that can calculate the optimal environmental temperature for each plant, know when plants need to be fed and harvested, and handle many other calculations that would otherwise require a person to have horticultural and technological (hardware and software) expertise.
Moving into 2021, we’ll definitely see a few more robots buzzing around the indoor farm. But the bulk of automation will be about software.
Read more at The Spoon (J. Marston)