If you improve the efficiency of farming it will change the world for all of humanity, and much of that will be due to the work of engineers, writes George Newbold, Lead Automation Engineer, Stacked Farm.
One of the challenges we face at our vertical farm, Stacked Farm, and one of the challenges in the industry globally, is increasing the output of a farm per square metre. To compete with outdoor farms, we need to bring costs down.
By farming indoors and vertically, it’s easy to get healthy, nutritious plants from near-perfect conditions. The hard part is being space and cost-conscious.
"We have to compete in terms of efficiency and cost of produce. That will make vertical farming commercially viable around the globe: a solution rather than an expensive alternative. So we focus on lowering costs such as power without compromising on quality of crops. Quality and taste are sacred."
The farm is one big system. It is about innovation on a number of levels, and that can only come from good engineering.
Automation is not our biggest consumer of power. We use automation for seeding, growing, harvesting and running pumps, but that only accounts for five per cent of our power usage. Most of the power — around 90 per cent — is used by lighting. Making that as efficient as possible is paramount.
Indoor farms use around 95 per cent less water than traditional farms. Imagine the effect it would have on water resilience if this approach were extended globally."
Read the complete article at www.createdigital.org.au.