Siemens drives automation at Italy’s Kilometro Verde vertical farm

Kilometro Verde is a vertical farm where high-quality salads are grown every day using innovative hydroponic technologies in a fully enclosed and controlled environment. The project was created with an ambitious goal: to revolutionize agriculture by combining innovation, tradition, and sustainability, without compromising on the quality of the final product. From this vision came founder Giuseppe Battagliola's idea to build a vertical farm—developing a completely new prototype by transforming and redeveloping a disused industrial area, thus avoiding the use of traditional agricultural land.

With the support of its partner Brescia Controlli, Siemens provided a complete technological solution. Thirty electrical power control panels were integrated with forty-eight independently programmed PXC controllers from the Desigo platform. At the heart of the system is the integration of microclimate control, lighting, HVAC systems, and energy monitoring, ensuring absolute precision in every environmental parameter.

© Siemans

The scale of the installation demonstrates the scalability of Siemens' solutions. It includes control of a 4.5 MW refrigeration plant with full heat recovery and sixty-five inverter-driven electric pumps, seventeen air-handling units, and thirty-four recirculation fans for a total air flow exceeding one million cubic meters per hour. The system also integrates around fifteen million LEDs and three hundred fifty multimeters.

The project shows how technology and nature can coexist perfectly. Siemens systems manage every aspect of the operation, including the recovery of sixty thousand liters of condensed water, full and optimized control of HVAC systems, management of the environmental microclimate, and lighting control.

Future expansions are already being considered, including the integration of the fire safety system, photovoltaic system, and trigeneration plant into the Desigo CC supervision platform. Comprehensive automation makes it possible to replicate this model on an industrial scale.