Canada: Factory Of The Future: The Automatic Farm
Linked by Michael Levenston
Shining down on each tier are nine-foot-long lamps equipped with 60 LED lights. Those lights are a specific combination of light (cool white, green, deep red, ultraviolet, far red), depending on the plant being grown.
The company, formed by CEO Amin Jadavji and six fellow foodies in 2017, had a simple mission: to grow high-quality herbs and salad greens such as kale and arugula for five Toronto restaurants.
Photography By Nathan Cyprys
Written By Judith Pereira
Globe And Mail
Published October 1, 2018
Excerpt:
That’s where the University of Guelph’s Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility (CESRF) comes in. CESRF is home to the Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture program, which has been at the forefront of trying to grow plants in a variety of hostile environments without an atmosphere—think of The Martian’s stranded astronaut, Mark Watney, growing potatoes using a complex hydroponics system.
The Guelph facility started off testing the kind of warm lights used by greenhouses, but then it began experimenting with LED systems created by Intravision Group, a photobiology company based in Norway. Intravision founder and CEO Per Aage Lysaa studies how plants respond to various wavelengths of light spectrum and intensity, and how changes in light could affect a plant’s nutrient or medicinal properties.