November 5, 2019

Radhica De Silva

Lead Engineer at Cube Root Farms Hamlyn Holder stands in a 40-foot container which was converted into a hydroponic farm at Preysal Crown Trace, Freeport. © KRISTIAN DE SILVA

In a 40-foot con­tain­er sit­u­at­ed in a ware­house in Cen­tral Trinidad, lies an amaz­ing freight farm with the ca­pac­i­ty of pro­duc­ing over 1,200 heads of let­tuce, chive and even straw­ber­ries.

De­vel­oped by Cube­root Farms,  the farm com­pris­es of a state-of-the-art hy­dro­pon­ic farm­ing sys­tem retro­fit­ted in­side a freight con­tain­er.

En­gi­neered by lo­cal agri-sci­en­tists and en­gi­neers, the farm is geared at pro­duc­ing enough crops to re­duce T&T’s stag­ger­ing food im­port bill.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Cube­root Farm’s lead en­gi­neer Ham­lyn Hold­er said they were hop­ing to share their tech­nol­o­gy with in­ter­est­ed per­sons.

“We will pro­vide train­ing and our aim is to set up this en­tire sys­tem for 20 farm­ers,” he ex­plained.

Us­ing a stacky sys­tem with a ful­ly-au­to­mat­ed nu­tri­ent flow, one sec­tion of the farm pro­duces four va­ri­eties of let­tuce and chive. The oth­er por­tion has a drip to waste sys­tem us­ing co­co­peat where oth­er types of leafy veg­eta­bles could be grown.

“Every­thing is con­struct­ed in house. We utilise grow lights and this pro­vides op­ti­mal tem­per­a­tures for op­ti­mal growth. We use en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient units to keep down op­er­a­tional costs while keep­ing plant per­for­mance high,” Hold­er said.

He said Agri sci­en­tists Jes­si­ca Chu­rar­i­an, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer An­drew Bridge­mo­hans­ingh and Agri sci­en­tist Nkosi Fe­lix were in­stru­men­tal in es­tab­lish­ing the farm.

“The Dex­ion shelv­ing came from Massy, even the au­toma­tion we put to­geth­er. We have Alexa in­te­gra­tion, CCTV cam­eras and we used lo­cal re­sources to put it all to­geth­er,” Hold­er said.

He ex­plained that every­thing grown on the farm is to­tal­ly or­gan­ic.

“We are aim­ing at us­ing ze­ro pes­ti­cides. Our sys­tems are built so pests are mit­i­gat­ed against from bac­te­ria to aphids or fun­gus. This type of tech­nol­o­gy of­fers a con­trolled en­vi­ron­ment when it comes to dis­ease,” he ex­plained.

Af­ter two years of tri­als, Hold­er said they were hap­py to re­port that more than 100 va­ri­eties of dif­fer­ent crops could be grown in the farm.

Say­ing this was T&T’s on­ly in­door farm, Hold­er said us­ing the cli­mate-con­trolled en­vi­ron­ment the farm can im­i­tate the ide­al con­di­tions for crops to gen­er­ate boun­ti­ful yields.

“We have grown straw­ber­ries, cher­ry toma­toes. We did many tri­als and tech­nol­o­gy gives that con­sis­ten­cy. It is lim­it­less and def­i­nite­ly can be used to grow any leafy veg­eta­bles as well as some flow­ers,” he added. An­thuri­ums were seen grow­ing in the farm along with pars­ley, kale, ba­by spinach and cilantro.

Hold­er said the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture was very sup­port­ive of the project and so was the Agri­cul­tur­al De­vel­op­ment Bank.

“We want to show this tech­nol­o­gy to the show this new tech­nol­o­gy to Min­is­ter of Health and the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion so they can in­cor­po­rate tech­nol­o­gy in­to agri­cul­ture and re­duce health is­sues as well as the food im­port bill,” he added.

Kennedy Char­ran of Green­gold T&T Lim­it­ed said the farm was in­no­v­a­tive and had great po­ten­tial. He said in­ter­est­ed per­sons will see a re­turn in in­vest­ment adding that once the farm is bought it could last for decades.

Tagged in: