Sustainability In Three Dimensions
Technology Spotlight December 20, 2018
Picture a snow globe. Inside its crystalline sphere, the conditions are always ideal for a winter wonderland—even in the hottest days of summer. So, what if farmers could take this idea and use it to create optimal, self-contained cultivation environments that allowed them to grow their crops during the dead of winter?
A traditional approach to this challenge is greenhouse farming, in which glass domes heighten and retain solar energy within a growing environment that’s closed off from the surrounding atmosphere. As a result, the temperature inside the dome is warmer and more stable, allowing farmers to cultivate warm-weather crops during the cold seasons.
If farmers can grow their crops through the winter, what if they could grow them through the night?
WHAT IF GROWERS COULD CREATE THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO GET 10 ACRES WORTH OF PRODUCTION FROM ONLY ONE ACRE OF LAND?
It may sound improbable to grow plants in closed environments without relying on the sun, but modern agriculture is already making incredible strides in bringing 24/7 cultivation to reality by augmenting existing practices with indoor vertical farms and robotic technologies.
In fact, vertical farms are on the rise. There are currently 2.2 million square feet of indoor farms operating across the globe, and that number is expected to increase almost tenfold to 22 million square feet in the next five years. Will vertical farming replace conventional farming practices? No, but this dramatic rise in indoor farms will add even more of a boost to our future food production capabilities, complementing the incredible innovations that are being made in traditional sun-soaked, outdoor crops.
Why such the exponential increase in interest and investment in both vertical farms and robotics? In short, this pairing offers profound potential to help agriculture achieve sustainability in the environmental, economic, and societal spheres.