Vertical Farms Tended By Robots To Make Harvesting More Efficient
- MARK BLUNDEN August 17, 2018
Clapham underground is home to 'Growing Underground', the UKs first underground farm. ( Getty Images )
Vertical urban farms tended by robots that grow vegetables — and even rear chickens, fish, and lobsters — in hundreds of stacked boxes have been designed by online grocer Ocado.
It has drawn up plans for a “mechanized growing system” to rival existing projects by London salad farmers, such as one at Clapham North Tube station.
According to a European patent, Ocado’s intensive warehouse system could grow plants using LED lights, and its stacking concept would do away with “large areas of land” normally needed for crops such as herbs.
The patent even suggests that in addition to fruits and vegetables, Ocado’s system could battery-farm “living organisms” such as poultry and fish.
The firm believes “vertical farming” will be cheaper, more efficient, higher-yielding and need fewer people than traditional methods. Produce would be grown in trays inside stacked boxes tended by wheeled, wifi-connected robo-pickers on rails, which winch up the trays when the produce is ripe and dispatch them to another robot for picking and packing.
Robots would also be used for planting, pruning, and spraying pesticides. The patent shows two levels of about 300 growing containers, each about 1m wide by 1.4m high, which would be supplied with water, fertilizer, light, and heat.
Each tray would be tall enough to “allow the plants to grow to their natural harvesting height”, the patent says, and the boxes could be stacked 20m high or more. The patent says growing the plants upside-down, lit from below, “would reduce the energy expended by the plant to move water and nutrients against gravity and may make some species grow faster”.
The idea is based on an automated system used in Ocado’s warehouses.
Dr Nick Palmer, of Compassion in World Farming, said he was “extremely worried” that Ocado envisaged raising fish, chickens, oysters, and lobsters in the system. He said: “A factory farming system where animals are likely to be crammed together with little space, natural light or stimuli would be a step backwards.”