Feeding the Future: How Vertical Farming Could Transform Food Production

Researchers explore how dynamic environmental control in indoor farms could help us feed a growing population with nutritious, high-quality, locally grown fruit and vegetables.

Vertical farming promises to revolutionize how we produce food in urban and extreme environments by optimizing plant growth through dynamic environmental control, particularly smart lighting that adjusts to electricity costs and plant needs. Researchers emphasize the potential for these systems to enhance food quality and sustainability while cutting down on energy use.

Innovative Approaches to Sustainable Agriculture

In our increasingly crowded world, ensuring everyone has enough to eat calls for innovative approaches. Vertical farming, with its method of intensively growing plants indoors, presents a viable option. The major hurdle for its widespread adoption lies in addressing the high costs and energy demands of the lighting needed for plant growth. Scientists are now finding that adjusting light to cater to the unique requirements of each crop can promote stronger, healthier growth and simultaneously cut down on energy use.

“The biggest benefit of vertical farming systems is that healthy food can be grown much more closely to consumers in places where this is impossible otherwise: in mega-cities, in deserts, and in places that are cold and dark during large parts of the year,” said Dr. Elias Kaiser, first author of the article in Frontiers in Science. “The biggest challenge is the costs associated with electricity use.”

Energy Efficiency in Vertical Farming

Many vertical farming systems are run using constant environmental conditions, which require lots of expensive electricity for maintenance. The scientists’ analysis shows that these demanding conditions are unnecessary: using dynamic environmental control, they suggest, we can achieve vertical farming which is more cost-effective and which raises healthier plants.

“We were motivated by the rhythms that plants show on diurnal as well as on developmental timescales, which require their growing environment to be adjusted regularly in order to steer their growth perfectly,” said Prof Leo Marcelis of Wageningen University, senior author. “We outline a strategy that makes use of plant physiology knowledge, novel sensing and modeling techniques, and novel varieties specifically bred for vertical farming systems.”

Harnessing Technology for Plant Growth

Because plants’ biological functions are heavily influenced by environmental conditions like temperature changes, light wavelengths, and the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, manipulating the environment allows a vertical farming system to manipulate plant development. Lighting is a critical variable; all plants need it to photosynthesize, and different light wavelengths have different effects on different plants. This variable is also particularly sensitive to electricity pricing, so offers opportunities to make efficiency gains.

“Fluctuations in electricity prices can be used to the advantage of vertical farming systems, by using more electricity when it is cheaper,” explained Marcelis.

The authors created a model for testing smart lighting that aims to keep plants’ ability to photosynthesize steady over the course of a day, while still lowering electricity costs. They found that an optimization algorithm could cut electricity costs by 12% without compromising plants’ carbon fixation, just by varying the intensity of the light.

They then tested whether varying light intensity affected the growth of leafy plants like spinach which are often grown in vertical farms, and found that there was no negative effect. This remained true even when the plants were subject to irregularly changing light intensity, rather than a predictable, regular pattern.

Preparing for the Future of Farming

Other critical issues remain to be resolved before vertical farming can help feed the world.

“Many of the proposed solutions have not been tested at the larger scales that vertical farms represent—they may have been shown at the single-plant level, but not yet at the whole crop stand level,” cautioned Kaiser.

Dynamically adjusting air flow rates, temperature, and CO₂ according to plants’ needs could potentially offer opportunities to minimize electricity costs. Farmers will need suitable sensors and models to help them monitor and adjust the environment, as well as new cultivars bred for vertical farming. These cultivars could take advantage of the potential for local production in sheltered conditions to focus on better nutrition and sensory qualities, rather than robustness or shelf-life. More research is required to calibrate all these variables and strike the right balance between high-quality and high-yield crops.

“In a vertical farm all growth conditions can be exactly controlled, which is very important to optimize yield, quality, and resource use efficiency,” said Marcelis. “However, the technical possibility of keeping them constant does not mean that keeping them constant is the best solution. Once dynamic environmental control has become established, both the energy use and costs of the used energy can be substantially reduced, increasing the profitability and sustainability of vertical farms.”

Reference: “Vertical farming goes dynamic: optimizing resource use efficiency, product quality, and energy costs” by Elias Kaiser, Paul Kusuma, Silvere Vialet-Chabrand, Kevin Folta, Ying Liu, Hendrik Poorter, Nik Woning, Samikshya Shrestha, Aitor Ciarreta, Jordan van Brenk, Margarethe Karpe, Yongran Ji, Stephan David, Cristina Zepeda, Xin-Guang Zhu, Katharina Huntenburg, Julian C. Verdonk, Ernst Woltering, Paul P. G. Gauthier, Sarah Courbier, Gail Taylor and Leo F. M. Marcelis, 3 July 2024, Frontiers in Science.
DOI: 10.3389/fsci.2024.1411259

Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.