Vertical Farming basics

In the last few decades, there have been many innovations in agriculture: Organic Farming, Controlled Environment Agriculture(CEA), vertical Farming, and more. The objective of these innovations generally is to improve yield per given resources and reduce the impact on the environment. These innovations help farmers with efficiency, reduce costs, and control environmental issues related to Farming. In this blog post, we will review Vertical Farming and how it can be beneficial to Indian farmers keeping space constraints, infrastructure resources, and climatic conditions in mind.

What is Vertical Farming?

Vertical Farming is producing food on a vertical or inclined surface. Traditional Farming includes growing crops on farmlands at a single level, outdoors, and exposed to natural sunlight. Conventional farms heavily rely on the water source and natural sunlight for the growth of crops. Greenhouses farms have clear shields made of glass or plastic covering surrounding the farming area. The farmers use the greenhouse for tender plants or crops out of season in cold terrestrial lands. The vertical farming method produces food in vertically stacked layers commonly integrated into building like structures. The vertical farms can built in existing structures such as a skyscraper, shipping container, even a repurposed warehouse.

Vertical Farming produces food & medicine on vertically stacked layers, inclined vertically faced surfaces & integrated into other structures. Image 1 shows an example vertical farm producing specialty crop. Vertical Farming typically leverages indoor farming techniques & Controlled Environment Agriculture(CEA) technology. By adopting indoor farming techniques, farmers can control environmental factors like light sources, temperature, airflow, humidity, and fertigation.

Know-hows of Vertical Farming

There are four critical areas to successfully implement vertical farming

1. Positioning
   As Vertical Farming involves stacking plants vertically, it becomes crucial to provide for required light sources for the plants. The special LEDs are excellent alternatives to natural sunlight to cover all plants.

2. Controlled Environment
   In addition to the light source, it is also essential to maintain the required humidity, airflow, temperature based on plant requirements. Farmers can achieve them by implementing sensors for them. The sensors create the necessity of a constant energy source.

3. Growing Medium
   Vertical Farming often involves soilless methods of growing crops, so growing mediums like coconut husk, peat moss are popular choices. The selection of soilless growing medium reduces dependency on fertilizers and reduces water supply demands.

4. Sustainability Features
   Vertical Farming can follow sustainability features to use renewable energy sources, recycle programs.

Advantages of Vertical Farming

Having great yield from a limited area is one of the advantage for the Vertical farming.  Following list describes additional noteworthy benefits :

1. Seeing the rapid growth of the population and development of Urban cities will definately see lack of agriculture land and to meet the future demand of food production it will be necessary to adopt Vertical Farming , not as an option but as a necessity. The world population is expected to grow 68% by the end of 2050. To meet the demand it will be necessary to adopt vertical farming within the city.

2. Vertical Farming allow us to produce more yield then regular soil based farming. 1 acre of indoor Farming can produce approximaely 4-5 times of Food and Vegetables compared to traditional farming. Also the Indoor farming can prodcue food through out the year controlled by artificial environment by using modern technology.

3. Vertical farming allows to consume 75% to 90% less water then the traditional farming.

4. In the recent times, due to green house effects, Cyclons, Floods, Increase in temperature is a common scenario, which often aften affects for the loss of crops, Vertical farming prevents all of the above calamity and food can be produced throughout the year in unfavourable conditions as well.

5. The crops are produced indoor without using any chemicals or fertilizers. The amount of organic food availability can be increased throughout the year.

Though Remarkable advantages of Vertical farming there are few limitations farmers need to consider for decision making.

Another drawback of this Method is that pollination has to be done manually as this environments are usually insects free. Additional pollination efforts need to be considered as an additional cost or labor.

The Vertical Farming is relies of controlled factors like specialized LED light source, temperature, humidity, airflow, and more. Most of these factors are maintained by energy consumption or simply put, electricity. The interruption in electricity supply may cause impact the yield or even failure to produce all yield in case of severe power outages.

For above stated reasons, the feasibility of the vertical farming is challenged in the largest food producing countries like India, USA, China. These challenges must be addressed in near future before farming focused countries and their farmers select vertical farming as mainstream approach.

Summary

Vertical farming technologies are still relatively new. Companies are yet to successfully produce crops at large scale and make it economically feasible to meet the growing food demand.

It is worth noting, however, that technologies developed for vertical farms are also being adopted by other segments of the indoor farming sector, such as greenhouses, which can utilize natural sunlight, albeit requiring much more real estate and longer routes to market.