Watch how Robots takes over how we farm
The noise hits you first as you walk across the heavy, air-locked door into the world’s most advanced indoor vertical farm. It’s quite audible. Machines hum and whir over the warehouse-scale air circulation system’s relentless drone. It’s not your typical farm scene; there’s no mud, no wellies, and no hens pecking in the yard.
However, the facility’s operators, a San Francisco-based business called Plenty, believe that the method they’re leading inside this warehouse in Compton, Los Angeles, can produce up to 350 times the yield of a similar-sized field.
Furthermore, they claim that their method consumes only 10% of the water and no pesticides, and that it can be replicated practically anyplace.
The new Compton farm grows four types of leafy greens: baby rocket, crispy lettuce, baby kale, and curly spinach, and has the capacity to produce up to 2 million kg (4.5 million lbs) of food per year in a single city block.
Farming now occupies half of the world’s livable land. More than three-quarters of that is spent on animal husbandry, while meat and dairy account for just about a third of the world’s protein supply and less than a fifth of its calories.
Let’s look into the journey of robots in farming
From Seed To Shop
Every stage of the process, from seed to shipment, is mechanized at Plenty’s Compton farm. The machines take over as soon as a worker places a bag of seeds into the drum of the seed-sowing machine. The newborn plants have a healthy set of initial leaves and their roots have threaded their way down through the substrate, making neat little plugs, two weeks after being sowed.
A swarm of white robot arms, each with a row of pincers, pull the plants and plugs from their trays with amazing delicacy. The arms move in synchrony, nestling the plants into evenly spaced holes along a slender 10m (32ft) stretch of metal track.
Except this isn’t a track; it’s a tower, as a gigantic yellow robot arm takes it, swings it through 90 degrees, and hangs it from the ceiling.In the harvest area, a robot arm unhooks the tower and flattens it before zipping it through a set of whirling blades.
The collected leaves are sent into an innovative optical sorting equipment, which employs artificial intelligence and specific wavelengths of light to inspect each leaf for damage. A targeted burst of air knocks any that don’t make the cut off the conveyor belt and into the rubbish pile.
The rest are packaged on the spot because they have never come into contact with soil, insecticides, or human hands.
Bright Lights
Vertical farming is not a new concept. The concept of stacking plants indoors to maximize the growing capacity of a given footprint of land was created in the early 2000s by Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier and students in his medical ecology class.
Heat is produced by the artificial lighting that plants use to flourish inside in the absence of sunshine. There’s a lot of it. The more heat produced by the lights, the brighter they are.
The beauty of fully vertical construction is that it allows for open air circulation, allowing natural convection to move heat up and away rather than trapping it between horizontal shelves.
To meet the farm’s stringent food safety regulations, four crew members spent an entire day before the shoot sterilising all of the equipment: trolleys, gimbals, sliders and rigs, nine cameras, and every last lens cap and screw.
Growth Strategies
Plenty employs nearly 80 plant scientists. It is their responsibility to determine the best growing conditions for each plant and relay that knowledge to the company’s more than 100 hardware and software developers.
Plenty’s scientists have learnt how to program features such as growth, flavour, texture, and nutrition by developing a thorough grasp of each plant’s physiology.
For example, lighting a plant at the bluer end of the visible spectrum at the correct moment in its growth cycle gives its leaves a pleasing crunch when harvested.
Plants require sunshine to grow and develop flavour, but they do not use the complete spectrum. Plenty uses a focused spectrum of light to offer every wavelength the plants require while also minimizing the lights’ energy usage and a small amount of heat generated.
Every year, traditional agriculture consumes 70% of the world’s freshwater. The water supply is managed plant by plant, and the vapour that evaporates from their leaves is condensed and re-injected into the irrigation system.
Owing to this method, the farm consumes less than a tenth of the water that field-based farms do. Meanwhile, because of the contained atmosphere, the Plenty crop may be grown pesticide-free. That means no washing, on or off the farm, and no agricultural runoff.
Conclusion
Climate change is already having a negative influence on food supplies. Floods, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires damaged more than $21 billion in crops in the United States in 2022, making it the third most expensive year on record.
However, because indoor farms are insulated from adverse weather, they could play an immediate role in climate resilience and food security. Of obviously, the globe cannot survive just on lettuce. And staples like wheat, as well as protein crops like soybeans, are still a long way from being economically viable in an indoor environment.
