Feeding the world’s population despite limited resources is an enterprise that traditionally has required ever more arable land and fresh water. Highly automated vertical farms could offer an alternative for the future of agriculture.
In automated indoor farming a lot of variables need to be measured to inform system optimisation.
Here, the food is grown indoors so the yield is protected from pests, pathogens or bad weather. At the same time, this type of cultivation reportedly requires 95% less water than traditional agriculture, and fertilisers are used at exactly the right dose. There is no need for pesticides and other polluting substances in indoor farming. And another advantage of this type of cultivation is that vertical farms can be built in the vicinity of cities, enabling savings on logistics costs and reduced CO2 emissions as a result of lower transport requirements.
For indoor farming companies, plant growth needs to be accurately controlled and in order to achieve a high degree of automation, a lot of variables need be measured. On the basis of these measured values, the system can be optimised to maximise crop yield.
Modern vertical farms require a system combination of hardware, automation, intelligent controllers and sensors. Process control and data acquisition are becoming increasingly complex and a conventional system design requires a considerable amount of programming and integration. Each indoor farm has hundreds of I/O signals on its individual vertically stacked layers and in conventional control and automation systems, these would be routed back separately to the controller. Accordingly, maintenance work, troubleshooting and the replacement of sensors becomes very time-consuming. Hence, better and smarter solutions are sought for new projects.
A variety of different process sensors are used in indoor farms: flowmeters for water and nutrient dosing, pressure sensors to monitor the water level, conductivity sensors to check the concentration of minerals, and sensors to control the pressure at the pumps. Connecting all sensors via IO-Link field modules reduces the complexity of process control and makes more data available from each sensor, thus reducing the overall number of sensors needed.
Recipe changes and design adaptations arising from ongoing innovations are easy to implement using digital communication. The entire setup process – from physical wiring to integration and programming – becomes much more efficient.
With the help of IO-Link technology, customers can standardise their systems and individual modules, so vertical farms can be scaled as needed. This means future projects can be implemented more easily and setup is accelerated. Customers value ifm as a technology partner that can help them improve all their applications.
Sensors from ifm can also be used in the automated harvesting process; image processing, position sensors and RFID are just a few examples – and here, too, ifm can provide optimum support.
Key benefits
Using IO-Link technology, all relevant measured values for an indoor farm can be easily monitored, ensuring high product quality and less rejected produce. Connected sensors provide for system transparency and increased efficiencies; commissioning can be done more quickly and systems become easily scalable with technological support from ifm.
For more information visit: www.ifm.com
