According to the Professor of Protected Cultures at the University of Queensland, enhanced technology and plant science are the key for controlled-environment agriculture to contribute to global food needs.
Professor Paul Gauthier is part of a global group of experts who are proposing ways for controlled-environment agriculture to reach its potential.
“Vertical farming operations grow crops indoors in stacked layers and provide consistent yields and harvest quality, but they use a huge amount of costly energy for lighting and air movement,” says Professor Gauthier.
“If we create a more dynamic environment that turns lights and sensors on and off during the day, in line with the cycles of photosynthesis, instead of keeping them on all the time, we can take advantage of cheaper energy during off-peak hours and maximize the benefits of vertical farming,” he explains.
Professor Gauthier emphasizes that technological solutions are only one way to make vertical farming more financially viable and help it reach its potential.
“We need to think long-term and adopt a new approach to plant science,” he says, noting that what we already know about how plants grow does not fully apply to vertical farming situations, as my research has shown.
“I managed to get strawberries to produce 6 kilograms per plant, when everyone said the maximum you could produce in a greenhouse was 2 kilograms,” he reveals, adding that “I tripled strawberry yields by altering the environment and pushing them to the limit.”
“We also saw this with wheat, where environmental control in a certain way increases yields by accelerating production, so that, instead of one or two harvests per year, we could have five,” he says, adding that “I would like protected crops or controlled-environment agriculture to be treated as a distinct discipline within plant science.”
“If we want to increase food production by 70% by 2050, we have to look at things differently,” he warns.
“That is what vertical agriculture allows us to do — we didn’t have this possibility before,” he concludes.
The opinion article was published in the journal Frontiers in Science.
