Believe it or not, there is a quiet revolution underway in food production that will soon shape the entire process for growing, producing, and distributing food around the world, local cities and towns. This is known as the automation of the food producing system. In the past, scientists referred to this as hydroponics, and the term still carries a lot of weight in describing what is happening all around the worldfrom Japan and China, to Britain and the European Union and to the United States. It will also help to make mobile learning and big data analytics more possible as the technology progresses.
Advantages to Growing Food by Hydroponics
There are many reasons why the automation of food production via hydroponics is changing the landscape of the farming world. Advantages to the growing of food using hydroponic techniques are so varied and include: less land use and more food production; water is reused and recycled; transportation is reduced and lends itself to an expanding and urbanized population around the world.
How Big Data and Automation Works with Hydroponics
In Japan, the firm Fujitsu has created a cloud platform called Akisai. This system analyzes big data that it stores from a variety of sensors located throughout the greenhouses. With this information, fans for ventilation and heating units can be turned on, all remotely or automatically to grow vegetables. Furthermore, thanks to big data the cloud service is collecting, its leading to better quality of food.
In the U.S., Freight Farmers, an organization that manufactures high-volume crop production shipping freight units is also using hydroponics with big data by gathering data from farmers within their networks to upload the best growing conditions from their users.
Basically through their data collection, they are creating a custom elearning development program for their users to learn the best tactics on how to grow their crops. Co-founder Brad McNamara explains, Every farmer that becomes a Freight Farmer now is exponentially better than somebody who started just a few months ago, because they are building on the backs of 40 or 50 people who have been doing it now for a few years. Rather than us just conducting research and development back in Boston, well actually work with the network of farmers and see what results they are getting.
Similarly in China, a new firm called Alesca has taken discarded and unused shipping containers and transformed them into impressively automated miniature farms that are all hydroponic. Only two hours or less of human labor per week are needed to care for the little farms, as the computer software and robotics handle the majority of the maintenance. The idea with shipping containers is that they are able to create microclimates which are most ideal for each type of vegetable plant they are growing. In addition, these miniature farms out produce any competing method of farming on a per square meter basis.
They accomplish this with the most cutting-edge automation, optimal LED lighting, and state of the art software components to craft the ideal environment for each type of plant. The plants are observed by sensors that tell the remote operators all about the health of the plants, their growth, and whether or not the nutrients administered and the overall environment require adjustment to achieve the most ideal conditions for growth. Alesca is convinced that this is the wave of the future for extremely and intensively produced local food for the highly populated dense urban cities of today and tomorrow and call it local concept zero-mile food.
Problems to Overcome With Automated Food Production
The biggest barriers to success for this type of automated food production have always revolved around the cost of such hydroponically produced food. Scaling up production has remained a challenge in the past, because of the intensive electricity needs and cost for feeding, cooling, heating and lighting systems. In the past, a great amount of personal labor that the system required kept this form of food production from being either economical or scalable.
However, thanks to the new software and increasing automation of the hydroponic farms, this is all changing enough for the soilless farming techniques to at least attain a sufficient industrial and commercial scale to become competitive enough to assist in feeding the world.
