S08 - Session O2 - Vertical farming of challenging crops requires optimized systems and operations: sensors and AI to the rescue

Authors: Celine Nicole *, Silvia Booij, Leonie Geerdinck, Marcel Krijn, Yuchong Chen, Mengjie Fan, Pepijn Obels, Rogier Brussee, Jakob de Vlieg

Vertical farming is becoming increasingly popular as a method to produce leafy vegetables. For lettuce and herbs, climate, irrigation, and lighting are being optimized for the most efficient use of resources such as water, and energy. Presently, the high production yield and light-use efficiency attainable for lettuce and herbs, are making vertical farming a viable business proposition. However, even with strong customer demand, for some crops, like spinach or wild brassicas, growers encounter challenges. In particular, baby leaf spinach is known to be a very challenging crop to grow in vertical farming. The growth cycle of baby leaf spinach is relatively short (around 20 days) leaving little room for mistakes. Moreover, small deviations from optimal growth parameters can have severe consequences on yield. Hence small changes in the environment will lead to low reproducibility from cycle to cycle and even low uniformity per cycle. We take this crop as an example and show how the vertical farm of the future, equipped with sensors, AI algorithms, and smart lighting control associated with a well-designed climate and irrigation/substrate system can help growers to improve performance. We report on the steps that led to doubling of the yield compared to the reference situation we started from, covering the growth stages of spinach from germination to harvest and storage. We show how we used imaging and sensor information to optimize harvest time and synchronize irrigation time. Finally, we indicate our processes lead to better quality and shelf life of the final produce.