Drives & Controls March 2023

30 n FOOD AND BEVERAGE March 2023 www.drivesncontrols.com Vertical farms: a growth market for automation? V ertical farming – the practice of growing crops indoors (or even underground) in stacked layers under closely controlled conditions, including intense artificial lighting – has attracted substantial interest in recent years. Around the world, vertical farms are being set up to grow crops under ideal conditions to maximise yields and minimise wastage. In the UK, for example, Jones Food Company (JFC) is building vertical farms to supply 24 tonnes of fresh produce every week. It employs 40 people across its sites and is committed to growing high-quality fresh produce. It sees automation as being a critical enabler. “Automation is at the heart of everything we do,”says JFC’s founder and CEO, James Lloyd- Jones.“Without it, we wouldn’t be able to produce our high-quality, high-yield crops sustainably.” Vertical farming is an energy-intensive process, using closely controlled environments and banks of LED lights to grow vast amounts of fresh produce. But the rising energy costs of the past year have already forced one UK vertical farmer to lay of half its workforce of about 1,000 people and to downsize its operations. Eighteen months ago, electricity accounted for around 25% of the cost of running a vertical farm in Europe; now the figure is around 40%. Jones Food Company is therefore keen to ensure that every kilowatt of energy input returns the maximum output. To help achieve this, it has formed a partnership with Schneider Electric, which is designing and installing AI- driven software to optimise growing conditions and improve energy efficiency. The AI helps to detect and adjust the growing environment to achieve optimum temperatures, thus increasing crops yields, cutting wastage and reducing handling times. JFC believes this will allow it to accelerate its speed to market. Schneider is creating a centralised, automated data analysis model that is flexible and scalable, based on its Aveva software. This will allow JFC to make real-time changes to growing conditions (such as temperature, humidity, nutrient mix and water quality) to achieve higher yields at lower energy costs. According to Lloyd-Jones, this means that JFC “can continue to innovate at breakneck speeds”. On a more global scale, Siemens is collaborating with 80 Acres Farms, an indoor farming specialist with five farms in the US and r&d facilities in the Netherlands.“In just seven years, we have scaled from a single r&d facility to a high-tech modular system that we can deploy across the world,”says Mike Zelkind, the company’s co-founder and CEO. Under the agreement, Siemens Digital Industries is installing a suite of automation technologies and edge devices to help automate 80 Acres Farms’production lines, while edge devices and HMIs will monitor and update the farms’control systems. Siemens Digital Industries Software is developing a digital twin that simulates the farms, plant growth and production processes to predict plant growth under diverse conditions, as well as to optimise future farms. Meanwhile, Siemens Smart Infrastructure is providing power distribution equipment for the farms, as well as energy and building management technologies that will help to monitor fire, safety, security and power distribution systems via a single interface. Siemens is also working with 80 Acres’ technology subsidiary, Infinite Acres, to support the industrialisation and scaling of a proprietary platform – developed with partners including Ocado, Priva and Signify – that combines crop management software, environmental controls, robotics, and automation. “We sometimes hear that food is medicine,” says Siemens US president and CEO, Barbara Humpton.“Vertical farming is an opportunity to turn this concept into a reality, and 80 Acres Farms’use of technology is nowmodelling the path forward for this transformative approach to food production. “In this moment of change and disruption – and in a world becoming increasingly ‘glocal’– what I see at 80 Acres Farms represents both the purpose and the power of the industrial technologies now readily available to us: the capability to invent anywhere, then to scale our world-changing solutions everywhere.” n A potentially lucrative new market is opening up for automation companies in the form of vertical farming – intensive indoor agriculture in stacked layers under closely controlled conditions, which aims to optimise plant growth, minimise wastage and produce crops close to their customers. Growing up: plants thriving under artificial lighting in a 80 Acres Farms facility in Ohio