Smart Greenhouses and Livestock farming | Green-deal for bright future

Greenhouse farming

Background on Greenhouse farming

Greenhouse agriculture has become very popular in all corners of the world. It originated in the 13th century, as a way to satisfy the gastronomic demands of royalty. Hundreds of years ago, greenhouse farming was also used to cultivate medicinal plants and herbs.?Today, entire university teams are dedicated to the scientific study of greenhouse growing. Coupled with recent advancements in agricultural technology, greenhouse farming has become more and more productive and lucrative agribusiness ventures. Because crop control is critical for a successful food production greenhouse agriculture is a growing trend around the world.

Usage and Advantage

Greenhouse farming is the process of growing crops and vegetables in a greenhouse. Doing so typically allows farmers to increase their performance and yields, while improving the quality of products. Greenhouse farming protects crops from external threats such as certain pests and extreme weather events.?Greenhouse agriculture also is a way of growing fruits and vegetables native to warmer climates in their colder counterparts - for example, growing tomatoes in a greenhouse in Norway.?In greenhouses, the light, ventilation, humidity, and temperature can all be controlled. This allows the farmer to create and provide optimal micro-ecosystems for their plants, helping them grow strong, beautiful, nutritious and tasty.

• Isolation helps to prevent insect infestations, which dramatically reduce crop yields
• Crops grown in open fields are susceptible to cross-pollination from neighbouring fields that may have genetically altered plants.
• Farmers retain precision control on irrigating their plants
• Food growers can reduce or eliminate the use of harmful pesticides, which is essential for organic farming
• Greenhouses protect plants from adverse weather events such as hail, snow, and intense heat and sunlight
• One of the biggest benefits of the trends in greenhouse growing is that as greenhouse management technology advances it will become more effective in helping to prevent crop failure

Well-implemented greenhouses in a controlled environment can be a low-cost solution to improving a farmer's productivity and profitability in countries with harsher climates. They also serve as an excellent vehicle for broadening one's farming or gardening horizons, and improving the quality of their crops.

However, not all crops are suited to being grown in greenhouses. Typically, crops that do well in greenhouses are those that require warm growing conditions, or those that are quite delicate and thrive only in a very narrow range of environmental variables.

Example tomatoes

Tomatoes are thought of as a staple in most western - and even some Eastern - cuisines. Yet these crops are surprisingly delicate and require a great deal of attention to detail in order to grow well.?In order for their tomatoes to thrive, the farmer must take into account the soil type, the quality of the soil, and the average ambient temperature. The soil must be moist enough to allow roots to grow through it and support the fruits, yet not too inundated that it drowns the plant. Tomatoes like temperatures no higher than 25° to 27°C. Anything above that, and the plant will not bear fruit correctly. So what does this have to do with greenhouses? Well, in order to achieve these very precise and specific conditions, the easiest solution is to use a controlled environment such as a greenhouse.?In addition to ensuring the delicate crops are well tended to, greenhouses also protect crops from pests and sudden changes in weather patterns. This is particularly relevant in parts of the world where the weather is prone to changing rapidly in short spaces of time. Some crops are not resilient enough to successfully cope with such drastic changes in environment so quickly, and so do significantly better under the shelter of a greenhouse.?

Livestock farming

Background on Livestock farming

Livestock farming systems produce milk and meat for human consumption. The milk and meat provide important nutritional compounds, especially protein. Nomadic people derive their nutrition almost completely from milk and meat from ruminant animals, but for most people, animal protein supplements a predominantly vegetable diet with essential amino acids and vitamins that are in short supply in vegetarian diets. Consumption of animal proteins is related to human culture but also to the level of prosperity; the higher the standard of living the larger the consumption of animal protein. The increase in human population, together with the increase in the standard of living in developed countries, are the main reasons for the rapid growth in numbers of farm animals worldwide and also for the increased impacts of livestock farming systems on the biosphere during the last few decades.

Usage and Advantage of smart Livestock farming

Precision Livestock Farming is smart technology that enables individual animals to be monitored more closely on farms that continue to upscale the size of their operations. The growing world population implies that the demand for meat and eggs will increase by more than 65% over the next 40 years. In order to secure food supplies for more than nine billion people worldwide, the number of pigs and chickens and the scale of farms where they are raised must increase. A parallel development is the declining number of farmers. This means that each farmer has to care for a growing number of animals, while there is an increase in demand from society that the right of animals to individual attention is respected. Because of this, precision livestock technologies are of great importance to deal with these challenges.

How Thaumatec contributes

We are developing and supporting green house and livestock farm companies or their product suppliers with?

• automation,?
• controlling,?
• connectivity,?
• and analytics solutions.

These products and solutions are dealing as well with food production and the growing world population e.g. for improving urbanisation and lack of clean (drinking) water, and reducing soil pollution, and energy waste.

The several different farming applications contain smart features for climate control, process automation in horticulture, chicken breeding, egg fetching, feeding systems and ventilation control, improving animal health, reducing energy and waste, more efficiency and many more.

The related projects are extremely interesting and our teams are responsible for the areas FW development, test automation, Continuous Integration / Deployment (CI/CD), IoT edge device development, metadata management, libraries and tools, and the agile processing and scrum master role.

Here is something more interesting about potential and ideas like drones and agrobots, Smart Sensors and Big Data on how to feed more than 9 billion people:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-content-future-farms-sustaining-the-planet