UAg Vertical Farm

Urban Agric. Vertical Farm System for CEA Research, Education an Outreach (UAg Farm)

The University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (UA-CEAC) and technology/industry collaborators have come together to launch a new multi-tier vertical farm (VF) based research, education, and outreach facility (UAgFarm) at the UA-CEAC. The UAgFarm facility was   developed for engineering and science based research to address challenges and help advancing technology and crop production applications with indoor growing under artificial lighting, to provide experiential educational opportunities for students, and to educate and inform growers and public on indoor growing systems. 

University of Arizona UAg VF facility located at Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (http://ceac.arizona.edu) has 770 ft2 floor space, with two independently climate controlled room, each room with 2 racks consisting of 3 deep-flow hydroponics beds (each 4ft wide x 8 ft length) with adjustable height between growing bed and lighting. Sole source lighting in UAg Farm utilizes LED modules (with blue and red channels) with remotely and independently controlled light intensity at each growing shelve. A custom designed and built data acquisition and graphical user interface system enables real-time monitoring of air temperature, relative humidity, CO2, light intensity from aerial environment and pH, electrical conductivity, dissolved oxygen from nutrient solution as well as monitoring of resource use (i.e. energy, water, CO2), while controlling CO2 injections. 

Related...

Plants will speak to you once you embrace technology and listen to the data.  The mission of the Advanced Sensing & Climate Control Lab for Sustainable CEA Systems develops resource use efficient CEA systems with computer vision guided real time crop growth monitoring systems.  Harnessing this technology makes for timely identification of crop health and status, to improve resource use efficiency.