What Is Controlled Environment Agriculture?
Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has been growing in popularity over the last couple of decades. Greenhouses have been around for hundreds of years. However, modern CEA has taken control over cultivation to new levels, which many see as the future of food production.
Using controlled environment agriculture practices, growers gain more control over their operation, increasing productivity and improving yields, among other benefits.
What Is Controlled Environment Agriculture?
Controlled environment agriculture refers to any type of crop production in closed spaces. It includes greenhouses, glasshouses, indoor farms, and growth chambers. CEA includes different farming methods compatible with closed-space or indoor agriculture, such as hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, and vertical farms.
Most crops are compatible with controlled environment agriculture. However, some crops benefit more than others from controlled growing environments, including certain vegetables, flowers, leafy greens, herbs, and more.
Highly sensitive and high value crops, in particular, are popular when it comes to CEA. Providing optimal growing conditions, including temperature, humidity and lighting, helps produce high quality products and larger yields. Protecting crops from the elements, as well as pests, also plays a significant role in improving yields and preventing crop loss.
What are the Benefits of Controlled Environment Agriculture?
Reliability and Consistency
The most basic benefit of growing in a closed environment is the ability to control your grow. By disconnecting your space from the elements, you can provide the best growing conditions at all times. So bad weather conditions, such as cold spells, rain, lack of radiation, etc., don’t affect your crops.
This lets growers reliably produce consistent crops. Whether you grow vegetables, greens, or flowers, consistency and reliability are important factors that have a significant effect on profitability.
High value and highly regulated crops, such as cannabis, require increased levels of control. High manufacturing standards and regulations make CEA ideal for these types of crops.
Improved Yields
Besides improving reliability and consistency, growing in a controlled environment also improves yields, in terms of size and quality.
Every plant has its preferred environment, in which it grows best. So, providing this environment ultimately leads to faster and larger growth, as well as higher quality end-products.
Growing in a closed environment lets you optimize your growing conditions, providing precisely what your crops need. This includes environmental controls, such as temperature, humidity, and radiation, as well as nutrients and irrigation.
Extending the Growing Season
Closed environments disconnect your grow from weather fluctuations and other natural elements. By providing ideal conditions at all times, growers extend their growing season well beyond that which would be possible outdoors.
For example, extending the length of day using grow lights, or increasing temperatures during the winter. These allow production even when the weather outside wouldn’t support it.
The ability to grow crops year-round also has an impact on food security and local food supply. For example, northern countries can use CEA methods to locally produce key crops, such as tomatoes or cucumbers.
Efficient Use of Space
One of the biggest benefits of controlled environment agriculture, on a macro scale, is efficient space use. CEA allows for more production in the same amount of space by using advanced farming methods and growing techniques.
For example, hydroponic farming has been shown to significantly increase yields in leafy greens, herbs, spices, and various vegetables. Additionally, vertical farming allows growers to stack crops on shelves. This way, they can grow multiple plants in a space that would normally house only a single plant.
Growing more crops on the same plot of land has major benefits on a larger scale. It allows farms to produce large amounts of food where it wouldn’t be possible otherwise. This is a great way to improve food quality and supply in urban and densely populated areas.
Reduced Pesticide and Fungicide Use
Toxic sprays, including pesticides, fungicides and herbicides play a big role in today’s commercial food production. However, these chemicals increase the toxicity of final food products, and have a negative impact on the environment as well.
Growing in a controlled environment helps reduce the use of these materials. It does so by preventing pests and pathogens from entering the grow space. Avoiding use of sprays may allow growers to get certified as organic. But it also improves food safety and creates an overall greener and healthier food supply chain.
Water Conservation
Controlled environment agriculture is much more efficient with water than outdoor cultivation.
When growing in a controlled environment, water can be circulated in a closed system. You can collect run off and drainage water to be reused. In an open field, irrigation water would simply be lost to the ground.
This is true whether you grow in soil or using more advanced methods such as hydroponics. Hydroponic farming, for example, can save as much as 90% on water, compared to traditional agriculture.
What are the Downsides of Controlled Environment Agriculture?
High Initial Costs
Despite the many advantages of CEA, there are some downsides. The first of which is the high investment required to build a controlled greenhouse or indoor grow room.
Building and setting up a controlled growing space is much more expensive than growing in a field. In general, the more control you want to gain, the higher your initial costs will be. For example, an indoor vertical farm is more expensive to build than a semi-closed greenhouse.
A fully controlled environment requires insulation, lighting, expansive environmental controls, specialized equipment, etc. All of these add up to a substantial initial investment.
High Energy Requirements
High levels of control come at another cost – energy. Environmental controls, such as HVAC, heat pumps, or chillers, require a lot of energy. The same is true for lighting, water management systems, and more.
There are differing degrees to the energy requirements for CEA. For example, a greenhouse that utilizes sunlight and ventilates during the day requires less energy than a fully controlled indoor facility. In general, more control means higher energy consumption.
Saving Energy in Controlled Environment Agriculture
High energy consumption is currently one of the biggest challenges CEA growers face. The ability to save energy in commercial greenhouses and grow rooms is crucial for profitability. It often determines whether growers can remain in business or not.
In order to optimize energy usage, growers have begun tweaking their protocols and investing in more efficient and effective equipment. It’s important to reduce energy requirements wherever possible.
One method that has been rising in popularity over the past decade is dehumidification. Using dehumidifiers to control humidity allows growers to keep the space closed, and avoid ventilation, keeping heat inside the space. This method already saves growers around the world as much as 70% on heating costs. Both in greenhouses and indoor growing facilities.
How Dehumidifiers Save Energy in Greenhouses
One of the biggest inefficiencies in greenhouse cultivation is humidity control. Traditionally, greenhouse operators reduce humidity by ventilating. This releases moisture, but introduces air from outside to the greenhouse.
While this method may be effective and even efficient when weather allows it, that’s not always the case. During the night, or on cold, rainy, cloudy, or damp days, ventilation may not achieve the desired results.
Additionally, besides releasing moisture, ventilating also releases heat. Heat which is produced in the greenhouse at a high energy cost. In order to offset the temperature drop, operators must keep heating constantly.
This inefficiency comes at a very high cost to growers. However, it’s one that dehumidification easily solves. Active dehumidifiers, such as DryGair, extract moisture from inside the space, making ventilation unnecessary. The savings on heating have been shown to average 50% in greenhouses growing all types of crops.
How Dehumidifiers Save Energy in Indoor Farms
When it comes to indoor cultivation, growers often control humidity using HVAC systems. The HVAC, which is primarily a temperature controller, extracts some moisture as a side-effect of its operation.
However, as HVACs aren’t optimized for humidity control. They do so inefficiently and require larger systems just to handle the dehumidification capacity. It also requires the system to run overtime, even when temperatures are already ideal for cultivation, just to keep extracting moisture.
So, reducing humidity with HVAC ends up using significantly more energy than dehumidifiers specifically designed for horticultural humidity control.
Decoupling temperature and humidity control, and using dedicated dehumidifiers, lets you optimize your environmental control. You can run the HVAC only when temperatures require it, reducing its energy consumption, as well as maintenance. It also allows growers to use much smaller HVAC systems that use less energy and require a lower initial investment.
