After four years of research and development, the fully automated Stacked Farm integrated vertical farm will soon be supplying leafy greens to national wholesalers, including Sumo Salad, QSR, Dnata, Crown Resorts and Morco Fresh.
This means that Stacked Farm products grown in cities from Burleigh Heads will be shipped to casinos, food outlets and retail outlets across Australia with plans to expand to new facilities in 2020.
A company spokesman says this is probably the first complex in the world to be fully automated. Direct speech: “Other vertical trusses may have an automation component, but one or two components are manual, whether sowing, shearing or packing,” she says.
Stacked Farm CEO Conrad Smith says the farm is commercially viable, scalable, and competitive, from seedlings to packaging using cutting-edge technology.
Direct speech: “A good crop does not depend on the weather and can be grown using 95% less water than in ordinary agriculture. It eliminates the use of pesticides and other hazardous climate-related processes, as cultivation is fully restrained and controlled, ”says Smith.
Direct speech: “Drought destroyed so many primary producers in the country. Water will always be a problem in Australia; it is our most valuable commodity. Vertical farming can help our farmers in times of drought or crisis. ”
Efficient use of water is just one of the sustainable aspects that make this operation attractive to food wholesalers in Australia. Plant growth occurs quickly, and the shelf life is longer: the whole process from seed to finished product takes only 16-21 days.
- In the Volgograd region, greenhouses created according to the European patterns of the latest fifth generation are tested in the city of Volzhsky.
- Greenhouses are increasingly being incorporated into rural development processes, and this weekend a new example of a rooftop greenhouse was presented in Swansea, Wales, UK.
- Lufa Farms has announced the construction of its fourth commercial rooftop greenhouse, which will soon be completed in Saint Laurent, Montreal.
- The South Korean government has developed a new vinyl greenhouse, which keeps the room temperature 2-3 ° C lower than the outdoor temperature.
