Innovations in light technologies, genetics, responsive glass and leaf coatings are boosting plant performance.
A heat sensitive coating for greenhouse glass, that would maintain optimum temperatures all year around and remove the annual cost of applying and removing shading, is being developed by University of Bristol spin-out Albotherm.
John Stamford – Plant physiology post-doctoral researcher at the University of Essex
REAP keynote, Professor Webb says we are at a tipping point where “we’ve got the fundamental biological knowledge and we’ve got the means to exploit it – with expensive automation like robots, cheap automation like smart irrigation, with smart data analysis tools and the ultimate: Controlled Environment Agriculture.”
Making fresh produce affordable is the aim of Crop Cycle an innovative social-impact project that brings together four leading vertical farming companies. LettUs Grow, GrowStack, Digital Farming and Farm Urban are collaborating to deliver four projects in Wales.
Light Science Technologies (LST) has secured Innovate UK funding to develop an ‘all in one’ sensor for vertical farming. It will measure light, water, air, temperature, humidity, oxygen and soil to enable monitoring and control of the growing environment.
Plant phenotyping is an emerging science that links the structure and appearance of a plant, its phenotype, with its underlying genomics. Analysing the phenotype is therefore important for research so, to determine the success of breeding, a new system from Analytik combines machine-learning with sensors to provide a rapid digital analysis of phenotyping traits.
Speed breeding techniques would allow six crops of wheat in a year, intensifying food production. A speed-breeding platform developed by teams at the John Innes
Sitting thirty-three meters underneath the busy streets of Clapham, a disused air raid shelter from the Second World War is currently producing sustainable and fresh