Seeding Food Innovation - Awarded Project 2019

NextGen Amplified Sustainable Agriculture (NASA). It's About Space

Project Description

By 2050 some forecasts show global food demand increasing by 60%. To mitigate significant risks of global malnutrition, hunger, and conflict; food production needs to become more efficient and sustainable. Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) can produce higher yields at reduced spatial and environmental footprints. This control improves management of key elements like water, nutrients, and nutritional outcomes. These advantages come with a cost however; energy is among the greatest of these. Modern greenhouses and vertical farms can have significant thermal management requirements, and increasingly, very large electricity demands.

This new project is being advanced to radically rethink how CEA should be developed, built, and implemented at small scales, large scales, and worlds beyond our own. The groundbreaking model-and-maker platform will transcend existing paradigms that historically may have constrained CEA to specific locations, configurations, scales, or socioeconomic class. Outcomes from this program are aimed at: 1) transforming the energy efficiency, resiliency, and sustainability of CEA operations at all scales, 2) increasing global access to the advantages of CEA, and 3) growing and empowering the next generation of amplified agriculturalists.

Food Innovation

This will be accomplished through a powerful model that is capable of simulating the transient climate inside a greenhouse or vertical farm; designers will be able to experiment with how to optimize the delivery of this environment. Typical fundamental variables include building shape and material, temperature, light, and irrigation. Innovative modeling efforts will also be used to investigate how cleaner, more sustainable energy systems can be developed to power and thermally manage the new growing spaces. The first applications of the model will be to investigate the potential for efficiency improvement in large established commercial growing operations.

Outcome

Extending lessons from this work, completely new growing environments will be imagined for three different remote locations, Kuglugtuk Canada, Syansu India, and Angas Australia. The simulation tools developed through this research will enable investigators to design new growing spaces and corresponding energy systems suitable for these very challenging and different locations. Optimum designs for each location will then be fabricated at lab scale with advanced additive manufacturing (AAM) “3D Printing” techniques. They will then be tested in conditions that mimic each location. Finally, through partnership with Windsor Essex County District School Board, students will be educated about the merits and requirements of controlled environment agriculture. These students will 3D Print and test their own designs for various different environments.

Grantees:

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