What Is The Meaning Of Indoor Farming?

When you image a farm, you usually think of a lovely little family owned operation with a house, a beautiful yard, and mountains of luscious greens. Or you may imagine a vast industrial enterprise with millions of dollars in big farm equipment operating in fields as far as the eye can see. But, there is an option to both: an indoor farm.

What is Indoor Farming?

The simplest plausible explanation is that indoor farming is agriculture done inside of a building. It does not require huge equipment like tractors or combines, and often requires less water than growing outdoors.

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Instead, it relies on other sorts of technology – including cameras and software – to produce food within. While it’s not ordinary to grow plants inside of a building like a greenhouse, cultivating leafy greens on a small scale is more akin to gardening. Whatever makes it indoor farming is if it’s done on a much greater scale.

Types of Indoor Farming

The major advantage of indoor farming is that it enables growers to control the growth process for increased yields. Droughts, storms, insect infestations and all the other perils of growing outdoors are gone. Instead, growers can manage everything, right down to the quantity of light plants receive on a minute-to-minute level.

Vertical Farming

As the term implies, vertical farming is whereby food is grown on levels that are layered on top of each other heading upward. This sort of indoor farming involves a rather large and tall building, a lighting system, a mechanism to make sure all the crops get the water and fertilizers they need, and some type of system for monitoring the plants, such sensors or some kind of software.

Vertical farms usually contain numerous tiers of plants blooming at any given time. The benefit of growing plants this way is that we can grow a lot more food on a given square foot of space than if you were only cultivating a single layer outdoors. If you had a 25,000 square foot structure, for example, vertical farming allows you to grow a lot more crops on numerous layers than if you were to merely use the area to cultivate a single layer.

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While indoor agriculture provides for better use of space whenever it’s done vertically, it is also highly energy intensive. In addition to the necessary infrastructure, a lot of energy is required to run the many lights, pumps, sensors, cameras and other equipment needed to make a vertical farm run. Many vertical farms aim to counteract this high energy usage by employing as much renewable energy as feasible.

Hydroponic Farming

One typical form of growing food in horizontal farms is hydroponic farming, which is when you grow plants without the usage of soil. Instead, plants are grown in a fertilizer solution combined with water. In hydroponic farming, plants don’t have to “seek out” minerals in soil. Rather, the nutrients totally surround the roots, making it much easier for them to absorb what they require.

This encourages the plants to develop quicker and more abundantly than if they grew in dirt. This method often leads to increased yields of fresh food. While it is more cleaner than soil growth because of the lack of dirt, it is also highly energy consuming. The many pumps and other equipment needed for hydroponic systems tend to use a lot of electricity.

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA)

CEA is an all-encompassing word that incorporates any sort of indoor agriculture, like greenhouses, hydroponic systems, and vertical farms. It also includes: aeroponics, the growing of plants using mist; aquaculture, the cultivation of aquatic organisms like fish; and aquaponics, which combines aquaculture and hydroponics.

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The key of CEA is that farmers can control every part of the environment that the plants are produced in, removing the need to rely on the weather or potentially dangerous chemicals like pesticides and herbicides. Controlling every step of the growth process often leads to more instances of food safety.

CEA also allows growers the flexibility to produce crops year-round instead of only when the weather is perfect for growing, and the ability to grow crops nearly anyplace, even in locations they wouldn’t ordinarily grow.

Between hydroponic farming, vertical farming, and CEA, more and more of the world’s food supply is being generated via indoor farming. It is estimated to be a $25 billion industry by 2027.