Critical Components of a CEA Operation

Owners, operators, managers, and stakeholders of large scale outdoor farming systems, orchards, and vineyards rely on God and nature to provide the necessary requirements to grow and deliver product to market. Most production agricultural systems are supplemented with additional nutrients, water, and other inputs as needed. As you may well understand, these professionals can never control the weather or atmospheric conditions thus they are at the grace of force majeure and their geographical location and related weather patterns.

Controlled Environment Agricultural systems (CEA) who choose to grow vegetables, leafy greens, herbs, cannabis, and other products inside a controlled environment have a distinct advantage of controlling all variables within a level of precision that is impossible with a traditional outdoor agricultural operation.

CEA operations that are well managed and even greenhouses offer many advantages such as:

• Counter-seasonal production and year-round growing
• Security
• Precision, control, and monitoring of the environment.
• Protection from extreme weather conditions and environmental concerns
• Elimination of pests and mold

Essential Components of Healthy Indoor Grow Operation

Properly managing the following essential inputs and conditions makes it possible to grow just about anything, anywhere, anytime.* (Cultural, physiological, and budgetary restraints).

Environment

By creating and controlling the ideal conditions for the perfect growing environment you can achieve optimal air flow and temperature control for the system. This requires maintaining ideal climate controls with minimum and maximum purification and ventilation cycling. Under controlled conditions you can help speed up or slow down the plants maximum potential yield and quality. The constraints are relative energy cost, system limitations, grower capacity, and outside environmental conditions.

Lighting

Proper light, light intervals, and spectrum is essential for effective plant development. For an indoor grow operation, LED lighting offers the best energy efficiency while delivering full plant spectrums to ensure enough energy needed for optimized growth. Utilizing LED to supplement natural PAR values reduces input costs significantly but requires more temperature and humidity controls. More advanced lighting can be programmed and scaled to illuminate zones or local areas to match the DLI (Daily Light Integral) requirements of each crop.

Energy consumption is the biggest challenge these farms face. Unlike conventional outdoor agricultural growing, which relies on the solar radiation, light, and true power of the sun, indoor farms are dependent on supplemental LED lighting to reach their ideal radiation and PAR values. Energy costs can run tremendously high, threatening profitability during peak usage times, and using fossil-fuel-powered electricity can increase the carbon footprint that the system was potentially going to divert. Read more on this here. CEA, Vertical, and Indoor Farms Have the Vision, but do They Have the Energy? Part I

Water

Pure, uncontaminated water is another essential component of the structure of most plants. CEA systems allow for the recapturing of rainwater, condensate water, and the utilization of other water sources in regards to the captial invested in filtration and treatment systems.

Cannabis, for example, is 90% water, while the content of a mature tomato is 95%. As a result, growers must ensure the water's pH level is near 6.5 and contains no harmful pollutants and has the ideal hardness, nutrient content, and amino acid profile. Since the quality of some public water supplies can be variable, many growers prefer to invest in the filtration and distillation of water in their operations. Sophisticated grow management solutions utilize sensors to monitor nutrients in solution as well as the soil moisture content to ensure plants receive just the right amounts of water utilizing automation and AI.

Modern Hydroponics CEA greenhouses use 99% less land and 98% less water than conventional growing practices.

Texas an an example has an economic dependence on irrigation. Improvements are needed state-wide as it pertains to irrigation efficiency, and the state faces water conservation issues as reserves dwindle. 4.7 billion dollars in Texas agriculture relies on irrigation. In the High Plains alone, irrigated agriculture accounts for nearly 9 percent of the Texas economy, including 7,300 jobs. Growing food in Texas also secures availability to produce for the state, dependence on more costly imported goods. What could Texas do to decrease the dependence on costly imported goods further and maximize water resources within the state? Read more about CEA Cultivation and The Future of Texas Water here.

Nutrients

Every living thing requires the right type and quantity of nutrients to grow and survive. Most indoor grown plants receive their nutrients through carefully formulated nutrients.

Most systems utilize hydroponic means to dose nutrients throughout the system. "fertigation," delivering dissolved nutrients via irrigation. The plant absorbs the growth-enhancing nutrients and distributes these throughout the plant by osmosis, the diffusion of fluids through the plant's interior membranes.

Maintaining the ideal nutrient balance in hydroponic systems can be challenging and at scale, the ability to manipulate the amount of water that has to be dosed and appropriately maintained has become a challenge. This has led to the development of Organic Bioreactors as a means of controlling nutrient levels in solution and improving plant growth.

Building a covered aerobic bioreactor to convert organic bio-waste like poultry or cow manure or the produce or green material from the CEA system into benign plant food might be among the best alternatives to expensive synthetic fertilizer or composting. There are even ways to create organic vegan nutrients derived from crop waste and silage. Both sources provide plants with beneficial micronutrients not available in synthetics or conventional nutrients. To learn more about Bioreactors and Their Role in Hydroponic read here.

Precision Monitoring and Control

Technology that oversees air and soil quality, moisture and nutrient levels, tunable power solutions, and full plant spectrum lighting helps take the guesswork out of your operation. Establishing the right control systems at the outset helps identify developing problems quickly while ensuring that each essential component is balanced. As a result, your grow operation will be more successful, consistent, and worry-free.