Resource use Efficient and Precision-Controlled Environment Agriculture

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) will increasingly serve as a resilient solution to global challenges such as the intensifying effects of climate change, loss of arable farmland, and resource scarcity. CEA allows crop production with the highest resource use efficiency, thanks to optimized environmental controls, year-round production, and reduced pest and disease incidence. An important factor affecting the success and profitability in controlled environment agriculture is a grower’s ability to deliver a predictable product consistently. To achieve this, growers must create an environment that supplies all the crop’s needs over its entire growth cycle by identifying and co-optimizing environmental variables such as CO2, light, humidity, airflow, and other parameters. The operational costs and resource-use efficiency of greenhouse and indoor vertical farming systems can be improved by appropriate production-system design modifications for key technologies and control strategies while considering the crop-specific minimum environmental requirements. Lack of detailed engineering analysis in the system design can lead to inefficient use of resources (energy, CO2, water), a non-uniform environment, higher system costs, and limited production quality, yield, and profitability. Wavelength shifting, semi-transparent, and photovoltaic-integrated covering materials present promising applications with unique capabilities to help enhance crop productivity, resource use efficiency, and the sustainability of food production within greenhouses.  Non-contact sensing-based crop health and growth monitoring is desirable for practical ad crop-centric environmental control. Soft sensors based on crop energy balance can help improve greenhouse environment control. An autonomous computer vision-guided plant sensing and monitoring system can help to continuously monitor temporal, morphological, and spectral features of crops providing timely warnings for crop health stress and growth status. Automation and robotics can help address these issues. Furthermore, precision and digital horticulture can support production management and help improve the quantity and quality of crop production with enhanced resource use efficiency. This presentation will focus on real-time sensing, monitoring, and environmental control strategies leading to enhanced resource use efficiency in controlled environment agriculture with greenhouses and indoor plant factory systems.

Bio:
Dr. Murat Kacira is the director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center and a professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. (2000) and M.S. (1996) in food, agricultural, and biological engineering from The Ohio State University. His B.Sc. (1991) is in agricultural engineering from Cukurova University in Türkiye.

Murat’s primary focus is on the resource-use efficiency of systems through integrated crop and production system sensing, monitoring, alternative energy, and environmental control applications. The University of Arizona Urban Agriculture Vertical Farming Facility is an integral part of his research programs on indoor agriculture. He interacts with stakeholders through technical consultations, organizing and presenting in crop production and engineering short courses with hands-on educational workshops and grower conferences, and presenting at national and international conferences.

He is a member of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), the American Society of Horticultural Sciences (ASHS), and the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS).