Vertical Farming

on

 Vertical Farming

Mrs. R. M. Shinde, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, SVERI’s COE, Pandharpur. Email Id: rmshinde@coe.sveri.ac.in

Introduction

The India is one of the biggest populated countries. Many families of India rely on agriculture and related activities to earn the bread and butter for their families. Nevertheless, feeding a population of nearly 1.3 billion is not an easy task, it is just like challenge so something is required to increase yield from available agriculture land. This can be achieved by vertical farming.

Mechanism

Vertical farming is a way of growing crops in vertically stacked layers in a controlled environment, where a natural environment is somewhat modified in order to increase the crop yield. The environment modification deals with four aspects of the farming, those are: (a) physical layout, (b) lighting, (c) growing medium, and (d) sustainability feature.

  1. Physical Layout:

In the physical layout, the plants are stacked vertically like one layer above another just like a tower-like structure. This way, we can minimize farming area and increase yield.

  • Lighting:

 It requires perfect environment in order to increase growth of plant that can be done by using combination of natural lights and artificial lights.

  • Growing medium:

The third main aspect is the growing medium for the plants in which plants can grow, generally soil is used as growing medium but in vertical farming we can’t use soil as growing medium as it increases weight of each layer and collectively weight of structureso here in vertical farming instead of soil as growing medium we can use aeroponic, hydroponic or aquaponic as the growing medium.

  • Sustainability:

The fourth aspect is sustainability that makes vertical farming way more beneficial.Vertical farming requires 95% less water as compared to other farming methods.

Most vertical farms use structures similar to greenhouses. In this type of farming uses concept of stack that places one layer above another that arranges layers vertically. The weight of each layer can be reduced using hydroponic methods as a growing medium instead of soil it also reduces water requirements by up to 70%.  Second method that is aeroponics further reduces weight and water requirements so most of the vertical farms use either hydroponic or aeroponic method.

The light provided to vertical farming typically uses a mixture of natural light and artificial light. Artificial lighting is often LED-based and generated by a renewable power source such as solar power or wind turbines.

Fig. 1 Vertical Farming

Advantages of Vertical Farming

Vertical Farming is one of the novel approaches towards agriculture. There are several advantages of vertical farming,

  1. One of the biggest advantages of vertical farming is that it allows farmers to grow plants in the indoor setting
  2. Another advantage of vertical farming is that it allows farmers to grow more plants and produce more yields in lesser area. As vertical farming lets us to grow plants in a tower-like structure,
  3. Vertical farming requires less amount of waterso it helps farmers to grow plant even in insufficient rain.
  4. As other ways of farming vertical farming is not affected by weather conditions because crops are grown in controlled environment. Favorable conditions are created so plants can grow efficiently so this kind of farming does not depend up on weather conditions.

Vertical farming is a good solution to problem of low yield in Indian farming. There are lots of problem that Indian farming currently facing likelack ofsupply or oversupply of farm produce, overuse of pesticides, overuse of fertilizers, deteriorating soils and even the un-employability and at last acceptance of vertical farming by Indian farming community.If Indian farmers accept vertical farming yield can be increased 3 to 4 time than current yield so vertical farming is one of the better options to increase yield.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

[2] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-you-should-know-about-vertical-farming-4144786

[3] Madhuri Shrikant Sonawane, International Archive of Applied Sciences and Technology Int. Arch. App. Sci. Technol; Vol 9 [4] December 2018: 122-125© 2018 Society of Education, India

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