GrowPro Växthusautomation

With food shortage becoming a growing problem at the same time as the world population increases and cities become more densely populated than ever before, resource efficiency has become a more dire issue than ever. One major problem in food production today is that production efficiency is very weather dependent, transportation is also a big factor in environmental impact and almost half the world's landmass is used for farming, meaning that cultivation of new land is under more pressure than ever. Furthermore pesticides have become commonly used to increase productivity and minimize waste while in recent years it has been proven that these methods can cause health issues. This is where indoor farming has become a growing trend in densely populated areas and it’s proving to be a financially feasible way to meet growing food production demand. Some vertical farms proving to be 100 times more efficient per square meter compared to traditional methods, with 40% less power consumption, 80% less food waste and 99% less water usage compared to outdoor fields. Furthermore the indoor environment can be kept sanitary and therefore the usage of pesticides can be kept at a minimum. With this as a background this project aims to design and build an automated indoor growing environment. An iterative approach will be taken and several prototypes will be constructed, one after another, in order to end up with a small-scale indoor farming setup, also known as a GrowPro