Agriculture Industry

The need for produce is increasing significantly.

The global population recently crested 7 billion and is projected to 9.8 billion by 2050. An ever-larger portion of Earth’s residents live in cities without producing their own food. This causes a fundamental problem.

Our dominant food paradigm is breaking down. Climate change, increasing drought frequency and severity, soil depletion and disease, excess fertilization, phosphorus scarcity, water pollution chemical overloads, pollinator destruction, and biodiversity loss threaten our business.

Fortunately, new technologies allow farmers to significantly increase their yields, increasing profitability.

Hydroponics: A Sustainable Solution

Hydroponic farming occurs in soil-less environments where plants grow in a growing media like rock wool while given fertilizer and nutrients via a computerized system. The growing environment consists of variables such as sunlight, humidity, temperature. Fertilizer/ chemical feed rates are consistently monitored by computerized systems which ultimately maximize yields. Growing plants outside of soil can lead to a great increase in productivity. Many consumers and retailers are increasingly interested in where their food comes from, how safe it is, and how it was produced. Hydroponics delivers that peace of mind for the end-consumer.

Hydroponics provide several benefits including:

10-20x higher yield than traditional open field agriculture (OFA)

90% less water usage than traditional farming

Avoid pesticides that can harm people and the environment

require smaller physical and environmental footprint

Additionally, automation is possible due to lower staffing requirements. Indoor farms are also protected from many risks of traditional farming – water and soil degradation, pesticides and herbicide pollution, and harm of biodiversity can be mitigated.

Energy Use in Greenhouses

Greenhouses offer a variety of benefits but can be very energy intensive and expensive to light, heat and cool. Energy costs vary by crop grown but can reach up to 15% of production costs for a greenhouse.

The solution: Combined heat and power.

Combined heat and power (CHP) is an efficient and clean approach to generating electric power and useful thermal energy from a single fuel source. So instead of purchasing electricity from the distribution grid and separately burning fuel in an on-site furnace or boiler to produce thermal energy, CHP provides both services in one, energy-efficient step.

Additionally, CHP benefits include:

  • CHP-friendly environmental regulations
  • Resiliency initiatives
  • Federal and state policies and incentives
  • Utility support
  • Project reliability

CHP can help reduce strain on the electric grid and lower greenhouse gas and other harmful emissions. CHP can lessen the need for new transmission and distribution infrastructure and uses abundant clean domestic energy sources such as natural gas and biomass.

If you’d like to learn more about opportunities in the agriculture industry, reach out to our office.