At the Siemens branch in Frankfurt, employees grow food for the staff restaurant under controlled conditions (controlled environment agriculture). The vertical farming model from the start-up 'greenhub solutions' is operated with the help of Siemens control technology and enables efficient and sustainable plant growth. Together with the farm management app from greenhub, the Siemens components in the model's control box enable automated irrigation and lighting of the plants. By using circuit breakers, electrical parameters can also be recorded and transmitted to mobile devices, PCs or higher-level IoT interfaces to support cloud applications. The greenhub model continuously collects data on plant growth in order to optimize the control of light and nutrients. This data makes it possible to maximize resource efficiency while producing high-quality food in an environmentally friendly way and without pesticides.

Controlled growing conditions in agriculture

The vertical farming model is based on a Siemens control system. This is used to control water and nutrient additions, among other things.

© Siemens

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) is a technology-based farming method that combines sustainability and profitability. Siemens' control systems make it possible to optimize plant growth, conserve resources and increase yields while taking advantage of automation and data-driven insights. The result is a decisive competitive advantage: products from a CEA plant are significantly larger and of higher quality than plants from conventional agriculture. At the same time, Controlled Environment Agriculture uses fewer resources such as water, soil, pesticides and general land use. Compared to traditional cultivation methods, up to 95 percent water can be saved and more than 300 percent growth per square meter can be achieved.

The advancement of plant science combined with more accessible data is leading to new concepts of smart agriculture. Farmers are using AI, analytics and IoT to make new types of decisions, for example based on real-time data on weather, temperature and soil moisture. Automated and digitalized processes help to reduce energy and labour costs. There is potential for automation in daily work processes, for example, expensive and time-consuming manual pollination of plants could be replaced by machine pollination. Robotic or automated sowing and harvesting can reduce costs and dependence on labor and make it possible to keep otherwise autonomous systems closed.