Precision farming is one of the important areas to ensure food security by coping with climate change and increase farmer’s productivity. Plant factory is one of the aspects of precision farming and recently sought attention among modern farmers in Malaysia. While ensuring continuous supply of crops throughout the year with increased quality and yield, plant factories consume large amount of energy to maintain their micro-climatic condition. This paper presents the energy consumption profiling of a plant factory, owned by Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) in Serdang, Malaysia. This study is important to establish the status quo of consumption pattern of the plant factory towards reducing the energy consumption. Hence, energy audit was carried at the plant factory for duration of 2 weeks. From the audit it was found that the energy was distributed as follows: Air conditioning system - 51%, LED - 36%, pump - 3% and others - 10%. Finally, suitable energy conservation measures were proposed to reduce the energy intensity of the plant factory.
A plant factory has been developed at Horticultural Research Centre, MARDI Serdang. The cultivation approach under the plant factory consists of nine units planting racks with each rack having seven tiers or levels that can cultivate up to 900 crops per rack. Each unit of planting racks has been installed with electrical conductivity (EC) and pH monitoring system. EC is a meaningful indicator of water quality, soil salinity and fertilizer concentration. In this study, the data for EC and temperature were taken for each level different locations (three points along the rack) to evaluate the fertilizer quality distribution. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of EC and temperature distribution on the planting rack of vertical farming system under the plant factory. From the study, it was found that EC and temperature parameters were not significantly different at each level and the point location of the vertical farming system. EC and temperature parameters were significantly different with the time (week) and point location from week to week. The effect of the interaction between time (week) and level on EC and temperature parameters were not statistically different. Therefore, it can be concluded that the effect of EC and temperature distribution at different levels of the vertical farming system did not depend on the time.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.