The Interplay of Genotype and Environment in Precision Indoor Agriculture
Introduction
The rapidly evolving Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) landscape demands a nuanced approach that synergizes environmental control and genotypic selection. The rise of vertical and indoor farming underlines the imperative need for specialized genotypic selections tailored to these contexts. At Precision Indoor Advisory, our holistic consultancy services aim to assist you in this multifaceted endeavor. In this comprehensive guide, we unravel the complexities of germplasm selection for indoor farming and delve into how it interacts with the environment for optimal outcomes.
Debunking the "Set it and Forget it" Myth
The ambition of CEA lies in the endeavor to exert control over environmental conditions. However, every system has its limitations. Contrary to many claims, even indoor farms do not have perfect control over their environments. Common examples include spectral composition, limited range of operating conditions, and limits on energy density or larger variances as densities increase. Many operators enter the industry under the presumption that an ideal environment can simply be "set and forgotten." However, reality paints a different picture—numerous inefficiencies, limitations, and contingencies often surface, requiring detailed commissioning work, identifying key limitations, and finding ways to enhance infrastructure performance. Most importantly, this work leads to the construction of a germplasm specification. We argue that the key to unlocking CEA's full potential lies in both optimizing engineering innovations and synchronizing them with context-specific breeding or selection strategies. Only through this dual approach can one achieve peak efficiency and dependable production of tailored varieties with unmatched market quality.
Distinct Selection Criteria: Indoor Systems vs. Open Fields
Open Field Farming
In conventional open-field agriculture, genotype selection revolves around the plant’s ability to withstand a range of environmental stressors such as drought, temperature fluctuations, and soil salinity. Crops also need resilience against biotic stressors like pests and diseases while ensuring good transport supply-chain compatibility.
Indoor Farming Systems
In contrast, indoor and vertical farming environments present a different set of challenges and opportunities. Here, plants should excel under artificial lighting and efficiently produce within spatial constraints, while performing well in hydroponics with low or no media. Rapid cycling, low labor, and compact morphologies perform best and drive profitability. This emphasizes the need for specialized germplasm.
Genotypic Selection's Role in Enhancing Operations
Labor Efficiency
The genotype's expression can drastically impact operational efficiency. For instance, plants with consistent and compact growth patterns simplify and reduce labor-intensive tasks such as pruning and harvesting. The density and morphology of plants are critical factors in mitigating the risks of pest and disease outbreaks, thereby reducing the threshold of monitoring and the frequency of intervention. As a new focus develops on high-order crop species in Precision Indoor Ag (PIA), canopy management is often thought to be a driver of labor cost. However, good engineering and good genotype selection are mutually reinforcing, facilitating airflow through canopies without as much intervention. A great deal of research is available for operators, detailing how light quality and environmental manipulation are effective tools in changing genotype expression. However, these strategies often bump up against infrastructure limitations. Hence, genotype selection is often the most practical approach to finding labor savings by adapting your crop to your system.
Integration with Automation
In a world currently being transformed by AI and automation, the next frontier is fully automating labor-intensive work. A carefully chosen genotype can also complement advancements in automation. Although some generalizations can be made, similar to the above, where short-stature morphologies facilitate materials handling automation, more bespoke considerations may be at play to facilitate image systems that enable technologies like automated berry picking. There, the important selection criteria may become berry attachment to the peduncle and length of peduncle to expose the berry to harvesting equipment. The advent of CRISPR and next-generation sequencing means systems design no longer has to take the biological side of the equation as a given on a practical timeline.
Input Efficiency
The interplay between lighting, water, and nutrient utilization is a cornerstone of plant physiology and operational efficiency. Exploring germplasm that efficiently converts nitrates into proteins and calcium into structural biomass is crucial for sustainable CEA operations. Genotypes themselves represent an often overlooked limitation in high-performance systems, some lacking sufficient expression of critical pathways along the biosynthesis spectrum. While these insufficiencies may not become a limiting factor in the context of a complex soil food web, which supplies these exudates and bootstraps biosynthesis, hydroponic systems typically aim to be abiotic. Thus, it's the plant’s ability to synthesize these molecules efficiently themselves that facilitates the use of low-cost raw salt inputs, in clean systems fertigation systems, that indoor operators desire.
Similarly, indoor operators are highly attuned to aggregate energy costs, and thus both quantum efficiency and water-use efficiencies are primary correlates to energy-efficient operations. Although it is obvious that the energy cost of lighting drives photosynthesis, what is less clear, and just as significant, is the cost of transpiration. While in a greenhouse context, driving transpiration is often the goal to facilitate nutrient uptake, both the ability to drive transpiration and the cost to deal with transpiration are enhanced in the PIA context. The latent heat of water vapor contains significant energy that must be dealt with; thus, finding an efficient transpirative rate and commensurate nutrient concentration is pivotal to achieving a lean operating state. Genotypes that drive high quantum efficiency with low water consumption are less energy-intensive crops and an important way to find operational efficiency. Such efficiency also provides downstream operational savings in wastewater processing expenses.
How Our Consultancy Can Assist
Navigating the maze of genotype selection in vertical and indoor farming is intricate, to say the least. Our consultancy is geared to provide tailored assistance in this critical phase. Through continuous improvement programs and lifecycle analyses, we offer insights into finding the right germplasm and optimizing your operation's environmental controls.
Lighting Analysis
Dynamic lighting plans and proprietary spectrums can substantially influence germplasm metabolomes. At Precision Indoor Advisory, we assist in implementing in-house lighting solutions for germplasm screening or finding choice varietals that optimize yield, quality, and ROI under your existing light array. We can show you tools you already have that can indicate how well your crop and conditions are utilizing your energy inputs and provide ways to modulate inputs and steer morphology to maximize endpoints.
Tailored Selection Programs
With an in-depth understanding of both crop science and system engineering, we offer bespoke selection programs designed around your specific needs. We can help you define your selection criteria, develop protocols for evaluation, source phytosanitary germplasm, and build the datasets to characterize their expression in your system.
Intellectual Property Development and Protection
As you innovate in the field of CEA, protecting your unique germplasm, technology, and operational methodologies becomes critical. We can guide you through the complexities of intellectual property (IP) development, from drafting patents to securing plant variety rights to licensing IP. Our expertise can help you commercialize your innovation.
Continuous Improvement
Trial and error yield intuitions; structured analysis yields results.
Conclusion
Combining the strengths of optimized environmental controls and strategic genotypic selection holds the key to unlocking the full potential of indoor and vertical farming systems. Partner with Precision Indoor Advisory to seamlessly integrate these two pivotal elements and cultivate success in this exciting frontier of agriculture.
