A new video takes you inside Dyson's impressive vertical farming operation, which is home to 1,225,000 strawberry plants and shows you how the company is applying its manufacturing knowledge to producing homegrown food for British consumers.
In the English county of Lincolnshire, a 26-acre glasshouse built by the Dyson company stretches across the land. Inside, giant wheels weighing about 500 kg (~1,100 lb) hold rows of strawberry plants that are slowly rotated to provide them optimal exposure to sunlight. UV-emitting robots rove the aisles exposing the plants to enough light to kill any mold that dares grow on the plant leaves, while a distributor bot releases beneficial bugs onto the plants in order to kill aphids and other destructive pests.
When the strawberries are ripe enough to be picked, the job is done by 16 robot arms that delicately pluck each fruit from the plant. According to James Dyson himself, the bots were able to harvest 200,000 strawberries in one month alone.
While it might be strange for a man who came to prominence building vacuums and fans to be branching into farming, Dyson thinks it's a natural fit.
"Growing things is like making things," he says in the following video that was recently released to showcase the impressive vertical farming operation. "I'm a manufacturer, and so I suppose in a way, I've approached farming from that point of view. How can we make it more efficient? What technology can we bring in that will improve quality, the taste of the food, use the land better, so that we can invest further and make a difference to farming?"
The giant wheels holding the plants measure 24 m long and 5 m tall (about 78 x 16 ft), which makes it, according to Dyson engineer Rob Kyle, the "biggest rig Dyson's ever made."
In addition to packing more plants into less space, the Dyson glasshouse employs a few other tricks to make its farming effort even more efficient. The facility is powered by an onsite anaerobic digester, which uses the gases from grain to turn turbines. The excess heat from this process is also used to keep the greenhouse warm. The byproduct from the digester is known as "digestate" and it winds up back in the fields as an organic fertilizer.
Rainwater is used to hydrate the plants after it's been collected from the rooftop of the glasshouse, which measures 760 m in length (about 2,500 ft) and is capable of producing 1,250 tonnes of strawberries each year. The growing system also relies on natural light as much as possible and uses the minimal amount of artificial light as a supplemental source.
Plus, because the strawberries are grown and distributed in the UK, there is less energy used importing the fruit from farther afield when they can't normally be grown outside the country's less-than-favorable strawberry-growing season.
“Sustainable food production, food security and the environment are vital to the nation’s health and the nation’s economy; there is a real opportunity for agriculture to drive a revolution in technology and vice versa," concludes Dyson. "Efficient, high-technology agriculture holds many of the keys to our future. Dyson Farming strives to be at the forefront of this."
If you're in the UK, you can find Dyson strawberries already on the shelves in select Marks and Spencer stores as well as at the local farm shops listed here.
Source: Dyson Farming
