Growing the future: smart greenhouses to save water, energy and soil
Producing food using technologies that save soil, water and energy. This is Agriculture 5.0, offering innovative growing techniques, and it's the focus of the Politecnico student team Smart Green. The group is dedicated to applying innovative solutions in agricultural production, with particular attention to digitalization, process automation and sustainability.
"Our main goal is to use advanced technologies that improve efficiency and sustainability in the agricultural sector – says team leader Luca Ghiotto – That's why one of our flagship projects is the development of automated, soil-free growing chambers, which allow vegetables to be grown in fully autonomous, controlled environments. These systems optimize resource use and minimize environmental impact, offering a response to the loss of soil, the depletion of natural resources and the rising costs that traditional agriculture is facing, partly due to climate change".
The team was founded four years ago with a contribution from Nicolò Grasso – then a student and team leader, now a doctoral student in the Department of Management and Production Engineering-DIGEP – and has embraced a multidisciplinary approach from the outset. This has become one of its defining features, allowing the team to follow every stage of a project's development: from the initial design of the structure and its systems, including irrigation, climate control and lighting, through to the integration of electronics for data collection and real-time monitoring of plant growth conditions.
In its early years, Smart Green developed several climate-controlled chambers for hydroponic and aeroponic crops, meaning no soil is used at all, fitted with systems to monitor water and energy consumption. The first trials were carried out on strawberries and lettuce, with tests on other vegetable crops such as potatoes and samphire set to begin soon. The team also applies the same growing techniques to more unusual plants, such as dye plants used for natural textile coloring. It plans to extend testing to medicinal plants for the pharmaceutical industry.
Beyond this, the team has also worked on wastewater treatment, drawing on advanced agricultural technologies and specific plant species. A project has also been proposed for growing crops in regolith, the type of soil found on other planets, with a view to developing technologies for food production in extraterrestrial environments.
These are ambitious projects that all share a common thread: the conscious use of resources. A key focus of the group's work is saving water (usage is cut by 90% in aeroponic and hydroponic crops) and energy. "Broadly speaking – explains Ghiotto – the goal of our research is to make vertical farming in protected environments as low-cost as possible". This is an important goal, especially given the ongoing loss of agricultural land, the effects of climate change, and rising energy costs, which have knock-on effects on several aspects of agricultural production, for example fertilizers and pesticides.
Paolo Chiabert, DIGEP lecturer and the team's academic supervisor, notes: "From an educational standpoint, Smart Green's work is very important because it helps train engineers who are well-equipped to introduce new technologies capable of managing the effects of climate change on agriculture, and therefore on food production".
Having worked on several prototype climate chambers, Smart Green is now searching for companies interested in testing these technologies and contributing to the design of new systems. This is part of an ongoing effort to cooperate with businesses, both for technology transfer and keeping education more closely aligned with the needs and challenges of the agricultural sector.