WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Extreme weather keeps ruining crops so James Dyson has created a new ferris wheel to grow more strawberries on his farm faster.
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We’ve seen lots of odd things happening to strawberries in the past such as being imprinted with trackable edible electronics, being 4D printed, and picked by robots … but now as the humble strawberry plant continues to be the futures experimental fruit after Dyson Farming announced that they’ve completed a trial that boosted British strawberry yields by 250 percent using revolutionary technology.
The company’s 26-acre glasshouse in Lincolnshire is already home to over 1.2mn strawberry plants, which are grown all year round to produce some 1,250 tonnes of high-quality British strawberries.
To maximise efficiency and crop quality further, the business has just finished a trial of its new Hybrid Vertical Growing System, which it said boosted yields by 250 per cent while optimising the quality of the fruit.
See it in action
Rather than arranging the strawberries in simple rows, Dyson’s system arranges them on vast, 5.5m high ferris wheel-like structures which rotate the strawberry plants, making use of the full height of the glasshouse and dramatically increasing the number of strawberry plants that can be planted in the same area.
Two aluminium rigs – each bigger than two double-decker buses placed end to end – rotate the trays of strawberry plants to ensure they get optimal exposure to natural light while also supplementing them with LED light when daylight levels are lower in the winter months.
A continuous and novel irrigation and drainage system ensures root health is never compromised, the company added. The development adds to the technology in the glasshouse, which already features advanced robots that select and pick only the ripest fruit using machine vision, physical manipulation and robotic secateurs.
Other robots glide on rails next to the plants, shining UV light on them at night to prevent mould growth and ensure the health of the crop. And instead of using pesticides and insecticides, robots distribute insect predators to tackle aphids through the year.
The glasshouse is adjacent to one of Dyson Farming’s anaerobic digesters, which enables the year-round strawberry production. Crops from the surrounding fields are fed into the digester and broken down by mico-organisms, creating gas which drives a generator providing both electricity that powers the equivalent of 10,000 homes, and heat which is piped into the glasshouse, along with CO2, to provide optimal growing conditions.
The waste digestate goes back onto the land as organic fertiliser to increase crop yields.
Robert Kyle, Dyson engineer, said: “We designed and built every aspect of the Hybrid Vertical Growing System ourselves – it has been a painstaking labour of love over the past 12 months. We’ve built the biggest machines in Dyson’s history and filled them with 6,000 strawberry plants.
“Slowly rotating, with a highly sophisticated and novel drainage system, they have been extremely happy plants producing wonderfully sweet fruit.”
Daniel Cross, from Dyson Farming, added: “The trial shows how the yields of delicious, high-quality fruit grown vertically under glass in the right conditions can be significantly increased. This need not only apply to strawberries. There is much more we can do and the precision that Dyson engineers bring to their testing and improvement is unlike anything I have ever seen in farming before.”
