Reepel Vertical Farming
Traditional Farming
Field-grown crops are driven by machinery logistics, soil microbiome, and weather which in combination control crop yield. Conventional farming is the best method to grow crops in an economical manner, as it has been refined over thousands of years. However, this method is subject to vagaries of temperature, climate, rainfall, and labour availability. It is difficult and extremely expensive to control all the key factors controlling plant growth across vast area and open fields. This leads to disproportionate water, pesticide, and fertiliser inputs as well as variability in growth rate and crop yield compared to enclosed intensive systems. Reepel has a solution for this using a combination of Reepel's technology for increased productivity, and IoT sensors which communicate with each other across large farm area to ensure proper control of the field.
To learn more about Reepel's solution, please visit this page and view Desai Microgation: Field Grown Crops - Soil Based Systems
Field grown crops have the advantage of free light and water but are constrained by seasonal cycle, locked to geography, soil, and have a high land-use requirement.
Delivery of fertilisers and control of pests and diseases add significantly to cost measured in active materials and the costs of delivery to the field. Recent increase in the cost of energy, to which all farm inputs are locked, together with tripling of fertiliser prices, and increasingly unpredictable weather significantly increases risks which carry through to the farm-gate price of crops produced.
Reepel has applied its technology and developed its own Vertical Farming system to accelerate and increase the yield of a variety of crops.
Conventional Vertical Farming Systems
Conventional vertical farming systems attempt to solve the problems associated with traditional farming by providing advantages listed below :
1. intensification by increased plant density,
2. use of multi-level cropping systems,
3. reduced water consumption by 90-95%
4. balanced light delivery with leaf biochemistry
5. 24/7 continuous operation
These are fantastic advantages for systems which require high energy inputs and hence ought to be carefully applied for achieving specific targets. These systems typically tend to be expensive to build and achieve gate prices worse than from growing in a field. One way to improve financial performance is to build big, levering advantage of scale in reducing energy cost but outputting what are scale commoditised crops.
Reepel offers an alternative which uses groundbreaking technology which reduces capital and operating cost and has the potential to provide farm gate price of grown crops if applied appropriately.
Reepel's Vertical Farming Solution
Reepel has developed a standalone totally controlled grow platform which can be used to provide a complete solution with high levels of control from seed to harvest. There are modular systems which can fit into containers or warehouses but depend on specific crop being grown.
The solutions are appropriate for high value crops as well as biologics or to produce off-season or non-local plants.
When the solution is built at large-enough scale, we can use it to produce appropriate commoditised crops at similar farm-gate costs to conventional farms.
Together with an advanced technology aquaculture company, and novel modified aquaponics cycle, Reepel has a city-centric solution which is a retrofittable "build anywhere" solution for integration into existing, new, bespoke or redundant structures. This very versatile solution brings clean-labelled pesticide-free crop and fish production close to the customer by integration into a shopping centre, high rise building or city centre office reducing food miles, maintaining freshness, at a highly competitive cost.