by Marie Kauna – EMTV Online, Port Moresby
Japanese company SPREAD, which operates indoor farms around Japan, has plans to develop a vegetable farm that will be operated entirely by robots.
While manual farming and agricultural activities has been costly and challenging for many, this form of farming could be an answer to solving many challenges witnessed by the agriculture industry and farmers across the globe.
The farm will focus more on lettuce, which is believed to grow easily indoors, and eventually expand into farming other vegetables. The farm will no longer need a large number of human farmers, as most responsibilities required within the farm will be fully carried out by robots.
Robots will handle the entire process including seed planting, seed germinating, transplanting of plants into larger beds, growing new vegetables, as well as harvesting.
Apart from these, growth monitoring, humidity and temperature checks, the robots will also do light lowering and raising, and nutrients adjustment levels.
The step by SPREAD is believed will be the world’s first automated farm, a new level for agriculture industry and is expected to be open by 2017 outside Kyoto.
