While it’s best known for vacuums and other household appliances, Dyson has also established itself in the world of farming, with a team of engineers coming up with tech-based solutions to improve efficiency and boost production.
A video (top) shared recently by the British company features a remarkable — and remarkably huge — Hybrid Vertical Growing System, located inside a greenhouse.
Dyson’s innovative system, which finished tests just recently, grows the strawberry plants on 5.5-meter-high rotating structures. The design makes use of the full height of the greenhouse to significantly boost the number of strawberry plants that can be planted in the available space.
“Two aluminum 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,” the company explains on its website, adding that a specially designed irrigation and drainage system ensures excellent root health.
The greenhouse also has teams of advanced robots that select and pick only the ripest fruit using vision sensing, physical manipulation, and robotic secateurs.
Additional robots glide along on rails beside the plants, bathing them in UV light at night to maintain the crop’s health by preventing mold growth. The robots even distribute insects to tackle aphids, avoiding the need for pesticides and insecticides
Commenting on the massive contraption, Dyson founder and CEO James Dyson said: “We always want to improve the efficiency of what we do, and our novel Hybrid Vertical Growing System has shown that it can increase yields by two and a half times.
“It rotates the strawberry plants so that they get the maximum natural energy from the sun, which is then topped up with artificial light when necessary.”
Dyson described the technology as “an example of what is possible through the application of ingenuity and technology in agriculture.”
Dyson Farming launched in 2012 and has since become one of the largest farming businesses in the U.K., operating across 36,000 acres in four English counties. The endeavor focuses mainly on long-term investment in British agriculture, sustainability, and the integration of technology into farming practices.
