Written By: Mr. Peter Klapwijk, Green Architect and Connector with a vast growing history.

Horticulture is an evergreen industry. No matter how society evolves, people will always need to eat, and retailers will always need to stock their shelves with high-quality produce. This is great for greenhouse businesses and for their investors.

While farmers may be producing the same crops year after year, there have been significant technological developments over the years that improve growing methods and equipment, leading to higher work efficiency and product quality.

Fifty years ago, one greenhouse manager(grower) would have had his or her hands full managing 5,000 square meters of crops. But today, thanks to many advancements, one manager can manage up to 24 hectares.

As we look to the new year, we expect to see further advancements in greenhouse technology trends that will further improve efficiency and ease of greenhouse management.

Greenhouses will be constructed for efficiency

As demand for produce grows, many farmers are building larger greenhouses to reduce labor energy costs and automatize. With larger greenhouses, it is more difficult to equalize the greenhouse climate. To address this challenge, there are different ways to construct greenhouses for improved efficiency.

Greenhouses are now constructed with ventilation in mind. Ventilation stimulates transpiration, which is of utmost importance for optimal growth and efficiency. Modern ventilation techniques mix the air inside the greenhouse to equalize the climate for all crops.

Additionally, many new greenhouses are built from glass and use special technology to combat reflection and to defuse light through the glass. This technology scatters the light to operate sort of like a mist and reduces the amount of radiation plants could experience from direct sunlight. This improves the light penetration into plants and results in increased photosynthesis. Foil also aids in transmitting and diffusing light.

To improve heating efficiency, many greenhouses use two to three layers of screens to keep heat inside. Today’s screens also have higher isolation values, meaning each one is highly efficient at trapping all the heat inside.

We expect 2024 greenhouse construction methods to continue focusing on optimizing natural resources such as light and heat.

AI will take charge of decision-making for autonomous growing

If you’re a greenhouse grower, you can only monitor your crops for so many hours a day. But sensors with artificial intelligence capabilities can monitor 24/7. AI sensors can check if plants are transpiring and monitor greenhouse temperatures in different places all at the same time. It can also measure leaf length, growth speed, pest levels, and everything else that managers check during scouting.

This data can then be used to make changes to ventilation, heating, irrigation, or any other actions that previously would have been initiated by the greenhouse manager. With AI, the manager must only create a specific algorithm that details how the AI system should respond to any data.

Because sensors are more specific and able to collect more data than humans, this can lead to much more precise growth. Most growers would be surprised at the differences between what they would have done and what their algorithms lead their AI systems to do simply because the AI sensors collect much more accurate data. This reduces human error and oversights and leads to much more optimal growth.

In 2024, we expect these AI systems to become more advanced and measurement technology to become more accurate. With self-learning, these sensors can get feedback from crops and create their own algorithms based on how plants respond to specific changes.

Grow light will lead to year-round crop consistency

Today, people don’t think of tomatoes as a summer crop. They expect to consistently buy tomatoes no matter the season or temperature. To ensure crops are available all year round, many greenhouses use grow lights for to produce year-round. In countries with early sunsets in the winter, this is extremely important because it significantly improves plant growth and crop quality. In fact, most retailers prefer to stock crops grown under grow light because this leads to higher quality and quantity crops, as well as better consistency.

While most greenhouses already use grow lights, we expect a trend in 2024 for using different color lights for improved growth. Modern LED grow lights give farmers more flexibility in the color spectrum so farmers can choose the saturation of different light colors shining on their crops. For example, blue light makes plants more generative. Red light also improves growth, so a mixture of blue and red light might be very beneficial for plants, even if it does make your greenhouse look light a nightclub. You can make the light appear whiter by adding some green. 2024 is a great year for experimenting with light colors for optimal plant growth.

Robots will get better at harvesting crops

What sounds more complex: building a rocket ship or picking a cucumber? If you think the answer is building a rocket ship, you would be wrong. Building a rocket ship has a specific set of instructions. Every board, nut, and bolt has a designated spot. That’s not the case with picking crops. Every plant is different, cucumbers might be different sizes or positioned differently on the plant. It’s easier to program a robot to do something with specific instructions, but less so when it comes to something that will be different every time.

Today there are already robots that are successful at deleafing crops or harvesting leafy greens. However, the technology for successfully harvesting cucumbers and tomatoes is not ready yet for widespread use. In 2024, we expect to see some advancements in robot technology for harvesting crops, as well as for scouting diseases. This technology will likely be expensive at first, but as it improves, prices will go down and it will be a great efficiency improvement.

2024 is about efficiency

The food industry is growing and farmers will need bigger greenhouses to meet consumer demands. The challenge will be to do this while improving efficiency, relating both to labor and resources. We look forward to new innovative ways to improve efficiency in 2024! Do more with less.