August 2021 - 36

PRODUCTION
Thanks to a recent USDA grant, university
researchers are investigating the best
practices to grow greens vertically.
BY STEPHEN KLOOSTERMAN
T
he relatively new frontier of indoor vertical growing now
has USDA support.
A multistate team of university researchers has a four-year
USDA specialty crop research initiative (SCRI) grant to study the best
practices and economics of indoor growing and how to do it well.
Called OptimIA (Optimizing Indoor Agriculture), the project is formally
titled " Improving the profitability and sustainability of indoor leafygreens
production. "
Receiving the grant is a sort of coming-of-age moment for a
relatively young sector of agriculture.
" To my knowledge, it's one of the first grants devoted to vertical
farming funded by the USDA, " says Michigan State University (MSU)
Associate Professor Roberto Lopez, who's a principal investigator on
the project. The SCRI grants have supported greenhouse production
proposals and even distributed grants on lighting and LEDs. But
OptimIA will deal only with so-called indoor-grown operations that
make no direct use of natural light.
GOING TO THE GROWERS
The team of horticulturists, engineers and economists led by MSU
has $2.7 million from the USDA in addition to matching funds from
the private sector, making it $5.4 million. Work on the four-year grant
began in 2020; Lopez said due to pandemic-related disruption, the
efforts may continue through 2025.
" It's a large multidisciplinary project, and one component will
involve on-farm trials, " Lopez says. " We want to make sure that our
research is going to be able to be used by the industry, so once we
have replicated our studies, we're going to verify them at various
indoor farms across the country to make sure that (with) what we've
found in the lab, that there will be similar results in the industry. "
36 AUGUST 2021 GPNMAG.COM
Controlled-Environment Lighting Laboratory (CELL) is a vertical farming research
facility developed by Erik Runkle in the Department of Horticulture at Michigan
State University. Photos: MSU

http://www.GPNMAG.COM

August 2021

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