PROJECT
Vertical Farm
Controlled Environment Agriculture
CLIENT
Local Urban Vegetables
SCOPE
Design and complete build of pilot farming facility
OVERVIEW
D2 had been in contact with the founder of Local Urban Vegetables [LUV] for a number of years regarding his ideas to build large automated vertical farms. We first started working with them on a small pilot facility in Huntington Beach, California.
When LUV finally acquired funding to build a pilot farm in Whittier, California, they selected D2 Realization as their design, development, and automation partner. From the start, the founder had a strong vision for a fully automated vertical farming system. Over the next year, D2 worked with the LUV founder and agriculture consultant on an innovative new concept for the farm and how it worked from nursery to final grow stages. The result was several vertical farming patents and an innovative wall growth system that had integrated features for easy automation.
The patent is here.
D2 did not just help with the system design. We then implemented and built the entire system for Local Urban Vegetables with the assistance of their assembly work crew. The pilot facility was successfully growing lettuce and microgreens when the project was completed.
This also was one of more in-depth automation projects D2 Realization has worked on as everything designed to go into the facility needed strong automation that allowed the entire farm to be operated with minimal personnel. We built an entire automation system primarily based on Opto22 control hardware that did everything from controlling the water and feed system, the environmental system and the entire grow cycle from seeding to harvest. This included installing robotics to perform the final harvest. The entire farm could be monitors and operated from a single control workstation.
