Stackable farming for economically and environmentally sustainable urban food production

Lack of fresh, year-round produce contributes to illness for the 13.5 million Americans who in live "food deserts," those mostly urban areas where little but fast and processed food is available. Growing urban produce is possible using controlled environment agriculture (CEA), including greenhouses and artificially lighted "plant factories," but has been difficult to do affordably and flexibly. Building and labor costs are a major problem for greenhouses, and using conventional automation has required large, hard-to-modify mechanical setups.The project will design and demonstrate a complete CEA system that uses stackable farming techniques and robots in place of the large fixed infrastructure conveyor systems or human labor to reduceboth building and operational costs. The robots and the software to orchestrate them are proven in the material handling industry and need only be adapted to this innovative approach to farming. The system will be heavily instrumented, and all inputs and costs will be tracked against the production of the system.With industry partners, we will run two pilot operations. These will yield data on what is required to grow crops using the system, enabling us to design a market-ready version for existing greenhouse growers, traditional farmers, entrepreneurs and schools. This project addresses five USDA National Challenge Areas: food security, climate variability and change, childhood obesity, food safety, and water