Integrated Urban Controlled Environment Agriculture Systems

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has evolved from very simple row covers in open fields to highly sophisticated facilities that project an image of factories for producing edible, ornamental, medicinal, or industrial plants. Urban farming activities have been developed and promoted as a part of the infrastructures that support residents’ lives in high-population-density cities. Technology-intensive CEA is emerging as a viable form of urban farming. This type of CEA is likely to include engineering and scientific solutions for the production of plants, delivery of environmental parameters, machines for material handling and process control, and information for decision support. Therefore, the deployment of CEA for urban farming requires many components, subsystems, and other external influencing factors to be systematically considered and integrated. This chapter will describe high-tech CEA as a system, provide a systems methodology (i.e., the concept of automation-culture-environment systems or ACESys), propose a decision support platform (i.e., the concurrent science, engineering, and technology or ConSEnT, computational environment), and identify challenges and opportunities in implementing integrated urban controlled environment agriculture systems or IUCEAS.