Using bibliometric analysis to map innovative business models for vertical farm entrepreneurs

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the literature on vertical farming to define key elements to outline a business model for entrepreneurs. The research aims to stimulate entrepreneurship for vertical farming in a smart cities' context, recognising urban agriculture as technology to satisfy increasing food needs.Design/methodology/approachThe research conducts a structured literature review on 186 articles on vertical farming extracted from the Scopus. Moreover, the bibliometric analysis revealed the descriptive statistics on this field and the main themes through the authors' keywords.FindingsDifferent perspectives showed the multidisciplinary nature of the topic and how the intersection of different skills is necessary to understand the subject entirely. The keywords analysis allowed for identifying the topics covered by the authors and the business model's elements.Research limitations/implicationsThe research explores a topic in the embryonic stage to define key strands of literature. It provides business model insights extending George and Bock's (2011) research to stimulate entrepreneurship in vertical farming. Limitations arise from the sources used to develop our analysis and how the topic appears as a frontier innovation.Originality/valueOriginality is the integration of literature strands related to vertical farming, highlighting its multidisciplinary nature to provide a holistic understanding of the themes. In smart cities' context, innovations allow traditional business models to be interpreted in a novel perspective and revealed the elements for transforming vertical farming from innovative technology to an effective source of food sustenance. Finally, the paper suggests a new methodology application for the analysis of word clusters by integrating correspondence analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis.

Plant Factory: A New Playground of Industrial Communication and Computing

Plant Factory is a newly emerging industry aiming at transforming crop production to an unprecedented model by leveraging industrial automation and informatics. However, today’s plant factory and vertical farming industry are still in a primitive phase, and existing industrial cyber-physical systems are not optimal for a plant factory due to diverse application requirements on communication, computing and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we review use cases and requirements for future plant factories, and then dedicate an architecture that incorporates the communication and computing domains to plant factories with a preliminary proof-of-concept, which has been validated by both academic and industrial practices. We also call for a holistic co-design methodology that crosses the boundaries of communication, computing and artificial intelligence disciplines to guarantee the completeness of solution design and to speed up engineering implementation of plant factories and other industries sharing the same demands.

Vertical Farming: The Only Way Is Up?

Vertical farming is on its way to becoming an addition to conventional agricultural practices, improving sustainable food production for the growing world population under increasing climate stress. While the early development of vertical farming systems mainly focused on technological advancement through design innovation, the automation of hydroponic cultivation, and advanced LED lighting systems, more recent studies focus on the resilience and circularity of vertical farming. These sustainability objectives are addressed by investigating water quality and microbial life in a hydroponic cultivation context. Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) have been shown to improve plant performance and resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses. The application of PGPRs to plant-growing media increases microbial functional diversity, creating opportunities to improve the circularity and resilience of vertical farming systems by reducing our dependency on chemical fertilizers and crop protection products. Here, we give a brief historical overview of vertical farming, review its opportunities and challenges in an economic, environmental, social, and political context, and discuss advances in exploiting the rhizosphere microbiome in hydroponic cultivation systems.

Energy Efficient Lighting in Plant Factories: Addressing Utilance

Vertical farming is considered to play a crucial role in future food supply. Until today, the high amount of electrical energy required for artificial lighting has been problematic in this context. Various possibilities for increasing efficiency through adapted lighting conditions have been and are being investigated. However, comparably little attention is paid to increasing utilance, i.e., the amount of photons that can effectively be used by the plant. In this work, a novel targeted lighting strategy is therefore proposed that allows for a dynamic adaptation of the luminaires’ light distribution to match the effective crop size at each stage of plant growth in a fully-automated manner. It is shown that the resulting utilance can significantly be increased compared to standard full-coverage lighting. Moreover, it is found that the proposed strategy is likely to consume less than half of the electrical energy usually required for the latter. An additional increase in system efficiency can be prognosticated and the potential energy savings are estimated based on assumptions of future LED generations derived from literature.