Ukrainian team works on ‘smart farm’ that waters plants with water out of thin air (video)

Ukrainian company IDA, which launched ‘smart oasis’ in Dubai, has begun working on a new project. The project is called Smart Oasis Farm and it is an automated greenhouse for plants that waters them with water out of thin air.

Project background

As the founder of the company Alex Prykhodko told AIN.UA, while working on a ‘smart oasis’ – autonomous drinking water fountain, the team took note of the global water consumption.

“From 70% to 80% of the total consumption is in the agricultural sector. You need from 30 to 50 liters of water to grow a single tomato, although mere 150-200 grams remain in the tomato itself. Therefore, we decided to engage in agricultural technologies,” he says.

The idea was to make a modular solution for growing food plants and to water them with water obtained from the air (more details in our previous article).

Product development progress

According to Prykhodko, now the first MVP version of the project in Kyiv at Kiltseva has been assembled and the first harvest has been gathered.

Currently, the ‘smart farm’ externally consists of insulated containers for transportation. Inside such a farm, water is transformed into the fog, enriched with nutrients and oxygen, after which the roots of the plants are fed with it. Full-spectrum LEDs are used to illuminate the plants.

According to the founder of the project, this technology allows doubling productivity compared with other similar solutions.

“Together with Ivan Chuba from Technovator, we created an automation that is responsible for managing climate, light, and nutrients,” says the project founder.

Currently, the team is working on robotization of planting, transplanting and harvesting to eliminate human errors. Ideally, all processes will be monitored by an agrotechnological program that would be able to replace a person by 90%.

The team plans to display both ‘smart oases’ and ‘smart farm’ at Expo Dubai 2020 at the Ukrainian pavilion.

Search