Sustainable Food Production System

The United Kingdom aims to reach its carbon neutral target by 2050, and all sectors have started planning and implementing strategies to achieve this goal. The food production industry is responsible for approximately 26% of global Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, of which 27% result from crop production. To achieve the industry's net-zero emission target for agriculture by 2040, a transformation is required in both the agriculture and energy production sectors, and especially in their interaction and collaboration.

However, global warming and the resultant erratic weather patterns, global pandemics, natural disasters, and human conflicts put food production at risk. A report published by the London School of Economics outlines that the COVID-19 pandemic shows how deeply the UK's food security is dependent on the EU, while more than 80% of farmers said they expected profits to fall in 2020\.

The agriculture sector is focused on increasing the productivity of food production processes by integrating automation and digitalisation into operations and using indoor farming. This will enable farmers to have more granular visibility and control over the operation in real-time and harvest crops year-round as it is not season and weather dependant process. However, this requires more energy to support the operation effectively and, hence, increases the operation's energy cost.

By 2025, it is anticipated that the agricultural technology sector will be worth more than £136 billion globally. Globally, Total Controlled Environment Agriculture (TCEA) is one of the fast-growing markets with CAGR of 20.4%, leading to a predicted 2025 market of £5.3bn (Markets & Markets, 2020).

The Sustainable Food Production System (SFPS) project aims to promote indoor farming using a TCEA system (free from the constraints of weather, seasons, time, distance, pests, natural disasters and climate) and develop an energy procurement system which integrates into food production operations to deliver zero-carbon products. The technology ensures the required power is supplied from renewable resources at an affordable price in order to reduce OpEx and provide products at a competitive price to become an adopted technology by mainstream suppliers to the consumer market.

Such an energy management system has the potential to be installed in sites around the world as a key part of an innovative transformation of food production, with positive consequences in feeding the world's population in a way that also addresses challenges associated with climate change.