Indoor Farming Grow Tray

Jones Food Company designs, builds and operates world-scale vertical in door farms, leading the next generation of UK agriculture by growing the highest quality freshest produce in a sustainable way in order to feed our future locally and affordably. They recently developed a new growing site in the UK to keep up with demand for their produce. This new site gave the opportunity to review the overall layout, enabling further automation improvements, and streamlining some processes of fresh produce direct to retailers. The key to this was the introduction of full automation and the design and development of a modular tray-based seed to harvest growing system.

The Brief

TRIG’s brief was to assist in the design and development of the Grow Tray and watering connection. The Grow Tray is the storage asset that stores the crop(s) throughout its entire life cycle from seed to harvest. The Grow Tray needed to provide an optimal physical environment for all plants to maximise yield in parallel, from the bottom row to the top; whilst being able to be transported seamlessly between all stages of the vertical farm process without any human interaction. The Grow Tray must also be compatible with all interfaces of the site to ensure that JFC’s open loop operational model of Seed to Harvest will be possible, optimising both energy and growth efficiencies.

The Process

As part of the JFC / IPL development team we identified several key design objectives and requirements: transferability, space optimisation, efficient and consistent Irrigation, tray durability, uniformity, and stability. We then produced several tray design concepts which we shared and discussed with the project team. Once the preferred concept was agreed we ran various FEA stress and load analysis simulations. The FEA output was then used to fine tune the design and complete a fully detailed 3D CAD part model. Multiple CNC machined full scale prototype trays were produced to enable physical validation and testing including grow trials, irrigation, automated harvesting, and automated washing. Once proven we assisted JFC / IPL’s chosen toolmaker with technical design support through the tooling and part sampling process.

The Result

The JFC Grow Tray product is a world first system to distribute water evenly and consistently to the crop’s root network from a bottom up. In addition to this it works across any numbers of rows & columns, and any height of racking up to 15 metres. The new system has greatly improved produce yield growth and reduced growing time periods to help provide a world leading indoor farming solution. Due to the success of the tray and the system JFC have secured several supply contracts with leading UK grocers and obtained further investment to develop a new larger indoor farm site.