GREENHOUSE AUTOMATION SYSTEMS
Today, modern greenhouses are increasingly turning into giant industrial enterprises. Of course, controls in these industrial companies are becoming more thorough and critical to the company’s efficiency. The modern greenhouse adventure that began about 50 years ago has evolved into total automation, with dozens of sensors and processes intertwined. In the last 20 years, in addition to the concepts of temperature and humidity for outdoor and indoor air, the idea of VPD (vapor pressure difference) has been added to these definitions. Other parameters must be considered today, along with the moisture of the plant beds and the pH balance of water and liquid fertilizer, which control irrigation fertilizers.
It is now important to perform the “PLANT-EQUIPMENT-HUMAN” controls in the greenhouse with an integrated automation module. It is no longer enough to control only some plant or greenhouse environment values, such as outdoor humidity or temperature. Apart from that, a system where all the equipment controls and maintenance of the company are monitored, the tasks and performance of the employees are determined, the energy and other expenses by tracking the cost of the seedlings purchased, which are the other inputs of the company, etc., shows us how much profit or loss the company actually makes at the end of the day.
It is now possible to monitor the daily activities of employees, crop performance, company profitability based on seasonal prices of the product sold, monitor the harvest trucks, spray trucks, and other mobile vehicles in use to determine user performance and make these processes more efficient by monitoring business processes such as increasingly automated product pickup, plant care, product cratering and product transfer. Without following this entire process, the inefficiencies of ever-expanding greenhouse operations and competition without continuous improvement will result in severe monetary losses and the exclusion of investors from local, then regional, and global markets.