Smart Plant Factory: The Next Generation Indoor Vertical Farms
About this book
"Smart Plant Factory: The Next Generation Indoor Vertical Farms," edited by Toyoki Kozai and published by Springer in 2018, represents a landmark contribution to the rapidly evolving fields of controlled environment agriculture, food systems engineering, and urban food production. This multi-authored volume brings together leading researchers and practitioners from Japan, Europe, and North America to address both the established science and the emerging frontiers of plant factories with artificial lighting (PFAL) — tightly controlled indoor growing facilities that produce crops without reliance on natural sunlight, open-field soil, or seasonal variation. The book was written against the backdrop of what Kozai and his co-editors describe as a global "third wave" of PFAL development, which began around 2010 in Japan and Taiwan and spread rapidly to the United States and Europe after approximately 2013, propelled largely by dramatic advances in LED lighting technology.
This wave transformed indoor vertical farming from a niche, high-cost curiosity into a commercially viable industry attracting significant private investment. "Smart Plant Factory" was conceived precisely to address the knowledge gaps that threatened to limit this industry's sustainable growth: the absence of rigorous, universally accepted concepts and methodologies for PFAL design and management; the lack of understanding among engineers about the physiological responses of plants to controlled environments; and the reciprocal lack of technical fluency among horticulturists regarding environmental engineering principles. The volume is organized into thematic sections that move from foundational concepts through recent advances to forward-looking perspectives on the next generation of smart PFAL systems. The opening sections establish the core principles of PFAL technology: the physical and physiological basis of plant responses to light spectra, intensity, and photoperiod; the engineering of precisely controlled growing environments in which temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, airflow, and nutrient solution composition are actively managed; and the fundamental economics of energy consumption, which represents the dominant operating cost in any artificial lighting system.
The book makes clear that while PFAL systems consume substantially more electricity than field agriculture, this disadvantage is offset by dramatic gains in land-use efficiency, water use efficiency (which can reach more than 95% compared to field production through closed-loop water recycling), year-round production independence from climate and season, elimination of pesticide use, and radical reductions in post-harvest losses due to geographic proximity to urban consumers. A central theme of the book is the transition from conventional PFAL operation — where environmental parameters are set and maintained at fixed target values — toward genuinely "smart" systems that employ artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced sensor networks, computer vision, and data analytics to dynamically optimize growing conditions in real time. Chapters examine the use of RGB imaging systems for automated plant growth monitoring and the detection of stress or disease before it becomes visible to human observers.
Other contributions address phenotyping-based AI systems capable of not merely monitoring but actively adjusting the growing environment in response to observed plant behavior, closing the loop between perception and intervention in ways that promise to dramatically improve both yield quality and energy efficiency. The book also explores the design and optimization of hydroponic nutrient solution systems, examining how dissolved mineral concentrations can be monitored and adjusted continuously to match the evolving nutritional demands of different crops at different growth stages. This precision nutrition approach is presented as a key differentiator of smart PFAL systems from earlier, less sophisticated indoor growing operations.
Complementary chapters investigate the role of biological rhythms in plants — the circadian and ultradian cycles that govern metabolic processes — and how these rhythms can be either synchronized with or deliberately manipulated through lighting schedules to enhance specific quality attributes such as nutritional content, flavor compounds, and shelf life. From a resource efficiency standpoint, the book provides both conceptual frameworks and quantitative tools for calculating the Resource Use Efficiency (RUE) of a PFAL — a metric that compares the quantity of each resource (electricity, water, CO2, fertilizer, seeds) actually incorporated into the harvested crop with the total quantity supplied to the facility. This metric allows operators and designers to identify inefficiencies and benchmark performance against best practices.
Several chapters examine the environmental benefits of locating food production within urban areas, including reductions in transportation-related carbon emissions, the potential to utilize urban waste streams as inputs, and the contribution of vertical farms to urban food security and resilience. Management and business considerations receive thorough treatment alongside the technical content. Contributors examine production process management systems, total indoor farming concepts for large-scale commercial operations, market considerations, and the business case for PFAL investment under different regulatory and economic environments.
The book also addresses the application of PFAL technology beyond conventional leafy vegetables to include medicinal plant production, molecular breeding research, and applications in pharmaceutical and nutraceutical crop development. For professionals in green building, sustainable urban design, and circular economy planning, "Smart Plant Factory" offers a sophisticated technical reference that places food production systems at the heart of the sustainable city. By demonstrating how high-technology indoor agriculture can dramatically reduce the land, water, and chemical inputs required to feed urban populations while generating food within the urban fabric itself, the book makes a compelling case for integrating plant factories into the design of next-generation sustainable buildings, neighborhoods, and cities.