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HIGH HOPES

Standing at the homestead looking out over the fields was once the typical way to observe farming. Now rather than looking outward, we can look upward at lush, leafy greenery as agricultural innovation stacks sustainability and food security in favor of the environment.

“Indoor farmers do not have to pray for rain, or sunshine, or moderate temperatures, or anything else related to the production of food crops, for that matter,” wrote Dickson Despommier in his 2010 book, “The Vertical Farm.” The concept was introduced much earlier but Despommier in 1999 was first to go from ideation to action.

During his tenure at Columbia University as a professor of environmental sciences, he challenged his graduate students to feed vast numbers of people using 5 acres of rooftop space. Over the span of nine years this challenge escalated to a 30-story building to feed 50,000 people.

These were the fundamental, humble beginnings of a blueprint for a commercial vertical farming establishment. The goal: sustainability and food security.

“Vertical farming has considerable potential for global food security. It is a viable solution for producing certain crops under unfavorable environmental conditions. It represents an efficient approach to growing more food with fewer resources and lower environmental impact,” Henda Mahmoudi, plant physiologist at the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture, a not-for-profit research center in Dubai, tells KUST Review.

How does it all work?

Vertical farming is one method of indoor farming in which rows of crops are planted and stacked in different stages of growth and everything the plants need is controlled and monitored.

There are three types of vertical-farming solutions, and the choice you make for your farm will depend on the facility and the types of plants you intend to grow.

The first is aquaponics. This is a symbiotic, cyclical system for farming fish and plants in which the fish water is filtered and sent up to feed the plants. In turn, the plants oxygenate the water and send it back down to the fish. This system can grow hundreds of plants.

IMAGE: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
As seen from space

Technology isn’t just helping farmers till new ground indoors. It’s also helping them find suitable agricultural soil from space. Read more›››

“Remote sensing is a powerful tool for assessing soil properties and determining its suitability for agriculture,” says Diana Francis, head of the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences Lab at Khalifa University.

Remote sensing can assess such factors as pH, moisture, texture and salinity. Sensors can also detect signs associated with soil fertility.

“Using data from satellites enables large-scale, non-invasive soil analysis that can provide critical information for optimizing crop yields,” she says. “This data-driven approach provides highly accurate, location-specific guidance.”‹‹‹ Read less

It doesn’t have to be a large commercial establishment. “Aquaponics is for everyone,” says U.S.-based Symbiotic Aquaponic. “Our partners and clients include hobbyists, gardeners, survivalists, environmentalists, educators, schools, nonprofit organizations (and) colleges.”

Next is the aeroponic solution, whereby plant roots are fed via a mist of nutrients pumped from a solution. The plants appear to be hanging, but there’s a lot going on below.

The planting begins on foam. Once the roots grow downward, they push through a mesh lid into the “fog chamber” beneath. This is where the mist feeds the roots in intervals. Everything is timed so that the plants receive the right amount of nutrition for optimal growth.

The most common form of vertical farming systems is hydroponics, in which a pump circulates a nutrient-rich solution continuously through plant roots.

While these are all different techniques, the primary concept is the same — they are all projects of controlled-environment agriculture technology.

There can’t be only one

While farming is typically a climate-specific industry, AgTech startups offering vertical farming solutions are popping up all over the world.

Like Norway-based Avisomo.

With such optimal growth environments, “Their vegetables are tastier, prettier, more nutrient-packed, and their business model is more competitive than ever before. LED grow lights were the key,” Avisomo says.

The company offers systems equipped with AI and robotics.

Each plant is placed in growth stations and is moved around the facility depending on where it is in the growth stage. And each station has controls to monitor and adjust irrigation, nutrition and airflow depending on the plant. Avisomo also offers recipes developed in partnership with local farmers.

The company’s systems allow for extended automation in which a robot, which resembles a large Roomba, moves trolleys full of crops around the farm upon reception of a cloud command.

The perks

You might think that an indoor facility like this would be a massive water and energy sucker, but it’s quite the opposite. Smart energy and water systems and automation provide savings across the board.

More than 70 percent of global water resources are used by the agricultural industry, but within a controlled environment, cultivation of indoor vertical farming crops uses nearly 95 percent less water than conventional farming. And as plants evaporate about 85 percent of the water not used for nutrition, smart water harvesting in these environments uses dehumidifiers that collect the water in the air and reuse it.

All three solutions are soilless, offering further reduction in water use. No soil-born pests or diseases also mean no pesticides. And there’s no soil turnover to release carbon into the atmosphere either.

That’s a number that adds up. According to the U.S. Center for Food Safety, cultivated soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock to the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

Additionally, LEDs save energy and costs. These lights don’t give off heat like traditional bulbs, which in turn requires less energy and, subsequently, less cash spent on cooling systems. And they give off more light with less wattage but can be controlled, unlike sunlight, which can burn plants.

Bonus — indoor vertical-farm crops can be grown year-round.

It’s always harvesting season

At the indoor vertical farm, seasons are non-existent, thus crops are not at the mercy of changing weather, frozen ground, overly wet springs, soil conditions or superstorms.

Predictable harvesting makes it easier to secure buyers for products, ensuring produce reaches its destination well before the shelf life runs out. And crop growth is accelerated, increasing annual yields.

U.S.-based AeroFarms is one of the largest vertical farming companies in the world. Its systems use the aeroponic method and have traditional farming yields beat by a reported 390 times. At this rate, we might be more likely to feed a growing population that, according to the United Nations, is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050.

What’s the catch?

Along with the perks come challenges. While traditional farming depends on predictable weather, indoor vertical farms depend on technology. The irrigation system, for example, is crucial to crop outcomes, but what happens if it breaks down?

And one of the primary pitfalls of scaling up this vertical farming is that although the LEDs are cost-effective, they’re still more expensive than the sun, which shines for free.

The technology also needs to be adapted to allow more kinds of crops to thrive in this environment. Currently it caters to a limited number.

Tech driven vertical farming has also been criticized for its potential to affect the soil’s CO2 sequestration. If we move to indoor farming, how will the soil absorb the carbon without the plants to absorb and store it in the soil? This is a major kink, but it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker.

Other types of plants can replace farmed crops. Trees, for example, increase stored carbon volume and eliminate the need for soil tilling, which releases carbon from the soil back into the atmosphere.

Is it feasible on a large scale?

“The commercial availability of modular plant factories for installation of vertical farming systems in containers, trailers or cellars was met with great enthusiasm worldwide, marking the dawn of the ‘agri-tech’ era. However, investment costs and energy requirements of these units turned out to be high, and some of them were less versatile than originally anticipated, largely restricting the production portfolio to leafy greens. Under the impact of the recent soar in energy prices, some plant factories even went out of business,” says Elke Neumann, associate professor at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) and director of ASPIRE Research Institute for Food Security in the Drylands (ARIFSID).

She says success will come with a cross-functional approach. “We need to bring down the energy consumption and the investment costs of these systems to make it more feasible.”

So the ARIFSID team is working toward these goals.

“In the UAE, water equals energy because ultimately, as long as you have enough energy, you can produce as much water as you like,” Neumann tells KUST Review.

How do we use less water, then?

In a warm country like the UAE, temperature tolerance of production systems can save water and energy. Crops that can produce yield at elevated temperatures require less water and energy for environmental control.

“Another thing that we need to address is the nutrient-supply side,” Neumann says.

The ARIFSID team works with aquaponics, combining fish farming and plant production.

Fish require a lot of feed so they can grow quickly, she says. “And like most farm animals they are not very good at utilizing the food. Maybe they utilize around 10 percent and the rest is going into their manure and they release it to the water.”

Credit: Fortune Business Insights

The water then needs to be changed, cleaned or recycled, so they use plants to clean it up.

The water is used as a nutrient solution for vertically grown plants. Once plant roots have extracted the water for nutritional elements, the clean water is returned to the fish.

But there’s more to it than this.

“We have to make sure that this works out economically and also ecologically, environmentally and also from a food-safety perspective. How safe is the food that is coming out of such a system if we’re using fish poop as a nutrient for plants? Fish can have a lot of parasites, so there is a lot that needs to be done,” Neumann says.

Additionally, the UAE is heavily invested in reaching climate neutrality. Part of this strategy includes contributing its Circular Economy 2021-2031 policy. UAEU University vertical farming initiatives align with this.

“To comply with the UAE’s circular economy strategy, strategies for embedding vertical farming systems into a circular food supply chain need to be developed,” Neumann says, “This is a considerable challenge in soilless production systems, given the integral role that soil plays in the global element cycles. Currently, most vertical farming systems still rely on continuous input of mineral fertilizers with a high carbon footprint.”

This research is supported by ASPIRE, the technology program management pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council via the ASPIRE Virtual Research Institutes Program.

ARIFSID, UAEU, Khalifa University and additional stakeholders are developing “food production systems for the UAE that are not only technically but also agro-ecologically advanced and ready to be integrated into urban buildings, food supply cycles, and contemporary lifestyles,” Neumann says.

The ARIFSID team is also looking at developing the UAE’s indigenous agricultural resources to find new sources of food.

Is it enough?

Though vertical farms offer many positive outcomes for the environment, the consumer and the vertical farmer’s pocketbook, you need to have the funds to get your farm off the ground. And that’s not cheap.

Vertical farm set-up costs can be up to 10 times more expensive than greenhouses that range from U.S.$2,200 to U.S.$2,600 per square meter. So, with startup costs, you need to be looking at a long-term return on investment.

While you might think the use of autonomous technology would reduce labor costs, experts are required to tend to these crops, and these different sorts of farmhands are substantially more expensive to employ.

Regardless of those costs and challenges, however, vertical farms appear to be the agriculture of the future.

More like this: Feeding tomorrow

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A new era in tracking space debris

As space debris becomes an increasing threat to operational in Earth’s orbit, researchers from Khalifa University have developed a new approach to tracking it using vision sensors aboard satellites and advanced data fusion techniques.

Traditionally, most space debris is tracked from the ground, using radar and telescopes. Ground-based tracking is limited by weather, atmospheric distortion and visibility constraints, but satellites equipped with the right sensors can continuously monitor debris from space, independent of weather and lighting conditions. The challenges lie in making these systems both accurate and efficient.

The research, published in Acta Astronautica, tackles this by developing a data fusion framework that processes and combines measurements from multiple satellites to improve tracking accuracy. Beyond tracking space debris, this framework could be used for future space operations, including interplanetary exploration, space tourism and satellite-based internet services.

More: Cleaning up our space

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AQUA BOTS

In a world hungry for nutritious food, aquaculture is clearly a winning idea.

It isn’t a new one, either. Humans have been farming seafood for millennia. In more recent years, aquaculture has expanded to land-based tanks, where farmers raise fish and other seafood. Those tanks, however, take up increasingly valuable space on land and worsen competition for scarce water and other supplies.

Hear the writer read this story

This has more farmers looking back to the sea, where space is abundant and water and nutrients are free. Mariculture, the subset of aquaculture in the open seas, however, presents additional challenges.

A UAE tradition

Robotics could be on tap to move traditional Emirati fishing techniques into the future. Read more›››

The robots Lakmal Seneviratne and his team are working on at Khalifa University could eventually be employed to clean and repair hadra – fence traps placed perpendicular to shore – and gargour – fishing traps woven from palm leaves into a semicircular form, he says. ‹‹‹ Read less

Traditional mariculture relies on intensive manual labor to clean and repair equipment, monitor conditions, inspect nets and care for the plants and animals raised for human markets. That kind of manual labor is expensive, requiring trained commercial divers who are increasingly spread thin as aquaculture operations expand. It can also be dangerous work for those divers, particularly as farms move out into deeper and more perilous waters.

Mariculture can also pose threats for the environment, spreading disease, antibiotics and parasites or allowing farmed fish to escape and negatively affect native species.

Eleni Kelasidi, a senior researcher at SINTEF, one of Europe’s largest independent research organizations, thinks those issues could have a common solution: robots.

Putting a robot into the open water can be a bigger challenge, however, than putting a robot on the land.

For one thing, Kelasidi says, it’s important that autonomous systems do not harm farmed fish and/or damage the flexible structures.

This is both an ethical and economic consideration, she says. The ethical consideration: “We cannot harm any living thing and/or let them to escape from the fish farms.” The economic: “The fish are the profit of the industry.”

Happy fish

Kelasidi and her team have access to industrial scale fish farms and operate full scale research facility to investigate how robots stress or otherwise affect fish using equipment originally designed for the oil and gas industry. They test systems to see how well they function but also to observe how fish react to, say, different colors, sounds or lights. The goal is to learn what stresses fish and ensure healthier fish stocks and better profits.

Humans on the surface currently perform many aquaculture jobs using remotely operated machines, she notes.

“Our job is to cut the dependence from the humans to get the robotic systems to operate themselves. They need to understand their environment and make sure they don’t collide with structures,” Kelasidi says.

Another challenge for researchers, she says: making remote-operating vehicles “more clever.”

‘An exciting frontier’

Self-operating aquatic systems is an issue Lakmal Seneviratne, director of the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at Khalifa University, is working on as well, and he’s optimistic.

CAPTION: Aquabots from Khalifa University

“It’s a very exciting frontier in underwater robotics,” he says, noting that 70 percent of the Earth is water but humans have explored only 5 percent of that.

Seneviratne and his team are also working on land-based agricultural robots such as “dogs” that can step lightly between rows of crops; “hands” that can gently pick fragile fruits; and robots on rails that can move up and down a field to monitor individual plants for signs of disease or readiness for harvest.

But ocean farms present a different set of challenges for autonomous systems.

“The problem isn’t that aquaculture is very deep, but (maintaining) navigation and control,” Seneviratne says, echoing Kelasidi’s concerns.

GPS doesn’t work beneath the water’s surface and robots have to be able to navigate currents and waves without damaging each other or farm structures.

Cameras, to capture images, and artificial intelligence, to sharpen and analyze those images, are important to managing these conditions, he says.

Looking to nature

But being able to see in the murky depths is only part of the issue for mariculture robotics. The machines also need control. So researchers are looking at life forms already adapted to aquatic environments for inspiration. Although not specifically designed for aquaculture, the biomimicry could prove useful in ocean farms. Among the ideas:

Aquaculture’s promise and challenges

As the world’s population grows and climate change puts more pressure on traditional terrestrial farming, sustainable aquaculture could play a key role, says Naveed Nabi, an assistant professor at Chandigarh University. Read more›››

“In the present times, when food security is a matter of serious concern, aquaculture has played a key role to mitigate this crisis, supplying about 178 million tons of food in which 20.2 kg per capita is destined for human consumption,” he says. “Aquaculture not only adds resilience to the global food system through improving resource-use efficiencies, but also by diversifying the farmed species.”

But he warns that farmed fish present challenges to the environment including fish escapees that harm native species and the spread of disease and parasites.

There’s also the issues of eutrophication, in which water becomes overloaded with nutrients, leading to deadly algae blooms; antibiotics in the environment through unconsumed food or fish waste; and threats associated with pesticides. ‹‹‹ Read less

A team from Harvard and the University of South Carolina in 2021 presented the Finbot, which uses four independently controllable fins.

In 2023, a team from Zhejiang University, China, in 2023 published results of their Copebot, designed to mimic the copepod, a small crustacean known to escape from predators with explosive jumps. Their bot, they report, was able to leap out of the water, land on a small pad, transmit data and jump back into the water.

Back at Khalifa University, meanwhile, researchers have other ideas.

“Looking at aquatic environments, many animals evolved flexible or completely soft bodies to improve their swimming capability and adaptability to the intricate underwater world,” says Federico Renda, who heads the team. “For instance, octopuses can squeeze into small apertures to hide or catch prey, and jellyfish developed the most efficient locomotion strategy of all. In my team, we take inspiration from soft creatures to build new underwater robots capable of replicating these functionalities while understanding the physical principles involved.”

One of KU’s designs mimics flagella, the whiplike structures that propel bacteria through liquid to solve another issue with underwater robots: Many are tethered. While the tethers allow the machines to be operated from the surface, they can also become tangled together.

“Recently, we have developed an untethered underwater robot inspired by flagellate microorganisms capable of efficient and safe locomotion in close proximity to sensible underwater habitats,” Renda says. “Furthermore, each flagellum can be used as a coiling gripper in addition to propulsion, achieving redundancy and multifunctionality, which can significantly simplify underwater operations.”

To test robots’ ability to navigate choppy waters, Khalifa University built a wave pool that simulates currents. Stanford University’s Oussama Khatib recently used it to run Ocean One, a humanoid robot designed to perform such tasks as monitor coral reefs and offshore oil rigs, through its paces.

SINTEF’s Kelasidi would like to see robots replace human divers or assist them on highly risky operations. Seneviratne likewise expects robots to allow human divers to inspect more often and longer.

“We see robots as helping divers instead of replacing them,” he says.

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A golden opportunity for medical
devices

A new way to embed gold nanoparticles into 3D-printed hydrogels could improve medical implants, optical devices and even contact lenses for colorblindness.

Scientists at Khalifa University published their research in Materials & Design. It introduces an eco-friendly method that places nanoparticles exactly where they are needed, without waste or extra chemicals.

3D-printed materials with nanoparticles are not new: The particles have previously been mixed into the printing material or applied as a coating afterwards. Both approaches limit device performance.

This new approach allows for better control over nanoparticle placement, making it useful for drug delivery, biosensors and light-based medical treatments.

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From Nobel-winning breakthroughs to
local innovation

Advances in protein design and the use of AI for predicting protein structures made the headlines with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But closer to home, researchers at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi are leading the way in using computational methods to predict the crystal structures and properties of materials.

This foundational work is driving progress in energy storage, drug development and the creation of components for advanced optoelectronic devices.

Listen to the Deep Dive

“The basic idea is to use computers to predict the atomic arrangement of solids before we synthesize them in the lab,” says Sharmarke Mohamed, head of the Chemical Crystallography Laboratory (CCL) at Khalifa University. “If we can do this accurately for all target molecules of interest, then this gets us one step closer to answering the scientifically interesting question of what experimental conditions are necessary to target the crystallization of a material with this particular structure.”

Using computers is time-saving, cost-effective and minimizes trial-and-error experiments. But why is this important?

Today, the challenge is not whether we can use computers to predict crystal structures, but how the predicted crystal structures can be used to guide experiments in the synthesis and discovery of functional materials.

– Sharmarke Mohamed, head of the Chemical Crystallography Laboratory (CCL) at Khalifa University

Crystallizing proteins allows scientists to understand their structure in detail.

Proteins are complex macromolecules, and their shape determines how they function in the body. By creating crystals of proteins, researchers can use techniques like X-ray crystallography to study their 3D structure. This helps in designing medicines that fit a protein perfectly to treat diseases. It also advances understanding of conditions like cancer and Alzheimer’s by revealing malfunctions in the protein structure.

CAPTION: Sharmarke Mohamed (from left), Praveen Managutti and Thomas Delclos

“Fifteen years ago, when I was doing my Ph.D. in chemical crystallography and computational structure prediction, the question of whether computers can predict crystal structures was still an open question. The problem was also somewhat niche and confined to the academic community because very few industrial researchers were engaged in method development and testing. Today, most pharmaceutical companies around the world have some sort of computational crystal structure prediction research program in-house,” Mohamed says.

But the field has developed immensely over the past couple of decades thanks to a little healthy competition.

Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) is a biennial event where researchers assess the performance of methods used to predict protein structures. Scientists worldwide participate in testing algorithms that aim to determine how proteins fold into their 3D shapes based solely on their amino acid sequences. Given the importance of protein structure in areas like drug development and disease research, CASP plays a critical role in advancing computer-based biology research and guiding improvements in prediction methods.

A similar blind test has been ongoing since 1999 for assessing progress in using computers to predict the crystal structures of small molecules.

The Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) Blind Tests, organized by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, bring together scientists from academia and industry to evaluate their methods on real-world examples in a controlled setting. These tests also foster collaboration within the CSP community.

Mohamed and his team — including M.Sc. student Mubarak Almehairbi, Ph.D. student Zeinab Saeed and postdoctoral research fellows Tamador Alkhadir and Bhausaheb Dhokale — participated in the most recent CSP blind test.

“This seventh blind test featured the most challenging target molecules to date,” Mohamed tells KUST Review. “The results show that the field has progressed significantly since the first blind test in 1999, as reflected in the success rate in both structure generation and ranking. But as with all advancements in science, when we make progress in one area, new questions and challenges arise.

“Today, the challenge is not whether we can use computers to predict crystal structures, but how the predicted crystal structures can be used to guide experiments in the synthesis and discovery of functional materials,” Mohamed says. “This is now the focus of many researchers in the field, including our group in the Chemistry Department of Khalifa University.”

For example, machine learning has improved how we rank predicted crystal structures, helping researchers identify which ones are likely to form successfully under normal temperature and pressure conditions.

Ranking crystal structures helps researchers figure out which ones are most likely to be observed under real-life conditions. This saves time and effort by focusing on the best options for experiments.

Mohamed’s group is developing new methods and codes to help experiments target new materials with desirable solid-state properties. For example, the team recently created the MechaPredict code, which is able to predict the mechanical properties of crystals on any surface of interest without the need for sensitive nanoindentation experiments.

CAPTION: MechaPredict code summary IMAGE: Khalifa University

This code is already being used by academics around the world and has attracted interest from pharmaceutical companies for its potential to extend the shelf life and improve the solubility and stability of drug products. Additionally, the code can be applied in designing new materials like hole-transport layers for solar cells, which can lead to more efficient, versatile, cost-effective and longer-lasting solar panels.

But with all the advances made in computational CSP methods, a well-equipped crystallography laboratory is necessary to validate the accuracy of the computational predictions.

“The Chemical Crystallography Laboratory (CCL) is the best-equipped crystallography lab in the UAE for performing single-crystal X-ray diffraction, the gold standard for determining the crystal structures of materials,” Mohamed says. “The CCL provides experimental crystallographic services to Khalifa University researchers as well as to collaborators in the UAE and around the world. The synergy between experimental chemical crystallography and computational CSP methods is the key to seeing further advances such as those recognized in the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.”