Plant Factory: An Indoor Vertical Farming System for Efficient Quality Food Production

Plant Factory: An Indoor Vertical Farming System for Efficient Quality Food Production provides information on a field that is helping to offset the threats that unusual weather and shortages of land and natural resources bring to the food supply.

As alternative options are needed to ensure adequate and efficient production of food, this book represents the only available resource to take a practical approach to the planning, design, and implementation of plant factory (PF) practices to yield food crops. The PF systems described in this book are based on a plant production system with artificial (electric) lights and include case studies providing lessons learned and best practices from both industrial and crop specific programs.

With insights into the economics as well as the science of PF programs, this book is ideal for those in academic as well as industrial settings.

• Provides full-scope insight on plant farm, from economics and planning to life-cycle assessment
• Presents state-of-the-art plant farm science, written by global leaders in plant farm advancements
• Includes case-study examples to provide real-world insights

Toyoki Kozai Ph.D, is the president of The Agricultural Academy of Japan. After establishing his early work on greenhouse light environments, energy savings, ventilation, and computer applications, his scientific interest was extended to in-vitro environments and their control for sugar-free medium micro-propagation and transplant production in closed systems using artificial lighting. He served as President of the Japan Plant Factory Association (a non-profit organization) and is leading the research and development of controlled environmental greenhouses using heat pumps, artificial lighting, fogging, CO2 enrichment, and nutrient solution control systems.
Selected awards are Lifetime Achievement Award (2009) from Society of In Vitro Biology, USA. The 2002 Purple Ribbon Award from Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. Japan Prize of Agricultural Sciences from Association of Japanese Agricultural Scientific Societies, 2018 honorary PhD degree from Mahidol University, Thailand ‘The Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star’ from Japanese Government 2019.

Dr. Genhua is a professor in urban horticulture with Texas A&M AgriLife Research at Dallas and Department of Horticultural Sciences. Her area of expertise is controlled environment agriculture and plant stress physiology. Her current research focuses on hydroponics, nutrition management, LED lighting, optimization of growing environment, and development of best management practices related to urban controlled environment agriculture. She is the co-editor and author of the book “Plant Factory - Indoor Vertical Farming for Efficient Quality Food Production” (1st & 2nd edition). Dr. Niu received several awards from Texas A&M University for her service and research, American Society for Horticultural Science, and USDA-NIFA.

Dr. Takagaki is Professor at the Graduate School of Horticulture, Chiba University, assigned to the University Farm, and has engaged in education and research.
In charge of foreign student affairs since 1997 and of international affairs in general since 2006. She holds a concurrent assignment as the Director of the Center for Environment, Health and Fields Sciences since 2009 (2009-2015, 2018-present). Engaging with research and experiments in Agronomy of Tropical Agriculture with major fields in Thailand, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, Dr. Takagaki has done research and taught in the fields of tropical agriculture, environmental control, protected horticulture and training of basic horticulture.