Climate & Sustainability
Greener Greenhouses — a Q&A with Katia Obraczka
UC Santa Cruz professor Katia Obraczka’s Greener Greenhouses project uses energy-efficient IoT technology to precisely monitor greenhouse conditions, helping growers reduce water and energy use while improving crop production.
Greenhouses play an increasingly crucial role in feeding the world’s growing population, allowing farmers around the globe to cultivate crops year-round as climate change alters historical growing seasons. However, the resource demands of traditional large-scale greenhouse farming have spurred concerns over sustainability — both from the environmental and financial perspective.
The Greener Greenhouses project, led by UC Santa Cruz engineering and computer science professor Katia Obraczka, aims to tackle those concerns. The project is developing new technology that monitors the conditions of greenhouses in great detail. Those conditions can then be adjusted to make sure every plant is getting exactly what it needs, thus maximizing efficiency and reducing overall energy and water use.
Obraczka is working with UCSC faculty, namely Colleen Josephson from the electrical and computer engineering department and Michael Loik from the environmental studies department, on the interdisciplinary project. The team received a grant from UCSC’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience to develop the system.
As the director of the Inter-Networking Research Group, Obraczka leads research on computer communication networks. The group develops monitoring systems with a wide variety of applications, such as tracking data to improve care for hospital patients or monitoring and recording climate patterns to predict wildfires.
Now, Obraczka is setting her sights on making food production more sustainable by improving greenhouse technology. Here, she explains what sets Greener Greenhouses apart from other greenhouse monitoring systems.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired the Greener Greenhouses project?
Mainly, this is driven by the need for us to be creative in terms of solutions for climate resilience. Greenhouses and protected agriculture environments are going to be key for us to guarantee food security as the population grows and we face very important climate issues.
The problem with greenhouses is that they tend to consume a lot of resources, including water, but also energy. Our hypothesis is that by being able to monitor greenhouse conditions more precisely, we will be able to improve the ability of these greenhouses to produce food, and do it in a resource-efficient way.
The Greener Greenhouses Project proposes using an Internet of Things, or IoT, to monitor greenhouse conditions and reduce water use. Can you explain how that works and the benefits of this system?
An “Internet of Things” is a network of nodes that have sensing capabilities as well as communication and computing capabilities. The nodes are small enough, usually, that they can be embedded in the world around us.
We are installing an IoT in the greenhouse that can autonomously and continuously monitor and report conditions in the greenhouse — for example, humidity, ventilation, temperature and soil moisture. All of this information can be used to better control the greenhouse.
Instead of the traditional radio frequency medium to communicate with the IoT nodes, we make use of the illumination infrastructure that is already present in the greenhouse to also transport data.
This means the LEDs in the greenhouse serve three purposes: illuminating the plants or complementing the illumination provided by the sun, powering the solar panels that power the IoT nodes, and also sending data down to the nodes so you can control them, such as increasing or decreasing sampling frequency or enabling or disabling certain sensors.
Energy efficiency comes in different ways here. First of all, the system is able to improve the energy and resource consumption of the greenhouse. The other aspect is that the Internet of Things itself is very energy efficient because it’s using passive communication. And, by being able to power these nodes using light, you don’t have to actually use the power grid for them to operate.
How is this monitoring system different from current systems on the market?
Traditional greenhouse monitoring systems, first of all, are very expensive. They also may not be energy efficient. And in many cases, they don’t have the ability to provide the granularity of monitoring that is needed to use resources efficiently while optimizing plant growth.
For example, the greenhouse on campus that we are equipping with this technology previously had one temperature sensor for the whole greenhouse. Bigger operations might be better equipped, but usually those systems are very resource hungry and are also not affordable for smaller growers.
For that reason, our project is open-source in the sense that both the hardware and the software we are designing will be publicly available. Our goal is to create a system that can be replicated and deployed in real production greenhouses.
We want this to be something that local growers and small farmers around Santa Cruz and beyond can benefit from. We hope this system will be really impactful for growers that are not necessarily able to afford the types of technology that are available now. For that, we will need to have an outreach component to connect with our local farming communities and demonstrate the system to them.
How has the project been going so far? Any challenges or surprises??
Well, research is always a surprise, right? You know where to start, but you never know where it will take you, what obstacles and roadblocks you’re going to face.
Our initial performance results have been critical to provide us insight that we are using to tune our hypothesis and design.. That’s all part of the process, and I think that we’ve been able to make great progress.
The interdisciplinarity of the project is super exciting to me. I’ve been learning a lot from my colleagues and also the students. It’s a very enriching learning experience and great opportunity to collaborate.
My collaborator on this project, Colleen Josephson, is a faculty member in electro and computer engineering, and also an engineer, like myself. So we teamed up with Michael Loik, a professor in environmental studies, who is a domain expert in greenhouses and plant physiology. Michael is helping us ensure we are doing something that would be usable in real applications.
What’s the next goal for this project?
Our next step is to continue our lab experiments using both a prototype of our system and a computer-simulated model. We are currently deploying this system in one of the greenhouses at the coastal campus. We expect to be able to demonstrate how this technology can help not only with food production, but also energy efficiency. We are also working on a paper that should be coming out soon, focusing on the system’s visible light communication component.