ForFarming > Case Studies > 8Farm Enhances Production by Over 40% with Farmio's IoT Solution

8Farm Enhances Production by Over 40% with Farmio's IoT Solution

Technology Category

Sensors - Environmental Sensors
Sensors - Humidity Sensors

Applicable Industries

Agriculture
Buildings

Applicable Functions

Facility Management
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Smart Irrigation
Visual Quality Detection

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

8Farm is an indoor farming company that specializes in growing fresh herbs. The company operates in a 45 m2 area, utilizing 8 flood & drain type grow towers, each having 3 levels of 2m2 trays. For lighting, they use 2 2-meter-long LED lighting fixtures on each level of each unit. There is a single irrigation tank, from where water is distributed to all units. For nutrient dosing, they measure pH and EC levels with hand-held probes every morning and add the necessary nutrients manually. The company was facing challenges in maintaining consistent yield and quality of their crops due to timer failures and insufficient moisture control.

The Challenge

8Farm, an indoor farming company, was facing challenges in maintaining consistent yield and quality of their crops. The company, which grows fresh herbs in a 45 m2 area using 8 flood & drain type grow towers, was struggling with timer failures and insufficient moisture control. These issues led to problems such as leaf blackening, wilting, and non-growth in its products. The annual average harvest was around 700 kg, and sometimes, the harvested crops were not sold due to poor quality. The company was in need of a solution that could better control the growing conditions to increase yield and quality and to ensure consistent harvests.

The Solution

8Farm adopted Farmio, a cloud-based IoT software developed by ForFarming. Farmio automates the facility to grow higher quality plants and improve harvest yields with less effort and using fewer resources. It controls the facility’s lighting, irrigation, fertigation, and HVAC equipment more efficiently and eliminates excess usage of light, water, and nutrients to minimize waste. 8Farm integrated Farmio into their facilities using a simple communication device and combined lighting, irrigation, fertilization, and air conditioning devices on a single cloud platform. The new system allowed them to control the irrigation times more flexibly, automatically dose nutrients, and optimally control humidity. The system also continuously records the data of all environmental conditions and sends notifications to 8Farm when the values fall outside the desired ranges.

Operational Impact

With the implementation of Farmio, 8Farm has been able to control the environmental conditions more precisely, leading to healthier and faster-growing plants. The quality of their harvest increased noticeably and became more stable from harvest to harvest. They can now largely avoid leaf blackening and poor growth problems. The system's ability to continuously record the data of all environmental conditions and instantly send notifications when the values fall outside the desired ranges has provided 8Farm with better control over their farming operations.

Quantitative Benefit

Harvest cycles were shortened between 15% and 20%
Harvest yields increased by an average of 15%
The annual amount of salable products increased by approximately 40% to over 1000 kg