Indoor cultivation operations can prioritize using automation to increase precision for fine-tuned production facilities. Cultivating CEA crops in CEA involves supplementing or replacing sunlight, maintaining environmental conditions, and providing water and nutrients, processes which can be performed manually or automated with control systems. Understand how hardware and software integrates with building-level controls of varying levels of sophistication and operates to optimize plant health.
Topical areas include:
How Controls Impact CEA Crops
Benefits of High-Performance Controls for Indoor Facilities
CEA Controls Types
Optimizing Controls System Design
Best Practices for Advanced Controls & Automation for Indoor Cultivation
Maximizing Technical Assistance for Controls Projects
Benchmarking Controls KPIs
Target audience:
Cultivators
Operations & Facility Staff
Design & Construction Partners
Property Owners
Utility & Government Representatives
| Funded with support from: |  |
| California Efficient Yields: Controls & Automation Best Practices for Efficient Greenhouses and Indoor Agriculture (17.4 MB) | Download | ||
CTO at Nimbus Cannabis, Joe has 15 years experience cultivating medical and recreational cannabis in California. Before joining Nimbus, Joe offered consulting services for energy, HVAC and Lighting system design, as well as compliance across the state to the nascent Cannabis industry. At Nimbus, Joe works with a team of professionals committed to a sustainable future for the cannabis CEA industry.
Rob has over 30 years of experience in plant growth facility management, plant research and commercial production. At Purdue University, he brought online and managed a computer- controlled 40,000 ft 2 research facility, made up of 25 greenhouses and over 60 growth chambers and grow rooms. He was responsible for hundreds of CEA studies involving flowering, food and medicinal species. He served on design teams for greenhouse projects and one of the first automated machine-vision phenotyping centers in the country. In his consulting role, he supported major hydroponic produce growers AeroFarms and Bright Farms; Big Ag companies Dow AgroSciences, Novozymes and Indigo Ag; and several cannabis operations including Clade9. He wrote cultivation plans for cannabis licenses awarded in Missouri and West Virginia.
Rob’s protocols for optimizing greenhouse production have been downloaded over 70,000 times in 104 countries. He participated in the publication, A Practical Guide to Containment: Plant Biosafety in Research Greenhouses, recognized throughout the world as a primary resource for safe production of genetically modified crops. In 2016, he was a member of the International Committee for Controlled Environment Guidelines that published Guidelines for Measuring and Reporting Environmental Parameters for Experiments in Greenhouse Facilities, the seminal document of quality assurance protocols for plant science research.
In his free time, Rob enjoys gardening, growing microgreens under LEDs, baking and winning croquet matches against his three grown children.
Robert Fisher is the engineering lead & senior technical advisor at Ceres Greenhouse Solutions, specializing in controlled environment agriculture (CEA). He has extensive experience developing advanced control systems for testing and validating commercial and industrial products for energy compliance. Currently, his focus is on sustainability within agriculture, seeking to reduce the carbon footprint of indoor cannabis facilities while improving crop health and yields for the cultivator.
