Cultivators use different approaches to retrofit and construct buildings to cultivate a variety of crops. Sometimes facility choices correlate with facility location, real estate prices, climate zone, crop, and final product. Each method has different pros and cons for businesses. Cultivators are motivated to grow in indoor farms to maximize profitability while minimizing operational expenses. Understand the key performance indicators and targets to guide producers and project teams during the design and construction phases, reduce energy use and operating costs for resilient facilities, and maximize incentives from your local utilities and efficiency programs.
Topical areas include:
Benefits of Indoor Controlled Environments for Crops
Assembling CEA Project Teams
The Value of Commissioning
Navigating Codes and Permits
Maximizing Technical Assistance for CEA Projects
Design and Construction Best Practices for Indoor Farms
Considerations for Indoor Enclosures and Vertical Farms
Benchmarking Design & Construction KPIs
Operations & Maintenance Planning
Target audience:
Cultivators
Operations & Facility Staff
Design & Construction Partners
Property Owners
Utility & Government Representatives
| Michigan Efficient Yields: Facility Design & Construction Best Practices for Efficient Indoor Agriculture (21.8 MB) | Download | ||
Boyce is a project manager at the Cambridge-based architecture firm, Anderson Porter Design, Inc., with local, national, and international experience in architecture and design. Anderson Porter Design brings strategy and design to high performance buildings and spaces. They engage clients in a data driven incremental approach which enables organizational learning around the human activities which drive creation of architecture and interior spaces.
Boyce has a Bachelors and Masters degrees in Architecture from Wentworth Institute Technology, a Masters in Program Management from Harrisburg University of Science and Technology with a focus on Agile Lean and the impact it can have on the architectural design process, and has his Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification. Boyce combines expertise in strategic thinking, master planning, multiple-discipline coordination and designing for controlled-environment agriculture to the local, national and international Cannabis industries.
Boyce started at Anderson Porter Design in 2016 after completing his Master of Architecture degree from Wentworth Institute of Technology. He has completed internships at Boston College in the Capital Projects Management Department where he worked on campus upgrades and long-term strategic and campus planning efforts; at The Architectural Team, where he worked on several multi-family residential and senior living projects, and Gillespie & Steel Associates (Barbados), where he worked on custom residential homes, retail and commercial buildings.
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.
