March 7, 8, and 9, 2022

This three-day event will be hosted both online and on-site at the center and will cover a variety of topics from academia experts and industry leaders.

Limited seats are available. 

Click here to register! 

View the 2022 Greenhouse Crop Production and Engineering Design Short Couse schedule.

For more information about attending this course, visit ceac.arizona.edu/events or email arizona.ceac@gmail.com

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Limited seats are available. For more information visit ceac.arizona.edu or email us at arizona.ceac@gmail.com

Join the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center for their 20th Annual CEAC Greenhouse Crop Production & Engineering Design Short Course on March 3rd, 10th, and 17th via Zoom. This virtual conference will increase your knowledge in Controlled Environment Agriculture and hydroponic growing and will allow you to network with industry leaders.

Each day will be jam-packed with incredible presentations given by experts in academia and the CEA industry. Topics will include Greenhouse Structures and Environments, Managing Plant Nutrition, Lighting, Fertigation Systems, Pest Identification and Control Strategies, Hemp and Mushrooms in CEA, Organic Hydroponic Food Production, and much more! Registration is open until February 26th, 2021. 

Click here for the 2021 Online Greenhouse Crop Production & Engineering Design Short Course Schedule 

For more information, visit ceac.arizona.edu.

Taught by Dr. Stacy Tollefson, this two-day event is perfect for novice growers and will be packed with tons of critical information and research discoveries that UA-CEAC has assembled into their courses and programs for over 20 years. You will get access to numerous lecture materials, personal question follow-ups, certificate of completion, and tons of knowledge!

Topics of discussion will include:

·         Principles of hydroponics and vining crop systems

·         Propagation of seedlings

·         Transplanting and spacing

·         Cultivation practices and bees

·         Nutrient solutions

·         Fertigation systems and management

·         Environmental conditions

·         Common tomato problems

For questions, please email us at arizona.ceac@gmail.com

Click here to register! 

Limited seats are available. For questions, please email arizona.ceac@gmail.com

This comprehensive summary is an essential information for indoor farming! February Indoor Ag Sci Café focused on water quality and biofilm for indoor production.

Dr. Fisher discussed characteristics of different source water and their potential issues (alkalinity, chlorine, salinity, and pathogens) as well as mitigation measures. Key steps of biofilm management was introduced and efficacy of different commercial products was discussed.

Indoor Ag Science Café is an outreach program of our project OptimIA, funded by USDA SCRI grant program (http://www.scri-optimia.org). The café forums are designed to serve as precompetitive communication platform among scientists and indoor farming professionals.

The Café presentations are available from the YouTube channel. Contact Chieri Kubota at the Ohio State University (Kubota.10@osu.edu) to be a Café member to participate.

Join us March 2 – 6 for CEAC’s Short Course! REGISTER HERE!  
Click HERE to reserve your room at the Tucson Marriott University Park Hotel

Get your questions answered and increase your hydroponic growing know-how at the Greenhouse Crop Production & Engineering Design Short Course! Expand your knowledge during a four-day intensive conference including 3 full days of lecture, 1 day of hands-on training workshops at CEAC facilities, and a commercial Arizona greenhouse tour. This jam-packed event is full of information from experts in research, production and the bottom-line business of controlled environment agriculture. Enjoy face-to-face time with industry experts, as well as networking time with industry leaders! 

For more information please call us at (520) 626-9566 or go to: https://ceac.arizona.edu/events/cea-short-course

Leafy greens include commonly consumed vegetables such as lettuce, kale, and microgreens. Production challenges outdoors have led to interest in growing these specialty crops hydroponically in controlled environments, such as indoor farms. However there is little information on whether this is economically viable. Capital and operating costs can be significant for startups, especially as it relates to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and cooling systems. Leafy greens are a good candidate for indoor farming because they can be grown rapidly and in relatively small spaces. Indoor environments are heavily controlled, so growers aren’t constrained to a small geographic area within the U.S. There are, however, other geographic concerns.

The team and its collaborators have three major goals:

• Define optimal profitability based on yield and other high-value attributes of the plants, such as nutrition content
• Optimize indoor environmental conditions, such as humidity, air movement, temperature, light and carbon dioxide concentration, to increase yield and high-value attributes
• Encourage indoor farming stakeholders to collaborate with academic and industry groups that are working in controlled-environment agriculture.

The long-term project goals are to help integrate indoor farming into the specialty-crop segment of agriculture in the U.S.; to increase the sustainability and hence profitability of this rapidly emerging sector; and to locally produce leafy greens that have higher quality attributes. To this end, our economists will better understand operating and capital expenditures (capex), and define risk and production scenarios that are most profitable. Our horticulturists and engineers will improve production efficiency, product quality, and value-added attributes of leafy greens for reliable, consistent, year-round production. In addition, the team will design and test more effective localized air-distribution methods suitable for indoor production systems, as well as develop strategies to better manage humidity around plants to reduce tip burn. While the project focuses on leafy greens, the results will also inform a wide range of controlled-environment growers through the development of growth recipes, strategies for nutritional content and anthocyanin enhancement, environmental management recommendations, and insights for economic sustainability as well as market and consumer perception of locally produced crops.

For more information, visit the project website at scri-optimia.org.

Get your questions answered and increase your hydroponic growing know-how at the Greenhouse Crop Production & Engineering Design Short Course!

Expand your knowledge during a four day intensive conference including 3 full days of lecture, 1 day of hands-on training workshops at CEAC facilities, and a commercial Arizona greenhouse tour.

This jam-packed event is full of information from experts in research, production and the bottom-line business of controlled environment agriculture. Enjoy face-to-face time with industry experts, as well as networking time with industry leaders!

For more information please call us at (520) 626-9566 or go to: https://ceac.arizona.edu/events/cea-short-course

Tomatoes, lettuces and leafy greens – we eat them every day! (or we SHOULD!) But how do we grow them sustainably with delicious flavor? 

Join the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center to answer these questions and more. Our esteemed staff and faculty will provide 40+ hours of classroom time and hands on application in the Greenhouses on the CEAC Campus to ensure your hydroponic tomatoes and leafy greens are a success.

For more information on our upcoming intensive workshops during January 2-9^th 2020 on hydroponics tomato and lettuce/leafy greens please visit  https://ceac.arizona.edu/events/intensive.

To register for the tomato intensive workshop visit here, and for lettuce intensive workshop visit here. Please contact Livvi Pearson with any further questions at livvipearson@email.arizona.edu or 520-626-9566.

While New York City as a whole by no means is a food desert, wherein access to fresh produce by its residents is severely constrained, such access nonetheless appears to require significant enhancement.

The 2019 American Fitness Index for America’s 100 largest cities, for instance, shows that only 17% of New York City’s residents get their recommended daily portion of vegetables, compared with the top-ranked city in the category, Washington, D.C., wherein 30% of its residents do.

Intriguingly, the same survey shows that New York City only has 18 farmers’ markets per one million residents compared with Washington’s 82.

It does not help that the state of New York’s production of vegetables, representing a measly 7% of its total agricultural output, does not come close to meeting the city’s demand.

Not surprisingly, a significant portion of New York City’s fresh vegetables are sourced from California and Arizona, a distance of at least 2,500 miles. This leads to considerably diminished food freshness, food waste through spoilage, significant long-distance transport energy expenditure and substantial greenhouse gas emissions, among others problems.

In the last few years a novel form of urban farming — vertical farming — has been slowly but surely emerging in the greater New York area, holding promise as a potent antidote to the city’s notably burgeoning food miles by growing and offering fresh produce locally.

Vertical farms are indoor crop production systems — using a warehouse, greenhouse or a modular structure like a shipping container — wherein crops are grown without soil and using liquid nutrient solution that is either flowing (hydroponic) or sprayed (aeroponic). Crop lighting in vertical farms is typically provided using red and blue LEDs, and ambient air temperatue and relative humidity are also regulated. The concentration of carbon dioxide in its air is also typically enriched to hasten the crop’s photosynthetic growth.

Consequently, the growth, yield and quality of crops in vertical farms are consistently much higher than in open-field cultivation, and the reliability of harvest throughout the year independent of the season and external climate conditions is virtually guaranteed.

And in addition to consuming less than 20% freshwater compared with open-field production, produce from vertical farms are patently fresh, pesticide-free and hyper local — with all of the latter’s attendant benefits including local jobs creation.

The greater New York area is now home to a number of highly innovative and enterprising vertical farms, including Square Roots, Gotham Greens, Farm.One, Aerofarms and Bowery Farming, among others, most of which regularly deliver their produce to the city’s local grocers and even to Whole Foods Market and to numerous high-end restaurants.

To help ensure both the economic and environmental sustainability of New York City’s growing vertical farms, however, the city needs to see and recognize them also as crucial nodes in the design of the city’s emerging circular economy. We need many more vertical farms.

In a circular economy, the methods of production and consumption are looped into a continuous cycle of resource recycle and reuse, thus minimizing or eliminating waste, with a view to achieving optimized resource utilization and value preservation.

Vertical farms serve as crucial nodes in a circular economy because they consume energy and require material inputs in the form of water, nutrients and carbon dioxide, among others — which may be derived or up-cycled from the effluent streams of other existing nodes in the economy.

For instance, while Gotham Greens is already harnessing solar photovoltaic electricity to power their indoor farming operations, the use of renewable natural gas produced from digested organic wastes is also an already available option for others — and for which vertical farms can possibly deliver their own organics in the form of inedible plant biomass waste.

The needed freshwater, nutrients and carbon dioxide for vertical farms may similarly be bio-cycled from other existing nodes in the economy.

In New York City and other big cities around the world, the future of food is decidely vertical and circular. Let’s seize it.

Cuello is vice chair of the Association for Vertical Farming and professor of biosystems engineering at The University of Arizona.

Lettuces and leafy greens – we eat them every day! (or we SHOULD!) But how do we grow them sustainably with delicious flavor?  Join the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center to answer these questions and more during our Intensive Hydroponic Lettuce and Leafy Greens course. Our esteemed staff and faculty will provide 40+ hours of classroom time and hands on application in the Greenhouses on the CEAC Campus to ensure your hydroponic leafy greens are a success. 

About CEAC: The Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC) is a research institution of The University of Arizona. The CEAC provides Education, Research, Outreach, and Extension activities, and is heavily involved with Agriculture & Biosystems Engineering, Plant Sciences/ES, and Agricultural Technology Management Departments.

Dates: October 5^th through 9^th 2019

Cost: $1,195

Instructor: Myles Lewis

Location: Controlled Environment Agriculture Center 1951 E. Roger Rd, Tucson, AZ, 85719

For more information on our upcoming courses visit  https://ceac.arizona.edu/events/intensive. To register for this exciting event visit here. Please contact Megan Dragony With any further questions at dragonym@email.arizona.edu or 520-626-9566.

Indoor Ag Science Café in April was full of data on climate uniformity, crop productivity as well as energy use in indoor farming, presented by Dr. Murat Kacira.  Murat is a professor and the Director of Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona. The first part was about the importance of designing air distribution system. Good air circulation is important for achieving temperature uniformity within the production system as well as minimizing plant environmental disorder such as tip-burn.  Murat’s research team works on optimization of the air distribution design by using a computational engineering approach called CFD – Computational Fluid Dynamics, which can visualize the possible difference in air speed and temperature distribution with different designs. Murat then described a theoretical analysis of energy use of indoor farms located in selected geographical locations (Duluth, Phoenix, Seattle, and Miami). Then he shared a recent study on lettuce productivity and tip-burn incidence under different combinations of CO₂ concentration and light intensity (daily light integral) conducted in his research facility at the University of Arizona. According to Murat, CO₂ enrichment increased tip-burn incidence at higher DLI. Therefore, 850 ppm CO₂ and 11-13 DLI is what he recommends and can achieve the energy use efficiency of 0.062 kg lettuce fresh weight produced per 1 kWh electric power consumption.

Three days of lectures from prominent Controlled Environment Agriculture experts from Arizona and around the country.

A full day of hands-on workshops that focus on different aspects of Controlled Environment Agriculture.

Great Networking Opportunities with peers, industry experts, and educators from all over the world.

Like tending to the vine closest to the wet-wall on a hot day, CEAC’s Short Course may be exactly what your operation needs for relief! Get your questions answered and increase your hydroponic growing know-how at the Greenhouse Crop Production & Engineering Design Short Course – A four day conference, put on by the University of Arizona Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, including three full days of lecture, one day of hands-on training workshops at CEAC, and an optional commercial greenhouse tour at NatureSweet Tomatoes.

• Hydroponic Crop Production
• Greenhouse Structure & Design
• Greenhouse Site Selection
• Developing Urban Ag Systems
• Medicinal Crops & CEA
• Emerging Greenhouse Crops
• Sole-source Electric Lighting
• Energy Conservation
• Environmental Controls
• Greenhouse Plant Lighting
• Plant Physiology & Nutrition
• Crop Layout, Care & Maintenance
• Integrated Pest Management
• Greenhouse Structure & Design
• Organic Hydroponics
• Myco-culture & Mushrooms
• Business Considerations

Click here for more information and to register!