In an effort to optimise crop production by controlling the temperature, improving the heat input and reducing energy costs, agricultural entrepreneur Sergio Aguilar, with support from the Innovation Fund for Competitiveness of the Metropolitan Regional Government, granted through the Foundation for Agricultural Innovation (FIA) of the Ministry of Agriculture of Chile, has developed a geothermally heated greenhouse.
The project, unique in the country, is still under study and so far has yielded excellent results.
Low-temperature geothermal energy is a technology that requires only a percentage of electricity to operate, allowing producers to reduce energy costs.
"The results validate the use of heat pump geothermal technology for air conditioning, and above all, the conditioning of water for hydroponics crops, enabling the production of better quality vegetables throughout the year. Therefore, if accompanied with proper business management, the products could be introduced in sales channels that would allow small and medium growers to achieve a greater profitability and enable their companies to grow," pointed out Abdo Fernández, executor of the initiative, in a FIA statement.
The document also stresses that the project could deliver up to five times more heat than the electric power it consumes. This makes the system environmentally much more convenient than burning fossil fuels.
"During the development of the project, and after conducting a couple of tests, we decided that the climate of the Metropolitan Region, where the project's pilot took place, would render it unnecessary to modify the normal temperature of the greenhouse for leafy vegetables; maintaining a given air temperature also entails a much higher energy consumption," said Fernandez.
"As for the water in hydroponics crops, it was conditioned to the known optimal temperature to facilitate plant growth, which meant being able to grow a product whose quality is equivalent to that obtained at the best time of the season, increasing the summer production by 80% compared to a normal greenhouse," he added.
For its part, the winter production was 65% higher, which overall entails an increase in productivity of close to 40%, considering that the natural growing conditions are close to optimal during a few months.
Source: Fresh Fruit Portal