Horticultural Structures and Plant Factory Final Report

Name: Choong Wen Kang Iain Student ID: 19190014

When you graduate university, you will start managing unique plant factory.
Explain the followings;

 What is the targeting crops? ; vegetable, fruit, …

 Explain how unique is this plant factory.
 Which kind of technologies are required to realize the plant factory?

The target crop of my plant factory is vegetable. I would like to plant cucumber and
tomato in my plant factory because Malaysian consume a lot for this two type of
vegetables. Cucumber is used for the Malaysia national food “ Nasi lemak” and chicken
rice. Tomato is also a vegetable that widely used in Malaysia dishes.

I would like to set up a plant factory with artificial lightning (PFAL) integrated with a
rooftop plant production (RPP). This is because there are a lot of advantages to use
plant factory especially rooftop farming to grow food crops. For example, less expansion
for agricultural land, less chemical leached to the environment, improving food security,
reducing cost of transportation and reducing carbon footprint. This plant factory is
environment friendly because it uses solar energy for the generation of artificial
lightning.

One of the unique feature for this plant factory is from the part of rooftop planting
system. The rooftop planting system has a stormwater catchment tank which can helps
to mitigate the storm water. On the other hand, the water that stored in the catchment
tank is used for the whole plant factory system. Thus, this stormwater catchment tank
can reduce the risk of the urban area in Malaysia to getting flash flood and act also as a
water supply system. Hence, this stormwater catchment tank in the rooftop planting
system can act in multifunction.

I think this model of plant factory is suitable for Malaysia because Malaysia has high
rainfall and high light intensity in the whole year.
Figure 1: Energy cycle of a plant factory Figure 2: Water cycle of a plant factory

with artificial lightning (PFAL) integrated with artificial lightning integrated with a

with a rooftop solar electricity production rooftop plant production system

References

http://www.doa.gov.my/index/resources/aktiviti_sumber/sumber_awam/maklumat_perta
nian/perangkaan_tanaman/booklet_statistik_tanaman_2018.pdf

Toyoki Kozai, Genhua Niu, Michiko Takagi. (2016). Plant Factory: An Indoor Vertical
Farming System for Efficient Quality Food Production. London, England: Elsevier Inc.