Search

A growing population needs an expansion of agriculture to ensure a reliable supply of nutritious food. As a variable concept, vertical farming, becoming increasingly popular, can allow plant growth for local food produc­tion in the vertical sense on, e.g. facades in addition to the classical layered structure in buildings. As substrates, textile fabrics can be used as a sustainable approach in terms of reusability. In our experiment, we investigated which properties a textile should possess in order to be suitable for an application in vertical farming by the example of cress seeds. To determine the best-fitted fabric, four different textiles were mounted vertically, and were provided with controlled irrigation and illumination. Our results showed that a hairy textile surface as provided by weft-knitted plush is advantageous. There, the rooting of cress plants used in this experiment is easier and less complicated than along tightly meshed, flat surfaces, as for woven linen fabrics.

Vertical farming is of major interest in research and development to enable the production of food in the quantity suffi cient for the growing world population under the weather conditions, which are increasingly becoming more and more extreme. Especially in cities, vertical farming allows for growing vegetables and other plants locally. Apart from industrial applications of vertical farming, new ideas are being developed to make cities “greener”, often related to the maker culture. In the study, we concentrated on the second approach by investigating the possibilities to grow plants on textile fabrics placed vertically, e.g. along a balcony railing, but also as structural elements in agricultural areas. Our investigations revealed, using the example of cress, that steadily irrigated knitted fabrics enable plant growth on them, indicating no signifi cant differences between differently knitted stitch dimensions and different illumination intensities. Finally, we discuss the possibilities to measure the time-resolved plant growth reliably and suggest additional possibilities to evaluate the growth success.