The adaptive greenhouse - an integrated systems approach to developing protected cultivation systems

Protected cultivation systems are used throughout the world as a powerful instrument to produce crops. They protect the crops from unfavorable outdoor climate conditions and pests and offer the opportunity to modify the indoor climate to create an environment that is optimal for crop growth and production, both in terms of quality and quantity. A quick scan of protected cultivation systems presently in use reveals that various types of protected cultivation systems have evolved in time. These cultivation systems differ for instance in terms of construction and cover materials used, the presence and use of different types of climate conditioning equipment, soil or soilless cultivation and nutrition. These differences are determined by the local climate, the availability of water, soil and water quality, the availability of capital, labor and materials and local legislation, to mention a few. With these observations in mind, this paper addresses the question of how to design a protected cultivation system that best satisfies the local conditions in the region considered. This is a multifactorial design and optimization problem. This research aims at developing a generic design tool, using available knowledge for instance contained in heuristic and mathematical models. In this paper, the outlines of a systematic design procedure to design protected cultivation systems are sketched. The design of a minimum fossil energy greenhouse is used as example to illustrate the approach.