Systems Assessment of Water Savings Impact of
Controlled Environment Agriculture Utilizing Wirelessly Networked
SDACs
Ron Pate, Sandia National Laboratory, and Dr. Gene
A. Giacomelli, Ag & Biosystems Engineering
This project intersects two areas of
interest: assuring water and agricultural safety, security and
sustainability as a matter of national security, and contributing to the
accelerated development and application of smart networked Sense, Decide,
Act, and Communicate (SDAC) systems to enable transformational
capabilities in sensing, situational awareness, and response for national
security and other dual uses. These areas are addressed by applying
networked SDACs to facilitate water savings impact assessment of
Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) for forage production in arid
regions. Experimental investigations and systems analyses will be
conducted to understand and quantify operational and technical system
performance, forage quality, optimization potential, and overall
viability. Experimental studies will be facilitated and enhanced by
using wirelessly networked SDAC systems capable of providing a more
adaptable and higher-density spatial distribution of multi-modal sensing
capability than would otherwise be possible or practical. The
challenge and opportunity is whether CEA can contribute more broadly to
water and agricultural security & sustainability through improved
systems understanding & design, adoption of improved technologies
& methodologies, performance optimization, and advent of better
decision-support tools. The proposed project will begin to address
this by quantitatively investigating the operational performance of CEA
for forage production.
Cooperators: Sandia National Laboratories
(FY04 Late-Start LDRD Project Proposal No. 04-1538), Jon Jordan, ABE MS
student
Completed 2004 |
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