Published in Scientific Papers. Series A. Agronomy, Vol. LXIII, Issue 1
Written by Volkan YEŞİL, Özgür TATAR
The rapid growth of the world's population, limited natural resources and environmental challenges caused by climate change have had brought up global food security to the agenda. Scientific researches and new practices considering sustainable food production and efficient use of natural resources are getting more attention during last decades all around the world. Furthermore, advanced technological applications that enable new agricultural production systems such as vertical farm have been starting to emerge to provide a solution on this issue. Vertical farming which is the method of growing crops in vertically stacked layers under controlled environment is one of the promising techniques to protect environmental resources, provide continuous and sustainable plant production. Applications of vertical farming have already experienced in many countries such as Japan, Singapore, England, USA, Netherlands and the vertical agricultural market is expected to increase by 25% by 2024 to reach 11.4 billion Euro. Plant groups that are widely grown with vertical farming system are mostly; carrot, radish, potato, tomato, pepper, pea, cabbage, spinach, lettuce and strawberries. Although, cereal grain production in the vertical systems is not economically profitable today, considering remarkable increase in demands on forage crops, barley fodder production seems to have great potential for vertical farming systems. The benefits of the system such as less water use (about 90%), no herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer application relative to conventional production would be more pronounced for barley fodder in vertical system comparison to other conventional forage crops production systems. In this review, potential of barley fodder production in vertical farming system was discussed.
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