Dyson Grows Millions of Strawberries on Ferris Wheels

Dyson Farming’s 26-acre glasshouse in England is home to 1,225,000 strawberry plants, which are grown all year round.

Credit: Dyson

Whilst Dyson is best known as the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, which works on the principle of cyclonic separation, he has now applied his inventive mind to maximising the efficiency of his farms and the quality of their produce. The most recent development in the glasshouse is Dyson’s Hybrid Vertical Growing System, the trial of which has just finished. It exceeded all expectations, boosting yields by 250 percent whilst optimising the quality of the fruit.

Rather than arranging the strawberries in simple rows, Dyson’s system arranges them on vast, 16 foot (5.5 m) Ferris wheel-like structures which rotate the strawberry plants, making use of the full height of the glasshouse, thereby dramatically increasing the number of strawberry plants which can be planted in the same space.

Two aluminium rigs - each bigger than two double-decker buses placed end-to-end - rotate the trays of strawberry plants to ensure they get optimal exposure to natural light while also supplementing them with LED light when daylight levels are lower in the winter months. A continuous and novel irrigation and drainage system ensures root health is never compromised.

The glasshouse is home to teams of advanced robots which select and pick only the ripest fruit using vision sensing, physical manipulation and robotic secateurs. Other robots glide on rails next to the plants, shining UV light on them at night to prevent mould growth and ensure the health of the crop. And, instead of using pesticides and insecticides, robots distribute insect predators to tackle aphids through the year.

The glasshouse is adjacent to one of Dyson Farming’s anaerobic digesters which enables the year-round strawberry production. Crops from the surrounding fields are fed into the digester and broken down by mico-organisms creating gas which drives a generator providing two outputs:

• Electricity: which powers the equivalent of 10,000 homes.

• Heat: which is piped into the glasshouse, along with CO2, to provide optimal growing conditions for strawberries all year round.

To round off the deliciously sustainable circularity of the facility, the waste digestate goes back onto the land as organic fertiliser to increase crop yields.

As Sir James Dyson says: “It is an example of what is possible through the application of ingenuity and technology in agriculture.”