Status of Automatization in Protected Horticultural Facilities and Prospect of Plant Factory in Korea

한국의 원예시설 자동화 현황 및 식물공장의 발전방향

In the recent years, protected horticultural facilities have been modernized and glasshouses are also propagating in Korea, even most vegetables production are conducted in the traditional plastic houses covered with, for example, PVC film for just temperature keeping. It would limit the productivity and competitivity of the vegetable production industry without automatization and high quality year round production. A plant factory, aimed to produce vegetables in the limited areas, was initiated in Christensen farm, Denmark in 1957, and widely propagated in some developed countries. As it has the automatized system which enables to keep optimized environment conditions, it will be the best facility for high quality products as well as year round planned production. However, we have not even started the plant factory production. Since the plant factory is requiring lots of resources, besides plant cultivation technologies, such as environment control, automatic engineering and robotics, our approach to the development of plant factories should be minded on Practical Plant Factories considering our current farming practices and least capital needs rather than blindly employing the advanced technologies from developed countries. Thus, Korean plant factory development can be initiated with year round leaf vegetables production in NFT or DFT cultivation system instead of the moval bed system, in which aerial environment factors such as light, temperature, humidity and CO$_2$ concentration and root environment ones such as solution concentration, temperature, pH and water soluble oxygen shall be automatically controlled. And the seeding, seedling and transplanting operations shall be accomplished in the house entrance, and the harvesting and grading opreations shall be conducted in the house exit. For practical plant factories, environment control technologies including artificial light source, illumination and air conditioning, automatic management for nutrient solution and automatic production line of moval bed system, transplanting and harvest should be developed along with researches on the cost reduction of factory building construction.

최근 우리나라 농업은 계속되는 농촌노동력의 감소 및 노령화ㆍ부녀화와 WTO체제 출범에 따른 농축산물 수입개방 둥 대내외적으로 매우 어려운 처지에 놓여있다. 이러한 농업여건변화에 따라 우리농업을 경쟁력 있는 강한 체질의 산업으로 육성하여 국제경쟁력을 키우고 국민소득 증대에 따른 고품질 농축산물 수요증가에 적절히 대응하기 위하여 품질이 좋은 농축산물을 값싸게 생산 공급할 수 있는 자본기술집약적 농업의 필요성이 점차 높아지고 있다. (중략)