OCS Assists Food Company Ljusgårda with Automated Lettuce Cultivation

Result: Ljusgårda Increases from 2 to 60 Tons of Harvested Lettuce per Month

Ljusgårda’s production, which has been partially manual on a smaller scale of 650 sqm, has been transformed into an automated production system totaling 7,000 sqm with high ambitions for continued expansion and growth. Thanks to Vertical Farming and the new method of lettuce cultivation, over 600 pallets of lettuce will leave Ljusgårda for distribution to over 800 stores throughout Sweden every week.

About Ljusgårda

Ljusgårda is located in Tibro, in a facility that was previously a wood industry but has been given new life and is today a state-of-the-art indoor cultivation facility. The facility is climate-certified where air, light, and water are regulated to create perfect growing conditions for each specific plant. At Ljusgårda, quality is the main focus, both in terms of nutrition and taste. Studies show that today’s fruits and vegetables contain fewer vitamins and minerals than 50 years ago; the main explanation for this is that nutritional content has been neglected during decades of plant breeding with a one-sided focus on high yield. By growing indoors under controlled conditions, both the production process, the environment, and the quality of the products are ensured.

Background

Ljusgårda contacted OCS requesting a solution to handle and automatically transport 2.5-meter-long vertical tubes for lettuce cultivation. The system would be transported through various stations and growing rooms.

Initially, the design was based on automatically driven tracks throughout the entire facility, but the investment was too high, so we developed a solution with non-driven buffers in the growing rooms. OCS examined various solutions to handle either fewer or more tubes per cart. The solution was to design a system with carts that handle 12 tubes at a time through the entire process. Each tube contains 24 plants, totaling 288 plants per cart. The system contains a total of 686 carts.

Automatic Transport Between Harvesting Station, Washing, Planting, and Growing Rooms

The growing rooms are designed as 15 closed cells to minimize contamination from potential pests between growing tubes in the different rooms.

The system handles 48 carts in each growing room, and 672 tubes are harvested every day. The carts are positioned in such a way that irrigation is possible from above the tubes. Lighting and ventilation are integrated with the conveyor system. At maximum capacity, the system holds approximately 300,000 plants.

After planting, the crops remain in the growing room for approximately two weeks. The crops are harvested at least twice to achieve maximum productivity and growth. While the tubes are in the growing room, a cart can easily be requested from a desired position in the room to perform inspection of the plants. When the crops are ready for harvest, they are automatically transported using the OCS Heavy Duty system via a transport route to harvesting. The lettuce is harvested, inspected, and packaged before being transported to the stores.