How to Run a 12,000 sqm Lettuce Cultivation in Polyhouse with One Employee
Project Information
- Customer: Commercial Lettuce Producer
- Facility: 12,000 sqm Polyhouse Project
- Method of cultivation: Nutrient Film Technique (NFT)
- Type of crop: Lettuce (Lactuca sativa)
The Customer's Challenge
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Manual Labor and Risks: Dependence on manual dosing and climate adjustments led to high operational costs and human error.
Climate Inconsistency: Without real-time steering, the lettuce polyhouse suffered from microclimates, causing uneven growth rates.
Preventable Crop Failure: Lack of fail-safes meant that simple mistakes in nutrient mixing or missed alerts led to significant yield loss.
GrowDirector’s Solution & Result
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Automated Repetitive Tasks: The system took over all daily adjustments for irrigation and climate, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
Precise Water Parameters: Automated dosing now maintains exact pH and EC levels 24/7, ensuring the lettuce NFT polyhouse receives the perfect nutrient mix.
Minimizing Crop Failure: By removing human error from the equation, the facility achieved a stable, risk-free growing environment.
Result: The facility successfully reduced its active workforce to just one employee while securing higher process reliability.
Equipment used in the case
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Seamless Integration with 3rd Party Equipment
Watch how we modernized this facility in less than 24 hours. Our team retrofitted the lettuce cultivation in polyhouse setup by seamlessly integrating the client’s existing third-party pumps and fans with the GrowDirector ecosystem ( HydroDirector, SensorDirector, DryContactDirector, and SocketDirector) . This rapid deployment proves that you can switch to advanced automation without facility downtime.
How to Run a 12,000 sqm Lettuce Polyhouse with One Employee: A Retrofit Automation Strategy
Stabilizing the Environment to Prevent Failure
Inconsistent climate control is the primary driver of crop failure in large-scale operations. By deploying SensorDirector modules with dual-point sensing (2x Temp, Hum, VPD), to trigger fans and heaters via the DryContactDirector, the system instantly corrects temperature and humidity deviations before they damage the crop.
Automated climate steering ensures stable growth conditions, effectively minimizing crop failure due to manual oversight.