ATGTM
is based on work funded by NASA and efforts by
various academic institutions to develop plant
growth facilities designed to enable plants to
grow with superior yields and/or the ability to
produce specific phytochemicals (i.e., valuable
plant-produced chemicals) in enclosed facilities.
These techniques not only improve the output and
quality of traditional agricultural crops, but
they also leverage certain sectors of high-tech
life-science based industries by the ability to
grow highly valuable plants and plant products
that are currently relegated to distant environs.
ATGTM systems have the ability to significantly
alter agriculture by deploying technologies that:
- Enable high rates for plant growth: over
50% higher yields than conventional greenhouse
systems, which in turn provide over 10X the
yield of field grown produce.
- Enable local production of high-value medicinal
crops that traditionally have only been grown
in tropical environments.
- Allow standardization of plant medical chemicals
production.
- Allow standardization of production of plant
medical chemicals
- Create environments suitable for the production
of plant-based production of pharmaceuticals
proteins.
While these technologies promise very high-production
yields (the foundation for developing a new pharmaceutical
production industry), the ability to grow new
crops locally has not seen widespread adoption
because of (1) the considerable energy costs (relative
to the retail prices of food crops) required to
achieve year-round production, and (2) the absence
of sufficient funding to deploy a fully capable
system for medical and pharmaceuticals production.
In food applications, ATGTM overcomes
this limitation by deploying a sustainable system
of efficient energy integration and entrepreneurial
agriculture. By using renewable sources (such
as biofueled microturbines) to provide base energy
needs, the waste-heat is adopted for heating and
cooling, and effluent CO2 is consumed
by plants as food for growth, thereby operating
costs are greatly reduced. For medicinal and pharmaceutical
production, ATGTM will use a scalable
system that can be deployed as the operation of
each component is validated.
|
|
