Climate, irrigation and yield
Greenhouse Farming
Yield is what the year turns on, and it still depends on which grower is on shift. The climate computer holds the setpoints someone chose last season, the strategy lives in one person's experience, and when they are on holiday the crop notices. Supplemental light and heat run on those same setpoints, so the energy bill is decided by the same choices.
What goes wrong, and what it costs
- Screen and vent decisions at dawn
- The most expensive hour of the day, decided by whoever is awake, and worth several percent of the heating bill across a season.
- Irrigation strategy drift
- Drain percentage wanders, root zone electrical conductivity follows, and the crop responds a week later when it is too late to correct cheaply.
- A climate alarm nobody hears
- The climate computer beeps in an empty control room at 02:00.
- Strategy locked in one grower's head
- Yield and energy vary by roster rather than by plan, and nothing is transferable to a second site.
Where the energy goes
A greenhouse is a thermal system where energy and yield trade against each other every hour, and the trade is decided by screen position, vent position, pipe temperature and the humidity that follows from all three. Optimising that continuously rather than twice a season is where the money is. It is also the problem KoPilot was built for and won a competition solving.
Where this sits now
Greenhouse is where Koidra started and where autonomous control is proven, so this page carries the strongest evidence we have. It is now one of three industries rather than the whole company, and the platform underneath it is the same one running pellet plants.
That is worth knowing if you are a grower: the maintenance system your technicians use is the one a biomass plant uses, which means it gets built for equipment reliability rather than for horticulture as an afterthought.
The competition results
Koidra won the international Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge twice, controlling a commercial crop over a full season with no human at the panel, scored against teams of expert growers. The 2018 run finished 6% ahead on yield and 17% ahead on net profit against the manual reference the expert growers operated, and it was the only AI entry that beat them.
The competitions matter more than a customer quote here, because they are the only setting where an autonomous grower and a human grower run the same crop under the same conditions and the results are published.
DripPilot
Irrigation has its own product, DripPilot, because irrigation control in a greenhouse is a specialised problem with its own sensors, strategy and failure modes. It is a greenhouse product rather than a platform tier, and it is not sold to pellet plants.
What the lower steps give a grower
Not every greenhouse wants autonomous control on day one, and the steps below it stand on their own.
Essentials puts climate data, hand-recorded crop registrations, and photographs in one place, with alarms that reach a phone rather than an empty control room.
Maintenance Management puts screen motors, pumps and heating equipment on a recurring schedule with parts attached.
AI Advisory sends the weekly summary that says what changed in the climate and where the energy went.
Proof
In commercial greenhouse operations KoPilot has delivered up to 27% yield improvement and 17% energy savings. Koidra also won the international Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge twice, and the 2018 run was the only AI entry to finish ahead of the expert growers on both yield and net profit. Nature Fresh Farms ran an AI-powered automation trial with us, and Great Lakes Greenhouses partners with us in Ontario.
What we measure here
- compartment
- screen position
- vapour pressure deficit
- daily light integral
- irrigation shot
- drain percentage
- electrical conductivity
- 24-hour average temperature
See Koidra on your greenhouse data
Bring a week of readings from one compartment. We will show you what the platform sees, what it would have flagged, and what it would have scheduled.
Book a demo