Tanya Weaver Fri 27 Jun 2025
Collected at: https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/06/27/dysons-ferris-wheel-vertical-growing-system-boosts-strawberry-yields-250
A trial of a hybrid vertical growing system in Dyson Farming’s 26-acre strawberry glasshouse on its Lincolnshire farm has massively boosted yields.
James Dyson’s farming business Dyson Farming owns around 36,000 acres of farmland across Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, West Berkshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire. This makes it the single largest farming business in the UK by land area.
Dyson Farming’s initiative to “invest in the future of sustainable British agriculture” was launched in 2013 with the purchase of Nocton Estate near Lincoln.
The aim of purchasing this farmland was to apply technology to grow food “sustainably, at scale and in harmony with the environment”.
Among the variety of crops grown by the business are 1,225,000 strawberry plants at its 26-acre glasshouse in Lincolnshire. Operating all year round, the facility is able to produce over 1,250 tonnes of strawberries annually.
The first strawberry harvest emerged in March 2021, and since then the Dyson Farming team has been looking at how to use technology and robotics to increase the yield and quality of the strawberries.
The most recent development in the glasshouse is the hybrid vertical growing system, the trial of which has just finished.
This system arranges the strawberry plants on rotating 5.5m-high ferris wheel-like structures. It makes use of the full height of the glasshouse, increasing the number of strawberry plants grown in a single area.
Two aluminium rigs, bigger than two double-decker buses placed end to end, rotate the trays of hanging strawberries to ensure optimal exposure to natural light. In the darker winter months, natural light is supplemented with LED light.
Dyson Farming has revealed that during the trial this vertical growing system exceeded all expectations, boosting yields by 250% while optimising the quality of the fruit.
Dyson said: “We always want to improve the efficiency of what we do, and our novel hybrid vertical growing system has shown that it can increase yields by two and a half times.
“It is an example of what is possible through the application of ingenuity and technology in agriculture.”
The system was designed from the ground up by Dyson engineers. One of these engineers, Robert Kyle, describes the process as a “painstaking labour of love over the past 12 months”.
Kyle said: “We’ve built the biggest machines in Dyson’s history and filled them with 6,000 strawberry plants. Slowly rotating, with a highly sophisticated and novel drainage system, they have been extremely happy plants producing wonderfully sweet fruit.”
The vertical growing system is not the only technology in the glasshouse. Advanced robots roam the rows, selecting and picking fruit using vision sensing, physical manipulation and robotic secateurs.
Other robots glide on rails next to the plants, shining UV light on them at night to prevent mould growth. Instead of using pesticides and insecticides, these robots also distribute insect predators to tackle aphids through the year.
The glasshouse is powered by an adjacent anaerobic digester. Crops from the surrounding fields are fed into the digester and broken down by micro-organisms creating biogas, which produces electricity and heat for the glasshouse.
Dyson engineers are now looking into how to apply this vertical farming method to other crops.
Daniel Cross from Dyson Farming said: “There is much more we can do, and the precision that Dyson engineers bring to their testing and improvement is unlike anything I have ever seen in farming before.”
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