Tarming House

One room, eight climates

Tarming House is a pilot facility built for soilless, stacked farming. Two towers stand in a clean growing room of about 50 m². Each tower holds two production lines, and each line holds two growing cells.

The cell width was chosen on purpose: 1.415 m can be reached comfortably by hand from both sides. At harvest, no flower is ever out of reach.

Every cell runs its own climate

Each of the eight cells is independent, with its own controller, its own sensors and its own programme. That matters especially for saffron, because its stages are nothing alike. In the same room, one cell can sit dark and warm in summer incubation while another is in its cool, humid flowering stage.

What a cell manages:

• The canopy climate. Temperature and humidity are measured continuously just above the leaves. What's watched is the air the plant actually lives in, not the room.
• Light. LED lighting gives each stage the day length it needs: complete darkness in incubation, 12 hours in flowering, 10 hours in the leaf season.
• Airflow. Fans break up the still air around the leaves and remove excess moisture.
• Humidity. At flowering, saffron wants a narrow 80–85% humidity band. Each cell has a dry-fog humidifier that switches on when humidity drops below the floor. While it runs, the fans slow down to spread the fog.

Water: in its own tray, kept apart

Each cell's tray is physically separate. A root disease that starts in one cell can't reach another through shared water. For soilless saffron, that's the main protection against the corm rot that troubles fields.

The cells can run different irrigation methods on the same hardware. During saffron's leaf and corm season, the roots are fed either by low-pressure mist (aeroponics) or by periodic flooding (ebb and flow). The nutrient solution comes from a central reservoir, where its pH and conductivity are measured continuously and corrected when needed. Water that drains from the trays is collected and returned to the reservoir.

Watched remotely, but runs on its own

Every cell in the facility is monitored by the Tarming software. Each cell's temperature, humidity, light and irrigation can be seen live, and their history is recorded. When a value leaves its target, someone is told. Cameras let the facility be seen remotely.

Still, no cell depends on the connection. Even if the network or the central server goes down, every cell keeps running its own programme, light and irrigation. A fault in one cell doesn't affect the other seven.

How Tarming House helps Safranyolu

• We set the calendar. Incubation, flowering and the leaf season arrive on programme, not with the weather. A cell's flowering can be timed to the week the harvest team is ready.
• The area multiplies. Because the shelves are stacked, one floor area gives several times as much growing area.
• The harvest is clean and easy. Flowers are picked from the shelves without ever seeing rain, mud or wind.
• Everything is measured. Which temperature, humidity and light give larger corms and more flowers is learned by comparing eight separate cells.
• Corms grow here too. Because the leaf season also happens indoors, new corms grow away from soil disease and can go straight into the next year's incubation.