‘Our ambition is that our product is available in every corner of the planet’: Heat-absorbing roof could help subsistence farmers grow crops in hot climates
Second Sky is a heat-blocking roof that uses nanotechnology, developed by Iyris, to block the heat of the sun whilst allowing the light to travel through it.
As the world’s climate gets hotter, it is important to keep crops out of the worst excesses of this heat. RedSea and Iyris’s technology can help mitigate the worst effects that the world’s hottest climates have on crops, they claim. The more the effects of climate change spread throughout the world, the greater the need for such technology will be.
The need for the technology
While plants benefit from some heat, those plants that are not adapted to it will struggle.
“A lot of the crops you use as food today, primary food crops, including things that we focus on like berries or vegetables, are more adapted to temperate climates,” Ryan Lefers, CEO and co-founder of RedSea, told AgTechNavigator. “Keeping them closer to that temperature helps them to function better, so you end up with a better quality, you end up with a healthier crop, you end up with better yield.
“But unfortunately, with the state of the planet as it is today, we're trending up, and so you and I are getting more uncomfortable, and so are the crops that we need to eat.” We need, Lefers told us, to adapt the plants’ environment, bringing them the temperate climate they need to thrive.
Sky-blue
RedSea and Iyris’s technology aims to fix this. The nanotechnology in the Second Sky roof absorbs the heat in the sun’s rays, whilst letting in the light; therefore, allowing crops to get what they need to grow without stunting their development with overbearing temperatures.
The roof, like the sky itself, looks blue, Lefers told us. “The reason . . . is the same reason that our sky looks blue. It’s called the Rayleigh Scattering effect: you know we should look out into our sky and see black, because it's outer space, but we don't, because the light from the sun is scattered and so it makes it look blue.” The same thing happens, he told us, through the Second Sky technology.
The technology can be tuned to absorb different levels of heat for different purposes. “From an energy standpoint the beautiful thing . . . is once you put it in, you're sort of done. There's no moving parts, there's no electricity to apply; so we see significant electricity savings as a result of this. We see reductions in water use because the plants are cooler and the lead temperatures are cooler, they're not transpiring as much. And honestly, it's better to work under. You and I feel better working under it: we're not overheating either.”
The water saving potential the technology, Lefers told us, can alsoreduce the amount of irrigation the crops need.
“Because the heat is absorbed on the roof, you have less heat coming into the system, so we have a lower leaf temperature, and we also have lower soil temperatures. Because you have lower leaf and soil temperatures, you have less evaporation from the soil, because you have less transpiration from the plant leaves.
“That directly translates to a reduced demand for water. While it does depend on your starting temperature, we see anywhere from 10% to around 40-50% water savings depending on how difficult the system is to begin with in terms of temperature.”
It’s a ‘passive system’, Lefers pointed out, meaning that once the roof is installed not much is really needed to make it work. Sometimes it can even work too well. “We've seen when people apply this product on an existing system, all of a sudden their soil is wetter than it had been, so they need to adjust down their irrigation because too much water means other problems, like mould.”
Accessibility and adaptability
The system is very easy to install – it can be fitted over the top of a greenhouse with relative ease. Thus, Lefers believes, it can be accessible for all kinds of farmers, including poor subsistence farmers without access to technical education.
“The farmers, who really understand the economics of the growing system, are the first adaptors because they get it. They get that this is going to benefit them,” Lefers predicted. “They feel the pain-points of the heat.
“What we expect is as adaption increases, and we're already seeing this a bit with some pending projects in Africa, that it's going to roll into basically all farms on the planet, so being able to provide this product to subsistence farmers, low-income smallholder areas, that's certainly going to happen.
“One of the things that's exciting about this product is there's no training required, you just put it on and it works. So that also makes it really attractive for a farmer that might have a lower education level.”
The nanotechnology can also be put into a wide range of materials, making it adaptable. Lefers described it as “like an additive. It goes into the manufacturing process, it's evenly distributed within the roof material. You could choose any polymer-based roofing material: we work with nets, poly films, hard coverings like polycarbonate or acrylic, and it just goes into the manufacturing process.”
Finally, RedSea is ambitious in its plans to expand the use of technology, hoping for it to become an industry norm. “Our ambition is that our product is available in every corner of the planet,” Lefers told us. “Our ambition is in the future, let's say five years from now, it's almost an automatic.”
