Promoting innovation in Costa Rica’s agroindustry, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) delivered to its founding member country Costa Rica the first intelligent greenhouse developed domestically with the support of the Republic of Korea through the Korea-CABEI Single Donor Trust Fund (KTF). The facility was opened in April.
The project “Use of technologies to support the Government of Costa Rica in the development of a climate-smart greenhouse and its marketing strategy” consists of a 2,500 m2 space located at the Los Diamantes Experimental Station in Guápiles de Pococí and houses two greenhouses for growing tomatoes and sweet peppers, a control room, a nursery, and a storage space for agricultural inputs.
It is called “smart” because it includes state-of-the-art technologies that allow monitoring the crops and taking remote actions for cooling, heating, lighting, irrigation, and ventilation through sensors that measure light, heat, movement, humidity, and pressure, and collect data that is sent to a cloud-based computer management system capable of taking tailored actions to address detected problems, significantly improving productivity and product quality.
The initiative was developed as part of a US$700,000 non-reimbursable technical cooperation grant from the Korea-CABEI Single Donor Trust Fund (KTF) and was executed by the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG), with whom work has been carried out over the last two years on infrastructure development, capacity building and the transfer of Korean knowledge in the use of this technology.
In addition, support and expertise was provided by the Korean Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Korean company Shinhan A-Tec Co. Ltd., the University of Costa Rica (UCR) and the company Controlsoft, with supervision and technical support from the Costa Rican company Biomatec and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
CABEI is proud to be part of this transformative initiative and reaffirms its commitment to sustainable development in the Central American region.
Source: Cabei
