Dr. Genhua Niu is an off campus faculty at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center at El Paso with 100% Research Appointment. Her areas of special expertise are in environmental stress physiology and plant production in controlled environment. Her current research areas include identifying drought and salt tolerant low water use plant materials for urban landscape, quantifying growth and physiological responses of crops to drought, salt and heat stresses, and determining the minimum water requirement for urban landscape plants for maintaining a healthy landscape while conserving water.

Dr. Takagaki is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Horticulture, Chiba University, assigned to the University Farm, and has engaged in education and research. In charge of foreign student affairs since 1997 and of international affairs in general since 2006 he holds a concurrent assignment as a Deputy Director of the Center for Environment, Health and Fields Sciences. Engaging with research and experiments in Agronomy of Tropical Agriculture with major fields in Thailand, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, Dr. Takagaki has done research and taught in the fields of tropical agriculture, vegetable science, environmental control, protected horticulture and training of basic horticulture.

Plant Factory: An Indoor Vertical Farming System for Efficient Quality Food Production provides information on a field that is helping to offset the threats that unusual weather and shortages of land and natural resources bring to the food supply.

As alternative options are needed to ensure adequate and efficient production of food, this book represents the only available resource to take a practical approach to the planning, design, and implementation of plant factory (PF) practices to yield food crops. The PF systems described in this book are based on a plant production system with artificial (electric) lights and include case studies providing lessons learned and best practices from both industrial and crop specific programs.

With insights into the economics as well as the science of PF programs, this book is ideal for those in academic as well as industrial settings.