Phoenix Contact, as a global market leader in industrial automation and connectivity, offers technical solutions for a livable and sustainable future, with electrification, networking, and automation as its core fields of expertise. Phoenix Contact LLC, located in Cairo, Egypt, combines several years of technical and market development experience with its local team to support our customers in this growing market. Phoenix Contact proudly announces the successful implementation of a sustainability project in Egypt as part of its 100th anniversary celebrations. Committed to the sustainable use of living spaces and resource conservation, Phoenix Contact has long championed sustainability across its global operations.
In honor of the company’s 100th anniversary in 2023, Phoenix Contact LLC partnered with HITS Solutions, a local system integrator and software company focused on smart agriculture through the fusion of IoT and Bioinformatics and launched a sustainability initiative – an end-to-end “Precision Agriculture” solution prototype aimed at transforming hydroponic farming. This technology will help transform the food production system in Egypt, reduce freshwater use, and overcome food shortages.
Egypt faces freshwater scarcity, and Precision Agriculture technologies can help address future food shortages and reduce freshwater use. With global freshwater shortages and grain market instability, there’s a growing fear of increased global hunger.
Phoenix Contact developed a solution aligned with Egypt’s Vision 2030 to eradicate poverty and hunger by 2030. Ahmed ElShibini, Country Manager of Phoenix Contact LLC in Egypt, states, “We are confident that Phoenix Contact can have a significant role in the mission of helping the human race fight hunger.”
In collaboration with HITS Solutions, Phoenix Contact has advanced hydroponic agriculture by combining IoT with precision automation. The system automates irrigation and fertigation based on real-time sensor inputs, setting a new benchmark for sustainable agriculture.
HITS Solutions provided land for a “Center of Excellence” with two greenhouses—one for traditional cultivation and one for hydroponics. They developed a cloud-based platform to manage the system, integrating metagenomics to analyze microbial communities in the soil and environment to better understand plant health, nutrient cycles, and disease risks. This biological insight is combined with IoT sensor data to enable data-driven decisions for irrigation, fertilization, and crop management. Phoenix Contact’s EDGE boxes monitor and control the greenhouses, linking to the HITS software platform.
The results are transformative: water consumption reduced by 86.67%, from 24,000 liters to 3,200 liters for 1,200 plants. The vertical farming setup requires only 9.5 m², 17 times less space than conventional methods. HITS Solutions’ water metagenomics services ensure superior water quality, optimizing every drop.
This case study showcases the potential of advanced automation and intelligent software in revolutionizing farming for a sustainable future.
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