Engineering Perspectives in Modern Horticulture: Trends, Challenges and Future Opportunities

Abstract

Horticultural production has become one of the most engineering-intensive branches of agriculture. Structures, climate-control systems, lighting installations, fertigation hardware, sensing platforms, field and glasshouse robots, and refrigerated supply chains now mediate almost every stage between propagation and consumption. The associated literature has expanded rapidly, yet it remains fragmented along technological lines, with separate bodies of work on protected cultivation, precision irrigation, machine perception, robotics and postharvest engineering that seldom interrogate one another. This critical narrative review examines the engineering transformation of horticulture as a single, interconnected problem domain, and evaluates the quality of the evidence on which prevailing claims of efficiency, sustainability and viability rest. Literature was identified through structured searching of openly accessible scholarly indexes and metadata registries, supplemented by backward and forward citation tracking and by authoritative institutional publications, with a final search date of 2 June 2026. Sources were appraised for design adequacy, validity of performance metrics, transparency of system boundaries and external validity rather than for citation frequency alone. Four cross-cutting weaknesses emerge. Performance is reported through non-standardised and often self-selected metrics that resist comparison across studies. Demonstrations conducted under controlled or curated conditions dominate the literature, while independent, season-long field validation remains scarce. Energy, water and carbon assessments adopt inconsistent system boundaries, which allows the same technology to appear efficient or burdensome depending on the accounting frame. Techno-economic evidence is thin, geographically concentrated and rarely reported alongside technical results. Confidence is therefore strongest for component-level physical mechanisms and weakest for system-level claims about profitability, environmental benefit and transferability. Priorities include shared benchmarking protocols, pre-registered multi-season field trials, harmonised life-cycle accounting conventions, and the co-design of cultivars, canopies and machines rather than the retrofitting of automation onto architectures selected for manual labour.