The statistics for this incredibly successful indoor farming
endeavor in Japan are staggering: 25,000 square feet producing 10,000 heads of
lettuce per day (100 times more per square foot than traditional methods) with
40% less power, 80% less food waste and 99% less water usage than outdoor
fields. But the freshest news from the farm: a new facility using the same
technologies has been announced and is now under construction in Hong
Kong, with Mongolia, Russia and mainland China on the agenda for subsequent
near-future builds.
In the currently-completed setup, customized LED lighting
developed with GE helps plants grow up to two and half times faster, one of the
many innovations co-developed in this enterprise by Shigeharu
Shimamura, the man who helped turn a former semiconductor factory into the
planet’s biggest interior factory farm.
The specific idea to deploy it at this time and in this
place grew out of a disaster: the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that shook
the island nation, causing area food shortages in general and this building to
be abandoned in particular. Turning it into an indoor farm both gave the
structure a new purpose and has helped replace needed fresh, healthy and
locally-grown greens.
Shimamura has shortened the cycle of days and nights in this
artificial environment, growing food faster, while optimizing temperature,
lighting and humidity and maximizing vertical square footage in this vast
interior space (about half the size of a football field). No water is lost to
soil and a core-less lettuce variant reduces waste.
Currently, the process is “only half automated. Machines do some
work, but the picking part is done manually. In the future, though, I expect an
emergence of harvesting robots. For example, a robot that can transplant
seedlings, or for cutting and harvesting, or transporting harvested produce to
be packaged.”
With a long-standing passion for produce production, he “got the idea for his indoor farm as a teenager, when he visited a
‘vegetable factory’ at the Expo ’85 world’s fair in Tsukuba, Japan. He went on
to study plant physiology at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, and in 2004
started an indoor farming company called Mirai, which in Japanese means
‘future."
Shimamura continues to think about future refinements,
applications and expansions: “I believe that, at least technically,
we can produce almost any kind of plant in a factory. But what makes most
economic sense is to produce fast-growing vegetables that can be sent to the
market quickly. That means leaf vegetables for us now. In the future, though,
we would like to expand to a wider variety of produce. It’s not just vegetables
we are thinking about, though. The factory can also produce medicinal plants. I
believe that there is a very good possibility we will be involved in a variety
of products soon.”
The beauty of this development lies partly in its
versatility – since it deals in climate-controlled spaces and
replicable conditions, a solution of this sort can be deployed anywhere in
the world to address food shortages of the present and future. Saving space,
indoor vertical farms are also good candidates for local food production in
crowded and high-cost urban areas around the globe. Aforementioned strides in waste
and power reduction also make these techniques and approaches far more
sustainable and cost-efficient.
Ultimately, the hope (and goal) is to refine the system and
apply it in other areas where resources and/or space are scarce or
where weather is problematic, from developing countries to developed cities.
Indeed, the same team is already building anew in densely-packed Hong
Kong, where real estate is extremely expensive and local food harder to come by
as well.
Reference:- weburbanist.com by Urbanist
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