From cultured meat to plant-based foods and robotic kitchen assistants, the generation turns out to be leaking into every corner of our food system, and that’s a smart thing, because we desperately want tactics to make more and more foods with fewer resources.
Vertical agriculture, which uses LED lighting fixtures and a highly controlled indoor environment to grow products with much less water, area or fertilizer than in classical agriculture, is a fast-spreading generation that does just that.
There are vertical farms around the world, from Singapore to the UNITED Kingdom and the United States, and this week the first phase of the structure of what will be a major addition to the industry has ended.
The new facility is located in Denmark, in a domain called Taastrup outdoors in Copenhagen. With a domain of 7,000 square meters (just over 73,000 square feet), it will be the largest vertical farm in Europe. Crops will grow in 14 layers -High stacks and use more than 20,000 LED lights.
Agricultural generation comes from a Taiwanese vertical agricultural company called YesHealth Group, which has partnered with Danish food generation company Nordic Harvest for this project.
Beyond the abundance of layers and delicates, automation takes it to the next level; small robots on wheels will take the seeds to the other rows of stacked crop shelves. Sensors combined with intelligent software will monitor and process more than 5,000 knowledge points; A key element, for example, is the intensity of the soft LED depending on the level of expansion of the plant.
In the midst of all this, green vegetables would be grown with one liter of single water according to the kilogram of product, 250 times less than what is used in classical agriculture. its roots extend into shallow channels of nutrient-rich water. What about all that LED light? It comes from the electrical energy generated through the wind; Almost some of Denmark’s total energy comes from wind energy, and the farm’s creators felt that using this sustainable energy source was the optimal choice.
As the Nordic Harvest online page is published, Western consumers are licked. We have become accustomed to being able to buy and eat the culmination and vegetables that we prefer at any time of the year. Blueberries in February?Course!Oranges in July?Why not! Out-of-season products charge us a little more at our local grocery store, and are likely to be air-transported or shipped thousands of miles away, but well, you just need to make a cherry pie from scratch in the middle of winter.
However, the chain of origin to bring those new foods from point A to point B is not an easy task, whether you stay in the culmination or vegetables remain bloodless and pest-free during the holidays to make sure they are flawless in using chemicals to maintain them. newer for longer, this formula puts a lot of certainty in the environment and in the food itself.
Vertical farms will replace that. Of course, they might not grow everything in the sun; for now, they are basically limited to green vegetables such as lettuce, spinach, kale, etc. , but can produce the same quantity and quality of crops throughout the year. , and redefine the meaning of ‘local eating’. If enough emerges from them, they would possibly even help reforest some farmland.
According to the Nordic Harvest website, if it created more sites like Taastrup and grew vegetables in an area equivalent to the length of 20 football pitches, it would be consistent with Denmark becoming “self-sufficient in salads and herbs” than uploading them from other countries. ; currently, only 30% of danish intake of these products is grown nationally.
Taastrup will not only produce local products, but grow them quickly. The plant plans to harvest the vegetables in layers 15 times a year, for a total production of 1,000 metric tons consistent with the year. “In this type of method of cultivation . . . you may not be influenced by the weather, so you can [evolve with] a new calendar,” said Stella Tsai, CEO of YesHealth Group.
The plant plans to start production in the first quarter of next year and is expected to succeed next year as well, achieving its full capacity of 1000 tons until the end of 2021.
Image credit: Nordic Harvest