28 Mar 2016 At this supermarket, the produce section grows its own produce

At the end of the produce aisle in the Metro supermarket in Berlin, an indoor farming company is testing the ultimate in local food: greens and herbs are growing inside the store itself.

The greens grow inside glowing modular boxes, in a design that the company behind the project, Infarm, says is so efficient that it can finally make vertical farming affordable on a micro scale.

“Pretty much any type of greenhouse needs scale to be economic and efficient,” says Infarm cofounder Guy Galonska. “In our case, the technology we developed is kind of a building-block approach, and this building block reaches efficiencies that are much higher. . . . It works at a very small scale, just a few square meters. So it makes a lot of sense in your neighbourhood supermarket scale.”

Infarm designed new technology—including some patented techniques—to make the tiny farms possible. It uses every centimeter of space. Unlike a state-of-the-art greenhouse, where seedlings might be raised in a dense area but later moved, all stages of plant growth happen in a single area.

“If you would look at our system, you would just see a sea of green,” says Galonska. “You wouldn’t see any wasted space or wasted energy.”

Like other vertical farms, it has environmental advantages—not just eliminating transportation, storage, and refrigeration, but also using only a tiny fraction of the water or fertilizer typically used on a farm….

FastCoexist.com: Read the full article

Watch this video for more on the concept…