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Fourteen rows of lettuce, herbs and cabbage are stacked on top of each other in a new “vertical” farm facility in Copenhagen.
The facility consists of row after row with space for vegetables on several floors. The robots circulate and take care of work tasks in the facilities. Photo: Thibault Savary / AFP
Rows go from floor to ceiling in the concert facilities of startup Nordic Harvest. The area is seven square kilometers.
The products can be harvested 15 times a year, even though the plants never see daylight or fertile soil, because they have purple light throughout the day from 20,000 specialized LED lamps. In the futuristic facilities, tiny robots deliver seeds from one row of shelves to another.
It is expected that 200 tonnes of vegetables can be harvested during the first quarter of next year, and eventually up to 1,000 tonnes a year, when the plant operates at full capacity, explains Nordic Harvest CEO Anders Riemann.
This will make the plant one of the largest in Europe of its kind.
skepticism
The plants have been greeted with skepticism by many who engage in more traditional agriculture, with questions about production capacity and electricity consumption.
But according to Riemann, the plant has significant climatic advantages, with short-distance products and the use of green electricity.
– A vertical farm is characterized by not damaging the environment, by reusing all the water and nutrients and fertilizers, he says.
According to Riemann, all the plant’s electricity will come from wind turbines. He also states that his plant needs one liter of water per kilo of product, which corresponds to 40 times less than underground plants and 250 times less than in large fields.
Urban agriculture also allows reforestation on land that had previously been used to grow a single crop, Riemann says.
