Last Thursday, engineers, researchers, and other Lyon architects presented the project FUL (Ferme Urbaine Lyonnaise), which could produce more than 600,000 salads per year, starting in the summer of 2016.
While on the North American continent urban horticulture exploits already exist, this Lyon project could constitute a first for France. This first urban farm would appeal to a completely innovative cultivation technology based on hydroponics: that is to say, indoor cultivation, under climate control, reproducing outdoor lighting, hygrometric, temperature and wind conditions.
In the first place, the testing, which will debut throughout 2016, should consist of time devoted to lettuce production because this plant is easy to cultivate.
The farm is organized vertically on superimposed technical plates. The lower level houses the nursery, where the baby lettuce will begin the cycle, climbing through the different levels in order to end up on the building's last level, after forty-nine days of cultivation, where they will encounter the natural light before getting sold off with their roots, in little clumps of peat.
Imagined within the lens of maximizing horticultural production, in a context of the rarefication of agricultural lands, climate change and population growth, the project FUL also wants to be respectful of the environment. Therefore, pesticides and other chemical products will be proscribed. Moreover, the building (whose construction site has not been revealed yet) will be ecological and will not consume energy thanks to the recuperation of emissions from environmental heat.
Is there vertical farming in the city you live? What are your favorite vertical farming examples?
Original article, originally in French, here.
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