FEATURE VERTICAL FARMING
BBC ONE
Find out more about vertical farming by watching Planet Earth III
tepping through the heavy, air-locked door into the world's most advanced indoor vertical farm, it's the noise that hits you first. It's loud. Machines buzz and whir over the insistent drone of the warehouse-scale air circulation system.
The lights are dazzling. Peering up at the two-storey-high living curtains of plants quickly prompts a protest from your neck. Nearby, a few workers, wearing coveralls, hair nets, hard hats and earplugs, keep a cool eye on their busy robot underlings. The air is bright with the fresh, sweet scent of tender young salad leaves.
It's a far cry from the story-book picture of a farm; there's no mud, no wellies, no hens pecking in the yard. But the owners of this facility, a San Francisco-based company called Plenty, claim the system they're pioneering inside this warehouse in Compton, Los Angeles, can produce up to 350 times the yield compared to a field of the same size. What's more, they say their system uses just 10 per cent of the water and zero pesticides – and that it can be replicated almost anywhere.
The new farm in Compton grows four types of leafy greens: baby rocket, crispy lettuce, baby kale and curly spinach, was on site a day after the farm began operating, so that audiences around the world could see for themselves.
