South Korean industrial equipment manufacturer CN World is promoting what it decribes as a four-dimensional farming system that can be used in deserts or in the mountains to produce food while minimising water use. It claims the system, where people can sit and harvest the crops, also has the potential to solve global food shortages.
Examples of the new patent-pending modular system shared by the company online are designed to take up a space of about 16m x 21m inside a suitable building. The system consists of trays that contain the growing medium and move along tracks from the top to bottom of a rack system.
The time to complete the journey is linked to the plant’s growing cycle, and a continuous cropping system is employed to maximise use of the rack space – so, for example, two trays of mature crop could be removed and harvested, and two new trays of seedlings added.
Water, light – which is now cheap and easy to supply at the ideal wavelengths for the plants via LED systems – and fertiliser is all supplied in the racks.
Examples described by CN World (its full name is Clean Noise World Company Ltd and its primary products in the past have been silencers for industrial equipment) include growing lettuce, strawberries and mushrooms. It suggests and area of 16m x 21m could hold 14,400 lettuce plants, 7,200 strawberry plants or 26,400 Shitake mushrooms.
