By using shelves and stacking the crops on top of each other, we use waaay less land and grow waaay more food. If you ask the typical outdoor farmer, they might tell you that they can produce around 2 kg of salad per square meter a year. Vertical farms like ours can grow a mind-boggling amount of 50-80 kg fresh salad per square meter per year. Take that times the four levels we have, and you got yourself more than 100 times the food. Puuh!
The vertical technique also means that we can grow food pretty much anywhere, like in our case, an underground cave. Or as we like to call it, our oasis. We are never affected by current weather conditions and can grow greens every day, all year around. Even during the cold Swedish winters.
There is another important advantage of growing food like this, and that is that we don’t use any soil. Instead we’re using clean nutritious water! This is called hydroponic farming. And the best part is that the water is constantly circulating, the only water we lose is actually going into the plant you eat. Yum! More specifically, we are saving 90% in water use compared to traditional soil farming. This means that we’re able to get the most out of the resources we have, with little to no waste!
And just when you thought “it can’t get any better than this”, it sure can! We do not use (or need to use) any pesticides when growing our greens. That’s because we’re raising the crops indoors, where they are well hidden to anything that would require pesticides. We call this the “hide and seek” technique.
So next time you’re headed down to your local supermarket, look for our vertical greens.
Tasty love,
Urban Oasis
