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Lately, when I go shopping, I have been picking up more and more sprouts. This is because the price of vegetables has increased a lot. Instead of green vegetables, processed foods and meats seem to be added more frequently. Consumers aren't the only ones who are worried about this. When there are weather issues such as an early heat wave or a long rainy season, the price is also a price, but there is also a great difficulty in supply and demand, so distributors are also struggling. This is why supermarkets are paying attention to smart farms or storage technologies that can stably secure fresh vegetables regardless of the weather.
The salad company directly operates a smart farm... Relighting plant factories at the price of vegetables through the sky
Palm Eight, which runs the nation's largest salad manufacturer, built a plant factory altogether. At the Icheon factory in Gyeonggi, in addition to leafy vegetables grown in many existing smart farms, experiments on cultivation such as strawberries, leeks, and mushrooms were in full swing. The crops grown here are cleaned and sorted in the facility next door and supplied for salads or sold as eco-friendly vegetables in supermarkets. The nutritional content is the same as that grown in the field. The Palm Eight employee said, "If you're from South Korea, you've probably tried lettuce grown here at least once," and the Smart Farm vegetables were close to us.
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'Even if you don't bend over'... New agricultural maps
In fact, I didn't expect anything special until I saw the plant factory in person. LED lights instead of sunlight and vegetables rooted in culture instead of soil are already well known. However, what caught my eye while interviewing them was the "employees who work without bending over." There was also a labor shortage here, so migrant workers and Koreans were working together, but most of the work was done on stand. It looked very different from traditional farming, where you squatted in a field under the scorching sun and bent over and over again. Also, the fact that the room temperature is kept constant seemed to be a big advantage for those who worked. Nevertheless, due to prejudice against agriculture, it is difficult to find people, and it is difficult to cultivate human resources consistently. There are still many young people who say they would rather choose IT than agriculture, which is a homework to solve.
The yield is 40 times higher than that of ordinary fields... Almost no weather impact
Since it's a vegetable made in a factory, I thought that if you adjust the light and nutrients according to a set rule, like a mathematical formula, you can get a certain yield, but that's not the case. When the reporter visited, we could see that the conditions of the plants were different depending on the air flow, humidity, and human touch in the same factory. Some lettuce wilted, while others looked unusually crispy. Reducing this kind of trial and error is the current challenge. Each crop varies, but in the case of butterhead lettuce, which is often eaten for salads, it is said that up to 40 times the yield can be obtained from a smart farm compared to a normal open field of the same area. The great advantage is that it is almost unaffected by the weather outside and can be supplied at a similar price 365 days a year.
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Of course, we still have a long way to go. The company survived because there were clear distribution channels. This is in line with the frustration of many farmers, saying, "We will farm somehow, but the market is the problem." The initial investment to build the facility is much higher than in conventional agriculture and requires continuous research, so most of it is done in the corporate type. Due to the abnormal climate that has become commonplace, it seems clear that "manufactured vegetables" that can be bought at relatively low prices will be on our table more often.