The Problem: People living in apartments don't have the outdoor space to grow many plants.
The Solution: Create plant factory farms that can be put in wardrobes.
Many people will have read about, and seen images of, underground plant farms, growing crops under LED lighting and using hydroponics on long lines of shelves, what I refer to as plant factory farms.
Given that this technology exists already at a large scale, it makes sense to scale it down for individual homes.
I therefore propose creating off-the-shelf plant factory farms, which people would buy much like they buy a fish tank. All of the trays, lighting and hydroponics would be set up, all customers would need to do was plug in the system and fill the built-in water tank. The machine would then water the plants as needed and in-built sensors would notify customers when plants were ready to be harvested.
Given the lack of space, particularly outdoor space, in apartments, this offers a great solution to help people grow plants, either decorative or food. Having grown tomatoes this summer and tasted the difference between them and the bland supermarket options, plant factories providing fresh, tasty fruit and vegetables are very appealing.
The plant factories would be made to standardised sizes, which could fit together into multiple layers. They would, in effect, be like drawers and cupboards, with the desired height and number of shelves selected by the customer.
Not only would the plant factories provide fresh produce, they would also help purify the air in the apartment. Anything could be grown, as the factories could be heat- and humidity-controlled, for example, enabling produce usually only grown overseas to be grown at home.
By growing the market for plant factories, more money and investment can flow into the sector, helping to drive innovation up and costs down, which in turn could lead to major breakthroughs to help with larger-scale plant factory farming projects, which in turn can help improve food security and reduce the environmental impacts from conventional farming.
Solar panels on homes helped expand the market and led to massive reductions in the cost of solar power and increases in its efficiency, so this could do the same for plant factory farming.
I would be the first to buy a tomato plant factory for all year round flavour!
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