Ikea Now Has Indoor Vertical Farm, Huge Potential For Solar Partnership

With the world’s climate constantly becoming hotter by the year, industries such as farming are going to experience massive problems such as drought and daylight heat that’s too much for plants to handle. That’s why products like Ikea’s indoor vertical farm are being hailed as great ideas because they can grow food three times faster and with 90 percent less water consumption. What’s more, there’s a huge opportunity to use solar power as a major component.

The new farming implement called Lokal came via Space10, the furniture company’s laboratory researching innovative products, Business Insider recently reported. It’s just a prototype, for now, but it shows great potential. It can grow herbs and greens indoors and is made up of stackable trays so it can go up as high as space would allow.

While the idea of an indoor farm is good, Ikea’s engineers are still working on improving the technology behind Lokal. For example, they want to integrate sensors into the stack so that users can monitor the state of their plants via smartphones.

Even if Ikea is not yet ready to put Lokal on retail, other companies are already looking at indoor vertical farming as a legitimate replacement to traditional tilling and sowing. There’s the indoor vertical farm in Philadelphia, for example, which is the first of its kind to be powered by solar energy.

The entity called Metropolis Farms has apparently constructed a 500KW solar setup on the roof of a building, Clean Technica reports. In the fourth floor of the building, the farm has crops that are reportedly worth 660 acres. More impressive is that they all feet in a space of only 100,000 square feet.

Paired with the news that Ikea could be offering consumer indoor vertical farm constructs in the future, there could be some major investment and startup opportunities in the works. At the very least, it provides hope that humanity might not starve, after all.