Ikea is known for its flat-pack kitchen tables, islands, and cabinets. Now the home-furnishings retailer is experimenting with products that allow people to harvest food at home. Space10, Ikea's innovation lab, has designed a prototype of a mini-farm that can grow greens and herbs indoors. Called Lokal, it uses a hydroponic farming system â allowing crops to grow on trays under LEDs in a climate-controlled box. Space10 debuted the device in September at the London Design Festival in Shoreditch. Check it out below. View As: One Page Slides
The Lokal farm lets anyone harvest greens indoors.
Crops grow under LEDs instead of relying on natural sunlight.
This process allows the greens to grow about three times as fast as they would in an outdoor garden.
The Space10 team estimates that Lokol uses 90% less water than a traditional garden to produce the same amount of greens, since the crops grow at a faster rate.
Space10 gave 2,000 free samples of Lokal microgreens to London Design Week attendees.
The purpose was to see how Londoners felt about Ikea's experiment and food grown hydroponically in general. In a press release, the team said they were optimistic about the project.
Michael La Cour, Managing Director of IKEA Food Services, said in a statement that Lokal still needs to be developed further before the company decides whether to sell it in stores.
The Space10 team is now working on adding sensors to the growing trays, so that users can track how the greens grow using Google Home. Using machine learning, the sensor system could allow gardeners to learn how to improve the growing process. This isn't the first time Ikea has experimented with agriculture. In late 2016, Space10 launched a flat-pack spherical garden called the Growroom that grows plants, veggies, and herbs. Ikea made the Growroom's design plans open-source in February 2017.
drphungky on October 3rd, 2017 at 16:21 UTC »
I would love to see this as an almost out of the box solution for aquaponics. With minimal modifications, a fish tank, pump, and siphon could be added to this.
For those not in the know, contrary to hydroponics, which requires regular maintenance and costly chemicals, or aquaculture (raising fish) which requires cleaning the water periodically, the combination of the two, aquaponics, just works. Water from the fish tanks is pumped up to the grow beds and then eventually drained back to the fiah tank.The fish waste feeds the plants in the growbed, and the plants (and worms, usually) clean the water for the fish. There's a whole subculture of people who do it for fun, AND those who do it for actual food production. A large enough system lets you harvest veggies AND fish which is great. It's particularly popular in places like Australia, with good year round weather for aquaponic farming, but water scarcity issues that make it more attractive than small scale traditional agriculture. Aquaponics keeps WAY more water in the system, as mentioned in the article.
If you want more information, I'd love to say check out /r/aquaponics, but that place is often a ghost town. Check out Aquaponic Gardening by Sylvia Bernstein, or any number of specialized aquaponics forums. It's a great hobby, and way better than bending down in the dirt, messing with weeds and keeping critters away like an outdoor garden. I do both, but once I have more space the aquaponics will expand like crazy.
FarkCookies on October 3rd, 2017 at 15:31 UTC »
Wait, IKEA has been selling indoor farming systems for a while: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/indoor-gardening/indoor-growing-cultivators/ . I actually have one.
Jeptic on October 3rd, 2017 at 13:07 UTC »
And all the home pot farmers collectively say, duh!