Ten times the yield per unit area with vertical farming on our campus

On the Gebze Technical University (GTÜ) campus, where our lab KutmanLab is based at the Institute of Biotechnology, there is an LED-Supported Vertical Farming Laboratory (LAVFARM), set up for smart agriculture applications under a university and industry collaboration. In this lab, 20 different plant species were grown without soil or sunlight, with water and LED light alone. No pesticides or herbicides were used.

Under the project, three-tier vertical growing areas were built in two containers, each with a floor area of 20 square metres, which raised the plant growing area to 120 square metres. Growing the 20 kinds of plants together in stacked layers gave ten times the yield per unit area.

In these trial runs, the plants came to harvest sooner than in conventional production and gave a higher yield.

Source: GTÜ