The Farm That Grows in 42 Days

• No sunlight. No soil. Just 42 days.

BIVAN SALUSEKI

Yangling, China

IN YANGLING, China’s “Agricultural Science City”, a seed becomes a head of butter lettuce ready to eat in 42 days – grown under LED lights, fed by nutrient solution and picked without washing.

Welcome to the Yangling Smart Agriculture Demonstration Park.

The park brings together more than 1,100 new technologies. On the ground floor, Red Tilapia are raised at 120kg per cubic metre in recycled water. Only five percent of the water is changed daily, yet the farm produces 30-40 tonnes of sashimi-grade fish a year, worth about K5 million.

Upstairs, in a 30,000m² smart greenhouse, Dutch tomatoes grow in coconut bags with no soil for 11 months. Yield: 28kg per square metre. A farmer checks temperature and humidity on his phone – 23.1°C, 62 percent – and the system adjusts itself.

Once matured, you harvest the tomatoes every day for nine months!

The most striking sight is the plant factory: a 24-layer vertical farm, the first fully automated one in China. The lights follow a “light recipe” – more blue light for strong roots, more red light for growth. Just four to five people run the whole facility.

“In the past, farmers relied on experience; now they can also rely on algorithms,” said a journalist from Ethiopia.

He added: “This saves land and water while giving high yields. It will help food security and desert greening.”

Yangling has already trained 400,000 people among them Africans. Its model has reached 10 countries. A solar-powered container farm now grows vegetables year-round on the cold plateaus of Tajikistan, thanks to the technology from China. Robots and drones do look after the plants and harvest with very little human intervention.

For Zambia, the lesson is clear. We have land, water and sun. What we need is organisation, processing and data.

As our guide Wang Lu put it: “The weather is unpredictable, but data never lies.” https://enews.daily-mail.co.zm/welcome/home