<Anchor> In
places with low sunlight, such as Sejong Station in Antarctica, only leafy vegetables such as cucumbers and zucchini could not be grown, so only leafy vegetables such as lettuce were cultivated. Domestic technical staff developed a technology to grow fruit vegetables with artificial lighting.
Reporter Park Chan-beom.
<Reporter> This
is the movie'Martian' about the survival of an astronaut isolated on Mars.
The protagonist's survival food is potatoes grown directly with artificial lighting.
However, most of the vegetables grown under artificial lighting on Earth are leafy vegetables that grow rapidly with little light.
Fruit vegetables such as peppers and tomatoes require stronger lighting and a lot of water, so they have not received the attention of indoor agriculture, but domestic researchers have developed a next-generation'plant factory' that can grow two types of vegetables simultaneously with the same lighting energy.
[Ahn Se-woong / Researcher at the Academy of Horticultural Sciences: Using LED light to replace sunlight.] We have
improved the cultivation environment such as temperature so that fruit vegetables grow fresh even with weak lighting.
Fruit vegetables grown only with LED artificial light can be harvested in 50 to 70 days, and leafy vegetables in 30 to 40 days.
This plant factory is first moved to the Antarctic Sejong Station.
The base crew has grown only leafy vegetables such as lettuce and garland chrysanthemums, but now fruit vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini can be grown indoors.
[Lee Jun-hyuk/Head of Antarctic Sejong Station Facility Maintenance Manager: Seeing green vegetables is a pleasure.] The
Rural Development Administration expected that the productivity of indoor agriculture or urban agriculture, which is having difficulty in supplying this technology, will also greatly increase.
(Video coverage: Kim Heung-sik, video editing: Jo Moo-hwan, CG: Choi Jin-hoi)