Behind a blue wall that seals a former highway tunnel stretches a massive indoor farm bathed in rose-tinted light.
Fruits and vegetables grow hydroponically in vertically stacked layers inside, illuminated by neon-pink LEDs instead of sunlight.
Operators of this high-tech facility in South Korea say it is the world‘s first indoor vertical farm built in a tunnel. It‘s also the largest such farm in the country and one of the biggest in the world, with a floor area of 2,300 square meters (25,000 square feet).
Instead of the chirrups of cicadas, Claude Debussy‘s “Clair de Lune” resonates in the tunnel in hopes of stimulating the crops‘ healthy growth.
“We are playing classical music because vegetables also love listening to music like we do,” said Choi Jae Bin, head of NextOn, the company that runs the vertical farm.
Sixty types of fruits and vegetables grow in optimized conditions using NextOn‘s own growth and harvest systems. Among them, 42 are certified as no-pesticide, no-herbicide and non-GMO products, said Dave Suh, NextOn‘s chief technology officer.