Farm in a box [The big picture News]

The newest wrinkle in industrialization doesn\´t involve computer chips or car parts but the manufacturing of... lettuce. In place of open fields of green, plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura has turned a former Sony Corp. semiconductor plant in Tagajo, Japan, into a roughly 2,300-squaremeter indoor garden plot. The crop is grown under 17,500 specially made LED lights on racks that reach to the ceiling. Purple LEDs stand in for night, and white lights are adjusted over the course of the day to mimic the rising and setting of the sun. Shimamura\´s high-tech horticultural fab, which opened in July, can grow lettuce at more than twice the rate of outdoor farms. Meanwhile, control over the "weather" at the indoor facility lets the plants thrive on 1 percent of the amount of water that a typical farm uses.