Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Clarisse Treillesand today I’m talking about Interstellar Lab’s vision for the agriculture of the future.
Grow vanilla in Canada and passion fruit in England? Tomorrow, it may not be such a far-fetched idea anymore. In any case, this is what the French start-up Interstellar Lab imagines, with its hydroponic project called BioPod.
In a few words, it is a portable module about ten meters long in which shelves are installed for growing plants above ground.
Parameters such as air, humidity and water are monitored in real time to optimize production and minimize waste.
Tests on medicinal plants
The Interstellar Lab team has been working on it for four years. This month, the first model ever built was presented to the press. Interstellar Lab intends to accelerate the pace, and intends to manufacture a hundred models of this type by next year.
While these BioPods can’t feed the entire planet, they are a response to overuse of farmland and climate change that threatens to destroy crops.
Farmers are not the only ones interested. Interstellar Lab also participates in tests with pharmaceutical manufacturers, who study the growth of certain species of plants with medicinal properties in an artificial environment.
Strawberries on Mars?
And the stakes go beyond our dear planet: according to Interstellar Lab, this technological project revives space exploration. The start-up dreams of being able to embark its module on space missions… and why not one day grow strawberries on Mars.
Well, even if NASA and CNES got wind of the project, we still lean more towards science fiction than reality. Moreover, the reference to the film Alone on Mars will not have escaped you. In this story, an astronaut left for dead on the red planet tries to grow his own food to survive in this inhospitable arid desert.