LED lighting combining hydroponics system enables people to cultivate food anytime anywhere. In France, a startup company has turned an underground garage in Paris into a vertical farm to grow mushroom and greens, providing fresh food for local people.

The government built several parking spaces under the city of Paris during 1960’s to 1970’s and these spaces become abandoned as the driving population declined. La Caverne, a French startup, thus decided to grow vegetables via urban agriculture project in a garage under the city.

(Image: La Caverne)

Founders of La Caverne, Jean-Noël Gertz and Théophile Champagnat, have been utilizing abandoned urban spaces since 2017. They transformed an old military storage room into an urban farming site in Strasbourg in 2017 and carried the refined cultivation system to Paris, where they rented the underground garage from a social building to build a new farm.

La Caverne constructed an urban farm with LED lighting and hydroponics system in the underground park which takes over 3,500 square meters. Mushrooms, greens and herbs are the major crops grown in the farm with the yearly production target of 54 tones.