Babylon Micro-Farms Provides Local Produce During The Pandemic
April 27, 2020
By Courteney Stuart
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- The coronavirus pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in this country’s food supply chain, and the co-founder of a local company, Babylon micro-farms, says it's part of a solution.
“What we saw was an opportunity for technology to make this kind of indoor farming accessible,” said Alexander Oleson, who co-founded Babylon with Graham Smith while they were undergraduate students at the University of Virginia in 2016.
“What we’ve done is basically load all the complex aspects of growing, so nutrient dosing, environmental control, LED grow lights and that kind of thing, into a standardized unit that can be produced at scale,“ Smith said.
Each modular vertical farming unit can hold about 500 plants and yields about 50 pounds of produce each month.
Oleson said each micro-farm takes up about 15 square feet while growing the same quantity outdoors would require 2,000 square feet.
“We’re using 90 percent less water than outdoors," Oleson said. "There’s no intensive pesticide, no intensive fertilizer.”
The company caters to commercial clients like universities, hospitals, and senior living facilities. It operates the units virtually through the cloud using an app.
"All the user has to do is plant their seed pods and harvest,” Oleson said.
During the pandemic, Babylon micro-farms has also donated surplus to the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. Branch Manager Joe Caputi says locally grown produce has been critical during this crisis.
“It allows us to get their product into the hands of people who really need fresh vegetables and nutritious pounds of food,” Caputi said.
Oleson says having fresh produce that doesn’t rely on a long food supply chain has been a benefit to Babylon's paying clients as well.
“For a lot of the health care and senior living, it’s been really encouraging to see how happy they are to have their fresh produce every week despite the disruption to the supply chain and the crisis around them,” he said