Best Discovery This Week: Tech In Canada
Best Discovery This Week: Tech In Canada
Roopinder Tara
May 04, 2018
Contributors: Michael Alba, Emily Pollock, Juliver Ramirez
Once a year, Ontario trots out its brightest companies, hippest startups, and most amazing technologies and sets a stage for it all at OCE Discovery conference in downtown Toronto. This year, over 3,600 attendees, 550 companies and exhibitors made Discovery a pretty hot ticket. ENGINEERING.com, headquartered in nearby Mississauga, dropped in to cover it.
During her keynote speech, Megan Smith–once a CTO of the United States, a VP at Google, an MIT graduate, and now spearheading shift7 (that’s the “&” symbol on the keyboard)–gave a Silicon Valley blessing to the Canadian event. Smith expressed her belief that “if we include everyone, we can fix nearly everything.”
Have Your Kale and Eat It Too
Living room furniture can sprout plants. That's a good thing for those seeking greens closer to home, says Conner Tidd, of Just Vertica
From the abundance of booths devoted to tech farming, it would seem one of the world’s problems that Smith alluded to is the lack of kale. The bitter leaf that ruins salads and smoothies was featured in three booths.
“You’ve not had kale like this kale,” said Conner Tidd, of Just Vertical, as we ripped off a leaf from a mini vertical farm designed to double as living room furniture. The company grows the kale and other edible plants through hydroponics, combining farming and living room decoration. Sure enough, the kale was not bitter. “That’s just the way it’s grown on industrial farms,” said Tidd.
Looking like an abandoned microwave overrun by nature, modgarden's Tiny Farm offers another solution for cultivating your own vegetables.
Down the aisle, another tech farmer promises “a salad a day” in what is either the smallest farm in the world or the greenest appliance. The size of a microwave, the countertop “tiny farm” by modgarden brims with leaves, all presumably edible. The farm appliance can be ordered now for $500 and will be $650 if you wait for its production in Fall 2018.
The geodesic half-dome greenhouse by husband and wife Ben Canning and Stefany Nieto of Growing North aims to bring vegetables to the native people of northern Canada, people who rarely, if ever, see anything that is green and edible, much less kale.
“We gave one girl a lettuce and you should have seen her face light up as she ate it,” said Destine Lee at the booth.
Growing North runs on the goodness of the hearts of its founders, making it a non-profit operation. Its ability to harness solar energy during the long, sunny Arctic days–up to 23 hours of sun a day–makes it green in more ways than one. The organization relays the energy into the country’s grid. The greenhouses then draw from the grid during the dark Arctic winter, enabling the produce to grow year-round.