Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
SOUTH AFRICA: “The Face of Future Farming” Aeroponic & NFT Systems
Impilo Ponics is a South African based enterprise and was formed 3 yrs ago with a mandate to design various vertical growing towers to meet the ever-increasing demand for sustainable fresh nutritional food security produce especially in rural poverty-stricken areas on the African continent
Impilo Ponics is a South African based enterprise and was formed 3 yrs ago with a mandate to design various vertical growing towers to meet the ever-increasing demand for sustainable fresh nutritional food security produce especially in rural poverty-stricken areas on the African continent, consequently, we identified that our designs are also in demand for Urban based populace by means of individual residential units that allow for space-restricted dwellings Ie residential apartments, townhouse dwellings, underutilized rooftop areas to name a few.
The tower systems are made up of modular panels made from recycled plastic with various additional additives for color and UV stabilization, the unique design of the panels have the advantage of “flat Packing” which allow for compact packaging reducing logistical transportation costs both locally and Internationally, the tower designs allow for a very simple DIY assembly in a very short period of time with minimal effort and no tools involved.
We have two discipline options in the way of Aeroponics ( high pressure misting irrigation 30 >>50 Micron mist) and NFT ( a low pressure spraying irrigation 200 > 250 Micron spray), the modular design allows for additional tower segments to be added as tower height extensions as and when the users want to increase growing capacity for higher yields of the cultivars planted in the towers, we promote “multi planting” in the growing pockets of the tower for example:- Chillis x 3 plants, Basil x 3 plants, Spinach x 3 plants, Peppers x 3 plants, etc, this means that in an 84 pocket tower, for instance, you can plant up to approx. 250 plants vertically in a 1.5m2 footprint area, the system is a soilless growing method that reduces the need for fertile soil as a growing medium and allows the flexibility of dead space utilization.
The Aeroponic system only requires a timer-based irrigation time cycle that drastically reduces both energy and water source consumption - the towers only consume on average 2 litres of nutrient water source per day and the pressure pump energy usage as little as 30 watts per day, this lends itself to utilizing a small affordable solar panel system to run the towers, rainwater collection can also be utilized to sustain the water source, the end result being that we have an “off the grid” solution especially for areas with limited resources.
The NFT solution uses more or less the same amount of both energy & water consumption and again can be utilized into an “off the grid” solution.
The main difference between the two systems is that the Aeroponics generates a highly oxygenated nutrient-based mist that adheres to the root zone and during the ‘rest period between cycles” allows up to 90% of absorption of the Nutrient based nutrient solution, this encourages a shorter maturity of both plant growth and yield.
The NFT system has continual spray irrigation of root zone very much on the hydroponic principle but in a vertical environment instead of a horizontal environment, however, the irrigation cycle can be setup through a programmed timer at prescribed time periods before dehydration of the root zone takes place, all this depends on the cultivar for hydration requirements for example:- lettuce requires regular irrigation where chillis/peppers/tomatoes, etc require less
The tower designs also allow for a very simple conversion from NFT to Aeroponics at the discretion of the end-user.
The Impilo panel system also allows for a multitude of tower sizes and designs to client specifications for example:- we can create square towers, hexagonal towers, Cylindrical towers of any size and height.
Our latest designs are introducing Aeroponic Living walls, horizontal “tuber” aeroponic growing chambers (baby potato yields of up to 20Kgs per m2 surface area on a conservative 100 day growing cycle -comfortably 3 growing cycles per annum).
We also design and manufacture modular greenhouses as a turnkey solution for Micro farming to commercial size operations, budget-related affordability for a new generation of smart farming entrepreneurs, and micro-farming opportunities.
Click & Grow 25 Is An Efficient, Self-Monitoring Indoor Garden
“I started the company with a dream to make fresh food available and accessible for everyone and with the Click & Grow 25, we finally made it happen in a sustainable way,” said Mattias Lepp, founder, and CEO of Click & Grow
Written by Dawn Hammon
June 9, 2021
In a world struggling to find balance between busy lifestyles and healthy living, Click and Grow 25 aims to offer an easy-to-use way to grow organic food inside your home.
The smart indoor garden only takes up as much space as a microwave, yet with stacking trays, you can grow fresh produce for one person, two people or an entire family. With such a compact design, anyone can incorporate the Click & Grow 25 into their apartment, home or office.
The system is intuitive and does most of the work for you. Simply select your proprietary biodegradable Smart Soil plant pods, which are similar to the design used in single-serve coffee machines. Each pod is pre-loaded with seeds and soil. Once planted, the built-in technology takes over, monitoring the growth of leafy greens, fruits, and herbs.
This self-growing garden takes care of plants automatically by maintaining optimal levels of moisture, nutrients, root oxygen and pH. The device ensures perfect conditions needed to grow lush produce at a faster rate than you will find in an outdoor garden. Plus, the direct garden-to-table aspect offers a higher nutrient content than store-bought food, often pulled from the field weeks before. All plants are organic without the need for fertilizers and pesticides.
Click & Grow 25 not only provides convenience, but its energy-efficient design consumes just 200 kWh of electricity per year, which equates to about $40 in large urban areas. An associated app lets users know when it is time to add more water and offers harvesting tips as well as recipes.
“I started the company with a dream to make fresh food available and accessible for everyone and with the Click & Grow 25, we finally made it happen in a sustainable way,” said Mattias Lepp, founder and CEO of Click & Grow. “With the impact of population growth and the demand on our natural resources, it is inevitable for us to become more self-sufficient. I believe we are all going to be growing some of our food at home soon and I’m certain we’ve developed the best solution to do just that.”
Click & Grow 25 recently launched via Kickstarter, where it was fully funded in the first 20 minutes. At the time of writing, it had raised over $500,000 of the $35,000 goal.
Images via Click & Grow
Home Kits Allows To Grow All Kinds of Plants
If you're the green-fingered type, then Altifarm's latest addition to its indoor garden range—the PicoMax—will be of interest. The brand has just launched its crowdfunding campaign
If you're the green-fingered type, then Altifarm's latest addition to its indoor garden range—the PicoMax—will be of interest. The brand has just launched its crowdfunding campaign.
Growing your own flowers, plants, fruit, and vegetables can be a laborious process for many. Plants die easily without the correct care and attention, and busy lifestyles mean we can't always get out in the garden and tend to a vegetable patch or flower bed. Thankfully, Altifarm has the answer. After successfully launching its palm-sized Pico indoor garden via a well-received 2020 crowdfunding campaign, the brand is back with the latest in its range; the PicoMax.
What is the PicoMax indoor garden?
Essentially, PicoMax is an indoor planter that automatically waters your plants and provides them with exactly the right amount of light to ensure rapid growth and an abundance of greenery.
Altifarm has designed the PicoMax to water your flowers automatically and provide them with the correct amount of light to encourage rapid and abundant growth.
It does this using an irrigation system attached to the base of the planter, along with full-spectrum white LEDs (plus specific red and blue wavelengths) on telescopic arms above the planter. Telescopic, to allow you to move them up as your plants or vegetables grow.
Using its own Real-Time Clock (RTC) powered by a button cell (the first of its kind among its indoor garden peers), and a rechargeable battery pack that lasts up to four days, you can pretty much leave your plants to their own devices and just watch as they grow.
Read the complete article at www.makeuseof.com.
Publication date: Wed 26 May 2021
This Indoor Garden Will Feed You Greens Year-Round
The plants grow out of coffee-pod-like earth nuggets and the whole system is designed for minimal interaction. The Smart Soil pods contain calibrated dirt and nutrients and the system waters the plants automatically
May 11, 2021
Click & Grow 25 is the latest project by former orchestra conductor Mattias Lepp who felt that the idea of indoor gardens—essentially, a farmer’s market in a box—would be just the tool for staving off future food shortages. His company, founded in 2009, raised $11 million in 2018 to develop new materials and hardware technologies for indoor gardens. Now, he and the Click & Grow team are taking the tools they used to build large-scale gardens and bringing them into the home.
Lepp calls his tech “hyper-local farming,” and he claims that what he and his team created is entirely unique.
“We’re the only ones in both vertical farming and smaller indoor growing device segment who have figured out how to provide the future of sustainable food while being profitable and having a global reach,” he said. “Compared to big vertical farms we’ve looked at what’s the real problem of vitamin-rich foods like leafy greens—it’s the overly long supply chains that produce waste, nutritional degradation, and transport emissions. The greens from vertical farms still go through the traditional food supply chain, albeit they’re fresher, cleaner, and come from a more local urban farm, they sit in stores, get moved around and half go to waste in a dark corner of a fridge. Unlike vertical farms, we’ve taken a step out of the traditional supply chain and figured out the only sustainable solution, both in terms of nature and business, and that is growing food at the place of consumption.”
Photo: Click & Grow
The Click & Grow 25, which is currently available through Kickstarter, costs $399 for early birds and consists of a frame, containers, and lights. The plants grow out of coffee-pod-like earth nuggets and the whole system is designed for minimal interaction. The Smart Soil pods contain calibrated dirt and nutrients and the system waters the plants automatically.
Lepp’s goal was to make the system as small and simple as possible.
“In 2018 we looked at the numbers and figured out that a family of 4 could feasibly grow a fifth of their food plate in expendable living space, on just 80 square feet of wall at home, for example,” he said. “The idea went through different experiments and prototypes through the years, mainly focusing on how to integrate a garden of this size into even a small New York City apartment and into anyone’s busy lifestyle with its ease of use.”
The team plans to ship in February 2022, and there are a number of permutations of the garden product, which you can stack them against a wall for maximum usage of space. An app will tell you when you add water and when your greens are ready to nosh.
The product is already fully funded to the tune of more than $227,000 and counting, and it looks like just the thing for folks who might need to feed a hungry family or just a hungry rabbit.
John Biggs is a writer from Ohio who lives in Brooklyn. He likes books, watches, and his dog. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo. Signal: +16468270591 Telegram: @johnbiggs
Lead photo: Photo: Click & Grow
Want To Grow Your Own Food? Try A Hydroponic Garden
Today’s home kits are stylish, smart, and easier to use than ever. Here’s how to get started.
05.08.2021
Today’s home kits are stylish, smart, and easier to use than ever. Here’s how to get started.
WE ALL BECAME homesteaders during the pandemic. The inability to leave home and disruptions to the food supply chain led a lot of people to plant gardens to grow their own food. Upon flexing their green thumbs, though, many found that gardening comes with its own set of issues, from vermin to seasonal shifts. But what if there was a way to bypass those vexations? Say hello to home hydroponics.
How Home Hydroponics Work
To grow something hydroponically is to grow plants without soil. It’s long been associated with growing weed—just saying the word hydroponics will induce smirks—but in recent years, systems like Rise Gardens and AeroGarden have come along to give gardeners a sleek, high-tech way to grow produce like bell peppers, lettuce, and tomatoes from the confines of their homes.
All you need for a hydroponic growing system is a bin filled with water, nutrients, and LED lights, so you don’t need to buy a whole system at all, really. But many of the systems on the market are designed to be aesthetically pleasing and meant to be part of your home, not hidden away.
Most are horizontal and basically have a planter bed that you drop seedpods into. A pump delivers water and nutrients to the seeds, and LED lights mimic the sun. Some systems are vertical, like the Gardyn and the forthcoming Soilless. Large systems typically start at around $400, with plenty of small ones to be found around $100.
Hank Adams, founder, and CEO of Rise Gardens, lives in Chicago where the growing season is short and the summers are hot, he says. A lot of gardening enthusiasts use the hydroponic system to supplement their outdoor endeavors, and he says it's the food lovers that really get a lot out of it. “Everybody knows that fresh ingredients are better. They're better tasting, and what may be less well known, is just how much more nutrient-dense they are,” says Adams. Compared to produce that has been shipped to the grocery store, traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles, freshly plucked lettuce can be more nutritious. It tastes better when it's been freshly snipped too.
The aroma of fresh produce is enough to make Teresa Edmisten, an architect with Tvsdesign in Atlanta, appreciate her hydroponic system. Hers is more utilitarian, she says, but it still effectively grows basil which she and her husband frequently turn into pesto. “Depending on the varieties you do, those leaves are luscious. And the smell is ridiculously beautiful,” says Edmisten.
More Than Just a Garden
One thing that’s certain about modern hydroponic systems is that they are not what they used to be. Manufacturers are being intentional about designing structures that you’d actually want decorating your home.
For Rise, Adams worked with industrial designers to create a system that is made of polished metal and real wood. They went through seven prototypes before landing on a model that can double up as a piece of furniture. Their systems are modular, allowing users to stack up to three tiers of gardens, and the top one has a hard surface that can serve as a table. “It’s minimalist because we wanted plants to be the stars of the show, but it's still a physical structure that has some size to it,” says Adams. “So we wanted people to find it attractive and kind of neutral, so it would fit a lot of different settings.”
A more artful approach to this is the forthcoming system made by Soilless. The company is the brainchild of Westen Johnson and Julie Joo, two graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design who first came up with the system while they were students. The design is simple: “It’s basically a big bag,” says Johnson. He explains that the bag consists of two layers that seal together similarly to a pool float, except instead of being inflated with air, it’s water. The vertical system can grow up to 23 plants. It hangs from a rod with an LED lighting fixture attached and looks like something you'd see hanging in a high-end loft. “It's basically something that a normal person can afford and eat off of that's like a living piece of art in your home,” says Johnson. When the system launches, it’ll retail for around $200.
There's a System for Every Space
You don't need a suburban house with ample space in order to make room for a hydroponic gardening system. In Atlanta, Greg Crafter founded Produce’d with the urban dweller in mind. “For an urbanite, space is very limited and comes at a premium So you want to utilize it and maximize it the best way you can,” says Crafter. People testing his system, which will launch in Atlanta this summer, keep it everywhere from their office to their living room.
If space is just too tight, there are tabletop options too. Rise has a personal garden system that grows 12 plants, but others include Edn which grows 10 plants, down to the petite Sprout by Aero Garden, which grows three plants (perfect for kitchen herbs). These smaller systems will probably not replace the produce you buy at the grocery store, but it’s a good way to supplement things like herbs.
Plants Are Good for Your Mental Health
Spending so much time at home has made us rethink our indoor spaces. We’re surrounded by square shapes and hard lines, which, whether we know it or not, has our brains longing for something akin to nature. It’s why more people are turning to biophilic (love of life) design, which focuses on incorporating nature into indoor spaces. “There are certain patterns and forms and sights and sounds that we encounter in the natural world that give us a positive physiological response,” explains Jennifer Bissonnette, the interim director of RISD’s Nature Lab. From the sound of running water to the aroma of basil, biophilic design elements can help reduce stress, lower blood pressure, and improve overall happiness, says Bissonnette.
While being a “plant parent” is a familiar Instagram trope, it applies to hydroponic plant owners too. Hydroponic systems don't necessarily require the same amount of daily attention that a houseplant might, but engaging with these plants makes us feel connected to them. “I can't stress that enough: It’s wonderful to have it in your living environment, but there's something about engaging with another living thing and understanding that you're in a relationship with it. I think that's a marvelous thing for us,” says Bissonnette.
In a continuous loop of Zoom calls and reruns of The Office, these systems can also help you feel grounded. For Edmisten, checking on her plants is part of her daily routine. “It’s just a focused escape. The escape isn't going somewhere else, it's getting connected to where you are,” says Edmisten.
Tech Offers Faster, Foolproof Growing
Want produce quickly? Then hydroponic growing is definitely for you. “The plants grow twice as fast, because the nutrients are being supplied right to the roots. You can have a smaller garden and still produce a lot more food with it,” says Johnson.
As an added bonus, many of these systems connect with apps that make it harder to kill your plants. Rise, for example, has users enter which plants they’re growing on the app, and then it tracks the water levels, pH balance, and sets the lighting schedule. “We tell you when to do it, how to do it, how much. You really don't need to be techie,” says Adams.
Lia Picard is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who loves exploring all things food and design.
Lead Photo: COURTESY OF RISE GARDENS
Natufia Labs Raises $3.5M For Its Indoor Garden Appliance, Relocates To Saudi Arabia
Natufia makes an automated home gardening appliance about the size of a refrigerator that automatically controls elements such as lighting, as well as water and nutrient dispensing
Natufia Labs, the Estonia-based automated kitchen garden startup, announced today that it is relocating to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). KAUST is also leading a $3.5 million investment round in Natufia, awarding $2 million through the KAUST Innovation Fund. This brings the total amount of money raised by Natufia to $4.7 million.
Natufia makes an automated home gardening appliance about the size of a refrigerator that automatically controls elements such as lighting, as well as water and nutrient dispensing. The $13,000 Natufia cabinet uses seedpods that are placed in a special unit to germinate before being transferred to pots to grow and be harvested. Right now, Natufia’s appliance can grow leafy greens, herbs, and flowers.
In a press announcement sent to The Spoon, Natufia Labs CEO and Founder Gregory Lu said, “From Estonian icy-snow winters to the arid climate of Saudi Arabia, sustainable access to food supply is a global issue, so it is more than natural that this technology is thriving from Saudi Arabia.”
Problems with our existing food supply chain were revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, causing a surge of interest in consumer indoor agriculture products. A new wave of high-tech appliances automate all the “hard” parts about growing food, allowing people to more easily grow and control their own food supply. Other players in the space including Gardyn, AeroGrow and Click & Grow have all seen demand increase during the pandemic.
With its new funding, Natufia said it will accelerate the development of its next models, hopefully bringing the price down to something more affordable for even more people.
FILED UNDER: CONNECTED KITCHEN FUNDING NEWS SMART GARDEN
Purdue Plant Science Startup Receives NSF Funding to Advance In-Home Greenhouse Technologies
February 8, 2021
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue University-affiliated startup that designs, distributes and supports direct-to-consumer, in-home greenhouses has won a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant.
The SBIR grant, worth $256,000, is in addition to $50,000 in matching funding from Elevate Ventures to conduct research and development work on multispectral photomorphogenesis in rotary aeroponic cultivation chambers.
Heliponix LLC, founded by Purdue Polytechnic Institute graduates Ivan Ball and Scott Massey, sells the GroPod Smart Garden Appliance. It is a small in-home greenhouse to grow daily servings of Pure Produce from subscription Seed Pods. The dishwasher-sized device fits under a kitchen counter and grows produce year-round, providing consumers with lettuce and other greens that are fresh and pesticide-free.
Heliponix, a Purdue-affiliated startup that designs, distributes and supports direct-to-consumer, in-home greenhouses, has won a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant. (Image provided)
Heliponix LLC, founded by Purdue Polytechnic Institute graduates Ivan Ball and Scott Massey, sells the GroPod Smart Garden Appliance. It is a small in-home greenhouse to grow daily servings of Pure Produce from subscription Seed Pods. The dishwasher-sized device fits under a kitchen counter and grows produce year-round, providing consumers with lettuce and other greens that are fresh and pesticide-free.
As a leader in tunable horticultural research lighting systems, the Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) Center of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working with Heliponix to provide research-grade, multi-spectral, tunable LED modules and associated programmable control systems compatible with Heliponix’s rotary chamber.
These modules are based on the LESA Center’s TIGER horticulture research lighting modules and will provide the research flexibility needed in Phase I to optimize the LED illumination impact on plant growth variables in leafy greens including biomass, crop yield, nutritional content and energy efficiency.
“NSF is proud to support the technology of the future by thinking beyond incremental developments and funding the most creative, impactful ideas across all markets and areas of science and engineering,” said Andrea Belz, division director of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships at NSF. “With the support of our research funds, any deep technology startup or small business can guide basic science into meaningful solutions that address tremendous needs.”
Massey said, “In the wake of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic’s disruptive force on produce cultivation and recurring food safety recalls, there’s an urgent need to democratize cultivation to establish food sovereignty. We are incredibly thankful for the backing of the National Science Foundation, Purdue University, Elevate Ventures and the countless Hoosiers who have supported our pursuit to grow to become the world’s largest farm through our connected, smart garden appliances known as GroPods without owning a single acre of land.”
Once a small business gains a Phase I SBIR/STTR grant (up to $256,000), it becomes eligible to apply for a Phase II grant (up to $1 million). Small businesses with Phase II grants are eligible to receive up to $500,000 in additional matching funds with qualifying third-party investment or sales.
Startups or entrepreneurs who submit a three-page project pitch will know within three weeks if they meet the program’s objectives to support innovative technologies that show promise of commercial and/or societal impact and involve a level of technical risk. Small businesses with innovative science and technology solutions and commercial potential are encouraged to apply. All proposals submitted to the NSF SBIR/STTR program, also known as America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, undergo a rigorous merit-based review process. Learn more about America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF.
About the Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) Center
The LESA Center is a graduated National Science Foundation engineering research center, with matching fund support from the New York State Empire Development Corporation and corporate membership. LESA is an interdisciplinary, multi-university center developing “Systems that Think.” It is dedicated to developing autonomous intelligent systems to address modern challenges in the connected environment and is housed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. To learn more, visit https://lesa.rpi.edu.
About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Founded in 1824, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is America’s first technological research university. Rensselaer encompasses five schools, 32 research centers, more than 145 academic programs and a dynamic community made up of more than 7,600 students and over 100,000 living alumni. Rensselaer faculty and alumni include more than 145 National Academy members, six members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, six National Medal of Technology winners, five National Medal of Science winners, and a Nobel Prize winner in physics. With nearly 200 years of experience advancing scientific and technological knowledge, Rensselaer remains focused on addressing global challenges with a spirit of ingenuity and collaboration. To learn more, visit www.rpi.edu.
About the National Science Foundation's Small Business Programs
America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $1.75 million to support research and development, helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.1 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to today’s toughest challenges. Ranked the No. 5 Most Innovative University in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at purdue.edu.
Writer: Chris Adam, cladam@prf.org
Source: Scott Massey, scott@GroPod.io
Rise Gardens Debuts Indoor Smart Garden With Alexa Integration
It’s hard to describe the feeling of pride that comes with eating something that you’ve grown yourself
By Cody DeBos
January 15, 2021
Image: Rise Gardens
Growing food looks a lot different than it did even 50 years ago. No longer do you need a sprawling outdoor garden to grow fresh produce for your family. Advancements in the agriculture industry like hydroponics, vertical farming, and smart gardens make it possible to grow things just about anywhere.
These high-tech approaches are highlighted by companies like Rise Gardens. As part of CES 2021, the company announced a new compact Personal Garden. The smart growing system is designed to fit in tight spaces like on a countertop or shelf. It is also equipped with a variety of smart features—including integration with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant—to make growing produce at home easier than ever.
Indoor Farming
It’s hard to describe the feeling of pride that comes with eating something that you’ve grown yourself. Whether that tomato or bowl of power greens was grown in the ground or in a hydroponic indoor garden, enjoying the fruits (or vegetables) of your labor is extremely satisfying. Not to mention the health benefits that come with eating home-grown produce.
For those who don’t have the space (or desire) to plant an outdoor garden, an indoor solution is a great alternative. Rise Gardens’ proprietary systems make it possible to cultivate high-quality produce in a smart, simple way.
The company’s new Personal Garden joins the larger, modular Family Garden as Rise continues to expand its product lineup.
Consumers are able to grow up to four large plants (like peppers, tomatoes, kale, or swiss chard), eight medium plants (such as fresh herbs and certain flowers), or 12 small plants (like radishes, beets, chives, or lavender). It’s also possible to grow microgreens in the compact setup.
The Personal Garden is just 16-inches wide and 11-inches deep, making it a perfect growing system for those with limited space.
How Does it Work?
The thought of growing plants outside of soil might seem baffling to those who aren’t familiar with hydroponics. In essence, the process aims to replicate the ideal conditions that plants would experience if they were growing outside.
The Personal Garden boasts a unique water flow system to hydrate the plants on a continuous basis so they receive just the right amount of water. Naturally-occurring nutrients like nitrate, phosphorous, and potassium are added to the water to help the plants grow. This recreates the effect of adding manure to the soil in an outdoor garden.
Meanwhile, Rise Gardens’ Personal Garden uses an array of custom LEDs to bathe the plants in broad-spectrum light. This replicates the effects of sunlight, helping the plants grow very quickly and year-round.
Finally, the Personal Garden features a number of smart integrations. Rise Gardens is working on an Alexa skill that makes it possible to control the garden’s lights and water pumps hands-free.
In a press release, CEO and founder Hank Adams said, “Ever since Rise Gardens joined the portfolio of Amazon Alexa Fund companies this fall, we’ve been excited to add voice control to our products and work with the Alexa team. Now it’s easier and more fun to grow your own food at home, year-round, even if you’ve never gardened before.”
Rise Gardens also has a smartphone app that sends users reminders about their plants and when to do things like add water or nutrients. Thanks to this smart connection, you don’t need a green thumb to grow fresh, delicious produce.
For anyone that’s looking to get into hydroponics or gardening at home, something like the Personal Garden is a perfect starting point. Then, when you’re ready to expand, Rise Gardens’ larger systems make it easy to grow food for an entire family, entirely indoors.
TAGS CES 2021
This Modular Hydroponics System Will Give You Fresh Vegetables Year-Round
If you want to enjoy fresh home-grown produce while also adding some greenery to your home, then consider the hydroponics system made by Rise Gardens
Rise Gardens Makes Growing Food
Easy With Its simple Setup And Handy App.
December 18, 2020
Hank Adams (Rise Gardens)
If you want to enjoy fresh home-grown produce while also adding some greenery to your home, then consider the hydroponics system made by Rise Gardens. This clever system grows more than 60 types of vegetables and herbs, including beets, eggplant, peas, green beans, celery, cucumbers, different variations of peppers and tomatoes, as well as rooted plants and microgreens. These can be grown anywhere in a home, thanks to built-in LED lights.
This is the only modular system on the market, which means you can buy whatever size you want and keep adding to it if you need more room to grow food. It can be built up to three tiers high, and those tiers can be set at different heights to accommodate plants of different sizes. A smaller countertop-sized Personal Garden is available for those who don't want to take up floor space with the Family Gardens.
Each of the levels holds a lot of plants. A company representative told Treehugger, "The single unit can hold up to 36 plants, and the largest unit can hold up to 108 (compared to competitors that can only hold a maximum of 30 plants). The Personal Garden can even hold up to 12 plants on its own."
Hydroponics may be a fancy-sounding word, but Rise Gardens has made the process incredibly simple. It takes only 45 minutes to assemble your garden (which is made of coated wood, not plastic, and makes for a much nicer aesthetic in the home), then you use the WiFi-enabled function to connect to an app on your smartphone that will tell you exactly what your plants need. (This step is optional.) Plant the seed pods provided by Rise Gardens by putting them into holes in the tray, then add water and plug in the system. Eventually, you'll add liquid nutrients, as well.
Hank Adams (Rise Gardens)
Rise Gardens assures that the plants will flourish in water. Through hydroponics, plants can grow larger than in soil because "they don’t have to work as hard to obtain nutrients. The plant doesn’t require an extensive root system, allowing more growth above ground." They also grow 25-30% faster, thanks to that direct contact with nutrients, and they require less water due to reduced evaporation and runoff.
While Rise Gardens does admit that soil-grown produce is more nutritious ("There is no way to compete with the power of sunlight and good soil, it's just the best"), keep in mind that the produce you buy at a store is usually picked unripe and transported from far away, which causes it to lose nutrients anyway. It could also be sprayed with pesticides, so you are still ahead by growing your own hydroponically. Plus, it's beautiful and convenient to have these vegetables flourishing in your own home.
Hank Adams (Rise Gardens)
The app is an interesting added feature, telling you exactly what your plants need at any given moment – whether they're low on water, how far along their growth is, if you should tweak their nutrient plan, etc. It also lets you set a schedule for the lights.
Rise Gardens is worth checking out for anyone interested in gardening. It's too late now for Christmas ordering, but units will deliver in early January – a little something to brighten a long, dark winter and add a satisfying crunch to your salad plate.
Sky-High Vegetables: Vertical Farming Sprouts In Singapore
Entrepreneur Jack Ng says he can produce five times as many vegetables as regular farming looking up instead of out. Half a ton of his Sky Greens bok choy and Chinese cabbages, grown inside 120 slender 30-foot towers, are already finding their way into Singapore's grocery stores
November 9, 2012
Singapore is taking local farming to the next level, literally, with the opening of its first commercial vertical farm.
Entrepreneur Jack Ng says he can produce five times as many vegetables as regular farming looking up instead of out. Half a ton of his Sky Greens bok choy and Chinese cabbages, grown inside 120 slender 30-foot towers, are already finding their way into Singapore's grocery stores.
The idea behind vertical farming is simple: Think of skyscrapers with vegetables climbing along the windows. Or a library-sized greenhouse with racks of cascading vegetables instead of books.
Ng's technology is called "A-Go-Gro," and it looks a lot like a 30-foot tall Ferris wheel for plants. Trays of Chinese vegetables are stacked inside an aluminum A-frame, and a belt rotates them so that the plants receive equal light, good airflow, and irrigation. The whole system has a footprint of only about 60 square feet or the size of an average bathroom.
Troughs of bok choy stack up vertically at the 30-feet urban farm in Singapore. The veggies rotate along the A-frame to ensure they receive even light. Courtesy of MNDSingapore.
Advocates, whose ranks are growing in cities from New York City to Sweden, say vertical farming has a handful of advantages over other forms of urban horticulture. More plants can squeeze into tight city spaces, and fresh produce can grow right next to grocery stores, potentially reducing transportation costs, carbon dioxide emissions, and risk of spoilage. Plus, most vertical farms are indoors, so plants are sheltered from shifting weather and damaging pests.
But is vertical farming just a design fad, or could it be the next frontier of urban agriculture? That depends on your angle — and location.
Implementing these "farmscrapers" on a commercial scale has been challenging, and making them economical has been almost impossible.
It's still up for debate whether vertical farms are more efficient at producing food than traditional greenhouses, says Gene Giacomelli, a plant scientist at the University of Arizona, who directs their the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center.
The limiting factor is light. The total food produced depends on the amount of light reaching plants. Although vertical farms can hold more plants, they still receive just about the same quantity of sunlight as horizontal greenhouses.
"The plants have to share the existing light, and they just grow more slowly," Giacomelli tells The Salt. "You can't amplify the sun."
For American cities, like New York and Chicago, Giacomelli thinks putting plain-old greenhouses on rooftops could be just as efficient as vertical farms – and a lot easier to implement.
In fact, two companies are already working on that approach. Gotham Greens is producing pesticide-free lettuce and basil for restaurants and retailers from rooftop greenhouses in Brooklyn, while Lufa Farms grows 23 veggie varieties in a 31,000-foot greenhouse atop a Montreal office building.
But for the island of Singapore, where real estate is a premium, vertical farming might be the most viable option. "Singapore could be a special case, where land value is so exceptionally high, that you have no choice but to go vertically," Giacomelli says.
An illustration of the 177-feet vertical farm by Plantagon currently in the works for Linkoping, Sweden.
The Sky Greens vegetables are "flying off the shelves," reports Channel NewsAsia — perhaps because the vertical veggies are fresher than most available in Singapore, which imports most of its produce from China, Malaysia, and the U.S. They do, however, cost about 5 to 10 percent more than regular greens.
"The prices are still reasonable and the vegetables are very fresh and very crispy," Rolasind Tan, a consumer, told Channel NewsAsia. "Sometimes, with imported food, you don't know what happens at farms there."
Lead photo: Senior Minister of State Lee Yi Shyan transplants some leafy green seedlings at the grand opening of Singapore's first commercial vertical farm. Courtesy of MNDSingapore.
SINGAPORE: Tampines Residents To Grow Vegetables From Vertical Hydroponic Kits
The scheme is part of an initiative called Our Green Hut, which also involves starting a vertical hydroponic farm to produce more than 15 types of vegetables
The kits - about 1m wide and just under 2m high - can accommodate about 20 plants. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH
November 21, 2020
SINGAPORE - Tampines residents will soon be able to grow their own organic vegetables for personal consumption in a cleaner, more efficient way.
Rather than the traditional method of planting in soil, Our Tampines Hub is offering residents vertical hydroponics kits that can be used to grow veggies at home, it announced on Saturday (Nov 21).
About 600 Tampines residents have already indicated interest in the vertical hydroponic project.ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH
The kits - about 1m wide and just under 2m high - can accommodate about 20 plants.
A pilot project will give about 50 kits free to residents whose homes are suitable, such as having enough sunlight.
The scheme is part of an initiative called Our Green Hut, which also involves starting a vertical hydroponic farm to produce more than 15 types of vegetables.
Mr. Masagos Zulkifli told reporters at Saturday's launch event: "The bigger plan is to actually grow food within Tampines. We are releasing some carpark rooftop gardens that will not just be producing vegetables, but also for residents to get involved in growing a commercially viable rooftop garden."
About 600 Tampines residents have already indicated an interest in the vertical hydroponic project.
"This is only the beginning," said Mr. Masagos. "We don't want this to be a one-time endeavor and then they throw the equipment away.
"We want them to prove that they want to do this as a continuous endeavor to grow food at home, starting with simple vegetables, and then maybe later on with more difficult ones."
Ms. Tan Min Choo is one of the first residents to start growing vegetables using the vertical hydroponic kit. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH
This also feeds into the bigger aim of Singapore meeting 30 percent of its nutritional needs by 2030, a plan that has been brought forward due to the coronavirus crisis, Mr. Masagos noted, adding: "We must also get involved in understanding what we need to grow food at home so that our children understand the technology involved, as well as the production and the growth."
Ms. Tan Min Choo, 64, a retired air traffic service officer and a volunteer at Our Tampines Hub, is one of the first residents to start growing vegetables like "chye sim" using the vertical hydroponic kit.
The structure was installed on her balcony about a month ago ahead of the pilot project.
She said: "I used to live in a kampung (village), so I always liked planting vegetables and I thought there was no harm trying something new."
The kit ensures nutrient-filled water is internally circulated so Ms. Tan does not have to water the plants daily but just monitor the nutrient level using a meter every few days and add more nutrients or water if necessary. The plants take about three weeks to harvest.
"This kit makes growing vegetables so clean, whereas soil can be dirty and dusty. It also saves space because of the vertical set-up," she added.
Lead photo: The kits - about 1m wide and just under 2m high - can accommodate about 20 plants.ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH
Introducing Our New Website!
We can bring farms to almost any space, including your home and office! Check out our new Home Farm and Office Farm offerings showcased on our website. You can also find out about how we started out and keep up to date with our blogs and events!
Due to the lockdown we've wound down farm operations for the time being, but we've been using the time to work on a number of exciting developments. 🥁 One of those is a new and improved website, which you can a first look at here!
We can bring farms to almost any space, including your home and office! Check out our new Home Farm and Office Farm offerings showcased on our website. You can also find out about how we started out and keep up to date with our blogs and events!
Click here to explore our new site.
Gardyn Aims To Make At-Home Vertical Farming Small, Simple, and Stylish
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late. Trouble is, many consumers don’t have the know-how to cultivate their own leafy greens and other produce in the backyard. Even those who do often lack adequate space.
A company called Gardyn is addressing both of those issues with an at-home vertical farming system that requires minimal input from the user and can easily fit inside a small apartment if need be. The idea, as Gardyn founder and CEO FX Rouxel explained to me over the phone last week, is to make growing food in one’s own home as simple and straightforward as possible. To do that, the company has built a farm that relies on AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and maintaining an edible crop of food. Or as Rouxel said, “The system is managing everything for you.”
Gardyn’s system is made up of two parts: a compact vertical tower, which can grow as many as 30 plants, and an accompanying app powered by an AI assistant named “Kelby.” Users only have to order seeds and “plug” the seedpods into the vertical towers. The system automatically circulates water and nutrients to the plants, while Kelby monitors plant growth and sends reminders when it’s time to add water to the garden or harvest the plants.
Right now, available crops from Gardyn’s site include mostly leafy greens and herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers can also use their own seeds if preferred.
The system uses what Rouxel calls “a hybrid of different hydroponic technologies,” including the deepwater method and aeroponics. (The company brands its approach as “hybriponics.”) By themselves, these different methods have certain limitations in the at-home setting. Deep water, where plant roots are fully submerged in nutrient-enriched water, requires a lot of space. Aeroponics is a great setup for outdoors, but once indoors it requires lighting, which gets expensive very quickly. Gardyn pulled elements from both to create a system that takes up only two square feet of space and doesn’t require any extra hardware. “Within just two square feet, you can produce a lot of food,” says Rouxel, adding that Gardyn’s units have produced “over 25,000 pounds of produce” during the last few months.
That quest to grow a lot of leafy greens in a small amount of space is an area with plenty of competition these days. Farmshelf recently unveiled its first-ever farm for the home, and companies like Rise Gardens and Agrilution (the latter recently bought by Miele) also offer promising solutions for the consumer space.
And while historically, investment in vertical farming has mainly gone towards the industrial-scale indoor farms (think AeroFarms), at-home farms are fast becoming a lucrative area. Investors, Rouxel explained to me, see traditional agriculture as a risky business that’s less insurable because its success is in part dependent on the weather outside. With climate change triggering more extreme weather, investors will look more and more to alternative solutions in controlled-environment agriculture.
“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” he says. Chiefly, that will be growing the food in much closer proximity to consumers, whether through at-home systems like Gardyn’s, in-store farms at grocery retailers, rooftop gardens, and high-tech greenhouses. “In future, we’re going to have a spectrum of solutions,” Rouxel noted.
Getting these vertical farms closer to consumers and in their own homes will require bringing the price of the machines down. At the moment, Gardyn’s system is roughly on par pricewise with other systems out there that can realistically feed a family of four: $799 for the base model all the way up to $1485 for the “Plus” model.
Rouxel is aware that the cost is still too high for many consumers. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”
Many companies, including Gardyn, offer financing options on their farms now. And more investment dollars going into the space in the future could mean companies have the time and space to innovate on ways to make their system cheaper for the average consumer.
While pricing remains a question, one thing that’s certain is that at-home vertical farming is on the path to becoming a regular part of the kitchen, rather than just a trend. “What we want is to develop solutions that will quickly change the way people access food,” said Rouxel. “We won’t solve everything, that’s for sure, but we want to be part of the solution for how we shape food.”
FILED UNDER: AG TECH BUSINESS OF FOOD EDUCATION & DISCOVERY FEATURED FOODTECH
Amazon’s Alexa Fund Invests In At-Home Vertical Farming Company Rise Gardens
Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed
Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed.
According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the deal is both a collaboration and a cash investment that will “fuel new products, accessories and further R+D” for Rise Gardens.
The Chicago-based Rise is best known for its standalone console (roughly the size of a standard bookcase) that contains a hydroponic grow system for consumers at home. The system does most of the hard work—calculating nutrition and pH levels, knowing when and how much to water the plants—for the user, whom it notifies via a corresponding app.
Rise’s system is also modular, so it can be added to or subtracted from over time depending on how many greens your household consumes each week. Users can also grow beets and tomatoes in addition to leafy greens and herbs.
Rise raised $2.6 million in seed funding earlier this year; Amazon’s new investment is an extension of this seed funding, according to today’s press release.
Amazon’s investment in Rise sounds promising, not just for the company but for the entire vertical farming sector. To start, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted today at Alexa functionality for the Rise system: “Collaborating with the Alexa Fund will better enable us to integrate our smart, connected garden with Alexa, making indoor gardening even easier. We are also excited about the opportunity to work with Amazon to evolve and expand how we reach consumers with our device and consumables business concept,” he said. The details of that Alexa integration are scant as of now, but one imagines being able to ask Alexa about your plant’s pH levels or tell the speaker to adjust the light mixture. On the flip, Rise could notify users via Alexa when it’s time to water the plants.
There’s no question that consumer-grade vertical farms are still a pretty niche product right now since many of them cost more than the average person can easily afford. (Rise’s single unit console starts at $549.) But the pandemic and accompanying disruptions to the food supply chain have undoubtedly increased folks’ desire to control more of what they eat, which has led to an influx of new devices. From Gardyn’s stylish take on at-home farming to consumer electronics companies like LG building them into the kitchen, vertical farming is definitely making its way into the home.
Amazon, of course, wants to control your entire home, including your kitchen, so it’s not surprising the Seattle tech giant would partner making at-home vertical farming products. As well, the company has made forays into the gardening space before, like this patent from 2017. Amazon knowing what types of plants you are growing can fuel its selling machine to recommend recipes and other groceries.
Like it or not, Amazon’s moves in food tech tend to influence others, which means the collaborations and products that come out of the Rise partnership will influence the future of at-home vertical farming for everyone
Filed Under: AG TECH BUSINESS OF FOOD CONNECTED KITCHEN FEATURED FOODTECH FUNDING SMART GARDEN VERTICAL FARMING
I Grew Tomatoes With The Heat From My Crypto-Mining PC
Just before Covid-19 struck, I started a project to build the world’s most overengineered, high-tech garden.
Anything Worth Engineering Is Worth Overengineering
10-08-20
Images courtesy of the author.
If you spend time on Instagram in our post-pandemic world, you’re probably experiencing some gardening FOMO. Maybe your biggest lockdown goal was “pwn Candy Crush” or, if you’re like me, “limit your toddler’s screen time to a scant five hours per day.” Now that we’re months into the pandemic, though, your friends who channeled their early quarantine angst into planting seeds are likely starting to reap the benefits in terms of fresh herbs and handfuls of juicy, Insta-friendly heirloom tomatoes.
If you’re more comfortable with wires and while loops than bugs and compost, don’t despair. Gardening has become increasingly tech-enabled. There are now tons of ways that you can apply emerging technologies to the challenge of growing your own food.
Just before Covid-19 struck, I started a project to build the world’s most overengineered, high-tech garden. It ended up incorporating hydroponics, solar power, cryptocurrency mining, recycled water, sensors, the Internet of Things, infrared imaging, and much else. Here’s how I did it — and how you can build your own tech-enabled pandemic garden, too.
I should say this clearly from the get-go: I kill plants. Even succulents, which can go weeks with no care at all, are too much for me. People often give these to me as gifts, and I’ve managed to keep exactly three of them alive. This is surprising, as I come from a long line of gardeners — my father is an avid gardener, as was my maternal grandmother. But apparently this inclination — and the corresponding skill — skipped at least a few generations.
It was a dilemma, then, when I discovered that my three-year-old has a passion for gardening. We got him some plants last summer, and he diligently watered them every day, growing a handful of tomatoes and a lovely calla lily on our back patio. Mornings began with at least five minutes of “plant time,” spent checking his plants, fertilizing, pollinating flowers with a toothbrush, and performing other gardening functions that are alien to me. Obviously, we wanted to encourage that interest. But again, none of that is in my wheelhouse.
As the founder of an A.I. company and the owner of a DIY-tech YouTube channel, though, gadgets, green tech, sensing, and the like most definitely are. In late 2019, I hatched an idea of creating an indoor sustainable garden by applying as many technologies and gadgets as I could think of. I wrote up my musings about the idea in January of this year. Then I figured what the hell, dove in, and actually built it.
Right from the start, I knew I didn’t want to mess around with soil. For one thing, it’s yucky. It’s also mysterious. As The Atlantic shares in a detailed article about soil, the stuff is teeming with bacteria, archaea, microbes, and fungi — as well as bugs, earthworms, and other beneficial creatures — that work together in a complex synergy to keep plants healthy. As The Atlantic reports, a single teaspoon of good soil can contain 10,000 to 50,000 different species of “protozoa, nematodes, mites, and microarthropods” and “more microbes than there are people on the earth.”
That felt way too complex to me. Wanting to abstract much of that away, I turned to a technology that has existed for thousands of years and is enjoying a tech-enabled resurgence: hydroponics. Hydroponics is the science of growing plants in water. Instead of placing them in soil, you bathe your plants’ roots in flowing water. You then add the basic nutrients they need to that water, instead of providing them via soil.
The benefits are numerous. Compared to traditional gardening, hydroponics can allow for up to a 90% reduction in water use, much higher yields, and up to two times faster growth rates. Because the water in a hydroponic system continually recirculates, there’s also no need to worry about watering plants consistently, you can control and eliminate fertilizer runoff, and you can grow plants indoors, in a tiny space.
This last part was important to me, as I wanted to set up my high-tech garden in my garage. The San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, enjoys long outdoor growing seasons and little danger of frost, but I wanted to demonstrate that one can create a viable high-tech garden in any space: a basement, an unfinished room or shed, the balcony of a rented apartment, etc. Hydroponics allows you to grow meaningful amounts of produce in small spaces — including indoor spaces with little to no natural light — so it felt like a fit for that reason, too.
When I first started my project, I expected to have to build a small hydroponics system from scratch. But I quickly discovered that someone had done that for me. AeroGarden — a division of the well-known garden supply company Miracle-Gro — sells a variety of premade hydroponic gardens. These range in size from the diminutive Sprout (which retails for $76.99 and grows a handful of herbs table-side) to the $895 Farm 24XL, which grows 24 plants and includes advanced features like a programmable day/night cycle and Alexa voice control.
Choosing a new type of plant to grow feels a bit like importing a Python module or installing a new graphics card.
All AeroGarden models (and, fundamentally, all hydroponic systems) include a few basic components. There’s a water-filled tray to hold your plants, a small pump to circulate water over their roots, and a set of LED grow lights that provide the illumination your plants need to thrive, even in an otherwise dark room.
AeroGarden sells its plants as “pods,” which include seeds and a porous support material inside a plastic tube that you snap into your garden. Larger garden models accommodate more pods. You can mix and match many pods within a single garden, allowing you to grow several kinds of plants at once. AeroGarden offers a dizzying array of premade pods, from spring flowers to ghost peppers. It also offers a grow-anything kit, which allows you to create your own pods and grow nearly anything in your AeroGarden. (To preempt an obvious question, yes, you can grow pot in it.)
I love the modular aspect of AeroGarden’s pods. For someone used to the conventions of the tech world, it’s very familiar. Choosing a new type of plant to grow feels a bit like importing a Python module or installing a new graphics card. You browse through a list of options, make a choice based on a set of capabilities or features that you want to access, and then plug the new module into your project.
I bought two AeroGarden Harvests — a midrange model that costs around $110 and accommodates six pods each. I also picked up a set of heirloom cherry tomato pods and a set of pods for assorted herbs. My son and I set up the AeroGardens in the garage and installed the pods. By the time we got them up and running, it was mid-February.
AeroGardens are primarily designed for indoor use in a climate-controlled room. My garage isn’t climate controlled. California has mild weather, but it still gets chilly at night. In February, daytime temperatures are usually around 60 degrees Fahrenheit and dip into the 40s after sundown. Tomatoes grow best with a daytime temperature of 70 to 85 and a nighttime temperature above 60, so this didn’t seem optimal. I knew we would need some kind of heat.
We started by getting an Educational Insights tabletop greenhouse ($43 on Amazon) to hold the AeroGardens. This helped a bit with temperature—and kept the tomatoes nice and humid—but it still wasn’t ideal. To bump up the temperature and our tomato yield, I had an idea: Why not heat the greenhouse with the waste heat from a cryptocurrency-mining computer?
Cryptocurrency has exploded in prominence and impact over the past several years. According to industry publication Coin Telegraph, the market for mining hardware (used to create new cryptocurrency coins) is set to grow by $2.8 billion between 2020 and 2024. All this growth comes at a very real cost. The mining of bitcoin alone is estimated to consume up to half of all the electricity used by all data centers worldwide. The bitcoin network currently uses as much electricity as the country of Colombia.
All this electricity ultimately turns into heat. Most of the time, that heat is wasted. But some cryptocurrency miners, seeing an opportunity, are putting waste heat to productive use. Ukrainian company Hotmine is developing crypto-powered hot-water heaters and furnaces for home use. Heatmine, a Canadian company, has experimented with using crypto waste heat in homes in Quebec, which has frigid winters. And as of 2018, a Czech company was experimenting with “cryptomatoes” using heat from bitcoin mining to heat tomato greenhouses.
I’ve experimented with heating my home using cryptocurrency-mining waste heat on a small scale, with a good deal of success. For that project (and a photo series on the cryptocurrency industry), I built my own mining rig. It uses a custom PC, a super-high-efficiency EVGA power supply, and an NVIDIA GeForce 1070 graphics card — a staple of cryptocurrency miners — to mine a variety of crypto coins using the automated software NiceHash.
Running at full blast, the PC also gets quite toasty. For my heating experiment, I calculated that my rig draws about 220 watts of electricity, putting out 716 BTUs of heat per hour. That’s about the output of a small space heater or one of those overhead heaters you see on restaurant patios. The rig, which cost around $600 to build, generates up to $0.76 in mining revenue per day — not remarkable, but enough to offset some of my heating costs when I used it indoors in the winter.
Piping 716 BTUs per hour directly into my tiny greenhouse, I calculated, would be way too much heat. My greenhouse is 24 cubic feet, so putting in all the heat from the cryptocurrency-mining computer would increase its temperature by around 40 degrees. Even in the dead of winter — with a nighttime temperature of 45 degrees — that would still push my tomatoes to their 85-degree limit. On warmer nights, it would risk roasting them on the vine.
Instead, I opened the side panel on the computer and connected it to the side of the greenhouse. Using a FLIR One infrared thermal camera, I determined that the NVIDIA 1070 heats up to around 110 degrees when mining. This radiates a nice amount of heat into the greenhouse, moderating its internal temperature without overdoing it.
The glowing green logo of the NVIDIA GeForce is visible inside my greenhouse.
I also found that just running the computer near the greenhouse kept my garage a bit warmer than normal. It’s like a high-tech version of the tried-and-true gardening practice of placing water bottles near your plants. The bottles heat up in the sun during the day and then radiate heat at night, protecting your plants from frost and helping them grow just a bit better.
With all the supplemental heat from my mining computer, I felt like I needed some kind of monitoring system for my garden. At first, I thought about building a DIY temperature monitor with a RaspberryPi. But in keeping with the modular concept of the project, I decided to use another solution: an industrial sensing system from Monnit.
Monnit sells a variety of sensor gateways, which you install in your facility and connect to the internet. Once you have a gateway installed, you can buy up to several hundred tiny sensors, which allow you to monitor everything from temperature to vibrations to whether someone is sitting in a chair.
Each sensor uses a coin cell battery that lasts about six months and transmits over a short-range wireless radio to the gateway. That means you can place the sensors anywhere you want in the space you’re trying to monitor. The gateway forwards the sensors’ data along to Monnit’s cloud, where you can log into a web interface and get a real-time read on conditions in your facility.
This is a system intended for commercial or industrial applications, so it’s not cheap. Monnit’s ethernet gateways run about $220, and each sensor costs around $50 to $80. But the system has rock-solid reliability and accuracy, and Monnit’s data storage and charting functions are top-notch. I also liked how the system could potentially scale to a commercial-size greenhouse. I don’t plan to scale up my tomato project to a commercial facility, but it’s good to know that the technologies I’m demonstrating in my tiny greenhouse could potentially be used in a real, full-sized indoor farm.
I’ve experimented with heating my home using cryptocurrency-mining waste heat on a small scale, with a good deal of success.
The final step for my garden was to add water. Hydroponic systems use dramatically less water than traditional planting methods; according to the National Park Service, they can use up to 1,000% less. But because the plants are immersed 24/7, water is a crucial part of the process of growing plants hydroponically.
AeroGarden recommends using distilled water with its gardens. This felt like a big hassle — and a potential generator of a ton of plastic waste. So I looked for another solution. Ideally, I wanted to use recycled water. On a trip to Israel in 2012, I saw tomatoes grown using recycled water in the Negev Desert. And closer to home, I did a photo series at CoCo San Sustainable Farm in the Bay Area, which uses recycled water from sanitation provider Central San to grow food for local schools. So I knew it could be done.
But I didn’t want to have to drive to a recycled-water pickup point every time I wanted to water my tomatoes, and the water provided there wouldn’t be distilled. Doing some research, I came up with a solution: I could use the condensation generated by my home air-conditioning system to irrigate my garden.
If you have central air and you’ve walked around outside your home in the summer, you may have seen a little tube or hose dribbling out a stream of water. You probably thought, “I hope that isn’t a problem,” and then went about your day. It’s not a problem — air-conditioning systems work in part by removing water vapor from the air in your home. All the water has to go somewhere. Most air-conditioning systems jettison it through a little tube into the ground in your backyard or, in some cases, directly into the sewer.
That’s a major wasted opportunity. While the water from an AC condensate drain isn’t safe to drink untreated, it tends — like distilled water — to be very low in mineral content. It’s also free, readily available, and otherwise wasted. Many big institutions take advantage of this source of eco-friendly water on a grand scale — Rice University, for example, captures 14 million gallons of water per year from its AC systems. I decided to try doing so at home.
In a series of experiments, I determined that my home AC system dumps about one gallon of condensate water per hour. That’s a lot of water. At first, I thought about building a complex device to catch water from my AC unit using a marine bilge pump, external power supply, and tubing to pipe the water into my AeroGardens.
Instead, I settled for a clear plastic bucket, which I placed under the condensate drain in my backyard. AC condensate can contain Legionella bacteria, so ideally you should boil it or treat it with UV light, chlorine tablets, or ozone before using it and avoid using it in applications that create aerosols, like a sprinkler system. I settled for letting my buckets fill up, then placing them in the sun for several days before pouring the water into my AeroGardens. I can’t vouch for the safety of that technique, but I’ve been okay so far.
With all the pieces put together, I now had a system that used hydroponics and LED grow lights to nurture modular plant pods. The whole thing was contained in a tabletop greenhouse, kept at optimal growing temperatures 24/7 by cryptocurrency waste heat, monitored by industrial IoT sensors, and irrigated with recycled water. It was an ideal way to experiment with some of today’s most compelling green technologies.
Oh, and it produces tons of tasty tomatoes. With AeroGardens, your only real responsibility as a gardener is to keep each garden filled with water and add some liquid fertilizer every two weeks when a light on the garden turns red. You can also do some light pruning to increase the yield on your plants — if you don’t, they’ll grow so large that they overshoot the AeroGarden’s grow lights, and your tomato production will drop. My son and I watched as our tomatoes germinated and began to sprout right on schedule, about five days after we “planted” the tomato pods.
Our herbs started to shoot up even faster, with little sprouts emerging about two days after planting. Over the next several months, our plants grew aggressively. We got to experience the excitement of seeing our tiny tomato seedlings grow into a giant, leggy plants with little yellow flowers, and ultimately green tomatoes, which rapidly turned red — and were perfect for plucking by tiny hands.
The tech aspects of the project have worked out surprisingly well. The Monnit sensor system beams in temperature readings every two hours, which I can access as a series of charts in a web interface. The cryptocurrency computer has done an admirable job of keeping things balmy. On a recent chilly night in September, when nighttime temperatures dropped into the 50s, our garden stayed at a comfortable 74 degrees. In the heat of the day, it got a few degrees above the ideal maximum temperature of 85 degrees, but the tomatoes seem fine.
Chart of temperatures in the greenhouse during a day and night in mid-September.
From our limited experiment, I’ve seen that hydroponics really do appear to deliver on its promise of faster-growing times and bigger yields. Last summer, we labored for months to grow about 10 tomatoes and a handful of herbs in the backyard. With our high-tech garden, we got to watch as our herbs—the basil especially—started out by producing enough leaves to flavor a tomato sauce, then enough for pesto, and finally so many that I had to cut them back almost daily, drying them or using them in infused olive oils to stop them from going to waste.
AeroGarden plants last about six months; during that time, you can harvest from them continually. Our herbs died back after their six-month growth window was over, but the tomatoes are still going strong. At times, we’ve been able to harvest tomatoes by the handful and have used them in everything from sandwiches to Caprese salads to soups.
At the beginning of the project, I struggled with deciding what to grow. It takes about an acre of land to grow enough food to feed one person, so feeding our whole family with a hydroponic garden wasn’t realistic. What, I wondered, would have the most impact? Should I grow plants that perform other functions, like filtering the air? Should I look toward something like blue spirulina, which several readers of my first Medium piece on the project emailed me to suggest as a space-efficient superfood?
As you do a bit more gardening, you might also be surprised how similar gardeners are to coders and other technologists.
When the pandemic hit, that question rapidly answered itself. The absolute best use for a Covid-19 garden, I found, is to grow ingredients that enliven and add interest to other foods.
I can’t even begin to describe the mental health benefits — at the height of the pandemic lockdowns, when going to the grocery store literally felt like a life-and-death endeavor — of taking some boring, pandemic-friendly canned food or store-brand boiled pasta and topping it with fresh basil, crushed sprigs of thyme, and sliced cherry tomatoes, picked a few minutes earlier in our garage.
One of the hardest parts of weathering a lockdown is fatigue. Sticking with the same routine day in and day out for months — with limited trips outside your home — is mentally and emotionally draining. So is eating the same foods for months on end. In the early days, we ate whatever shelf-stable staples weren’t sold out at Target or bought strange brands of pasta or canned goods by the box for absurd prices on Amazon.
Gardening itself has been shown to reduce stress. But the little handfuls of fresh ingredients that we harvested each week from our AeroGardens served their own, extremely important function: They allowed us to add color, freshness, and variety to the bland, generic things we were otherwise eating. That, in turn, lent a bit of variety, excitement, and connection with the natural world to the drab, monotonous process of quarantine.
Having that little bit of freshness in our diet made the lockdowns a tiny bit easier to tolerate — and gave us one fewer reason to go to the store. When the world is falling apart outside your door, don’t underestimate the power of a handful of Thai basil or a drink topped with mint you grew yourself to make things just a bit better. It’s an effect that’s been around since the victory gardens of World War 1, and it’s something that thousands of us are rediscovering today.
Even if you’re more familiar with the silicon variety of random trees than the ones found in a real forest — or if your historical track record with plants isn’t stellar — now might be the perfect time to try out gardening. Gadgets like the AeroGarden make the process simple—and especially with more complex models that allow you to track and tweak light levels and feeding schedules, downright geeky.
As you do a bit more gardening, you might also be surprised how similar gardeners are to coders and other technologists. Take one look at an experienced gardener’s charts of hardiness zones and little grid-based garden maps drawn on graphing paper or mapped in Excel, and you might feel a sense of familiarity. If you want to take a stab at growing your own plants, you could do what I’ve done and make your garden extremely automated and tech-intensive. I’m still planning to work solar power from my private microgrid and a self-watering system into mine. My garden is, of course, more a platform for experimentation than an economical way to grow produce — accounting for the mining PC and Monnit sensor system, I estimate that it cost about $1,200 to build. But even if you just buy an AeroGarden and put in on your kitchen counter — or borrow a few of the ideas I’ve demonstrated and create your own DIY versions — that’s a great start.
I’m still reluctant to call myself a full gardener. That title goes to the people who effortlessly call up plants from the soil or, like my son, have a passion for the watering and pruning that managing a full garden often requires. But I’m comfortable calling myself a technologist who dabbles — or perhaps as Wired suggests, a “domestic terraformer.” And I’m proud to say that I now have the tomatoes to back up that title.
WRITTEN BY
Thomas Smith
Co-Founder & CEO of Gado Images.
I write, speak and consult about tech, privacy, AI, and photography.
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Gardyn Aims To Make At-Home Vertical Farming Small, Simple, And Stylish
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late. Trouble is, many consumers don’t have the know-how to cultivate their own leafy greens and other produce in the backyard. Even those who do often lack adequate space.
A company called Gardyn is addressing both of those issues with an at-home vertical farming system that requires minimal input from the user and can easily fit inside a small apartment if need be. The idea, as Gardyn founder and CEO FX Rouxel explained to me over the phone last week, is to make growing food in one’s own home as simple and straightforward as possible. To do that, the company has built a farm that relies on AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and maintaining an edible crop of food. Or as Rouxel said, “The system is managing everything for you.”
Gardyn’s system is made up of two parts: a compact vertical tower, which can grow as many as 30 plants, and an accompanying app powered by an AI assistant named “Kelby.” Users only have to order seeds and “plug” the seed pods into the vertical towers. The system automatically circulates water and nutrients to the plants, while Kelby monitors plant growth and sends reminders when it’s time to add water to the garden or harvest the plants.
Right now, available crops from Gardyn’s site include mostly leafy greens and herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers can also use their own seeds if preferred.
The system uses what Rouxel calls “a hybrid of different hydroponic technologies,” including the deep water method and aeroponics. (The company brands its approach as “hybriponics.”) By themselves, these different methods have certain limitations in the at-home setting. Deep water, where plant roots are fully submerged in nutrient-enriched water, requires a lot of space. Aeroponics is a great setup for outdoors, but once indoors it requires lighting, which gets expensive very quickly. Gardyn pulled elements from both to create a system that takes up only two square feet of space and doesn’t require any extra hardware. “Within just two square feet, you can produce a lot of food,” says Rouxel, adding that Gardyn’s units have produced “over 25,000 pounds of produce” during the last few months.
That quest to grow a lot of leafy greens in a small amount of space is an area with plenty of competition these days. Farmshelf recently unveiled its first-ever farm for the home, and companies like Rise Gardens and Agrilution (the latter recently bought by Miele) also offer promising solutions for the consumer space.
And while historically, investment in vertical farming has mainly gone towards the industrial-scale indoor farms (think AeroFarms), at-home farms are fast becoming a lucrative area. Investors, Rouxel explained to me, see traditional agriculture as a risky business that’s less insurable because its success is in part dependent on the weather outside. With climate change triggering more extreme weather, investors will look more and more to alternative solutions in controlled-environment agriculture.
“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” he says. Chiefly, that will be growing the food in much closer proximity to consumers, whether through at-home systems like Gardyn’s, in-store farms at grocery retailers, rooftop gardens, and high-tech greenhouses. “In future we’re going to have a spectrum of solutions,” Rouxel noted.
Getting these vertical farms closer to consumers and in their own homes will require bringing the price of the machines down. At the moment, Gardyn’s system is roughly on par pricewise with other systems out there that can realistically feed a family of four: $799 for the base model all the way up to $1485 for the “Plus” model.
Rouxel is aware that the cost is still too high for many consumers. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”
Many companies, including Gardyn, offer financing options on their farms now. And more investment dollars going into the space in the future could mean companies have the time and space to innovate on ways to make their system cheaper for the average consumer.
While pricing remains a question, one thing that’s certain is that at-home vertical farming is on the path to becoming a regular part of the kitchen, rather than just a trend. “What we want is to develop solutions that will quickly change the way people access food,” said Rouxel. “We won’t solve everything, that’s for sure, but we want to be part of the solution for how we shape food.”
VIDEO: HYVE - Hydroponic Solutions
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