Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
EAT LOCAL + HEALTHIER + GREENER + FRESHER
As Americans increasingly reject cheap, processed food and embrace high-quality, responsibly-sourced nutrition, hyper-local farming is having a moment
EAT LOCAL
EAT FRESHER
EAT HEALTHIER
EAT GREENER
Photo: AeroFarms
image taken by photographer Holly Challinor, Jones Food Company Ltd.
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ALL OF THE AG LAND IN THE WORLD
VIDEOS: A Made-In-Canada Clean Energy Solution Wins Multiple Awards For Innovation
The Eavor-Loop is a closed system within which a proprietary working fluid is contained and circulated
Eavor’s technology consists of several Patent Pending innovations. The Eavor-Loop is a closed system within which a proprietary working fluid is contained and circulated. The working fluid is not fluid from a reservoir flowing into our wells, it is a fluid added to the closed-loop Eavor-Loop™ to create an efficient radiator, much like a vehicle radiator circulates fluid in a closed-loop to remove heat from a gasoline engine.
Eavor-Loop™ harvests heat from deep in the earth to be used for commercial heating applications (ex: greenhouses or district heating) or to be used to generate electricity using conventional heat to power engines. Eavor-Loop™ is an industrial-scale geothermal system that mitigates many of the issues with traditional geothermal systems, which rely upon using wells to produce brine from a subsurface aquifer.
The closed-loop is the key difference between Eavor-Loop™ and all traditional industrial-scale geothermal systems. Eavor-Loop™ is a buried-pipe system, which acts as a radiator or heat exchanger. It consists of connecting two vertical wells several kilometers deep with many horizontal multilateral wellbores several kilometers long. As these wellbores are sealed, a benign, environmentally friendly, working fluid is added to the closed-loop as a circulating fluid. This working fluid is contained within the system and isolated from the earth in the Eavor-Loop™. The wellbores act as pipes, not wells producing fluid from the earth.
The working fluid naturally circulates without requiring an external pump due to the thermosiphon effect of a hot fluid rising in the outlet well and a cool fluid falling in the inlet well. The working fluid contained in this closed-loop pipe system brings thermal energy to the surface where it is harvested for use in a commercial direct heat application or converted to electricity with a power generation module (heat engine).
Unlike heat pumps (or “geo-exchange”), which convert electricity to heat using very shallow wells, Eavor-Loop generates industrial-scale electricity or produces enough heat for the equivalent of 16,000 homes with a single installation.
An excellent new video by CNBC entitled 'How Geothermal Energy Could Power The Future' features Eavor CEO, John Redfern and several others in the modern geothermal industry such as Catherine Hickson of Geothermal Canada, Tim Latimer of Fervo Energy, Cindy Taff of Sage Geosystems and Joe Scherer of GreenFire Energy.
The video covers topics such as:
- What is Geothermal energy?
- Geothermal startups gain traction
- Major opportunity for oil and gas
- The future of geothermal
"Miles below the Earth’s surface, there’s enough thermal energy to power all of humanity for the foreseeable future. It’s called geothermal energy, and it’s poised to play an increasingly large role as a source of always available, renewable power. Now, there are a number of startups in the geothermal space, working to figure out how to access this heat in difficult-to-reach geographies, at a price point that makes sense. And it’s even gotten the attention of oil and gas industry giants, who are interested in greening their portfolios while sticking to their core competencies - extracting energy resources from deep within the Earth."
Life In 2050: A Look At The Homes of The Future
In an age where Climate Change and technological change will essentially be competing for control of our future, the challenge will be how to leverage one to address the other
Rapidly Accelerating Technology And The Need For
Sustainable Living Will Revolutionize
How People Live by 2050
May 15, 2021
Welcome back to the "Life in 2050" series! So far, we've looked at how ongoing developments in science, technology, and geopolitics will be reflected in terms of warfare and the economy. Today, we are shifting gears a little and looking at how the turbulence of this century will affect the way people live from day today.
As noted in the previous two installments, changes in the 21st century will be driven by two major factors. These include the disruption caused by rapidly accelerating technological progress, and the disruption caused by rising global temperatures, and the environmental impact this will have (aka. Climate Change).
These factors will be pulling the world in opposite directions, and simultaneously at that. Rising seas, hotter summers, wetter winters, increased flooding, drought, pandemics, desertification, and shrinking supplies of fresh water will likely lead to all kinds of scarcity, humanitarian crises, and increased levels of mortality.
Meanwhile, technological advances in terms of renewable energy, fusion power, materials science, blockchains, smart technology, additive manufacturing (3D printing), commercial space exploration, and biotechnology are set to lead to a new era of abundance in terms of energy, wealth, health, and new resources.
In an age where Climate Change and technological change will essentially be competing for control of our future, the challenge will be how to leverage one to address the other. All told, there are four areas where this will really come into play:
Growth of Urban Centers
Machine Learning and AI
Decentralization of Everything
Sustainable Cities
Rising Seas and Sinking Coastlines
The growth of cities
As we addressed in the second installment, the global population is projected to grow considerably by 2050. In fact, according to the "World Population Prospects 2019" report compiled by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the global census rolls will account for about 9.74 billion people by mid-century.
Furthermore, a 2020 report by the International Institute for Environment and Development estimates that by 2050, roughly 68% of the population will live in urban centers. That works out to 6.6 billion people, or an increase of 2.2 billion from today. You might say that almost all of the population growth between now and 2050 will happen in cities.
This will result in an increased demand for housing, electricity, water, food, basic services, education, transport, and medical services in these places. The infrastructure and resources needed to meet this demand will place added stress on the surrounding environments, which are already heavily stressed as it is.
Urban expansion means that more land needs to be cleared to build infrastructure, more water needs to be diverted for utilities, more electricity needs to be generated, and more agricultural land needs to be set aside for growing food.
Luckily, there's an upside to all this growth. While more people means more in the way of need, it also means more in the way of production. And if there is one thing cities are very good at, it's fostering innovation, the creation of new industries, and cultural expression - and all through the act of bringing people together.
As a result, cities in 2050 will be built (or rebuilt) to provide for the basic needs of their populations in ways that absolutely must be sustainable. This means finding ways to do more with less, not to mention eliminating waste as much as possible. All of this will be possible through the art of...
"Smart" living
The idea of "smart homes" is one that has really taken off in the past decade. The concept builds on the idea of "smartphones" and other such devices, which are accessible anywhere there is an internet connection. In the case of smart homes, a person will have access to everything in their home (appliances, devices, utilities, etc.) through Bluetooth and wireless internet.
In the future, this will extend to the point where the "Internet of Things" (IoT) becomes a reality. This concept refers to the way in which the digital world and real world will become intertwined like never before. On the one hand, this will be driven by the trillions of devices, sensors, and geotags that connect countless points in the real world to the internet.
On the other, people's experience of the real world will be increasingly mediated throug augment tedh reality, virtual reality (AR/VR), and the help of artificial intelligence. On top of that, the ability to connect with just about anyone and everything will revolutionize the way we live. And strangely enough, many of us have had a preview of this due to the recent pandemic.
Source: Alex Knight/Unsplash
For one thing, people in 2050 will be used to being able to have just about everything delivered to their doorstep. Door-to-door delivery services will likely become increasingly automated and involve smart cars, shuttle pods that drive around on their own tracks, and aerial drones.
Similarly, just about everything will be doable from the comfort of home, especially when it comes to working. Home offices with high-speed internet will become the norm, meetings will be virtual, and traveling for the sake of business or attending conferences will be largely unheard of.
Even education will take place in the home or within individual apartment blocks and tenements. Similar to distance education, children will log in to virtual classrooms where they are guided (with the help of a teacher or AI) through various lessons. Haptics will provide the sensation of "hands-on" education, eliminating the need to be physically in a classroom.
An explosion in the use of household robots is also projected to take place by 2050. These could take the form of mobile units or next-generation appliances that are integrated directly into a room. These robots will be able to handle everything from regular household maintenance, cleaning, preparing food, and other such tasks.
Moreover, the concept of the "smart home" will achieve literal proportions. Household AI 'managers' are sure to become a common feature of future homes, connected to all your devices, running your household robots and your appliances, and monitor your habits to ensure that you are remaining within your budget.
Distributed systems
Another interesting change is the way in which energy, money, goods and services, and even politics and administration will be distributed in the coming years. Whereas the industrial revolution brought about greater centralization of work and economics that is still in use to this day, the world of tomorrow will be almost entirely decentralized.
For example, in the previous installment, we looked at how increased reliance on renewable energy will affect the global economy. Given that the majority of demand for electricity will still be coming from urban centers, the shift will be visible in terms of how and where power is generated. In short, energy concerns of the future will be moving away from the centralized grids and become more localized.
Today, the infrastructure for providing electricity (aka. the electrical grid) consists of the following connected elements:
power stations located away from heavily populated areas, which are connected
electrical transmitters to carry power over long distances
electrical substations that transform voltage from high transmission to low distribution
distribution transformers to individual homes and buildings
The term "grid" is fitting because the electricity is generated in a central place, then routed through a gridlike network to where it is needed. In contrast, by 2050, cities will have distributed power stations that run on solar, wind, piezoelectric, geothermal, biomass, and other "green" sources of energy.
Source: Inhabitat
These localized centers will provide power for a specific area, and large buildings are likely to provide their own power using built-in solar arrays, turbines, and biofuel generators. However, power grids will not disappear, as the development of fusion power and Tokamak reactors will still require distribution centers and nodes.
The proliferation of wireless internet, satellite internet, and blockchain technology will also mean people can connect anywhere at any time. As a result, politics could look more like "town hall meetings" that will be virtual events that far more people will be able to participate in. In the same way that video conferencing will mean that most business is conducted virtually, local politics will also be affected.
Green megacities
Due to the ongoing loss of arable land, cities will also become greener spaces, where architecture and ecology come together for the sake of healthy living. This concept, known as "arcology," was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who proposed the concept as a means of addressing urban sprawl and the consequent destruction of green spaces.
In designs featuring arcology, agricultural operations and green spaces co-existed alongside residential and commercial centers, and space was to be used more creatively. Whereas most cities are two-dimensional, with individual highrises dotting the landscape (or clustered in the central business districts), arcologies are three-dimensional and built into the surrounding environment.
This thinking has become revitalized since the turn of the century, thanks to the escalating problem of climate change. Today, there are countless architectural firms and design studios that specialize in the creation of urban spaces that are reminiscent of the principles of arcology or similarly governed by the same principles of efficiency and sustainability.
Common features include urban farming, where local residents tend to community gardens, vertical farms, hydroponics, insect farms (high-protein!), and aquaponics (where plants and fish live symbiotically, and both are a source of nutrients). These operations will be helped along with the development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and microbial engineering.
To prevent stress on the existing water supply, most of what is needed for irrigation will come from rainwater capture, grey-water recycling, and water reclamation units. It's also a safe bet that by 2050, many homes and domiciles will have a 3D food printer dedicated to manufacturing nutritious meals tailored to specific tastes and dietary requirements.
Another recent innovation is carbon capture, which city planners are incorporating into modern urban development plans for the sake of combating climate change and urban pollution. While foliage has always been a means of cleaning city air, future cities may include large numbers of artificial trees, bioreactor facilities, and carbon-absorbing structures built right into their facades.
As an added bonus, carbon dioxide that is scrubbed from the air can be easily converted into biofuels using Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECSS) technology. Buildings equipped with a carbon capture apparatus will therefore be able to create biofuel, perhaps as a backup power source, but also as a local supply of fuel for vehicles that still run on biodiesel.
Powering it all will be a number of renewable energy sources, such as the aforementioned solar arrays, vertical wind turbines, piezoelectric surfaces, and heat-exchange technology (for the sake of climate control). Each building that contains multiple dwellings is likely to be its own grow-op, power plant, and fuel station, providing the basic necessities of life locally.
Crystal Island: This arcology was proposed by Norman Foster, founder of the architecture firm Foster and Partners. True to its name, Crystal Island would be a tall, spire-like compression structure that would appear crystalline. The entire structure would be wrapped in a breathable "second skin" that would be sealed in winter to prevent heat loss and opened in summer to cool the interior.
The planned arcology was to be integrated into Nagatinskaya Poyma Park in central Moscow. Standing 1,476 ft (450 m) high and containing 27 million ft² (2.5 million m²) of floor space, it would have been the largest structure on Earth. Construction was postponed in 2009 due to the global economic crisis and has remained in limbo since.
Masdar City: Named after the design firm building it, Masdar City is a planned project for the city of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Also designed by Foster and Partners, the city will be a hub for clean energy companies as well as the location of the International Renewable Energy Agency's (IRENA) headquarters.
Based on the goal of a carbon-neutrality, Masdar is powered by a combination of solar energy, wind power, and all lighting and water are controlled by movement sensors to reduce consumption. Much of the city's water is rainwater or captured by condensers, and up to 80% of wastewater will be recycled and reused as many times as possible.
As of 2016, the city's official website reported that 2,000 people are employed in the city and that only 300 students reside there. However, expansion is expected to continue until it reaches its planned capacity of 50,000 residents, 1,500 businesses, and 60,000 workers making the daily commute.
Cities at sea
In an age of climate change, many designers have incorporated rising sea levels and the loss of coastlines into their arcological concepts. A number of designs have been proposed already, examples of which include:
Boston Arcology: Also known as BOA, this concept for a sustainable megastructure in Boston Harbor was conceived by Kevin Schopfer. Designed in the shape of a rectangle with crisscrossing structures in its interior, this city would house 15,000 people and include hotels, offices, retail spaces, museums, and a city hall.
Consistent with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, it would draw its power from a combination of solar, wind, and other renewables and would serve as an expansion of the city without adding to the environmental impact of urban sprawl.
Harvest City: The Haiti earthquake of 2010 left 250,000 people dead, 300,000 people injured, and about 1.5 million people homeless. In response, Schopfer (in collaboration with Tangram 3DS) conceived Harvest City, a floating complex made up of tethered floating modules - 2 mi (3.2 km) in diameter - off the coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The city would be capable of housing 30,000 residents within four communities - dedicated 2/3 to agriculture, 1/3 to light industry - all of which would be interconnected by a linear canal system. The entire city would float and be anchored to the ocean floor, reducing its vulnerability to plate tectonics and earthquakes considerably.
Lilypad City: Otherwise known as just Lilypad, this concept for a floating city was proposed by Vincent Callebaut. Essentially, Callebaut anticipated that rising sea levels and disappearing coastlines would give rise to a new phenomenon known as "climate refugees." As coastal cities sink into the ocean in this century, people will need to be relocated to new facilities.
Hence the Lilypad concept, a completely self-sufficient floating city that could accommodate up to 50,000 people. Power would be provided through a combination of solar, wind, tidal, and biomass, while the entire structure is able to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere through a titanium dioxide outer skin.
New Orleans Arcology Habitat: Located off the coast of New Orleans, where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, the NOAH concept was another design proposed by Kevin Schopfer (the same architect who thought up BOA). The design was largely inspired by Hurricane Katrina and the understanding that recurring storm activity in the region is only going to get more severe.
"The first challenge is to overcome both the physical and psychological damages of recurring severe weather patterns," they wrote. "Though re-population has begun, the need to provide a stabilized and safe environment is paramount to a long-term recovery and economic well-being of New Orleans."
This triangular city would be able to house as many as 50,000 New Orleans residents within its 20,000 residential units - each measuring 1100 ft² (100 m²). To ensure that it kept the tourism industry alive, it would also have up to three hotels (200 rooms each), 1500 time-share units, and three casinos.
Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid: This megastructure (aka. the TRY 2004 Pyramid) was proposed by Shimizu Corporation in 2004 as a solution to Tokyo's problem of overpopulation. Inspired by the Great Pyramid of Giza, the structure would be built in Tokyo Bay, measure 6,575 feet (over 2000 m) high, and house 1 million people.
However, the design relies entirely on the future availability of super-materials (such as carbon nanotubes). This is due to the weight of the pyramid, which would be the largest structure ever built and exceed the stress tolerances of existing building materials. While the original plan was to commence construction by 2030, Shimizu remained determined to complete it by 2110.
Summary
As the 21st century unfolds, the world will be forced to suffer through two major opposing phenomena. Technological development will continue to accelerate, with serious implications for the way we live, work, play, and even eat. At the same time, climate change will be ramping up, causing severe disruptions to the very natural systems humans are dependent on for their survival.
Luckily, there's an upside to this mess of contradictions. While rising tides and increased drought, storms, wildfires, etc., will be a humanitarian nightmare, they will also pressure us to find solutions. And while the rapid advance of technology will be a constant source of stress, it will also bring about innovation that addresses environmental problems.
It will be a strange time, where the entire world will be caught between surviving and thriving, scarcity and abundance, recession and growth. Nevertheless, the potential for positive change is there and could lead to a whole new era of better living and sustainability.
Lead photo: Stefano Boeri Architecture¨
VIDEOS: How To Design A Successful Vertical Farm
Vertical farming provides a practical and cost-effective way to bring food production to congested spaces. Getting a vertical farm off the ground requires more than just a green thumb and some warehouse space, though
March 26, 2021
Vertical farming provides a practical and cost-effective way to bring food production to congested spaces. Getting a vertical farm off the ground requires more than just a green thumb and some warehouse space, though. Read on to find out how to design a successful vertical farm and start harvesting crops indoors in city environments.
What Is Vertical Farming?
Vertical farming is an indoor cultivation technique that maximizes the use of space for plant production. It involves layering multiple crops or types of crops in a highly controlled vertical hydroponic or container-based system. Those who are already familiar with indoor growing can think of it like a traditional hydroponic or container garden but on multiple levels.
The Four Key Design Factors
There are four key design factors that future vertical farmers must keep in mind if they want to bring down large, high-quality yields. They mimic processes that occur in nature but would otherwise be absent in a man-made system. The four factors are:
Lighting
Climate control
Nutrient control
Vertical integration
There’s little sense in purchasing seeds or rootstock until future farmers know exactly how they will provide for all the plants’ needs, so this is a good place to start. Let’s take a look at what factors farmers need to take into account before they start the design phase.
Adequate Lighting
All indoor farms and gardens require some form of artificial lighting. Farmers and growers who are still in the beginning stages of taking their operations indoors can get the basics down by visiting Agron and reading through their educational materials. However, vertical farming is a little more complicated than a normal hydroponic or container-based garden.Since plants will be grown on multiple levels, hanging lights from the ceiling isn’t always the best solution. Most vertical farmers purchase specialized ballasts and use LED lights that emit very little heat so they can keep their lighting as close to the plants’ canopies as possible. Some modern farmers also go in for more advanced options like installing rotating beds or utilizing smart lights, but they won’t make up for inadequate lighting for all levels of the vertical farm.
Climate Control
Plants can only grow and thrive under the right climate conditions. Vertical farms need good temperature, humidity, and air handling systems. In most cases, the building’s HVAC system will be able to handle heating and cooling demands. Without adequate ventilation and air handling systems in place, though, high humidity can negatively impact plants’ cellular respiration processes and create a perfect environment for the spread of fungal diseases. It’s worth taking the time to investigate options like dehumidification systems, exhaust fans, or specialized HVAC systems that manage humidity and airflow as well as temperature control.
Nutrient Control
Plants don’t get all the energy they need from photosynthesis alone. They require nutrients as well as light and water. Every species has a different set of requirements, but all terrestrial plants need macronutrients like nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K) along with a smaller amount of micronutrients to fuel healthy growth and crop production. How they get those nutrients is largely a matter of farmers’ preferences.
There are four types of systems that are appropriate for vertical farming. On a small scale, container farming using soil, amendments, and fertilizers can work. However, most large-scale vertical farms eschew this traditional practice in favor of hydroponic or aeroponic systems. Hydroponic and aeroponic setups remove soil from the equation entirely. They’re similar systems, but while hydroponics gives plants access to nutrients via a water-based solution, aeroponics involves leaving the roots exposed and spraying them with nutrients.
Finally, some more sustainability-minded vertical farmers introduce elements of aquaponics into their farms. Aquaponics involves cultivating both plants and fish. The fish provide beneficial nutrients via a hydroponic system, while the plants filter the water so the fish can thrive. The benefits of vertical aquaponics systems include improved sustainability, water conservation, and added crop value.
Vertical Integration
Not all indoor farms are vertical farms. To qualify as a vertical farm, the plants must be cultivated on multiple levels in the same room. Warehouses are perfect for this approach since they have high ceilings that can accommodate tall towers of plants and all the equipment required to maintain optimal temperatures, humidity levels, light, and nutrient delivery. The key in designing a vertically integrated farm is to maximize crop production by ensuring that the plants have just enough space to grow and thrive and receive as much light as possible.
Crop Selection for Vertical Farming
It may be tempting to assume that since vertical farming occurs indoors in a highly controlled environment, that means it’s suitable for all crops. While it’s true that vertical farmers can grow almost any kind of annual plants, and even some perennials, that doesn’t mean they should. Farmers need to consider these factors when selecting crops:
Local demand
Time to harvest
Climate requirements
Revenue margins
If the idea is to get crops out to market as fast as possible, farmers may want to stick with fast-turn crops like lettuce, potherbs, and other greens. Most of these crops will be ready for harvest in six weeks or less. Slow turn crops have higher revenue margins but require more inputs and time to grow than leafy greens. It’s also perfectly fine to plant a combination of crops as long as they all have similar climate requirements.
Vertical Farming Is the Future
With climate change poised to wreak havoc on agricultural lands across the globe and the costs associated with water scarcity on the rise, vertical farming poses a viable solution. A well-designed system can help to conserve water, avoid the impacts of inclement weather, and provide reliable, year-long access to fresh food.
The best part is, designing sustainability features like LED lighting, aquaponic systems, or even wind turbines into the vertical farm from the beginning can help to offset both the financial and environmental costs of producing food for city-dwellers, often right in their backyards. It takes a large initial investment to get started, but the payoffs will be worth it.
Related Videos about How to Design a Successful Vertical Farm :
Vertical Farms | Design, and Innovation
Growing Up: How Vertical Farming Works
Designing the vertical farm
Vertical Farming
Tags: vertical farming design pdf, vertical farming business plan, vertical farming technology, vertical farm for home, vertical farming in india, hydroponic vertical farming, vertical farming equipment, how to start vertical farming,
Abu Dhabi’s AgTech Ecosystem Expands Across Land, Sea And Space
The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) announced today individual partnerships with Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Pure Harvest), FreshToHome, and Nanoracks that will see the companies receive financial and non-financial incentives totaling AED 152 million (USD 41 million)
ADIO partners with Pure Harvest Smart Farms, FreshToHome, and Nanoracks
AED 152 million (USD 41 million) incentives for ‘land, sea and space’ projects to increase AgTech capabilities for food production in arid and desert environments
New partnerships part of ADIO’s AgTech Incentive Programme, established under Ghadan 21, Abu Dhabi’s accelerator program
Abu Dhabi, UAE – 10 November 2020: Three innovative agriculture companies will develop cutting-edge projects in Abu Dhabi to boost the emirate’s agriculture technology (AgTech) capabilities across land, sea, and space. The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) announced today individual partnerships with Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Pure Harvest), FreshToHome, and Nanoracks that will see the companies receive financial and non-financial incentives totaling AED 152 million (USD 41 million). The research and technologies developed by these companies will expand existing capabilities in Abu Dhabi’s AgTech ecosystem and promote innovation in the sector to address global food security challenges.
The new partnerships are a continuation of ADIO’s efforts to accelerate the growth of Abu Dhabi’s AgTech ecosystem through the AgTech Incentive Programme, which was established under Ghadan 21, Abu Dhabi’s accelerator program. The Programme is open to both local and international AgTech companies. The partnerships follow ADIO’s AED 367 million (USD 100 million) investment earlier this year to bring four AgTech pioneers – AeroFarms, Madar Farms, RNZ, and Responsive Drip Irrigation (RDI) – to the emirate to develop next-generation agriculture solutions in arid and desert climates.
H.E. Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, said: “Abu Dhabi is pressing ahead at full steam with our mission to ‘turn the desert green’ and solve long-term global food security issues. We have created an environment where innovative ideas can flourish and this has enabled the rapid expansion of our AgTech sector. Innovations from the companies we partnered with earlier this year are already propelling the growth of Abu Dhabi’s 24,000 farms. Partnering with Pure Harvest, FreshToHome and Nanoracks adds a realm of new capabilities to the ecosystem across land, sea, and space.”
Bin Hendi continued: “We are driving innovation across the entire agriculture value chain and this is producing a compounding effect that is benefiting farmers, innovators, and companies in our region and beyond.”
Pure Harvest, FreshToHome, and Nanoracks have been awarded financial and non-financial incentives to expand operations in Abu Dhabi. The competitive incentive packages include rebates on innovation-linked high-skilled payroll, high-tech CAPEX, as well as land, utility, and intellectual property support.
Since the beginning of 2020, ADIO has attracted seven AgTech companies to Abu Dhabi, each bringing a complementary skill to expand the ecosystem. ADIO’s new partnerships with Pure Harvest, FreshToHome, and Nanoracks will build on the achievements made by AeroFarms, Madar Farms, RNZ, and RDI, the AgTech pioneers ADIO partnered with earlier this year to establish R&D and production facilities in Abu Dhabi.
Partnerships with Pure Harvest, FreshToHome, Nanoracks
Pure Harvest is a home-grown, tech-enabled farming venture that uses cutting-edge food production systems to grow fresh fruits and vegetables in a climate-controlled environment, enabling year-round production anywhere, while using seven times less water compared to traditional farming methods. Pure Harvest will invest in smart farming and infrastructure technologies at its new farms in Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, to optimize growing conditions through hardware design innovations, artificial intelligence, autonomous growing and robotics, plant science research, and desert-optimized machines. The company will also progress R&D and deployment of a commercial-scale algae bioreactor production facility that will grow higher quality, healthier Omega-3 fatty acids without the limitations and challenges of traditional animal sources.
Sky Kurtz, Co-Founder, and CEO of Pure Harvest, said: “We are delighted to have received the support of ADIO to further invest in our home-grown, innovative growing solutions. It also serves as a powerful endorsement of our business case and mission as we pursue innovation to address food security locally and internationally. As one of the pioneering champions in the region’s emerging AgTech sector, this commitment will give us the resources we need to drive and expand our R&D capabilities and will position us for international expansion from our strategic base in Abu Dhabi. This partnership further demonstrates how committed the government is in supporting and enabling innovative technology companies, providing them with the tools, resources, and support to thrive and make a large-scale impact in the region.”
FreshToHome is an e-grocery platform for fresh, chemical-free produce. The company maintains complete control over its supply chain, inventory, and logistics by obtaining produce directly from the source through an AI-powered auction process. ADIO’s partnership will aid the expansion of FreshToHome’s land and sea operational and processing capabilities in the UAE, bringing expertise in aquaculture, contract farming for marine and freshwater fish species, and precision agriculture to Abu Dhabi. It will also invest in innovative fish farming technologies and cold chain.
Shan Kadavil, CEO and Co-Founder of FreshToHome, said: “At FreshToHome we use cutting-edge research in AI and precision aquaculture for furthering food security in a sustainable manner while also giving better value to consumers, fishermen, and farmers. To this end, we intend to bring our US patent pending AI-powered Virtual Commodities Exchange technology, our e-grocery platform, and our nano farm aquaculture technology to Abu Dhabi, enhancing food production and distribution for the region. ADIO has been a terrific partner to us and we are thankful for their support in helping us be part of the vision.”
US-based Nanoracks, the single largest commercial user of the International Space Station, opened its first UAE office in Abu Dhabi’s global tech ecosystem, Hub71, in 2019. Nanoracks is building the first-ever commercial AgTech space research program, the ‘StarLab Space Farming Center’, in Abu Dhabi as a commercial space research facility focused on advancing knowledge and technology for organisms and food produced in space and in equally extreme climates on Earth. The space-based technology will be applied to desert agriculture to address pressing environmental and food security challenges and to benefit long-term human space exploration.
Allen Herbert, SVP of Business Development and Strategy, and Head of Nanoracks, UAE, said: “Much of today’s technology used for vertical, urban and closed environment agriculture initially came from space research from 30 years ago, and Nanoracks is ready to synergize these technologies back to in-space exploration. We firmly believe that space research holds the keys to solving major challenges on Earth from climate change to food security. And our StarLab Space Farming Center in Abu Dhabi is just the beginning. We’re building a global research and development team that will produce and commercialize organisms, technology, and innovative products that will not only revolutionize farming in Earth’s deserts and harsh environments but also change the way humans are able to explore deeper into our universe.”
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VIDEO: How This Indoor Vertical Farm Makes Perfect Japanese Strawberries
The engineered berries go through a meticulous growth and monitoring process from seed to finished product. The result is a strawberry with a consistent and optimal size, flavor, and texture
Oishii Berry founder Hiroki Koga combines Japanese strawberry cultivation techniques with the technology of a first-of-its-kind indoor vertical strawberry farm in America to create the highest quality strawberry possible. The engineered berries go through a meticulous growth and monitoring process from seed to finished product. The result is a strawberry with a consistent and optimal size, flavor, and texture.
For more information:
www.oishiiberry.com
www.eater.com
Publication date: Fri 23 Oct 2020
80 Acres Farms Will Grow Tomatoes On Fifth Avenue In Guggenheim Exhibition
Based in Hamilton, Ohio, 80 Acres Farms is a leader in technology-assisted indoor growing and a multi-farm operator marketing a wide variety of freshly picked vegetables and fruits to retailers such as Giant Eagle, Kroger, Whole Foods, Jungle Jim’s and Dorothy Lane Markets
80 Acres Farms will grow tomatoes on one of the busiest streets in New York City outside the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the Guggenheim’s new exhibition in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas, “Countryside, The Future.”
Along with its commercial partners Infinite Acres and Priva Holding BV, 80 Acres Farms will grow cherry tomatoes in an indoor grow module right outside the museum on Fifth Avenue.
Based in Hamilton, Ohio, 80 Acres Farms is a leader in technology-assisted indoor growing and a multi-farm operator marketing a wide variety of freshly picked vegetables and fruits to retailers such as Giant Eagle, Kroger, Whole Foods, Jungle Jim’s and Dorothy Lane Markets.
The company was founded by veteran food industry executives Mike Zelkind and Tisha Livingston, who are supported by a deep team and a board of directors representing executive and leadership experience at leading food, healthcare and other companies.
Window on tomato production
People in New York will be able to look through a large window in the indoor farm to view a crop of fresh tomatoes being grown continuously during the next six months under precise LED lighting and other controlled conditions.
The first tomatoes will be ready for harvest by late-March.
The grow module will demonstrate how indoor farming can benefit the world through growing fresh, pesticide-free food near populations, anywhere in the world while using fewer natural resources.
The “Countryside, The Future” exhibition will examine political forces, social issues and environmental factors altering landscapes across the world, including traditional farmlands.
80 Acres Farms is a founding member of the Infinite Acres partnership venture, along with Netherlands-based Priva Holding BV, a leading provider of technology solutions, services and automation systems to horticultural and other industries; and Ocado Group, one of the world’s largest dedicated online grocery retailers, operating its own grocery and general merchandise retail businesses.
That partnership is now building large-scale, fully automated indoor farms in the U.S., Asia and Europe.
“We believe that what we are doing is about the future of food. We are changing the way fruits and vegetables are grown and harvested locally then delivered to grocers the very next day,” Zelkind said.
“There is an enormous market and consumer appetite around the world for produce that our crop scientists and other food experts have been perfecting during the past five years,” he said. “Our participation in this exhibition will allow New York residents and visitors to experience how the freshest, tastiest locally grown tomatoes can be grown year-round indoors in one of the busiest cities in the world.”
700-square-foot grow center
For the Guggenheim exhibition, 80 Acres Farms, Infinite Acres, and Priva Holding have collaborated on the 700-square-foot grow center and all of the state-of-the art ag-technology within it.
While in operation for the next six months outside the Guggenheim, the Infinite Acres grow module is expected to grow 50,000 tomatoes.
Additional tomatoes will be donated to City Harvest, a New York City food rescue organization that safely recovers excess food and distributes it to people in need.
“Countryside, The Future” will be open to the public through Aug. 14.
Hydroponic Indoor Gardening Kit Allows You To Grow Vegetables All Year Round
The Swedish company IKEA has developed a hydroponic system that would allow anybody to grow vegetables all year round without the need for a traditional garden
November 04, 2019
The Swedish company IKEA has developed a hydroponic system that would allow anybody to grow vegetables all year round without the need for a traditional garden. Users without immediate access to a garden now have the chance to grow their own foods via IKEA's indoor hydroponic garden. It's easy to use and requires no prior gardening experience and knowledge.
A hydroponic farm
The hydroponic system in order to function requires only adequate sunlight and water. With this, the user is able to grow much produce found in the aisles of their local grocery stores. Within the hydroponic system lies absorbent foam plugs that coat the seed. The specially created foam enables the seed to fully hydrated, keeping them moist enough without overwatering them which could be detrimental to their growth. Once germination is complete, they would then be transferred to a separate pot that is filled with pumice rock and water to complete the growth process.
Indoor gardening kit
Subsequently, the pots are then moved to a growing tray that is equipped with a solar lamp. The addition of the solar lamp is beneficial for places where sunlight is not readily available. The internal water sensor ensures that the plants are receiving sufficient water. According to, Helena Karlen, from the Swedish University Of Agricultural Science, the main objective was to make a hydroponic system that could be easily utilized by the average consumer. The series of a hydroponic device referred to as KRYYDDA/VAXER, was designed by a team consisting of Swedish agricultural scientist and was marketed to persons who live in apartments and those who want fresh produce during winter months.
Additionally, the product was designed to be a more sustainable, healthier and eco-friendly mean of growing and harvesting produce. Whether you live in China, North America or Northern Sweden, the product creators believe that you should be able to produce freshly harvested produce. Upon purchasing the basic VAXER series, the user will get seeds, starter plugs, nursery boxes, cultivation insert sets, fertilizer, pumice stones, cultivation light fixtures, and cultivation light. Additionally, the VAXER hydroponic system is more affordable when compared to traditional means of produce harvesting. It's also the company's first departure from traditional household items like bookshelves and tables. The head of the sustainable department of the Swedish company states that the device is the first of many that will be placed on the market in an attempt to provide a more eco-friendly and sustainable life for users.
MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Syrian Refugees To Tout Food Computers That Didn't Work
Media Lab’s Caleb Harper claimed success for a deployment of food computers to a refugee camp in Jordan, but an investigation by IEEE Spectrum reveals that it never happened
Media Lab’s Caleb Harper claimed success for a deployment of food computers to a refugee camp in Jordan, but an investigation by IEEE Spectrum reveals that it never happened
Photos: Left: WFP Innovation Accelerator; Right: Andreas Gebert/picture-alliance/AP
Left: A food computer at the World Food Programme office in Amman, Jordan. Right: Caleb Harper speaks during a panel discussion of the DLD17 Conference on January 15, 2017 in Munich, Germany.
“So we just put these last week in a Syrian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan,” Caleb Harper of MIT’s Media Lab told an audience at the Georgia Technology Summit in late March 2017.
He was referring to machines developed by his Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) at the Media Lab, where he is a principal research scientist. The machines had been delivered to a United Nations World Food Programme project that aimed to give refugees in the Azraq camp—located in the Jordanian desert 90 kilometers from the Syrian border—the means to grow their own food, right inside the camp.
The vehicle for this agricultural miracle is called a personal food computer (PFC): an enclosed chamber the size of a dorm-room refrigerator loaded with LEDs, sensors, pumps, fans, control electronics, and a hydroponic tray for growing plants. PFCs are programmed to control light, humidity, and other parameters within the chamber to create the perfect conditions for growing a variety of plants. It’s a simple yet potentially revolutionary idea: a portable box that can grow practically any kind of plant just by downloading a recipe and planting some seeds.
The refugees fleeing war in Syria, leaving their homes, loved ones and possessions behind, had no idea where or when they would leave this temporary desert encampment or how they would make do while they were there. But what the refugees really needed, Harper contended, was “to be connected to other growers to share knowledge.” He added: “So super proud that that’s happening.”
On its face, the project sounds like one of the most ambitious and altruistic uses of high-tech agriculture you could imagine. In his talk in Georgia and presentations elsewhere as recently as this year, Harper enthusiastically conveyed a vision for the PFC that mimics how regular digital computing is scaled: PFCs would find a home in classrooms and home kitchens; food-computer “servers” would be housed in shipping containers to supply, say, a restaurant; and data center–scale vertical farms would feed entire cities.
As the name of the OpenAg initiative suggests, the food computer’s hardware and software are entirely open-source—that is, the equipment specs and code are available free to anyone with the desire to experiment with indoor agriculture. “Nerd farmers,” the hashtaggable moniker given to members of the OpenAg maker community, build their own machines and then test their “recipes”—consisting of an array of controlled environmental parameters such as nutrient mix, temperature, carbon dioxide and pH levels, and light color and intensity. The recipe’s purpose is to arrive at a specific expression of a given plant’s phenome, which is an organism’s physical and biochemical traits expressed in response to the interaction of its genes and environment. Nerd farmers share their experiences via the OpenAg community forum and wiki, and can even upload their recipes to a Github repository, allowing others to replicate that exact plant phenome in their own machines.
Launched in 2015, OpenAg differed from other indoor farming efforts in both its ambition and its scope. While the operators of urban indoor farms are careful to locate them in areas that have access to water, electricity, and cheap real estate, often using proprietary software and equipment, open-source food computers could be built by anyone and would be deployable virtually anywhere. Data from food computers all over the world would be fed to machine learning algorithms to optimize recipes and help people grow, say, the most flavorful basil (the subject of this peer-reviewed PLoS-One paper authored by Harper et al.) or replicate an Aleppo pepper grown in Syria in a food computer in the Jordanian desert.
It’s a nice idea—if your food computer works.
But the situation on the ground never matched the fantastic claims that Harper made about the WFP project in public appearances during the spring of 2017 and in briefings for corporate patrons of the Media Lab in the spring and fall of 2017. Harper and a colleague also cited the personal food computer’s successful deployment in the Azraq camp in emails to potential partners and patrons for the Open Agriculture Initiative and for Fenome Inc., a spin-off company that Harper founded in 2016.
Even as Harper took the stage in Georgia, it was clear to those working with the food computer at the World Food Programme (WFP) and at Fenome that the project wasn’t progressing as the team had hoped. Indeed, in September 2017, the WFP project officially ended without any of the machines having completed a single grow cycle, according to the official in charge of the project. The WFP’s personal food computers weren’t even deployed at the Azraq camp, home to some 35,000 Syrian refugees, but rather at a facility run by Jordan’s National Center for Agricultural Research and Extension, in Mafraq, an hour’s drive from Azraq.
Harper did not respond to detailed questions about the WFP project sent to him by IEEE Spectrum for this article.
Photo: WFP Innovation Accelerator
May 2017 photograph of two food computers at the World Food Programme office in Amman, Jordan.
Recently, the OpenAg initiative has come under scrutiny following the departure in September of Media Lab director Joichi Ito. He was a champion of the project, which started during his tenure and seemed to exemplify his “deploy or die” approach. (In a 2014 TED talk, Ito announced he was changing the lab’s motto from “demo or die” to “deploy or die,” focusing researchers’ efforts on real-world implementations of the technologies they were developing.) MIT is now investigating OpenAg, following allegations that staff were told to demonstrate food computers with plants that were not actually grown in them. Business Insider and the Chronicle of Higher Education first reported these allegations.
Perhaps the only unqualified success of OpenAg was Harper’s ability to sell his idea. His first big public unveiling of the food computer came in a 2015 TED talk that has been viewed more than 1.8 million times. Audiences and the press alike swooned. Glowing reports about the food computer, including one in Spectrum, quickly followed, and continued right up until the most recent revelations. And Harper helped raise the capital to start up his OpenAg spin-off, Fenome.
Last month, The New York Times reported that four former researchers connected to OpenAg have complained about some of the claims Harper makes in his talks, including that the average age of an apple in a U.S. grocery store is 11 months sometimes and 14 months other times, statements refuted by a U.S. Department of Agriculture official in an email reviewed by the Times.
It’s one thing to get an incidental fact wrong. It’s quite another to repeatedly state that refugees were benefiting directly from food computers and enjoying a taste of home, when they were doing no such thing.
The WFP project started off with the best intentions. According to Nina Schroeder, Head of Scale Up Enablement at the WFP Innovation Accelerator and the World Food Programme official in charge of the Jordanian hydroponics project in 2017, the long-term goal of the project was indeed to deploy food computers at refugee camps. “First we wanted to come up with a concept that we could bring to a larger scale that actually makes sense to deploy. For the early research phase, it wouldn’t have made sense to deploy it inside the refugee camp.”
As Schroeder described it, the pilot program would let researchers evaluate the technology and determine if it was appropriate to install PFCs at the camp. If everything went well with the pilot, then the Azraq camp would receive the food computers.
The project launched at the end of January 2017, when a team from Fenome went to Jordan to assemble and install the food computers. At the time the company was based in Salt Lake City, with a staff of 17 there plus two employees in Boston and one in Seattle. Four food computers were placed at the WFP’s office in the Jordanian capital of Amman and six at the National Center for Agricultural Research and Extension (NCARE) facility at Al-Khalydeha Salinity Research Station in Mafraq, about a one-hour drive from the Azraq refugee camp.
The plan was that after installation, the project would be monitored remotely from Utah via the Internet and by three NCARE staff on site in Jordan. The NCARE experiments focused on testing the technology using local water and changing the light spectrum of the food computers’ LEDs and the nutrient mix of the hydroponic solution, according to a person close to the project who spoke with Spectrum anonymously for fear of retaliation. Plants tested included cucumbers, basil, and baby lettuces. The source confirmed that Fenome’s team communicated regularly by phone with their Jordanian counterparts.
Photo: Joi Ito/Flickr (CC by 2.0)
November 2014 photograph of Caleb Harper (left) and Media Lab director of operations and strategy and Fenome board member Barak Berkowitz, taken by Joi Ito.
According to corporate filings and internal Fenome documents obtained by Spectrum, Harper had helped raise $4 million for his startup, where he was executive chairman and a director. Barak Berkowitz, director of operations and strategy at the Media Lab and Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of Mozilla, also served on the board. Other directors included representatives of two venture capital firms that funded Fenome: Lucas Mann from Campbell Soup’s VC arm Acre Venture Partners and Ignacio Martinez of Flagship Pioneering, founded by Noubar Afeyan, who is also a member of the MIT Corporation, as the school’s board of trustees is known.
Martinez declined to comment on the WFP project or Fenome. Berkowitz, Baker, and Mann did not respond to questions posed by Spectrum.
But despite all this money and brainpower, things soon went awry in Jordan. Schroeder, in a phone interview, told Spectrum that the conditions at the NCARE site were harsh, with a very dry desert climate and high indoor temperatures. The power frequently failed, which shut down the building’s air conditioning and the food computers’ LEDs. When the air conditioning conked out, it sometimes reached 45 °C (113 °F) inside the lab.
Worse, the Wi-Fi was unreliable. A Wi-Fi connection was necessary to remotely monitor some of the parameters inside the grow chambers, which were equipped with cameras and sensors that measured temperature, humidity, and pH levels. Whenever a food computer went down, it had to be connected to Wi-Fi so that the remote team could reboot it. The software was still quite buggy, so not all features could be controlled locally at the NCARE facility. The Fenome team returned a month after the initial deployment to modify the boxes and some functions, and to allow the machines to be rebooted locally, according to our source close to the project.
But while Fenome might have solved some problems, others cropped up, according to Schroeder. Algae grew inside the containers, possibly because of low-quality water and light shining through the food computers’ clear acrylic access doors. The doors also deformed due to the heat, creating gaps that let ambient air into the grow chamber and contaminated what is supposed to be a controlled environment.
In all, the Fenome support team visited NCARE four times to set up the food computers, train local teams, and adjust the personal food computers. The last visit was in May 2017.
In late April, just a few weeks after OpenAg Inc. officially changed its name to Fenome, Inc., 15 of its 17 employees in Utah were dismissed. In the fall of 2017, the company left Utah and relocated to offices at its VC partner Flagship Pioneering, in Cambridge, Mass.
“When they closed down the Utah office, that made it very difficult to continue the experiments that were going on,” says Schroeder. The WFP officially ended the Jordanian project in September 2017. Not a single grow cycle was successfully completed, Schroeder says.
“The food computer we tested there wasn’t ready for our purpose, and it was still in the development stage,” Schroeder says. Her team is now deploying lower tech, locally adapted hydroponic systems to food-insecure communities in Algeria, Chad, Jordan, Kenya, Namibia, Peru, and Sudan.
The concept of the food computer “is so attractive that you have the possibility to grow locally,” she says. “But you need to have the right kind of environment. That food computer version was too early.”
While it may have been the most high profile, the World Food Programme wasn’t the only Fenome partner left high and dry.
Photo: Charisa Moore
Charisa Moore (right) and her students experimented with three food computers.
In the fall of 2016, Charisa Moore, a biology teacher at Bainbridge Island High School in Washington state, watched a recording of Harper’s TED talk. The food computer sounded like just what Moore had been looking for to beef up her curriculum with content centered on ecology. Moore called Harper.
She says Harper told her he could talk about what OpenAg had done in putting food computers into Boston-area schools but warned her that they didn’t work in a lot of the schools where they were deployed.
“Well, I can make it work!” Moore told Harper. Harper invited Moore, another teacher, and a star student to MIT for a week to learn how to build, program, and troubleshoot the food computer and experiment with plant recipes. Fenome would provide Moore’s school with the hardware, help her and her students build the units on-site, and support them free of charge.
When she got home in late April 2017, Moore and her team decided to give a TED-esque talk themselves to about 400 people in the Bainbridge community about the project they were about to embark on with the help of Fenome.
“We did basically Caleb’s presentation using his Fenome team. And then that week we built the computers.”
Students and teachers started running experiments with the food computers. The food computer cameras and sensors sent data to Fenome in Utah, and the Utah team communicated with Moore on what they saw happening in the machines.
“And then it kind of got really weird,” Moore recalls. “We started not hearing very much. We used [the food computers] through the summer. Starting the next [school] year, we started to hear Fenome was going to go out of business. So that team was not able to then really troubleshoot any of our stuff.”
Without tech support from Fenome, software maintenance proved difficult. Moore struggled to push updated software that had been published on Github to the machines. “It’s very complicated,” she told Spectrum. “This is way beyond my expertise. I can only barely code in Python.”
Hardware bugs were even more difficult to fix. “The equipment is really not sustainable,” Moore says. “It corrodes. You have a cooling unit on it, the Freon comes out, it freezes—it just becomes messy. So to clean it, you have to go and order the stuff and replace those items. And good luck finding them.”
Her team did come up with a solution for one glaring, design-for-demo’s-sake specification: the food computer’s clear acrylic door, which let in ambient light and contributed to the algae problems in Jordan.
“The thing about the food computer that sort of didn’t make a lot of sense to me was that it’s open.... It’s not controlled,” says Moore. At her students’ urging, she went to Home Depot and bought some silver wrapping and clad the chassis with it to shut out unwanted light.
Photos: Charisa Moore
The students modified the food computer by wrapping the door. They added a flap on the small rectangle to keep all light out.
Moore says that she and her students continued to experiment with their food computers, uploading plant recipes to the OpenAg open source forum. They also set up an experiment to see which equipment grew microgreens more effectively: a food computer or a basic UV light bank shining down on plants potted in soil. Moore’s team found that the conventional indoor setup grew microgreens at four inches per week—twice the rate of the food computer.
Moore concluded that the food computers “are pretty much not usable, because they just are not user-friendly. They’re too hard to troubleshoot. Any Joe could not just walk up and figure out how to do it. You couldn’t market that to put in your pantry at home unless you knew how to do all that stuff.”
Moore found herself with three food computers on her hands. She gave the “most unusable” one to a student, who took it home and converted the box “into a kind of a simplistic one with [manual controls] instead of electronic ones.” He used it to earn a Boy Scout merit badge.
Even as Fenome and its partners were struggling, Harper continued to enchant audiences with his tales of nerd farmers around the world. Harper, who holds a master’s degree in architecture from MIT and is a member of the World Economic Forum and a National Geographic Explorer, managed to parlay the exposure from his TED talk into a lucrative side gig as a speaker. He earns $20,000 to $30,000 per talk, according to his agent’s website. He also used a version of the TED talk at a pitch meeting with investors in the summer of 2016 to help get his company its first series of funding according to an email obtained by Spectrum.
In May 2017, Harper repurposed his Georgia Technology Summit talk for a Red Hat conference. He again spoke about how a refugee camp in Jordan was using the food computers. He also described what the refugees grew and the significance they attached to the machines: “We didn’t tell them what to grow. They decided to grow things that they missed from home. Things that they can’t get any more.”
“The food computer,” he said, “became a cultural object more than just a manufacturing object.”
Meanwhile, Harper’s startup was laying off staff and planning its relocation to Massachusetts. Just days after the Red Hat appearance, Harper posted about Fenome to the OpenAg Community Forum: “hey guys—the startup (fenome) in its infancy has had a couple gaffes (oops) and obv communications is one of them.” He explained that the Fenome team was working to fix bugs and upgrade these “crazy expensive and not fully functional” “1st run prototypes” so that the company could start selling PFC kits. He told the forum that “after some development we all think its [sic] better to be based in Cambridge and is in the process of moving.”
Trouble at his startup did not derail Harper’s traveling show.
Less than a month after Red Hat, he dusted off his talk and delivered it at the EAT Stockholm Food Forum. He repeated his claim that the food computers at the Azraq refugee camp had created much more than mere plants:
“We’ve deployed in the world with the World Food Programme in Amman in a Syrian refugee camp. We did not tell them what to grow. Turns out they wanted to grow things from home. It became a cultural object for them. They missed the flavor of the place that they were from and that creates their culture and creates happiness for them.”
Harper’s story about Azraq evolved further in an interview earlier this year with science journalist Miles O’Brien at a Purdue University event on 26 February. This time, he revealed how St. John’s Wort plants had been grown by a “person at the camp that happened to be a Ph.D. on St. John’s Wort.” Harper claimed that the person started a business selling the medicinal plant to treat a population “rife with depression”:
Besides these public claims posted to YouTube, documents obtained by Spectrum reveal that Harper and at least one associate also misrepresented the World Food Programme project in email correspondence with potential funders and partners.
In a February 2017 email chain that included Nest cofounder and iPod coinventor Tony Fadell, Harper and his assistant tried to arrange a meeting with Fadell, now principal at Future Shape LLC, an investment and advisory firm based in Paris. Harper sent links to a couple of blog posts, one from 2016 about his lab and another about the “2017 expansion of our ecosystem with a nonprofit and a venture.” He ended his 14 February 2017 email with “Btw we just deployed food computers to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordanon [sic] a contract with the UN. Pretty cool. C”.
And about five months after the project at NCARE had ended, OpenAg was in talks with a group at Google about supporting research at OpenAg, according to another email chain obtained by Spectrum. In an email dated 30 January 2018, Google’s Jess Holbrook, senior staff UX researcher and UX manager, asked several questions regarding food computers, including “Has anyone picked up the design and adapted it to specific use cases like edu, refugee groups (I know you mentioned Jordan), etc.”
Hildreth England, the OpenAg Initiative assistant director at the time and currently co-director of the Media Lab’s PlusMinus program, answered the next day, “...yes, the PFC v2.0 was deployed in a Syrian refugee camp with the World Food Program.” England declined Spectrum’s request to comment, citing “an open inquiry being led by MIT’s Office of the VP for Research.”
Around the same time as the exchange between England and Holbrook, Dr. Babak Babakinejad, then the lead researcher for OpenAg, was testing a food server being set up in a shipping container in Middleton, Mass., at MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center. Babakinejad told Spectrum that he documented several problems with the equipment, including differences in temperatures in various areas inside the food server, in what is supposed to be a controlled environment, and a lack of control over carbon dioxide levels, humidity, and temperature. He told Spectrum that he had reported these issues to the OpenAg team.
Photo: Babak Babakinejad
Food server set up in a shipping container at MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center.
Babakinejad showed Spectrum an email he sent on 16 April 2018 to officials with MIT Environment, Health and Safety to report that OpenAg was discharging nutrient solutions beyond state-permitted limits, a controversy that was examined last month in a joint report by ProPublica and WBUR. Babakinejad also took his concerns about OpenAg and Harper to Media Lab director Ito.
In an email to Ito on 5 May 2018, Babakinejad stated that Harper was making claims in public talks about “implementations of image processing, microbiome dosing, creating different climates and collecting credible data from bots across the world that are not true.”
In addition, Babakinejad wrote, “He [Harper] takes credit for deployment of PFC’s to schools and internationally including a refugee camp in Amman despite the fact that they have never been validated, tested for functionality and up to now we could never make it work i.e. to grow anything consistently, for an experiment beyond prototyping stage.”
Ito responded and asked Babakinejad if he could share these concerns with Harper. That’s the last Babakinejad says he heard from Ito on the matter. Within a month, Babakinejad had taken a leave of absence. He officially left the OpenAg project in September 2018. Two months later, Harper was promoted to principal research scientist at the Media Lab, a position that as of this writing, he still holds.
If you have any information about MIT’s Media Lab or its Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg), you can contact Harry Goldstein at h.goldstein@ieee.org or on Twitter (DMs open, ask for Signal number).
Paris Is Turning Abundant Car Parks Into Underground Farms
Falling ownership in car sales in Paris has increased the space of abandoned car parks in the city. This venture has taken a green turn as the city is transforming old car parks to grow mushrooms or even salad
Falling ownership in car sales in Paris has increased the space of abandoned car parks in the city. This venture has taken a green turn as the city is transforming old car parks to grow mushrooms or even salad.
Paris had built too many underground car parks in the 1960s and 70s, when the city tried to keep with the mushrooming housing blocks, building underground parking for residents hence became inevitable.
Sources allege, beneath Paris there are millions of square meters of car park. Figures however allege, a steady decline in car ownership in Paris, a trend which city authorities are keen to encourage. The drop in the number of car owners is also attributed to the new, convenient cab and bike services to move around the city.
As a result, some of the car parks find themselves surplus to the requirements. The city is hence calling for new ideas which can transform Paris’s underground to reveal its full potential. A number of competitions have taken place with this focus.
Urban farmers - Cycloponics were selected as one of the winners for rejuvenating three car parks in Paris. One of their projects was the redundant La Chapelle, a no-go area used by drug dealers and prostitutes. The space now is however blooming. The group made the space conducive for cultivating main crop: oyster, shiitake and white button mushrooms. They also grow chicory, a northern French delicacy that grows in the dark.
The produced harvest is sold through nearby organic grocery stores, which also means urban food is grown and consumed within a short distance. This method also reduces the pollution that comes along with the transportation.
In France there are a lot of regulations around operating a business underground not least for security reasons. Other businesses have been rejected for applications. Permits for such kind of farming have however been possible.
The city’s car parks are as a result experiencing a green makeover.
Posted in Environment, NewsTagged Paris, underground farms
Videos: Freight Farms - Container Farming
To learn more about how to get started with your own Freight Farm go to Freight Farms, or to inquire about a pre-owned Freight Farm Container go to iGrow News
FREIGHT FARMER SPOTLIGHT: PATRICK STOFFER
In a lot of ways, Patrick Stoffer isn't your average 28-year old. To start with, he is a hydroponic farmer, but perhaps even more unusual, he is roommates with a 90-year old, Harrie, just one of the members of his community he is passionate about serving. Patrick lives at Humanitas Independent Senior Living Facility in Deventer, The Netherlands. In exchange for room and board, Patrick spends time with the residents, who help him grow, harvest and prepare the fresh produce from his Freight Farms operation, Grow Local. To learn more about how to get started with your own Freight Farm go to Freight Farms, or to learn more about pre-owned Freight Farm LGM container, got to iGrow News.
GROW FOOD HERE: SPRINGDALE, ARKANSAS | VET VEGGIES
4 STEPS TO GROWING IN OUR CONTAINER FARM
FREIGHT FARMER SUPPORT
MEET THE FARMERS AT AGORA GREENS
2015 LEAFY GREEN MACHINE BY FREIGHT FARMS
INSIDE A SHIPPING CONTAINER VERTICAL HYDROPONIC FARM
INTRODUCTION TO THE LEAFY GREEN MACHINE
FREIGHT FARMS X KARMA FARM
THE STORY BEHIND FREIGHT FARMS
INSIDE THE LEAFY GREEN MACHINE
EDEN-ISS: Substantial Vegetable Harvest In Antarctica
“In just nine and a half months, we produced a total of 268 kilograms of food on just 12.5 square meters, including 67 kilograms of cucumbers, 117 kilograms of lettuce and 50 kilograms of tomatoes.”
EDEN-ISS ©Hanno Müller, AWI
Posted by Almut Otto | Aug 24, 2019 | Tags: Antarctic Neumayer III Station, Antarctica, DLR, greenhouses
No, luckily the climate in Antarctica is still inhospitable. And this is precisely why the German Aerospace Center (DLR) set up the EDEN-ISS greenhouse there in 2018. This is because food production of the future and future space missions are being researched in the immediate vicinity of the German Antarctic Neumayer III Station. In the meantime, the winter crew from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), including DLR researcher Dr Paul Zabel, has spent a year surrounded by constant ice. The team presented the results on 23 August: There was an unexpectedly rich harvest. According to Zabel:
“In just nine and a half months, we produced a total of 268 kilograms of food on just 12.5 square meters, including 67 kilograms of cucumbers, 117 kilograms of lettuce and 50 kilograms of tomatoes.”
EDEN-ISS ©Hanno Müller, AWI
Before his trip, by the way, Zabel had been smart enough to look into artificial vegetable cultivation in Dutch greenhouses. Zabel adds:
“The taste of the fresh vegetables and their smell left a lasting impression on the winter crew and had a visibly positive effect on the team’s mood throughout the long period of isolation.
A correlation that is now also being researched from a psychological perspective.
Lower energy consumption than expected
Additionally, the scientists were surprised that they needed much less energy than they had initially expected. The average power consumption during the analog Antarctic mission was 0.8 kilowatts per square meter of cultivated area. It was consequently less than half as much as previously assumed for aerospace greenhouses, which were estimated at 2.1 kilowatts per square meter.
“This is an important aspect for a subsequent space venture and gives us confidence about the future of this idea”.
… says Project Manager Dr. Daniel Schubert from the DLR Institute of Space Systems. Aside from that, he stresses the potential and useful addition to space food that can be supplied by the earth:
“In one year in the Antarctic we have seen very clearly how enough food can be produced in a very small space in order to supplement the food of a crew of six by a third with freshly grown food.”
High workload should be reduced
Notwithstanding this, the researchers still see some potential for development. Because in order to save valuable astronaut time, the amount of work required for support and maintenance has to be significantly reduced in the future. Zabel needed an average of three to four hours a day in order to cultivate the plants:
” I spent about two thirds of my time operating and maintaining the greenhouse technology, another third on sowing, harvesting and maintenance. In the future, a space greenhouse needs to significantly reduce the amount of an astronaut’s valuable time.”
On top of that, the time required for experiments was about four to five hours per day. The aeroponic cultivation system, i.e. nutrient solution without soil, enabled the plants to flourish successfully. Some pumps caused problems in the intervening period and the biofilm in the nutrient tanks were unexpectedly high, yet these problems could be remedied.
New EDEN-ISS designed for the Falcon 9 rocket
Based on the results and experiences of the EDEN-ISS project, a new design concept for a space greenhouse has now been developed. This greenhouse is fairly compact in its design so that it can be launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. At the same time, it is expandable and large enough to provide sufficient food for the astronauts on the moon or on Mars. “The area used for cultivation is around 30 square meters, almost three times the size of the Antarctic greenhouse container. Using this system, around 90 kilograms of fresh food could be grown per month, which corresponds to half a kilogram of fresh vegetables per day and per astronaut if six astronauts are present,” Schubert explains.
The concept may also be combined with a biofilter system (C.R.O.P.). Its purpose is to produce a fertilizer solution for plant cultivation that is able to be utilized from biowaste and urine directly. This makes the greenhouse concept almost a fully bio-regenerative life support system for future habitats. Prof. Hansjörg Dittus, DLR Executive Board member responsible for space research and technology, elaborates further:
“The newly proposed concept for a space greenhouse is an invaluable foundation on which we intend to further expand our research work.”
EDEN-ISS is open to research teams worldwide
Following Paul Zabel’s return to Germany, the Antarctic greenhouse was initially in “sleep mode”. Previously, the DLR team had maintained all systems on site in January 2019 and completely overhauled the container. The Bremen researchers then woke the system up from its sleep at the beginning of May using a remote control system and powered it up again. A seed sown at an earlier stage began to flourish.
“This step served to test another space scenario. Because a provisional greenhouse is expected to arrive before the astronauts and ideally start its operation remotely.
… DLR researcher Schubert explains and he adds: “The test run was a complete success. Now the current AWI winter crew is continuing to operate the greenhouse with strong support from the Bremen Control Center, from where we monitor as much as we possibly can from a distance. The procedures developed last year are currently proving their worth in minimizing the crew’s workload and simplifying procedures as far as practicable”.
The greenhouse is also now available to various research groups worldwide who are interested in conducting plant cultivation experiments in the Antarctic.
“As one of the first new collaboration partners, the American space agency NASA has already sent us original NASA salad seeds, which are also cultivated on the International Space Station ISS and now thrive here in Antarctica,” Schubert adds.
Findings are interesting for global food production
The frozen continent of Antarctica is one of the most exciting research regions in the world. “It is primarily here that we gather data on global climate change and Antarctic biodiversity. However, the greenhouse is an excellent example of how we can conduct research at Neumayer Station III on other important questions for the future. After all, we have a lot in common with space travel when we travel to regions that are hostile to humans in order to gain new insights. At the same time, the permanent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables has a very positive side effect on our winter crew this year once again,” says Prof. Antje Boetius, Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, who, during her stay at the station, was able to convince herself of the wonderful flavor of a juicy giant radish from the greenhouse. The cultivation of vegetables is consequently also interesting for future missions by the research icebreaker Polarstern.
Moreover, global food production is one of the central challenges facing society in the 21st century. An ever-increasing world population and the simultaneous upheavals caused by climate change call for new ways of cultivating crops even in climatically unfavorable regions. A self-contained greenhouse enables harvests that are independent of weather, sun and season, as well as lower water consumption and the elimination of pesticides and insecticides for deserts and regions with low temperatures, as well as for space missions to the moon and to Mars. In the EDEN-ISS project, such a model greenhouse for the future is undergoing long-term testing under extreme Antarctic conditions.
EDEN-ISS partners
EDEN-ISS is developed by DLR in cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) as part of a winter mission at the German Neumayer Station III in Antarctica. Numerous other international partners are working together as part of a research consortium under the leadership of DLR with the aim of ensuring that the Antarctic greenhouse functions properly. These include Wageningen University and Research (Netherlands), Airbus Defense and Space (Germany), LIQUIFER Systems Group (Austria), National Research Council (Italy), University of Guelph (Canada), Enginsoft (Italy), Thales Alenia Space Italia (Italy), AeroCosmo (Italy), Heliospectra (Sweden), Limerick Institute of Technology (Ireland), Telespazio (Italy) and the University of Florida (USA). The project is funded by the European Research Framework Program Horizon 2020 under project number 636501.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Almut Otto
Almut Otto is a writer and has over 30 years of know-how in the communications industry. She learned the trade of journalism from scratch in a daily newspaper and in a special interest magazine. After studying communication sciences in Munich, she worked as an international PR manager in the textile, shoe, outdoor and IT industries for a long time. For some years now, she has been concentrating more on her journalistic background. As a passionate outdoor and water sports enthusiast - her hobbies include windsurfing, kitesurfing, SUP boarding, sailing and snowboarding - she is particularly interested in keeping the oceans clean and shaping a sustainable future. In addition, she is always fascinated by the latest developments from the world's hardware and software laboratories.
Futuristic Farming Takes Root In Georgia
Agriculture is Georgia’s number one industry, but there is one local farmer innovating the way growers do business in the Peach State
by: Martin Staunton
June 27, 2019
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV)
Agriculture is Georgia’s number one industry, but there is one local farmer innovating the way growers do business in the Peach State.
Grant Anderson, owner of BetterFresh Farms, says traditional farming goes back countless generations for his family in Effingham County. But many family, friends, and neighbors near Guyton thought he was taking a huge risk when he walked away from his job in finance to start BetterFresh Farms two years ago.
“A lot of them thought I was a little crazy,” Anderson said with a chuckle, recounting their reaction to his decision to grow lettuce hydroponically.
The Agriculture Commissioner’s Office reports BetterFresh is the first commercial hydroponics farm to be established in Georgia. Anderson is investing in a new hydroponics container that’s state-of-the-art and it will double his lettuce production.
The new equipment was built in Canada by a company called Local Food Champions. Jason Carrier, President and owner, was on hand for delivery, his first to the Peach State.
“This is absolutely the future and this is bigger than all of us,” Carrier said. “So we are hoping we can get out there and feed some people. Farm to table in record time. This is farming for everybody.”
Hydroponics requires no soil, 90% less water than pivot irrigation, and eliminates the need for chemicals to control weeds and insects. Anderson only needed enough land to place two growing units — each is roughly the size of a shipping container — to bring this futuristic farming method to Effingham County.
“It doesn’t require the soil. It just requires the moisture to germinate,” he explained. “From there, we give it a nutrient recipe that supplies it enough nutrient to grow for a few weeks until it matures to a point where we can move it into our towers.”
The grow towers are the real game-changers for farming when it comes to harvest.
“It takes the seasonality out of harvesting, which is huge from a farm operation, as far as being able to cash week-in and week-out every year and not worry about the bumper crop or the drought that may impact your crop,” Anderson said. “We have consistent volume each week.”
BetterFresh Farms is moving operations to Candler County after joining a partnership with the City of Metter and Georgia Southern University, launching an Agri-Business Incubator. It’s got the backing of the Agriculture Commissioner’s Office under their “Georgia Grown” branding.
“Georgia Grown is going to be a tremendous partner, as far as the marketing of our product and helping people becomes aware of how we do what we do,” said Anderson.
City leaders in Metter say their new partnership with Anderson does more than just bring his farm to their town, it helps them lead the way in terms of one of the future paths for farming. Heidi Jeffers, the Tourism & Business Development Director for the City of Metter, says hydroponic farming can be a powerful weapon in the fight against hunger.
“It changes how we feed our people in Georgia and all over the United States. Hydroponics is a great technology that’s coming about with some great new changes and we are certainly excited to have this in Metter,” Jeffers said, adding that the city is proud to partner with a farming pioneer in Georgia.
“We’re excited to be on the cutting edge of hydroponics,” she said. “With this, it’s completely organic, uses less water, and really changes, a game-changer for this type of produce.”
Thinking of his ancestors, Anderson believes it might have taken some real convincing to bring them onboard when it comes to launching BetterFresh Farms, but he says he’s sure they are proud he’s carrying the family tradition in agriculture forward.
“It may not be the way my ancestors would have envisioned farming working out, but I feel like, with time, we’re all supposed to try and improve,” he said. “I feel like this was my opportunity to maybe pick the torch up and run with it.”
Georgia grown hydroponic crops a hit with Savannah chefs
The choice of lettuce as a crop was a no brainer for Anderson, given his proximity to Savannah and the hundreds of restaurants in business in the Hostess City.
“Virtually every restaurant needs lettuce,” Anderson said. His clients rave about his product being locally grown and organic.
Chef Andrew Wilson with the Emporium Kitchen and Wine Market is most pleased to have a produce vendor who can customize his crop to meet the needs of his recipes.
“The really cool thing is that, not only can say that we are supporting a local farm, but I can also say that they are growing what I ask them to grow specifically for this menu, which in turn means specifically for you the guest. It’s like you’re getting exclusivity,” Wilson explained.
One of Savannah’s newest pizza parlors, Squirrel’s Pizza on Bull Street, is nuts about BetterFresh lettuce.
“It flies outta here. The product that comes in, we can barely hold on to it,” said Jimmy Powell, Managing Partner with Squirrels. “We’re making phone calls the next day asking for special deliveries and requests.”
Anderson says his customer list is growing. He adds that he’s never missed a delivery in two years, and even though he’s up against giants in the industry — he likes his chances for future growth.
“Personally, I believe I have a competitive advantage, even if I am a small fish in a big pond, so to speak,” Anderson said with a grin on his face and a gleam in his eye.
Learn more about his work at betterfreshfarms.com
Hydroponic Farming: Why the Future of Food Is Indoors
Hydroponic farming needs a fraction of the water and space needed
to grow crops compared to conventional farming.
Hydroponics could help meet the world’s growing food pressure.
Pixabay
There are about 7.5 billion people on the face of the planet. With every new person born, there’s a new mouth to feed.
In just a few decades, we might just hit a Full-Earth scenario.
By 2100, the global population will be around 11 billion. To feed this many people, we need 0.22 hectares of cultivated land on average per person. That gives us 2.4 billion hectares. Currently, there are 1.5 billion hectares of cultivated land in the world. So, we need about 1 billion more hectares of farmland, roughly the size of the United States.
That’s not even thinking about all of the water needed to irrigate these crops and the strain this will put on the world’s water resources.
Besides being unfeasible, it’s just an unsustainable model that we used and tested for a very long time.
Non-conventional agriculture systems, like vertical farming and urban farming, could help produce more food, while also easing environment issues related to food production.
Hydroponic farming is another method that allows growing plants to not only meet quantity needs but also quality standards.
Indoor Hydroponic Farms: no Soil, no Pesticides, and Very Little Water
If hydroponic farming sounds futuristic, the concept itself is about as old as agriculture with many instances of hydroponic farms throughout history and civilizations.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is the first known example of hydroponic farming. The Aztec built chinampas, floating farms that used hydroponic systems.
Hydroponics is basically an irrigation system that allows growing plants without soil.
Leveraging robotics and data analytics, many companies are taking indoor hydroponic farming to levels never before reached.
One such company is Bowery Farming, a startup founded in 2014 in New York that specializes in indoor farming.
The company claims its farming system to be 100 times more productive than traditional farming while using 95% less water and zero pesticides.
A combination of tech solutions enable Bowery to produces a wide variety of crops, twice as fast, and take them to market within a few days after harvest.
Irving Fain, Bowery CEO and co-founder, told Clean Technica:
“BoweryOS, our proprietary software system, uses vision systems, automation technology, and machine learning to monitor plants and all the variables that drive their growth 24/7, while combining software and automation with industrial process management to optimize production, fulfillment and distribution. By applying proprietary machine learning algorithms to millions of points of data collected by an extensive network of sensors and cameras.”
Because indoor farms offer a closed and controlled environment for greens to grow, there’s more to these products than just their little resources requirements.
They are safer to eat because controlled environment technology minimizes the risk of contamination from different sources, like animal waste, water, or irrigation run-off.
In the case of Bowery products, because they control “the entire process from seed to store, our greens aren’t matriculated through large distribution and fulfillment centers that often lead to additional exposure to contaminants”.
Zayan Guedim
Trilingual poet, investigative journalist, and novelist. Zed loves tackling the big existential questions and all-things quantum.
Playing "Happy Families" To Understand Urban Agriculture In France
We hear a lot about urban agriculture, but what is it exactly? How is it different from traditional agriculture? What is the difference between rural farms and urban farms?
11 December 2018
Agnès Lelièvre, lecturer in agronomy at AgroParisTech, Baptiste Grard, postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Functional Ecology and Ecotoxicology of Agroecosystems (AgroParisTech/INRA), Christine Aubry, head of the Urban Agriculture research team at AgroParisTech, and Véronique Saint-Ges, economist at INRA, tell us about the different forms of urban agriculture.
We hear a lot about urban agriculture, but what is it exactly? How is it different from traditional agriculture? What is the difference between rural farms and urban farms?
New definitions of that concept have emerged in the past few years—including that of Canadian expert Luc J.A. Mougeot (2000) and French experts Paula Nahmias et Yvon Le Caro (2012)—, along with new typologies such as those of Cerema, Exp’AU and IAU. In the present case we will use Mougeot’s definition of urban agriculture:
“A production unit located within a city or metropolis (urban) or in its direct vicinity (peri-urban) that produces, raises, processes and distributes a diversity of food or non-food products by massively (re)using human and material resources, products and services from that urban area and its surroundings, and providing human and material resources, products and services to that same area.”
To depict the different forms of urban farming, we have chosen to use the analogy of “Happy Families”, where each category of urban agriculture is a family. For each family, we will relate the story of its ancestors and parents (the ancient forms) as well as that of its children (the current forms).
Without further ado, let’s get to know all these happy families.
1. The “Feet in the soil” family
This family has historically lived in an urban environment, while staying deeply connected to the soil. In today’s context, this category suffers from two recurring issues: access to land and pollution.
The ancestors of that category were the vegetable gardens of aristocrats, such as the well-known “King’s garden”, established in Versailles during the 17th century to provide fruit and vegetables to Louis XIV’s court.
In this family, the parents are a popular and commercial version of their ancestors. They are, for example, the marais ("swamps") at the heart of Paris, which have led to the French word maraîchage (“market gardening”). These farmers were great initiators and inventors of agricultural techniques that are still being used today. They practiced intensive agriculture on small areas using frames or glass domes to cultivate earlier in the season. Horse manure (which at that time was abundant in the city) and urban mud were some of the resources commonly used. This shows how helpful market gardeners were to city dwellers.
They have a large, varied descent that includes peri-urban farms, often pushed outside of the cities due to urban densification and hygienization. These farmers continue to sell their products to city dwellers, i.e. mainly vegetable produce and small animals (chickens, eggs, etc.). Over the past fifteen years, these farms have become increasingly popular through the development of short, local distribution networks such as AMAPs. These farms usually cover a few hectares each. In 2010, almost half of French farms producing vegetables and honey sold their produce through short distribution networks.
However, some farmers have managed to establish themselves within cities—or to maintain ancestral farms, although this is less common—by diversifying their activities. Some of them do community work, for instance for individuals that have been disconnected from the job market (such as the gardens of association Aurore), others do educational work (Veni Verdi for vegetable production, Bergers urbains for urban pastoralism) or organize cultural events (La ferme du bonheur).
The closest descendants of market gardeners work in production farms (such as Perma G’Rennes), located on former agricultural plots, or in schools or parks with plots from a few hundred m2 to 1 or 2 hectares.
The garden of the Pierre Mendès France college in Paris, overseen by the Veni Verdi association. (Michèle Foin/Vimeo, 2016).
2. The “Rooftop” family
This family has been around for centuries, as plants were already found on rooftop terraces in ancient Egypt, as shown in certain images of the book Palais et Maisons du Caire ("Palaces and houses of Cairo"), on the architecture of the 13th-16th centuries. Today urban honey is harvested from beehives installed on the roof of many public and private buildings.
There has been a growing interest in "green roofs" (i.e. not producing food) since the 1980s. Now the “agricultural descent” of this family includes farm that are community-oriented—to foster social interactions (Culticimes), for educational or experimental purposes (AgroParisTech‘s rooftop) or for event planning (Jardins suspendus). Some roofs also host farms for productive purposes (Aéromate, AgriPolis).
Interview of Louise Doulliet, co-founder of startup Aéromate. (Supbiotech/YouTube, 2017).
These “rooftop farms” have specific requirements as they have limited space compared to regular land farms. Today, rooftop vegetable gardens can be seen as a solution to issues related to land access and soil pollution, to the point that in a growing number of cities, new constructions anticipate their presence. Yet many questions remain unanswered, including about their design and the growing medium used.
3. The “Vertical” family
Growing produce on walls may seem risky... Yet Montreuil’s peach walls were renowned worldwide during the 19th century for the quality of their production: the fruits were exported as far as the Russian Tsar’s court. Vines have also been climbing on small walls and all kinds of arbors since antiquity.
Whether in museums, hospitals or malls, living walls designed for decorative purposes have become increasingly popular since the 90’s and 2000’s. Today living walls producing vegetables or hop are also found next to urban microbreweries. Farms specializing in event planning also use walls on rooftops. This family is less common than the two previous ones.
Paris hops will grow on the walls https://t.co/6XSGvftnTJ — Le Parisien | Paris (@LeParisien_75) 18 février 2018
4. The “Greenhouse” family
Greenhouse farming extends the production period of fruit and vegetables. The aristocracy was the first to reap its benefits through orangeries and winter gardens. During the 19th century, greenhouses were built in Auteuil and Paris’s Jardin des plantes to ensure the conservation of varieties and species constituting plant collections.
Today, greenhouses are extensively used in agriculture—including in the well-known Dutch production units—but also in cities for productive purposes (Skygreen) or on rooftops (Les Fermes Lufa, The New Farm). They can also be used to educate or experiment on social reinsertion and food therapy (such as in the Cité maraîchère in Romainville).
Greenhouse kale crops in Montreal’s Loufa farms. Les Fermes Lufa Facebook page
Aquaponics is another form of greenhouse farming that combines raising fish and growing vegetables. Although this type of production can be done in tanks based on a living substrate (with fertilizing power for the plants), it is usually based on a neutral substrate in hydroponic systems where the necessary elements for plants—and fish, if any—are provided through water. This type of production is currently being studied as part of a national research project.
5. The “Shade” family
The ancestors of this family developed underground, in mushroom and endive farms. They are known as produits de cave (“basement products”) and are commonly found in the greater Paris area. The parents haven’t diversified their products, yet they have developed new production systems. The children took over the family business by diversifying the offer, through micro-sprouts in particular, and by reusing new types of waste generated by the city, such as coffee grounds. It is mostly production-oriented (Boîte à champignons, La Caverne).
The Boîte à champignons (mushroom box). Agnès Lelièvre
A high tech “parent” has appeared in the last few years with growth in a controlled environment (light, atmosphere, etc.) thanks to recent progress in spatial research. Its children are using existing buildings or recycled containers (Agricool, Farmbox). This family is strongly developing in some countries with high population density or facing intense climatic stress. In France, it has been used as an opportunity to reuse areas such as abandoned parking lots, and in certain cases, to establish mobile farms.
6. The “Sunday gardening” family
The ancestor of the individual garden has led to private gardens, but also to group gardening with allotment gardens, which emerged at the end of the 19th century.
The children of this family continue to maintain private gardens on balconies, terraces and actual gardens, which can be produce high yields. They also practice collective gardening which covers shared gardens, family gardens and multiple hybrid experiments. While private gardening is aimed at growing vegetables, collective gardening also has a social and educational purpose.
This family has grown a lot since the 20th century and it has become increasingly popular, especially in the case of collective gardening. There are over 1,000 collective gardens in Île-de-France, covering at least 900 hectares, in a context where professional vegetable production covers 5,000 hectares. It is a great success, even though obtaining a plot to cultivate in the city or its surroundings remains difficult, as evidenced by the long waiting lists to access a family or collective garden.
Family gardens in the Lilas public park in Vitry-sur-Seine (94). Agnès Lelièvre.
7. The “Self-service” family
Inspired my movements such as Guerrilla gardening, which, in the 70s, started reclaiming land that had been built and abandoned, this is a family of creative, conquering activists.
It has given birth to active offspring seeking to establish plant production in public spaces for everyone to enjoy. It includes international initiatives such as the Incredible edibles, as well as initiatives launched by cities themselves such as permis de végétaliser ("license to plant") and the reintroduction of fruit trees in public parks. Although still discreet, this family has a bright future, as it is an inspiration to local communities.
The original version of this article was published on The Conversation.
Infarm Expands Its ‘In-Store Farming’ To Paris
Steve O'Hear@sohear / November 2018
infarm
Infarm, the Berlin-based startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores, restaurants and local distribution centres to bring fresh and artisan produce much closer to the consumer, is expanding to Paris.
Once again, the company is partnering with Metro in a move that will see Infarm’s “in-store farming” platform installed in the retailer’s flagship store in the French capital city later this month. The 80 metre square “vertical farm” will produce approximately 4 tonnes of premium quality herbs, leafy greens, and microgreens annually, and means that Metro will become completely self-sufficient in its herb production with its own in-store farm.
Founded in 2013 by Osnat Michaeli, and brothers Erez and Guy Galonska, Infarm has developed an “indoor vertical farming” system capable of growing anything from herbs, lettuce and other vegetables, and even fruit. It then places these modular farms in a variety of customer-facing city locations, such as grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls, and schools, thus enabling the end-customer to actually pick the produce themselves.
The distributed system is designed to be infinitely scalable — you simply add more modules, space permitting — whilst the whole thing is cloud-based, meaning the farms can be monitored and controlled from Infarm’s central control centre. It’s data-driven: a combination of IoT, Big Data and cloud analytics akin to “Farming-as-a-Service”.
The idea isn’t just to produce fresher and better tasting produce and re-introduce forgotten or rare varieties, but to disrupt the supply chain as a whole, which remains inefficient and produces a lot of waste.
“Many before have tried to solve the deficiencies in the current supply chain, we wanted to redesign the entire chain from start to finish; Instead of building large-scale farms outside of the city, optimising on a specific yield and then distributing the produce, we decided it would be more effective to distribute the farms themselves and farm directly where people live and eat,” explains Erez Galonska, co-founder and CEO of Infarm, in a statement.
Meanwhile, the move into France follows $25 million in Series A funding raised by Infarm at the start of the year and is part of an expansion plan that has already seen one hundred farms powered by the Infarm platform launch. Other recent installations include Edeka locations in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Hannover. Further expansion into Zurich, Amsterdam, and London is said to be planned over the coming months.
“One thousand in-store farms are being rolled out in Germany alone,” adds Infarm’s Osnat Michaeli. “We are expanding to other European markets each and every day, partnering with leading supermarket chains and planning our North America expansion program for 2019. Recognising the requirements of our customers we have recently launched a new product; DC farm – a ‘Seed to Package’ production facility tailored to the needs of retail chains’ distribution centres. We’ve just installed our very first ‘DC farm’ in EDEKA’s distribution center”.
New Autonomous Farm Wants To Produce Food Without Human Workers
To View Video Please Click Here | COURTESY OF IRON OX
Down on a new robot farm, machines tend rows of leafy greens under the watch of software called “The Brain.”
by Erin Winick
October 3, 2018
Iron Ox isn’t like most robotics companies. Instead of trying to flog you its technology, it wants to sell you food.
As the firm’s cofounder Brandon Alexander puts it: “We are a farm and will always be a farm.”
But it’s no ordinary farm. For starters, the company’s 15 human employees share their work space with robots who quietly go about the business of tending rows and rows of leafy greens.
Today Iron Ox is opening its first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility—which is attached to the startup’s offices—will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. That’s the production level of a typical outdoor farm that might be five times bigger. The opening is the next big step toward fulfilling the company’s grand vision: a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the place of human agricultural workers, which are currently in short supply.
COURTESY OF IRON OX
Iron Ox isn’t selling any of the food it produces just yet (it is still in talks with a number of local restaurants and grocers). So for now, those tens of thousands of heads of lettuce are going to a local food bank and to the company salad bar. Its employees had better love eating lettuce.
The farm’s non-lettuce-consuming staff consists of a series of robotic arms and movers. The arms individually pluck the plants from their hydroponic trays and transfer them to new trays as they increase in size, maximizing their health and output—a luxury most outdoor farms don’t have. Big white mechanical movers carry the 800-pound water-filled trays around the facility.
COURTESY OF IRON OX
At first, making sure these different machines worked together was tricky. “We had different robots doing different tasks, but they weren’t integrated together into a production environment,” says Alexander.
So Iron Ox has developed software—nicknamed “The Brain”—to get them to collaborate. Like an all-seeing eye, it keeps watch over the farm, monitoring things like nitrogen levels, temperature, and robot location. It orchestrates both robot and human attention wherever it is needed.
Yes, although most of the operation is automated, it still does require a bit of human input. Currently, workers help with seeding and processing of crops, but Alexander says he hopes to automate these steps.
But why go to the trouble of automating farming at all?
Alexander sees it as solving two problems in one: the shortage of agricultural workers and the distances that fresh produce currently has to be shipped.
Rather than eliminating jobs, the company hopes, the robots will fill the gaps in the industry’s workforce. And he believes that by making it possible to grow crops close to urban areas without paying city-level salaries, the automated farms will enable stores to chose vegetables fresher than those that had to travel thousands of miles to get there. That is, assuming the startup can get its prices to match those of traditional competitors.
COURTESY OF IRON OX
“The problem with the indoor [farm] is the initial investment in the system,” says Yiannis Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Florida. “You have to invest a lot up front. A lot of small growers can’t do that.” This could risk creating a gap between the big farming institutions and smaller family-owned operations, in terms of gaining access to new technology.
To View Video Please Click Here | COURTESY OF IRON OX
Despite this, Ampatzidis says that bringing automation to both indoor and outdoor farming is necessary to help a wider swath of the agricultural industry solve the long-standing labor shortage.
“If we don’t find another way to bring people [to the US] for labor, automation is the only way to survive,” he says.
Erin Winick Associate Editor
I am the associate editor of the future of work at MIT Technology Review. I am particularly interested in automation and advanced manufacturing, spurring from my background in mechanical engineering. I produce our future of work e-mail… More
Smart-Farming Startup Grow Computer Has Just Launched Their First Product - A Digital Growing Platform Called GrowStrip
BROOKLYN, NY, September 26, 2018
GrowStrip offers a user-friendly way for growers of all kinds to make their grows smarter through a simple hardware and software platform. GrowStrip gives any farmer, student, home grower, or researcher the ability to collect environmental and energy data, build automation, remotely monitor, and receive alerts.
The system was designed for usability and takes only minutes to setup, requires no tools, and is totally plug and play.
Indoor farming is an exciting global trend and is empowering anybody to grow almost any plant in their own homes. Hydroponics and other indoor systems conserve water, remove the need for pesticides, and allow a year-round growing cycle. Around the world, hydroponic systems are being used to build amazing indoor farms, empower entrepreneurs, and teach STEAM education in K–12 classrooms.
The company grew out of two communities of agtech startups, one in Brooklyn, NY, and the other in Sacramento, CA. Co-founders Dan Nelson (CEO) and Ian McEachern (CTO) met online through MIT’s Open Agriculture forums, and built out the rest of team at the urban farming co-working space AgTech X in Brooklyn.
McEachern is a medical device engineer with over fifteen years’ experience developing exciting products and, cutting-edge medical devices, including artificial hearts. Nelson is an experienced startup founder and has worked with dozens of companies as a for-hire virtual CFO.
Grow Computer’s vision is to empower people around the world to connect and share plant growing “recipes” and new ideas. They hope this will democratize critical technologies and techniques. In Nelson’s words, Grow Computer may unlock a new urban farming revolution by providing access to better hardware around the world. If we can get a distributed community of growers working together, the potential for scientific, educational, economic, phenotypical, genetic, or operational innovations becomes incredible.”
Grow Computer is proud to launch our crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with Agritecture Xchange, taking place in Brooklyn from September 24–29.
The Xchange conference is a week-long series of events in New York City that will explore agriculture’s role within the sustainable city movement.
GrowStrip will launch exclusively on Indiegogo starting on Wednesday, September 26.
GrowStrip retails for around $600 US and ships with a thermometer and camera, as well as the free, open-source software platform. Indiegogo buyers can purchase GrowStrips at a significant discount.
Why Indoor Growing is Important
Urban populations are growing, bringing with them a growing need for high-quality, sustainably produced food.
To meet global demand, the world needs more farmers, and farms that are more efficient than ever.
We believe that indoor agriculture is the answer. Hydroponics, rooftop greenhouses, and vertical farms are proliferating in major cities and in people’s homes around the world. But, the available technology is still either prohibitively expensive or stuck in the 1980s.
press@growcomputer.com
40 Bushwick Ave
C/O AgTech X
Brooklyn, NY 11206
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Your Local Greens Lands $500,000 From 20 Investors
Sprouts at Your Local Greens
by Ryan Herron, North Carolina Business News Wire — September 7, 2018.
BURLINGTON — Your Local Greens Partners Inc. has raised $500,000 from 20 investors, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Burlington-based company filed a Form D to report the offering but declined to disclose what the funds would be used for.
The initial $600,000 offering by the organic farming company was comprised of a combination of debt and equity and has a duration of less than one year. It still hopes to raise an additional $100,000.
The company was founded by its current chief executive officer, Douglas Calaway, in 2015.
Your Local Greens establishes local indoor controlled environments to grow its crops. By doing so, it is able to increase the yield of its crops while using fewer natural resources to produce pesticide-free greens.
It is in the process of developing a hydroponic vertical farming building in the Raleigh-Durham area.
A hydroponic farm uses water to grow plants indoors, which allow it to grow crops at all times of the year. While a vertical farm grows plants in vertically stacked layers to maximize the use of space in an indoor farming facility.
“Live Better Than Organic”
Three Cyclist From Paris Bike 2000 Miles Visiting 60 Urban Farms
Linked by Michael Levenston
L'Equipe Agrovelocity Visit City Farmer from Michael Levenston on Vimeo.
Adèle, Audrey, and Mathilde from L’Equipe Agrovelocity Visit Urban Farms on the West Coast of North America from April to mid-August 2018
Aged of 22 years old, Audrey Rague, Adèle Maury and Mathilde Negri gather around a mutual interest for sustainable food supply, environment and the futures of agriculture. Inspired by the project Agrovélocités and Agrovelocity East Coast and in collaboration with their funders, they decided to continue AgroVeloCity together.
“We are three French students from Paris Institute of Life Science, and we are doing a project to see urban farms all the way of the west coast of the U.S., and we will be in Vancouver between the 3rd of August to the 10th!
Voici une petite vidéo sur l’agriculture urbaine à Los Angeles et les merveilleuses rencontres que nous avons faites avec les acteurs de la ville !
We are in partnership with the team of researchers from our university in Paris and we are doing report, videos, and social media like Instagram, facebook. We already visit more than 60 urban farms and community gardens in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, in the Bay area, Portland, and Seattle. And we go everywhere by bike!
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