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"I Can See Hydroponics Becoming Bigger, From Commercial Use To Homes"
A University of British Columbia student design team is developing a fully autonomous agricultural robot, driven by their belief that Canada can lead the world in sustainable farming.
A University of British Columbia student design team is developing a fully autonomous agricultural robot, driven by their belief that Canada can lead the world in sustainable farming.
The UBC AgroBot aims to precisely exterminate weeds and fertilize crops as well as record data from a farmer’s operation. The team has grown from four to 40 plus students with backgrounds in various engineering disciplines and many with no prior exposure to agriculture.
The AgroBot project involves four teams of students. The chassis team designs the mechanical body, structure and driving system. The extermination team works on the mechanics and chemical design to target weeds. The navigation team develops the autonomous software to navigate crop rows and the image recognition team uses machine learning technology to allow the robot to identify crops and weeds.
“To sustainably produce enough food for the world, there is an urgent need for innovation in the field of agriculture,” says Wendie Wu, AgroBot team member. “Engineering students are drawn by the technologies we see working in other industries and they’re eager to apply them in agriculture and help operations be as sustainable as possible.”
The UBC team was the only Canadian university design team planning to attend the AgGrowBot Challenge hosted by Indiana’s Purdue University last May, however the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the AgroBot team from attending. Still, their success has been noticed at UBC where they were granted official engineering design team status and have received financial support from various organizations, including Farm Credit Canada (FCC).
“Agriculture continues to be one of the most innovative and agile industries in Canada, says FCC marketing vice president Fred Wall. “In order to feed a growing world population, we need to focus on sustainability and technology. FCC applauds the UBC AgroBot students for seeing the opportunity to apply their skills in agriculture and make a real difference for the food sector.”
The interest and success of the AgroBot project has UBC supporting an aquaponics project as well, dubbed AgroPonics. It involves applying similar machine learning, image recognition and automation technologies to building an autonomous indoor garden system that is functional without soil.
Team member Seline Choe is motivated about what agritech can do for agriculture and food in Canada. “The agritech industry is growing fast. I see the opportunity to use more image recognition and data collection for the benefit of everyone. There are a lot of companies in the research phase and we can be a part of the talent pipeline that will evolve those technologies,” Seline adds. “I can see hydroponics becoming bigger, from commercial use to homes, it can be a more efficient way to grow food by optimizing growing conditions. We need to come up with new ways to support the world’s population with the food it needs.”
The UBC students are continuing to work on both the AgroBot and AgroPonics projects. They hope to implement their products on local farms and on the university campus in the near future.
For more information:
Farm Credit Canada
www.fcc-fac.ca
28 Oct 2020
Gardyn Aims To Make At-Home Vertical Farming Small, Simple, and Stylish
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late. Trouble is, many consumers don’t have the know-how to cultivate their own leafy greens and other produce in the backyard. Even those who do often lack adequate space.
A company called Gardyn is addressing both of those issues with an at-home vertical farming system that requires minimal input from the user and can easily fit inside a small apartment if need be. The idea, as Gardyn founder and CEO FX Rouxel explained to me over the phone last week, is to make growing food in one’s own home as simple and straightforward as possible. To do that, the company has built a farm that relies on AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and maintaining an edible crop of food. Or as Rouxel said, “The system is managing everything for you.”
Gardyn’s system is made up of two parts: a compact vertical tower, which can grow as many as 30 plants, and an accompanying app powered by an AI assistant named “Kelby.” Users only have to order seeds and “plug” the seedpods into the vertical towers. The system automatically circulates water and nutrients to the plants, while Kelby monitors plant growth and sends reminders when it’s time to add water to the garden or harvest the plants.
Right now, available crops from Gardyn’s site include mostly leafy greens and herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers can also use their own seeds if preferred.
The system uses what Rouxel calls “a hybrid of different hydroponic technologies,” including the deepwater method and aeroponics. (The company brands its approach as “hybriponics.”) By themselves, these different methods have certain limitations in the at-home setting. Deep water, where plant roots are fully submerged in nutrient-enriched water, requires a lot of space. Aeroponics is a great setup for outdoors, but once indoors it requires lighting, which gets expensive very quickly. Gardyn pulled elements from both to create a system that takes up only two square feet of space and doesn’t require any extra hardware. “Within just two square feet, you can produce a lot of food,” says Rouxel, adding that Gardyn’s units have produced “over 25,000 pounds of produce” during the last few months.
That quest to grow a lot of leafy greens in a small amount of space is an area with plenty of competition these days. Farmshelf recently unveiled its first-ever farm for the home, and companies like Rise Gardens and Agrilution (the latter recently bought by Miele) also offer promising solutions for the consumer space.
And while historically, investment in vertical farming has mainly gone towards the industrial-scale indoor farms (think AeroFarms), at-home farms are fast becoming a lucrative area. Investors, Rouxel explained to me, see traditional agriculture as a risky business that’s less insurable because its success is in part dependent on the weather outside. With climate change triggering more extreme weather, investors will look more and more to alternative solutions in controlled-environment agriculture.
“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” he says. Chiefly, that will be growing the food in much closer proximity to consumers, whether through at-home systems like Gardyn’s, in-store farms at grocery retailers, rooftop gardens, and high-tech greenhouses. “In future, we’re going to have a spectrum of solutions,” Rouxel noted.
Getting these vertical farms closer to consumers and in their own homes will require bringing the price of the machines down. At the moment, Gardyn’s system is roughly on par pricewise with other systems out there that can realistically feed a family of four: $799 for the base model all the way up to $1485 for the “Plus” model.
Rouxel is aware that the cost is still too high for many consumers. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”
Many companies, including Gardyn, offer financing options on their farms now. And more investment dollars going into the space in the future could mean companies have the time and space to innovate on ways to make their system cheaper for the average consumer.
While pricing remains a question, one thing that’s certain is that at-home vertical farming is on the path to becoming a regular part of the kitchen, rather than just a trend. “What we want is to develop solutions that will quickly change the way people access food,” said Rouxel. “We won’t solve everything, that’s for sure, but we want to be part of the solution for how we shape food.”
FILED UNDER: AG TECH BUSINESS OF FOOD EDUCATION & DISCOVERY FEATURED FOODTECH
Amazon’s Alexa Fund Invests In At-Home Vertical Farming Company Rise Gardens
Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed
Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed.
According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the deal is both a collaboration and a cash investment that will “fuel new products, accessories and further R+D” for Rise Gardens.
The Chicago-based Rise is best known for its standalone console (roughly the size of a standard bookcase) that contains a hydroponic grow system for consumers at home. The system does most of the hard work—calculating nutrition and pH levels, knowing when and how much to water the plants—for the user, whom it notifies via a corresponding app.
Rise’s system is also modular, so it can be added to or subtracted from over time depending on how many greens your household consumes each week. Users can also grow beets and tomatoes in addition to leafy greens and herbs.
Rise raised $2.6 million in seed funding earlier this year; Amazon’s new investment is an extension of this seed funding, according to today’s press release.
Amazon’s investment in Rise sounds promising, not just for the company but for the entire vertical farming sector. To start, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted today at Alexa functionality for the Rise system: “Collaborating with the Alexa Fund will better enable us to integrate our smart, connected garden with Alexa, making indoor gardening even easier. We are also excited about the opportunity to work with Amazon to evolve and expand how we reach consumers with our device and consumables business concept,” he said. The details of that Alexa integration are scant as of now, but one imagines being able to ask Alexa about your plant’s pH levels or tell the speaker to adjust the light mixture. On the flip, Rise could notify users via Alexa when it’s time to water the plants.
There’s no question that consumer-grade vertical farms are still a pretty niche product right now since many of them cost more than the average person can easily afford. (Rise’s single unit console starts at $549.) But the pandemic and accompanying disruptions to the food supply chain have undoubtedly increased folks’ desire to control more of what they eat, which has led to an influx of new devices. From Gardyn’s stylish take on at-home farming to consumer electronics companies like LG building them into the kitchen, vertical farming is definitely making its way into the home.
Amazon, of course, wants to control your entire home, including your kitchen, so it’s not surprising the Seattle tech giant would partner making at-home vertical farming products. As well, the company has made forays into the gardening space before, like this patent from 2017. Amazon knowing what types of plants you are growing can fuel its selling machine to recommend recipes and other groceries.
Like it or not, Amazon’s moves in food tech tend to influence others, which means the collaborations and products that come out of the Rise partnership will influence the future of at-home vertical farming for everyone
Filed Under: AG TECH BUSINESS OF FOOD CONNECTED KITCHEN FEATURED FOODTECH FUNDING SMART GARDEN VERTICAL FARMING
I Grew Tomatoes With The Heat From My Crypto-Mining PC
Just before Covid-19 struck, I started a project to build the world’s most overengineered, high-tech garden.
Anything Worth Engineering Is Worth Overengineering
10-08-20
Images courtesy of the author.
If you spend time on Instagram in our post-pandemic world, you’re probably experiencing some gardening FOMO. Maybe your biggest lockdown goal was “pwn Candy Crush” or, if you’re like me, “limit your toddler’s screen time to a scant five hours per day.” Now that we’re months into the pandemic, though, your friends who channeled their early quarantine angst into planting seeds are likely starting to reap the benefits in terms of fresh herbs and handfuls of juicy, Insta-friendly heirloom tomatoes.
If you’re more comfortable with wires and while loops than bugs and compost, don’t despair. Gardening has become increasingly tech-enabled. There are now tons of ways that you can apply emerging technologies to the challenge of growing your own food.
Just before Covid-19 struck, I started a project to build the world’s most overengineered, high-tech garden. It ended up incorporating hydroponics, solar power, cryptocurrency mining, recycled water, sensors, the Internet of Things, infrared imaging, and much else. Here’s how I did it — and how you can build your own tech-enabled pandemic garden, too.
I should say this clearly from the get-go: I kill plants. Even succulents, which can go weeks with no care at all, are too much for me. People often give these to me as gifts, and I’ve managed to keep exactly three of them alive. This is surprising, as I come from a long line of gardeners — my father is an avid gardener, as was my maternal grandmother. But apparently this inclination — and the corresponding skill — skipped at least a few generations.
It was a dilemma, then, when I discovered that my three-year-old has a passion for gardening. We got him some plants last summer, and he diligently watered them every day, growing a handful of tomatoes and a lovely calla lily on our back patio. Mornings began with at least five minutes of “plant time,” spent checking his plants, fertilizing, pollinating flowers with a toothbrush, and performing other gardening functions that are alien to me. Obviously, we wanted to encourage that interest. But again, none of that is in my wheelhouse.
As the founder of an A.I. company and the owner of a DIY-tech YouTube channel, though, gadgets, green tech, sensing, and the like most definitely are. In late 2019, I hatched an idea of creating an indoor sustainable garden by applying as many technologies and gadgets as I could think of. I wrote up my musings about the idea in January of this year. Then I figured what the hell, dove in, and actually built it.
Right from the start, I knew I didn’t want to mess around with soil. For one thing, it’s yucky. It’s also mysterious. As The Atlantic shares in a detailed article about soil, the stuff is teeming with bacteria, archaea, microbes, and fungi — as well as bugs, earthworms, and other beneficial creatures — that work together in a complex synergy to keep plants healthy. As The Atlantic reports, a single teaspoon of good soil can contain 10,000 to 50,000 different species of “protozoa, nematodes, mites, and microarthropods” and “more microbes than there are people on the earth.”
That felt way too complex to me. Wanting to abstract much of that away, I turned to a technology that has existed for thousands of years and is enjoying a tech-enabled resurgence: hydroponics. Hydroponics is the science of growing plants in water. Instead of placing them in soil, you bathe your plants’ roots in flowing water. You then add the basic nutrients they need to that water, instead of providing them via soil.
The benefits are numerous. Compared to traditional gardening, hydroponics can allow for up to a 90% reduction in water use, much higher yields, and up to two times faster growth rates. Because the water in a hydroponic system continually recirculates, there’s also no need to worry about watering plants consistently, you can control and eliminate fertilizer runoff, and you can grow plants indoors, in a tiny space.
This last part was important to me, as I wanted to set up my high-tech garden in my garage. The San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, enjoys long outdoor growing seasons and little danger of frost, but I wanted to demonstrate that one can create a viable high-tech garden in any space: a basement, an unfinished room or shed, the balcony of a rented apartment, etc. Hydroponics allows you to grow meaningful amounts of produce in small spaces — including indoor spaces with little to no natural light — so it felt like a fit for that reason, too.
When I first started my project, I expected to have to build a small hydroponics system from scratch. But I quickly discovered that someone had done that for me. AeroGarden — a division of the well-known garden supply company Miracle-Gro — sells a variety of premade hydroponic gardens. These range in size from the diminutive Sprout (which retails for $76.99 and grows a handful of herbs table-side) to the $895 Farm 24XL, which grows 24 plants and includes advanced features like a programmable day/night cycle and Alexa voice control.
Choosing a new type of plant to grow feels a bit like importing a Python module or installing a new graphics card.
All AeroGarden models (and, fundamentally, all hydroponic systems) include a few basic components. There’s a water-filled tray to hold your plants, a small pump to circulate water over their roots, and a set of LED grow lights that provide the illumination your plants need to thrive, even in an otherwise dark room.
AeroGarden sells its plants as “pods,” which include seeds and a porous support material inside a plastic tube that you snap into your garden. Larger garden models accommodate more pods. You can mix and match many pods within a single garden, allowing you to grow several kinds of plants at once. AeroGarden offers a dizzying array of premade pods, from spring flowers to ghost peppers. It also offers a grow-anything kit, which allows you to create your own pods and grow nearly anything in your AeroGarden. (To preempt an obvious question, yes, you can grow pot in it.)
I love the modular aspect of AeroGarden’s pods. For someone used to the conventions of the tech world, it’s very familiar. Choosing a new type of plant to grow feels a bit like importing a Python module or installing a new graphics card. You browse through a list of options, make a choice based on a set of capabilities or features that you want to access, and then plug the new module into your project.
I bought two AeroGarden Harvests — a midrange model that costs around $110 and accommodates six pods each. I also picked up a set of heirloom cherry tomato pods and a set of pods for assorted herbs. My son and I set up the AeroGardens in the garage and installed the pods. By the time we got them up and running, it was mid-February.
AeroGardens are primarily designed for indoor use in a climate-controlled room. My garage isn’t climate controlled. California has mild weather, but it still gets chilly at night. In February, daytime temperatures are usually around 60 degrees Fahrenheit and dip into the 40s after sundown. Tomatoes grow best with a daytime temperature of 70 to 85 and a nighttime temperature above 60, so this didn’t seem optimal. I knew we would need some kind of heat.
We started by getting an Educational Insights tabletop greenhouse ($43 on Amazon) to hold the AeroGardens. This helped a bit with temperature—and kept the tomatoes nice and humid—but it still wasn’t ideal. To bump up the temperature and our tomato yield, I had an idea: Why not heat the greenhouse with the waste heat from a cryptocurrency-mining computer?
Cryptocurrency has exploded in prominence and impact over the past several years. According to industry publication Coin Telegraph, the market for mining hardware (used to create new cryptocurrency coins) is set to grow by $2.8 billion between 2020 and 2024. All this growth comes at a very real cost. The mining of bitcoin alone is estimated to consume up to half of all the electricity used by all data centers worldwide. The bitcoin network currently uses as much electricity as the country of Colombia.
All this electricity ultimately turns into heat. Most of the time, that heat is wasted. But some cryptocurrency miners, seeing an opportunity, are putting waste heat to productive use. Ukrainian company Hotmine is developing crypto-powered hot-water heaters and furnaces for home use. Heatmine, a Canadian company, has experimented with using crypto waste heat in homes in Quebec, which has frigid winters. And as of 2018, a Czech company was experimenting with “cryptomatoes” using heat from bitcoin mining to heat tomato greenhouses.
I’ve experimented with heating my home using cryptocurrency-mining waste heat on a small scale, with a good deal of success. For that project (and a photo series on the cryptocurrency industry), I built my own mining rig. It uses a custom PC, a super-high-efficiency EVGA power supply, and an NVIDIA GeForce 1070 graphics card — a staple of cryptocurrency miners — to mine a variety of crypto coins using the automated software NiceHash.
Running at full blast, the PC also gets quite toasty. For my heating experiment, I calculated that my rig draws about 220 watts of electricity, putting out 716 BTUs of heat per hour. That’s about the output of a small space heater or one of those overhead heaters you see on restaurant patios. The rig, which cost around $600 to build, generates up to $0.76 in mining revenue per day — not remarkable, but enough to offset some of my heating costs when I used it indoors in the winter.
Piping 716 BTUs per hour directly into my tiny greenhouse, I calculated, would be way too much heat. My greenhouse is 24 cubic feet, so putting in all the heat from the cryptocurrency-mining computer would increase its temperature by around 40 degrees. Even in the dead of winter — with a nighttime temperature of 45 degrees — that would still push my tomatoes to their 85-degree limit. On warmer nights, it would risk roasting them on the vine.
Instead, I opened the side panel on the computer and connected it to the side of the greenhouse. Using a FLIR One infrared thermal camera, I determined that the NVIDIA 1070 heats up to around 110 degrees when mining. This radiates a nice amount of heat into the greenhouse, moderating its internal temperature without overdoing it.
The glowing green logo of the NVIDIA GeForce is visible inside my greenhouse.
I also found that just running the computer near the greenhouse kept my garage a bit warmer than normal. It’s like a high-tech version of the tried-and-true gardening practice of placing water bottles near your plants. The bottles heat up in the sun during the day and then radiate heat at night, protecting your plants from frost and helping them grow just a bit better.
With all the supplemental heat from my mining computer, I felt like I needed some kind of monitoring system for my garden. At first, I thought about building a DIY temperature monitor with a RaspberryPi. But in keeping with the modular concept of the project, I decided to use another solution: an industrial sensing system from Monnit.
Monnit sells a variety of sensor gateways, which you install in your facility and connect to the internet. Once you have a gateway installed, you can buy up to several hundred tiny sensors, which allow you to monitor everything from temperature to vibrations to whether someone is sitting in a chair.
Each sensor uses a coin cell battery that lasts about six months and transmits over a short-range wireless radio to the gateway. That means you can place the sensors anywhere you want in the space you’re trying to monitor. The gateway forwards the sensors’ data along to Monnit’s cloud, where you can log into a web interface and get a real-time read on conditions in your facility.
This is a system intended for commercial or industrial applications, so it’s not cheap. Monnit’s ethernet gateways run about $220, and each sensor costs around $50 to $80. But the system has rock-solid reliability and accuracy, and Monnit’s data storage and charting functions are top-notch. I also liked how the system could potentially scale to a commercial-size greenhouse. I don’t plan to scale up my tomato project to a commercial facility, but it’s good to know that the technologies I’m demonstrating in my tiny greenhouse could potentially be used in a real, full-sized indoor farm.
I’ve experimented with heating my home using cryptocurrency-mining waste heat on a small scale, with a good deal of success.
The final step for my garden was to add water. Hydroponic systems use dramatically less water than traditional planting methods; according to the National Park Service, they can use up to 1,000% less. But because the plants are immersed 24/7, water is a crucial part of the process of growing plants hydroponically.
AeroGarden recommends using distilled water with its gardens. This felt like a big hassle — and a potential generator of a ton of plastic waste. So I looked for another solution. Ideally, I wanted to use recycled water. On a trip to Israel in 2012, I saw tomatoes grown using recycled water in the Negev Desert. And closer to home, I did a photo series at CoCo San Sustainable Farm in the Bay Area, which uses recycled water from sanitation provider Central San to grow food for local schools. So I knew it could be done.
But I didn’t want to have to drive to a recycled-water pickup point every time I wanted to water my tomatoes, and the water provided there wouldn’t be distilled. Doing some research, I came up with a solution: I could use the condensation generated by my home air-conditioning system to irrigate my garden.
If you have central air and you’ve walked around outside your home in the summer, you may have seen a little tube or hose dribbling out a stream of water. You probably thought, “I hope that isn’t a problem,” and then went about your day. It’s not a problem — air-conditioning systems work in part by removing water vapor from the air in your home. All the water has to go somewhere. Most air-conditioning systems jettison it through a little tube into the ground in your backyard or, in some cases, directly into the sewer.
That’s a major wasted opportunity. While the water from an AC condensate drain isn’t safe to drink untreated, it tends — like distilled water — to be very low in mineral content. It’s also free, readily available, and otherwise wasted. Many big institutions take advantage of this source of eco-friendly water on a grand scale — Rice University, for example, captures 14 million gallons of water per year from its AC systems. I decided to try doing so at home.
In a series of experiments, I determined that my home AC system dumps about one gallon of condensate water per hour. That’s a lot of water. At first, I thought about building a complex device to catch water from my AC unit using a marine bilge pump, external power supply, and tubing to pipe the water into my AeroGardens.
Instead, I settled for a clear plastic bucket, which I placed under the condensate drain in my backyard. AC condensate can contain Legionella bacteria, so ideally you should boil it or treat it with UV light, chlorine tablets, or ozone before using it and avoid using it in applications that create aerosols, like a sprinkler system. I settled for letting my buckets fill up, then placing them in the sun for several days before pouring the water into my AeroGardens. I can’t vouch for the safety of that technique, but I’ve been okay so far.
With all the pieces put together, I now had a system that used hydroponics and LED grow lights to nurture modular plant pods. The whole thing was contained in a tabletop greenhouse, kept at optimal growing temperatures 24/7 by cryptocurrency waste heat, monitored by industrial IoT sensors, and irrigated with recycled water. It was an ideal way to experiment with some of today’s most compelling green technologies.
Oh, and it produces tons of tasty tomatoes. With AeroGardens, your only real responsibility as a gardener is to keep each garden filled with water and add some liquid fertilizer every two weeks when a light on the garden turns red. You can also do some light pruning to increase the yield on your plants — if you don’t, they’ll grow so large that they overshoot the AeroGarden’s grow lights, and your tomato production will drop. My son and I watched as our tomatoes germinated and began to sprout right on schedule, about five days after we “planted” the tomato pods.
Our herbs started to shoot up even faster, with little sprouts emerging about two days after planting. Over the next several months, our plants grew aggressively. We got to experience the excitement of seeing our tiny tomato seedlings grow into a giant, leggy plants with little yellow flowers, and ultimately green tomatoes, which rapidly turned red — and were perfect for plucking by tiny hands.
The tech aspects of the project have worked out surprisingly well. The Monnit sensor system beams in temperature readings every two hours, which I can access as a series of charts in a web interface. The cryptocurrency computer has done an admirable job of keeping things balmy. On a recent chilly night in September, when nighttime temperatures dropped into the 50s, our garden stayed at a comfortable 74 degrees. In the heat of the day, it got a few degrees above the ideal maximum temperature of 85 degrees, but the tomatoes seem fine.
Chart of temperatures in the greenhouse during a day and night in mid-September.
From our limited experiment, I’ve seen that hydroponics really do appear to deliver on its promise of faster-growing times and bigger yields. Last summer, we labored for months to grow about 10 tomatoes and a handful of herbs in the backyard. With our high-tech garden, we got to watch as our herbs—the basil especially—started out by producing enough leaves to flavor a tomato sauce, then enough for pesto, and finally so many that I had to cut them back almost daily, drying them or using them in infused olive oils to stop them from going to waste.
AeroGarden plants last about six months; during that time, you can harvest from them continually. Our herbs died back after their six-month growth window was over, but the tomatoes are still going strong. At times, we’ve been able to harvest tomatoes by the handful and have used them in everything from sandwiches to Caprese salads to soups.
At the beginning of the project, I struggled with deciding what to grow. It takes about an acre of land to grow enough food to feed one person, so feeding our whole family with a hydroponic garden wasn’t realistic. What, I wondered, would have the most impact? Should I grow plants that perform other functions, like filtering the air? Should I look toward something like blue spirulina, which several readers of my first Medium piece on the project emailed me to suggest as a space-efficient superfood?
As you do a bit more gardening, you might also be surprised how similar gardeners are to coders and other technologists.
When the pandemic hit, that question rapidly answered itself. The absolute best use for a Covid-19 garden, I found, is to grow ingredients that enliven and add interest to other foods.
I can’t even begin to describe the mental health benefits — at the height of the pandemic lockdowns, when going to the grocery store literally felt like a life-and-death endeavor — of taking some boring, pandemic-friendly canned food or store-brand boiled pasta and topping it with fresh basil, crushed sprigs of thyme, and sliced cherry tomatoes, picked a few minutes earlier in our garage.
One of the hardest parts of weathering a lockdown is fatigue. Sticking with the same routine day in and day out for months — with limited trips outside your home — is mentally and emotionally draining. So is eating the same foods for months on end. In the early days, we ate whatever shelf-stable staples weren’t sold out at Target or bought strange brands of pasta or canned goods by the box for absurd prices on Amazon.
Gardening itself has been shown to reduce stress. But the little handfuls of fresh ingredients that we harvested each week from our AeroGardens served their own, extremely important function: They allowed us to add color, freshness, and variety to the bland, generic things we were otherwise eating. That, in turn, lent a bit of variety, excitement, and connection with the natural world to the drab, monotonous process of quarantine.
Having that little bit of freshness in our diet made the lockdowns a tiny bit easier to tolerate — and gave us one fewer reason to go to the store. When the world is falling apart outside your door, don’t underestimate the power of a handful of Thai basil or a drink topped with mint you grew yourself to make things just a bit better. It’s an effect that’s been around since the victory gardens of World War 1, and it’s something that thousands of us are rediscovering today.
Even if you’re more familiar with the silicon variety of random trees than the ones found in a real forest — or if your historical track record with plants isn’t stellar — now might be the perfect time to try out gardening. Gadgets like the AeroGarden make the process simple—and especially with more complex models that allow you to track and tweak light levels and feeding schedules, downright geeky.
As you do a bit more gardening, you might also be surprised how similar gardeners are to coders and other technologists. Take one look at an experienced gardener’s charts of hardiness zones and little grid-based garden maps drawn on graphing paper or mapped in Excel, and you might feel a sense of familiarity. If you want to take a stab at growing your own plants, you could do what I’ve done and make your garden extremely automated and tech-intensive. I’m still planning to work solar power from my private microgrid and a self-watering system into mine. My garden is, of course, more a platform for experimentation than an economical way to grow produce — accounting for the mining PC and Monnit sensor system, I estimate that it cost about $1,200 to build. But even if you just buy an AeroGarden and put in on your kitchen counter — or borrow a few of the ideas I’ve demonstrated and create your own DIY versions — that’s a great start.
I’m still reluctant to call myself a full gardener. That title goes to the people who effortlessly call up plants from the soil or, like my son, have a passion for the watering and pruning that managing a full garden often requires. But I’m comfortable calling myself a technologist who dabbles — or perhaps as Wired suggests, a “domestic terraformer.” And I’m proud to say that I now have the tomatoes to back up that title.
WRITTEN BY
Thomas Smith
Co-Founder & CEO of Gado Images.
I write, speak and consult about tech, privacy, AI, and photography.
Subscribe: https://bit.ly/33xx752 Email: tom@gadoimages.com
Gardyn Aims To Make At-Home Vertical Farming Small, Simple, And Stylish
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late. Trouble is, many consumers don’t have the know-how to cultivate their own leafy greens and other produce in the backyard. Even those who do often lack adequate space.
A company called Gardyn is addressing both of those issues with an at-home vertical farming system that requires minimal input from the user and can easily fit inside a small apartment if need be. The idea, as Gardyn founder and CEO FX Rouxel explained to me over the phone last week, is to make growing food in one’s own home as simple and straightforward as possible. To do that, the company has built a farm that relies on AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and maintaining an edible crop of food. Or as Rouxel said, “The system is managing everything for you.”
Gardyn’s system is made up of two parts: a compact vertical tower, which can grow as many as 30 plants, and an accompanying app powered by an AI assistant named “Kelby.” Users only have to order seeds and “plug” the seed pods into the vertical towers. The system automatically circulates water and nutrients to the plants, while Kelby monitors plant growth and sends reminders when it’s time to add water to the garden or harvest the plants.
Right now, available crops from Gardyn’s site include mostly leafy greens and herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers can also use their own seeds if preferred.
The system uses what Rouxel calls “a hybrid of different hydroponic technologies,” including the deep water method and aeroponics. (The company brands its approach as “hybriponics.”) By themselves, these different methods have certain limitations in the at-home setting. Deep water, where plant roots are fully submerged in nutrient-enriched water, requires a lot of space. Aeroponics is a great setup for outdoors, but once indoors it requires lighting, which gets expensive very quickly. Gardyn pulled elements from both to create a system that takes up only two square feet of space and doesn’t require any extra hardware. “Within just two square feet, you can produce a lot of food,” says Rouxel, adding that Gardyn’s units have produced “over 25,000 pounds of produce” during the last few months.
That quest to grow a lot of leafy greens in a small amount of space is an area with plenty of competition these days. Farmshelf recently unveiled its first-ever farm for the home, and companies like Rise Gardens and Agrilution (the latter recently bought by Miele) also offer promising solutions for the consumer space.
And while historically, investment in vertical farming has mainly gone towards the industrial-scale indoor farms (think AeroFarms), at-home farms are fast becoming a lucrative area. Investors, Rouxel explained to me, see traditional agriculture as a risky business that’s less insurable because its success is in part dependent on the weather outside. With climate change triggering more extreme weather, investors will look more and more to alternative solutions in controlled-environment agriculture.
“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” he says. Chiefly, that will be growing the food in much closer proximity to consumers, whether through at-home systems like Gardyn’s, in-store farms at grocery retailers, rooftop gardens, and high-tech greenhouses. “In future we’re going to have a spectrum of solutions,” Rouxel noted.
Getting these vertical farms closer to consumers and in their own homes will require bringing the price of the machines down. At the moment, Gardyn’s system is roughly on par pricewise with other systems out there that can realistically feed a family of four: $799 for the base model all the way up to $1485 for the “Plus” model.
Rouxel is aware that the cost is still too high for many consumers. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”
Many companies, including Gardyn, offer financing options on their farms now. And more investment dollars going into the space in the future could mean companies have the time and space to innovate on ways to make their system cheaper for the average consumer.
While pricing remains a question, one thing that’s certain is that at-home vertical farming is on the path to becoming a regular part of the kitchen, rather than just a trend. “What we want is to develop solutions that will quickly change the way people access food,” said Rouxel. “We won’t solve everything, that’s for sure, but we want to be part of the solution for how we shape food.”
COVID-19, Agriculture Re-Awakened
The COVID-19 Pandemic is a current reality that is forcing the global population to reassess affected industries, and plan a future that will be less dependent on the weak links in our current supply chain facing unprecedented disruptions
The COVID-19 Pandemic is a current reality that is forcing the global population to reassess affected industries, and plan a future that will be less dependent on the weak links in our current supply chain facing unprecedented disruptions. Travel restrictions imposed to limit the virus’s spread have resulted in migrant laborer shortages to harvest produce as mentioned in Essential, but Unprotected.
Leafy green vegetables will be the first affected due to their early spring harvest, while already facing consumer scrutiny over food safety concerns for being highly prone to foodborne diseases when grown outdoors. To make matters worse, these vegetables are a critical part of a nutritious diet needed to support the immune systems of people fighting off viral infections. With many resorting to nonperishable foods and little exercise, there will likely be a spike in obesity which statistically makes the virus even deadlier.
Social distancing and self quarantining have become daily routines for nearly everyone in the US. The concept of decentralized agricultural production, or more commonly known as indoor gardening, enables people to grow safe and nutritious produce within their homes to minimize exposure from crowded grocery stores while shopping for highly perishable goods that require frequent visits.
Gardening has the benefit of educating children who are out of school about agriculture and technology. It also improves the psychological well being of the individuals by being around aesthetically pleasing plants as well as improving indoor air quality according to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). Over the past few years, we’ve seen e-commerce aggressively challenge brick and mortar stores across industries. Despite this market trend, the food and grocery industries still heavily rely on in-store experiences, led by big-box chains such as Walmart, Target, and Costco.
This is attributed to the high perishability of produce, two-thirds of which are grown in California which requires an extensive supply chain and energy-intensive refrigeration sections to constantly account for losses. However, in recent times, the value proposition of grocery delivery has seen a meteoric rise in response to consumer viral transmission fears. This is true for one such company, Heliponix, which has built their own direct-to-consumer supply chain for growing food that has been unphased by current events.
Heliponix© provides consumers with the GroPod© Smart Garden Appliance with a Seed Pod™ subscription that could be described as "Keurig for food." Their automated, hydroponic hardware combined with smart, cloud software allows anyone to become a farmer regardless of their climate, space, or existing knowledge of agriculture. Consumers enjoy Pure Produce™ that is better for their health, and the environment by reducing water consumption and food waste through local production while maintaining social distancing. Keeping the plants alive until the moment of consumption will maximize the nutritional content and taste for the user.
Co-Founder and CEO, Scott Massey stated, “We have experienced an explosion of inquiries in light of the pandemic from consumers who want control of their own produce supply. Consumers want food that tastes better, while being healthier for them from a trusted source. The GroPod makes them self-sufficient in production from our convenient seed pod subscription, and automated appliance that doesn’t require agricultural knowledge. Not only is it environmentally sustainable by avoiding the harmful pollutants of industrial agriculture, but it is also financially sustainable for the consumer who will generate a profit from the premium quality produce when all hardware, subscription, and even negligible water and energy costs are accounted for.”
Massey then went on to say, “Our company had a unique founding while my Co-Founder, Ivan Ball and I were both undergraduate students at Purdue University. We met while working as coworkers and worked as research engineers on a NASA funded project to design targeted LEDs to grow food on the ISS (International Space Station) under Dr. Cary Mitchell. We became familiar with many leading experts in this growing industry destined for mass adoption and were very fortunate to receive our first pre-seed and seed investments from Purdue Ventures Ag-celerator fund which focuses on innovations within the AgBioScience realm. I view the adoption of the distributed farming model as inevitable as global food output needs to increase by 70% as we exceed 9 billion people in 2050 according to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), but we’re not making anymore farmland. Vertical, indoor agriculture is the most viable solution, however, energy, labor, and facility infrastructure are the most expensive costs resulting in low margins. This is why we chose a direct-to-consumer model; to decentralize the facility into consumer appliances, developed a more energy-efficient design, and are not dependent on labor to plant/harvest/process the crops since they are grown directly at the point of consumption, the household.”
Ivan Ball explains, “We are now deep into the fourth industrial revolution with blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and IoT connecting everything in our homes to our phones. Development of these systems will provide the architecture we need to begin connecting biological organisms to our digital world.” Computer vision and machine learning are the tools needed to understand a plant's response to a given environment and enable our automated device to adapt the environment to a plant’s preference in real-time. Additionally, a user will be able to input their preferred taste preference of a plant, for example, a “sweeter basil”, so that their GroPod can cultivate a garden of plants with a personalized taste. Already we are seeing indoor vertical farming move closer to people by growing it directly in the grocery stores. This trend from dirt to fork is compared to the ice industry of highly perishable goods being decentralized and produced within the home. It is our goal to decentralize agriculture to eliminate food waste, save water, reduce energy consumption, and become the world’s largest farming company without owning a single acre of land.
Heliponix, LLC recently won the Leyton International Startup Sustainability Challenge which landed them a booth within Eureka Park at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2020 in Las Vegas. They received a phenomenal amount of press from the likes of The Associated Press among others.
Source: Minnesota Historical Society/Getty Images. A poster from the Minneapolis Defense Council urged planting.
However novel the GroPod Smart Garden Appliance’s innovative design improves efficiencies, the concept of consumers growing their own food has been accomplished before. A similar mass, consumer gardening experiment was successfully orchestrated in 1943 when war-time Victory Gardens produced close to 40 percent of the country’s fresh vegetables, from about 20 million gardens in homes, schools, and community gardens. Our dependence on grocery stores will be greatly reduced by consuming produce directly from the source of a personal farm. Perhaps people may re-adopt the agrarian lifestyles of our ancestors through these automated farming appliances at a consumer level in the new gig economy.
Peloton Meets Greengrocer: Farmshelf Launches Home Version of Indoor Farming System
The latest high-tech offering: a fully-automated indoor farm for greens and herbs, all housed within a sleek case the size of a bookshelf
John Jannarone
IPO-Edge.com April 28, 2020
From Peloton Interactive Inc. to Netflix, Inc., companies offering at-home technologies to keep people busy, healthy, and entertained during the lockdown have thrived. The latest high-tech offering: a fully-automated indoor farm for greens and herbs, all housed within a sleek case the size of a bookshelf.
Farmshelf, which currently sells a professional device popular with celebrity chefs like José Andrés, has launched Farmshelf Home, a slightly smaller version designed specifically for home use. Farmshelf Home, which is available for pre-order, features a remotely-controlled hydroponic system and an app that monitors the miniature crop with cameras and sensors. Everything from hydration to airflow to nutrients are controlled by the machine, with owners simply needing to occasionally refill water and harvest plants.
“Our mission has always been to make it easy for people to grow their own food where they live, work, and eat. We started where they work and eat at restaurants and corporate cafes, now we are coming to the home,” said Andrew Shearer, founder, and CEO of Farmshelf. “Giving people the opportunity to harvest food as it’s needed will not only elevate the idea of ‘farm to table but help reduce the ongoing cycle of food waste.”
Farmshelf Home is truly the first of its kind. While other contraptions exist such as a tabletop system from The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, they are relatively small. Farmshelf Home produces enough to cover a meaningful part of a weekly shopping list: a sample harvest includes 8 heads of lettuce, 8 bunches of herbs, and 8 bunches of greens.
View photos
“The food we eat was not designed to ship 1500 miles,” Mr. Shearer said. “We are going from shipping food miles to shipping food a few feet. It really changes the equation.”
Users can choose from a diverse menu of over 40 different herbs, leafy greens, and edible flowers. Choices include staples like romaine lettuce along with more exotic plants such as shiso and viola flowers.
The system also reduces food waste because users simply trim whatever ingredients they need for a meal. Farmshelf estimates the system, which sells for $4,950 on pre-order and has a $35 monthly fee for seeds and other essentials, can save users up to $2,500 a year in grocery bills.
The system also has advantages over normal gardening. Thanks to the controlled atmosphere and technology, plants grow three times as fast and need 90% less water. There’s also no need for pesticides or herbicides, meaning users technically can eat greens without washing them.
While away from home, users can keep an eye on their plants through the mobile app. It features live camera views and sends alerts for needs such as a water refill.
The success of the professional model suggests Farmshelf Home will be a hit. Farmshelf is very popular with superstar chefs like Mr. Andrés, who actually has a professional version in his own home. He recently tweeted a video of one of his Farmshelf units, raving about romaine lettuce.
Farmshelf also serves large groups of diners at schools and corporate cafeterias. American Express Company, for instance, uses multiple Farmshelf systems to serve 3,000 people per day.
To date, Farmshelf has raised over $8 million privately. Mr. Shearer said the company may seek more capital in the future as it continues to grow.
Contact:
John Jannarone, Editor-in-Chief
editor@IPO-Edge.com
Designing The Future of Urban Farming
INFARM collaborated with IDEO to further explore their B2B offer, including concepts for the industrial design of the stackable, modular, climate-controlled units; the interaction design of an accompanying app to monitor and control the units, and its business model
Helping a Berlin startup strengthen its offer of vertical farming products and services
INFARM
THE CHALLENGE
Help INFARM develop the vision, products, and services for their B2B vertical farming offer.
THE OUTCOME
Concepts for the industrial design of B2B vertical farm units, the interaction design of the app to control and monitor the units, and a business model for sustainability.
The challenge of how we’ll feed the exploding world population in the future—in a sustainable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly way—is seeding an agricultural revolution in Europe.
In 2012, INFARM founders Erez, Guy Galonska, and Osnat Michaeli found that vertical farms could be a solution to urban self-sufficiency. These farms could allow people to grow vegetables and herbs in small spaces, with no soil and far less water.
If every city on earth were to grow 10 percent of its produce indoors, it would allow us to take 340,000 square miles of farmland back to the forest.
DICKSON DESPOMMIER, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND MICROBIOLOGY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND FATHER OF VERTICAL FARMING
An approach that’s captured the imagination of futurists for decades, vertical farming involves growing vegetables and herbs in stacked units or inclined surfaces, within which moisture, light, temperature, and nutrients are monitored, and controlled.
After creating their first vertical farming experiment in their apartment in Berlin, the founders brought together plant scientists and industrial designers to explore and develop vertical farming’s potential.
Since then, the startup has created custom growing systems for clients including Airbnb, Mercedes-Benz, and Weber. Most recently, INFARM installed a vertical farm growing herbs and vegetables at the Berlin branch of German supermarket chain Metro, the fourth-largest retail chain in the world, to sell to the public. It’s been profiled in Wired Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, and Zeit.
The vertical farm is designed to be modular, allowing consumers to purchase according to their needs.
INFARM collaborated with IDEO to further explore their B2B offer, including concepts for the industrial design of the stackable, modular, climate-controlled units; the interaction design of an accompanying app to monitor and control the units, and its business model.
Urban farmers will sign up for “farming as a service,” comprising the units themselves, as well as a monthly subscription for seeds, cartridges filled with nutrients, and a pH regulator. Because they’re stackable, the modules can be scaled to suit anyone from a home grower to a restaurant chef or supermarket owner. And Erez claims a 1 square meter growing tray can yield four to six mature plants every day, 365 days a year, doubling that of state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouses.
The consumer app allows farmers to choose a set of herbs designed around specific recipes.
As well as remotely regulating each unit’s climate, the app will educate growers about new vegetables and herbs, selling packs of complementary seeds, with suggested recipes for them, and cooking instructions. Aiming to promote biodiversity, the firm will sell rare-breed and heirloom seeds too.
The startup has funding from the EU’s European Pioneers fund and is now looking to secure investment to accelerate software development and ramp up their hardware production capabilities. Quite literally, it's growing its business.
Farmshelf Unveils Its First Consumer-Facing Vertical Farming Unit
Farmshelf, the vertical farming company best known for outfitting restaurants with its high-tech indoor farms, today unveiled its first-ever consumer-facing product, according to a company press release
Farmshelf, the vertical farming company best known for outfitting restaurants with its high-tech indoor farms, today unveiled its first-ever consumer-facing product, according to a company press release.
Dubbed Farmshelf Home, the new product is similar to the company’s commercial model championed by high-profile chefs like José Andrés. It’s roughly the size of a bookcase and uses a combination of sensors, cameras, software, and custom LEDs to automatically deliver the correct levels of water, light, and nutrients to each plant growing in the farm.
For the average consumer, that means once the farm arrives, it’s a matter of plugging it into a wall, connecting it to wifi, setting seeds in pods, then remotely monitoring the hydroponic system from a corresponding smartphone app.
Farmshelf Home is available to pre-order through the company’s website. Though it ain’t cheap: the company lists the “exclusive pre-order price” at $4,950, while the standard retail price will be set at $6,450. There is a $100 deposit (applied to the price and also refundable) as well as a monthly $35 fee that covers seed pods, nutrients, and access to the Farmshelf software for monitoring plants. At the moment, those interested only need to hand over the deposit to sign up for a pre-order. According to the fine print, there is no firm delivery date yet.
Three months ago, I would have called the high price point a deterrent for most people. Certainly, the average American family won’t be purchasing a Farmshelf anytime soon.
But those in higher income brackets may. A global pandemic has revealed just how out of whack our food supply chain is and what happens when people panic shop in droves and grocery stores can’t keep up, factors that might justify the price point for some folks. The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out recently that “As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”
Now we have to see whether consumers will pay thousands of dollars to ensure that independence. More at-home vertical farming companies were coming to market even before the pandemic, with large appliance makers like Samsung, LG, and Miele announcing high-tech gardens meant for your kitchen or living room. They range in price from the hundreds to the thousands, though not quite as high as Farmshelf.
Currently, Farmshelf is in a number of restaurants and hotels, including NYC chain Tender Greens, Marriott Marquis Times Square, and the Condé Nast offices. Angel network she1K syndicated an early-stage investment in the company at the end of last year.
Tags: AG TECH BUSINESS OF FOOD FEATURED FOODTECH MODERN FARMER SMART GARDEN
Miele Commitment To Vertical Agriculture At Home
Miele continues with its commitment to acquire or participate in new projects to diversify its business and redefine the experience in the field of cooking, with the purchase of Agrilution assets
02/14/2020
Miele continues with its commitment to acquire or participate in new projects to diversify its business and redefine the experience in the field of cooking, with the purchase of Agrilution assets . This young company of German origin has opted to offer vertical agriculture solutions, which many experts have defined as the future of greenhouses, in the home itself.
This type of agriculture, which is based on aeroponics (a technology that does not require land, sun, or water) makes plants grow based on the humidity and heat of artificial light. Its domestic use means having a kind of standard refrigerator, which offers the perfect growing conditions, with minimal care and an extra design contribution both in the kitchen and in the living room.
In the words of Maximilian Lössl, founder of Agrilution together with Philipp Wagner, "our domestic greenhouse provides fresher lettuce, herbs, and micro vegetables directly on the table."
Agrilution's home greenhouses allow fresh, aromatic and nutrient-rich sprouts, herbs and micro vegetables to be enjoyed at home throughout the year, through a self-contained ecosystem with simple seed coatings, regulated lighting, and a controlled microclimate, as well as automatic irrigation.
The first crop can be harvested one to three weeks after commissioning.
To establish a comparison that clearly illustrates its effectiveness, a lettuce grown in the field requires up to 120 liters of water to grow and that volume is sufficient to supply an entire Plantcube throughout the year.
The Booming Indoor Gardening Movement
LG’s indoor farm appliance is an example of how a built-in, columned indoor garden using lighting, temperature and water control can change the way consumers obtain their kitchen ingredients
Sarah Buckley
22/01/2020
The booming indoor gardening movement, prominently explored at CES 2020 earlier this year, is allowing consumers to grow their greens indoors, all year-round.
LG’s indoor farm appliance is an example of how a built-in, columned indoor garden using lighting, temperature and water control can change the way consumers obtain their kitchen ingredients.
LG’s offering of all-in-one seed packages and a growth monitoring app makes the one-stop-shop capable of feeding a family of four with home-grown produce.
The appliance replicates optimal outdoor conditions by matching the temperature inside the insulated cabinet to the time of day.
The LED lights, air circulation, and wick-based water management system allows the produce to quickly grow, alongside the automated gardening solution’s non-circulating water supply technology.
The core technology, which evenly distributes the precise water required for the plant’s to healthily flourish, prevents algae and odors for a hygienic, green enclosure.
Much like LG, n.thing, a South Korean agriculture start-up has developed ‘planty cube’ which is an automated vertical farming system, to a more elaborate effect – allowing consumers to maintain crops from anywhere, at any time.
Cubes, blocks, cells – the hydroponic farm, presented in a shipping container, has each square evenly stacked with rows of shelves of plants.
A computerized system controls the environment by monitoring the plants’ health, adjusting the environment accordingly.
These alternatives to glasshouse production are presenting solutions to production, health, convenience, pollution, water-use, but most notably, are finally brought to the consumer’s arena.
Are In-Home Vertical Farms The Next Big Appliance For Connected Kitchens?
Whether you’re contemplating your own home grow system or just curious, here’s a look at what’s available and what’s in the pipeline
A little less than a year ago, The Spoon looked at a number of hydroponic farming devices that could fit into the average person’s apartment. These were, for the most part, table-top models or units that could hang on a wall. At the time, the concept of having a grow system in your own home seemed more than a little novel.
Fast forward to now and things have changed. Putting an indoor vertical farm in the average consumer’s home isn’t yet a mainstream concept, but as more startups and major appliance-makers alike have shown over the last 12 months, the idea is making its way into the Everyman’s kitchen with more speed these days. Now, thanks to a bunch of concepts shown off at this year’s CES, suddenly the idea of having a smart farm in your kitchen doesn’t seem so novel.
Whether you’re contemplating your own home grow system or just curious, here’s a look at what’s available and what’s in the pipeline.
Aspara
If you’re like me, you have minimal space (almost none, really) in the home for adding much in the way of smart farming systems. Aspara’s hydroponic growing device could potentially solve that problem because it’s small — 14 inches high and 21 inches wide — and could reasonably fit on a countertop, shelf, or even on top of the refrigerator. The system uses a combination of LEDs, an auto-watering feature, and sensors that detect nutrient levels, humidity and air, and other factors to create the optimal grow “recipe” for the plants.
After a user does the initial planting of the seeds, the Aspara app manages most of the grow process, notifying the user when it’s time to refill the water tank and harvest the plants. It also includes tips and recipes for growing and lets you monitor multiple Aspara farms at the same time.
The device is currently available in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. through online retailers. For U.S. buyers, the device currently goes for $259.99 on Amazon for just the machine and $339.99 with a starter seed kit included.
Rise Gardens
Chicago, IL startup Rise Gardens is one of those companies aiming to make a truly “plug in and go” indoor vertical farming system for the home. This one is a standalone console that can be purchased with one, two, or three “levels” for plants and weighs between 60 and 106 pounds depending on the size.
A user assembles the garden — much as you would a piece of furniture from IKEA, from the looks of it — then downloads the app, which controls the lighting and nutrients schedule and reminds the user when it’s time to water the plants. Each garden comes with a starter pack of 12 plant pods that can be inserted directly into the grow trays.
Price ranges from $549 for a single-level console to $949 for a triple.
Agrilution’s Plantcube
Not to be confused with Plantycube (see below), the Plantcube made headlines at the end of 2019 when its maker, a German company called Agrilution, was acquired by appliance-maker Miele. Less device than full-on kitchen appliance, the Plantcube automates temperature, light, climate, and water levels of the indoor vertical farm, and can be controlled from within the Agrilution app.
The appliance looks like a wine cooler and is about the same size. However, unlike a wine cooler or any of the systems listed above, the Plantcube is meant to be built directly into your kitchen cupboards or beneath a countertop. That would perhaps explain the price point: €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), a figure most consumers wouldn’t spend on an indoor farm right now. Even for those who would, the device is currently only available to those in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxemburg or the Netherlands.
Even so, the concept Plantcube pushes is one to watch. It’s entirely possible that appliances like these eventually become as common in the home kitchen as microwaves. The price point would have to come way down for that to become a reality, which is one reason we’re watching Plantcube closely in the future.
GE Home Grow
As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote recently, CES 2020’s standout in the consumer kitchen was GE because, “rather than create product demos designed as show-off vehicles for new technologies, GE illustrated how these technologies could be employed in a cohesive, systematic way to provide consumers answers to some of their biggest problems.”
Among those technologies was Home Grown, GE’s indoor gardening concept that uses a combination of hydroponics, aeroponics, and soil-based grow systems that are built directly into the kitchen design. For each of the three systems, water, nutrient, and light delivery are controlled through an app, which also guides the user through the seeding and harvesting stages of the grow process.
The system also offers consumers information on the health benefits of each plant as well as how to prepare herbs and greens in meals once they are harvested.
Home Grow is purely conceptual at this stage, so there’s no price point on these systems. Like the Plantcube, however, GE is thinking bigger than the just-another-appliance concept and imagining a system that can encourage healthier eating, reduce food waste, and increase consumer education around the foods they’re eating.
Honorable Mentions
We’ve covered these in-depth already, but LG and Plantycube are also at the forefront of bringing vertical farming technology into the consumer kitchen. Both showed off products at CES this year.
LG’s forthcoming appliance is the size of a fridge and, as I wrote recently, “takes many of the functions found in commercial-scale indoor farming and applies them to a device specifically made for the average consumer.”
N.thing’s Planty Cube, meanwhile, is a highly modular indoor farming system that can be small enough to fit on a countertop or large enough to serve cafeterias at schools, offices, and other institutions.
Since things are never as simple as they seem, there are obviously still a lot of questions around these “plug-in-and-grow” systems. Will they raise consumers’ utility bills significantly? What happens if they break? Are they worth the cost if they can only grow leafy greens and not more substantial veggies, like carrots or broccoli?
Many more questions will sprout up as companies introduce new systems to the consumer market, and it’s ok that those questions won’t get answered immediately. The more important point here is that entrepreneurs and corporations both are testing new ways to make food cleaner, more local, and more in the consumer’s control. Right now, we need concepts as compact as an Aspera and as conceptual as GE’s Home Grown right now to help get us there.
The Humble Veggie Patch Just Went Hi-Tech
Growing vegetables and herbs is set to get a whole lot easier with big tech companies creating indoor 'vertical farms'
Forget battling insects and having to remember to water your veggie patch, growing herbs and vegetables at home is set to become hi-tech with new indoor farms.
by Tanya French
9th Jan 2020
Growing vegetables and herbs is set to get a whole lot easier with big tech companies creating indoor 'vertical farms'.
Samsung and LG have both spruiked their answer to the humble vegetable patch - creating indoor gardening appliances that enable people to have their own veggie garden, even if they don't have a backyard.
Samsung's Chef Garden technology integrates with its next-generation Family Hub refrigerator and automatically regulates light wavelengths to enable users to grow and enjoy fresh, pesticide-free fruit and vegetables all year round.
Samsung's vertical farm.
"There is a growing interest in healthy food," said Samsung LED technology centre's Chohui Kim.
"Horticulture LED is playing a key role in vertical farming and indoor crop cultivation, and we are looking to expand its applications in various fields."
The indoor farm integrates with the Family Hub fridge.
While Samsung's offering can easily fit into an existing kitchen, LG's version needs to be in-built into new or renovated kitchens.
The LG vertical farm consists of 24 pods which all have seeds and fertiliser in-built.
The machine recognises the amount of light and water it requires for optimum growth.
The farm - which takes 4-6 weeks to grow - will produce enough leafy vegetables to feed a family of four.
LG’s vertical farm solution. Photo: Tanya French
There's no word yet on when the technology will be available in Australia or what it will cost but an LG spokeswoman said it was 'very high end and part of a bigger kitchen solution'.
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Kitchens Get Smarter At CES Tech Show, Not Yet In Many Homes
Tell your refrigerator about your dietary preferences and it'll concoct a recipe plan for the coming week, sending a shopping list to your smartphone when it notices you've run out of the right ingredients
By MATT O'BRIEN and JOSEPH PISANI
Associated Press
JANUARY 8, 2020
LAS VEGAS — Tell your refrigerator about your dietary preferences and it'll concoct a recipe plan for the coming week, sending a shopping list to your smartphone when it notices you've run out of the right ingredients.
Counter-top robotic arms help chop veggies. Artificially intelligent oven cameras and internet-connected meat thermometers keep track of what's cooking. And then — voila! — a stove-top camera can show off your culinary creations on Instagram.
These are some of the new "smart kitchen" tech features on display this week at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas. Appliance-makers are competing with one another to show off futuristic kitchen innovations they hope might resonate with younger consumers, knowing that once these appliances squeeze themselves into a home, they could stay for a while.
Just don't expect to get much help at your local Home Depot anytime soon. There's also the challenge of getting consumers interested and keeping up with rapid changes in technology.
"The problem is that refrigerators are 10-year devices," said food technology analyst Michael Wolf, who hosts a podcast on smart kitchens. "The sales personnel haven't really asked about smart features and consumers really aren't asking for them."
That hasn't stopped big appliance-makers like Samsung, LG Electronics, GE Appliances, Whirlpool and Bosch from trying to reinvent the kitchen around internet connectivity.
Their mission: Appeal to consumers who are comfortable with smartphone apps. Target consumers include those looking to discover new step-by-step digital cooking instructions and consider themselves foodies even if they're not necessarily expert chefs with a lot of free time.
"Food and food culture is just really one of the dominant things that Millennials and 'Gen Z' put on their social media," Wolf said.
GE Appliances added a third, AI-powered oven camera to its Kitchen Hub system, which includes a 27-inch touch screen for interacting with friends and family or tuning into Netflix or Spotify while a watchful computer helps make sure you don't burn dinner.
Bosch is using its partnership with startup Chefling to send recipe commands to appliances such as refrigerators, which have cameras inside to keep track of inventory. Bosch is one of several companies using computer vision inside refrigerators to recognize items and how long they've been sitting there.
Whirlpool unveiled its Yummly smart thermometer, which can be pierced into a raw chicken. As your meal roasts, your phone will get alerts when the thermometer reaches the right temperature. Later this year, the $129 thermometer will also be able to follow recipes on the Yummly app and automatically adjust the temperature of Whirlpool's smart ovens.
LG showed off an entire "smart" restaurant at its CES booth, complete with a robot to cook and make coffee, one to greet customers and a tabletop robot to take orders. The rounded, expressive robots are part of LG's CLOi line announced at CES in 2018. The South Korean company debuted the cooking Chefbot robot in November at a restaurant in Seoul.
Samsung also emphasized an artificial intelligence-laden kitchen that could help plan meals and monitor nutrition. The company also has a robotic kitchen aid — Bot Chef — a mechanical arm that can chop, whisk, stir and otherwise help prepare food.
As with all internet-connected home devices, some of them raise privacy and security concerns. The devices record audio and video as they listen for your cooking commands and watch from your stove-top or from behind the milk cartons. Hackers could spy inside homes if the apps or devices have security flaws, as many do.
But even if appliance-makers are able to address those risks, some experts say they're still focusing too much on what's technologically possible and not on the improvements in the food experience that consumers might actually want.
"It fits the old school way they've been thinking about this — that every year or two they update the physical models," said Frank Gillett, a tech analyst for Forrester Research. "They're not thinking in terms of outcomes, which are meals. How do you shift the thinking from delivering the best stove to giving people the meal experience they want to have?"
Gillett predicts big structural changes in the food tech industry in the coming years. One far-out possibility: subscription services enabling consumers to commit to a favored supermarket, tech company or other provider. This company would deliver groceries and help run the appliances that work with its system.
Wolf is not as excited by all these AI-enabled bells and whistles as he is about other food tech innovations such as indoor hydroponics, the practice of growing plants without soil.
A few big appliance-makers like LG are now experimenting with indoor gardening technology. Previously, the products were confined to startups like Indiana-based GroPod, which showed off a prototype that can sustain 60 plants that just need water and small nutrient pods.
But none of these smart appliance features and hydroponic gadgetry have taken off with consumers as much as simpler kitchen tech innovations that sit on counters and don't need internet connections.
"Two counter-top appliances have become mainstream: Instant Pot and air fryers," Wolf said. "Five years ago, no one was using those."
GE Appliances Shows Off Future Kitchen Technology At CES
Louisville-based GE Appliances, a Haier Company, will reveal its reimagination of the home at CES 2020, which comes in the form of two new kitchen concepts: “Shift,” and “Home Grown.”
The Home Grown Kitchen employs three different gardening systems for consumers to cultivate their own trees and produce in-home. It additionally comes with guides to assist the user from seeding, harvesting, and preparation of produce.
By Sarah Shadburne – Reporter, Louisville Business First
Jan 8, 2020
Louisville-based GE Appliances, a Haier Company, will reveal its reimagination of the home at CES 2020, which comes in the form of two new kitchen concepts: “Shift,” and “Home Grown.”
"At GE Appliances, our driving force is to eliminate the distance between what we make and what our consumers need, and it propels us to imagine what's to come," said Shawn Stover, vice president of SmartHome Solutions, GE Appliances, in a news release.
CES, the brainchild of the Consumer Technology Association, hosts its annual event this week as tech trailblazers from around the world make the pilgrimage to Las Vegas for a three-day showcase of their innovations.
GE’s thesis statement is one of personalized kitchen convenience for all members of the home, the release said.
As many homes become multigenerational and house people with varying physical abilities, GE said it sought to create kitchens that empower their users.
“Shift” is a technological kitchen which utilizes face and voice recognition technology to determine features applicable to its user, which include height adjustments for wheelchair users, to update the space in real-time.
The “Home Grown” offering features three different gardening systems so users can grow foods directly in their homes. The gardening system utilizes aeroponics, hydroponics, and soil to enable in-kitchen growth for trees and produce and is regulated by a user interface which guides the user from growth to harvest to food preparation.
At the conference Tuesday, GE was named Smart Appliance Company of the Year for the second year in a row through the IoT Breakthrough Awards program. The program attracted 3,700 nominations this year and seeks to recognize innovators, leaders, and visionaries in internet-of-things (IoT) categories such as industrial and enterprise, connected home and home automation and more.
“GE Appliances was the first manufacturer to offer a full suite of connected products for the home and they continue to define what’s possible, responding to consumer needs and preferences with “breakthrough” products that deliver real-world results,“ said James Johnson, managing director at IoT Breakthrough, in a news release. “GE Appliances is redefining the appliance industry by creating appliances that get smarter over time with software updates and upgrades. Making continued investments in research and development of compelling and useful smart appliance features and products, GE Appliances proves it is the leader year-after-year in the smart appliance segment. We congratulate them once again and look forward to continued leadership and innovation in the smart appliance arena.”
GE will also host Tech Talks at its booth #16006 daily through the conference from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Haier section of the booth will highlight its work to create a fully connected IoT living space, from Smart Kitchen to Smart Living Room to Smart Closet.
Locally, GE is the second largest manufacturer in Louisville, with 6,000 full-time employees and 12,500 companywide. They operate the Appliance Park at 4000 Buechel Bank Road.
Miele Acquires Consumer Indoor Vertical Farm Company Agrilution
Agrilution’s Plantcubes look like wine fridges that are meant to be built directly into home kitchens. The automated systems regulate the lighting, climate, and water levels plants receive, all key parts of delivering the right “recipe” of nutrients to crops grown in vertical farms
Miele announced today that it has acquired the assets of the German company, Agrilution, makers of the Plantcube indoor vertical farm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Agrilution’s Plantcubes look like wine fridges that are meant to be built directly into home kitchens. The automated systems regulate the lighting, climate, and water levels plants receive, all key parts of delivering the right “recipe” of nutrients to crops grown in vertical farms. Plantcubes cost €2,979 (~$3,300 USD) and are capable of growing a number of different greens including kale, leaf lettuce, basil and more.
According to the press announcement, Miele came on board after Agrilution failed to raise more financing and filed for insolvency on Dec. 1. Agrilution will become a subsidiary of Miele, and almost all of Agrilution’s employees will be transferred over to Miele.
Having an in-kitchen grow system makes a lot of sense for people wanting to reduce their carbon footprint as well as have more transparency into and control over the food that they eat. These small farms could be especially appealing to those that don’t have the space, inclination or talent to grow their greens outside. In fact, building hydroponic grow systems directly into cabinets was a trend predicted during a panel on the future of the kitchen at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit.
The acquisition of Agrilution also seems like a smart play for Miele. Since Agrilution was in insolvency, the assets for the company probably weren’t that expensive. Miele has also shown that it isn’t afraid to shake up the traditional kitchen with new appliances like its solid state RF oven, its own meal delivery service, and investments in digital recipe startups like Plant Jammer and KptnCook.
A big player like Miele could also help push indoor farming systems more into the mainstream. Miele has the market muscle other in-home farming startups like Seedo, SproutsIO, or Ponix just can’t match. The only question remains is whether in a world of on-demand food delivery, people will have the patience to grow their own greens.
Grow Lettuce Indoors All Winter
There’s nothing better than biting into a nice, crunchy salad made with homegrown lettuce leaves, but with frost covering the backyard garden, you’re going to need to move production indoors. Luckily, lettuce is one of the easiest crops to grow inside, even if you’re new to indoor gardening
Kathleen Marshall | November 11, 2017
Takeaway: There’s nothing better than biting into a nice, crunchy salad made with homegrown lettuce leaves, but with frost covering the backyard garden, you’re going to need to move production indoors. Luckily, lettuce is one of the easiest crops to grow inside, even if you’re new to indoor gardening. Just follow these simple steps.
Buying fresh salad greens in the winter can be a pretty pricy endeavor. Fortunately, you can easily grow your own indoors, even if you’ve never tried indoor gardening before.
Choosing the Right Variety of Lettuce to Grow Indoors
You might think that lettuce is all the same, but loose-leaf varieties grow best in indoor gardens, especially in colder temperatures. This is important because even though you can control the temperature when you are growing indoors, the less heat you have to add to the grow space, the more economical your growing endeavor will become.
Varieties especially suited for growing indoors include black seeded simpson and tom thumb. Mesclun mixes, arugula, and baby spinach also do well but don’t be afraid of experimenting with other varieties or you might miss out on a special favorite you haven’t discovered yet. Loose-leaf lettuce grows quickly, can produce multiple yields and comes in a variety of colors to create a colorful salad.
Selecting the Right Location
If you can, choose a room that gets lots of natural light, but even if the room you choose has lots of natural light, your plants will need the help of artificial lights.
Lighting isn’t your only consideration when choosing where to grow your lettuce. Choose a room that isn’t too hot or freezing cold. Make sure you have easy access to water, as running from one end of the house to the other transporting water loses its fun-factor quickly.
Easy access to electricity is also important. You don’t want extension cords running through the house to power your supplemental heat or light sources.
Heat and Light Considerations for Growing Lettuce Indoors
To successfully grow lettuce, you’ll need a minimum of 12 hours of light, with 14-16 hours of light being ideal for most plants. If you are relying heavily on windows for some of your lighting needs, you’ll need to rotate your growing containers or your plants will lean towards the light as they grow
Keep in mind there are fewer daylight hours in the winter, so a supplemental lighting source is necessary. A wide array of grow lights will provide full-spectrum lighting, but some of the more advanced systems may seem pricey to novice indoor growers.
To start out your indoor gardening adventures, you can opt for a simple T5 grow light from your neighborhood hydro store. As you gain more experience and confidence in your abilities, you can always upgrade your equipment to match your needs. Make sure your light source is adjustable and keep it 4-6-in. above your plants. As the plants grow, you’ll need to raise the lights.
Most types of lettuce thrive in cooler temperatures and go to seed when it gets hot, but there are several varieties bred to be slow to bolt. Lettuce thrives in temperatures between 60 and 70˚F during the day, and about 10 degrees cooler at night. You can grow lettuce in cooler temperatures than these, but it will grow more slowly.
Picking the Right Medium
A seed-starting mix is ideal to use when you are growing lettuce indoors. It is lightweight, which makes it easy for seedlings to pop through the surface of the soil. A soilless potting mix is also a good choice. You can make your own with equal parts peat moss or coir, vermiculite or perlite, and sand.
Growing containers can be shallow, as lettuce does not have a deep root system. You can use growing trays from your local garden center or even recycle containers from home, like empty yogurt cups or egg cartons.
If you have an assortment of flowerpots or planter boxes, those will work just fine, too. It isn’t necessary for each plant to grow in its own container.
Fill your containers with moist potting mix and you are ready to plant.
Planting Lettuce
Plant your seeds about an inch apart, or about four seeds per pot if you are growing in seed-starting trays. Lettuce seeds are small, but if you sow seeds a little thicker than desired, you can simply pull any excess seedlings.
Once your seeds are in place, cover lightly with potting mix and mist with a spray bottle. It’s important to water gently so you don’t wash away the tiny seeds.
If you have a seed-starting tray, put the cover on it and keep it moist until the seedlings sprout. You can achieve the same effect by covering containers with plastic to create a greenhouse effect.
Moisture from the soil accumulates on the plastic and then drips onto the seeds. Once seeds have germinated, remove the plastic covering.
Fertilize when the first real leaves appear on your plants. I like to use an organic fertilizer that’s diluted by half. Avoid getting fertilizer on the leaves so you don’t burn your plants.
Harvesting Your Indoor Lettuce
You can expect to start enjoying the fruits of your labor within several weeks—in 20-30 days, your lettuce will have grown to about 4-in. tall. To harvest, cut the larger outer leaves. If you cut what you need just above the soil and allow the smaller parts to grow, you can extend your harvest to 2-3 cuttings.
For a continuous harvest all year, sow seeds every two weeks. You might have plans to grow lettuce outside when the weather warms up, but if you continue growing indoors, you won’t have to worry about slugs and rabbits eating your salads. And no one says you can’t do both! Experiment and decide what fits your needs the best.
Growing lettuce indoors is a rewarding project for beginners because it offers quick results with little effort. It’s also an excellent learning opportunity for children.
Once you’ve enjoyed a fresh, homegrown salad in the middle of winter, you may be inspired to try other indoor gardening projects like culinary herbs. Start small and add more as your experience allows.
Read More: Winter Lettuce Production Tips
Written by Kathleen Marshall
Kathleen Marshall has been gardening since she was old enough to hold a shovel. She is a master gardener through the University of Florida and likes to experiment with various types of growing, indoors and out. Her passion is self-reliance. Currently, she resides on a 100-acre homestead with her family, where she works on growing as much of her family's food as possible. Full Bio
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.