We have been playing around with the idea of basic free food, something very similar to basic income https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income/ and lately been able to reduce the cost of our plant growing technology to a level that could actually make the idea attainable.
The idea behind the technology is simple, instead of using the expensive mechanical control systems that hydroponic systems employ, we control the most important parameters affecting plant growth on a micro level and use chemical not mechanical mechanisms to optimize the grow cycle. Parameters such as pH, aeration, moisture, and nutrition can be easily manipulated or fixed with today’s materials.
In place of complex control system and rockwool (most common growing substrate), we decided to develop a growing medium that provides the exact pH level, aeration, moisture and nutrition level based on each plant/variety’s needs.
That growing medium allowed us to get rid of sensors, pumps, mixers, dozers, aerators, filters etc. and thereby reduce the initial investment for farms and growing systems nearly 80% when compared to similar hydroponic systems.
We are also using growth phase adaptive lighting system which allows us to reduce energy cost compared with static LED grow lights. By adjusting dynamically spectrums and spectrum intensity during the growth periods, we are able to achieve the optimal photon stream.
I would really appreciate you thinking along with me on this and share your thoughts/ideas especially about basic free food and if you have any questions, I would be more than happy to answer.
With our grow module https://goo.gl/0sClyv some crops are already cheaper today. It is difficult to compete with 500 acres but there are some aspects we should consider - food mileage, food waste and indirect damages of intensive farming are growing and mostly because of that the food prices are trending up, same time the cost of local/organic/urban farming is going down, at some point those trends will meet. I don't think we'll get rid of intensive farming but some important crops will be grown in urban farms soon because of the cost.
Eh, if you stick to specialty crops you might have a chance, I assume the long term plan is to pivot to Marijuana as it gets legalized in more states?
At least in Wisconsin & Iowa, I know from family & friends that the smallest plot your gonna make a run at farming with is 500 acres, anything less than that and you should lease your land out to someone who has the scale to make the economics work.
Re: food waste, most isn't occurring at the farm or distribution hubs (Savon, Unified Grocers, etc), its actually the stores where things are going bad & getting yard wasted. Locally sourcing produce doesn't seem to reduce this either, mainly due to the unpredictability of produce sales. Unless you can cut the time to market lag to a few days for the demand response, food waste is not going to be reduced significantly in the US.
Thanks for the support! We are definitely planning to use our technology to improve the food production on a larger scale as well. We are currently in discussions to start testing it with a company involved in large scale food production. Our technology actually helps save quite a substantial amount of water in comparison to traditional agricultural practices (up to 95%)! So we see there is a lot of potential to make the whole process a lot more efficient, make the ecologial footprints smaller while improving the yields and health of the plants.
Prototype ready in a week, planning to sell a couple to early adopters by the end of the program as well. Currently planning to officially launch in the beginning of 2016.
