Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

urban farming

Babylon Micro-Farms

This Stylish Table Is the “Next Generation” of Automated Urban Farming

One of the more promising urban-farm concepts is not in New York, Los Angeles, or any other major city. It’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, courtesy of one University of Virginia alum and a very small team of employees.

Recent grad Alexander Olsen started Babylon Micro-Farms in 2016, as part of the UVA student entrepreneurial clubhouse, HackCville. An early prototype won $6,500 from Green Initiatives Funding Tomorrow, part of the UVA student council.

Now, Olsen and six other employees are working to get the hydroponic farms inside the homes of consumers, billing them as “the next generation home appliance.”

The concept is pretty straightforward. You start by selecting crops from Babylon’s online menu. Pre-seeded plant packs are then delivered to your door. Right now, pod pack choices include: wellness (kale), spicy peppers, pesto, a mini romaine crop, herbs, edible flowers, a cocktail mix, Asian greens, and arugula.

Once seed pods are set up, the farm regulates itself—you may occasionally have to top off the water or nutrients, but otherwise, the process is automated. A corresponding app provides live data about crop health, notifies users when water and nutrients are needed, and tells you when it’s time to harvest your crops. Once the latter is done, you can order another round of crops and start the process all over again. For the extra-ambitious (and restaurants), the app can control multiple farms at once.

One thing setting Babylon Mirco-Farms apart from other urban farming products is its emphasis on visual design. To that end, the system takes the form of a table with a UV light hanging overhead, and is small compared to its industrial counterparts: 6 feet wide by 3 feet deep and 6 feet tall. And instead of seeing wires and buttons, everywhere, pinewood hides those operational things and makes the farm as much a stylish conversation piece as it is a food supply.

The company isn’t alone in their mission to marry urban farming with, uh, urban style. The Ava Byte also uses soil-less grow pods, which come in a slick, space-age-looking container that would blend into a lot of modern kitchen designs. Verdical calls itself “a living food appliance” and is also small enough to fit into most homes. Farmshelf is more geared at serving restaurants and retail spaces, but as of November, they were considering a move to more residential markets.

UVA has given Olsen and Co. considerable support for the project, from grants to advice about the next phase of business. Farms are also installed at university dining halls, where students are encouraged to harvest what they need. According to Olsen, the farms are “a massive hit” amongst the students.

Babylon is now focused on bringing the farms to consumers outside of universities. Currently, a the micro-farm farm goes for $1,799. Pre-order one here. East Coasters get free shipping.

The company also wants want to eventually offer a smaller system for less than $1,000, which would be a hit for both cost-conscious consumers and those of us living in shoebox-sized apartments. Neither price tag is pocket change, but I suspect with the right amount of dedication, an investment in one of these would pay for itself pretty fast. Stay tuned.

Photo credit: Dan Addison, University Communications, UVA

Meet Farmlab.One, The Latest Indoor Farming Experiment From Germany’s Largest Retailer

While we haven’t arrived at a future where every corner grocery has an in-store farming system with rows and rows of produce, it isn’t for lack of trying.

This is especially true for METRO Group, Germany’s largest retailer, who has been experimenting with in-store farming since early 2016.

That’s when the retailer launched Kräuter Garten (herb garden), the first retail in-store farming installation in Europe. The technology for METRO’s first foray into vertical farming was provided by INFARM, a vertical farming startup based in Germany. Since the launch of  Kräuter Garten in Berlin, other retailers such as EDEKA (Germany’s largest grocery store chain) have since taken an interest in in-store growing.

Now METRO is at it again, launching another vertical farming experiment with Farmlab.one, a joint project between the retail giant and Schmiede.ONE, a German innovation lab focused on future business models that intermingle agriculture and cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence.

The project will be managed by James Lindsay of Schmiede.ONE in an indoor lab in Düsseldorf. METRO has provided resources in the form of indoor farming racks from TowerGarden, the indoor farming division of Juice+. The project is starting with three crops to start, which you can watch here via Periscope.

While the project is a modest one, it’s a sign of continued interest in vertical, in-building farming by a large food retailer. In the US, we’ve seen growing interest in solutions from companies like Farmshelf, and just last month we saw one of the biggest investments ever in a vertical farming startup when Jeff Bezos, among others, invested $200 million in stealthy startup Plenty.

A comparison of yields and resource consumption of indoor vs. soil-based farming. Source: Schmiede One

While it’s unlikely that in-store vertical farms could produce at the scale to meet the total demand for fresh produce purchased at a high-volume urban retail storefront, it’s clear that soilless vertical farms produce at a much high rate of productivity compared to soil based farming, which means much less overall space is needed to produce the same amount of produce. With such high yields, one can envision a future where a mix of in-store grown produce combined with other warehouse grown urban farmed food could be enough to meet a large percentage of overall demand for fresh produce.

Innovative Approaches Bringing Urban Farming To Cities Across The Globe

Across the globe, innovators are working to make fresh, locally grown food more accessible to city dwellers via urban farming.

In Paris, where consumers pay a premium for fresh everything, the concept of urban farming might lead locals to turn up their nose. Agricool, a French startup, is hoping to dot the country’s landscape with shipping containers that are retrofitted to grow plump, juicy strawberries. What separates this startup from others in the urban farming space is the care it takes in developing custom LED grow lights and precise temperature control. With a new round of startup capital, Agrciool is moving from early stage to production mode.

The short-term plan for Agricool, explains co-founder Guillaume Fourdinier, is to have five custom containers in the Paris area selling strawberries, “Our mission is global and we have to go where fruit and vegetable prices are “an anomaly”.  In [places such as] New York, in the Emirates, and in Asia, you cannot find strawberries of good quality at reasonable prices,” Fourdinier told French magazine Les Echos. Once the Paris rollout is successful, the company plans to outsource manufacturing of its container gardens and sell the units globally.

AGRICOOL et la Révolution Hydroponique - Rencontre #05

(ed note: turn on captions and auto-translate to see comments in English)

The fledging company’s roots began in a small apartment in Paris. As Fourninier wrote in Medium:

We were disgusted with the strawberries we could buy in the city. So (co-founder) Gonzague (Gru) and I (both sons of farmers) decided to build a farming system in our apartment. A few weeks later (and really, against all of our expectations) we had 2 strawberries waiting for us. And even more surprisingly, they tasted delicious and sweet!

We were shocked. How did our little experiment, with no preparation, no science, give us strawberries? Ok, only two, but still, real and delicious strawberries! Why does the rest of the world say it’s impossible to grow fruits and vegetables without pesticide in cities? Fear? Ignorance? Laziness?

Whatever, those two strawberries gave us the magic to keep going. 
We wanted more. Much more.

And so Agricool warn born.

Agricool is but one of several urban farms operating outside the U.S., each deploying a different market approach.

In Berlin, InFarm is working with wholesale grocer Metro on operating a vertical farm in one of its supermarkets. Twice a week is harvest time and customers can buy fresh basil grown in this 10-foot-high tech-driven agricultural marvel.

In China, Alesca Life is developing turkey hydroponic container farms which will aid with the country’s lack of arable land.

A Meal from an Urban Farmer by Alesca Life

In Singapore, Panasonic developed an indoor farm that produced leafy greens which were sold to local grocers and restaurants. From its inception in 2014, the 2,670-square-foot farm yielded 3.6 tons of produce per year. With its success, both the size of the farm and its output have nearly quadrupled.

Clean Air Nurseries in South Africa has patented what it calls a “closed-loop water system” called EGGS to grow greens indoors in a short time frame with less water. EGGS is a computer-driven technology that monitors the recycled water as it flows through a series of glasss tubes, while using a hybrid of hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics techniques.

No matter what the approach, it’s clear urban farming is beginning to work its way into dense city landscapes as a way to bring fresher food closer to point of consumption.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is around the corner. Get your ticket today before early bird ticket pricing before it expires to make sure you are the the one and only event focused on the future of food, cooking and the kitchen.