Shipping-container Farms
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Technology
About the size of the standard one- car garage, each shipping container farm can produce the same amount in crops as two acres of outdoor farmland.
Kimbal Musk, the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is trying to change the way we eat by creating what he calls a "real-food revolution."
For over a decade, Kimbal Musk has run two restaurant chains, The Kitchen and Next Door, which serve dishes strictly made with locally sourced meat and veggies. Since 2011, his non-profit program has installed so-called Learning Gardens in over 300 schools to teach kids about agriculture.
Musk's latest food venture delves into the world of local urban farming.
In early November, he and fellow entrepreneur Tobias Peggs launched Square Roots, an urban-farming incubator program in Brooklyn, New York.
The setup consists of 10 steel shipping-container farms where young entrepreneurs work to develop vertical-farming startups. Unlike traditional outdoor farms, vertical farms grow soil-free crops indoors and under LED lights.
Everything grows inside 320-square-foot steel shipping containers. Each container can produce about 50,000 mini-heads of lettuce a year.
On four parallel walls, leafy greens and herbs sprout from soil-free growing beds filled with nutrient-rich water. Instead of sunlight, they rely on hanging blue and pink LED rope lights.
About the size of the standard one-car garage, each shipping container can produce the same amount in crops as two acres of outdoor farmland.
Musk and Peggs chose Square Roots’ first class of 10 entrepreneurs from over 500 applications. Peggs said they represented the next generation of farmers — though not all had previous farming experience.
Before Josh Aliber, 24, moved from Boston to Brooklyn to join Square Roots, he had never farmed. Now he's starting up a specialty herb business and running a vertical farm.
These shipping container farm runs on 10 gallons of recycled water a day, which is less than an average shower's worth.
Aliber can monitor everything from the oxygen level to the humidity — which affects the plants' taste and texture — using the "computer panel" near the door and sensors in the growing beds. If he wants a tropical or northeastern climate, he can control that, too.
Vertical farms can grow crops all year, using significantly less water and space than outdoor farms.
Critics of vertical farms say that the LED lights drain a lot of electricity. Peggs said Square Roots was exploring how the farmers could switch to solar power in the future, since electricity is the program's biggest cost.
Square Roots' lights are on only lit in the evening and night, although other vertical farms run theirs 24/7.
Source: Business Insider
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