1) a container
2) a tin shed leaning on it on one side
3) a small plastic? nursery/seeding house on the other side
4) a 3 Kwh solar plant (including batteries, etc.)
5) a bunch of pumps (and I presume pipes) for drip irrigation
6) web connectivity
7) possibly a bunch of hand farming tools
do not sum up to costs that justify the US$ 50,000/60,000 sell price, maybe I am missing something very relevant?
And - though admittedly I am not an agriculture expert - the 150 people feeding out of 1 hectare sounds like an extremely tall story to me, I would think more at around 10/15 people per acre (in a proper, fertile piece of land with good climate).
1) Shipping Container - ~$2,000
2) Tin Shed - Maybe another ~$1,000
3) Hoop Greenhouse - ~$400 [1]
4) 3Kwh Solar Plant with Batteries - ~$8,500 [2]
5) 2 Acre Drip Irrigation System - ~$3,000 [3]
6) WiFi Access - $1,000 (I have no idea what hardware/capabilities they're delivering here, but it seems like that's a safe number)
7) A Bunch of Hand Farming Tools - $1,000 (Another guesstimate)
8) A 1,000 gallon water storage tank - ~$700 [4]
So that takes us to about $17,600. Let's add another $5,000 for preparation, packaging, research and educational materials. Let's add another $5,000 for stuff that's more expensive than my guesstimates, and remove nothing for the article's claimed efficiencies that makes this so much more cost-effective than buying a la carte.
That still only puts us at $28,000, so either there's something I'm totally missing here, or this is total BS.
[1] http://www.greenhousemegastore.com/product/16-foot-wide-cold... [2] http://www.bimblesolar.com/3kwcomplete-sunny-island [3] https://www.berryhilldrip.com/Kit-Pro-2-This-Complete-Kit-wi... [4] http://www.plastic-mart.com/category/9/plastic-water-tanks
Also, where'd would I get the water for that water tank?
Actually, they do mention "sensors" - I wonder if that includes anything beyond the weather station?
Excellent, I roughly computed 26,000 US$ (actually 25,000 Euros), I was lower on the connectivity and on the solar plant and missed the water tank, but I will gladly accept a 10% increase, let's call it rounding.
Still we are around 100% margin, which should mean that the "manual" and "lessons" must be overpriced.
And they are doing this in San Francisco, which would greatly up the costs of everything vs doing it pretty much anywhere else. If they aren't careful with shipping everything to them that can easily eat $5k or more (a shipping container can cost more to move than the cost of the container itself).
WHICH refrigeration system?
I cannot find any mention of it: "Every unit comes equipped with a renewable power system, internet connectivity, basic farm tools, micro-drip irrigation system and water pump that can be adapted to fit either a groundwell or municipal water supply.
Every Farm from a Box unit can be customized with optional components including sensors, water purification units, and even remote monitioring technology."
And it would IMHO have merited an icon in the picture here:
AFAICU the US$ 50,000/60,000 is for the "current" thing, not for the "new" one.
(I am a small farmer with a side job in tech.)
"we’re starting with the 20-foot model that serves two acres"
So you make something that's ostensibly targeted at poor rural villagers, and sell it to some deep-pocketed do-gooder entity at a huge markup.
There's an excellent article that champions the calories-per-acre metric by WP: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-...
In the calorie department, corn is king [..] corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre [..] wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million. Rice is also very high-yielding, at 11 million, and potatoes are one of the few crops that can rival corn: They also yield about 15 million [..] Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million
And like was mentioned by dghughes, rotation is important. From about the middle ages to the early 20th century, European farmers practiced the three-crop rotation scheme. Winter wheat or rye in one field, peas, lentils or beans in a second, and the third would be "resting". It got replaced in Britain and Belgium with the four-crop rotation plan, which produced more calories.
Here's what I think I'd grow:
Potatoes - Incredibly easy to grow. Produces a ton of food. Can be grown in trash cans on otherwise unusable land. Very versatile and useful in so many cuisines. If I had to place my bets on one staple crop, it's potatoes.
Green beans (Blue Lake variety or similar) - Also very easy to grow. You trellis them and they don't take up a lot of ground space. Incredibly bountiful crop--you'll have trash bags full from 50 sq ft of beans. Puts nutrients back in the soil--very good crop to rotate.
Kale - Nutritious, versatile crop. Easy to grow.
Tomatoes - Nutritious and so easy to grow. Can be grown vertically in raised pots for more space efficiency.
Tomatillos - Tasty, good for sauces. These grow as voraciously as the green beans.
Pumpkins, squashes, etc. - These are wandering vines so you can plant them in good soil on the edge of unusable land and let them grow out over the areas that you couldn't plant in.
Various lettuces - Not easy to grow--they're susceptible to pests and they bolt as soon as the weather gets too warm--but they grow fast and if your family likes salad, you'll eat a lot of them.
The potatoes, on the other hand, he grows by the bucket in piles of hay thrown into old, bald tires. I suspect the damned things will grow in anything that's been near a nutrient.
Your children will see potatoes grow live, and you can eat them with them. Fun thing to do, very easy, and works so well.
For soil, just some normal soil you can dig out anywhere is enough, but you can also buy pre-fertilized soil if you wish (as said, the potatoes would even grow in garbage cans)
I lost my entire crop to the Colorado Potato Beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle in 2016.
Note: "However, many chemicals are often unsuccessful when used against this pest because of the beetle's ability to rapidly develop insecticide resistance."
If that was my staple crop, I'd be dead of starvation right about now.
Of course the idea is not to hate on potato as a crop but rather to stress the importance of genetic diversity in one's food supply.
I would add a bit of barley/oat but that's more work than the rest.
If you're after some flavour, I'd also add onions and celery, which I guess go in normal soil with the cabbage and potatoes, and also carrots, which will want sandy soil. There's a good reason these three veggies together form the basis of lots of French and Italian cooking.
People don't generally believe me when I say this, but I've made this point often: for self-sufficiency and/or small scale farming like the GP is proposing, you need a hectare (2 acres) to feed a family year-round. The reason people don't want to believe this is because it shows that it's impossible to do this sort of farming at scale, because there simply isn't enough land to feed everybody this way. So we need industrial scale farming today to produce the food people want in the quantities we need it.
I say this as someone with a 1 hectare experimental alternative agriculture plot; it's not that I don't want better, more sustainable agriculture systems. It's just that the 'solutions' being proposed are wildly insufficient, and I'm not talking double digit percentages, but orders of magnitude. How do we fix it - I don't know. But I do (by now) recognize snake oil and sophistry when I see it.