Your Own Indoor, Hydroponic Grove
fastcolabs.com
fastcolabs.com
Then there's actually a ton of labor that goes into growing, picking and correcting the plants. Just ask someone who has worked in a garden, tried aquaponics or grown something hydroponically (weed or otherwise). Automation can still only do so much, especially when it isn't at scale.
This relegates their grove to growing single types of plants very well. Growing fruits requires more light than vegetables, but either way you're looking at at least 40 watts per sq ft of space, usually much more (especially since the light needs to penetrate down through the leaves). For even a small setup of 8 sq ft you're looking at something that pulls 4 kwh of electricity a day at minimum (around a half a dollar). Taking between 3 and 6 months to grow some fruits you're look at a minimum of $75 a yield but probably closer to $400-$500 or even more after you calculate the costs of HVAC (big), water pumping and heating/cooling costs and chemicals (which are on the order of a dollar-per-day expensive). And then a lot of the equipment needs to be replaced and is very expensive, especially if you are running lights. Most of those have a shelf life of around a half year, unless you do LEDs which are extremely expensive investments. Of course this needs to be compared to the yield but generally economies of scale, even organic ones, can produce goods much cheaper. And hydro isn't organic...
The reason hydroponics is associated with weed is because you need to grow something that costs more than your inputs.
I don't care about organic. I'd be happy to see contained growing that means I'm not losing large amounts of my plants to slugs/snails and caterpillars as I am now. Also the extreme heat in Australian summers troubles my garden too.
Google "blue light in greenhouses" for research in that area; an image search gives several examples. And yes, they do look weird, for example the alien world on page 3 in http://www.lemnislighting.com/pdf/65259%20Lemnis%20Folder%20...
The amount of light energy required to grow plants properly is very large and hard to supply with artificial light sources. Fruiting plants, like tomatoes, have much higher requirements than leafy crops, like lettuce. Lamps are rather inefficient converting electricity into light.
A 1000 Watt metal halide or high-pressure Na lamp is barely adequate to cover a square meter (if the only light source). Calculate the energy cost of running it 16hr/day for a month and it gives new respect for Mother Nature.
Another headache is plant nutrition. Vegetables grow fast and suck nutrients out of their environment at an alarming rate. There are many systems but the short version is reusing nutrient fluids requires constant chemical monitoring to assure proper pH, mineral content. Automated equipment is out of the question, and a home farmer very likely won't have the knowledge and lab equipment to do it optimally by hand.
There are a whole bunch of other constraints, but the above is enough said. Doing experiments is fun, but apartment-scale production of edibles is definitely no more than a pipe dream.
1000 Watts of metal halide or HPNa? Per square meter? That's huge! You don't need anywhere near that kind of figures for growing salad in your kitchen. If you're working in a commercial gardening operation, then it's a different deal. But then you're either growing weed and/or have a huge area so the W/m^2 figure goes down.
A single fluorescent tube in addition to natural light and your usual kitchen lighting goes a long way.
Most plants are not very sensitive to pH figures nor do they suck up nutrients like crazy. Automated pH and EC measurement would be nice, though. Even better if this garden could automatically add in nutrients and acid if necessary.
Lessons from growing weed are not necessarily valid for food production.
It's not viable for growing fruit or vegetables, though. That just doesn't make any sense economically.
We have a very similar hydroponic garden at our office and it's not a lot of work to maintain it. Basically adding a few buckets of water every week is enough. Every few months it needs an hour of maintenance, though (planting new seedlings or cuttings).
There are also organic hydroponic nutrients available. A dollar per day for nutrients is way too much if you're growing salad. Your basic plant food from the supermarket is a few bucks and lasts for months. You can spend as much money on expensive weed nutrients but that isn't necessary.
Hydroponics are used a lot outside of growing weed. Commercial production of herbs, salads and other greens is almost exclusively done with hydroponics, at least here in northern Europe, where light and heat are at a premium half of the year. Maintaining a greenhouse is expensive so maximizing the production per area per time is required for a viable commercial operation.
Perhaps what one needs to do is use the hydroponics to grow an environment for insects to live in and feed off the insects instead?
Not sure it's that expensive. DIY solutions are very affordable and I believe LEDs are getting cheaper and cheaper. They don't consume much energy and you can select their frequencies to approach an optimal spectrum for your plants.
But with hydroponic + vertical farming you could need a lot less (±1meter square).
You can with today technology have a production (versus traditional farming) gain of : - 2x improvement by controlling light cycle to trick plant into growing faster - 4x improvement by controlling season (in temperate climate you can just growth 6 months a year) - 5x for hydroponic vs. soil growing. - 15x production by stacking cultivation box in top of one other.
Using this technique you should be able to attain 600x production over traditional farming for the same surface.
Some are already doing it for cabbage in Japan (see Mirai : http://www.fieldrobotics.org/~ssingh/VF/Challenges_in_Vertic..., who sell itself to GE and who produce 5000kg of cabbage / day in a 1200m2 farm).
What make this technology viable now is the availability of cheap and energy efficient LEDs.
I grow food in two ways.
I use "earth boxes" (very water efficient) to grow veggies on our deck - where the wild pigs and other wild animals can't eat the plants.
I have about a 25x30 square foot area in a community garden. In return for doing a lot of volunteer work keeping a 1 mile irrigation ditch free and running (that supplies water to both the garden and a park) I get free water and use of the land, for non-commercial use. In other words, I can just grow food for my family and friends. Really hard physical work, but fun!
Also, I don't think these people would be expanding their operations if growing under artificial lights was uneconomic. - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140717-japan...
There's quite an active group over on reddit who discuss hydro issues /r/hydro.
You can actually build a pretty decent home brew set up with minimal cost with some careful planning.
With short days or chronically overcast skies, daylight still gives adequate blue light such that supplementary high-pressure Na (reddish spectrum) lighting can provide good enough conditions at low-moderate cost.
It wouldn't duplicate the lovely garden you describe, but might be better than nothing at all.
I live 60 degrees northern latitude (still 1000 km to arctic circle). It is not possible to grow vegetables in gardens like this (indoors, in warm, with artificial light next to a floor to ceiling window wall). It is barely possible to grow herbs and greens, as long as they have been germinated earlier in the fall. Trying to start a seedling or a cloned cutting no longer works when the length of day goes around six hours or so.
Of course, you can put in a huge amount of grow lights but that's no longer practical to do in your kitchen.
You are right though, even a large south-facing window doesn't provide as much illumination as a proper greenhouse, sharply limiting what can be grown.
BTW if you get 6 hours of daylight at 60 deg latitude, that's impressive. My location is ~46 deg, but because of surrounding hills, and frequent thick cloud cover, we effectively get barely 6 hours of daylight at the start of winter, maybe less.
In the off season, we're relegated to getting what produce we can from the grocery store, taste-free as it may be...
6 hours was a guesstimate figure for when plants stop growing. That's for the actual lit period, not sunrise-sunset times.
At the darkest period of the year, the sunrise is after 9am and sunset is somewhere around 3 pm. Looking at the exact figures, it's 5 hours 49 minutes on the shortest day of the year. If you work a regular day job, you'll never see the sun for several months.
But effectively, that's pretty much perpetual darkness. During the midday, there's a brief period of "daylight", but most of the time is just twilight because the sun doesn't rise very high. The weather tends to be cloudy for the whole period, last year there was 20 minutes of unoccluded sunlight in December and one or two clear nights.
You learn to manage with the darkness in the winter and the light in the summer but coping with the rapid change in spring/fall is the worst. Humans are photosensitive animals, it really fucks up your mind.
Near my office, I've measured daytime illumination. At the least obstructed spot, midday it was 40K lux in the sunny summer, but late fall 9K was as good as it got when moderately cloudy.
In late fall it's identifiably daylight (if barely) at 9:00 and getting dark by 15:00 even though sunrise/sunset times promise 8.75 daytime hours in early December.
A couple of notable consequences are a high rate of seasonal depression, and widespread vitamin D insufficiency. Light is a cue for circadian rhythm, and people sensitive to fall/winter darkness often benefit with phototherapy. I'd make sure to take vitamin D supplements too, usually 2K IU is a standard recommendation.
Similar indoor garden products are very popular here in northern Europe because the price of salad and veggies is outrageous during the winter months. And also it's a nice aesthetic element when there's very little light or green in the winter.
This garden looks nice but it's way too big and probably too expensive. It will never be able to pay back its price in the food it produces.
So if the guys of this startup are listening, you should go smaller, at least initially.
Apart from that, this kind of gardens are very nice and low maintenance. But it's just a nice supplement, not something that feeds your family.
lets solve some real problems?
Currently this is being marketed at people with money, but research into indoor / vertical farming is definitely attacking a real problem.
Do you think there might be funding available?
This is a decent example of this, although the style that it's being implemented is more for bourgeous effect than helping everyday families.