CityFarm, born out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is an Urban Farming project that is Soil-Free and uses Virtually No Water.
This system that may be economically feasible for cities — regardless of locale. The 60-square-foot farm grows lettuce, tomatoes and herbs in a windowless room inside MIT’s Media Lab, Fast Company reports.
“It’s essentially like a big, clear plastic box, about 7-feet wide by 30-feet long,” Caleb Harper, a research scientist leading the project, tells Fast Company. “Inside of that box, I have pre-made weather. I monitor everything,”
With no soil and the help of artificial light, the farm produces crops with as much as 90 percent less water than traditional methods.
The system uses both hydroponic (water) and aeroponic (air or mist environment) soil-free processes to grow and has produced crops three to four times more quickly than the normal growth process. Using a 30-day cycle, CityFarm has produced food for 300 people !
“No one has proven an economically viable model for these kind of plant environments,” says Harper. “What I’m trying to do is kind of be the Linux for these environments — the person that creates the common language for this new area of food production.”
Harper believes his methodology could eventually reduce agricultural consumption of water by 98 percent and eliminate the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, double nutrient densities and reduce energy use to grow crops.
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