grey hair and pimples

What is AutoMicroFarm?

AutoMicroFarm is like solar panels, but for your food.

What if you could grow 90% of the food essentials that your family needs—vegetables, fruits, fish, nuts, and beans—in an area the size of a two-car garage? What if that food kept you healthy and skinny? What if the time to maintain it took no more than going to the farmer’s market each week? What if the ongoing cost for this was 90% less than groceries cost you now? What if it paid for itself within two years? That is the project I am working on, called AutoMicroFarm.

Please see my other blog posts tagged AutoMicroFarm for more details.

TED talk on aquaponics

Wow… this guy presents a vision very closely aligned with what I had imagined. The other two resources that I had in mind are:

• Beekeeping: have an embedded wall unit that houses a beehive (think window AC), enabling them to fly both outside and inside the greenhouse to pollinate the plants, and provide honey.
• Freshwater clams/mollusks to further also filter the water and provide food very rich in vitamin B12.

Starting the AutoMicroFarm MVP

Thanks to my wife’s support, I’ve decided to start the AutoMicroFarm MVP in the late summer/early fall.

To do so, I’ll buy the  following for less than $500, hopefully:

• greenhouse on craigslist
• materials for an aquaponics setup
• garduino, arduarium

The biggest hurdle to making this work is the yield per square foot, in my opinion. If I can achieve at least 10 lbs yield per square foot annually, then a 400 ft^2 greenhouse could provide 90% of the food for a family of four (coincidentally, my family’s size).

I am thinking of doing a kickstarter fundraiser for this, but I don’t know if this is too early… perhaps for phase II, when the >10 lb/ft^2 annual yield is proven?

AutoMicroFarm Minimum Viable Product

I am thinking the MVP for the AutoMicroFarm would be between 4 and 24 square feet of growing space; this would require between 30 and 180 gallons for the fish tank.

I have two options in mind for the MVP:

1. Take it indoors; this adds light requirements [1]. In essence, it become an aquaponics kit such as this one, but with lights.
   1. Advantages: don’t need to worry about heating/cooling; becomes a showcase/conversation starter; can be situated very near or in the kitchen.
   2. Disadvantages: ideally want LED lights, which are at this point very expensive.
2. Set it up in a greenhouse.
   1. Advantages: don’t need to worry about lighting, so initial costs are appreciably lower.
   2. Disadvantages: need to heat in the winter, perhaps cool in the summer.

Right now, I am leaning towards the greenhouse, since it will involve a smaller up-front cost and LED grow lights will (or at least should, in theory) come down in price, hopefully soon. Please share any experience or advice you may have about this.

[1] Research on LED growing lights: if there is no additional light source, the energy required is 5.84 kWh/lb, assuming lights on 12 hours a day and 15 lb/ft^2 annual yield.

My Top Idea Refined: A Greenhouse in a (Half)-Shipping Container

I’ve been continuing to think about how to implement the automated microfarm idea I first blogged about here. What has spurred me to think this idea is feasible is the Eat to Live diet that I have been following for five weeks now (to great results, with more to report soon.) According to the diet, an adult optimally needs 2lbs of vegetables daily, 1 lb of fruit, 0.3  lbs beans/legumes, and 0.1-0.2 lbs of nuts for a total of about 3.5 lbs of plant-based food daily. (Twelve ounces of animal or dairy products are also allowed weekly, but not required as long as certain conditions are met.)

I recently came up with the idea to take a standard shipping container, slice it in half, and use the two halves as greenhouses:

Here are some features I had in mind:

• The open side of the container would be covered in several layers of plastic, and made to face south.
• The whole container would be insulated to PassivHous standards to minimize/eliminate heating during the colder months.
• Plant waste could be burned to provide additional CO2 to the growing plants, and heat to the greenhouse.
• The greenhouse would be an aquaponics system to provide both plant-based food and fish.

Since beans and nuts can be stored for relatively long periods of time in room temperature, those can be grown conventionally (not in the greenhouse). That leaves 3 lbs/person/day to be grown in the greenhouse to supply 100% of the fruit and vegetable requirements. With a 20ft shipping container, this requirement is met if the greenhouse can annually produce 7 lbs/square foot to feed one person, or 14lbs/square foot to feed a couple. A permaculture greenhouse has reported yields of 12-16 lbs/square foot annually.

There are somewhat similar ideas out there (1, 2, 3), but none of them aim to provide 100% of a person’s or family’s food.

Please post any thoughts or ideas that you may have in the comments below.

My Top Idea

Recently, Paul Graham wrote an essay exploring the concept of a Top Idea: 

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it.

This has prompted me to share my top idea with a few people. I had a hard time trying to explain it, so I want to get my thoughts in a blog post and refine them to coherency.

Basically, what I would like to do is to come up with a system that is capable of producing a large percentage of the food an average family needs (70-90% —> several tons) on a relatively small lot size. My inspiration was the Dervais family Urban Homestead, which produces ~6 tons of food per year on 0.1 acres. Unlike the Dervais family, however, I envision my system designed to be largely automated: not requiring more than 0.5 to 1 hour a day of work, on average. Now, I don’t envision a completely robotic system (yet), but I want it to be so that the biggest tasks humans need to do is think.

How will it work in principle? My idea is to use greywater and harvested rainwater, combined with aeroponics aquaponics to grow crops and fish. I’ve been following the progress of one company in particular that sells aeroponics systems: AeroFarms. However, I think that limiting yourself to artificial light does not make sense from the standpoint of the amount of energy needed.

This idea has been bothering for more almost two years now. I think that it’s a seriously great idea: it’s something that would genuinely change the world for the better, if it existed. Because of this reason, I really want to make it happen, but I’m not sure how to start, or what a prototype / minimum viable product would be. Or rather, I started by planting a square foot garden this year. It’s neat, it takes less than half an hour a day, but produces at most a handful of vegetables daily: not quite enough for even half of our family’s food consumption.

I was excited to read about a vertical farming center opening up in Chicago: The Plant Chicago. I really wish something like this existed in the triangle area, but as far as I know, it does not.

To conclude this rambling post: if you know of anyone working on something similar, preferably in the Triangle, NC; please refer me to them, or vice versa. Also, if you have any thoughts on the subject, feel free to let me know :~).