students tended have around: eggs, cookie dough, cheese, jam, pesto, flour. Perhaps his most interesting observation: “Cream cheese is something students like to work with a lot.”
Lipson and his students have developed 3D food printers, and are well on their way to creation of specialized 3D printed food products. The applications are infinite. Gauging input of calories, of sugars, or responding to medical or health needs by printing meals or snacks or match body chemistry.
Another approach to feeding a more populous planet is in creating ways to grow more food as efficiently as possible. Using digital strategy plus historical methodology, technologists have begun companies taking the initiative to feed the planet in abundance.
Freight Farms, a company in Boston with its roots in Clark University in nearby Worcester, is doing what’s been called Agronomy for a New Age. It’s based on Hydroponics.
Hydroponics goes back to a book by Francis Bacon published in 1627. It rose to cult status in use as a secret indoor marijuana growing method in the 1960s and early 70s. Other uses of hydroponics included indoor gardening in apartments and other closed areas.
What Freight Farms came up with, quite successfully, is new hydroponics farming, commercially known as the Leafy Green Machine. The concept is sustainability as bottom line, not a temporary solution. Freight Farms repurposes 40-foot shipping containers into Leafy Green Machines (“LGM”). The containers are retrofit to grow herbs and vegetables, no matter what the climate. They can be used 12 months a year. This removes the shipping and timing issues of fresh greens. To make a Freight Farm LGM work, seeds are planted in peat moss “grow plugs” in the machine. When they bud they get transplanted into a recycled plastic mesh. Next, the mesh is inserted into growing towers that are hung from hooks. Inside is a system continually recirculating nutrient-rich water. High-efficiency blue and red LED lighting system mimics sunlight.
Freight Farms adds even more digital strategy to the system. Environmental sensors balance temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels. With connectivity the container’s owners can monitor their operation anywhere in the world via computer. An iOS app enables remote adjustments to all the farm’s environmental components.
A Freight Farm trailer, aka a Leafy Green Machine, can grow as many as 7,500 plants in the 320 square feet of space it occupies. The company says a Leafy Green Machine will produce the equivalent yield of an acre of farmland while using 90 percent less water and no pesticides.
These containers are sold to clients worldwide. Google has one at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA, to produce greens for its employees’ meals. Restaurant groups and grocery suppliers have bought Leafy Green Machines. Similarly, Square Roots in Brooklyn a company started by entrepreneurs Tobias Peggs and Kimbal Musk (yes, Elon Musk’s brother) is gaining a great deal of attention. It’s Freight Farms’ largest customer, boasting a full parking lot full of LGMs. It has a mighty vision. The Square Roots parking lot full of LGM units is populated by resident local growers and entrepreneurs, enrolled in the Square Roots Urban Farming curriculum. A 13 month program, the Resident Entrepreneurs, as it says on the website, “take part in a curriculum of skill-based training, professional development plans, and experiential learning in the four pillars of Farming, Business, Community, and Leadership. The coursework spans classes, workshops, coaching and training sessions, and practical experiences empowering each Resident Entrepreneur to run their farming businesses and get connected with the real food community.”
The LGMs are self-contained, and thus they can program the simulated daytime hours inside the farms to run at night when energy costs are lower. This is efficient, ecologically sound, and it's a sustainable system that has legs. Musk’s vision for Square Roots is to expand the containers beyond Brooklyn and into cities across the country, far and wide. In an interview with Popular Mechanics, Musk was quoted as saying, "My hope is that we are in every metro area in America as fast as we can get there."
Be it metro areas in the US or North America, or water-challenged areas in Africa, hydroponic agronomy for the New Age or 3D Printing of edibles both represent ways of dealing with feeding an ever-growing population. Digital strategy and technology plus creative innovation and science all coalesce to address sustainability, and to prevent or cure famine. These are positive leaps forward for the benefit of mankind.
Dean Landsman is a NYC-based Digital Strategist who writes a monthly column for PR for People “The Connector.”