Harvest Produce at the Grocery Store
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There's a big push lately for eating local. Restaurants like to promote menus with ingredients harvested locally and grocery stores advertise produce grown on nearby farms.
A concept for a grocery store that actually grows its own fruits and vegetables on site is taking the "local" adage to an entirely new level.
The do-it-yourself grocery store concept called Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming to grow vegetables without soil in an urban environment. Shoppers will come in and see all the produce growing on-site and point to what they want. Nutrients from fish in aquaculture tanks goes to feed the plants, and the whole place becomes an ecosystem. A restaurant there will also serve produce from the urban farm.
Agropolis was just presented this week at the Nordic Exceptional Trendshop 2010 conference an annual event that showcases technology taking place through September 3 in Arhus, Denmark. As conference attendee Augustus Schraven writes in Tech the Future, the concept came about as a solution to a challenge laid down by Rob Nail, a VP of corporate development at the interdisciplinary Singularity University on the NASA Ames campus.
Nail asked a team of business professionals to figure out a way to produce food locally without arable land. The diverse team consists of MBA student Robert Denning, bioinformaticist Rand Hindi, entrepreneur Anders Hvid, tech and public health expert Maggie Jack, comp-sci masters student Derek Jacoby and biotechnologist business strategist Sam Thorp. According to their site, the team would like to collaborate with NASA to put "sensor and robotic innovations" in hydroponic systems, research genetically modified organisms that could work best in the controlled growing environment and integrate advanced lighting such as LEDs into the design.
In the past, I wrote about retrofitting shipping containers to grow produce at mind-boggling rates without sunlight, dirt or pesticides, and using minimal water and nutrients. The downside to that is, now that I think about it, the harvesting still remains hidden from view. As a farmers' market fan whose heart also does a little dance inside nice grocery stores, I love the idea of incorporating controlled growing technology into an urban grocery store. It's the next best thing to picking tomatoes off vines in the backyard.
One of the challenges to urban farming is getting the volume and variety of produce to feed a sizable, picky population. A store like Agropolis could be the perfect proof of concept -- not just for scaling up urban farming, but also for making efficient soil-free tech work in concert with a sustainable aquaculture ecosystem. Add a cheese-making operation and I'm there.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/harve...mkcpgn=rssnws1
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