Harvest produce at the grocery store

Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming

By Alyssa Danigelis
Discovery News
Sept. 1, 2010

Excerpt:

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.

Read the complete article here.

Agropolis

AGROPOLIS is a concept for the next wave of hydroponic, aeroponic, aquaponic farming – growing vegetables without the use of soil. Initially, it will be a combined farm/restaurant/concept store, where people come to eat food they can see was grown on the premises. You walk into the store and on all the walls, and through the back wall into a room beyond, you see nothing but green – the vegetables sold in the store being grown on site.

Underneath your feet you will see tilapia swimming in the aquaponics fishtank, the nutrients they process going directly to feed the plants. The store is an ecosystem unto itself.

What we offer to consumers is a different experience with food. You will never have a tomato fresher than one you just saw being picked, or a lettuce more local than one where you stand next to the room in which it was grown. That is the value we offer.

Unlike other urban farm efforts, we are aware of and will integrate new and emerging technologies.

Our technological contributions are threefold:

(1) In collaboration with NASA, we will combine sensor and robotic innovations into the state of the art hydroponic systems.

(2) We will research genetically modified organisms made specifically for a controlled agricultural setting.

(3) We will integrate new advances in artificial lighting like LEDs into controlled agriculture.

Finally, our farm, unlike urban farms to date, will be a powerful consumer experience – aiming urban farming not simply at the environmentally conscious but also to those who simply enjoy fresh food.

See the AGROPOLIS website here.