Category — Hydroponics

‘iQ by Intel’ is brought to you by the employees of Intel

By Luke Kintigh,
iQ Managing Edito
Aug 16, 2012

Excerpt:

Referring to BrightFarms hydroponic greenhouses.

Sensors throughout the greenhouse will feed information back to a central computer system, which is programmed to make intelligent decisions about growing factors such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed. If the greenhouse becomes too hot, roof vents will automatically open. If it remains overheated, fans switch on; and if that’s still not enough, a shade will draw down. The computer even knows what conditions are like outside, so it won’t open the roof if it’s raining.

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Green City Growers Cooperative

5800 Diamond Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44104
216.268.0200

Green City Growers Cooperative, Inc. is a 3.25-acre leafy greens, hydroponic greenhouse in the Central neighborhood of Cleveland, OH. The greenhouse, which officially opened on February 25th, 2013, has 15,000 square feet of packinghouse and office space, and is currently producing Bibb lettuce, green leaf lettuce, gourmet lettuces and basil.

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O’Hare’s Urban Garden. Photo by reallowvibe.

The airport has also been home to a handful of honeybees being tended to by urban beekeepers

By Rick Paulas
KCET
March 21, 2013

Excerpt:

The 928-square-foot garden, first opened last September, consists of 26 aeroponic towers that grow a variety of herbs and vegetables. The list of produce growing in the towers includes, but is not limited to, chard, basil, lettuce, edible flowers, bell peppers, and tomatoes. And just who is using these vegetables? Currently, three restaurants in the airport proper make regular treks to the garden to harvest produce for their dishes: Wolfgang Puck, Rick Bayless’s Tortas Fontera Grill, and the highly-acclaimed Wicker Park Sushi Bar.

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Photo by Bob Benenson.

90,000-square foot facility in the industrial Chicago southwest suburb of Bedford Park

By Bob Benenson
Good Food Festivals
Feb 28, 2013

Excerpt:

When FarmedHere was founded, its indoor vertical produce farm was located in a tiny 4,000-square foot building in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Co-Founders Jolanta Hardej, Steve Denenberg and Paul Suder, and vice president of development, Paul Hardej, delivered their basil and arugula to retail merchants in Ziploc bags.

Now, just about three years later — enhanced in part by strategic support from FamilyFarmed.org and the Good Food Financing Conference — FarmedHere is set for the grand opening of a 90,000-square foot facility in the industrial Chicago southwest suburb of Bedford Park. It will be the largest vertical farm in America.

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Jolanta Hardej, co-owner and CEO of FarmedHere LLC. Photo by Erik Unger.

A desire for local food that leaves a small carbon footprint has fed interest in indoor farming.

By Lorene Yue
Crain Chicago Business
March 04, 2013

Improved techniques for cultivating marijuana and a growing desire for local produce are the unlikely combination bringing commercial farming back to Cook County.

Urban agriculture has existed for years in the form of community gardens. But now three small ventures are looking to profit from growing produce year-round in warehouses.

FarmedHere LLC in Bedford Park, which started in 2009, is the largest operation, with 25 retail clients selling its herbs and lettuce.

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Hydroponic vegetable farm in an unused utility room on the roof of a downtown Nashville condo.

From Kickstarter:

Urban Hydro Project is an urban hydroponic farm that provides fresh, local food YEAR ROUND to people in the Nashville community. We grow lettuces, tomatoes, herbs, and other leafy greens. Here’s the catch…we’re currently only using a quarter of our grow room.

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Aquaponics and algae farms will help change Australia’s food industry

By Geoff Wilson
Aquaponic Network Australia
Vol 2, No 1, Jan 15. 2013

Excerpt:

Early signs of massive changes in the $100 billion a year (retail value) Australian food industry include:

Considerable new Australian investment into large-scale and home-scale urban and peri-urban aquaponics for production of more valuable, organic, fresh healthy foods such as fish, crustaceans, molluscs, many vegetables, most herbs, plus some fruits.

Pioneering new investment into urban and peri-urban algae-growing industry – to provide important food additives such as essential oils and high quality food proteins, feed proteins plus petroleum-competitive local transport fuels.

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A hydroponic vertical growing system that will maximize growing area, save energy and fill a vital community need.

By Nona Yehia + Penny McBride
From Kickstarter
Launched Dec 3, 2012

Excerpt:

Vertical Harvest will be the first of its kind: A three story vertical farm built on an infill piece of land that will grow fresh, local produce in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, extending its four month growing season to all year round. What makes this project truly unique is that we will develop an innovative hydroponic growing system that can be used in vertical greenhouses of all configurations.

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Over 100 aluminum A-frames, some as tall as nine-meters, are used to grow vegetables at the farm. Building is on-going and there are plans to add up to 2,000 in the next few years.

Urban farming looking up in Singapore

By Liz Neisloss
CNN
Dec 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Less than 20 miles from Singapore’s skyscrapers is a completely different set of high-rise towers.

Much smaller in scale but with a big ambition, over 100 nine-meter tall towers at Sky Greens vertical farm offer a new vision of urban sustainability.

Green vegetables like bak choi and Chinese cabbage are grown, stacked in greenhouses, and sold at local supermarkets.

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The LED mini garden system

Excerpt from the Operations Manual:

LED Growlight
LED growlight is an artificial light which is able to replace the sun light. It is composed with the most efficient wavelengths. Moreover, the luminosity and the wavelengths are adjustable simply with using switch on the both upper and lower shelf.

Aeroponic Growing tray
This device holds the plants to grow properly and also supplies nutrient solution to the plant roots. Aeroponic system optimizes the growing condition to increase the growing efficiency.

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Sherrye Coggiola is the first female president of the Asheville Independent Restaurants. She and her husband, Anthony, are also starting Asheville Urban Farms which uses hydroponics to grow food. Photo by Erin Brethauer.

Air’s New President Has Big Plans For Indoor Hydroponic Farms

By Mackensy Lunsford
Citizen-Times
Nov 9, 2012  

Excerpt: 

“We play Native American music for our plants all day,” said Anthony Coggiola, stepping into his humid hydroponic West Asheville grow room.

If “grow room” conjures up images of a nefarious nature, you’re not alone. But Asheville Urban Farms’ chief goals are ending food insecurity and supplying food for restaurants in Western North Carolina and beyond.

And the only things sprouting under Coggiola’s grow lights are edibles.

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Manhattan School for Children

James and Myasia are 7th grade students (going into 8th in September 2012) at the Manhattan School for Children (PS 333). Wesley is an 8th grade student going into high school in fall 2012. They all took the module “Farmers on the Roof” that focuses on Hydroponic Urban Farming as a solution to the world’s growing population.

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ELIOOO is an instruction book about how to build a hydroponic system to grow plants, herbs, or vegetables in your apartment, using IKEA components.

VISION: The ultimate object of design is information. As a designer I display quantities and dimensions; I organize briefs, I explain procedures. Sometimes this has more to do with storytelling than with technical drawings. These stories and their illustrations are traditionally given to artisans who, in their workshops, mills, or labs, actually turn them into concrete things: objects.

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Agri-cube is available in two designs, priced at 5,500,000 yen (~US$70,000) and 8,500,000 yen (~US$108,000)

By Don Kennedy and R.Osuga
Digi-Info TV
Aug 1, 2012

Excerpt:

Agri-cube is a hydroponic unit developed by Daiwa House Industry.

Agri-cube utilizes unique technologies, including the Variable Height Illumination System, which can provide a specific amount of light for cultivation, and the Fertilizer Circulation and Drainage System, which makes cleaning cultivation racks easy. Air-conditioning and other equipment is also provided as a package. So, even people with limited experience in vegetable cultivation can use the agri-cube easily.

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System Uses sensors (to detect water level, pH and temperature), microprocessors (mostly the open-source Arduino microcontroller), relay cards, clouds and social media networks (Twitter and Facebook)

By Kirsten Dirksen
Faircompanies
June 25, 2012

Excerpts:

The land in West Oakland where Eric Maundu is trying to farm is covered with freeways, roads, light rail and parking lots so there’s not much arable land and the soil is contaminated. So Maundu doesn’t use soil. Instead he’s growing plants using fish and circulating water.

Aquaponics has become popular in recent years among urban gardeners and DIY tinkerers, but Maundu- who is trained in industrial robotics- has taken the agricultural craft one step further and made his gardens smart.

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A birds-eye-view rendering of the new 38,000 square foot greenhouse being built by BrightFarms, which broke ground on June 4, 2012. A BrightFarms representative said their greenhouses can cost up to $2M to build. Photo by Frederick Melo.

The 0.87-acre greenhouse will grow more than 350,000 pounds of lettuce, tomatoes and herbs per year

By Frederick Melo
pioneerpress.com
06/05/2012

Excerpt:

At the groundbreaking for a new BrightFarms greenhouse, an aerial rendering of what the finished 38,000 square foot greenhouse will look like. (Pioneer Press: Frederick Melo)
Coming soon to a Cub Foods near you: fresh local produce, grown in St. Paul in February.

The Stillwater-based warehouse grocery giant has teamed with a number of outstate Minnesota growers to sell everything from cucumbers to sweet corn in season, but its latest partnership will be more local and less seasonal.

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One hour Webinar about an aeroponic vertical growing system

Webinar hosted by Dr. Mitra Ray
May 9th, 2012

The Tower Garden is a proprietary aeroponic vertical growing system that allows any-and-everyone to garden easily and efficiently. The whole family can get involved in growing your own nutrient-rich produce safely and sustainably. Listen to Tim discuss how he came to develop the Tower Garden, and to hear about his dream of making vertical farming a reality for people all over the world.

Link here.

Recent R&D shows we exceeded our yields! Over 100 lbs of heirloom tomatoes per 2 square feet per year.

“There is large potential for producing food using GLTs stainless steel panel system”

Green Living Technologies International
7 Mar, 2012

ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 7, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Green Living Technologies International (GLTi) announces establishing two pilot indoor urban farms, one at FoodLink, a regional food bank in Rochester, NY, and a second at Cornell University’s New York State Agricultural Experimental Station in Geneva, NY. These indoor farms are using GLTi’s patented vertical design layouts patented and organic food producing process for growing food indoors.

GLTi’s vertical growing technology is capable of producing over 2000 pounds of tomatoes in a year with a foot print of 16 sq ft and 48 sq ft of growing space using an A-Frame System with patented food grade stainless panels. These pilot systems will give GLTi the documentation for food production capabilities and also demonstrate the economic viability of these indoor food factories.

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