Urban and indoor farming will grow in importance as the population rises. Grove Labs is showing how engineers can tackle sustainable food and tech challenges.
As the population climbs toward 9 billion in 2050, the planet will need more food. As cities develop and arable land vanishes, we will have to take advantage of urban spaces. As the climate changes, we must find innovative ways to farm.
Mimicking nature with 21st century technology requires skilful engineering. Simply maintaining indoor farms is difficult -- not to mention the feat of replicating sunlight or the challenge of building sensors and software to gather and analyse information about the well-being of plants.
The traditional notion of a farmer throughout the past century for most people is probably an older man, clad in overalls, driving a beat-up Ford pickup truck around his land. But that is finally beginning to change -- and it has to.
"By introducing engineers and technologists, people that have worked at consumer design brands, and bringing that experience and worldview, we can make farming and food tech and ag tech sexy. Once [that] appears, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. [There will] be more engineers," said Gabe Blanchet, co-founder and CEO of Grove Labs, which has created a home aquaponics system the size of a bookshelf that has sensors and software to automatically update people of their crops' health and send the information to their smartphones.