Architects, commercial growers, entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers, designers and sustainability managers will be working together to consider a viable ‘agritecture’ concept for London at a special interdisciplinary workshop on 24th & 25th June, co-hosted by Agritecture.com, the Association of Vertical Farming (AVF), Southbank Consulting, Blue Planet Consulting and venue hosts, CASS School of Architecture, London. The two day workshop, titled ‘Integrating agriculture into urban neighbourhoods’ will be led by mentors from AVF and Blue Planet Consulting who first started running the workshop in New York in December 2014. Since then they have since taken it to other states including California in February…
Author: Jim Pantaleo
When I first met Chris Lukenbill in March of 2015 at Indoor Ag Con in Las Vegas, he was the founder of Fresh with Edge a Rochester, Minnesota indoor farm start-up utilizing Bright Agrotech’s well-known ZipGrow Towers™. As he handed me his business card I was a little freaked out by its texture. Upon closer view, it was one of those cards imbedded with small seeds so when soaked in water and then planted in soil, it grew wild flowers. Brilliant! Fast forward to June 2016, where I found Chris occupying the role of Director of Software for Bright Agrotech’s…
One need not look far to understand that in the nascent industry of indoor vertical farming reside both appearance and reality. Between the two often lie hard lessons learned. Such is the case with the new Bay Area start-up, Farm Ecology (www.farmecology.farm). Born from one of the region’s first indoor commercial operations, Ecopia Farms, the team at Farm Ecology consists of Ecopia founders Phil Fok and Ken Stutzman along with lighting pro Steve Oster and advisor, UC Davis’ plant physiology expert, Dr. David King. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with CEO Fok and CTO Oster for a…
The 2016 Urban Food Systems Symposium will be held June 22-25 at the Kansas State University Olathe campus in the metropolitan region of Kansas City. Our goal is to bring together a national and international audience of academic and research-oriented professionals to share and gain knowledge on urban food systems and the role they play in global food security. This symposium includes knowledge on: urban agricultural production, local food systems distribution, urban farmer education, urban ag policy, planning and development, food access and justice, and food sovereignty. The 2016 Symposium is a partnership between the Kansas State University Global Food…
It did not take long to realize the founder of Auroras (www.auroras.eu), Paolo Marenghi, was a kindred spirit. He may also be a distant cousin although, admittedly, my roots are distinctly and fiercely southern Italian. Auroras, a four-person start-up established in 2014, provides environmental monitoring systems to agriculture, among other industries, and is headquartered in the small northern Italian city of Codogno (population 15,462) where farming is ubiquitous. The fertile plain surrounding Codogno, known as the Basso Lodigiano or the Lodi Basin (think Central Valley of California) sits roughly 25 miles from Italy’s fashion and industrial hub – Milan. When…
I recently had the pleasure of virtually meeting the founder of Indoor Organic Gardens of Poughkeepsie, Brud Hodgkins. First, who doesn’t love his name? It’s phonetically pronounced like brother (versus brooder). Brud is no fly-by- night operator either, as he’s logged a respected 40-year career in the financial services industry and has been enticed into his new role by the hard data and much needed agricultural sustainability aspects that indoor vertical farming exposes. An engineer by education, he’s now putting his money where his mouth is…and putting clean and nutrient-dense micro greens into the mouths of others; namely local school…
In August of 2014 I was burned out. The previous twenty years of my life were marked by a career as a software-licensing business development manager; half of this time spent with tech behemoth Hewlett Packard. My ‘field’ positions consisted of all-things corporate; like long days and nights on the road far from home and family with far too many mind-numbing meetings and (far too many) incompetent and adversarial managers. I needed change desperately. More than anything, I wanted the second half of my work life to be focused not on my tax bracket but rather on doing some good…