If you google the words "micro farm" or "micro farming" or any derivative you will see an incredible variety of answers and websites to this seemingly simple search. Most searches show contemporary field farming but on a small or micro scale. There are very few systems that fit in the home environment but that is rapidly changing.
MICRO-FARMING GOES MAINSTREAM
While 2015 might have been the year that culinary 3-D printers go mainstream, it was also the year that hydroponics and aquaponics started capturing the same buzz as Makerbots.
"The kind of asks we get from clients tends to signal trends that are right around the corner," says Jason Severs, executive creative director at Frog Design. "And more than three independent companies asked us to design microfarming solutions for them in 2014 alone. That's an indicator that this is about to get big."
Mainstream adoption of indoor growing technologies to bring farming right to the consumer is now front and center. Microsoft uses several technologies to bring fresh food production into their cafeteria. In their corporate blog entry entitled "As local as it gets: why microsoft has farmers growing vegetables right in the office" you get to see growing tech that is being used today to bring added nutrition to the company workers.
Jessica Schilke, an urban farming specialist at Microsoft, helps manage an experiment that might just revolutionize what it means to “eat local” at the office. She and her team grow trays of microgreens in brightly lit cultivation machines that look like glass fridges and a variety of lettuces in hydroponic towers. These veggies aren’t hidden away, either. According to Schilke, “Our guests get to watch the microgreens and salad greens grow right in the cafés.”
It didn’t take much to convince Microsoft employees that these greens are enviable. As Schilke notes, “I love to do side-by-side comparisons of the ones we were buying before and the ones we are growing now; the microgreens we grow are full of flavor—some earthy, others very spicy—whereas the ones we were buying were described to me as just tasting ‘green.’”
MicrogreenFarm is dedicated to bring you the same abilities from our individual MicroFarm Kits to our complete farm units including LED lighting for 12 month food production right in your home or office regardless of what is happening outside your window.
This is just the beginning ...