Apr 23, 2020
In week three of Agritecture’s Digital Conference Series, we featured presentations from Nik Nikolayev of Rooted Leaf Agritech, Mel Bandler the Retail Sustainability Manager at Fair Trade USA, Carolyn Zezima the president of NYC Foodscape, Chris Rawley the CEO and Founder of Harvest Returns, and Gregory Lu the CoFounder of Natufia.
One of the main topics covered during this week’s webinars was around the innovative and creative ways to grow produce at home with both low tech and high tech installations. As a response to COVID-19, we have seen an increasing interest from consumers to become more self-sustaining by growing their own food at home.
Carolyn Zezima explained the different ways you can grow produce in your own home or garden space with very little to no technology at all. Growing your own produce at home is a very inexpensive way to obtain food, as well as promote a hyper-local food system. Zezima shares several ways you can build small scale gardening systems, such as her very own herb spiral. While you may only be using small spaces to grow at home, “You can still grow a lot of food, and especially supplement a budget as things may start to get a little bit harder.” Not everyone may have access to an outdoor garden space, alternatively, Zezima shares one type of indoor growing system, the smart garden, a small controlled environment urban farming device that uses little technology. These smart gardens are an eco-friendly approach and are easy for anyone to use at home, as they can be controlled by your smart device.
Check out Plus.Farm to build your own DIY System!
Agritecture also has designed a DIY indoor vertical farming system, Plus.Farm, where users can build their own system and grow indoors by following a simple grow manual created by Agritecture.
Another at-home grow system is Natufia’s indoor grow system. Natufia Labs is a research lab and a specialized manufacturer of high technology hydroponic equipment. Gregory Lu presents the Natufia Kitchen Garden, a product that helps you grow produce in your own home kitchen. Growers face several challenges that affect the quality of food that is produced and consumed. Lu explains these challenges range from the toxicity of food, food pollution, packaging, logistics, loss of nutrition and food waste. The vitamin and nutrient contents in our produce are often lost, “the point of Nufitia, is that in some food, especially greens, we lose the vitamins in a question of hours. So, with Nufitia, we are able to keep that. You grow it, you eat it and you have total freshness.” Nufutia Kitchen Garden creates a solution where consumer well being is a top priority. Their sophisticated system helps grow healthy, tasty produce while being easy for anyone to use.
We also learned about things consumers can do to protect our farmers' income and give back to the very people who supply us with food, something even more important during the pandemic.
Mel Bandler discusses why it is so important for consumers to purchase fair trade labeled goods. Fair trade aligns with sustainability guidelines and creates benefits for the growers of the produce. Consumers often forget the people behind the purchases we make and how we can make a positive impact on their lives by buying fair trade goods. Fair trade offers resiliency to growers by supplying them with health and safety, suitable wages and working conditions, recruiters and labor contractors, and housing. Bandler explains the real purchasing power lies within the consumer, “The consumer really has the power to vote with their dollar and to think about that by purchasing a fair trade good, they are sourcing responsibly and really investing in a model that strives for long term livelihood and impact.”
Farmers also face financial problems. In his presentation, Chris Rawley explains that these problems are a result of the drop in commodity prices and bankruptcy rising within the farming industry. Because of this, farmers are at risk of losing their family farm if they have to mortgage their land. Producers receive a very small percentage of the value chain by producing their food. Rawley explains, “For every dollar of food farmers sell, it's like two or three cents that actually goes to the farmer.”
This week we also received a crash course in botany! We learned more about the science behind plants and what we can do to help our plants and produce maintain their health and nutrition at home.
Nik Nikolayev discusses the importance of carbon within plants and how the addition of carbon can benefit your produce and plants in different ways. So, what happens when you add carbon to your plants? According to Nikolayev, adding more carbon leads to more photosynthesis, an increase in water uptake, faster growth, an increase in nutritional content, and an increase in the overall health of plants. All plant agriculture evolves around carbon and that carbon deficiency in plants is invisible to the naked eye. “Carbon makes up everything you can see, touch, feel and taste in a plant, you know the zest in a lemon peel, the starch in a potato, the color or the hue of a carrot.”
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