Pretty light on details, even the website of this company itself. The claim of being able to feed 150 people off 2 acres (about 1 hectare, for those of us who like to think in units that make sense) is a pretty wild one. Maybe you could grow potatoes with [150 x 1700 x 365] calories in them in a climate where you can grow year round, but that's surely not what they're insinuating in their marketing pictures.
I have troubles in computing the BOM (Bill Of Materials) of such a thing.
1) a container
2) a tin shed leaning on it on one side
3) a small plastic? nursery/seeding house on the other side
4) a 3 Kwh solar plant (including batteries, etc.)
5) a bunch of pumps (and I presume pipes) for drip irrigation
6) web connectivity
7) possibly a bunch of hand farming tools
do not sum up to costs that justify the US$ 50,000/60,000 sell price, maybe I am missing something very relevant?
And - though admittedly I am not an agriculture expert - the 150 people feeding out of 1 hectare sounds like an extremely tall story to me, I would think more at around 10/15 people per acre (in a proper, fertile piece of land with good climate).
I was trying to do the math here too. Here's what I came up with.
1) Shipping Container - ~$2,000
2) Tin Shed - Maybe another ~$1,000
3) Hoop Greenhouse - ~$400 [1]
4) 3Kwh Solar Plant with Batteries - ~$8,500 [2]
5) 2 Acre Drip Irrigation System - ~$3,000 [3]
6) WiFi Access - $1,000 (I have no idea what hardware/capabilities they're delivering here, but it seems like that's a safe number)
7) A Bunch of Hand Farming Tools - $1,000 (Another guesstimate)
8) A 1,000 gallon water storage tank - ~$700 [4]
So that takes us to about $17,600. Let's add another $5,000 for preparation, packaging, research and educational materials. Let's add another $5,000 for stuff that's more expensive than my guesstimates, and remove nothing for the article's claimed efficiencies that makes this so much more cost-effective than buying a la carte.
That still only puts us at $28,000, so either there's something I'm totally missing here, or this is total BS.
3) is underestimated. A typical shipping container is 40 feet long, so I think they ship a 32' not a 24' one. Also, 4' centers are necessary in most parts of the world: 6' will collapse under snow load in half the US. That's $600, not $400. The benches shown are at least another $400. Finally, the most expensive part of a greenhouse is the endwall and the plastic; probably +$500, making it $1500.
>That still only puts us at $28,000, so either there's something I'm totally missing here, or this is total BS.
Excellent, I roughly computed 26,000 US$ (actually 25,000 Euros), I was lower on the connectivity and on the solar plant and missed the water tank, but I will gladly accept a 10% increase, let's call it rounding.
Still we are around 100% margin, which should mean that the "manual" and "lessons" must be overpriced.
where are you getting WWT containers for $2k? Last one I was involved in was about $8k for WWT + shipping and picking, which was about another $2k with some minimal site prep (pea gravel and railroad ties). Prices were slightly lower to buy them in Seattle instead of the closest port, but the lower purchase price was offset by the much larger shipping costs
Interesting. An 8x45 WWT is indeed ~$2k on that site, and CWO is only marginally more. Thanks. Guess I should have looked for prices in SLC - $6k would pay for a lot of shipping
Don't forget the refrigeration system, which can easily cost $10-20k if they are getting a walk in one like the ones used by restaurants.
And they are doing this in San Francisco, which would greatly up the costs of everything vs doing it pretty much anywhere else. If they aren't careful with shipping everything to them that can easily eat $5k or more (a shipping container can cost more to move than the cost of the container itself).
I cannot find any mention of it:
"Every unit comes equipped with a renewable power system, internet connectivity, basic farm tools, micro-drip irrigation system and water pump that can be adapted to fit either a groundwell or municipal water supply.
Every Farm from a Box unit can be customized with optional components including sensors, water purification units, and even remote monitioring technology."
And it would IMHO have merited an icon in the picture here:
"A new thing that we’re deploying now is an internal cold storage system to make sure that we’re able to keep the crops fresher, longer, post harvest, before the crops actually get to market."
I have 4 acres. The last thing I need to grow vegetables is a weather station, wifi and a storage container. For $50K I'd want a backhoe/tractor - that would allow me to do some real work.
Also, where'd would I get the water for that water tank?
I think there is a thread above this one that nails the discrepancy: the target market here isn't poor Ethiopian villages. Rather, the target market is NGOs and governments who have funding to buy overpriced but cool stuff that looks like it will Make A Difference.
So you make something that's ostensibly targeted at poor rural villagers, and sell it to some deep-pocketed do-gooder entity at a huge markup.
I would say corn, then potato. But you're right, the startup isn't being all that forthcoming with details and it's likely their claims are (greatly) exaggerated, or perhaps, from a purely "well, technically..." point-of-view.
In the calorie department, corn is king [..] corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre [..] wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million. Rice is also very high-yielding, at 11 million, and potatoes are one of the few crops that can rival corn: They also yield about 15 million [..] Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million
If I was designing a two-acre farm to feed my family, I wouldn't devote much space to corn. Corn is a very useful crop but mostly once it's processed and you need a lot of it.
Here's what I think I'd grow:
Potatoes - Incredibly easy to grow. Produces a ton of food. Can be grown in trash cans on otherwise unusable land. Very versatile and useful in so many cuisines. If I had to place my bets on one staple crop, it's potatoes.
Green beans (Blue Lake variety or similar) - Also very easy to grow. You trellis them and they don't take up a lot of ground space. Incredibly bountiful crop--you'll have trash bags full from 50 sq ft of beans. Puts nutrients back in the soil--very good crop to rotate.
Kale - Nutritious, versatile crop. Easy to grow.
Tomatoes - Nutritious and so easy to grow. Can be grown vertically in raised pots for more space efficiency.
Tomatillos - Tasty, good for sauces. These grow as voraciously as the green beans.
Pumpkins, squashes, etc. - These are wandering vines so you can plant them in good soil on the edge of unusable land and let them grow out over the areas that you couldn't plant in.
Various lettuces - Not easy to grow--they're susceptible to pests and they bolt as soon as the weather gets too warm--but they grow fast and if your family likes salad, you'll eat a lot of them.
Seconding this. My dad's been trying to grow a bit of corn on our land in Texas for years, probably decades at this point. All we have to show for it is a once-a-year small ear of corn on Thanksgiving.
The potatoes, on the other hand, he grows by the bucket in piles of hay thrown into old, bald tires. I suspect the damned things will grow in anything that's been near a nutrient.
Yup. Something that I can recommend if you have children: just buy a large flower pot (15" diameter), put it on your balcony, and stick 2 potatoes in it.
Your children will see potatoes grow live, and you can eat them with them. Fun thing to do, very easy, and works so well.
For soil, just some normal soil you can dig out anywhere is enough, but you can also buy pre-fertilized soil if you wish (as said, the potatoes would even grow in garbage cans)
Most important thing I would add to that is cabbage, which I believe you can grow together with the potatoes. Entire countries survived WW2 on cabbage and potato soup, it's very nutritious.
If you're after some flavour, I'd also add onions and celery, which I guess go in normal soil with the cabbage and potatoes, and also carrots, which will want sandy soil. There's a good reason these three veggies together form the basis of lots of French and Italian cooking.
Note: "However, many chemicals are often unsuccessful when used against this pest because of the beetle's ability to rapidly develop insecticide resistance."
If that was my staple crop, I'd be dead of starvation right about now.
Agreed with you list. Corn can be interesting to feed chickens, though. (I mean maize when I say corn, do you guys mean maize or wheat?) BTW, you can grow beans in the corn, it grows over it.
I would add a bit of barley/oat but that's more work than the rest.
These are 1st year or 2nd year numbers. The output per-acre will steadily decline afterwards unless you know to set some land aside to be fallow and grow something that will return nitrogen to the soil.
And like was mentioned by dghughes, rotation is important. From about the middle ages to the early 20th century, European farmers practiced the three-crop rotation scheme. Winter wheat or rye in one field, peas, lentils or beans in a second, and the third would be "resting". It got replaced in Britain and Belgium with the four-crop rotation plan, which produced more calories.
Jean-Martin Fortier, in Quebec (not known for its balmy climate), successfully runs a 200-family CSA on 1.5 acres, which is an even higher level of intensive cropping than this box proposes. No, not everything can be grown on 2 acres for 150 people, but you can grow all the vegetables needed.
A CSA with 200 customers != 'feed 200 people'. Yes with intensive agriculture methods you can grow enough to harvest 150 or 200 boxes of vegetables a week during most part of the year; that's still only - what? 10, 20% at most of the calorie intake of those people? And most of those calories are carbs, too - there's going to be very little protein and fat in those boxes. And not year round, either. Again, yes you can grow lots of potatoes (potatoes are better than e.g. corn for this purpose because they keep better than corn with only slightly lower caloric yield per area unit. Yes you can process corn e.g. into flour but that then has to be calculated into the total energy input, and it requires much more preparation afterwards to turn it back into edible food; again with high energy inputs) for a few years (need to rotate crops, especially nightshade family crops) to close the gap over the winter season; but fill your boxes with potatoes and a pumpkin here or there for 3 months once and watch your subscriptions plummet next spring.
People don't generally believe me when I say this, but I've made this point often: for self-sufficiency and/or small scale farming like the GP is proposing, you need a hectare (2 acres) to feed a family year-round. The reason people don't want to believe this is because it shows that it's impossible to do this sort of farming at scale, because there simply isn't enough land to feed everybody this way. So we need industrial scale farming today to produce the food people want in the quantities we need it.
I say this as someone with a 1 hectare experimental alternative agriculture plot; it's not that I don't want better, more sustainable agriculture systems. It's just that the 'solutions' being proposed are wildly insufficient, and I'm not talking double digit percentages, but orders of magnitude. How do we fix it - I don't know. But I do (by now) recognize snake oil and sophistry when I see it.
Yeah farming is by far one of the hardest businesses in developed economy. It's a good idea for schools and the like, you know just to get the community spirit going and get in touch with nature, and other hippie stuff like that. But the reality is this is going to make not an iota of difference in the world. What is needed are better policies and laws on ethical farming, and holding up corporate conglomerates up to those laws.
There's a gardeners society here (Les Jardiniers de France) which sells a set of packets of seeds which are said to be able to grow on 200m2 and feed a family of 4 people.
They probably say 'grow vegetables for a family of 4'. On 200m2, you'd have an abundance of vegetables, yes; at least in warm climates like in southern France. But not enough to be self-sufficient, and a 200m2 traditional vegetable garden is a lot of work, too (one day a week, averaged over the year, probably?).
Takes a bit more then that to make a 200m2 plot thrive. My experience has been that it would roughly equate to 3-4 days of 4-6hrs. That is assuming you are keeping on top of all of the tasks and not using any serious tooling. If you do that and have good conditions/knowledge, you'll see a density that is enough to provide for 4 and generate a small surplus.
