This Is the Future of Small Space Urban Gardening
From aquaponic greenhouses to trees that can charge your phone to growing microgardens in your tiny city apartment, it’s pretty clear that technology is creeping its way into sustainable living. To add to that list, CropBox is utilizing technology and giving people the opportunity to grow an acre’s worth of crops within the small footprint of a shipping container.
CropBox is a service offering people the opportunity to rent out an entire shipping container filled with a whole growing system built right in. According to one of the CropBox designers, Ben Greene, “Normally, you’d have to purchase a $50,000 greenhouse. If you lost contracts or customers, you as a small farmer would be left holding the bag.” CropBox gives you the resources you need to run a growing system such as a built-in light source, a water and nutrients circulator and sensors that measure temperature and carbon dioxide levels. Also, the hydroponic system uses 90% less water and 80% less pesticides than conventional agriculture.
Here’s where the techy fun comes in: You can monitor and adjust different factors within your CropBox from a smartphone. Or if you like to see the growth of your crops, you can monitor them via the webcam set up inside. But just because everything looks a-okay doesn’t mean your crops are fine. That’s why the companion app will let you know if something like pH level change happens.
If you don’t want to rent a CropBox, you can buy one or rent-to-own. But it might be better to go the rental route, seeing as CropBox promises to take the shipping container back if anything goes wrong or if you just don’t end up liking it. CropBox is changing up the agricultural game and decreasing the farming footprint size. Soon, we might have giant stacks of crops that we’ll get to in our flying cars.
What do you think about CropBox? Let us know in the comments!
(h/t Fast Company)
