The Local Farming Solution

We reduces the environmental impact of our food system by promoting local farming through the development of a novel vertical greenhouse farm that uses machine learning and automation to preform all farm and supply chain tasks. Our farm; 

1. Promotes local economies by enabling individuals and communities to benefit from industrialized automation.
2. Uses 95% less water and no pesticides, herbicides, or plastics. 
3. Reduces waste by adjusting outputs to regional market demands through our highly controlled growing process.
4. Reduces all major crop production expenses (labor, resources, energy, land) to make local produce affordable.

We build fully-automated vertical farms designed to be implemented in an urban landscape. For instant, our 1200 sqft farm can be place on idle backyard space, provide 3-acres worth of produce to local retailers, and be controlled and operated remotely. Our farm is designed to empower any individuals to produce food for their own communities. 

The problem that we are trying to solve is the promotion of a faulty food system that relies on imports and a stable climate. Our imports for fresh fruits and vegetables have tripped since 1980. We are not building a food system resistant to climate change as the US only produces .2% of global greenhouse fruits and vegetables. If we do not address these problems our climate will continue to be impacted and our populations' access to healthy food will continue to decline.

Our fresh food system is centralized and is contributing to global warming. Roughly 75% of the nation’s lettuce and leafy greens are grown in California due to its climate. 

We continue to promote a faulty food system because there are no alternatives that can compete with the product pricing that large-scale farms and foreign providers have set. Local farms are unable to compete because they do not benefit from the economies-of-scale that large-scale commercial farms do and must navigate all aspects of the food system themselves. This includes, production, processing, distribution, consumer, and waste management. In 2019 farm dept reached a record-high of $416 billion and chapter 12 bankruptcies were up 24% from the previous year. 

Our innovation and product is an autonomous vertical greenhouse farm. It was developed as a reimagined method of growing food that relies on its automated features to perform all tasks required in the food production process. Seeds are planted, plant life support systems are maintained, and transplanting is performed without human labor. To complete the processes, plants are harvested, cut, and sorted robotically. 

The scale of the farm is not intended for hobbyist but as a profession and the main source of income for a household. The farm will produce over 224 plants per day using 1200 sq ft of land. This is the equivalent of producing 3 acres-worth of produce on a quarter of a basketball court. This can create a new genre of farming where people can possess the physical means of industrialized automation on their own property. The Rogue Farm will integrate the social benefits of a cottage economy (provide for local community, work from home, more free time) and the production benefits of an industrialized economy (high production output, cost efficiency, continuous improvement). 

Our farm will create desirable job opportunities in efforts to decrease imports and build a radically transparent food system.

We are trying to make local fresh produce accessible to as many people as possible. As a majority of Americans purchase their food at retail markets, we are addressing many of the pain-points supermarkets, restaurants, and institutions face. The pain-points food retailers encounter when sourcing fresh and local produce include: lost profits when under-stocking, waste when over-stocking, inconsistency of product quality, logistical difficulties when sourcing from seasonal-dependent growers, accessibility to non-regional foods, food transparency (easily traceable food sources), and slim profit margins. 

To better understand the needs of food retailers we have engaged with managers at local restaurants such a The Urban Farmer and Departure in Portland, OR. They have such a need for locally sourced and affordable produce that they grown their own food on the roof and in the basement of the hotel they are located in.

Our solution was developed around the needs of retail markets. Through our farming technology we can provide an consistent affordable local produce annually due to our controlled environment. Our system will also be able to adapt its outputs to our customers market demands due to our novel growing system and automation.  

We believe local farming is the most viable path towards a truly sustainable food system. By providing a solution that addresses the larges hurdles for local farming, we believe we are directly addressing the Sustainable Food Systems challenge. Our target market, the food retailer, relates to the challenge as they are the primary public-facing entity in the food system and dictate a majority of consumer choices. By not only addressing the retail food market's pain-points when sourcing local food directly, but also making urban farming more accessible to individuals, we can make local farming a more plausible solution.

Our primary competitors are that of controlled environmental agriculture (CEA) supplying local produce. There's a lot of 'experimentation' in the CEA space but none have been able to provide a product that is affordable due to OpEx, accessible due to CapEx, and sustainable due to energy usage.

• Indoor 'warehouse' vertical farms use artificial lighting to grow food within cities. Though these farms deploy sophisticated automation, machine learning, and reduce resource inputs, it is unclear if they are more sustainable than traditional agriculture due to their extremely high energy usage and inability to use natural lighting. 
• Container farms can be dispersed in communities reducing supply chains but demand high labor costs. The size of these farms cannot justify the cost of labor automation and they cannot benefit from migrant labor. 
• Greenhouses have been proven viable as they benefit from natural lighting but require immense startup, land, and labor costs when located in urban areas. Companies have build greenhouses on top of builds but still suffer from mono-cropping and distribution and labor expenses. 

Our advantage is derived from our novel farm design and its ability to harness the best qualities of each CEA system. We have designed a unique vertical growing system that can utilize natural lighting. We have sized our farm to justify labor automation. We have designed all of our own automation from the ground-up to reducing CapEx costs. Finally, our farm is compatible with a large variety of crops to avoid mono-cropping and ensure product diversification in regional markets. 

Our farm is an intricate recipe. Meaning success is not dependent on the development of a hypothesized/unproven technology but on the execution of integrating multiple proven technologies into a novel system.

There are many core technologies that we rely on to create our overall farm design. We are using custom gantry robotics and end-effectors to manipulate objects and plants. Machine vision is used to analyse vegetation and water indexes throughout the entire growing process to understand what inputs create an optimal plant and to provide data in adjusting the environment (light intensity, humidity, temperature) automatically. A modified version of nutrient thin film hydroponics is used to deliver specific nutrient recipes to specific plants. All of these existing technologies are being modified and integrated into a re-imagined farm so that it can be nearly autonomous.

The farm's fully automated process and its ability to be distributed is fundamental to our business model. Without the automated process and without the farms ability to remain functional over long durations, it would not be plausible to provide such a complex automated system to individuals. Because our farm can be controlled remotely and only needs servicing every other month, it is viable to place on non-technical users properties. Farm franchising has never been done before due to the inconsistency of product on a farm-to farm basis. We believe out technology will enable us create a new business model where we can use idle backyard space through franchised farming. 

Numerous existing technologies have been modified to work coherently in our novel farm. Through we have not build and proven the concept of the overall farm, we are confident each sub-assembly will function properly due to there prior existence. 

• Complete labor automation has been achieved on a larger scale greenhouse farms in the Netherlands such as Visser. They have designer robotics that can manipulate plants throughout their entire growing process. Our goal is to simplify their produce, reduce the CapEx costs, and integrate them into our farm. 
• Rotating plant beds used in a greenhouse application have been implemented by Sky Greens in Singapore. Though they do not use hydroponics to water their crops and elect to use misters, they prove plants will grow while rotating on a vertical carousel. We have also implemented our on method of propelling the plant beds efficiently. 
• Computer vision, to analyse plants, have been applied to a variety of applications. Companies such a Blue River or Farmwise use computer vision to detect weeds in fields. 
• Greenhouse environmental control has been implemented throughout the world as is proven viable. 

Our primary challenge will be incorporating all of these technologies into our farm with a reasonable CapEx cost which we have estimated to be $360,000. In addition, we must ensure the farm is robust enough to be place in urban and rural communities.

Our primary activity will include research and development around our novel farming system. Through product diversification and OpEx/CapEx reduction we can increase our customer base and make local produce more accessible for the general population by integrating it into the daily routines of American consumers.

Our short term outputs created by product diversification will enable a wider range of local and healthy products to be sold at retail markets so that consumer can integrate a wider range of produce into there daily meals. By growing fresh herbs, leafy green, vine-ripe produce, and mushrooms, we can provide fresh local produce for a majority of consumer needs. 

Our medium term outcome will come in the form of improved heath. By mitigating processed food, reducing animal consumption, and by consuming fresh local produce, our consumers will be able to take a preventative approach to their heath opposed a reactive approach through medicine. 

Long term outcomes come in the form of sustainability. By incrementally moving towards locally produce foods, reducing animal production, reducing food miles, and reducing resource usage, we can work toward a more sustainable food system. This will have a much-needed impact on our environment in the efforts to fight climate change and leave a foundation for a sustainable food infrastructure for future generations.   

Our current solution does not currently serve anyone as we are still in the development phase. As we have already designed the full scale farm, produced a bill of materials, selected machining vendor, and created a team of technical employees, we need funding to build our initial prototype. 

Within the first year we plan on having a functioning small scale farm that can begin to serve customers at farmers markets. We will only be impacting community members local to Portland Oregon at this point. 

We hope to serve an institution such as a university or tech campus in addition to a hand full of grocery stores within five years. 

Within the next year we plan on proving the feasibility of our farm by building a small scale prototype. Our initial focus will be on our core technologies. Our core technology is labor automation. By proving that we can automate the entire growing process we can uncover the first layer of unknowns.

After completing and proving the labor automation aspects of the farm, we will focus on plant growth. We will begin to implement machine vision and develop optimized growing process for herbs and leafy greens within our farm. 

We intend to prototype all aspects of the farm, while excluding redundant mechanism, to uncover any unforeseeable complications by the first year.  We hope to be able to prove our estimated CapEX cost for a full scale farm by extrapolating the expenses of the smaller scale prototype. 

Mid-term goals include building and proving the full-scale farm by year 3. Our core technology is not massive in scale and is designed to be standardized. Developing a single farm will prove viability of our OpEx ($32,000 / yr), CapEx ($336,000), revenue ($300,000 / yr), and robustness of our farm. 

By year 3 we intend to enter the process development phase where be refining the farm design and developing manufacturing processes. 

By year five we hope to be entering the production phase where we will being to mass produce the farms, in an assembly line fashion, and distribute them across key regions. 

Current barrier that exist for our team is financing. As we have already designed the farm in CAD and have a committed team we are currently looking for financing the build our minimum viable product. 

Initial capital will enable us to build first layer of credibility by filing for patents. 

A larger amount of capital will enable our three team member to work on the project full-time, acquire a small shop, and purchase the required materials. 

Plant growth cycles are also barrier that hinder our ability to move quickly. An average plant life cycle in an indoor farm is around a month. We will have longer development cycle to accommodate plant life cycles. 

Other barrier we foresee in the future are zoning restrictions. As Portland Oregon is relaxing with their zoning and allow farms in urban areas, we acknowledge that not all cities are as progressive as Portland. 

We plan to overcome the barrier of financing by applying to the NSF and NIFA SBIR grants. In receiving these grants we will be able to build a prototype and raise further funding from Venture Capital. 

Zoning restrictions is a barrier we will solve by avoidance. We will conduct research into specific regions zoning restrictions prior to entering their markets. 

Solve can help us overcome these barrier by proving credibility and initial funding to file for patents. With the notoriety MIT Solve bring and the credibility patents bring, we will be more effective while fund raising. 

We currently have zero-full time employees. 

Two of our team members work on the project 20+ hours a week while the third works on the project ~5 hrs a week. 

Our team of 3 have proven success in their respective domains and their skill-sets will be sufficient in developing an initial prototype

• David Ashton is a Mechanical Design Engineer and works for a mechanical design consulting firm for the last 3 year. He is currency working for Facebook Reality Labs (previously Oculus) for research and development on AR/VR products. Prior to consulting, David lead a privately funded agricultural automation venture in the Hops industry. There, he begin as a single employee in his apartment and grew the company to 6 full-time employees and function shop and successfully developed a working prototype. 
• Ning Jeng has worked as a Engineering Project Manager at Apple for the last 3 years and has focused on products including the iPhone 7, iPhone 6 and Watch Series 2. Prior to Apple, Ning co-founded a carbon fiber 3d printing startup. He has also helped develop a farm robotic called farmbot. 
• Justin Gravett has worked 4 years as a software engineer in the aerospace industry. He has experience with embedded systems programming for Uber, NASA, and Lockheed Martin. 

We are confident we can build our product with our initial team as we all have relevant experience in our respective fields. 

We have engaged with Cal Poly and the BRAE Department. Our past professor has shown interest in supporting us with students and facilities and is providing a letter of support for our NSF SBIR grant application. 

We will operate as a B2B wholesaler of local fresh produce. We intent to supply retailers produce through the use of our novel farming systems. To build an infrastructure of farms, we plan to scale using a mixed chain/franchising model that can leverage idle resource (ie.open yard space, transportation) of our franchisees. This business model will allow us to coordinate across the franchisees to appropriately fulfill demand across wholesalers, access municipalities (water and energy), and buffer our CapEx farm costs.

We are offering a more affordable supply of locally sourced fresh culinary herb and specialty crops to retailers. Through the use of our novel system we will be able to adjust our production quantities on an month-to-month basis to meet market demands precisely, offer a regional and non-regional products annually, and guarantee a supply of premium produce that does not contain contaminants and unwanted chemicals.  

We are addressing many of the pain-points food retailers encounter when sourcing fresh and local produce that have gone unfulfilled. These problems include, lost profits when under-stocking, waste when over-stocking, inconsistency of product quality, logistical difficulties when sourcing from seasonal dependent growers, accessibility to non-regional foods, food transparency (easily traceable food sources), and slim profit margins.

We are targeting retailer because this is where the vast majority of food in the U.S. is purchased. 

We are applying to solve in the hopes of receiving the solver aware in addition to the Future Planet Capital Prize. 

We will use both the funding and the award itself to build credibility within the company and team. To do so we will spend the initial $10,000 on patent protection for the farm. 

If awarded the second price funding or $200,000 it will enable our entire team to work on the project full time and build out a minimum viable product.

Additionally we would love to leverage the network MIT Solve has. As we are a solely technical team, we would utilize the MIT Solve network to further develop a business plan. 

We are exploring the viability of localized sustainable food production as a true competitor with conventional agriculture. If successful, we have the potential to reshape how and where food is produced. As there is little data on the viability of urban indoor agriculture, the data and materials we provide will be valuable in accessing future farm technologies.