Pop-Up Agriculture

Image: Er.We via flickr

Ever since leaving Savannah, i've been carrying an ideas notebook around with me. This past weekend, I had a late lunch at Whole Foods and, naturally as a designer, began coming up with ways to make the Whole Foods shopping and dining experience more authentic and engaging. For almost the past year, I've been actively struggling through the fact that we have sacrificed superior-quality farm fresh food for convenience. In the midst of it, i've been yearning to find a way to bring a bit of the farm to everyday life. Mind you, i'm not talking about a farmer's market, or a rooftop garden (well, not exactly). "How can we make gardens accessible, but only when we want them?," was my initial problem statement. From there, I started sketching and came up with some ideas for modular infrastructures that would bring agriculture to cities.

I'm not totally sure where i'm going with this idea yet, but something interesting is budding. After spending a few days this past spring designing a mobile gardening application that would allow users to water their plants while on vacation, I've begun to realize just how passionate I am about locally-grown food, and local fruits and vegetables especially. I think that there is a HUGE opportunity to combine the tech-driven capabilities of today's companies with the centuries old techniques of farming to develop a game-changing new market opportunity and I intend to keep plugging along in this space for a good while longer. Meanwhile, here are some fun links that i've stumbled upon recently:

• Brooklyn's First Urban Farm Pop-up (if only it read urban pop-up farm!)
• The Public Farm Installation in New York City
• The Vertical Farm (yes, I already linked to it on my tumblr several months ago, but it's just so inspirational!)
• Freight Farms (tagline: Grow Food in Any Environment, yes i'm in)
• Metabolicity (A city that metabolizes its resources to supply inhabitants with nourishment? No way.)
• in.gredients (Package-free and zero-waste grocery store coming to Austin, TX. I chatted with one of the founders over the winter holidays in 2011 and let me tell 'ya i'm sold on the concept and sold on the fact that he and his team are the right people to try to make it happen)

Yay. More sketchy slash concept-oriented posts coming soon. For now, enjoy the links!