With 6 days still left to invest, the Californian startup Farm From a Box has reached its fundraising goal of $100,000 on Republic. Who are they and what do they want to achieve?
Healthy Food For All
As Farm From a Box argues in their campaign, over 800 million people worldwide don’t have the access to fresh, nutritious food. Traditional, mass-production farming tends to focus on the quantity, not the quality of the produce. What’s more, the high concentration of farming space in one spot makes the entire operation vulnerable to droughts, floods, plagues and other natural disasters. Not to mention the pesticides, overprocessing of food and long distribution chains. As the founders of Farm From a Box believe, “It is time to shift the focus from mass food production to food production by the masses and reinvent the small farm.” That’s what their product is for. They want to decentralize agriculture by providing communities and individuals with tools necessary to set up a 2-acre organic farm.
An Off-Grid Farm
Let’s take a closer look at the Box itself. Based on a shipping container, it’s equipped with everything needed for a successful farming operation. There are solar panels on the roof, a micro-drip irrigation system, an electric pump, and a Wi-Fi Internet of Things system with sensors that provide the farmer with real-time data. Some basic farming tools come with the package as well. Thanks to its compact frame, this farming kit could be delivered and deployed basically everywhere. Thanks to the solar panels, it can operate off-grid. As long as there are favorable farming conditions, the Box could do the trick. What’s more, the additional components make it easy to modify the setup to better suit different climate conditions. The entire design emphasizes efficiency, energy & resource saving, and sustainability.
Multiple Uses
The potential customer base for the Box is quite broad. It can work in hunger-stricken areas and turn unused land into autonomous farms, serve educational projects and Community Sustained Agriculture groups. Furthermore, the Box can be a start of a farming business and boost the urban farming trend. Apart from the kit itself, the offer includes a training program on sustainable farming as an enterprise. With all of these tools combined, the potential farmers stand a bigger chance of success.
You can check the promo video below:
