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Comment by davehcker | Hacker News Reader

I'm growing the freshest lettuce, iron-rich kale, and a lot of other leafy greens!

While in college (CS & Math), I got heavily interested in growing food in the most efficient and healthiest way possible. I was a dreamer when I started so I thought more of how to grow 'earthly' produce on Mars, but then I realized that my own planet Earth is so massively underserved.

It's basically like this- I mastered growing leafy greens in indoor closed environmenet, then I tried to cover all the major physical and biological markers, then I try to optimize the most optimal levels of 5-6 variables (currently) that I can fully control and may produce the best phenotype- CO2, O2, Light, Nitrate, P, K. These parameters have their own sub definitions.

So far I have had great results. I am trying to raise investment so I can finally make it a reality. Check the numbers here: hexafarms.com (no fluff)

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> THE FINAL PRODUCE IS THE ULTIMATE MANIFESTATION OF THEIR PLATONIC IDEAL FORMS

How's the taste?

Not denying it's possible to grow food very efficiently indoors but a vastly oversimplified opinion is that plants need sunlight to be tasty. Is this wrong?

You'll have to buy my words- but taste wise (based on my surveys too) it's the 'best' they have had (mostly city dwellers I'm talking about).

Yes, you don't really need sunlight whatsoever. I was myself shocked until I recalled high school biology concept of genotype and phenotype i.e. the genetic structure that manifests itself given the right physical conditions (at least of plants.) As for the plants' nutrients, here's a classic- Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener's Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition, by Lowenfels. I was amazed to find how complex, yet simple plants are.

You should check out "The Real Martian" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8t8Dq8oZeAjGDx_87azBw/abo...

and Beanstalk (a YC company) https://www.beanstalk.farm/

Funny story: I was rejected by YC last batch. But I get it- I thought they look for traction and what not, so I rather made the pitch video on a very specific aspect of Hexafarms- which is monitoring, since some people were willing to check it out. No doubt YC would reject it. On the other hand, Thiel Foundation reached out to me, but they had some drop out thing and what not which I was not able to fullfil (and after a while they also stopped reaching out too).

Thanks for the references.

The Real Martian is great. Go back and watch the Hab 1 videos, it was truly sad to see snow collapse it. he's now quit his full time job and joined some startup and they're about to go full steam ahead into Hab 2 after months of modelling and other stuff. Ultimately they're looking at creating a commercial product where a family, or a couple of families, can erect a habitat and grow a decent amount of their food.

Hab 1 had aquaponics and fish, not sure where Hab 2 is going to look like as they haven't shared much but he's just started churning videos out again the past month or two.

It's a really neat project, I just hope he continues to show as much as he did with Hab 1 now that he's part of a startup.

Hey Dave,

Is it possible to setup a 'microfarm', similar to a window fridge appliance, in a part of an apartment room?

I'm ok with some manual work every 2 days, such as filling in a water container.

Besides water & substances, how much electricity would this use to grow a generation of leafy greens, per kg of produce?

Thanks for working on this!

Amazing! It would be awesome if people living far from traditional agricultural areas could access fresh greens without insane transportation costs (both financial and environmental).

Are your farming systems fully automated? If so, has that been more of a software challenge, or more of a mechatronics challenge?

>It would be awesome if people living far from traditional agricultural areas could access fresh greens without insane transportation costs (both financial and environmental) That's what actually got me started. A head of lettuce on average 1200 miles (https://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/608-319.pdf) and it is so disconnected from the site of consumption.

My vision is to have distributed farms (as opposed to conventional wisdom, i have found that smaller indoor farms will be more profitable) every eight blocks or so.

Not really- It's quite manual (as of now). I had to change my country almost three times since I started; so I'm rather focussing more on data, and training algorithms part to figure out the right parameters (and the farm is a just a testbed). One example would be to have a $5 camera for measuring growth than buying a $100 3D what not camera.

> mastered growing leafy greens in indoor closed environment

I love this! Makes me happy to see someone's working on such an interesting problem that would benefit many.

For feedback, I believe using photographs of the leafy greens would be effective in communicating your vision.

Thanks I'll do that.

I actually graduated from college this year; and for personal reasons I've had to change countries; now I'm in another Master's program... ready to drop out anytime. The whole project has been dead for months once in a while! I'm more trying to leverage ML for optimizing things. I guess that's what modern farming is missing (not ML per se, but optimization).

I'm trying to raise some investment (or in the worst case bootstrap and risk everything in the next few months), then I will go crazy with the idea.

This is awesome man, exactly what piqued my interest!

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