Wyoming Hydroponic Tower Co. Seeks to Facilitate Sustainable Food Production and Make Farming Less Expensive

February 6, 2012 | Matt Wilhalme

Nate Storey and business partner Paul Bennick want to make farming more efficient, sustainable and affordable for the private and commercial greenhouse grower. To do so, the partners founded Bright AgroTech, LLC, a mission driven company that develops modular hydroponic production towers to not only increase production in hydroponic and aquaponic systems, but also facilitate sustainable food production.

“We got into it to make farming less expensive,” Storey says.

The product that Storey, a PhD candidate in agronomy at the University of Wyoming, along with Bennick, a Wyoming Army National Guardsmen who served two tours in Iraq and grew up on a ranch, developed to reduce costs is called the ZipGrow Tower™. Read More

Local Urban Aquaponic Farming Model to Reduce Food Mile, Create Jobs, Enhance Food Security

January 11, 2012 | Matt Wilhalme

On the Westside of Los Angeles, in the Mar Vista district, urban farming organization, EVO Farm, is utilizing aquaponics to create a replicable and sustainable farming model that will facilitate the creation of a network of local urban farms that grow and distribute produce that exceeds organic standards.

“Who would want a big giant farm in one place when you could have 100 farms in 100 places?” asks EVO Farm’s founder David Rosenstein.

According to Rosenstein, an urban aquaponic farm doesn’t necessarily require a lot of space. Rosenstein built what he calls a “suitcase-model,” which requires only as much space as a desktop computer. Read More

To Create Sustainable Food System, FarmsReach Focuses on Tools to Help Farmers Streamline Business Operations

January 4, 2012 | Matt Wilhalme

When FarmsReach launched in 2007 it sought to facilitate connections between farmers and buyers by focusing its efforts on resolving food distribution issues with an online portal to help local farmers get their produce into the hands of consumers and address the increasing demand for organic regionally grown food.

But after the product scaled to 26 states, at a time when founder Melanie Cheng expected these marketplaces to boom and locally grown produce to become available in more and more places, transactions and volumes decreased. The main problem, according to Cheng, wasn’t the venue or point of sale, it was the “pre-marketplace.” Read More