Posts By Mitchell Hagney
San Antonio Housing Authority Embraces Sustainability and Local Food
May 19, 2014 | Mitchell Hagney
Image courtesy of San Antonio Housing Authority
San Antonio has lots of poverty and cheap land.
Now, through urban gardening and sustainability, the San Antonio Housing Authority is starting to use all that extra space help the population.
SAHA has found a great deal of success enhancing community development through local food. Their efforts are led by Beth Keel, Sustainability Initiatives Liason, who works on everything from energy efficiency to stormwater catchment.
To Keel, sustainability is a key part of any vision for affordable housing.
“Short-term cost savings are a big motivator, but it’s also longevity. These buildings are intended to last many more decades than most building designs and keep providing public benefit,” she says. Read More
Indoor Agriculture Firm Opening Doors to the Public through SEC Filing
March 25, 2014 | Mitchell Hagney
Mitch Hagney is Chief Executive Officer of LocalSprout, a hydroponic farm based in San Antonio, Texas.
Houston-based Indoor Harvesting Corporation has begun the process of becoming a publicly traded company by filing a registration statement for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Their decision to go public may represent a larger shift for the industry from small controlled environment farms to larger urban agriculture conglomerates.
Known more for its oil refining and industrial car culture, Houston may seem a strange place to launch a green revolution. Yet it is here that Indoor Harvesting is engineering urban farming equipment to make controlled environment agriculture accessible to anyone. They specialize in aeroponics, which is a technique that delivers nutrient-rich water vapor to the roots of the plants. Their goal is to make systems that anyone can use without much technical knowledge by making all the components fully compatible.
How Learning to Grow Food in Space Can Help us Here on Earth
January 29, 2014 | Mitchell Hagney
One of NASA’s seedling experiments to discover how low pressure and oxygen affects the growth of Arabidopsis. Photo courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul.
Mitch Hagney is Chief Executive Officer of LocalSprout, a hydroponic farm based in San Antonio, Texas.
The seed has been planted for agriculture in space.
We’ve grown Swiss chard and zucchini on the space station, and next year NASA hopes to grow the first crops on the moon in a can.
As space travel becomes more feasible, scientists have found that agriculture will be just as foundational to actual spaceships as it is to “spaceship earth,” an old concept that calls for our planet’s inhabitants to view themselves as a single harmonious crew. Read More
Sharing and Community Drives Expansion of Hydroponic Farming
December 20, 2013 | Mitchell Hagney
Dr. Patricia Rorabaugh teaches students from across the country in January 2013 at the University of Arizona’s Intensive Tomato Production course. Photo Credit: University of Arizona Controlled Environment Agriculture Center
Mitch Hagney is Chief Executive Officer of LocalSprout, a hydroponic farm based in San Antonio, Texas.
Farming has always created communities, but new technologies are creating communities of farmers in new ways.
As greenhouses free farmers from the constraints of their local climate, more and more consumers are increasing their demand for local produce. Together, these trends are opening up space for small farms to open up right where they’re planning on selling.
According to IBISWorld, in 2013 two companies, Eurofresh and Village Farms, accounted for 34 percent of all hydroponic produce sales. The next closest company produced 3 percent of all sales. Most hydroponic farms occupy less than an acre of land, and average revenues for each farm are just below $200,000. Read More
Beyond Freight: Startup Transforms Shipping Container into Turnkey Solution for Hydroponic Farming
December 6, 2013 | Mitchell Hagney
LocalSprout’s Freight Farm located in downtown San Antonio. Photo Credit: Mitch Hagney
Mitch Hagney is Chief Executive Officer of LocalSprout, a hydroponic farm based in San Antonio, Texas.
When a hydroponic farm grows a head of lettuce, the story doesn’t start with a seed.
Every part of the environment has to be provided for the seeds before they germinate, including everything that nature usually gives away for free.
To make a plant’s conditions ideal, the farmer must also be a plumber, an electrician, an engineer, and a chemist. Even those growers with lots of experience often lack the construction expertise that building a hydroponic farm requires, so they turn to those whose sole business is building.
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