Advertisement

Now You Can Start a Farm Anywhere With This Tricked Out Shipping Container Kit

Taysha Murtaugh
Photo credit: Farm From a Box via Twitter
Photo credit: Farm From a Box via Twitter

From Country Living

What happens when you combine the container home trend with the movement for local food production? A farm in a box, or as this San Francisco-based startup dubs it, "Farm From a Box." That's right: a tricked out $50,000 portable shipping container with everything you need to power a two-acre farm-well, except the land and seeds, of course. With one unit, you can grow any crop, specifically enough food to feed up to 150 people for a year or potentially earn up to $150,000 annually.

Founders Brandi DeCarli and Scott Thompson were inspired after working together on a youth center in Kenya, where containers provided resources like health and education-but not food.

"There's a bit of a missing infrastructure that occurs in a lot of underdeveloped areas, and even here within the U.S," DeCarli told Smithsonian Magazine. "So we thought, let's provide communities with the tools they need to be able to grow and sustain their own crop so that the resilience is actually built up from the ground itself."

The goal? To "shift the focus from mass food production to food production by the masses, and reinvent the small farm," says the startup's crowdfunding page on Republic.

The self-described "Swiss-Army knife" of sustainable farming, each starter kit comes equipped with basic farm tools, a seedling house, ICT and data mapping, plus solar power, pumping, water purification, and irrigation systems. Not to mention other bells and whistles like training materials, wifi and cloud, a charging area, and sensor technology. All of this means the farm can essentially be started anywhere.

The first Farm From a Box prototype, aptly named "Adam," at Shone Farm in Sonoma, California, is "going amazingly well," DeCarli said to Smithsonian. "It's actually more efficient than we had even planned, which is a good problem to have."

Up next, the startup will deploy another unit in California to aid refugees from Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan, as well as a Virginia box for veterans.

(h/t Curbed)

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Story" customtitles="10%20of%20the%20Most%20Popular%20Tiny%20Houses%20of%20the%20Year" customimages="" content="gallery.3969"]

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Story" customtitles="The%20%22Agrihood%22%20Trend%20Is%20Taking%20Off" customimages="" content="gallery.3341"]

You Might Also Like