I was waiting for this question! We’ve been working on integrating both our space design and our Earth design for the past 2 years. I’d like to break down the comment and my answer into a couple parts because I have a lot to say about it. To address the elephant in the room, the cost is to construct one of these is significantly less than the cost to construct many of the other space food production systems out there. I don’t want to quote you a price just yet because we are still negotiating costs with our space market. We also have several ways to lower the price to deploy on Earth which again, for negotiation purposes I can’t discuss.

In terms of time, the units require 0 daily maintenance. As one of our primary testers, I can confirm that even with our prototypes, the only maintenance I’ve been required to do is planting and harvest. Planting takes ~40 minutes, and I did it with a plastic spoon, an egg carton, $0.99 packets of seeds, and a small plastic Chinese takeout container. Harvest took me about 2.5 hours, but I was also weighing the harvest, measuring, taking photos, vacuum packing samples, taking photos, and taking notes. I spent significantly less time messing with the units than with my outdoor garden!

In terms of water, it takes significantly less water than an outdoor garden as well. We replant and adjust water content in between harvests. Times between harvests vary, but on the current cycle, it’s ~35 days. The general suggestion for an outdoor garden would be ~ 1 inch depth of water per week per square foot, or 0.623 gallons/square foot per week. At this point, the amount of water we used to restore the entire system after 35 days, about 1.5 gallons, was equal to the amount of water added to about 2.5 square feet of a regular garden per week. If a family is struggling to obtain safe and clean water, our system would be the better choice.

Space! These can be hidden in furniture if needed. Or they can be stacked. Or rearranged. Our current prototypes fit into the 4 foot by 4 foot area right now, but we are making a version whose footprint can be rearranged (think legos), as long as a 16 square foot area can be achieved. We’re based in a city and currently running a couple of these in our apartments for testing. While they are bigger than expected, they allow us to grow more than planters would and take up less space than some pieces of furniture.

Food insecurity is definitely NOT a food production issue, and we’re not pretending to solve all the systemic issues that exist. However, we hope to address some: lack of transportation and lack of fresh food available. People in urban areas often can’t travel to grocery stores, or their grocery stores don’t have healthy food options at a reasonable price point. Many food banks that we’ve spoken to aren’t equipped to ship out food regularly or struggle to obtain and ship out perishables. We’re eliminating the middleman.

Electricity would be our main concern, and we currently have existing no-power required backups for every system except one, which is cooling. We’re exploring options for this one, and there’s a couple interesting possibilities…but this comment is too long already for me to weigh pros and cons for each one!