Using artificial intelligence to monitor and control existing technologies is likely to give birth to all manner of wondrous new devices in the near future and this indoor vegetable-growing machine is a prime example.
The AGWA is roughly the size of a half-height wine fridge and can sit below counter-height in your kitchen and maintain a supply of fresh herbs and vegetables using minimal time, energy and effort.
It’s a complete system, with AGWA supplying the machine, a smartphone app, and a wide range pods that fit inside the trays in the AGWA.
The array of available pods covers the whole gamut, through an array of lettuces, kale, choi, spring onions, herbs and spices, radishes, sprouts and watercress.
You can even watch the growth of your plants remotely on your smartphone, but the monitoring, adjusting and growing decisions are made and implemented by a computer (AGWA’s Cloud-based AI Virtual Agronomist) using three cameras and an array of other sensors to maintain the optimal health of your plants, until they’re ready for harvest.
Now it would be very easy to dismiss the AGWA as a solution looking for a problem, but there are some very compelling reasons to have an AGWA in the kitchen.
Feeding a large city requires logistical wrangling on a scale so immense it’s difficult to visualize. The systems the food industry has evolved over time all involve lots of haulage and climate-controlled storage. In turn, this has resulted in a long term trend where the average distance our food travels from farm to table in the United States has been growing for decades, and it is already more than 2,000 miles.
It might seem insane that so much energy is consumed and carbon emitted, but the industry obviously believes it is the most efficient way, when all the cold and climate controlled storage give the supply line flexibility to adjust to the nuances of supply and demand.
Guilty pangs of environmental responsibility aside, there are other reasons all this haulage and storage isn’t a good idea: the nutritional degradation of the food and the wastage the current system generates.
From the moment the vegetable or fruit is picked, it begins to degrade nutritionally.
Supermarket fruit and veggies spend weeks, sometimes months in controlled atmosphere storage, which is only part of the reason a third of all fruit and vegetables perishes somewhere in the supply chain to the supermarket. Hence your food costs 50% more than it needs to because of wastage alone, and that’s before you pay for the freight and climate controlled storage.
Cold storage might be adequate for preventing fruit from going mushy and veggies losing their crispness, but it does not prevent the food from deteriorating nutritionally.
Within three days of picking, most produce has lost at least 30% of its nutrients. Spinach can lose 90% of its Vitamin C within 48 hours of harvest. We’re guessing that the food industry knows of these nutritional shortcomings even though spurious “fresh and crisp” advertising catchcry is usually nonsense. That’s the ace in the AGWA feature portfolio – it solves the freshness problem, and ensures you are feeding the only body you have with the best nutrition in can get, instead of eating otherwise identical faux veggies.
AgwaFarm.com
There’s much to commend this invention, and I do think it has “killer app” qualities.
It solves a host of problems, most notably freshness … and for those who might never have actually experienced it, fresh food tastes better.
Source: AGWA
