Urban Farming with Shipping Containers- Insights from a TEDx Talk by Stuart Oda

Inspiration comes from a number of places, but for Stuart Oda of EDN (Everyday Nutrition), his inspiration was derived from seeing hungry children while traveling throughout India. The eyes of the starving children he witnessed haunted him and also inspired him to find a solution to create commercial scale quantities of food within a small footprint.

The solution he found rested within cargo containers. Their abundance, small size, and mobility offered the key components he was looking for to achieve his goal. By retrofitting cargo containers into shipping container farms, he and his team would be a step closer to accomplish their goal of tackling world hunger. Not only would they have a source for food, but they would also have a solution that could be implemented anywhere and more importantly directly where the food was consumed.

Their shipping container farms offered a solution that uses one hundred times less land than a traditional farm, twenty times less water and fertilizer, low labor needs and no heavy machinery or pesticides.

They installed a vertical racking system with recirculating hydroponic channels, high efficient LED lighting and a robust insulation and airflow system. They tie this in with a monitoring and automation system and a task management app. Their farm is state of the art to say the least.

Their system is so efficient in terms of water use that it is able to water up to 3,000 plants with about a much water as you used today in your daily shower. Not only does it save water, but it also reduces the amount of chemicals or pesticides used in farming, allowing them to produce clean food, while also removing the negative impacts that traditional farms have on the environment.

Their current farm is structured on a roof top in a parking lot in Beijing. This farm produces up to 50 kilograms of leafy greens per week and looks to be proof that you can use cargo container farming as a way to bring produce directly to the people it will feed.

EDN has a goal to not only bring shipping container farms to large cities, but to arid desserts and even the moon. They believe they have a solution to solving the world hunger crisis, while also being ecofriendly.