Perfect plans: Ebony Walden describes her skills as a mix between creative catalyst and community builder. The urban planner, consultant, and facilitator, who has been transforming communities for over a decade, will speak on the theme of transit at the next Creative Mornings gathering. Expect Walden to challenge your brain’s muscle memory with her infectious, authentic strategies. “Art, technology, good questions, thought-provoking activities, and focused discussions are just a few ways I will keep you engaged,” she says.
Tag: technology
Soon, you might not need a green thumb to farm continually fresh greens at home. For that matter, you might not need a garden, at least not in the traditional sense.
For that, you can thank Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith, two recent UVA graduates who have developed a series of hydroponic micro-farms that are already in use commercially here in Charlottesville.
Babylon Micro-Farms sprung from a challenge UVA professor Bevin Etienne posed in his social entrepreneurship class, in which students were asked to develop a product to help refugees, something with high impact and a low price tag. Something that people would be able to download an open-source design for and make on their own.
In the research process, Olesen says he got “very hooked” on the idea of hydroponics—a method of growing plants without soil—and how it has the potential to use significantly less water than conventional agriculture and grow crops twice as fast.
Olesen quickly realized that there was nothing available to the average consumer interested in trying this game-changing way of growing food. Hydroponics systems are largely limited to massive consumer operations, and worse still, inaccessible to people in developing countries and communities who could benefit greatly from such a product.
The initial micro-farm prototype—for which Olesen and Smith teamed up with Hack Cville—turned out to be low-tech and the size of a small car, and the entrepreneurs realized that if a community doesn’t have access to food, it’s not likely to have access to pH monitors, nutrients, and everything necessary to make the hydroponics system work, either. “Everything we’ve done since is figure out a way that we can make a platform that allows anyone to engage in hydroponic farming regardless of their background or expertise,” says Will Graham, Babylon Micro-Farms’ director of marketing and sales.
Olesen, who graduated this past spring, spent the summer with Darden School of Business’ iLab, refining the product and securing grants from the iLab and UVA Student Council’s Green Initiatives Funding Tomorrow program, as well as $600,000 from angel investors in order to grow the company from its two founding members to an eight-person operation with a Downtown Mall office. To better serve the customers the company has in mind, it has developed the technology to make the mini farms run themselves. “It’s plug-and-play,” says Graham—at least for the consumer.
“The farm grows crops from seed-to-harvest with no need for maintenance, bringing produce closer to…the consumer. Most of what you buy from grocery stores has been picked days ago and is leaching [nutrients], so you’re getting a more nutritious end-product this way.” – Will Graham
Babylon Micro-Farms provides pre-seeded trays to be placed into the farms, which are big, clear cabinets with four levels of shelving. Each shelf holds beds for seed trays, and each bed is lit from above with special bulbs that give crops a continually perfect sunny day. Once the pre-seeded trays are in the cabinet-farm, technology does the rest of the work.
“In this controlled environment, you’re giving [the crops] the concentrated nutrient profile they’d be taking from the ground, but in a solution form, and with optimized lighting” and more, says Graham. The conditions inside the cabinet are all monitored and regulated by the system, which assesses, among other things, the pH (acidity) of the water/nutrient solution, carbon dioxide levels, air temperature, and humidity, and adjusts accordingly, depending on what’s growing—micro-greens, leafy greens, herbs, edible flowers, fruits, or vegetables. The system will even stagger harvests so the crops ripen in waves, ensuring dozens of heads of lettuce won’t ripen at once, but a few at a time, just as they’d be eaten.
“The farm grows crops from seed-to-harvest with no need for maintenance,” says Graham, “bringing produce closer to the end goal, the consumer. Most of what you buy from grocery stores has been picked days ago and is leaching [nutrients], so you’re getting a more nutritious end-product this way.” Currently, there are a few Babylon Micro-Farms apparatuses installed in kitchens around town. There’s one at UVA’s O-Hill dining hall, and another at Three Notch’d brewery, where Executive Chef Patrick Carroll has been impressed with its output. “We love our micro farm from Babylon,” says Carroll of the unit, which is visible from most spots in the restaurant and brewery. “It always excites us to harvest creativity by truly growing local greens. It adds an extra wow factor as guests walk into the restaurant.”
Babylon Micro-Farms is also working on a self-sufficient hydroponic farm at Boar’s Head’s Trout House, one that will provide salad greens, herbs, peppers, and tomatoes, all “exclusive heirloom varieties from the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants” at Monticello, to help provide food for the resort, says Graham. They’ll be installing a micro farm in the new Cava location on Emmet Street in October as well.
All of this condensed growth in three short years is as impressive as the accelerated growth seen in Babylon Micro-Farms’ machines, says Olesen. But the company hasn’t forgotten its roots. Babylon Micro-Farms has teamed with Etienne’s climate resilience lab at UVA, working to develop concepts for low-cost and portable systems, such as a fold-out farm that collapses to the size of a rain barrel and can be sent to areas of food scarcity for disaster relief; places ravaged by increasingly disastrous hurricanes, for instance. They’ll test the system with UVA’s Morven Kitchen Garden as they work on pilot projects on Caribbean islands devastated by last year’s Hurricane Irma. And for the eager at-home farmer here in Charlottesville? Those systems could be available for order as soon as the end of this year, with a spring delivery, for an estimated cost of $3,500.
Local company Foodwaze creates sustainable food locator app
It’s not hard to hunt down basic information about restaurants. Between Yelp, Google and Facebook reviews, you can find photos, entire menus and lengthy customer reviews from just about every restaurant in town. But what about the component of food and drinks that everyone seems to be talking about? Short of inviting yourself into the kitchen and asking the chef precisely where his meat and produce came from, how are you supposed to know how the food you’re eating out is being sourced?
Enter Foodwaze, a Charlottesville-based startup that wants to provide exactly that information for consumers. Co-founder Michael Reilly, a certified health coach and former journalist who teamed up with his tech-savvy partner Lou Foster to create the website and app, started the company for the same reason a lot of people go into business for themselves: He had a need that wasn’t being met by the market.
“On the surface, it seems like it’s just another app out there to help people find healthy food,” Reilly says. “But really, it’s to help be a catalyst in a lot of the developments happening out there in food and bring those forward.”
Reilly defines “sustainability” as producing and consuming food in a way that promotes health and nutrition, protects the environment and benefits the local economy.
The app and website (both of which require an annual $5 fee for access) are designed to help consumers find places that value and produce food that is sustainable. Users can access background information about restaurants, farms and shops that Reilly has gleaned by personally meeting with chefs and business owners, plus photos and details about where the products come from and the people who are making it happen.
Organic labels and buzzwords such as “farm-to-table” can create a lot of confusion and mistrust in the food industry, Reilly says. It’s easy to slap a sticker on a container of strawberries to make consumers feel better, but Reilly wants the Foodwaze brand to become recognizable and trustworthy.
“When you really look at the word sustainability, it’s the opposite of our industrial food system,” he says. “There are so many organizations that are working hard to make that shift, from farms to restaurants to nonprofits. What we’re trying to do is connect those efforts better to the consumer. A lot of those efforts aren’t really going to go anywhere if consumers don’t know where to find this food and if they don’t trust what they’re getting.”
An apple a day
It’s that apple time of year again, y’all. Virginia Cider Week rolls around every fall, and as the commonwealth’s apple and cider industry continues to expand, so do the Cider Week festivities.
Beginning on Friday, November 13 and stretching until Sunday, November 22 (we use the term “week” loosely), cideries and restaurants across the state will host tastings, dinners, pairings and other events to celebrate Virginia’s favorite fruit.
Local events include cider tastings at Whole Foods and Beer Run, a home cidermakers workshop at Fifth Season Gardening, cider-centric food at Firefly all week and a food truck takeover hosted by Hill & Holler at Adventure Farm in Earlysville on November 15.
For more information, check out ciderweek va.com.
Categories
Cheers and fears: Locals weigh in on drones
In March 2013, Charlottesville was the first city in the United States to pass an anti-drone resolution, which declared Charlottesville a No Drone Zone. This moratorium ended July 1 and—you guessed it—the drones are here.
Darren Goodbar, an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, pilot in the Air National Guard, served overseas in Afghanistan as an operations manager for several aircraft. On September 14, he began working for Draper Aden Associates, a consulting engineering firm in Charlottesville, as the director of aerial services. His big idea: aerial surveying and mapping by drone technology.
“As surveyors and engineers, we’re just super excited to be able to see our entire site from a planning perspective,” says Kris Caister, the Western region survey manager at Draper Aden, “but also to work toward creating that survey-grade data so that we can do the good work to help out the community and our clients.”
Aside from using aerial technology for surveying, Goodbar says he’s also interested in providing area mapping and imagery after a natural disaster. For instance, if the city is hit by a derecho, and if communications are down and roads are flooded, he says, “I can be up in the air and survey Charlottesville and the county really quickly.” He says he would then be able to feed that data back to an emergency management department instantly, rather than trying to send an employee out in the dangerous environment. Drones must fly within the pilot’s visual line of sight, which is usually about half a mile from the launchpad.
Other local emergency services are considering the implementation of drone technology, including the Charlottesville Fire Department and Albemarle search and rescue teams.
Former Charlottesville Fire Chief Charles Werner, who has a longtime interest in drone technology, says they can be used for pre-fire planning by providing images of buildings and roofs, which could later be used for reference during a fire.
“It also allows a photo capture of unit locations and fire conditions at separate times that can be used for comparison and for later incident critique and training,” he says.
Werner recalls that a drone from Virginia Tech was used in the search for Hannah Graham. Albemarle County Sheriff Chip Harding says his search and rescue teams are interested in the technology, as well.
“We’ve had several searches where even the mapping didn’t indicate small bodies of water that I’d like to have known about sooner than I did,” says Harding. He is concerned with the privacy regulations that come with flying a drone, and the department is working to learn more about the rules of flying unmanned aerial vehicles.
“There’s not much privacy left,” says the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead, who was involved with passing Charlottesville’s initial anti-drone resolution. He believes it would be beneficial for emergency services to have access to drone technology, but says it would be unconstitutional for police to use the gadgets, without a search warrant, to gather information that could be used against someone in the court of law.
Werner, a drone hobbyist, uses a DJI Phantom 3, which is capable of taking 1080p high-definition photos and 2K resolution videos.
“It was my research and my personal experience with my own drone which validated to me the extreme value that these devices will add to public safety,” he says.
Goodbar says the reason more people aren’t flying drones in more places is the regulatory environment currently in place by the Federal Aviation Administration. Currently, the FAA requires commercial entities to have a special exemption, a certificate of authorization, a registered aircraft and a licensed private pilot.
“That’s one of the big hurdles right now,” he says. “A lot of companies are waiting until that requirement goes away.” Goodbar believes this may no longer be a requirement in the near future.
According to Goodbar, drone technology is already being successfully implemented in Europe by DHL Express—the international express-mail service is experimenting with delivering medicine by drone and eventually hopes to be able to collect mail such as bills, greeting cards and small packages in a payload and deliver it to a remote island, making the sending and receiving of snail mail more effective and more cost-efficient than sending it by a manned aircraft, he says.
“So if you’re living on an island and you want to send a card to grandma or you need to pay your electric bill,” he says, “you give them that and, just like any other post office, they deliver it [by drone].”
In Wise County, officials are also testing the use of medicine delivery by drone. During a test a few weeks ago, Goodbar says a plane landed at an airport and dropped off a box, then a drone picked up the box and took it to a clinic. The next step would be flying the box from the clinic to a person’s household. Though this method isn’t immediately necessary, Goodbar says they’re planning for a potential snowstorm or natural disaster.
On September 12, Goodbar taught a class about drone technology at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and its attendees included people with commercial and recreational interests and drone advocates, as well. He taught about federal regulations, types of drones, flight safety and lesser-known industries that could benefit, such as agriculture and real estate.
Recreationally, Goodbar says there’s local interest in drone racing, called FPV, or first person view racing, where pilots wear goggles that allow them to see from their drone’s eyes and fly through a predetermined course. Red Bull is significantly invested in creating a national racing program in which drones could race at speeds of 75 miles per hour.
“It’s going to be nuts in the next three years,” Caister says about local drone use in general. “And in five years, it’s almost going to be commonplace.”