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12 minutes ago15 min read

Growing Tomorrow: Farming Innovation Builds Community

We explore how farming innovation is reshaping our relationship with food and each other. From LA's community farming initiative turning front yards into neighborhood food sources, to innovative hydroponic systems bringing agriculture into grocery stores, to the remarkable Global Seed Vault preserving our agricultural heritage – we discuss solutions making food production more accessible. While examining barriers like HOA restrictions and water rights, we also discover how these “alternative” methods are actually returning us to more traditional, community-centered ways of growing food. Join us as we “dig in” to the future of farming, from your windowsill to your local supermarket.





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Episode Transcript:

Raakhee: Welcome to Signal Shift, by Horizon Shift Lab. We're your hosts, Lana Price, Raakhee Natha, and Sue Chi. Each episode, we explore the latest signals in technology, culture, and society, uncovering insights that will impact our daily lives in the future. Join us as we shift perspectives, explore possibilities, and delve into real changes in our world. Curious to learn more? Go to horizonshiftlab.com.


[0:40]


Raakhee: Hello and welcome to Signal Shift. I'm Raakhee Natha and I have Lana and I have Sue here today.


In the past, we've spoken about things like pandemics and emergency preparedness, we've even spoken about crazy food experiences like eating in space and I'm sure like everyone else, you have found us whining about the problem with our food systems often, very often.

But today we wanted to focus on the more exciting, the more optimistic, the more encouraging side of food and our food systems and I think also a side that hopefully as we'll see today will highlight maybe some of our agency in this realm, too.


So today's topic is all about innovative and new ways of farming, whether it's at the commercial level or even just gardening in your own backyard. So yeah, let's get into it today. Who wants to share first?


[1:47]


Lana: Well, since you mentioned gardening in your yard, I'll go since that's what mine is about.

And my signal is from a recent story in the New York Times is about an organization called the Crop Swap LA, which transforms yards and unused spaces into micro farms. And so it runs three front yard farms that provide organic fruits and vegetables each week to 80 families, all that live within a one mile radius and who in this neighborhood who often have kind of food insecurity.


And so this was started by just one person, Jamiah Hargins, who's just started growing food in his garden. And he was producing so much food that he started to swap with other gardeners who also had excess of what they were growing, you know, so he had excess vegetables and someone else had excess fruit and they would trade. And so then sort of had this idea to join forces to become a nonprofit. And so they it's hyper local. And there's also neighborhood volunteers who help with the weekly harvest.


And so it's a really a wonderful story, but also, you know, in terms of, it does recognize that, you know, it takes a lot, it takes a huge investment to convert a yard into a farm. There's like solar paneling, irrigation systems, and of course, all of the labor.

And so I felt very inspired by the story.


And one of the things that I learned that I didn't know is that there are laws about whether or not you can have a front yard garden in each city or each state, right. And so, like, for example, I checked in Oregon, so one of the main issues is water rights. And so you have to have water rights to use surface water or groundwater, and then local zoning laws and ordinances, you know, like if you have like a HOA, for example, can impact your ability to grow vegetables at home.


And so, you know, I think I'm really, I'm really interested in our discussion today because food, food prices are expected to go up. Unfortunately, 2025 there are expected rises in grocery prices, restaurant prices, beef, pork, and eggs because of the bird flu, as we've talked about.


And so, you know, I think some of these questions and decisions that people might have about, you know, whether they should start doing something like this, I think is very, very valid. But yeah, so that's, that's my signal, this is from Crop Swap LA.


[5:00]


Raakhee: So much to dig into there, would love to get into it. Yeah, I think I'm going to share mine next, and then Sue will have you after.


I guess I'm, yeah, I'm really excited about this one, so I'm going to share this. But I've been so interested in this topic for the longest time because it's such a cool term and I was like, ooh, I want to know more about it, but it's really hydroponics.


And hydroponics is a way of growing plants using a water-based nutrient system rather than soil. You do have to add certain kinds of minerals and nutrients to some of the systems sometimes, to the water, some of them you can just do water, and it's used to cultivate all kinds of herbs and vegetables, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, you know, those sorts of things. And the thing is that these systems can actually be used by small farmers, by commercial enterprises, and by you and by me, which is what makes it really awesome.


So access to land and access to soil to grow is a challenge for many. Think about people living in Manhattan or Mumbai, right, it's a lot of apartment living we've built upwards. So there's definitely cities like that in the world where I can see this, of course, being a great solution for even somebody living in an apartment, which is really awesome.


What's also really nice is you can grow all year long, right, seasons don't have to affect your growth cycles, which is pretty cool. It actually uses less water than traditional soil based farming. And it offers faster growth and higher yields like 30 to 50%, right, I didn't know any of this.

So discovering this was like, this is all sounding really, really positive.


You do need light, but artificial indoor lighting can be fine. So that's something, you know, you'd have to figure out is around lighting, and a positive thing, of course, is you don't risk soil borne pathogens and insects either, right.


And I'm squeamish, I'm worm-ish, and that is definitely, I think, something that maybe has scared me from gardening to-date, though that is still something I want to do. But this just sounds like an easy, great way to start, right.


It will require power though, because there's a pump that facilitates the movement of water. So you will need power or some sort of mechanism to facilitate that, right. So, you know, just have to keep that in mind.


So yeah, I'm just very interested because it seems so much simpler than traditional methods, and you know, I'm very interested exactly, like you said, Lana, in reducing my grocery bill, and kind of, you know, also reducing packaging in my life. Like, you know, a pack of herbs has to come in a big plastic container sometimes, because they just don't have, you know, the lots that are lying open, and it's so frustrating, like, oh my gosh, this is so much packaging. When my husband and I look at our recycling for the week every week, it's like, it makes me really despondent, because we try every week to, like, reduce and reduce and reduce. And this is just the recycling, just the plastic that comes from our groceries.


So I really like that is a solution to that as well. And this company is like, MyGardyn, and I think GardenTech, and they've become quite popular. And you might have seen their ads. They have home setups for, like, $800 to $1,000, and even some for $100 on Amazon that are selling these systems, right? So they're really affordable, and I haven't tested one, but I think it's going on my Christmas list. I'm like, okay, I'm going to get one of those this year, and I'm going to give it a shot, so I'll definitely kind of report back on how it goes.


 And the truth is that growing plants in water, and even sand culture, they're not new. It actually comes from ancient cultures. We've been doing it for a very long time. It's just, we've popularized it again, which is kind of cool.


But my signal, and I'll make it short, it links to hydroponics. It's actually about a company called SweGreen, and they're based out of Stockholm, and they're taking this hydroponic system, and what they're doing is creating sort of hydroponic setups in supermarkets directly. So in the supermarkets, you have literally like a live hydroponic farming solution. You can see your greens growing. You can come in this week, it's growing this week, next week it's grown, and I pick it from there.


It also means they are not transporting goods there. Yeah, and I mean, each platform that they develop can cultivate up to like three hectares of food that you would do on agricultural land, so it is a good amount. It's really exciting.


And I was just imagining a time where, you know, I can walk into the grocery store. That's how I get my greens. And then I'm a plant-based milk person, so I can imagine machines where I just take the almonds, pop them in, pour my nut milk into my own jug, go home. No packaging.

Anyways, all of this is making the kind of modern and the new grocery store and what we have to look forward to really exciting for me. So that was the core signal for today.


Sue: Yeah, these are great signals, and I will say Raakhee, as someone who's tried a miniature hydroponic garden, it's so wonderful, especially in the cold months, when you want some fresh things at home.


[10:20]


Sue: So yeah, you talked about gardening in your front yard, gardening hydroponically. The question is, what will you grow?


And you know, I love this topic. There's so much I want to talk about. It's essentially a hobby I picked up, you know, during the pandemic, like many, many others, and I've just continued it.

You know, I started with herbs, then easy veggies. Now I have flowers, composting. I mean, now I'm starting to dry my own herbs, like collect, save my own seeds for next year. It's really crazy. You know, nature is really, really amazing.


But anyway, one thing I realized that, you know, what is the reason you garden for, right? There's so many different things. And one of the top ones I have is for diversity, right? So if you go to a traditional grocery store right now, it's very easy to find like a basic cucumber or tomato, and it's like quote, unquote, so basic.


And to me, there's so many different kinds of flavors and textures and visuals that you want to see. And so I love the idea of experimenting with what grows well, what tastes good, what looks good for you and your environment.


But you know, not only is that fun, it's also really important for the future because, you know, as agriculture has gone industrial, we've lost so much of our crop diversity. And so I learned that since 1900, farmers have abandoned three out of every four crop varieties, which means we've lost 75% of our crop diversity.


And you know, it's understandable, like they are favoring things that are more efficient to grow, more productive, even if that means you're reducing the variety you have. And it's less nutritious for us to consume. So in the long run, you know, it's an extremely risky approach, especially with climate change and like all these other contributing factors, and with population growth, we're just going to need other ways to grow food in all of these conditions.


So the signal I wanted to point out this week is that a few weeks ago, the World Food Prize was given out. And this was started in 1986 by Dr. Norman Borlaug. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in global agriculture a long time ago. He's basically considered the father of the Green Revolution.


So anyway, this year's prize was given to the co-founders of, I'm going to mispronounce this name, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. And it was given to these two people named Geoffrey Hawtin and Cary Fowler. You know, they've done many things in their career, but this global seed vault, it's amazing. It's in the Arctic Circle, so it's very far away from everything else. And it's a vault that right now, it's 15 years old. It holds 1.25 million seeds of crops of over 6,000 species from every country in the world. And it includes even countries that are in conflict. I mean, their boxes of seeds are like right next to each other, you know? And the founders are saying this holds 13,000 years of agricultural history in this vault.


It's the world's largest seed library, so if anything happens, we've got backup seeds there to figure out what kind of genetic material we can make new kinds of crops. And it has the capacity to store 2.5 billion seeds. So think of it like a gene bank for all crops in the world.


They've actually used this once already. It provided a set of backup seeds that were destroyed during the Syrian Civil War. And so the lot basically for Syria is now empty because they've sent them all back to Syria and now they're producing new seeds again, and then they'll send more back.


So it's super exciting, you know, and so that's the global seed vault. There's actually a really awesome video I'll post in the links too, just to see what this thing looks like.


But you know, it's the backup system, and most countries have seed savers for them. So in the United States, there's a Seed Savers Exchange, and they also put out a new article, I think it was in the Washington Post, that talked about how they need citizen scientists to help test all these seeds. So I just signed up. You can sign up. They're taking signups until January, and it's called the ADAPT program.


So you know, like, I know farmers down the road, they're launching, they bought a new property just to diversify the seeds that they have and to be able to save it and kind of contribute to this idea of what we grow in the future.


So you know, to me, I'd suggest like, if you're going to try hydroponics or yard gardening, yeah, definitely start out with the things that you love, but also think about like: how can I help diversify what I'm growing and what can I learn from it?


So I think you'll be, you know, helping us out in the next 10 to 20 years when we're really going to need to know what works in our communities. So that was my signal.


Raakhee: Yeah, I've seen the image of this vault, right? It looks like a real proper something out of a movie, right? Which is so cool, but so incredible that they are doing that with the seeds and to hear that kind of the seeds went back to Syria and, you know, they'll come back into the vault. Yeah, that's so interesting. And I think even your mention of the seeds of conflicting countries sitting next to each other. Yeah, something about how nature sits above it all, right? Which is really beautiful.


[16:03]


Raakhee: Yeah, so wow. OK, so so much here to unpack. What is what's coming up?

And Sue, you are the gardener supreme. Guys, so Sue is an amazing gardener. We've seen pictures of like the flowers she's cultivating and stuff. And they are really, they are gorgeous. Something you'd find in like the top-end florist. So, truly, truly. So, yeah, I'm so curious. Yeah, what do you what do you think about some of these signals that's coming up for you? And then Lana, of course, want to hear your thoughts as well.


Sue: Yeah, thank you for that, Raakhee. You know, and that's another reason I garden is like what's really expensive to buy? Really nice flowers. Let me just grow them myself.


So, yeah, a lot of, I understand what the price of things in the grocery store, why more and more people want to start their own gardens. And, yeah, I think just the theme coming up for me is all these, ironically, they're called alternative ways. But really, I think, like you said, Raakhee, they're just bringing back the ways we used to grow our own food and the way we used to cultivate community and agency among ourselves. It's just coming back.


And I think a lot of it has to do with the response of how just, yeah, the food systems just haven't worked out for us. So we're trying to figure out how we can manage in this day and age while things seem so unstable.


I think the big question to me is going back to Lana's signal, which is: what is in the way of us being able to do this? Like before we did these signals, I didn't know that there are a lot of HOAs. Even if your state allows you to garden, HOAs can just completely ban this from where you live. I think also if you're a tenant, a lot of property managers won't allow you to put even pots in your patio, your little deck or whatever.


So there's a lot of systemic biases that are just preventing us from flourishing for these kind of edible gardens or additional produce that you might want. So I think that's what I'm leaning with is like, what are some of those barriers that we didn't even know existed, but now that we're trying to see that there's a lot in our way? How do we help break those down?


Raakhee: So how do we figure this out? How do we balance? Of course our neighborhoods still looking beautiful, but allowing our land to be nourished and rewilded in many ways as well. So yeah, it's a big question there. But Lana, what are you thinking? What's coming up for you?


Lana: I guess in response to that, I'm thinking about victory gardens, which were the thing from World War I and World War II. And those were gardens from private residences and public parks, not just in the US, but UK, Canada, Australia, Germany. And so that was something that was very much government supported, encouraged, because during the war people didn't have as much access to food, so it helped reduce that pressure on the food supply, but also it boosted morale.


So it's kind of this big thing in history, and so it's interesting whether there are some of, if there would be a coming back to that idea, that it's actually something that people could feel good about, and that it will reduce some of the potential anxiety around food prices. And so yeah, so that's a question that I had about that.


And yeah, I just really appreciated that all of our signals were very community-based, and I could even envision, like Raakhee your image of the grocery store and the hydroponics, and having diversity even there. Like it's interesting, it would be fun to think about kind of all of these coming together.


Raakhee: Yeah, totally, this is such, and I could imagine them working in concert so beautifully. Like imagine at these grocery stores, we're also having a conversation with the Seed Vault people, and being like, okay, this is what's different, let's introduce this to our communities, and you know what I mean, like let's start a bigger global conversation about that, because the diversity of food exactly to your point is so important, and it's important to our gut microbiome, right?


Anyone who's working on it knows that you have got to eat a whole range of fruits and veggies, and even with that today, that's so, like you said, Sue, it's come down to like such a basic level. So even with the diversity we try to get, we know we're not getting what would be ideal, with the diversity that even our bodies kind of need.


[21:10]


Lana: This is a random one, but I'm thinking about how beautiful seed catalogs are. I don't know if either of you have looked at a seed catalog. It's remarkable, and so I'm thinking about the seed catalog from the Vault, how amazing that could be to just have, from maybe a design perspective, but also to increase our awareness of just what's out there beyond what we see in our grocery stores. So I'm loving that image too.


Sue: Yeah, I love that. I remember the first time I went picking for asparagus. I had no idea what it looked like coming out of the ground, and I'm like, oh, it looks exactly like the thing you get at the grocery store, but it just made me realize going through all these seed catalogs and like, oh, that's what that looks like before it winds up on my plate.


And yeah, I just love the idea of more and more people knowing where their food comes from, how it's grown, what it looks like, and what it takes, all the labor involved to get it to your home. Because it is quite an effort, and I think the more people that are involved in it, the better, hopefully more fortified it'll become.


Raakhee: Yeah, I love that image. And when we were little, I think in the stores, we'd see more of those seed packets, right? And you think about, oh, they got replaced by like chocolate bars and packets of chips, and it's highly processed stuff. And so maybe we'll see the cycle change. Hopefully we'll see seeds now and be like, grab a packet of seeds or a catalog, at least learn about it, you know, as you leave. So I do, I love that visual.


So yeah, I think thank you both, such amazing signals and definitely something I think, you know, we all want to work on in different ways. And Sue, please keep us abreast of whatever new things you're making. We love seeing it and, you know, we'll definitely share glimpses of that on the podcast.


So thank you both so much and to everybody listening. What are your stories? Do you garden? What do you enjoy gardening? Even send us pictures of your, you know, the stuff you're gardening. We'd love to see it. We love having a conversation about these things that are so important for all of us.


So as always, you'll find us at horizonshiftlab.com. But on any of our sites, even on the podcast channel, you can kind of send us a text, leave us a message. Let us know what you're thinking. We love hearing your thoughts.


So I will leave it at that for today and we will see you again next week. Bye for now.


[23:52]

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