LIVE AT STUTTGART - The place we grow our company and crops

As you might know from our very first blog post, farmee has modest goals like reinventing urban food production and solving the future food crisis. We will do so by simplifying smart farming, effectively building an accessible open software and hardware platform to manage and control your farm and crops.

As an early stage startup, we still have to figure out a lot to achieve our goals. And we know, of course, that we have a long way to go. What is already set though, is where we will be while figuring things out. And we’re always open for visitors, in case you’re interested what we’re doing around here.

Growing, together

The old factory building of Leitz, a famous german office supplies company, is located in Stuttgart-Feuerbach. It is currently a huge construction site, since production moved away some years ago. Today, the old building is set to become one of Europe’s biggest Innovation Campuses.

On 36,000 square meters, our friends at LIVE AT WORK are developing their vision of the future of work: shared offices, startup and company spaces, a machine park and a maker’s market place, fitness club, a restaurant, bistros as well as a rooftop terrace to meet, work and enjoy everything LIVE AT STUTTGART – the projects name – has to offer.

A project of this magnitude isn’t done over night and we are more than grateful that farmee is a part of this story from the very beginning, peacefully co-existing on the construction site. While the construction workers are busy getting the other areas ready for new tenants, we have found our base on the seventh floor, together with the corporate startup platform Pioniergeist, their residential startup teams and the startup studio hatchery.

Isn’t that the perfect surrounding to invent the future of farming?

 

Photo by LIVE AT STUTTGART

 

Why is farmee and LIVE AT STUTTGART such a good fit?

A cornerstone of the LIVE AT STUTTGART concept is the close proximity of all tenants on campus and the synergetic opportunities generated, when working together and repeatedly meeting in the community areas.

A basic idea is to create value cycles within the campus, where startups, corporates and artists not only become co-workers, but also inspiring customers or partners in crime.

With farmee, we want to be the first startup to fully embrace this spirit by not only working at the premises, but also becoming a supplier for the campuses restaurant. We already have two prototype racks here, which are currently our base for development purposes, but we’ll make that lab a permanent institution – and always open for anyone interested. Last but not least, we’ll try to install a fancy showroom on-site, suitable for educational purposes and events of any kind.

Today, as you can see in the image below, our base is a bit less glittery, but has all the magic of a fresh start in an inspiring environment!

Hard at work in the farmee office.

To sum it up:

  1. You can visit us anytime, just give us a shout beforehand, so we can safely guide you through the construction site
  2. If you do so, you can see two working prototype racks in our lab as well as witness the birth of our operating system farmee.OS
  3. We have great plans for farmee and LIVE AT STUTTGART, e.g. using the community area to create a showroom and other knowledge touch points to get the idea of open smart farming out there
  4. We’re planning a cooperation with the on-site restauraunt to produce and deliver food that is truly homegrown..

Join us in the forum and tell us your ideas about this place!


So, what is farmee and why the heck should I care?

You should care about farmee because it will revolutionize the way we grow our own food in cities.

Ouch, yes, we used the word revolution in the first sentence of our first blogpost. Is that a good idea? Probably not… But now it’s out there and we can’t take it back, so why not stick to it? We’re on a mission to make smart farming simple. We set out to lower the threshold to the world of sensor- and software-driven farming, making it accessible for you and your mother. If that’s not a revolution, then what is?

Who are we?

We’re a group of five friends sharing a passion for technology, entrepreneurship and great food! We’ve spent the last couple of years founding and running different companies, but ultimately decided to commit ourselves to something really important: food production. We believe, food production should not only be run to huge corporations, so we’re empowering people to grow their own food. But hey: there’s nothing bad in commercial farming per se, plus there are amazing people out there dedicating their lives to developing sustainable yet forward-looking farming methods. We’re absolutely sure there will be commercial farms running farmee software in the near future and we’ll totally dig it!

So, we’re on a mission to make smart farming easy.

Why now?

To date, cities produce nothing but waste. At the same time, more and more people live in cites and overall population is rising to 9.7 billion people by 2050. There is serious doubt there is enough farmland to feed that rapidly increasing number of people. If farmland is unable to expand, we can only rely on technology to increase crop yields and developing areas that used to be unsuitable for food production. Smart farming can achieve just that, as there is no need for soil, natural light and the necessary amount of resources can be reduced to an absolute minimum.

(By the way, if you’re interested in these things and want to know more, here are some good places to start: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/publications/files/wup2014-highlights.Pdf here: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_findings_wpp_2015.pdf and here: How to feed 11 billion people: Addressing the 21st….)

Building our own rack

We’ve been busy building our own prototype grow racks lately and they’re pretty awesome! It’s also a huge pain in the ass to do so from scratch, there’s a shitload of cables, tiny sensors with connector plugs going nowhere, more cables, tubes, water tanks, pumps, led-strips, raspberry pis, more sensors and so on. And then there’s lots of soldering involved, cutting, glueing and even planning in advance. Of course, we’re exaggerating a wee bit and in reality, it’s totally fun and a huge adventure. But, at the same time, we wished there was an existing resource with helpful tutorials and the like, because to be honest: it’s really hard to build a working rack. You have to learn a lot if you’re planning to build your own vertical farming rack and possible points of failure are countless.

So, to cut to the chase, we are going to be that resource. In this blog you will find a ton of helpful content, like our own construction plans, how-tos and featured interviews with experts in different fields (even actual farmers!). We’ll also post thought experiments like plant recipes (more on that later), tailor-made hardware-packages, software-architecture and, on a more general note, the future of farming.

 

Plant recipes

If we’re serious about making smart farming simple, we first need to make farming simple. A lot of folks, ourselves included, know very little about growing plants these days. How much water does a specific variety really need? Which nutrients are important to drive growth? What the fuck is molybdenum? We believe to have an easy solution for that and we call them plant recipes. We’ll get back to these as soon as possible in a dedicated blog post, so if you’re having a hard time figuring out what your plants need: we have you covered!

farmee as a software platform

Plant recipes and prototype racks aside: our core product is going to be a software platform, part operating system, part eco-system. It  has quite some tricks up it’s sleeve: You’ll be able to plan your own farm, choose crops of your taste and combine them into useful zones. You can hook it up to a ton of different sensors and actors to measure conditions like temperature, humidity, PH, EC, ambient light and infrared, as well as trigger actions such as water pumps and lights, for example. It will seamlessly integrate our plant recipes to feed your plants exactly the way they need, without you having to be a farmer yourself. Development for farmee is already in full swing, so it’s hard to summarize all our thoughts in a single paragraph, so stay tuned for more!

That’s it for the moment, make sure to come back next week for more. And from there on: every week!

farmee – smart farming made simple