Feeding a rapidly expanding population without depleting the Earth’s finite resources, is one of the major challenges of the 21st century.
These four entrepreneurs - who have all been selected as the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers for 2019 - have a vision to transform the way we farm in order to help feed the world.
Mini-farms in underground parking lots
In an abandoned car park in downtown Beijing, trays and trays of planting beds are stacked on top of each other.
This is a mini-farm, right in the heart of the city, and it supplies nearby hotels with lettuce, celery, herbs, kale and other green vegetables.

“It’s no longer impossible to grow food where people work and live”, says Stuart Oda, who co-founded the agriculture start-up Alesca Life in 2013, referring to the amount of disused urban infrastructure available, including things such as old shipping containers.

LEDs provide the light, and mineral nutrients are added to water instead of soil. Internet-linked devices monitor humidity, acidity levels and the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, allowing such variables to be adjusted to increase yields.

“Our system allows us to automate all of the major points of human error that could lead to a loss of crop,” Oda says.
Stuart Oda shows his container farms to the UAE’s minister for food security.

The proximity of the mini-farms to the customers means that the produce is fresh, and reduces transport and packaging.

Alesca Life has signed an agreement to distribute 1,000 container farms across the Middle East, Africa, China, and North America.

Oda’s decision to launch his company was prompted by the change he could see happening all around him in China, including rapid urbanization, population growth and land degradation of traditional farms.

“There’s a real sense of urgency to dealing with these challenges and I want to dedicate all my productive years, including my passion and my youth, to addressing them,” he says.

2. Finding a market for ugly fruit and veg

Christine Moseley has witnessed massive food waste at first hand.
During the harvest of romaine lettuce, Moseley watched as 25% of each plant was put into uniform packaging, while the rest was discarded.

“I knew then we had a broken food system. It was my ‘aha’ moment and I vowed not to stop until I found a way for that produce to be utilized for consumption,” she told Forbes.

That was when she decided to start Full Harvest, a B2B platform to sell rather than waste unsightly or unwanted fruit and veg.

Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN.

In the US alone, 9 billion kilos of ‘ugly’ and surplus produce are wasted each year simply due to the cosmetic standards of grocery stores.

4. More productive seeds

“Seeds are the heroes of modern agriculture. If we improve seeds, then we determine how much land, how much water, how much fertilizer will be used,” says Ponsi Trivisvavet, CEO of Inari Agriculture. “We can solve these major environmental problems by going back to the root cause - the seed.”

Read the whole article following the WEF link above