The LED lights are a key part of the farm's magic. They allow Shimamura to control the night-and-day cycle and accelerate growth. "What we need to do is not just setting up more days and nights," he says. "We want to achieve the best combination of photosynthesis during the day and breathing at night by controlling the lighting and the environment."
Shimamura says that the systems allows him to grow lettuce full of vitamins and minerals two-and-a-half times faster than an outdoor farm. He is also able to cut discarded produce from 50 percent to just 10 percent of the harvest, compared to a conventional farm. As a result, the farms productivity per square foot is up 100-fold, he says.
The Tyddyn Teg cooperative has eight members and some lovely volunteer helpers. We share a commitment to the importance of quality local food and the challenges of sustainability in the twenty first century. We see ourselves as part of the global family of small farmers and aim to become a practice based centre for research and education for sustainable local food production.
Our primary objective has been to maintain vegetable production and meet the needs and expectations of our veg box customers. In this we have had a great deal of help and advice from John and Pippa (who were the previous owners of the farm). We are also supplying vegetables to Moelyci Shop and Dimensions Shop in Bangor.
Our aims over the coming years are:
Expand and improve our vegetable growing
Develop the Farm to support WWOOFing
Create new spaces for events
Open opportunities to have a small scale restaurant/cafe on the farm
Establish a luxury camping business where people can come and stay
Provide a living wage to every member of the cooperative
"SensorAide is a web remote monitoring platform for Wireless Sensor Networks, specialized for agriculture and farming. SensorAide stores data on the cloud and provides visual meaningful and actionable real time representations. "
found by Yasir on Startup Chile
Recommended by Billy Smith (via Mastodon):
The Astralship runs a rural hackspace in Wales, and are partners/co-members with the farming co-operative.
They're explicitly working on OSHW to improve their farming methods.
Contact Liam Kurmos and Aglae.