Editor’s note: We’re chronicling how tech is changing the way we eat and drink as we lead up to this fall’s Food Loves Tech. Our annual deep dive into appropriate food and ag technologies returns to Industry City on November 2–3, 2018.
Ask five people about indoor agriculture and you’re likely to get five different and possibly even conflicting answers. AgTech X is hoping to create a community around those discussions while clearing up some of the confusion and they’ve got a new pop-up exhibit launching at Governor’s Island this August to help.
“We’re trying to make it a place where people can experience indoor farming and engage with different systems,” Ag Tech X co-founder Ricky Stevens said. “We’re not saying that this is the future of agriculture but that it can be one node of a larger system that’s more sustainable, more resilient.”
Sponsored by Tower Farms, the exhibit inside a shipping container, will be on Governor’s Island (home to the Billion Dollar Oyster Project, a GrowNYC teaching farm and Earth Matter’s compost center). It’s just one of the things that AgTech X has been working on since opening up their urban agriculture co-working space a little over a year ago.
AgTech X quickly outgrew its Williamsburg space and moved into the offices of co-founder Henry Gordon-Smith’s business, Agritecture Consulting, where they have room for twelve coworking members. The company also realized that they needed to refine their membership and now focuses specifically on entrepreneurs and small startups that already have ideas and/or projects in the urban agriculture space they are working on.
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They are, however, still heavily invested in teaching people about and creating networking around urban agriculture and launched a series of classes and workshops, including one taught by Yemi Amu of Oko Farms to help accomplish that goal.
“We discovered there are lots of topics that people wanted to know about and we had a lot of connections to urban agriculture experts so we could bring them in to lead a class,” Stevens said.
The classes which start at $25.00 and normally last for 90 minutes are on various topics such as “Intro to Hydroponics & Urban Agriculture in NYC,” “Building an Urban Farming Business,” and “Building the Rooftop Farm: Advice from a Structural Engineer.” You can check out the full calendar and register on the AgTech X website. They’re also looking for people who want to teach classes, too.
