It has been a while since we posted a progress report. We finally have a good balance of fish and plants in our system. Sixteen blue gill are very active and alive which is a great sign! The plants are also doing well, but there is a lot of room for improvement. We recently harvested the iceberg lettuce, and we continuously harvest tomatoes and cucumbers. Tomatoes and cucumbers are definitely good vegetables for the AutoMicroFarm, if you’re focused on high yield. We will not, however, plant more iceberg lettuce due to a much lower output with a large space requirement. Below are some progress pictures:  

Tomatoes and Cucumbers (1) plant each.

Fish: (16) Blue Gill

Harvest of Lettuce.

Recently, I saw a tweet that fit in perfectly with this post that we’ve been writing:

It’s 2017, and your startup is wildly successful. How is the world different?

Well, Jason, we’re glad you asked, because boy do we have a story for you.

By 2017, we hope that a sizable percentage of rural, suburban, and even urban houses with a bit of space or a refurbished roof have AutoMicroFarm systems (or something similar). And, these systems are providing the vast majority—up to 90%—of healthy, delicious, and organic food for their households. We’ve made three conceptual sketches of what AutoMicroFarm products might look like integrated with houses. Each drawing assumes a household size of four adults. Of course, if there are more or less people, the number of systems would be scaled accordingly.

The first concept is a rural home, where the relatively large amount of land allows the system to be housed in a stand-alone enclosure.

The second concept home is in a suburban location where the attached enclosure contains the AutoMicroFarm systems (this works equally well for rural households). In fact, this concept is probably the most favorable of the three, since it puts the growing food literally a few feet from the table, yet is simpler than a rooftop system, shown in the last concept.

The last concept shows the AutoMicroFarm systems on the roof above the garage; although they could have just as easily been placed elsewhere on the roof. This concept is for homes that have very little land, and the 400-500 square feet that receive the needed amount of direct sunlight are not to be found elsewhere.

Below is a rendering of one AutoMicroFarm unit, large enough (~50 square feet growing space) to provide 90% of the food for one adult. Please keep in mind that this is a concept rendering; no plumbing, pumps, siphons, etc. are shown and the first prototype (not to mention the final product) will look a lot different.

Update: you can view higher-resolution images at our g+ page here.

We’re making nice progress on our proof-of-concept prototype, as can be seen from the other blog posts, and are starting to design our first “real” prototype, now that we have some ideas on how to make a convenient, easy-to-set-up, and easy-to-maintain aquaponics system. We are as committed to open-sourcing as ever, and will post designs for download as soon as we feel we have something useful.

But more importantly, we would like to validate our market. One way we are doing that is chatting with early adopters about their pain points and solutions they use to work around them. If you feel you are in this category of aquapons or gardeners, please contact us (just enter your email at our main page) and we’ll set up a time to chat on skype or google hangout.

Right before the second harvest.

First prototype of AutoMicroFarm. 

The purpose of our first prototype is to test our hypothesis that an aquaponics system can achieve a harvest yield of 50 ~ 100 kg/m^2 annually from the system. It was a relatively quick build, which we have a lot of learning experiences from. One of the biggest things we learned was that any changes to barrel-ponics proved to be more trouble than they were worth. Our next prototype will be modularized and built so we could make changes on the fly and test out different ideas without too much trouble. Below I wanted to summarize in a few points our progress and experiences (good and bad) of the first prototype. 

• Infrequent water chemical measurements led to a false confidence that our system was cycled properly. (This paper talks about cycling the system, otherwise known as starting a biofilter). This wasn’t the case, and as the system cycled with the fish, it led to fishkill… typical newbie mistake, don’t do that at home kids!
• Low temperatures made the first harvest very small: took 3 months to achieve 130g.
• As soon as the temperatures went up, in two weeks, the harvest went up to 240g in just ONE vegetable bed.
• After enjoying several high-yield weeks, the nitrates went down, as the now fishless system finished cycling and the plants took up the nitrates; and consequently the yield went down.
• We bought  and caught more fish to get the cycle working again. We had a few more fish die; we’re working on figuring out what happened there (it wasn’t the nitrogen getting out of balance this time).

We’ve been working on our elevator pitch for AutoMicroFarm; this is what we’ve come up with.

AutoMicroFarm is solar panels for your food: an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software.

Key Features

• Grow 90% of your food (organic vegetables, fruits, fish, nuts, and beans) in an area the size of a two-car garage.
• Spend significantly less time than traditional gardening.
• Save 90% of your current grocery costs with a system that pays for itself within two years.

Technical details

AutoMicroFarm  is an automated, open-source aquaponic system. We are using the WikiSpeed extreme manufacturing model to quickly iterate to an optimum solution, while exploring other ideas as we come up with them.

Recently, I saw Food, Inc., a documentary film that brings up concerns with our food growth. The health and safety concerns brought up by the documentary about how our food is really grown, made an impact on me to make a change. A change where I would be in control of what I ate. In today’s world growing our food has dramatically changed and resulted more about business and making a large profit with little attention to health and safety concerns. The food industry is monopolized by huge multinational corporations that genetically modify the food to increase quantity.

At AutoMicroFarm, we would like to change the food you consume to a healthier option. You’re in control of what you eat by growing it yourself and controlling the environment condition without the sweat of a constant gardener. AutoMicroFarm is a easy process of growing your food that will be organic and fresh right out of your own back yard to the kitchen. Concern about yard space? Don’t be alarmed as AutoMicroFarm will not need much space to grow your food.

AutoMicroFarm uses an already known and tested method known as aquaponics. This is why we are here. We are here to offer an open-source aquaponics solution to the public. 

Continue to follow our blog to see the results of our experience with building the AutoMicroFarm, as well as plans, designs, instructions, and eventually orders for setting up your own AutoMicroFarm.

I’ve finally gotten around to posting a blog post on the first AutoMicroFarm prototype. The prototype is a modified barrel-ponics system, with a few modifications. The photos are roughly in the order of constructing the prototype.

In hindsight, I probably should not have done the modifications, since they took up a lot of time, trial and error, and did not contribute towards answering the important technical questions that I set out to answer on the prototype. The greenhouse is also turned out to be a large time and money sink, but it did make it possible for me to start during the winter months.

My main goal is to see whether it’s possible to attain at least 20 lbs/ft^2 annually. This comes out to 0.6 lb/day in my 11 square foot grow beds. I’ll track the yield, as well as other metrics of the prototype, in a spreadsheet that I’ll link to on the blog.

Welcome to the official AutoMicroFarm blog. You probably won’t be too shocked to find out that we, the AutoMicroFarmers, will blog here.

In the meantime, feel free to checkout Andrew’s thought process of coming up with the AutoMicroFarm here.