What is a refrigerator?

It’s easy to think that it is a modern miracle designed to preserve the freshness of food. But in reality, it’s a morgue for food which is already dead. A refrigerator only slows the decomposition of already dying food. Suddenly that doesn’t sound as appetizing, does it?

What if it were possible to grow and sustain the life of a plant beyond what is reasonable? Nurture growth by creating the perfect context for growth and sustainability of plants? Of course this would revolutionize the idea of the refrigerator, converting it from a morgue into a garden. But, moreover, preserving and extending the life of plants would make it possible for everyone, no matter their economic status to sustain themselves.

To understand why plants die, it's important to understand how they live. A plant needs five essential ingredients to sustain life: air, water, sunlight, Micro and Macro Nutrients and pollinators. We tend to call these things Nature.

But what happens when Nature changes so radically that it no-longer supports these essential ingredients. The World Health Organization has predicted by 2025 1.8 Billion people, 22% of the Global Population will be living in countries with absolute water scarcity. This is all happening in a context where the global population is predicted to quintuple in the next 100 years.

In California alone, one study predicts up to a fifty percent reduction in land suitability for growth of the six main crops, 10% loss in wine grape yields, increase in disease and pests, predicted yield losses for maize, rice, sunflower and tomato, reduced photosynthesis and increased respiration due to loss of the snow pack, heat waves, drought and flooding in the next 40-60 years.

It is clear that we may need to nurture Nature to sustain the growth of our population and the demands for food and clean air. Hydroponics is well understood. Developed by William Frederick Gericke in the 1930’s the science dates back to 600BC with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Today Hydroponics has seen a resurgence and is often touted as the solution to our current predicament. And to some level that is true. But the existing systems for Hydroponics are resource intensive, requiring a constant stream of clean water which after use cannot be completely recycled due to the massive and indiscriminate application of nutrients to the water reservoir.

The current vision of Hydroponics is born from the same expected abundance that nature will no longer provide. Water is our scarcest resource. It also assumes that the environment within which a plant can be grown can be hermetically controlled and consistent. So we set out to create a different ecosystem which provides no more and no less than needed to sustain growth.

Creating a closed loop system that learns why and how a plant grows could create an index of growth would provide a unique map to the nature that each species could follow. By connecting a plant to direct infusion and sensing, we can teach an algorithm to control a system to provide precise amounts of water, micro and macro nutrients and light for each plant. Connecting each plant to this ‘internet of growth’ helps us understand the contexts where the plant thrives and where it does not. This enables the augmentation of Nature around the plant to create the optimum environment.

This not only helps sustain one plant, but can create micro natures around all plants of the same species no-matter-their-context. This helps grow a plant anywhere. In a refrigerator, in space, on Mars, in a basement, in a desert, on a rooftop on a windowsill. It also allows those plants to inform their own growth, so the grower can assume ignorance – essentially gifting green fingers to everyone.

This invention creates the ability to grow plants on any surface, the floor, the walls and even the ceiling without fear of getting drenched by water droplets. This will revolutionize the potential surface area for growth in urban environments, transforming buildings, thoroughfares and transportation. And because it only uses the minimum amount of resources possible it enables the idea of vertical farms without the need to pump extremely heavy amounts of water against gravity.

We’ve gotten to a place of abundance where most can own a refrigerator, the natural next step is for the refrigerator to become smart enough to make things grow.