The Problem with “Disrupting” Gardening
I recently came across “Grove,” an in-home “aquaponics” system designed (like so many other gardening innovations) to bring your garden indoors and something something “elegance” something something “ecosystem.”
The co-founder of the company (after some stunningly egregious claims that he’s come up with these ideas) goes on to say that:
The Grove Ecosystem, our flagship product, captures the essence of the ecological approach to growing food and brings it down to a scale where people can practice it in the home and the classroom. The Grove Ecosystem is truly an ecosystem — a set of plants, animals, and microbes that work in symbiosis to grow food for us humans, the keystone species of the Ecosystem. At the highest level, here’s how the Ecosystem works: we feed the fish, who feed the microbes with their waste, which feed the plants with organic nutrients, which feed us greens, herbs, and fruit. This method for growing food is called aquaponics and it is a great example of an ecological approach to growing food.
There are a number of similar devices on the market (as a quick Google search reveals), but Grove is couched in the lingo of “innovation.” They want to start a “revolution”:
We can harness powerful new technologies, like efficient LED lights that mimic the sun and sensors that make gardening and growing food delightful and easy. We can design products and services that inspire city-dwellers to grow their own food using controlled environment techniques (like greenhouses and entirely artificially-lit indoor gardens). We can distribute food production while also inspiring people to be involved with what they eat, and to care about where it comes from and how it was grown.
A visit to their official website underlines the Silicon Valley promise of “more for less.” No need for all of that boring “learning how to do it and building it” stuff — just order Grove and…
“Skip the mundane setup and get right to the fun part…aquascaping!”
Don’t want to take the trouble to “read up” on how to run an aquaponics system? No problem — Grove even offers an app that takes care of everything for you, from turning on the LEDs to reminding you when filters need cleaning. “It’s so easy!”
Great, so let’s suppose you buy into this “innovation” and decide you’d like to order it. You visit their website and click the “purchase” button, and then see this….
Let’s see that again.
This is FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS.
But don’t worry — you can pay in monthly installments of $199 until it’s all paid off!
And this is the essence of the problem, right here: these “garden innovations” are all for rich people. You know what else you can buy for $199 a month? GROCERIES.
Look, there’s no “app” for it, but if you really want an herb garden, or to grow some tomatoes, you can buy some flower pots, some decent potting soil, and some seeds for like $30. If you live someplace where you don’t have room to grow stuff, but you want to grow stuff, you could look into a community garden. Hell, a little research and some tools and you could make one of these for a couple of hundred dollars.
Hey, if you want to sell rich people ‘boutique’ aquaponics systems so they can feel good about growing tomatoes in their living room, that’s one thing. But trying to sell people $4500 all-in-one aquaponics systems because they’re “innovative” and “revolutionary” and “world-changing” comes reeeeeally close to crossing the line into “scam” territory.
I could go on, about how indoor food systems only tend to work well at a large scale and may be terrible for the environment, and how they usually produce food that’s not terribly nutritious like lettuce and herbs. I could get even more philosophical, about how these indoor “food revolutions” (like Kimbal Musk’s latest foray into “disrupting agriculture”) actually separate us from nature and the processes found in ecosystems. Why worry about climate change and ecosystem health when you can grow your lettuce in a discarded shipping container, after all?
But, sometimes you need to look at the basics. Food distribution is a social justice issue, and if your “gardening revolution” isn’t accessible to people without money, or phones, or access to the app store, or a place to put an aquaponics system, it’s not a revolution at all.
Never take an “innovator” at face value, especially one claiming to solve all of the world’s food problems. I predict, and kind of hope, that ten years from now 95% of these “Groves” will be taking up space in garages and storage units, covered in dust (or scavenged for parts). Probably next to laundry-covered exercise bikes. Fingers crossed.
