A new way to grow food…

The folks at Omega Garden have created a few different machines that are going to change the way we think about a greenhouse.  Rotating cylinders with a light in the center and plants growing all along the inner side, watered automatically all day long by a controlled gravity drip.  Omega has created models for home/small business and another model for high scale greenhouse operations.  With the commercial sized one you can get 6,600 sq ft of growing space while only using 100 sq ft of floor space.

Currently, the worlds population growth is far outstripping our ability to produce food.  Already there are about a billion people in the world that do not always have enough to eat.  Whats worse is that our government has not caught on with the times and still subsidizes poor factory farming practices that destroy the land, and use far more water while polluting everything around it with pesticides and animal by products.  With the Omega garden and other smarter hydroponic methods of growing food, water use is reduced up to 99% because the water is not lost into the ground and can be recycled.  Furthermore, the machinery is enclosed indoors so the water loss from natural plant transpiration and evaporation are eliminated along with the bugs and the need for pesticides.

The Omega garden goes even further in the conservation than other hydroponic methods as they conserve light energy through the cylindrical design.  Normally, a light would have to be above the plants, and have a reflector above it so that the light moving upwards away from the light would not be lost.  With the cylindrical design, the light is in the center and the plants are growing all around it, giving it 360 degrees of effectiveness.  Using this design, you can get a pound of basil for .38KWh (about 3-5x the yield of standard methods).

With water and farmable land becoming scarcer and our population growing, its ideas like this that are going to keep us from starving……See more at Ecofriend