A note from our co-founder Jacob on an ancient idea that somehow still feels new.
There's something about growing food in soil that intuitively feels natural. Hydroponics, by comparison, can sound technological. But the ideas behind it are much older than the word itself.
The word “hydroponics” is less than a hundred years old, from the Greek hydro for water and ponos for labor. In the 1930s, Berkeley plant physiologist William Gericke made headlines growing enormous tomato vines in tanks of nutrient-rich water, their roots directly in the solution, no soil at all.
Outside Mexico City, in a place called Xochimilco, the Mexica built chinampas: extraordinarily fertile growing plots raised out of shallow lakes, surrounded by canals and replenished with nutrient-rich sediment from the water.
People still farm them today, five hundred years later. It's a brilliant system. Technically, though, it's not hydroponics. The plants still grow in soil. The canals keep that soil extraordinarily well supplied with water and nutrients.
For a closer match, travel halfway around the world to Bangladesh. For generations, farmers there have built floating gardens called 'dhap' out of water hyacinth and other organic matter. Crops grow directly in the floating beds. When monsoon floods submerge the land for months at a time, farmers figured out how to grow on the water instead.
The images of these systems are incredible. But what strikes me more than the methods themselves is the ingenuity behind them. People were solving the problem long before anyone thought to give it a name.
For thousands of years, people have looked at the place they lived, the land and water they had available, and figured out how to grow within those constraints. They adapted the way they grew to the way they lived.
Over the last century, our growing cities faced the same basic challenge. And we came up with almost the opposite solution. Instead of figuring out how to keep farms close to us, we figured out how not to need them close at all.
For four decades, from 1910 to 1950, Los Angeles County ranked #1 in agricultural production among every county in America. In the most recent Census of Agriculture, it ranked #817.
Today, our most abundant crop may be aspiring actors. The land didn't become less valuable for growing food. It simply became more valuable for everything else. Studio lots included. Refrigeration, highways, and an increasingly sophisticated supply chain made that possible.
Today lettuce can be grown a thousand miles away, harvested, cooled, packaged, trucked, warehoused, put on a grocery store shelf, and brought home. And yet, somehow, that feels perfectly normal. But normal and natural aren't necessarily the same thing.
I think we've simply confused familiar with natural. Growing a plant a few feet from where you'll eat it, giving its roots the water and nutrients it needs directly, doesn't strike me as particularly unnatural. At least not compared to the alternative.
Maybe the next evolution is using what we know now to make growing fit the way we live now: on a rooftop, a balcony, a patio, or a little patch of concrete.
Growing food close to where we eat it isn't a new idea. Maybe what's changing is simply our idea of where growing belongs.
