Chicfarm: www.chicfarm.org: Hydroponics of Floating Bouy

SeaLeaf is a modular hydroponic unit that can grow vegetables while floating like a buoy. Four former students at the Royal College of Art and the Imperial College, London, designed the new system of growing produce with this challenge in mind. Instead of relying on fields, it uses oceans.
A team of engineers has designed a hydroponic module that could shift urban farming from the rooftop to the sea.

Students at the Royal College of Art and the Imperial College, London, Roshan Sirohia, Jason Cheah, Sebastiaan Wolzak, and Idrees Rasouli, have created SeaLeaf, a modular hydroponic unit that can grow vegetables while floating like a buoy. The team has demonstrated in at least one test that it can grow seven to eight yields of bok choy a year, while conventional farming only produces two or three. Because 18 of today’s megacities currently sit on coastlines, the team envisions a network of climate-resilient SeaLeaf farms that can feed millions of people. In theory, the farms would only be as far as a kilometer from the nearest pier.

SeaLeaf runs on solar cells and is made of recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE), but was inspired by traditional means of farming on water in Bangladesh. There, farmers have been constructing floating farms on beds of bamboo and water hyacinth to accommodate floods for hundreds of years. But because SeaLeaf controls for the amount of sunlight plants are exposed to through its “smart lid,” the tool could be used in a number of locations, even under harsh exposure to the sun.

In fact, no matter it's floating system or Dr. Kratky's non-circulating hydroponics, Chicfarm's patented 7-In-1 complete set has created a 25 pots, 18 yields per year growing shelf for our modern world's home mini farm. For urban indoor farm, our full set hydroponics systems are also proven easy to grow, fast to harvest.