“This is how you’re going to get people fed when we have no water,” said Mike Straight, chief executive officer of FarmPod LLC, who dreamed up the idea of putting a fully automated aquaponics system inside a shipping container. “This is how you get fed when you have no land.”
Straight and his fiancée, Siria Bonilla, see the pod, the Santa Fe startup’s first prototype, as a common-sense solution to food deserts. New Mexico, where many people live in remote communities far from grocery stores or farmers markets, has some of the nation’s most expansive food deserts. About 300,000 people in the state, or about 15 percent of the population, lack access to healthy foods, according to recent studies.
Inside the shipping container that makes up the FarmPod’s bottom level, fish grow in three large tanks. One tank holds koi and two hold barramundi, a mild-flavored fish, also known as Asian sea bass, that’s popular in Thai cuisine. Water containing the fish’s waste is pumped up to the greenhouse on the second floor, where it trickles down through the vertical towers, feeding the roots of young plants. The clean water circulates back to the fish.
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