This month, Sustainable America will welcome the arrival of its new Omega Garden, an innovative rotary hydroponic system, which will serve as one of three indoor, urban agriculture demonstration units showcased in our new Stamford office.
Designed with efficiency, simplicity, and maximum yield in mind, the Omega Garden system is a cylinder-shaped hydroponic system that slowly rotates around a light source. It requires as little as 2 X 3.5 feet of space, but its shape actually provides 20 square feet of growing space with the capacity to grow up to 80 plants to maturity! That same cylindrical design means the plants capture almost all of the lumens emitted by the system’s light source, meaning greater energy efficiency than traditional hydroponic systems.
As the cylinder rotates, it passes plants slowly through a feeding trough where plant medium absorbs only the water and nutrients that it needs. This results in strong, healthy, and pure growth and uses much less water than other methods. Interestingly, the machine’s rotation combined with gravity’s influence, compresses the plants, producing more internodes, or flowering sites, with stronger growth.
Taken together, this unique mixture of features produces a robust harvest. In fact, the Omega Garden team has found that they can get up to 3.5 times more in harvest per plant, on average, and this is all done without the use of any chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. Now that’s impressive.
The system is designed to operate 24/7, 365 days a year, and can be stacked for the more serious home or professional grower. This means that you could convert a spare room or garage into a hydroponic farm and produce vegetables, herbs, flowers or other plants year round to consume at home or sell at farmers markets, restaurants or even to neighbors.
Omega Garden Int., based in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, has been producing patented rotary hydroponics designs for 14 years, and was the first company to bring this technology to the marketplace. The clean technology company aims to change the farming paradigm and address critical world issues of water shortages, usable land for growing, energy conservation, and employment within the food industry with a single green technology.
One of Sustainable America’s core goals is increasing food availability by 50% over the next two decades. At the same time, we are working to reduce oil consumption by 50%. An important piece of this puzzle is growing more food in unique ways in urban settings, close to consumers. The Omega Garden system is one great example of how this could be done, and we’re excited to showcase this cool new innovative product in our forthcoming Stamford “Sustainability Showroom”.
Omega Garden Systems are available for $1,495, plus shipping (generally under $200 in North America), and they are also in the last week of a crowdfunding campaign to raise critical funds to purchase equipment that will manufacture the Omega Garden system efficiently and at high volumes. A percentage of the funds raised will also be used to manufacture gardens for educational institutions so students can learn about urban and hydroponic agriculture and produce fresh, local, organic food for consumption in schools. Click here to learn more about the campaign and/or contribute to their efforts. But hurry! The campaign ends this Friday, April 11, 8 PM.
Stay tuned for the arrival of our very own system, and come visit our showroom to see it in action!
