FarmCity

Inspiration

Amrinder grew up surrounded by broad-acre farming in Australia. He saw the impacts of climate change on decreasing yield and wellbeing. Passionate about finding a way to innovate, he started looking into regenerative agriculture. When he came to London, he met Nicole, whose Singaporean background made her especially attune to food security issues.

Together they started exploring controlled environment agriculture.

What it does

Farmcity converts abandoned and unused commercial floorspace around London into vertical farms to meet the high volume demands of local supermarkets and restaurants.

Challenges we ran into

1. Few of our team members had limited knowledge about the agricultural landscape and the advancements. Hence, we had to spend some time in building that understanding
2. We realized that the business was capital intensive. Hence, we had to spend a lot of time on researching ways we could utilize to fund the business

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe our team has come up with a solution that reduces waste in a unique and creative way while improving social value. We have learned so much about the vertical farming industry and have come away inspired by its potential in securing food supply, engaging communities and improving mental wellness in cities.

What we learned

We derived a business model to monetise vertical farming, build a brand whilst also being a social enterprise by helping communities learn about agriculture. We believe our team was very well-rounded where we had deep expertise in vertical farming, design, engineering and economics which enabled us to learn from each other. We learnt to think practically about a business while being creative.

What's next for FarmCity

We plan to do more industry research on the funding that we will need to get started and start speaking to TfL to understand the feasibility of utilising their network of underused tube stations. We want to understand which is the suppliers of vertical farming technology and explore different ways that we can make the business more sustainable and have a net zero carbon footprint

Built With

• business