High-Tech Farming: A Partly Anecdotal Journey from Personal Experience

An Introduction

What I am sharing here is a mixture of personal experience and my training  back in the late 2000s as a biotechnologist. 

I am taking this step to gain practical experience running a hobbyist farm to test out concepts which I know would work in principle and to see how far I can push what I personally consider biologically low-tech farming. 

The high tech part is usually reserved for the mechanical augmentations and chemical adjustments that are done automatically in the farm. 

Hardly anyone talks about the biological high-tech techniques that can be used to apply to farming, these include simple things like plant cell/callus level propagation or complex things like gene editing. 

But these biological means are beyond the scope of this discussion as these are not available methods for the hobbyist or small scale commercial farmer.

What are my aims

Its been a while since I've kept anything alive so my goal was simple: Farm to Table. 

Not many people fully understands the brevity of Farm to Table. 

The effort it really takes to get food onto your table.

Sustainability is key, whether cost, taste, and resource consumption using this method is viable in the long run.

But first things first. I need to get a working farm model to see what works and what doesn't.

First Steps

Intuitively I know the best way forward for a circular farming model is that of Aquaculture (Mix Plant, Aquatic Creature). 

So the first thing I did was to borrow a disused fish tank from my Dad. 

So technically the first farm I started with was a fish tank to model aquaculture; there were fish, plants were aquatic but otherwise the same. I even got to experiment with shrimp who were on poop cleaning duty 100% of the time. 

My key takeaway was that Dissolved Oxygen in the water was a very important parameter that needs to be monitored as were dissolved solids which can be roughly approximated by conductivity, which build up, the overly nutritious broth gave rise to a whole host of problems, mostly algae related. At this point I wasn't using proper measurement tools but was just approximating based off the corrective actions I had to take which settled the problems.

Of course solid waste removal was a problem so I had to have a mixed aquaculture instead of a monoculture if I wanted the whole system to self regulate except for the feeling portion.

After the fish tank stabilized, I moved on to understanding what terrestrial plants needed by growing them first hand.