Our Mission
The World Factbook estimates that 30-60% of the Earth’s population is employed in agriculture around the world[1]. Records show that many of those people spend more than 12 hours per day working on food production, from farmers that rise and set with the sun, to meat factory worker that take increasingly long shifts. In various agricultural industries, food production has increased by 20% or more in the last decade.
And yet, despite this massive investment into agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) estimates that 800 million people (1 out of 9) suffer from regular food shortages and that over 2 billion people (1 out of 4) have micronutrient deficiencies.[2] Indeed, eradicating hunger was the first of the eight Millennium Development Goals[3] that the United Nations hoped to meet by 2015, and is the second of the seventeen current Sustainable Development Goals[4], which the UN aims to achieve by 2030. According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, approximately 11.1% of households across the US were food insecure in 2018, meaning that they did not have enough nutritious food for all household members at some point during the year.[5] Members of such households have a higher rate of health issues due to poor nutrition and have reduced lifespan expectancies.
Pocket ‘Ponics will automate the use of small-scale hydroponics. By leveraging low-cost materials, Pocket ’Ponics greenhouses will be cheaper for the end-user, reducing the cost burden of urban agriculture. (When Pocket ‘Ponics is available for end-users to buy, they will be sold on a buy-one-give-one model; the cost that an individual user pays will purchase a second greenhouse that will be donated to lower-income families) Similarly, the greenhouses will be easier to set up than a traditional garden, with a plug-and-play approach that has become so popular with IoT devices. The user-friendly app and the Pocket ‘Ponics server will allow the greenhouses to automate many of the time-consuming tasks of hydroponics and provides notification and direction every step of the way. Basically, Pocket 'Ponics will be like the IKEA furniture of urban agriculture; it will be easy to set up and simple to run, requiring no specialized knowledge and containing all of the instructions needed. Pocket ‘Ponics will be easily accessible to everyone, regardless of background.
[1]"Labor Force – By Occupation". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived in the Wayback Machine from the original on 22 May 2014. Retrieved 13 Sept 2019.
[2]“FAO and Post 2015.” FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015, www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/266124/. Retrieved 13 Sept 2019.
[3]“United Nations Millennium Development Goals.” United Nations, United Nations, www.un.org/millenniumgoals/. Retrieved 13 Sept 2019
[4]“United Nations Sustainable Development.” United Nations, United Nations, 2015, www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/. Retrieved 13 Sept 2019
[5]”Household Food Security in the United States in 2018”, ERR-270 Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew P. Rabbitt, Christian A. Gregory, and Anita Singh. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2019. Retrieved 13 Sept 2019