Sustainable Urban Farm Business
POSTED ON BY ADMIN
02
Aug
Integration of organic food production, retail sales, cafe's and restaurants and energy production
This project was designed for a local Food Giant grocery store owner in Atlanta. We included an anaerobic digester in this project because of the need for power in the adjacent grocery store and proposed processing facility. One of our partners at Bioponica is a professional waste water engineer with extensive experience in design and installation of anaerobic digesters. The scope of this project includes digester, power facility to offset $250K worth of energy costs, solar panels and a parking lot surface run off lagoon and rainwater rooftop harvesting.
Rooftop solar panels plus rainwater harvesting demonstrates excellent sustainability features with water collection supporting needs for evaporative cooling, anaerobic digestion and greenhouse water top off. Additional benefits of rainwater are the superior value to the organic hydroponic urban farm. The community also benefits with rainwater harvesting and re-use as the large surface area discharges a lot of storm water with each downpour. Power needs are also great as processing equipment utilizes a lot of energy and needs for hot water.
Schematic of the integrated features of rainwater, anaerobic digestion, methane powered boiler, hot water, leachate processing with nutrients to greenhouse and electrical energy distribution.
Ponics Cafe and Juice Bar with public view of the entire greenhouse complex. A cafe and juice bar located at the same place as a grocery is good for business. It attracts customers to shop at grocery and it also proves valuable as profits are good when produce is sold as a prepared food for site down dining.