Recently, Paul Graham wrote an essay exploring the concept of a Top Idea:

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it.

This has prompted me to share my top idea with a few people. I had a hard time trying to explain it, so I want to get my thoughts in a blog post and refine them to coherency.

Basically, what I would like to do is to come up with a system that is capable of producing a large percentage of the food an average family needs (70-90% –> several tons) on a relatively small lot size. My inspiration was the Dervais family Urban Homestead, which produces ~6 tons of food per year on 0.1 acres. Unlike the Dervais family, however, I envision my system designed to be largely automated: not requiring more than 0.5 to 1 hour a day of work, on average. Now, I don’t envision a completely robotic system (yet), but I want it to be so that the biggest tasks humans need to do is think.

How will it work in principle? My idea is to use greywater and harvested rainwater, combined with aeroponics aquaponics to grow crops and fish. I’ve been following the progress of one company in particular that sells aeroponics systems: AeroFarms. However, I think that limiting yourself to artificial light does not make sense from the standpoint of the amount of energy needed.

This idea has been bothering for more almost two years now. I think that it’s a seriously great idea: it’s something that would genuinely change the world for the better, if it existed. Because of this reason, I really want to make it happen, but I’m not sure how to start, or what a prototype / minimum viable product would be. Or rather, I started by planting a square foot garden this year. It’s neat, it takes less than half an hour a day, but produces at most a handful of vegetables daily: not quite enough for even half of our family’s food consumption.

I was excited to read about a vertical farming center opening up in Chicago: The Plant Chicago. I really wish something like this existed in the triangle area, but as far as I know, it does not.

To conclude this rambling post: if you know of anyone working on something similar, preferably in the Triangle, NC; please refer me to them, or vice versa. Also, if you have any thoughts on the subject, feel free to let me know :~).