Designing Aquaponics for the Home by Daylight + Back to the Roots

Back to the Roots is on a mission to inspire more people to grow their own food. Founded by two Berkeley graduates, Alex and Nik, the company's first product was a little brown box that lets people grow their own gourmet mushrooms using coffee waste. Now, they are launching their second product, a personal aquaponics garden. Created with the help of Daylight's product design and development team, the aquaponics garden is a DIY, closed loop system that takes advantage of the symbiotic relationship of plants and fish. Watch the video to learn more about the product and how it came to life.
daylightdesign.com
www.backtothero...
Transcript:
My name is Alex and this is my boy Nik. We're here in Oakland,
California, and we are on a mission to inspire more people to grow
their own food. Actually it all started out for us a couple years ago
during our last semester at UC Berkeley. We were both seniors, heading
in the corporate world, with job offers I was going into consulting,
Alex was going into investment banking. And a few months before
graduation, we fell in love with this totally random fact that you
could potentially grow gourmet mushrooms on coffee waste. Nobody had
ever tried it, we were the only two crazy kids in the class that went
up to the professor and got more info. Tried out a few test buckets,
literally out of my fraternity, ended up getting $5000 dollars from
our chancellor and at that point said what the heck, give up banking,
give up consulting, full time mushroom farming it is. Since then, we
launched our first product - a mushroom product, a little brown box
that lets people grow their own mushrooms. Since then we realized that
we have absolutely fallen in love with helping people grow their own
food at home. Why is there plants on top of the tank? And today we are
excited to now introduce our brand new product, the personal
aquaponics garden. Aquaponics is a closed loop system that mimics the
symbiotic relationship of plants and fish. The fish they poo and they
pee, and all that waste water gets upcycled and is used as the
fertilizer for the plants. What is really cool is that the plants
themselves clean the water, and pump it back down for the fish. The
best part is that all of this is happening without soil and without
any chemical fertilizer. The plants are grown just on rocks, and all
the nutrients are coming from the fish. And you never have to clean
the water, so it is a self-cleaning tank. We spent the last 8 months
working with the top designers and acquaponics experts to make this a
reality and bring this into homes and classrooms. Aquaponics is
amazing it uses 90% less water than any other farming system, and it
has been used by hobbyists and commercial farmers, but the prospect of
bringing it into homes was really exciting. The challenge was to take
all the thinking and learning of commercial aquaponics and condense
that down into something that was more accessible and educational.

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You may not have heard of Aquaponics, but it is an increasingly popular way of growing your own food at home that doesn't rely on chemical additives and where fish do all the work for you!