STRP

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA), indoor hydroponic farming, is rapidly emerging as a way to optimize agricultural production, including increases in both crop yield and crop nutritional quality. Engineering innovations have been applied to all aspects of CEA, from seed germination to plant growth and harvesting. One area that the industry has largely failed to optimize is plant growth substrates (PGS), which are largely still composed of sterile mats of fibrous minerals called “rockwool”. The key objective of this project is to develop a fundamentally unique PGS that is vastly superior to rockwool. This will be accomplished by encapsulating beneficial bacteria within hydrogel soil surrogates to recreate a natural root zone, complete with an intact microbiome. Referred to as MicroBiome-Utilizing Growth Substrates (μBUGS), these materials will host the microbiome within a material that is salubrious to its growth and propagation, while allowing reciprocal diffusional transfer of exudates from growing plant roots to microbes and of microbial metabolites to the plant roots. Based upon customer discovery conversations with Plenty, Inc., this innovation overcomes a key bottleneck that has hindered the introduction of beneficial bacteria communities into CEA and would be readily adopted when available as a commercial product.