Grow your own organic food in your own living room with Crofters!

With the advent of industrialization, the amount of pesticides and processed food bogging down our systems has increased drastically. The processed food we consume is tainted with preservatives. Also, because of travelling longer distances more than 50% of the food is wasted even before it reaches us. The farming sector is already facing a lot of challenges due to the past mistakes of humans. Hence, creation of sustainable solutions has become the need of the hour. The Crofters team believes that this problem can be solved by devising sustainable ways to grow food locally.

Consisting of a group of engineers, food lovers and gardeners who are working on a technology that will make urban farming affordable and enjoyable, the Crofters team has come up with new devices that will help people to grow fresh local food devoid of any pesticides and preservatives in a sustainable manner.

Ashish Khan and his co-founder Deepak Srinivasan were college mates. They wanted to apply technology in one of the oldest industries, agriculture. While they were working on home automation they bumped upon Aquaponics. Then they started with DIY projects which they iterated into a device that will help people grow their own fresh organic food inside their living room.

An ecosystem portraying a unique blend of nature and technology

Crofters is a unique amalgamation of nature and technology. The concept behind the ecosystem they’ve built is unique and their design is the key factor that’s attracting people. Crofters’ product is a unique intersection of hardware, software and ecology. The Ecosystem they’ve built is a thoughtfully crafted fun, educational, and rewarding one. This is what has helped them to reach more people. Their indoor aquaponics ecosystem is suitable for all types of consumers. Even for people living in clumsy, scrappy apartments without balconies and extra spaces!

The science behind the ecosystem

Initially, they found it difficult to create LED grow lights that mimic the sunlight for efficient growth of plants inside the homes. However, through their continuous R&D they have created Grow Lights that use only the red and blue spectra to mimic sunlight in an efficient manner. Their LED technology will help in converting huge spaces in urban areas which were initially considered unsuitable for farming into spaces suitable for farming.

Competitions you are facing

They have competition from traditional gardening tools and semi-automatic gardens. However they can’t consider any of them as a direct competitor. This is because Crofters is focusing on indoor gardening and farming with the power of technology with no extra maintenance. They’ve built a product which is equipping people to farm at places which was unimaginable before.

Crofters came up with an early adopter program for their first MVP and through word of mouth and social media they were able to reach out to their first set of early adopters.

Future plans for Crofters

Their future plans include recording the plant growth over a period, which will set them up in the long term for doing vertical farming on a large scale. Thus, fulfilling their vision to localize food production in the country. Also, they are working on affordable large scale indoor urban farms. They are working with the mission to make farming available to everyone on this planet. Currently, they are bootstrapped and they want to achieve a good amount of traction before thinking about funding.

Crofters is not just working on technology to improve the food quality we eat. Through their crofters for education initiative they have also worked on teaching the basics of science and agriculture to a group of Government school primary kids.