The Idea: Getting the Carbon Out of My Salad
It all started because I wanted to get the carbon out of my salad.
Eat local, as it were. I'd learned that some of the produce I love is actually air-freighted to market—sometimes traveling thousands of miles before landing on my plate. The carbon footprint was staggering, and the nutrient loss even more so. Fresh produce starts losing nutrients the moment it's harvested, and by the time that air-freighted arugula reaches your kitchen, it's a shadow of its former self.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I tried to farm my kitchen counter.
The Kitchen Counter Experiment
Turns out, trying to farm your kitchen counter is problematic. It's too small, so the ecosystem gets out of balance quickly. A few aphids can devastate your entire crop when your entire crop fits in a shoebox. And the harvest? Not much to show for the effort. A handful of microgreens doesn't exactly make a salad.
But the real problem wasn't just scale—it was that I was thinking too small.
Why Buildings-as-Farms Doesn't Work
I looked at the vertical farming movement. Surely, I thought, turning buildings into farms would solve this. But the economics don't work out. Too much heat to manage, too few crops economically viable at the scale required. You need massive capital investment, industrial HVAC systems, and even then, you're limited to high-value crops like leafy greens and herbs.
The energy costs alone make most vertical farms unprofitable. You're essentially trying to recreate the sun with LEDs, and while the technology has improved dramatically, physics is still physics.
The Historical Context
Before modern urbanization, small veggie plots were the norm. Every household had a garden. Communities had allotments. People knew where their food came from because they grew it themselves.
Today, community gardens can help strengthen neighborhoods and provide fresh produce, but they can't scale to meet urban demand. They require dedicated land—increasingly scarce in cities—and they're not durable enough for most urban environments. A community garden in a vacant lot is one rezoning decision away from becoming condos.
The Greenhouse Problem
The other traditional solution—greenhouses—requires even more dedicated land. In colder climates, you often need poured concrete acting as a thermal sink, which moots economically feasible urban locations. You can't exactly pour a concrete foundation in a parking lot or on a rooftop.
And that's when it became an interesting design challenge.
First Principles Thinking
I broke it down from first principles. What do we actually need?
- A smaller form factor - Something that fits in urban spaces
- General purpose - Adaptable to different needs and climates
- Mobile - Can be relocated as needed
- Distributed - Doesn't require massive infrastructure investment
I looked to recent technological history for a similar challenge and solution. Like the evolution from mainframes to PCs, we needed a smaller, more distributed approach. Not one massive vertical farm, but many small, efficient growing spaces scattered throughout the city.
The Sphere Emerges
I started with a familiar shape: the sphere.
Why a sphere? Because it's made from the fewest parts for the volume enclosed. And the fewest parts is always a good thing when you're aiming for low cost and durability. Every joint is a potential failure point. Every seam is a place for heat to escape.
The sphere is also an efficient shape for thermal management—critical for avoiding the vertical farm problem of excessive energy costs. Its natural convection properties mean heat rises evenly, creating a stable growing environment without complex HVAC systems.
The Nested Solution
Then I had a breakthrough: what if we nested one sphere inside another?
We'd create a doubly insulated space with double convection. The air gap between the spheres acts as insulation, and the convection in each sphere helps regulate temperature naturally.
Like any good camper knows, you move your tent off the cold (or hot) ground to further insulate. So we elevated the nested spheres, creating a form factor where two units can fit in one parking spot.
The Realization
And that's when I realized: this isn't just about farming. This is about creating modular, efficient spaces for any purpose. The same principles that make it good for growing plants make it good for saunas, workshops, storage, entertainment spaces—anything that needs climate control and efficient use of space.
The Agrosphere was just the beginning. The real idea was the Thiosphere—a modular, open-source platform for creating specialized spaces.
What This Means
There are 8 billion parking spots in North America, with only 1 billion vehicles. Imagine if we could farm even a fraction of those spots. Or turn them into workshops, studios, wellness spaces, or community gathering places.
The idea isn't to replace traditional agriculture or architecture. It's to create a new category—distributed, modular spaces that can be deployed wherever they're needed, built by local communities, and adapted to local needs.
All because I wanted to get the carbon out of my salad.
Next Post: The Need: Why Nutrient Density Matters
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