Two Acre 'Farm in a Box'
It all started with shipping containers. Brandi DeCarli and Scott Thompson were working in Kisumu, Kenya on a youth center meant to provide basic resources like education, health and sport. It was to be built from shipping containers, set around a soccer field, but after some transparency issues with that nonprofit, DeCarli and Thompson decided they needed to follow a different idea, based on a company within their control. In the process, they’d noticed that access to food was still an issue, with a lack of the infrastructure needed for reliable crop production, especially in drought conditions.
“There’s a bit of a missing infrastructure that occurs in a lot of underdeveloped areas, and even here within the U.S,” says DeCarli. “So we thought, let’s provide communities with the tools they need to be able to grow and sustain their own crop so that the resilience is actually built up from the ground itself.”
Business partners who have worked in international development and nonprofits, they stuffed a whole two-acre farm capable of feeding 150 people into a shipping container, partnered with irrigation and solar companies, and founded Farm From a Box. I sat down with DeCarli in San Francisco, where the for-profit benefit corporation is based, to hear about the $50,000 kit, what makes it special, and how it could be useful to governments, NGOs, schools, and even individuals who want to start a farm.
Phil Beard