Ankaponics

A GT Grand Challenges Startup

Grand Challenges is a Living and Learning Community at Georgia Tech centered around solving the world's Grand Challenges. For my team, we noticed that as the globe warms and populations rise, droughts become more prevalent and water becomes more scarce. Thus, we wanted to tackle water scarcity, and because 70% of the world's freshwater is used for agriculture, we wanted to figure out how to make agriculture more water efficient. 

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We looked into hydroponics because hydroponics is a new technology which uses up to 90% less water and land than traditional farming techniques. We noticed that hydroponics was more prevalent elsewhere in the world, and we wondered by hydroponics didn't seem to be as successful in the US. Through a variety of interviews, we noticed that new hydroponic users, who often had no agriculture experience, faced a variety of strange issues that experienced farmers learned to solve through experience. These issues were prevalent enough to cause many hydroponic startups to fail within he first 3-5 years.  We realized that existing support mechanisms for hydroponic users lacked breadth and depth, so we decided to attempt to implement these missing services.

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We created a landing page which contained a variety of resources such as a detailed wiki, apprenticeship and mentorship programs, and a newsletter. We advertised our landing page to the relevant communities and received wide support for our ideas, including hundreds of questions for our wiki, dozens of subscriptions to our newsletter, and several business offers. 

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Thus, we plan to expand and publish our services soon.

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