About the Windowfarms Project

A Food Revolution

The first window farm was built in a low-light Brooklyn window after Britta Riley read Michael Pollan's New York Times' Magazine article "Why Bother?" Pollan suggests growing some of your own food to help heal "the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen."

Building Up

What she lacked in yardspace, Riley made up vertically, developing a hydroponic system to grow food all year round in her window. Made from recycled and easily accessible materials, the first Windowfarm produced 25 plants and a salad a week and sparked thousands of other growers to build gardens in their own windows. Riley and Rebecca Bray fully developed the project in February, 2009 through an artist's residency at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and sponsorship by Submersible Design, Riley and Bray's interactive design firm.

Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

Researchers have argued that to grow some of one's own food is the most effective action an individual can take for environment. It is estimated that current industrial food production in America uses 7-10 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of food. It's easy to forget all the fossil fuels needed to cultivate, fertilize, package, refrigerate, and transport a head of lettuce, especially during the winter. And by the time it arrives in the aisles, that lettuce will have lost a good deal of its nutritional value.

A Microcosmic View of the Food System

A Microcosmic View of the Food System Through their careful cultivation of plants and harvesting the fruits of their labors, Windowfarmers gain experience with a nearly-lost fundamental human art and get a microcosmic view of the food system. They develop a stake in the conversation, and come up with new ideas for how to take care of ourselves and our planet in troubled times.

Working with Windowfarms

The Windowfarms Team is taking several legal challenges head-on and is seeking legal partners who are willing to work at a discounted rate or even pro bono in recognition of the legal precedents we are setting that benefit the social enterprise and open source movements. If you know someone who might be a good fit, please email businessdevelopment[at]windowfarms.org.

Windowfarms for Foodies

Having a Windowfarm means fresh basil for pesto, dill to flavor salmon, and lettuce for salads, and you can get more local than your own window. Fresh ingredients are key to any good meal, and think how impressed your friends will be when you tell them you grew it yourself. It really is a microfarm for your window. Plant whatever you want. Give the farm a name, talk to it, find out what kind of music makes it grow.

An Online Community

Building a community of growers online and providing a platform for open source collaboration have been part of the Windowfarms mission from the beginning. Since the Windowfarm Community launched online in 2009, it has grown to include over 20,000 people from all over the world: the Netherlands, Sweden, China, Brooklyn, Boston.

Ask a Windowfarmer

Windowfarmers post information about everything from their first growing cycle to kitty- proofing their system. New Windowfarmers can get advice from seasoned growers or the Windowfarms staff about waterflow issues or lighting questions. And members of the community can get ideas for modifications from others who have used solar power to run their farms orused alternative planting vessels because of concern over BPAs.

Crowdsourcing Innovation

The Windowfarms Project approaches environmental innovation through a web 2.0 model similar to crowdsourcing and open source software development. Ordinary people can bring about innovative green ideas and popularize them quickly. Web theorists like Clay Shirky (he's on the Windowfarms Board of Advisors) claim that this capacity to "organize without hierarchical organization" will be a fundamental shift in our society brought about by the web over the coming decades. The windowfarms core team presses past crowdsourcing into "mass collaboration" with an opensource collaboration model, modified for physical mechanical & biological systems, called R&D-I-Y (research and develop it yourself).

By harnessing the power of the Internet as Shirky suggests, Windowfarmers can communicate over oceans while still creating the community Michael Pollan says evolves when people have their own gardens: "Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools."

Accomplishments

After only one year and with very limited funding, the project has already been widely acclaimed and supported with features by NPR, The New York Times, Grist, Art in America, Good Morning America, Wired Blog, the Martha Stewart Show, Ready Made magazine, prominent food blogs, and documentary films. Over 20,000 people have downloaded the instructions worldwide and are building windowfarms in city windows all over the planet. Please check out the activity on the community website to see what's "trending" now.

The Future of Windowfarms

New web features coming soon will move the center of activity from the engineering of the windowfarm as a physical platform to the plants. A new data structure will drive the community to share variables around plant species, nutrients, and microclimate conditions that prove the most successful under the unusual conditions of personal scale hydroponic food growing.

A Social Enterprise

In 2010, founder Britta Riley made the choice to organize Windowfarms, not as a non-profit, as she had originally anticipated, but rather as a social enterprise. She calculates that the pace of growth and capitalization needed to fund a fast-growing green R&D virutal community is simply not achievable economically with the constraints of 501c3 non-profit organization structure in the US currently. However, the project can fund its D-I-Y mission work sustainably with sales of windowfarms products & with limited investment by socially-minded angel investors asking for a reasonable rate of return. Thus, Windowfarms is a business with a social mission written into its by-laws. Windowfarms can make a profit suitable for investing in its own future, it can reward investors who take the risk of committing their funds early, AND it can achieve targeted social and environmental goals. As CEO, Riley is able to make decisions based not only on shareholder financial returns, but she can also hold environmental and social factors in the balance as well. Check out Windowfarms' positive impact track record so far. To learn more about opportunites to invest in Windowfarms, please email invest[at]windowfarms.org.

Learn about the mission

Learn about the theory, team, and a lot more behind the Windowfarms Project in the Windowfarms Project 2010 Look Book. Download a copy for yourself here (3mb), or browse it below.