Locavore (2018)

The text tells how Gurjot Singh entered the author’s path and how, from that relationship, the idea for Locavore emerged. The project was thought up to help cities, villages, and communities reduce food transportation and produce a portion of what they consume, with a focus on high-quality nutrients.

The experience included portable aeroponic gardens for homes and a demo farm in Bangalore, semi-automated with Raspberry Pi. The group also supplied fresh produce to local restaurants, tested vitamin B12 infusion in spinach, and was interviewed in Mountain View before being rejected for the winter 2019 Y Combinator batch.

Reading notes

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• Gurjot Singh was introduced to the author in 2017; he is a doctor and later became a research scientist at IISc, in Bangalore.
• Gurjot’s work involved studying the carbon metabolism of cities in developing countries and creating empirical models of urban carbon flow.
• In 2015, he participated in a summer institute funded by the NSF at the University of Minnesota to study lake sediment sampling techniques.
• Locavore was thought of as a way for cities and communities to reduce food transportation and produce some of their own food with good nutrients.
• The group experimented with portable aeroponic gardens and built a demo farm in downtown Bangalore.
• The farm was semi-automated, ran on Raspberry Pi, and required checklists and daily visits to add nutrients and refill water tanks.
• The project supplied fresh produce to some local restaurants, and neighbors also liked the fresh strawberries.
• There was success in the lab in infusing vitamin B12 into spinach, with the idea of creating a “Super Spinach” for pregnant women.
• The project was interviewed in Mountain View, but did not get into the winter 2019 Y Combinator batch.
• Later, Gurjot went on to work at BioShakti, an energy startup focused on biofuels and e-fuels to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors.
• BioShakti introduced dry anaerobic digestion at commercial scale in India and was selected by the GEF and UNIDO as an innovative waste-to-energy project.
• The author says he remains an advisor and friend of Gurjot and that, later, this phase led him to work in climate tech with Valinor Earth.