gro.io: The Future Of Urban Micro-Farming
It is rare to come across a tech that resonates on a deeply human level. Gro.io, the “world’s first, app-controlled hydroponic system,” is such a product. Created out of the purest of needs, a husband looking after his wife, gro.io’s origin story is more than the story of a new agro-tech. It is also a love story and proof positive that good things happen when you ask the right questions.
Doug Slemmer’s journey toward creating gro.io began in Texas almost four years ago. His wife, Tabitha, was battling cancer. “[She] started a clinical trial. And it was working. The only downside was that the nausea was so debilitating for the seven days that she took the drug that she wanted to drop off the trial,” he told me in a recent phone interview.
None of the pharmaceuticals Tabitha’s doctors prescribed for her nausea helped.
“After a month or two, they had her on literally five different medications. And they all had scary short or long term side effects. And they weren’t working,” he said.
It was at this point, “about four years ago now,” recalled Doug Slemmer, that a friend suggested the Slemmers give medical marijuana a try. They bought a vaporizer and went about procuring some cannabis the old fashioned way.
“You go and ask a buddy’s friend, ‘Where can I score some weed?’,” said Slemmer.
What happened next must have felt like a miracle.
“When she started her next treatment, within moments of having her treatment, she got nauseous. She took two puffs off this vaporizer, and the nausea was gone. Literally, within twenty seconds, what five different prescription medicines couldn’t solve was solved in just this little plant,” Slemmer recalled, the wonder and relief resonating in his voice.
Cannabis didn’t just cure his wife’s nausea; it made a believer out of him regarding the potential of cannabis as a holistic healing agent.
“I’d smoked occasionally in my life, but I wasn’t a big user. And I thought a lot of the legalize movement was sort of not necessarily bunk from a medical perspective but maybe a stretch,” said Doug with a friendly laugh. “But when I saw what it did for my wife, it was really eye-opening.”
While the Slemmers now had a solution for her nausea, they now had a new problem to solve. A problem that many medical marijuana patients across the country face: Procuring legal medical marijuana safely and consistently. It’s no easy task in certain parts of the United States. Doug decided to teach himself how to grow legal medical marijuana.
“I got down and googled the heck out of “growing your own” and learned how to do it,” he said. Through Slemmer’s self-education, the components of gro.io began to take root. His research brought him to hydroponic growing, an indoor method of growing plants in water without soil using a mineral-enriched solution and tightly scheduled lighting. Maintaining a hydroponic system can be a complicated and time-consuming dance, but it has many benefits. Grow time is significantly faster, and the yield in a hydroponic system is somewhere between 30-50% higher than growing in soil. It appealed to Doug’s tech guy mindset.
“You can’t control the variables outside,” he explained. “But hydroponics, being a data and tech guy, there’s a really finite number of variables that go in there. There’s the light spectrum and the schedule. There’s the nutrients and those are all defined down to the chemical make-up of each nutrient. There’s the Ph and water temperature.”
Slemmer went about purchasing his dream grow set-up. He imagined an automated system with sensors and pumps that a novice grower could use easily. But there was one problem.
“I actually went and looked for the product we developed three years ago on the internet just to buy it. Like just give me something that will encapsulate all I of what need to know. That will do all this water PH and nutrients stuff for me. That will turn lights on and off. Just make it easy. And I’ll buy it online, and I will pay whatever you’re going to ask me to pay because I need this for my wife and I need it quickly. And it didn’t exist,” Slemmer explained.
And now, four years later, that system exists with some bells and whistles a hydroponic grower could seriously use that only a tech guy could add.
“What is gro.io?,” asks their launch blog, “The short answer is: it’s an automated growing platform that combines a powerful computer with sensors, valves, and pumps, making it super easy for everyone to grow hydroponically.”
Gro.io is a one online stop shop for the hydroponic grower. While components can be sourced elsewhere, everything you need to get started from lights to grow buckets to the center of it all, the gro.hub, is available on their website.
The gro.hub is a Linux computer “with a 1-GHz ARM microprocessor that is 45 million times more powerful than the navigational system on the Apollo spacecraft,” claims the site’s launch blog. We then embedded everything that is needed to have great grows: smart sensor technology, intelligent automation, adaptive dosing algorithms—the works.”
The whole system is cloud-connected, giving your system notifications and updates. Access and manage your grow anywhere through the “intuitive” gro.io mobile app. One cool feature of which is what Slemmer called “the online heartbeat.”
“It basically, every five minutes, if you want it to, will ping our server, and if our server doesn’t hear your ping, it sends you a text message to tell you that your system is offline,” explained Slemmer. “Now that seem like such a tiny, little small thing. But anyone who has ever had a plant, a home grow or any type of hydroponics knows when things go wrong, its like they go wrong fast. Plants will die in an hour or two if they run out of water if something happens. The heartbeat system will send you a text message. I think stuff like that, we don’t know all the cool scenarios and things from a code and tech standpoint that we can push out.”
Gro.io is a system built by someone who experienced the trial and error process of hydroponic growing. Because of that, it is designed to be modified and expanded. The feature that will be most vital to that process, via growers joining the gro.io network, is the data collection and sharing feature. In Slemmer’s grow education period, he came across “over 100 discussion groups online” discussing the art of growing cannabis. There, growers shared tips and growing techniques.
But the gathered data was mostly “anecdotal” data,” explained Slemmer. Gro.io’s built-in data collection and sharing component feed an ever-growing database built from hydroponic grows the world over.
“That’s sort of where I came form is data,” Doug explained. “And so I thought not only could I automate this and make this easier for people or pretty much anybody with a mobile phone and interest but we could take that and push it to a whole other level. There’s wonderful discussion online where you can go and learn about growing hydroponically. You can grow anything hydroponically.”
And that brings us to the edge of the future. The reality of the world is that climate change is real, droughts are real, and modern living is changing from coast to coast. More people are turning to small, organic farms or doing it themselves. Urban farming is becoming more prevalent. As Slemmer described the automated smart phone-controlled gro.io system with its pumps “no louder than a kitchen espresso machine”, I imagined putting a six-bucket system in my basement and beginning a garden that included strawberries and squash like my grandfather used to grow.
“The amount of cannabis you can grow in this system in three or four months is a lot. We don’t quantify what a lot means,” said Slemmer. One plant will yield somewhere from half an ounce to more than an ounce. ” So if you buy a three-plant or a six-plant system from us, an ounce is a lot of weed. Then you get three ounces . . . for the average Joe, it’s going to last a really long time. So I encourage people ‘Hey, you’ve got this great system. If you can grow cannabis legally, Awesome. Do it. But then once you’re done, load up the program that grows peppers or tomatoes or strawberries or anything else. Because basically, you’ve got this highly sophisticated and automated growing computer set up. Why not do that?”
While gro.io was born out of a need to grow weed, the possibilities are endless. Slemmer said he has had inquiries from a private chef who grows his own ingredients and a horse farmer who had been sold some contaminated barley and now wanted to raise his own. Gro.io, a hydroponic system founded out of personal need, may change the way we grow everything from medical marijuana to your favorite fruit forever. And more than that, it may connect a new generation of farmers of all kinds. Welcome to the future.
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