
Meet the Machine That's Turning Grocery Stores' Food Waste into Fertilizer
The Harvester is a machine that, in six to 24 hours, turns food matter into a high-nutrient liquid that can be converted to organic fertilizer. It works with anything from fish scales and carrot tops to wine. After food waste is converted, the resulting liquid is picked up by a pumping company and delivered to a processing facility. The final product, fertilizer, is sold both to farmers and to consumers at the stores that scrapped the leftover potato salad in the first place. The company is processing 15,000 gallons of fertilizer per month.
Why Entrepreneurs Are Suddenly Finding the Beauty in Ugly Produce
Ugly produce is midway through a massive makeover. Misshapen potatoes, multi-pronged carrots and past-their-prime apples — rebranded as “cosmetically challenged” and “beautiful in their own way” — are coming into vogue. Campaigns aimed at reducing food waste are bringing these fruits and vegetables, previously reserved for hogs, compost piles and landfills, to the forefront of our minds, if not quite to our grocery shelves. And now, food entrepreneurs are picking them up as ripe for innovation.
High-Tech Dutch Trend of 'City Farming' Grows Food Faster without Sunlight
Those who visit Brightbox, a high-tech horticulture lab in the Netherlands' agricultural hub of Venlo, are invited to taste what is grown under light-emitting diodes, or LED lights. The Netherlands is the second biggest exporter of agricultural products after the US, and a leader in greenhouse technology. So it isn't surprising that the Dutch are at the forefront of the new trend in agriculture: vertical farming, also known as city, urban or even warehouse farming. It is even being eyed for skyscrapers.
