A design and engineering student at Imperial College London has offered a glimpse into the future of food production, utilising wasted space in commercial freight containers to produce food.

Phillipe Hohlfeld’s collapsible hydroponic farm uses empty shipping containers to grow crops whilst they are carried around the world. The global shipping industry sees 20 million shipping containers moved around the world transporting goods, but many containers make the return journey empty.  Up to 7.5 million containers travel empty between North America and China each year.

Hohlfeld’s idea is to set up the ‘Growframe’ which when in use will produce up to £1,500 worth of food in a single 20-foot container per journey. When it’s not needed, the Growframe collapses to a tenth of its original size. In the system, seedlings are placed into a frame, which balances the nutrients and light to grow plants within containers over the course of a voyage. The plants are harvested upon arrival and up to 40 collapsed farm frames can be shipped in a single shipping container back to their place of origin.  

Coming from a design, rather than an agricultural background Phillipe looked at a range of other options to make use of empty container space, before settling on growing.

The Imperial College student explained why, with land use coming under ever-increasing scrutiny, this represents such a good use of the space, “For routes between China and every other continent so many of the containers go back empty because so many goods are produced in China. The empty container was an opportunity. There’s 12sqm of land in a container, it’s essentially free, it’s sealed and you can do anything you want in it.”

“I wanted to create something that could exist autonomously over three weeks in the sealed container and help fulfil a need in China. I learnt from a study by the Met Office that China is having a lot of problem with crops due to pollution. Growframe could provide a clean, secure and safe source of food for the Chinese market.”
 
In on-land experiments, the grow frame has produced crops of beansprouts, pac choi and lettuce. Phillips now plans to embark on the first at-sea tests to see whether food can eventually be grown on the three week voyage between Europe and China.

A podcast looking at the collapsible farm is available here.