Growing Coastal Communities

Improving self-sufficiency and holistic health in coastal communities.

Historically, native coastal communities in the Pacific Islands were completely self-sufficient, with access to adequate nutrition and resources. Due to the arrival of foreign companies and Westernization, however, the islands’ fisheries and natural resources were depleted; their cultural heritage of subsistence farming and fishing was destroyed. Many of the companies have since left, taking their jobs and resources with them, leaving coastal communities in the Pacific Islands economically depressed and without resources. Now, they must also cope with the effects of climate change, including reef damage that further decreases wild fish stocks, and rising seas that encroach on already scarce arable land and freshwater supplies. Fishing, which was once a staple part of their diets, is becoming increasingly difficult and agriculture nearly impossible.

The isolation of the Pacific Islands, the state of depleted natural resources, and the effects of climate change, together with the loss of subsistence skills and economic opportunities, have made proper nutrition
economically out of reach for many families.

High shipping costs mean that they face the highest food prices in the world and with limited fishing, farming, or job opportunities, many islanders can only afford high-calorie, nutritionally-devoid yet more affordable imported foods such as SPAM and turkey tails.

Pacific Islanders (PIs) suffer the highest rates of obesity in the world. According to The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, five of the ten most-obese countries in the world are in the Pacific Islands, with the vast majority of the population (at times 90%) of several islands categorized as overweight. As a direct consequence of obesity, PIs suffer epidemic rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Forty-seven percent of American Samoans have Type 2 diabetes, the highest rate in the world and nearly 8 times the world average (World Health Organization: Western Pacific Region. Pacific Food Summit Fact Sheet 2010). The WHO estimates that over 4 million Pacific Islanders suffer from NCDs and many are dependent on government assistance for healthcare and financial support.

The Native Hawaiian (NH) population in Hawaii faces similar challenges to those indigenous communities on more remote Pacific Islands. Many NHs live on coastal “Homesteads,” which are similar to Native American reservations; populations on Homesteads are 100% Native Hawaiian. These coastal communities face similar consequences from climate change as what is left of subsistence agriculture & fishing is made increasingly difficult by the effects of climate change.

We leverage economies of scale, our proprietary, low-cost, above-ground farming technology, and provide ongoing support to empower PI families to grow healthy food on unarable land 6 times as productively and using 98% less water than traditional farming. We aggregate and sell the surplus, earning families supplemental income and us revenue that we use to fund expansion.

Our solution puts healthy food production directly into the hands of those people who need it most, gives them supplementary income, and allows us to self-fund our own exponential expansion to additional families and into additional coastal communities around the world.

Our focus: Climate change adaptation, not mitigation or policy change. We empower communities to grow nutritious food, despite worsening environmental conditions, in ways that do not deplete already-scarce resources (freshwater/wild fish).  

We utilize a systemic approach to nutrition-assistance: SNAP/WIC/food stamps/food banks are stopgap measures and can be used to purchase calorically-dense, nutritionally-sparse foods (Curtis, 2004), while keeping participants locked in a poverty cycle. These fail to address causes and foster continued dependency on government. We empower individuals to become self-sufficient by working with community leaders and equipping families with skills, supplies, and support to grow their own healthy, traditional crops.

To address the challenges coastal communities face (e.g. scarcity of arable land/freshwater), we've developed a proprietary off-the-ground agricultural system that is affordable, ultra-productive, and requires minimal inputs. It is 1/3 the cost of existing systems, 6X more productive than traditional farming (/unit area) while using 98% less water, can be located on salt-infiltrated soil or pavement, and has no runoff. We have a patent-pending on media that our systems utilize that is made from a waste stream component common to all coastal communities and we are currently developing technology that allows us to remotely manage our network of farms.

*Improve the cost and effectiveness of our technologies with the help of the MIT Solve network.

*Continue to refine our innovative business model that complements our proprietary technologies. Thus far, we have proven the model, but are not yet profitable and earning expansion capital. We are confident operations can be profitable within a year. 

*Empower our pilot coastal community in Hawaii to increase food self-sufficiency

*Prepare to expand into our second coastal community in Hawaii.

In Y2, we will utilize earned revenue from our operations, together with grant funding, to expand into a second coastal community in Hawaii.

By Y3, we will move beyond Hawaii to coastal communities in more remote Pacific Islands: e.g. Ebeye Atoll, Marshall Islands, and American Samoa.
Existing sites will continue to operate and earn reinvestment capital for further expansion. This reinvestment capital will be combined with other funding opportunities to fuel growth. As the number of our sites grows, the pool of reinvestment capital will accumulate at an exponential rate, accelerating our growth across Hawaii, the Pacific Islands, and beyond.

We already have a long wait-list of families interested in joining our network that continually grows longer and longer as people see our operations in their neighborhood. We fund our own expansion (as outlined in our answers above) and our systems are deployed at "community builds” where our staff, families, their friends and neighbors, and volunteers gather to work. These builds increase feelings of ownership of the systems for the families and camaraderie in the network.

Our pilot coastal community is low-income, underserved, and facing significant health challenges. Our network of over 100 residents is already growing food, generating supplementary income, and gaining direct access to healthy nutrition. The surplus food our network is producing is sold at below-market prices to the coastal community at-large, providing affordable, healthy food to a population of over 6,200.   

In Y1, we hope to expand our network to 50 families (over 230 people), empowering them to grow their own healthy food, improving health, and providing supplementary income. As outlined in answers above, based on production data from our pilot program and our financial projections, we expect our operations to largely fund our own expansion. In three years, we plan to be in 10 low-income, underserved, coastal communities with 500 families (over 2,300 people) in our network.

Our team is made up of agriculture and business experts, chemists, tech professionals (including the creator of YouTube), and seasoned community organizers. We are resource magnets who make friends and connections quickly. We get to know others, gain their trust, and create lasting partnerships. We have already recruited an advisory board that includes a former State Director of Health, an agriculture economist, a food safety trainer, a Whole Foods Purchasing Director, and a world hydroponic expert and multiple-patent holder.

Data from our pilot program have shown that each of our systems can produce all of the vegetables a family (of 5 individuals) needs, plus a large surplus that we are able to aggregate and sell. As we have perfected our growing methods, we have proven that this surplus production is very high quality and it can be sold as a premium, organically-grown product at significantly high prices. Our pilot program has proven that we can secure high-volume, high-price buyers, and that we can generate significant revenue for our program. We plan to re-invest this earned revenue into expanding our operations and network of families, self-funding our growth as we serve more and more families and more and more deserving coastal communities. Please see our video pitch for further information. We are happy to provide more details and data upon request.

By leveraging our backgrounds and experiences and through trial and error and multiple rounds of redesign, we have developed technology that is affordable and works very well. However, it is pieced together from various sources, is heavy, and relatively time-consuming to construct. MIT has the best engineers in the world. If we could partner with manufacturing engineers in the Solve network, we are confident that together we could come up with a design that is lighter, easier to transport, and faster to construct and deploy. This, in turn, could tremendously accelerate the expansion and subsequent reach of our solution.

We have a diverse team of experts from many fields, but none of us are manufacturing engineers. This is where a gap in our competency lies. Members of the MIT Solve network would be the perfect complement to our team.