Device for Gardening May Aid Small Farms

A lemon tree springs from the soil in Jason Aramburu’s backyard in Berkeley, California, alongside rose bushes, birds of paradise, strawberry plants and squash blossoms. The garden is thriving, but its upkeep requires almost no effort from Mr. Aramburu. Instead, a 30-centimeter soil sensor does much of the work.

The plastic-and-stainless-steel device, topped by a tiny solar panel, determines the amount of water to be delivered to the garden each day, using Mr. Aramburu’s Wi-Fi network to communicate with a valve attached to his irrigation system. If the air is humid, or if rain is forecast, the valve limits or cuts off the supply.

If the soil lacks nutrients, Mr. Aramburu receives an alert on a smartphone app telling him to add fertilizer. The sensor initially analyzed the clay-filled dirt of his yard and recommended which plants would thrive there.

The soil sensor and the water valve are Mr. Aramburu’s creations; he will soon begin selling them through his new company, Edyn. But his plan for his business goes beyond enabling people in upscale areas to cultivate things like exotic kale and heirloom beets. He also intends to sell sensors to farmers in developing nations at a low cost to help them grow food more efficiently and sustainably.

Through Edyn, Mr. Aramburu, 29, is trying to tackle the problems of drought and the global food shortage. Although the concept of for-profit companies addressing social issues isn’t new, entrepreneurs with a flair for humanitarianism were stymied by capital constraints until fairly recently.

But in recent years, such business efforts are beginning to be stoked by venture capitalists and nonprofits wielding grant money.

And schools are embracing social entrepreneurship as an area of study: Oxford’s Said Business School, for instance, holds a social entrepreneurship conference each year. Harvard Business School’s social enterprise club is one of its largest extracurricular groups.

For Mr. Aramburu, the social entrepreneurship seed was planted by his parents, a doctor and a nurse working with low-income patients in San Antonio, Texas. They instilled in him the importance of giving back to society, he says.

After graduating from Princeton University in New Jersey in 2007 with a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, Mr. Aramburu studied soil science at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and then worked at a Manhattan-based tech start-up. He came up with the idea of making and selling a charcoal- based alternative to fertilizer, called biochar, in 2008. To develop this product, Mr. Aramburu received funding from nonprofits. Mr. Aramburu fine-tuned his biochar and began selling it to gardeners in the United States. He also developed relationships with 5,000 small farmers in Kenya, eventually selling the biochar to them at a much-reduced price.

Mr. Aramburu had noticed that generations of entrepreneurs before him were more focused on making money than on solving global problems. But among younger entrepreneurs, that tension appears to be lessening. “I don’t think we can continue the business as usual of just trying to maximize profits,” he said.

After using some of his own profits from his biochar venture to start Edyn, Mr. Aramburu raised $1.6 million from investors in Silicon Valley. One investor, Yves Behar, the co-founder of the industrial design firm Fuseproject, also signed on to design Edyn’s soil sensor, valve and smartphone app.

According to Mr. Aramburu’s calculations, as demand for the sensors and valves increases in the United States and the company begins producing them in larger batches, manufacturing costs will drop, making it financially feasible for him to sell the devices at a minimal cost to growers in the developing world, as he did with the biochar. In countries where farmers don’t have Internet access, the sensors will use cell networks.

Mr. Aramburu also hopes to make an impact closer to home. He says the devices can significantly reduce water use — a potential boon for drought-plagued parts of the United States.

Mr. Aramburu’s idea for Edyn sprang from his biochar work and was cemented when he read a United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs report showing that the earth’s population will hit 9.6 billion by 2050.

Mr. Aramburu wondered how he could “use technology and the Internet to help farmers and other people grow more food.”

from http://mag.udn.com/mag/edu/storypage.jsp?f_MAIN_ID=381&f_SUB_ID=3731&f_ART_ID=522160