[3D Printing News] Farmshelf: 3D Printed Custom Parts for Urban Farms

[3D Printing News] Farmshelf: 3D Printed Custom Parts for Urban Farms

Farmshelf has built a fully autonomous system that allows individuals, residential communities, and restaurants to grow food on-site, creating a space for urban agriculture . To create, test, and improve their unique hardware and software platform, they make extensive use of the Ultimaker 2+ printer , enabling them to make many design improvements for their large, modular, custom-part systems that would otherwise require significant time and money to outsource.

Although the Farmshelf team knew exactly what they needed to accomplish with their flagship product, the engineering of autonomous processes involving living organisms was a formidable challenge.
In addition to meeting the stringent engineering requirements of each part and subsystem, they also need to produce a large number of custom-made factory enclosures, mounting brackets, etc.
They also need to test the parts by constantly harvesting these edible plants. Traditional manufacturing methods not only mean spending a lot of money – it's impossible to build a successful company this way – but any mistake in traditional manufacturing can cost the garden's value and crops months.

Freedom to design and change

As the CEO of Andrew Shearer and the founder of Farmshelf, he understood early on what value 3D printing technology could bring to his business.
He said, "As a company, you can think of 3D printing as a way to involve more people in the building process and involve more prototyping and dreaming processes, thanks to its ease of use."


Andrew Shearer inspects plant pods

By selecting Ultimaker printers into their design process, Farmshelf is able to customize and reshape custom parts on-site.
Therefore, they retained challenging production requirements to meet the necessary functionalities used in designing early products that served as preparatory plant prototypes.
Farmshelf doesn't rely on dice rolls to determine the success or failure of each round of custom parts orders; instead, it finds cost-effective solutions at every stage, from prototyping to production. 3D printing meets all the needs of design and laboratory research.

"When we got our hands on prototypes of all these parts, Ultimaker proved to be an excellent solution."
This technology has enabled us to accelerate our timelines and keep the company moving quickly, meeting all our different needs from prototypes to small-batch production parts. Building hardware is always difficult, but Ultimaker makes it much easier.


Close-up of Farmshelf plant pods

Thanks to the use of 3D printing technology, the Farmshelf team only needs to cover the cost of the prototype parts.
Outsourcing would lead to costs for materials, suppliers and services, as well as bottlenecks in waiting for a new round of custom parts changes, thus slowing everything down.
Farmshelf product designer Jaesong Yi stated, "Without the Ultimaker printer, we would have to use off-the-shelf components and design our products around those readily available parts. Or worse, we would have to use CNC machining to mass-produce the parts, which would be a time-consuming and costly process. Owning the Ultimaker machine allows us to..."

Product expansion and installation

The conclusion is a direct reward for the Farmshelf design team. They not only have the freedom to quickly and efficiently customize parts, but also possess functional prototypes that allow them to test the product throughout the entire pod growth cycle. In turn, product scaling is a more efficient and cost-effective process, enabling the team to install and showcase test models in various high-profile public locations without impacting the budget.


Farmshelf plant pod design loaded into Ultimaker Cura

"Simply put, the Ultimaker 3D printer allowed us to build early prototypes of Farmshelf," said Gabe Benton, a botanist at Farmshelf.
"Because the number of plastic parts we use in the system is custom-made, I can't even imagine how many tens of thousands of dollars it would cost us to manufacture these parts without them."

Custom parts printed on Ultimaker 2+

After saving time and money producing plant pods and various parts, they seized an unexpected opportunity a few months ago to share their products with the world.
The Farmshelf team was invited by world-renowned chef Claus Meyer (co-founder of Noma) to install a fully functional Farmshelf unit in the heart of New York City's downtown train station.
This experiment proved to be very successful, as the Peking University Dining Hall in the central Meyer was able to directly harvest microgreens and some leafy greens from these prototypes.

Their spirit is inspired by the early success of Grand Central Station, and they continue to expand upon the initial idea, in part innovating, to create a bright future for urban agriculture.

Original source: https://ultimaker.com/en/stories/52419-farmshelf-cost-effective-custom-parts-for-an-urban-farm-system