The chipped-paint exterior masks a research team developing a crafty system purporting to save 80 percent of the water wasted in farming. The company, Inka Biospheric Systems, was started in April by Pescadero resident Paul Giacomantonio, the jack-of-all-trades visionary leading the project.
Giacomantonio is an energetic well-tanned 52-year-old with a motormouth when talking about his work. He has worked for years in the Peace Corps and traveled on his own to countries around the world and he saw farmers struggling with the same problems. In those desert conditions, he realized, locals were pressed to farm with poor resources and an extremely limited water supply.
  
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Giacomantonio makes a daily commute from his Coastside farmland home to the urban core of the Bay Area to research sustainable agriculture. The future of farming looks more like a metal shop, with about a dozen workers using welding torches, power saws and heavy machinery, blaring a deafening cacophony.
Under heavenly yellow lights rests the product of his metalworks: a prototype of an “aquaponic” wall growing nascent samples of strawberries, lettuce, cabbage, bok choy, celery, tomatoes, corn and squash all sprouting out side by side along a four-by-four vertical wall. The plant display looked sort of like hair plugs (“It’s the Plant Club for Men,” joked one engineer.)
The plants had no soil, instead they were tethered in a half-inch think synthetic “carpet” of fibers, specially designed to allow the plant roots to spread through and grip. A patent on the carpet is pending, said Giacomantonio, hesitant to reveal what materials it is made from.
With no soil for nutrients, the plants get their food from a very different source. The plants were growing above a large bathtub-size tank filled with numerous fish and dirty green fishwater.
That filthy water was crucial to his agriculture system, Giacomantonio explained, showing how a water pump piped the water up to the top of the hanging carpet where the plant roots reside. The water and its fish effluent trickled down through the carpet, nourishing the plants with ammonia, nitrogen and nitrates; and in turn, purifying the water for the fish.
“This system is hydro-centric,” he said. “The water never touches the ground. We almost take more care of the water than the plant.”
It was a solid closed system, he said, except for occasionally refilling the water and feeding the fish.
Giacomantonio says he hopes to fine-tune the hydration system to one day allow farmers in arid regions to get the most use out of their waste water.
“It’s a prairie fire of an idea,” Giacomantonio said. “There’s a lot of velocity behind this, and we’re getting a lot of requests for this.”
The team describes its current plan for the prototype is to be “evangelical,” taking the displays to conventions and events to show off and promote the technology. Inka recently presented a large solar-powered version of its fish-tank farming system, the “Sun Curve,” last weekend at the Maker Faire, a popular exhibition of homegrown engineering projects in San Mateo. The Sun Curve is an artistically designed version of the hydroponic wall mounted on two arches. The project won first prize.
ISKME, a Half Moon Bay educational nonprofit, was so impressed by the Sun Curve design that its team has taken a major hand in promoting it. The nonprofit hopes to continue using the prototype as an educational resource to demonstrate innovate design to students and teachers.
“We saw right away that it’s a beautiful sculpture and it takes scientific principles and design in a shared space and integrates them in a new way,” said Amy Godwin, director of strategic initiative ISKME. “We thought that should really be something that should be in schools.”
Other farming wall displays developed by Inka have been prominently displayed at the Coyote Point Museum, and the group has designed a large “monopod” farm for the Google campus in Mountain View.
Inka is also fielding requests from the San Francisco slow-food community to install similar agriculture walls at buildings throughout the city, including several schools and a Latin-American resource center in the Mission District.
The Inka team plans to continue developing the sustaining farming system, fine-tuning it both to eventually sell to regular homeowners, and also to promote it more on the world stage.
Giacomantonio says he hopes to have a $500 model of his hydroponic wall available for sale in the next few months.
Giacomantonio says his motive for the project is simple: he’s a parent.
“I want to be a good parent and leave the world intact,” he said. “Everything we’re doing is about generational accountability.”
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