When Growing Meets Tech: Grownextdoor

Strictly speaking, Grownextdoor isn’t a farmer, but a fresh food home-delivery service in South Florida. At least that’s what their website says. But this business, whose partners include creative director Vianny Guillen, chief technical officer Farzad Barzin and CEO Jonathan Cox, encompasses their plan to incorporate vertical hydroponic farms, conventional small farmers and even backyard growers with a new tech application that will connect fresh, ripe produce with customers. Each member of the team brings specific expertise: Guillen, a Dominican-born visual artist and aspiring plant-based chef; Barzin, a mobile front-end and back-end app developer; and Cox, a front-end web developer who learned about vertical hydroponic gardening at the Urban Farming Institute in Oakland Park. We spoke with Cox about their current work and plans for the future:

A Typical Work Week

Monday: Manage invoicing and coordinate with final orders placed for the week. Tuesday: Go to Homestead to source from our familiar network of farmers located down there. Wednesday morning: Source from our northern farmers in Indiantown and/or Immokalee. Wednesday afternoon and evening: Run the wholesale and retail orders for the week. Thursday/Friday: Install and or update our newest urban farm installations (one hydrotower installation in Homestead and one urban farm in Sunrise. Saturday and Sunday: Rest and perform new farmers market activities. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Farms You Work With

As of now, our most noteworthy and non-proprietary farms consist of Gratitude Garden Farms (Loxahatchee), French Farms (Homestead), Possum Trot, P&P Farms, and more. While we aim to continue working with these local growers, we are also eager to encourage our own community to grow for themselves and the platform come this new year.

What This Platform Will Do

We will have our system determine what the proposed output or yield would be for a given project, based on information that the user inputs and our urban farmers verify. Anecdotally speaking, anybody with a mango or avocado tree in South Florida can be one of our urban farmers. Our seasons run long and every second that the sun is out there shining on green is a chance for something to grow – for all of us to grow. There are plenty of backyard farmers in Homestead that we would love to reach out to, since we’re already working with plenty of farmers down there. I just don’t think there’s been a tool to tie them together and catch the fruits when they’re just ripe. That’s where we want Grownextdoor to come in. Nothing is wasted here.

Why Hydroponic Gardening? 

Vertical hydro farming is this century’s latest agricultural innovation and for a good reason. Apart from water conservation factors, vertical farming can often make farming well, easier – [no more] bending over to take care of our plants. On top of that, by growing vertically, one takes advantage of every inch of available space, turning essentially a .25-acre empty lot into theoretically a whole one-acre farm when utilized correctly. We imagine a network of hydro tower growers that can instantaneously turn their small backyards into yielding outputs – and leverage condensed growing abundances into a credit system. They grow for the community, and in turn the community grows for them.

Interested? What You Can Do

Start growing! The best time to plant a fruit tree is often two years ago. We will be having more volunteer opportunities for people to get involved. We’re still growing and learning - and honestly doing way more than we ever thought we would, but we can use all the help we can get. Programmers, artists, urban farmers, chefs, writers – we need our community to pitch in and we will be developing the structure for them to do so efficiently.

We’re looking forward to growing with this South Florida community through our work with the environment. COVID-19 has taught us all how fragile life can be. Yet we all collectively were drawn towards nature and our love for the outdoors. It’s time to get back to that again, with the tools we use on a day-to-day basis (our phones). Let’s work through mother nature and have her work through us. Let’s grow!