The AquaGarden turns your aquarium into a beautiful, intelligent garden. Fresh, organic food grown in your own home year-round.
This project will only be funded if at least $150,000 is pledged by .
At InnoGro, we believe food should be healthy, sustainable, and accessible. We believe it should be healthy not only for you, but also for the environment. We envision a world where food isn’t grown with toxic pesticides and herbicides, then carried on boat and truck for days or weeks before getting to you. A world where you know what’s in your food, because you sourced it locally or grew it yourself.
The AquaGarden embodies that vision, turning beautiful yet impractical decorations into sustainable food production tools. Our platform empowers everyone (yes, even you “Black Thumbs”) to easily take control of your food and simplify your aquarium maintenance.
We have a booth at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire, the nation’s largest gathering of an estimated 150,000 makers and supporters. Come see us!
The AquaGarden is an intelligent, self-sustaining ecosystem that lets you grow fresh, organic food right at home from your aquarium.
With an efficient footprint, the AquaGarden can turn any area into a productive garden, adding a beautiful living system to your living space. It’s easily managed from your smartphone with the InnoGro App, which guides you through the entire process, ensuring a bountiful harvest!
The AquaGarden benefits from the power of aquaponics, an efficient agriculture method that utilizes a symbiotic relationship between plants, bacteria, and fish to organically grow flavorful produce with high nutrient density.
The AquaGarden uses a number of sensors and actuators to create the perfect environment for your fish and plants. Lights, pumps, irrigation, heaters, and more are available at the touch of a button.
The brain of the system harnesses decades of aquaponic farming knowledge, providing guidance and presets for even the greenest of gardeners. And for those veteran farmers, in-depth analysis and tight environmental controls give you the edge to keep pushing towards better results.
The tools and knowledge of a modern farmer are available to you at the touch of a button. Our app turns the aquaponic process into an easy, fun, and interactive experience. Choose whether you want to simplify your AquaGarden with default presets based on decades of farming experience, or fine-tune every detail to your liking.
No matter where you are, or what you’re doing, your AquaGarden is always right at your fingertips. Check equipment status and environmental conditions to ensure everything is running smoothly, and easily take control whenever you want.
The InnoGro App has thousands of plants and fish to choose from, all with environmental presets to get your AquaGarden thriving. From water temperature and irrigation frequency, to light schedule and nutrient levels, the InnoGro App is your “farmer in a phone”. You can even create your own plant files and customized presets for future use.
Whether you just want to check current conditions, or delve into past results to learn and improve, the InnoGro App has you covered. In-depth analytics and visualizations let you know exactly what you’re doing right and where you can improve, leading to ever-improving harvests.
Use our journaling feature to track the progress of your fish and plants. Create journals for your entire AquaGarden, or each individual fish and plant. Add entries with pictures, test parameters, notes, and more so you never forget what you’ve done.
Find peace of mind, trusting that your AquaGarden is running smoothly. Real-time sensor readings combined with our farming database let you know exactly what your system needs at just the right time.
Planning and managing a garden is no easy task! But with our task management and organism guidelines, you can easily schedule the work to be done and view all upcoming tasks on your calendar. We’ll even let you know when each task is due, so you’re sure to never forget!
Share updates and progress with friends to let them know how you’re growing!
We’ll be open-sourcing our platform to foster a collaborative and innovative AquaGardening experience. You’ll be able to hack your own custom programs, expand on other AquaGardeners’ solutions, and keep improving your system. Email tech@getinnogro.com to be an early contributor or tester.
Connect with your AquaGarden from any iOS or Android device. You can even connect multiple AquaGardens to a single device.
The AquaGarden has been designed to accommodate a wide variety of vegetables, herbs, and even some fruits, regardless of your gardening experience.
While you can choose from literally thousands of plants with aquaponics and we heartily encourage experimentation, some plants will be easier than others to grow. Here are a few of the more common crops we’ve had success with and recommend for getting started:
Simply choose your desired plants from our database and the InnoGro App will provide all the guidance and automation you need to get growing. From irrigation and nutrient requirements to lighting schedules and harvest planning, we’ve got you covered!
The AquaGarden is powered by the Photon microcontroller and Particle platform. For more than a year we’ve been working with the talented team at Particle to develop a high quality product. Their platform provides easy setup and connection for the AquaGarden, simple OTA firmware updates, high reliability, and rapid scalability.
The AquaGarden you see today is the result of more than a year of design, prototyping, and development. Our functional prototypes have been undergoing trials for over six months, providing lots of fresh herbs and veggies for the InnoGro team as well as teaching us valuable lessons about the features and functionality required for a fun, easy experience.
Since creating those first prototypes, we’ve continued iterating, improving designs, and gathering feedback to keep driving innovation. We’ve improved our electronics, built out our software, rigorously tested sensors and other key components, enhanced the AquaGarden’s reliability, added functionality, and continued working to reduce costs. The result is a beautiful, intelligent garden which incorporates the knowledge and technology of commercial farming operations to let you easily grow your own fresh, healthy food.
Take a look at some of the process that’s gone into creating the perfect AquaGarden:
With our electronics fully built out, firmware undergoing testing, software back-end completed, front-end being developed, and supply chain in place, we’re excited to be so close to getting an AquaGarden into your hands!
It’s been an incredible journey so far, and we’re just getting started. Take a look at the production timeline below to see our monthly plan through delivery in April 2017. Clearly, we have a few exciting and challenging months ahead of us, and we need your help to make these next steps possible!
So, where do your funds go?
We’re nearly finished with prototyping and development, and we’re ready to start scaling production. This comes with a few large expenses, primarily:
Your support through these steps is crucial in making the InnoGro vision a reality!
We’re a passionate team with a goal of pushing humanity forward through innovation. Collectively, we bring decades of combined experience in modern farming, software development, industrial design, supply chain management, marketing, and more.
And as a veteran-owned startup, we’re no strangers to pressure and problem-solving!
Connect with us and follow our journey!
We’ve spent more than a year working on this project, building a talented team and partnering with incredible companies to minimize the risk to our Backers before launching. Still, all projects have inherent risks and challenges to overcome. We’ve determined these to be the primary risk factors:
Final Engineering
Product development is an involved process, requiring a great deal of problem-solving to create an incredible user experience as well as ensure manufacturability of the product. Throughout the entire design and prototyping stages we’ve worked closely with our manufacturers to make sure the AquaGarden progresses smoothly from prototype to mass production.
Manufacturing
As with any product, shifting from a small batch to commercial volume comes with unique challenges. Tooling, materials, lead times, and more must all come together in order for us to deliver as intended. Having partnered with one of the world’s most reputable manufacturing groups (joining the likes of Mercedes, Ford, Boeing, and others), we’re excited about a productive relationship that increases our likelihood of success.
Suppliers
Because our project includes components utilizing a worldwide supply chain, there is always the possibility of an issue with individual suppliers. Our team’s experience with supply chain management has allowed us to address this risk by building a reliable and efficient supply chain, and we are confident in our suppliers’ ability to continue delivering as expected.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterSetup is EASY and does not require any special skills or tools aside from your smartphone. We’ll guide you through the entire process, and we’re always just an email or phone call away.
Your AquaGarden includes a variety of seeds to get you started. We will also be offering additional seeds through our online store.
Due to ethical reasons, we do not provide live fish.
Your local fish or pet store should carry a variety of fish. We recommend finding a reputable vendor, as many pet stores provide unhealthy fish that have been kept in unethical conditions their entire lives. A diseased fish puts your entire ecosystem at risk.
Due to the fact that many of our supporters already have aquariums, and including them would dramatically add to the shipping cost, we are not currently offering aquariums.
Any local aquarium or pet store should carry standard 10 gallon aquariums (20"x10"x12") which fits our system.
Yes you can, though no aquarium lighting is provided so lighting will have to be added underneath the AquaGarden for aquatic plants that require more light. We also recommend adding aquarium plants into an already-established system to ensure you have a balanced system with adequate nutrients for the edibles in the top grow bed.
Yes! We take health and safety considerations VERY seriously and are using ONLY food-grade materials for the AquaGarden. Our goal is to improve the current food system, which includes knowing exactly what’s in your food. You’re entrusting us with your health, and we do not take that lightly.
When growing edible food, extra caution must be taken before putting anything into the aquarium water. Certain water conditioners and medicines may not be food-safe and should be avoided to ensure your harvests are completely organic and healthy!
The AquaGarden sits atop a stand and can be easily moved several inches to gain access for routine tasks, and it can be removed completely for complete access to the aquarium.
Less than an ordinary aquarium! Plants clean the water for you, so you don’t have to do regular water changes. The sensors tell you exactly what’s going on, so you don’t have to perform regular testing (time-consuming and expensive!). All you have to do is feed the fish.
Including electricity (based on the national average $0.12kWh), seeds, water, fish food, etc. your AquaGarden will cost approximately $5-6 per month.
An established system can produce approximately 8 heads of lettuce every 3-4 weeks. Including recurring expenses, this saves over $25/mo on groceries, returning the entire investment in just 14 months.
Since you’re likely already using an air pump, filter, or water pump in your aquarium, the AquaGarden won’t make any more noise than you’re used to. The water draining back into the aquarium is the loudest element. If this noise is an issue we recommend attaching the included hose to the return fitting, which will prevent the waterfall effect and drastically reduce the noise.
The AquaGarden has 54w of full-spectrum fluorescent lighting, more than enough to productively grow any plant out of the 288 sq in footprint.
LED lights are still in their infancy stage and thus are not yet ready for most consumer products. Dollar for dollar, fluorescent lighting still provides more PAR, which is the specific light spectrum utilized by plants for photosynthesis. As advances in LED technology are being made daily, we are always weighing every option to deliver the best product at an accessible price point and are excited to continue innovating.
The InnoGro App will be available for both iOS and Android devices.
Yes! Because our goal is to empower an open, collaborative community to continue improving and hacking new solutions, we will be open-sourcing this project later this year. If you’re interested in being an early contributor or tester, contact us at tech@getinnogro.com.
We're planning a ship date of April 2017. See our timeline above for more details on how we intend to get there.
We stand firmly behind our product. We guarantee you’ll receive a working AquaGarden unit, and every AquaGarden comes with a limited one year warranty.