Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith first met as students at the University of Virginia, where they quickly discovered a shared passion: providing nutritious produce to those in need. Soon after, they banded together to design a low-cost micro farm, an agricultural method that uses specialized and compact equipment to automate food growing, in order to do their part in providing food to refugees.
In 2017, the duo leveraged their shared passion into a full-time venture, co-founding Babylon Micro-Farms with the goal of giving everyone the capacity to grow their own food. Drawing on the principles of sustainable hydroponic farming, they designed their trademark modular micro-farm—a system that allows users to grow vegetables three times faster and using 90% less water than outdoor farming techniques. Babylon manufactures and sells 32-by-66-by-96-inch machines that use controlled environments and hydroponics to grow leafy greens, herbs, and more. In contrast to other indoor agricultural systems, Babylon’s micro-farms don’t use soil, sunlight, or even standard seeds. Instead, Babylon is able to remotely manage each machine in order to ensure that each crop receives adequate water and light, maximizing the per-acre yield of each crop.
