Team name: Edufarm
Team members: Michelle Rodriguez and Rebeca Pinto
Host: Circular Influence, Barcelona, Spain
Challenge: How can communities in the EU and Latin America have access to digital systems innovation education and use it to sustainably protect, manage, and restore their food, agriculture & land use local ecosystems?

After the pandemic, many organisations have found themselves oversized in square meters of the workspace as many employees have been reassigned to remote positions, leaving many companies and estate owners with empty, non-productive spaces. At the same time, the pandemic has prompted us to maintain a more local lifestyle- it has allowed communities to grow fonder of their local distributors and has opened the door for local entrepreneurs. It is important to promote efforts to have agriculture present in cities and even more appealing to city students, as it can evolve into a great career path.

With EDUFARM, we are taking advantage of the empty spaces and making them productive with the creation of high-tech agro-laboratories located in urban areas in order to promote the education, learning, and experimentation of agriculture. Our solution consists of solving the logistics behind the connection of two different providers: estate owners and agro-technology companies in order to create high-tech urban agriculture laboratories offered to universities and agrarian institutes for research and project development.

While we offer this service, we adapt spaces in disuse in order to make them productive, profitable, and valuable. We also promote the local cultivation of organic food that end up reducing shipping costs and Co2 emissions from the transportation of this product. Moreover, our initiative promotes agricultural education through technology. We will provide university students with the high-tech facilities and equipment needed to experiment, experiment, collect data and develop their projects and research.

Read the full description here.