Marco Tidona, inventor of the aponix.eu vertical barrel concept
„As a software service provider I have been looking for a real product for more than 10 years in the software and apps business and to every idea there have been one or more caveats. By accident I got into aquaponics in 2014 and started to play with plants and wanted to set up a small home system. But there were no useful, affordable higher quality growing devices on the market to provide an easy initial setup of grow spaces. So I invented one… V1, V2, V3.
With increasing world population a comprehensive supply with high quality fresh organic food is more and more depending on efficient new growing methods. It will be critical to grow with high density, ecologically beneficial and close to the consumer. Urban farming is emerging and new production methods are currently tested and invested in.
This image basically sums up what we already knew when we started and now you can see it too: Vertical farming is also beautiful!
Many impressive rooftop farms have been set up worldwide so far. And apart from just stacking levels using shelves or racks other shapes were emerging. So aponix took the opportunity to define another new innovative shape to set up grow spaces in 3D using lego-pieces to set up modular vertical cylinders (barrels) that are flexible and scalable. The aim was to enable smaller and more central farming plots or community spaces to also operate on a viable economic basis and open the space for decentralized urban micro farming.
Many people ask why the large diameter and not a ‘tower’? The answer might surprise you: a) There where already tower solutions (like TowerGarden from juice+) out there and b) it was simply based on a function that had the diameter of ~57cm or a circumference of 1.8 meters as a maximum. The function described dispersed cylinders in a 3D room and what happened to the available total number of grow spaces when you increase the diameter of all used cylinders adding more space for additional grow spaces per level.
Aponix.eu started as a project of Manticore IT GmbH in 2015. The company was renamed (actually up-cycled) in April 2018 into: aponix GmbH, Im Neuenheimer Feld 583, D-69120 Heidelberg/Germany.
Please visit us on Facebook to find out more about the development and production methods of our barrel parts, planting examples etc. and tell all your friends.
Please do not be confused since the prototype parts had a weird fish-shaped logo with the letters ‘ponix‘ on it. We hope if you are googling for ponix, you finally find aponix. We had to change the logo and the name during the initial setup of our venture to ‘aponix‘ due to a naming collision…
Aponix stepped away from looking for ‘distributors’ or ‘resellers’ to sell the aponix pieces and started to work out more sophisticated solutions with ‘product partners’ from 2020. The idea is, that aponix pieces represent just infrastructure pieces that need to be engineered into a larger tailored context for certain target groups (the actual users). If you know what you are doing and just like to test run or integrate our bare aponix equipment into your own project you can order pieces any time from us B2B or also B2C. All more complete solutions for different applications (end-user setups, cannabis growing chambers, supermarket living plant dispenser setups, house plant nursery systems, whatever you can imagine etc) will be engineered and provided by aponix product partners independently. Please check the product partner detail page if you are curious what the rules for this look like.
In an address to the students on the 12th December 2019 Marco Tidona explains his personal story and the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of aponix / SDG Conference Warsaw Universities and SkyFarms / Location Warsaw, Auditorium Maximum UKSW:
Marco Tidona explains the advantages of hyperlocal edible plant production and consumption at Seeds&Chips 2018 in Milan and shows how the aponix vertical barrel system can contribute to the trend to grow more hyperlocal produce (talk starts at 38:18):
This is a setup video of our friend Kevin from Epic Gardening. Kevin explains how to set up and run one of our vertical barrels (17min):
Some production videos: