Farmshelf: Affordable Custom Parts for an Urban Farming System

Farmshelf has earned its place in the urban farming space by creating a fully self-contained system that allows individuals, residential communities, and restaurants to grow plants wherever they want. To create, test and refine their unique hardware and software platform, they used Ultimaker 2+ printers which allowed them to produce many design iterations for large numbers of custom modular parts, a process that would otherwise have taken too much time and money to outsource.

While the Farmshelf team had a clear idea of ​​what they needed to achieve with their flagship product, designing autonomous processes involving living and growing organisms can pose a serious challenge. In addition to meeting stringent technical requirements for each component and subsystem, they had to produce a variety of custom enclosures, mounting brackets and more. They also had to test all these parts through successive harvests of a wide range of edible plants. Traditional production methods would not only cost too much for an emerging company, but any misstep with traditional production would jeopardize the harvest and months of work.

Freedom to design and iterate

Andrew Shearer, CEO and co-founder of Farmshelf, immediately recognized the opportunity 3D printing presented for his business. “For a company, 3D printing is a way to involve more people in the building process and focus more on the prototyping and design process,” says Andrew.

By choosing to integrate Ultimaker printers into its design process, Farmshelf was able to mold and reshape custom parts on site. As a result, they maintained the demanding manufacturing demands needed to produce working, plant-ready prototypes for their first products. Instead of rolling the dice to determine the company’s success and failure with each round of custom parts, Farmshelf discovered a cost-effective solution for every stage, from prototyping to manufacturing; 3D printing met all their design and lab research needs.

By choosing to integrate Ultimaker printers into its design process, Farmshelf was able to mold and reshape custom parts on site. As a result, they maintained the demanding manufacturing requirements needed to produce working prototypes ready for the first plant run. With each batch of custom parts, Farmshelf has discovered a cost-effective solution for every stage, from prototype to production; 3D printing met all their design and research needs.

With 3D printing available in-house, the Farmshelf team only needed to cover the cost of filament for the prototype parts. Outsourcing would have resulted in costs of materials, consumables and services, as well as a stalled iteration process that would have slowed down the entire flow.

“Without access to Ultimaker printers, we would have had to resort to using off-the-shelf parts and designing our product around them,” says Jaeseong Yi, product designer at Farmshelf. «Or worse, we would have to mass-produce parts using CNC, which is an expensive process. Ultimaker gave us a lot of independence in our design process.»

Expansion and installation of the product

The results brought immense joy to the Farmshelf design team. Not only did they have the freedom to customize parts quickly and efficiently, they also had working prototypes that allowed them to test products through entire plant growth cycles. In turn, scaling the product was a much more efficient and cost-effective process, allowing the team to deploy and expose beta models to various high-profile public sites while staying within budget constraints.