Ante Toni Debelić, a 16-year-old student from Rijeka, won 1st place at the annual high school business competition "Idea of the Year" for his project GrowCity, reports srednja.hr.
GrowCity is an automatised portable system of food cultivation in ship containers that would have their own micro-climate. "You would be able to grow food anywhere in the world, regardless of weather conditions and external factors. A container with a surface of 28 m2 could grow the same amount of food annually as a regular land plot of 2200 m2. At a regular farm, there are two harvests per year, while the container system would enable 20 to 22 harvests annually because the climate can be entirely automatised and the process repeated," said Debelić.
He got the idea during a family trip to the Philippines, where a traffic jam in Manila got him thinking about ways of improving the process of food transportation from the place of production to the store chains in the cities. An online search resulted in finding one company in the US that uses a similar container principle, but their farm operates at a fixed location. Debelić started thinking it would be much better if the farm could be transported anywhere, and got inspired by the port in Rijeka where he sees a large number of container ships on a daily basis.
"I have a background in robotics and automatics so I promptly started working on the idea, and then I saw the announcement for the competition," he said. He wrote the business plan in five days, and Salezijanska grammar school in Rijeka will support his project by allowing him to work on a prototype on the school grounds.
"Idea of the Year" is an annual competition open to high school students from all parts of Croatia. It's organised by srednja.hr portal in collaboration with Institutes for higher education Algebra and Effectus, with Rimac Automobiles and IN2 as friends of the project.
