By Kassandra Reyes
“I remember exactly how it happened.” Alfredo Costilla-Reyes, Texas A&M University doctorate candidate, was approached by a surprised mother who said something that’s stuck with him since. It was his “Aha!” moment when he realized he could do something with agriculture and electrical engineering. All because the mother said she hadn’t known that if her kids grew vegetables, they’d eat them too. “I intersected the two very big worlds and that’s how BitGrange was born,” he says.
Born in Toluca, State of Mexico, Mexico, Costilla-Reyes was in contact with agriculture his entire life. Raised on a farm (in Tejupilco de Hidalgo, Mexico) like his parents and grandparents, he remembers the early mornings and hot afternoons well when he’d milk the cows and check the crops, plants, and vegetables. While he was still very young, his family moved to Toluca, a larger city and capital of his home state, where they attempted to keep in touch with their farming roots by using a small piece of land in their backyard to plant things.
“The best memories I have is me and my brothers pulling some carrots from the ground,” Costilla-Reyes says. “It was amazing because you see all this orange coming from the soil and you couldn’t see anything before.”
After graduating from National Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, the biggest university in the state, with a degree in electrical engineering, Costilla-Reyes started a company in consumer electronics. He then participated in Mexico’s “Concurso del Universitario Emprendedor” and won the first prize: a trip paid in full to Texas A&M for a summer research project. This helped kick-start Costilla-Reyes’ journey in the U.S.
Once in Bryan College Station, Costilla-Reyes made sure to keep agriculture close to his heart. He started volunteering at Kemp Elementary School in Bryan through the Texas A&M Howdy Farm organization, and he replicated what his parents did with him as a child. They placed small beds of soil in front of the school, prepared the land, and taught the children how to grow food. Something simple, right? Costilla-Reyes recalls telling the kids they would begin by growing radish and lettuce and getting questionable looks that read, “What is a radish?” or “What is a lettuce?”
“I’m pretty sure [they] have eaten [lettuce] before at McDonald’s but that hit me like a train,” Costilla-Reyes says. “New generations are not being exposed to where their food comes from. They just see a package in front of them and start eating whatever you put in front of them.”
That realization prompted Costilla-Reyes to work towards something that would help continue to educate children and encourage them to learn about the global food sustainability issues. Thus, the agriculture-educational app was introduced along with the device that allows for plant breeding.
Introduced as BitGrange with the byline, “Lettuce change the world,” the gadget revolutionized urban farming. Dr. Kim E. Dooley, associate dean for Academic Operations for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, saw the innovation take off. Dr. Dooley comments on the uniqueness of the gadget — the way the system connects to your phone and how the farmer is able to check on the health of their plant. The device is also customizable to fit the water, light, and nutrient requirements of different plants.
“It was a kind of a ‘feeding the world’ situation in urban agriculture because you didn’t have to have land to grow food,” Dr. Dooley says. On top of food security, she recalls how Costilla-Reyes and his team want to emphasize youth development.
BitGrange was engineered to allow anyone to grow food indoors, without having to deal with the everyday problematic variables farmers come across. The gadget uses hydroponics, the process of growing plants with nutrients sans soil, so the amateur farmer only needs to provide water and nutrients, and monitor the plant with the BitGrange app. Thanks to the network of software and sensors that allow objects to collect and exchange data (known as the Internet of Things used in devices like thermostats, cars, and lights), the sensors and LED light on the device mimic sunlight, which makes for a very successful plant cycle.
“What makes BitGrange so amazing is that it is a gamified version of what I was doing with the kids [at Kemp Elementary School],” Costilla-Reyes says.
Aside from wanting future generations to know where their food is coming from, Costilla-Reyes also stresses another issue current farmers are facing: age. He says the average age of a farmer in the U.S. is about 60 years old, and it only increases. What then? With no new generations replacing these farmers, Costilla-Reyes predicts we will run out of farmers (aka food producers) in the future. Additionally, these farmers do not want their kids to continue in their profession because there is so much instability in farming, such as weather, weeds, and worrisome pests. Costilla-Reyes also predicts that by the time he dies, more than three-quarters of our generation will live in bigger cities, abandoning the farms.
“This is what BitGrange is all about. I believe that we (we as in everybody), starting with millennials, we are a new generation of farmers that need a new generation of tools to do agriculture,” Costilla-Reyes says. “This new generation that seems to be so separated from the farm, they are looking for an excuse to be connected again. But not with the same tools. Why would you be doing the same mistakes as before? … We want to know what goes into what we eat. And we provide that with this device.”
Dr. Dooley also adds that children will learn responsibility similar to the way they learn to take care of pets with electronic simulations of pets. “[BitGrange] is the same concept, except that child would really be growing something they could eat,” she says, which adds to the concept of food security and the organics of food.
Costilla-Reyes often pinches himself, still in disbelief of the progress his company has achieved. After failing miserably dozens of times, he calls this sudden splurge of success the “tip of the iceberg.” From an embarrassing Tupperware prototype at Kemp Elementary to a company noticed by many, Costilla-Reyes keeps three things close to his heart daily. The first is to have faith in oneself, the second is to work really hard, and the third is to never give up.
“What makes me jump out of bed every single morning is thinking that, by providing this tool to millions of families out there, one day I want to see the largest farm on the planet that doesn’t own a single square inch of land,” Costilla-Reyes says.
After all the awards and recognition, Costilla-Reyes steps back to reveal that his parents should be the ones credited, saying he is just the result of their work and encouragement. He also thanks all of the people who were willing to take the risk on his “crazy idea.” The doctorate candidate has high hopes for BitGrange and the future of farming. Why? “Agriculture is ripe for innovation.”
For more information on the company and device, visit www.bitgrange.com.
