Square-foot garden rental. Mail in the seeds and specify the area needed (in 1ft^2 increments), service plants/waters/weeds/harvests accordingly, providing webcam/etc updates, mailing the produce back.
Even better, you get an API that gives you a photo of your square, air and soil humidity, temperature, and a call to water the square for x seconds. Planting and harvesting is manual, everything else you automate!
I thought the CSA model was essentially pre-selling a share of the harvest. Whereas I believe this idea is to offer a plot that the user could control with remote hands? Possibly even a web-controlled arm or something?
You mean 1m^2 increments, probably. There are various paper and online resources that document the "row distance" for various crops. Those numbers are based not just on both above and below ground width of a given type of plant, but also how 'thirsty' it is. On further thought, maybe it would be legit to make your minimum unit equal to the average row distance of your most common crops.
Also, did you know that all plants are engaged in constant chemical warfare with one another? Meaning, each plant releases toxins that inhibit the growth of competitive species. I recommend a book called Carrots Love Tomatoes. Why do I mention this? Layout matters. You can't grow tomatoes adjacent to brassicas effectively.
There are plant compatibility charts which would allow you to develop a layout algorithm... BUT, there are also age-old predefined garden layout templates which are optimized not just for plant compatibility but also accessibility (you need paths to get in there and water) and beauty.
...And that folks is what happens when a programmer knocks up a gardener. :)
But have you considered renting individual plants or something, instead of squares of land? The predefined garden layouts can be scaled, but I'm not confident that they can be tiled... In this model, no individual would own any specific spot--it'd just be one big garden! s/gardener/modern anarchist/
When I search the internet for information about agriculture, I usually keep an eye out for results from .edu webservers, rather than yuppies.
Iowa State University has a great Ag program, for example, and they cite their sources and publish their data.
I mean, you can of course rent sqft chunks of land, one unit is as good as another. Just try not to picture a 100x100 grid of squares each with a customer in the center--the plants would not grow for various reasons outlined in this thread. :)
I meant "square foot". It's a gardening thing in the USA. If you want more, rent more; 1ft^2 is the basic unit.
Good point on "chemical warfare" - and this arrangement can solve it. Unless you request a particular arrangement of adjacent square feet, the GaaS (Gardening as a Service) provider can arrange arrangement with other people's plots to improve on inter-species interactions, and do so in ways that individual gardeners can't because they don't have the scale nor variety.
Sure, rent-a-plant would work too. I prefer the "square foot" approach. My idea started when the lead post reminded me of those odd real estate semi-scams that sold "one square inch" of some otherwise desirable area, complete with legal deed; then I realized that "square foot gardening" is a thing, and ran with it, and now hopefully calbear81 will really take it somewhere.
Do you mind if I run with this idea at a hackathon? It's like your garden in Plants vs. Zombies! I had some tweaks in mind but very similar to your base idea.
Square-foot garden rental. Mail in the seeds and specify the area needed (in 1ft^2 increments), service plants/waters/weeds/harvests accordingly, providing webcam/etc updates, mailing the produce back.