Growing sweet potatoes with NUS!

Here at Ripe, we're always open to collaborations with educational institutes, because we LOVE researching new varieties and methods to grow plants indoors more efficiently.

So when National University of Singapore approached us to build an aeroponic system to grow Sweet Potatoes in the NUS Agritech Centre, you bet we were stoked to work with them!

The NUS Agritech Centre is an innovative sandpit for researchers, entrepreneurs and visionaries to present challenges, experiments, and explore market-based solutions in agriculture.

We knew that root crops are impractical in a hydroponic system, but very well-suited to aeroponics, which is of course, our specialty. This is because the roots have plenty of room to grow and are easily accessible for harvesting, making it ideal for monitoring root crops and data collection during the growing period.

We kicked off our collaboration with NUS with a modified aeroponics growing system, with a deeper grow chamber to accommodate the sweet potatoes. NUS also aims to grow sweet potato leaves simultaneously for consumption, hence the grow space above is also designed for optimal foliage growth.

Our team headed down to Singapore to personally install and test the system in their Agritech Centre, and here's some Behind the Scenes of how it went down!

We're looking forward to seeing the results from this growing experiment, testing and hopefully proving that aeroponics is the superior growing method for root crops!