| Overview |The Taiga Tower is the only fully-automated IoT home garden that provides fresh and organic produce. Fill up the water base once a week and the Tower will automatically manage and optimize plants' moisture and light levels to guarantee their health and quality. As the only indoor system capable of growing 8 of the 10 most popular vegetables grown in the United States, and 6+ varieties and 30 plants concurrently, the Taiga Tower provides the functionality of a normal garden with none of the pain. | Background |In this increasingly urbanized world, gardening in urban areas needs to play a bigger role in feeding city populations. According to the US Census Bureau, 82% of Americans live in urban areas. Considering that the average piece of produce will travel ~1500 miles on average in the "modern" supply chain, people in cities are having to compromise quality for affordability.Despite the popularity of gardening, its sheer difficulty has prevented the practice from becoming mainstream in urban areas. In order to maintain a garden, it takes ~1-2 hours a week for all steps including soil prep, watering, fertilizing, etc. Using New York City as an example, which has a population of over 8.5 million Americans, the average work week is 49 hours or ~10 hours per day. In addition, with approximately 60% of households in New York having families, there is zero time for the extracurricular. Even if time isn't an issue, the urban dweller has to consider another potential hurdle – space. With the average size of a Manhattan apartment being 550-750 ft2, there is barely enough room for furniture, let alone a garden. Considering other factors such as cost, dirtiness and quality control, it seems quite obvious why urban dwellers forgo the idea of maintaining a garden. This pain point creates a considerable opportunity for the urban farming industry as a whole – but in particular, indoor smart gardening as the most intuitive and subtle product within this industry.