introducing
The HomeField™
all-season gardening appliance
Advanced grow technology for food independence.
Pre-order today and save! Starting at $3,999
Free shipping within the U.S. (except HI & AK)
STEM Cultivation’s mission is to combine science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) principles with the art of cultivation to help anyone achieve sustainable food independence.
I was raised on a farm in Ohio and earned a degree in architecture from MIT. That combination led me to invent the heavy-duty HomeField™ as a way for on- or off-grid households, schools, restaurants, etc., to take control of their food supplies. The HomeField™ uses a 3’ x 4’ footprint to create a year-round garden with a capacity for 50 sq ft. of fresh, nutritious, and chemical-free food that tastes better and costs less than store-bought, using less energy than a desktop computer!
Kyle Moffitt, Founder, STEM Cultivation, Inc.
FRONT VIEW
SIDE VIEW
Made in the USA of sturdy aluminum and food-grade components, the HomeField™ is a mobile and self-contained heavy-duty gardening system for indoor or outdoor growing.
The Homefield™ continuously rains Nutrient water onto naked plant roots that use their exposure to oxygen to absorb the nutrients better.
The patent-pending SunSQUARED™ technology immerses the entire plant in a bath of low-wattage light, increasing its capacity to self-nourish (photosynthesis) when exposed to more nutrients simultaneously.
So, maximizing the plant’s nutrient and light absorption maximizes its production and minimizes the water, nutrients, and energy required!
The complementing effect of HomeField™’s NFT hydroponic design and sunsquared™ lighting is a force multiplier that turbocharges plant growth. (Video) Roots don’t lie! Here is a single tomato plant that harvested 2-3 lbs every few weeks for 9 months!
The HomeField™ optimizes nature and nurture to enable a personalized food supply with more taste and less waste than industrial farming. It’s the foundation of a sustainability movement we call ‘plant2plate’ that makes household food independence a reality!
THE HOMEFIELD™ LEVERAGES SEVERAL PLANT PHYSIOLOGY AND PHYSICS PRINCIPLES simultaneously TO OPTIMIZE GROWTH WITH MINIMAL ENERGY use.
NFT HYDROPONICS
NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) is a high-efficiency hydroponic (i.e., soilless) growing method that recirculates nutrient water over plant roots directly exposed to oxygen in the air. It is renowned for growing bigger plants faster.
Plant roots love oxygen because it facilitates nutrient absorption, which in turn facilitates photosynthesis, which increases metabolism and, thus, growth. Therefore, plants grow faster, produce more, and use less nutrients.
The HomeField™ continuously rains oxygenated nutrient water over naked roots to maximize absorption.
GRAVITROPISM
As it turns out, when given a choice between growing its internal structure to oppose gravity or growing its branches to find light, plants will always choose structural stability before canopy expansion because floppy plants get less light.
This is the effect of gravitropism, which is how plants respond to gravity to know which way is up and down and can grow towards light.
Gravitropism causes trees to extend their roots downwards into the ground and branch upwards towards the sun with their branches and leaves. If we lived on Tatooine (with two suns), plant canopies would expand equally toward both suns!
So, the roots of a plant growing from the side of a tower (or cliff) will still grow down, and its branches will self-support to curve upward and toward the direction of the light (or lights!).
The HomeField™ uses gravitropism to create a wall of plants lit by two ‘suns’ that multiplies phototropism in all directions.
PHOTOTROPISM
Plants like direct sunlight because it causes photosynthesis, which creates nourishment. This initiates phototropism, an instinct that causes plants’ stalks (trunks), branches, and leaves to grow and bend insatiably toward any lights that maximize photosynthesis.
Although plants have evolved with only one light source, photosynthesis, and gravitropism compel them to bend toward any light source at every angle and direction to increase photosynthesis.
The HomeField™ uses phototropism to expose more plant canopy to direct light from multiple angles to increase photosynthesis.
INVERSE SQUARE LAW
Plants love light, but only at the intensity found in nature that activates photosynthesis. Growing indoors requires the inverse square law to calculate the correct distance between the lights and the plants to mimic the sun’s intensity. It's called "inverse square" because light intensity exponentially increases as the distance to its source decreases, and vice versa.
Imagine standing 4 feet from a light and measuring its intensity. The inverse square law says that to maintain the same intensity from 2 feet away, you must make the light 4 times dimmer—in other words, you would use less energy for the same effect.
The HomeField™ uses the inverse square law to activate photosynthesis using less energy by placing lights closer to the plant canopy.
The Homefield™ combines science, technology, engineering, & math (STEM) principles to maximize plant production with less energy, water, and space needed.
The HomeField™’s super-efficient NFT design offers faster growth rates and higher plant yields with minimum water, nutrients, and space requirements. Its highly oxygenated environment substantially enhances nutrient uptake, fuels cellular respiration, supports root health, facilitates essential cellular processes, and helps the photosynthetic process.
As a living wall, plants grow from the side of towers and respond by bending to reorient their growth to counteract gravity. This bending allows the plant to maintain an upward growth trajectory despite the sideways orientation; it responds to the constant downward force by developing an ever-stabilizing structure as it seeks maximum light exposure. That means virtually all plants - including large plants like sunflowers and melons - are naturally self-supporting!
STEM™’s patent-pending SunSQUARED™ immersive lighting illuminates plants from the front and rear to maximize photosynthetic exposure across the entire leaf canopy and ensures optimal energy capture for growth and metabolism. By exploiting the inverse square law, the SunSQUARED™ technology saves up to 90% of the energy per plant required to challenge its capacity.
Putting it all together in one integrated package, the Homefield™ is a heavy-duty gardening system that uses fewer resources to produce bigger harvests in less time year-round!
About STEM Cultivation
STEM Cultivation was founded in 2017 to create a more sustainable way to grow plants indoors.
Our mission is to combat food insecurity using the principles of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math to enable the sustainable production of safe, nutritious, and fresh produce commercially or at home.
STEM is driven by a ‘fail fast’ R&D philosophy that follows the evidence wherever it takes us. We have discovered and proven many innovations that often defy conventional wisdom and reset the bar for efficient all-season growing.
Our first target market was commercial cannabis growers. Why cannabis? Because legal markets were new, demand was insatiable, and production was super-competitive, growers were looking for any way to lower their costs without sacrificing quality.
After considering every method and style of growing, we decided a ‘living wall’ style vertical hydroponic system offered the best way to grow big plants at scale using the least space, water, and energy.
The HomeField™ uses a ‘living wall’ concept to produce more in less space.
We built a basic prototype to test the hypothesis and were off to the races…
We first established a baseline harvest using a hydroponic technique called deep-water culture (DWC) in a traditional horizontal orientation with lights shining down on the plants.
Then, we repeated the test in our prototype using the same number of plants, plant genetics, lights, nutrients, etc.
When we compared the results of our prototype to our horizontal DWC, the differences in how much we grew in the same floor space using less energy and water was staggering!
Soon after, STEM Cultivation was born, and we set out to scale up our prototype to something that could work commercially…
in 2018, we debuted the stem box, the first self-contained hydroponic grow room for commercial cultivation, using the ‘living wall’ concept.
The STEM Box prototype integrated manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and horticultural best practices to create a totally isolated and environmentally precise room that could grow hundreds of large plants with unparalleled efficiency.
In 2019, we launched The STEM Box v1, a 30’ (L) x 10’ (W) x 11’ (H) self-contained growing room with integrated lights, water, & climate control, and a capacity of 480 plants.
In our first full-scale harvest for a commercial client, we produced 92 lbs of cannabis* in only 300 sq ft of floor space, compared to 15 lbs they averaged in growing rooms that were 50% larger! We made so much that the COO of the company complained that we had made too much and they couldn’t sell that much of the same strain at once (true story!).
* Weight and purity certified by the State of Nevada.
In 2020, COVID threw us a curveball. cannabis Growers’ demand for technical innovation and production efficiency was replaced by their struggle to simply survive.
However, the aftermath of COVID lockdowns exposed two market trends that transformed our story…
First, legal cannabis markets across the U.S. and Canadian markets crashed due to oversupply, and many commercial growers went out of business.
Second, the pandemic caused many people to experience food shortages for the first time, causing millions to take up gardening as a hedge against food insecurity. We had already grown garden plants like basil, kale, and sunflowers in the system, so we knew it would support food plants just as well as cannabis so…
…in 2022, STEM switched gears and set a new course to apply our knowledge and expertise to help families become food-independent. After two years of R&D, we released The HomeField™ gardening system in 2024.
