Keith Agoada has a young company, Sky Vegetables. A kid with a vision, he takes underutilized space in urban areas and grows food there, creating green jobs, providing access to fresh produce, increasing self reliance, localizing the economy, and creating a better life by building communities through growing vegetables.

The idea came to Agoada just before his senior year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which he graduated from last year. The vision is both simple and elegant: green rooftops, not just as gardens, but as urban agriculture hubs for herbs and edible greens, utilizing off-the-shelf hydroponics and aquaponics equipment in greenhouses to grow food to sell for profit within the community.

He saw the community gardens in Chicago and thought that it was fantastic that they were building community by growing food and doing it in the city. So he went back his senior year at Wisconsin and received three credits for doing a feasibility study to see if rooftops could be commercial farming locations, quickly learning that it was possible to generate self reliance and grow a myriad of things in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, when it’s below zero and covered in snow.

That led to a business plan competition, which he won, garnering local press coverage and investor interest.

Amid all this, Agoada remained a reluctant businessman. He studied entrepreneurship in school and learned that he didn’t want to be an entrepreneur.  He was afraid of the gut-wrenching roller coaster .
He eventually took on investors and business partners, based in the Boston area, a continent away from Agoada’s Berkeley, Calif., base. And Sky Vegetables was born.

Now he is not only going green but is encouraging self reliance in communities and changing the face of the modern urban landscape. Sky Vegetables has unlimited potential to feed all of our appetites for creative and conscious capitalism.

Shane Krider- Polaris Media Group