Musk’s solution is simple, if a tad controversial: The accelerator’s first yearlong field experiment did away with the need for a field entirely. Instead, its 10 farming containers are located in a Brooklyn-based parking lot.

So far, we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm if you can bring the farm to the farmer.

Kimbal Musk’s swashbuckling entrance into hydroponics has upset some farm-to-table chefs and sustainable farming advocates, who see his approach as Silicon Valley-style industrialization. Growing plants in a sci-fi-like way–in Musk’s method, there’s no soil required–might scale quickly, delivering certain foods more cheaply to grocery stores, restaurants, and people in need.

At the same time, the container method doesn’t address rising concerns from environmentalists about how to fix the U.S.’s reliance on resource-intensive and pollution-causing commodity cropland. Or how to create farms with the sort of wide-variety of offerings that can remain resilient if weather shifts, or more apocalyptically, the power cuts out.

Read the full article on Musk's container farming accelerator by Ben Paynter at FastCompany