A Manufacturer And A Food Caterer Among New Players Feeding Singapore’s Urban Farming Boom

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Tang See Kit

@SeeKitCNA

11 Aug 2021

SINGAPORE: In a small room tucked away on the second floor of a precision engineering factory in Tuas, pots of kale and lettuce stacked in vertical racks grow under the glow of pink-purple lights.

These light-emitting diode (LED) lights have been designed to shine at a customized spectrum that will help crops grow better. Smart sensors also keep tabs on temperature and humidity in the room, while a special water treatment system reduces bacteria growth.

In here, the goal is to find the best way to farm vegetables indoors, all with the use of technology.

“You can control everything, even how much nutrients or water is being used for each plant,” said Mr. Nelson Lim, co-founder of I.F.F.I, which stands for Indoor Farm Factory Innovation.

“We want to bring indoor farming into something more precise, where you calculate the least input for the best output. That is precision farming,” he told CNA.

Mr. Lim is also the chief executive of precision engineering firm TranZplus Engineering, which is the parent company of I.F.F.I. TranZplus’ two-story office in Tuas now houses both a manufacturing facility for semiconductor components and a farming showroom.

“A lot of people ask me: ‘Nelson, are you crazy? You’re in engineering, why suddenly do farming?’ Actually, the two are not unrelated. We can put our engineering skills to good use in indoor farming,” Mr. Lim said while demonstrating the farming racks that can be adjusted according to height and size.

Robotics is another expertise that the company has incorporated into its farming solutions to not just improve the yield and quality of crops, but also workflow efficiencies.

For instance, automated machines that can perform seeding, transplanting, potting and harvesting tasks will be put to work at I.F.F.I’s mega indoor farm when ready at the end of this year.

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(Left to right) I.F.F.I's general manager Veronica Lee, chief operating officer Kelvin Ng, and co-founder Nelson Lim. (Photo: Tang See Kit)

SEEDING A DIVERSIFICATION

TranZplus’ venture into agriculture was first seeded in 2016 when it became one of the vendors for Panasonic’s indoor farm in Singapore.

“Initially, they just wanted to have a rack. Then we thought why not have racks that can be customized, why not put in an irrigation system and other types of automation?” Mr Lim recalled. “We worked out a prototype and they were impressed.”

The company kept on with research and development after that, while being involved in setting up three other small-scale farms. In 2019, it decided it had gained enough experience to give it a shot.

Mr. Lim said the decision to venture into indoor farming was driven by “strong business potential”, partly on the back of Singapore’s “30 by 30” goal to produce 30 percent of the country's nutritional needs locally by 2030.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the potential, with global disruptions to the harvesting, shipping, and sale of food making it even more important for the country to have its own resources. Indoor farms can be the solution, he added.

Last September, I.F.F.I. became one of the nine urban farms to secure grants totaling S$39.4 million from the Singapore Food Agency.

Its 38,000 sq ft indoor farm, which remains under development at the JTC Space @ Tuas, will be using a soil-based cultivation method that allows more vegetable varieties to be planted.

When operational, the mega farm will be able to produce 800 to 1,000kg of vegetables, like nai bai and spinach, per day, said Mr Lim.

Another new player on the field is food caterer Kitchen Haus, which co-founded “farm-to-table” concept brand Frux Earth a few months ago.

With its core business facing a slow recovery amid the pandemic, the company has been diversifying actively in search of new opportunities over the past year.

Agriculture is “not unrelated territory”, chief executive Patrick Chan said. “It’s still part of the food ecosystem so when the opportunity came, I agreed instantly.”

It teamed up with home-grown urban farming company Metro Farm for the new venture. With the latter’s expertise, the farms under Frux Earth – three sites spanning 60,000 sq ft – are powered by an aquaponics system that converts fish waste into nutrients for the vegetables.

For instance, its 12,000 sq ft rooftop farm atop an industrial building in Bendemeer has eight fish tanks with red tilapia and jade perch. These fishes were chosen for their hardiness and ability “to produce more waste”, said Metro Farm’s director Chris Toh.

“We have a filter to separate the fish waste, which is then broken down by bacteria. Our system will then keep the nutrients flowing to the vegetables 24/7,” said the farm’s other director Brandon Toh, who added that the system is “self-sustainable” and keeps costs low.

The Bendemeer farm, with its 720 vertical plant towers, can harvest more than 30,000 stalks of vegetables, including purple lettuce and kale, a month. The fish will also be sold once they reach table size.

Mr. Chan said: “This is a breath of fresh air for us and we pivoted because we want to jump on the trend of food sustainability.

“I think Metro Farm sees the value in us having the know-how of food preparing, catering, and retail. And we partner them because it’s not easy to set up a farm and they are the experts.”

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Metro Farm’s director Chris Toh (left) and Kitchen Haus' chief executive officer Patrick Chan (right) joined hands to form a new urban farming company Frux Earth. (Photo: Tang See Kit)

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Metro Farm, which started its first farm in Kranji almost nine years ago, noted that the local agriculture sector has become “much more vibrant”.

While the presence of new and bigger players means greater competition, the increased attention has also made it easier for businesses to secure farming sites in land-scarce Singapore, including vacant rooftops on both public and private buildings.

“In the past, we have to explain what is a rooftop farm and what we are doing but now, more landlords are opening up to the idea,” said Mr. Brandon Toh, although he noted that not all rooftops are suitable given the need to take into consideration the additional loads of farming.

Frux Earth has plans to open three more urban farms over the next few months.

Its “farm-to-table” menu is in the works as it ramps up its crop production, while it is also gauging the interest for a weekly vegetable subscription service, said Mr. Chan.

These “culture boxes”, as they are called, will be filled with 1 to 2kg worth of freshly harvested organic vegetables and delivered to the doorsteps of customers every week. For now, it has started supplying a few restaurants located near its farm at the Marina Country Club.

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Frux Earth is planning to launch a weekly vegetable box subscription service. (Photo: Frux Earth)

Over at I.F.F.I, the protracted pandemic and its impact on labour and supplies of raw materials have caused some delays at its mega indoor farm which was initially scheduled to open in the middle of this year.

“We are catching up and hopefully we can have everything ready soon,” said Mr. Lim. “Certainly, costs have also gone up with the increase in raw material prices, but we are managing that."

Meanwhile, the company is working on opening an “indoor farm pro-shop”.

“There will be a mini-farm set up for visitors to understand and raise awareness about indoor farming,” said I.F.F.I chief operating officer Kelvin Ng.

“If they like what they see and want to start their home cultivation system, they will also be able to purchase everything they need at the shop. We will even have consultants ready to guide you. It will be a one-stop shop about indoor farming.”

I.F.F.I. also sees opportunities beyond Singapore where they can serve as consultants or designers to those looking to set up indoor farms. For instance, in Russia where crop production is a challenge due to the cold climate.

Its technologies can also be deployed in “bite sizes” even in traditional food-producing countries as solutions to specific problems, such as water pollution.

Mr. Ng said: “There are many opportunities emerging in the space of indoor farming, and we want to be bold and seize them.”

Source: CNA/sk(cy)

Lead Photo: I.F.F.I, an affiliate of precision engineering firm TranZplus Engineering, is looking to open its mega indoor farm in Tuas by the end of this year. (Photo: Tang See Kit)

Vertical Gardening: A Modern Farming Method

July 25, 2021

Many of our communities are transforming into industrial and urban centres as the earth’s population increases. This growth, coupled with climate change, poses new challenges to the human populace to produce enough food as farmland acreage decreases and consumers’ demands increase.

Over the past decade, scientists and agronomists have been developing methods to produce double or triple the amount of food, using the same scale of land or less a farmer may cultivate. One of these approaches currently gaining much attention and adaptation is the vertical gardening or farming method.

NAREI staff harvesting and inspecting various crops planted in the vertical stack stand model, using PVC gutters

The notion of farming indoors is not strange to us, since greenhouse agricultural systems have been widely adopted for some time now. These houses have been used for years, providing conditions for numerous commercial crops (such as tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and cucumbers) to thrive at its maximum production index. Cultivating under shaded facilities compared to outdoor farming fields can aid in year-round production, but few or none of these greenhouses have been constructed as multi-storey facilities.

Vertical farming is a method that uses vertically inclined surfaces to produce food, instead of the traditional method of growing vegetables on a single level in a greenhouse or open field. The National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI) is currently evaluating the cost and productivity of various vertical-farming models. The experiment is being conducted at NAREI’s compound, Mon Repos, ECD.

NAREI staff harvesting and inspecting various crops planted in the vertical stack stand model, using PVC gutters

The vertical models installed under the tunnel house are: vertical stack stand using PVC gutters, vertical trellis made of nylon, barrel model using recycled plastic drums, and vertical wall using recycled plastic bottles.

Using vertical farming techniques have numerous advantages, such as: year-round production; reducing soil erosion and runoffs; maximising the use of abandoned structures or unused spaces; minimising crop failures due to harsh weather conditions and reduces the use of fossil fuels, since less farm mechanisation is needed. It also creates new urban employment openings; adds energy back to the grid via methane generation; returns farmlands to nature, aiding in restoring ecosystem functions; reduces pest and disease indices; reduces the need for abundant use of pesticides and herbicides, and offers the possibility of a sustainable food-production engine for our communities.

The experiment is being done to ascertain yields of a wide variety of crops needed to sustain large populations, without exhausting existing resources. With the success of this study, local households in Guyana can better utilise yard space to produce their foods at a cheaper cost and local farmers can increase productivity to reach consumer demand. In addition to that, this method can be utilised to combat major challenges faced due to climate variation in Guyana, such as flooding.

The Philippines: Simple Is The best

I was motivated to develop our farm, Kitakitz Natural Farm, when I saw local children were suffering development issues. Kids of the same age in my hometown of Bloomsburg Pennsylvania are Significantly healthier. When we first retired to the Philippines in 2010 I was shocked when I discovered kids that were of similar ages to our 9-year-old were actually several years OLDER! They were short, lightweight, boney, and had numerous development issues including poor skin, hair, and dental health. 

So I decided growing food for my own use was NOT ENOUGH!

Everything we do is 100% Organic and we do NOT use Chemical pesticides or fertilizers. Our Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers, Various Plants, Bamboo, trees & scrubs, cuttings & Seeds are grown in compost and vermiculture created soil. 

We are also developing HYDROPONIC SYSTEMS USING HANGING VERTICLE BAMBOO POLES. 

Throughout the farm, we apply NO TILL agriculture and permaculture food forest techniques similar to the Cuban Urban ORGANOPONICO & CONSULTORIO. We also provide FREE training to those who want to duplicate our programs and provide fresh produce, seeds, & Tools in ADDITION to wages for those who work on the farm. We also SELL fruits and Vegetables through our vendors at BELOW market prices. Our goal is NOT to make $$ but to help people to become 100% food Self Sufficient. 

We have friends in the USA who help us sponsor families here. Our programs create Long term solutions for food Security. We are totally Unlike Government Give-away programs. State-sponsored programs are weak at best and only provide short-term solutions with minimal disbursement amounts of rice and processed food sufficient for only a few meals.

In nearly 100% of our cases, our PLAN is providing long-term solutions. For less than $100 per family, we set them up with over 150 lbs of food like Rice, Oats, Flour, Fruit juices, peanut butter, canned meat & fish, and of course SEEDS. Plus we provide EDUCATION on Nutrition & Meal planning, how to save seed, and growing sprouts and vegetables in limited space and sunlight. When they follow the PLAN within a few days our recipients are growing and eating their own FRESH food. Additionally, within a few weeks they can also be harvesting fast-growing crops like 50 DAY Radish, & 30 to 40 DAY Pakchoi, Spinach & lettuce.  (See photos below of our standard Seed, Food & Sprouts Family plan)

Our investment is returned to us TEN TIMES PLUS in increased local participation in our FREE training programs and peaceful sleep knowing people are NOT going to bed hungry.

Were Medieval Cities Greener? Urban Agriculture In The Middle Ages

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By Lucie Laumonier

Cities have grown so rapidly in the past century that we tend to forget that, until the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of people actually lived in rural settings. Even just one hundred years ago, most of the suburbs of large modern cities were completely rural.

In the Middle Ages, cities comprised a large population of farmers, ploughmen, and agriculturalists who worked in close vicinity to urban spaces. Most cities’ outskirts included an important portion of estates dedicated to agriculture where urban peasants laboured. However, one of the key characteristics of any city is that the food it produces does not suffice to feed its population. Medieval cities thus had to import most of the foodstuff required to sustain their citizens, even if a portion of it was produced locally.

Medieval cities were also full of gardens and vegetable beds that people cultivated for their own sustenance or for extra revenues. This preoccupation with urban agriculture is evident in Le Ménagier, a housekeeping guide written by a fourteenth-century gentleman from Paris for his young wife which included several sections about gardens. This was done in part so that his wife would “have some knowledge on horticulture and gardening, grafting in the proper season, and keeping roses in winter.”

This article looks at the urban farmers of medieval France and discusses the roles of the gardens that were found throughout medieval cities.

Urban peasants: How Many Were There?

Medieval population estimates depend on the nature of available sources, few of which were drafted for demographic purposes. Wills and fiscal sources are often the main indicators of a population’s stratification. In the town of Manresa, Catalonia, 13.5% of fifteenth-century taxpayers were farmers. This proportion is relatively low, especially compared to the large city of Montpellier, Languedoc, which counted more than 30,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Black Death. There, 22% of the 1380-1480 taxpayers were farmers or gardeners.

The data thus suggests that one in five late medieval urban dwellers in Montpellier practised agriculture. But, except for the gardeners, we have no concrete information about the actual work the farmers performed. We do not know for instance what proportion specialized in cattle or sheep rearing; how many were mainly producing wine or cereals. We do not know either how many owned the fields they tilled, how many farmed the estates of others, or how many had no land and no job security, and hopped from farm to farm looking for work.

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A gardener from around the year 1425, depicted in the Housebooks of Nuremberg – Amb. 317.2 fol. 8v

Part-Time Urban Farmers

Few work contracts were made by the urban peasantry. In Marseille, Provence, 10% of the fourteenth-century work contracts analysed by Francine Michaud concerned farming and agriculture. The figure is low but compares to the data I collected for Montpellier in Languedoc. The reason for such a small figure is that agriculture, in general, seldom prompted the drafting of a work contract, even in rural settings where it was the primary occupation of workers. Since agricultural work was seasonal in nature, it rarely called for the legal guarantees long-term work contracts required.

In the Montpellier sources, some self-identified urban peasants juggled different jobs, suggesting that agriculture was not, in fact, their full-time occupation. Some men described themselves as “agriculturalist and gardener”. Two men were “carpenter and ploughmen;” one taxpayer worked as “musician and ploughman and public crier;” one was a “glove maker and ploughman;” while another was listed as a “ploughman and fishmonger.” It is possible that agriculture was their primary occupation but that they had a side activity to make ends meet.

But it is also possible these workers took on agricultural work during harvest season as a way to supplement their earnings coming from their other activity. Medieval city dwellers often owned small pieces of land they rented out or cultivated in their free time. In the town of Castelnaudary, near Toulouse, 95% of the fourteenth-century taxpaying inhabitants owned at least some agricultural land. The rate was 91.5% in the fifteenth century. Most of these landowners held very small estates (less than 2 hectares), which would not have sufficed to sustain their families. Nonetheless, these lands did offer the guarantee of some sustenance to their owners.

Urban Gardens for the Poor and the Wealthy

Vegetables, fruits, and various herbs had always been cultivated in cities for practical and sustenance purposes. Cities were covered with backyard vegetable beds in which people planted cabbage, carrots, peas, and other products they would eat. Historian Jerry Stannard dubbed such vegetable beds “kitchen gardens” and underlines that “the produce of the smallest, most crudely tilled plot was preferable to nothing at all,” in that they provided “free” food to their owners. Besides vegetables, artisans and workers also planted (grew) medicinal plants.

However, the existence of kitchen gardens often depended on the population density of cities and on the demographic context. At times of demographic pressure, when cities were full, the spaces taken up by the gardens and vegetable patches of the poor were used for housing. The size and number of such gardens therefore decreased. But when the population declined, such as after the Black Death, unoccupied lots and abandoned houses were turned into vegetable beds to help sustain more modest households. Today still, depopulation in cities sometimes prompts the reconversion of available lands into gardens and parks.

Unthreatened by demographic changes were the patrician gardens that belonged to the wealthier inhabitants of cities. These gardens were usually of the mixed type, containing edible and medicinal plants as well as ornamental species cultivated for their beauty and delightful scents. Ornamental gardens were heavily featured in medieval literature (which teems with scenes unfolding in gardens), where protagonists engaged in all sorts of activities — preferably courting a lady or discussing philosophy with allegorical figures. The Romance of the Rose is a fitting example of such.

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An illustration from Roman de La Rose, depicting a fountain and a stream pouring outwards from the centre of the garden – Wikimedia Commons

Ornamental Gardens: Aromatherapy and the Pleasure of the Senses

Ornamental gardens gained traction (in popularity) after the devastations of the plague and its ulterior episodes. The scientific belief that nasty vapours carrying miasmas had caused the disease, as the airborne transmission of plague through droplets had been acknowledged by medieval physicians, fuelled the idea that gardens had the power to clean up the air. Gardens, in short, had a curative power one should not ignore. Through their odour, wrote Italian physician Marsilio Ficino in the second half of the fifteenth century, flowers and plants “restore and invigorate you on all sides, as if by the breath and spirit of the life of the world.”

The curative virtues of gardens worked in two ways, notes historian Carol Rawcliffe. On the one hand, the smell of flowers restores health by strengthening the heart, while on the other it works as a prophylactic agent. Medieval scientists recommended the scent of roses and violets as a form of protection against the plague. The perfume of violets was also prescribed to treat headaches, fevers, and skin diseases. Fourteenth-century physician John of Burgundy therefore recommended “to smell roses, violets, and lilies” before leaving one’s home in times of plague to avoid catching the disease.

Even more ambitious was physician Ibn Khatimah, who had witnessed the devastations of the Black Death in Andalusia. He argued that cities should protect themselves from the plague through the intensive cultivation of sweet-smelling plants around their boundaries. This physical barrier against the disease could then be enhanced by the stockpiling of plants to prevent its vapours from reaching the cities’ dwellers. In their homes, town dwellers could scatter freshly cut herbs and flowers on the floor to clear the air; and “refresh” their straw mattresses with the addition of lavender and other plants.

Besides the curative virtues listed above, medieval physicians also believed flowers to be beneficial to mental health. Walking in gardens, smelling and looking at flowers uplifted people’s morale, which in turn had positive effects on their general health. Moderate exercise and strolls in gardens or, when possible, in the countryside, cured both the soul and the body. The reason why medieval hospitals kept gardens in their precincts were both practical (cultivating the medicine and food they needed) and philosophical, thus enabling the sick to breathe some fresh air and engage in light yet invigorating activities.

Medieval cities were surrounded by agricultural estates. Within their walls, the urban space was partly covered with gardens that belonged to the wealthy, to hospitals and convents. In humbler neighbourhoods, the extent land was taken up by private gardens depended on the period of time and the density of the city in question. The fewer the inhabitants of a city, the more numerous its gardens tended to be. Besides their role in alimentation, gardens, ornamental ones especially, also had medicinal virtues for the soul and the body. In the Middle Ages, smelling the roses was to be taken literally.

Lucie Laumonier is an Affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University. Click here to view her Academia.edu page or follow her on Instagram at The French Medievalist.

Continuing Education: Urban Agriculture

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April 1, 2021

Katharine Logan

It’s been 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution gave rise to cities. Agriculture now covers more than half of the world’s habitable land, and is spreading at a rate of about 15 million acres annually. Cities, meanwhile, now comprise more than half the global population (over 80 percent in developed countries), and the numbers are rising. Using current farming methods to feed a global population expected to hit 10 billion by midcentury would require adding new farmland equal in size to the continental United States.

This alarming situation is not even factoring in the impact of the climate crisis, which is expected to alter growing seasons and disrupt the phenological cycles that keep plants and their pollinators in sync. What’s more, new agricultural land mostly comes from felling biodiverse, carbon-sequestering forests to make room for mono-crops that stash very few greenhouse gases and for livestock that actually generate them. That makes the climate crisis worse and farming more difficult.

In addition to land consumption, agriculture guzzles three-quarters of the fresh water used globally each year, while runoff from fields treated with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers contaminates significant amounts of the water that’s left. Then there’s transportation. As farms extend farther and farther from the cities they supply, food is trucked, shipped, and flown vast distances: farm to plate, the ingredients in a typical American meal travel an average of 1,500 miles. From a security perspective, the fact that most of the world’s food production is controlled by just a handful of corporations is unnerving. And from a public health perspective, the emergence of Covid-19 and other new diseases offers yet another indicator of ecological imbalance. It’s time to rethink the way we farm.

Food security, as defined by the United Nations, means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that serves their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. Key to achieving food security in a way that’s more sustainable than current practices is urban agriculture—not as an outright replacement for rural farming, but as a crucial component in a balanced system.

Urban agriculture can take many forms: rooftop greenhouses raised beds, and community-farming initiatives such as the City of Atlanta’s “Aglanta” program, which turns underused parcels in utility rights-of-way into farm plots eligible for U.S. Department of Agriculture certificates and associated loans. Ultimately, though, horizontal strategies are not productive enough to make a real dent in the food needs of a city. (If raised beds covered every rooftop in Manhattan, the produce grown would feed only about 2 percent of the borough’s population.) Just as cities grow vertically, so too must urban agriculture, and that means bringing it indoors.

“Controlled environments have been used for many years,” says Chieri Kubota, a professor of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at Ohio State University. “Now that multiple issues are making conventional production outdoors more difficult, putting controlled environments in and near cities brings food production closer to potential markets—and also to younger generations of potential farmers who want to live in urban centers.”

Vertical agriculture is a type of CEA that—like high-rise buildings—stacks layers to provide usable area many times the footprint of the site. Instead of growing in soil, which is a heavy way to deliver nutrients, plants in vertical farms are grown hydroponically, aquaponically, or aeroponically. In hydroponics, plants are cultivated in nutrient-enriched water, which is captured and reused so that the system uses as little as a tenth of the water conventional agriculture needs. An aquaponic system pairs hydroponics with fish production, circulating the nutrients in the fish waste to feed the vegetables, and using the plants as a biofiltration system that returns clean water to the fish. Reducing water consumption even further—by as much as 98 percent, compared to field growing—aeroponic systems deliver nutrients in a fine mist to plant roots that are just hanging in the air. And because controlled environments exclude the weeds and pests that trouble field-grown produce, the use of herbicides and pesticides is all but eliminated.

Stacked plants may need to be rotated to make the most of available sunlight, which can be supplemented (or even substituted altogether) with LED grow lights. These can be calibrated to provide blue and red light in optimal doses for each type of plant, and timed to increase plant growth with extended days and growing seasons. (While it’s technically possible to grow any type of crop this way, for now it’s mainly leafy greens and tomatoes that are economically viable.) Cool enough to be strung right in among the plants without burning them, LEDs reduce site electricity consumption (and costs) per square foot of grow area by about a third compared to older technologies, such as high-pressure sodium. “Energy is a game-changer,” says Dickson Despommier, an emeritus professor of microbiology and public health at Columbia University, whose seminal 2010 book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, is widely credited with kick-starting vertical agriculture in North America. Cost-effective LED lighting opens up the possibility of converting urban and urban-adjacent building types such as parking garages, big-box stores, and shopping malls into productive local farms, he says.

With productivity rates that are orders of magnitude greater than conventional farming, high-rise growing is gaining traction worldwide. The world’s first such system began operations in 2012 in Singapore. The land-strapped city-state, which imports about 90 percent of its food, aims to grow a third of its produce locally by 2030. Indoor vertical farms in the country now produce about 80 tons of greens a year, and the Singapore Food Agency is supporting research into and development of the method as its main bet on the future.

In China, great swaths of arable land have been lost to development (more than 30 million acres between 1997 and 2008) and 20 percent of what’s left is contaminated. At the same time, the country has a strong tradition of urban-adjacent farming. When a 247-acre agricultural site, midway between Shanghai’s main international airport and the megacity’s center, recently came up for redevelopment, global design firm Sasaki proposed that, rather than create yet another tech park, the client take its agricultural mission to the next level. As a result, the Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District is slated to become one of China’s first comprehensive national agricultural zones. Sasaki’s master plan, which has received approval from the Pudong District and is now proceeding for formal approval from the City of Shanghai, expands the district’s role in Shanghai’s food network, integrating vertical agricultural production, research, and education into a dynamic public domain. In addition to research and development facilities and an agriculture production zone, the plan provides for a civic plaza showcasing productive landscapes, a science museum, an interactive greenhouse, an aquaponics display, and a destination market. “It’s urban agriculture on steroids,” says Michael Grove, chair of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and ecology at Sasaki.

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The Sunqiao project will include a civic plaza with productive landscapes (top), a science museum, and an interactive greenhouse (above), among other elements. Image courtesy Sasaki.

Grove identifies three primary drivers for prioritizing urban agriculture globally: the need to curtail agricultural sprawl and thereby protect ecosystems, to reclaim economic agency by diversifying control of food production, and to build community: “Food brings us together,” he says. Behind Asia’s early adoption of urban agriculture, he sees a historic understanding among the region’s societies that the well-being of the population requires systemic support. That may also be a factor in Europe, where the Netherlands is a global leader in controlled-environment technology, and Denmark is home to the world’s latest and largest vertical farm, a partnership between a Taiwanese CEA tech company and a local start-up: with growing shelves stacked 14 deep, the 75,000-square-foot wind-powered facility has the capacity to produce 1,000 metric tons of greens a year.

A hub for teaching, research, and community engagement, located within sight of downtown Columbus and designed by Erdy McHenry Architecture, supports Ohio State’s CEA efforts. Brad Feinknopf

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North America has been slower to adopt vertical farming, a lag that Ohio State’s Kubota attributes in large part to the year-round, nationwide availability of produce from California, Arizona, and Florida. But now, she says, climate disruptions and shortages of viable farmland in those states, along with the increasing urbanization of the workforce, strengthen the rationale for controlled environment agriculture. To support Ohio State University’s multidisciplinary research into CEA, a one-acre vertical greenhouse is under construction within sight of downtown Columbus. As part of the facility, the recently completed Kunz-Brundige Franklin County Extension Office serves as a hub for teaching, research, and community engagement around food, health, agricultural production, and sustainability. Both buildings are designed by Philadelphia-based Erdy McHenry Architecture.

Although still tiny, vertical farming is the fastest-growing sector in U.S. agriculture. A projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 20 percent from 2020 to 2026 is expected to bring sales to around $10 billion a year. And while significant numbers of start-ups in the capital-intensive sector have failed—as indicated by the track record of several initiatives profiled in this magazine eight years ago —experts say that’s an inevitable aspect of an emerging technology.

Among the growing number of enterprises going strong, however, is Vertical Harvest, the first vertical hydroponic greenhouse in North America. Cofounded by architect Nona Yehia, principal at GYDE Architects, the company began operations in 2016 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jackson is a rural town, but it performs like a city in relevant ways: 97 percent of its developable land is already in use, and, with a four-month growing season, 98 percent of its food is imported. Inspired by Despommier’s work, the need for a local food supply, and the opportunity to provide meaningful work for community members with intellectual and physical challenges, Yehia designed a three-story greenhouse for a 30-by-100-foot municipally-owned lot next to a parking garage. “The town councilor who showed us the property thought we’d put up a plastic hoop structure to extend the growing season a couple of months, employ a few people, and call it a day,” recalls Yehia. But she and her business partners wanted to grow as much food as possible, to employ as many people as possible, and to do both year-round. “That’s where the idea to grow up came from,” she says.

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Vertical Harvest’s three-story CEA facility in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, produces as much food on a tenth of an acre as on a 10-acre conventional farm. Photos © Vertical Harvest (1), Hannah Hardaway (2 & 3)

With a footprint of a tenth of an acre, the greenhouse produces as much food as would a 10-acre conventional farm. It employs 30 people, more than half of whom have a disability. And it’s profitable. “It would have been easier as a nonprofit,” Yehia says, “but we were committed to creating a replicable model that is not about charity: it’s about empowerment.”

After five years of operation, Vertical Harvest is ready to expand. Construction is scheduled to start this year on a second location that incorporates affordable housing and municipal parking in Westbrooke, Maine. The new 70,000-square-foot greenhouse is expected to provide the equivalent of 50 full-time jobs and to produce 1.3 million pounds of produce a year, supplying hospitals, corporate cafeterias, schools, chefs, restaurants, and caterers, as well as individual customers. “These ecosystems can put out a lot of food,” says Yehia. “Making sure you have customers who can buy at scale is as essential to success as growing plans.”

Vertical Harvest intends to build up to 15 farms in the next five years, with agreements already in place for projects in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, and discussion is under way for five other locations. Like the Wyoming and Maine projects, they will integrate social value and community engagement with their agricultural mission. “It’s the perfect intersection to show what architecture can achieve in its social role in our communities,” Yehia says. And while she has run Vertical Harvest as designer, entrepreneur, and urban farmer, it’s entirely possible for architects to advocate for urban agriculture in their more usual role as prime consultants, coordinating the work of other experts.

As CEA picks up speed, the time may not be far off when every municipality will incorporate vertical farming into its civic infrastructure, valued the way public libraries and recreation centers are. “It should be something that we all expect to see when we go to cities,” Yehia says: “infrastructure that grows food and futures, and bolsters the sustainability of the community.”

Continuing Education

To earn one AIA learning unit (LU), including one hour of health, safety, and welfare (HSW) credit, read the article above and watch this video.

Then complete the quiz. Upon passing the test, you will receive a certificate of completion, and your credit will be automatically reported to the AIA. Additional information regarding credit-reporting and continuing-education requirements can be found at continuingeducation.bnpmedia.com.

Learning Objectives

1. Explain how conventional agricultural methods contribute to climate change.

2. Define terms such as urban agriculture, controlled environment agriculture (CEA), and vertical agriculture.

3. Describe technologies relevant to CEA, such as hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics.

4. Discuss how CEA can enhance food security and bring social value to underserved communities.

AIA/CES Course #K2104A

Complete the Quiz

Lead Image: KEYWORDS cities / climate change / urban planning

Vertical Farming Startup Oishii Raises $50m In Series A Funding

By Sian Yates

03/11/2021

Oishii, a vertical farming startup based in New Jersey, has raised $50 million during a Series A funding round led by Sparx Group’s Mirai Creation Fund II.

The funds will enable Oishii to open vertical strawberry farms in new markets, expand its flagship farm outside of Manhattan, and accelerate its investment in R&D.

“Our mission is to change the way we grow food. We set out to deliver exceptionally delicious and sustainable produce,” said Oishii CEO Hiroki Koga. “We started with the strawberry – a fruit that routinely tops the dirty dozen of most pesticide-riddled crops – as it has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of vertical farming.”

“We aim to be the largest strawberry producer in the world, and this capital allows us to bring the best-tasting, healthiest berry to everyone. From there, we’ll quickly expand into new fruits and produce,” he added.

Oishii is already known for its innovative farming techniques that have enabled the company to “perfect the strawberry,” while its proprietary and first-of-its-kind pollination method is conducted naturally with bees.

The company’s vertical farms feature zero pesticides and produce ripe fruit all year round, using less water and land than traditional agricultural methods.

“Oishii is the farm of the future,” said Sparx Group president and Group CEO Shuhei Abe. “The cultivation and pollination techniques the company has developed set them well apart from the industry, positioning Oishii to quickly revolutionise agriculture as we know it.”

The company has raised a total of $55 million since its founding in 2016.

This Vertical Farming System Was Designed To Build Up Community And Accommodate The Urban Lifestyle!

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BY SHAWN MCNULTY-KOWAL

03/19/2021

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Following interviews with local residents, Andersson set out to create a farming system that works for the city’s green-thumb community.

Urban farming takes different shapes in different cities. Some cities can accommodate thriving backyard gardens for produce, some take to hydroponics for growing plants, and then some might keep their gardens on rooftops. In Malmö, small-scale farming initiatives are growing in size and Jacob Alm Andersson has designed his own vertical farming system called Nivå, directly inspired by his community and the local narratives of Malmö’s urban farmers.

Through interviews, Andersson learned that most farmers in Malmö began farming after feeling inspired by their neighbors, who also grew their own produce. Noticing the cyclical nature of community farming, Andersson set out to create a more focused space where that cyclical inspiration could flourish and where younger generations could learn about city farming along with the importance of sustainability.

Speaking more to this, Andersson notes, “People need to feel able and motivated to grow food. A communal solution where neighbors can share ideas, inspire and help one another is one way to introduce spaces that will create long-lasting motivation to grow food.”

Since most cities have limited space available, Andersson had to get creative in designing his small-scale urban farming system in Malmö. He found that for an urban farm to be successful in Malmö, the design had to be adaptable and operable on a vertical plane– it all came down to the build of Nivå.

Inspired by the local architecture of Malmö, Andersson constructed each system by stacking steel beams together to create shelves and then reinforced those with wooden beams, providing plenty of stability. Deciding against the use of screws, Nivå’s deep, heat-treated pine planters latch onto the steel beams using a hook and latch method. Ultimately, Nivå’s final form is a type of urban farming workstation, even including a center workbench ideal for activities like chopping produce or pruning crops.

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Taking inspiration from community gardens and the local residents’ needs, Andersson found communal inspiration in Malmö.

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Backyard and patio gardens are popular options for those living in cities who’d still like to have their very own gardening space.

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Lead photo: Designer: Jacob Alm Andersson.

Kimbal Musk’s Quest To Start One Million Gardens

MARCH 20, 2021

The tech veteran and restaurateur (and brother of Elon) has been preaching the ‘real food’ gospel for years — and his newest project may be his most ambitious yet

By ALEX MORRIS

Million Gardens Movement

On the day he almost died, Kimbal Musk had food on the brain. The internet startup whiz, restaurateur, and younger brother of Tesla’s Elon had just arrived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from a 2010 TED conference where chef Jamie Oliver had spoken about the empowerment that could come from healthy eating. This was something Musk thought about a lot — food’s untapped potential, how he might be a disruptor in the culinary space — but beyond expanding his farm-to-table ethos along with his restaurant empire, Musk hadn’t yet cracked the code. Then he went sailing down a snowy slope on an inner tube going 35 miles an hour and flipped over, snapping his neck. The left side of his body was paralyzed. Doctors told the father of three that he was lucky: Surgery might bring movement back.

“I remember telling myself, ‘It’s all going to be fine,’ and then realizing that tears were streaming down the side of my face,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, OK. I don’t really know what’s going on. I’m just going to, you know, let things go.’”

Musk, 48, eventually made a full recovery, but it involved spending two months on his back, which gave him plenty of time to think about the intersections of food, tech, and philanthropy. Since then, he has launched an initiative to put “learning gardens” in public schools across America (now at 632 schools and counting); courted Generation Z into the farming profession by converting shipping containers into high-tech, data-driven, year-round farms; spoken out vociferously against unethical farming practices and vociferously for the beauty and community of slow food; and this year, on the first day of spring, is kicking off a new campaign with Modern Farmer’s Frank Giustra to create one million at-home gardens in the coming year.

Aimed at reaching low-income families, the Million Gardens Movement was inspired by the pandemic, as both a desire to feel more connected to nature and food insecurity have been at the forefront of so many people’s lives. “We were getting a lot of inquiries about gardening from people that had never gardened before,” says Giustra. “People were looking to garden for a bunch of reasons: to supplement their budget, because there was a lot of financial hardship, to help grow food for other people, or just to cure the boredom that came with the lockdown. To keep people sane, literally keep people sane, they turned to gardening.”

The program offers free garden kits that can be grown indoors or outdoors and will be distributed through schools that Musk’s non-profit, Big Green, has already partnered with. It also offers free curriculum on how to get the garden growing and fresh seeds and materials for the changing growing seasons. “I grew up in the projects when I was young, in what we now call food deserts,” says EVE, one of the many celebrities who have teamed up with the organization to encourage people to pick up a free garden or to donate one. “What I love about this is that it’s not intimidating. Anyone can do this, no matter where you come from, no matter where you live. We are all able to grow something.”

Rolling Stone recently talked with Musk about the Million Gardens Movement, why shipping containers can grow the most perfect basil, and how he is channeling his family’s trademark disruptor drive to change America’s relationship with food.

How did you first get interested in food and then how did that grow into an interest in agricultural innovation?
I’ve always loved food. I started cooking for my family when I was 12, maybe even 11.

What was the first meal you made? Do you remember?
It’s actually funny. My mother is a wonderful person, great dietitian, but because she’s a dietitian, the food we ate was brown bread and yogurt or bean soup. I mean, as a kid, it drove me crazy. So I asked my mom, “If I could cook, could we get something else?” And so I went to the butcher, and I asked them, “How do you roast a chicken?” And he said, “Put it in a really hot oven for one hour.” And I was like, “Oh, how hot is hot?” He was like, “Make it as hot as your oven goes for one hour, and if it starts to burn, then just take it out.” And he gave me the chicken, and that was it. I’ve kept that recipe forever. 450, 500 degrees, one hour. That’s a great straight-up recipe.

And then my mother insisted on a vegetable, so I decided to do French fries, which was my funny way of convincing her that I’m doing a vegetable.

It is a vegetable.
I totally screwed up the French fries. I didn’t heat up the oil ahead of time, and if you don’t do that, the potatoes actually soak in the oil so you’re eating basically a sponge of oil. I made everyone throw up. But the roast chicken was delicious. Everyone loved that. And so I was encouraged to cook more. I cooked for my friends in university. I didn’t have any money, so I figured out how to cook for 40 cents a person. It was a Kraft dinner with weiner sausages. And if someone chipped in an extra dollar, I’d get actually real cheese instead of the powdered cheese.

Anyway, I studied business, and then went down to California to start a company with my brother building maps and door-to-door directions for the internet.

I read that you and your brother were sleeping in your office and showering at the YMCA and that sort of startup lifestyle made you appreciate food.
Yeah, that’s totally right. We only had enough money for rent for either an office or an apartment, so we rented an office. I had a little minibar fridge and put one of those portable cooktops above it, and that was our kitchen. But we also ate at Jack in the Box all the time because it was the only place that was open late. Ugh, 25 years later, I can still remember the items on that menu. It was just really, really not great — a huge inspiration to go focus on real food after that.

And I just did not like the lack of social connection. It’s a work-hard-go-to-sleep-and-work-hard-again culture with not much socializing in the way that I enjoy, which is eating food, eating together over a meal, talking about ideas. I kind of was suffocating a little bit.

It’s a Soylent culture.
Yeah, exactly. They actually want food to be a pill. So I kind of needed to leave. We ended up selling [our company] for a gazillion dollars when I was 27, and I had this sort of opportunity to do whatever I wanted. So I went to New York to enroll at the French Culinary Institute.

Was culinary school as brutal as people make it out to be?
Absolutely brutal. It was Full Metal Jacket, but cooking. They just totally break you down. They make sure you don’t have any faith in your own abilities — within a few months, you’re like, “I am a completely useless fool” — and then after that, they start building you up with the skills they want you to have. It was very, very hard on the ego. I managed to graduate, but I would say 70 percent of the people that start don’t finish — and you pay upfront.

I actually graduated just a few weeks before 9/11 and woke up to the sounds of the plane hitting the building. That’s how close we were. Fourteen days later, I started volunteering to feed the firefighters. We would do 16-hour days, every day — there was never a reason not to work because the alternative is you sit at home during the nightmare after 9/11, where no one was on the streets or anything. I started peeling potatoes and eventually got to the point where I would drive the food down to Ground Zero. The firefighters would come in completely gray in their face and gray in their eyes, covered in dust. And then they’d start eating, and you’d see the color come back in their face, the light in their eyes.

And you worked as a line cook after that?
Yeah, for Hugo Matheson, at his restaurant. He was the chef of a popular restaurant in Boulder, and I just wanted to learn. I was a line cook for $10 an hour for probably 18 months. And loved it. You know, it’s a submarine culture. And you get in there and everything you do in the moment is measured in the moment. It’s very much the opposite of [building] software.

You and Hugo eventually started a restaurant [The Kitchen] that practiced the farm-to-table thing before it was even really a term. Why was it so important to you to have local suppliers and organic methods? At that point, was it mainly about flavor, or was there a bigger ethic behind it?
For sure flavor was the driver. But I think that the thing that I resonated with more was the sense of this concept of community through food. You know, when I was feeding the firefighters, it was all about community. The fishermen would come and give us their fish, so we got the best fish you can imagine. The cooks were all volunteers. We were going through this really tough time. So for me, the community through food was what I loved about it.

[At The Kitchen], we literally had a basic rule to farmers saying we’ll buy whatever you grow. We said that if you can deliver by 4 p.m., then we will get it on the menu that evening.

Oh, wow.
We would get fiddlehead ferns at 4 p.m. and be trying to think, “OK, what can we do with this?” If you turn the food around that quickly, it really does show up in the flavor.

Food that had potentially been in the ground that morning.
Not potentially. Every day was working with the harvest of that day. We had 43 different farmers coming to the back door. It was awesome.

Let’s move ahead to the part of the story, after your accident, when you’re like, “All right, I’ve gotten this new lease on life and now what am I going to do with it?” Obviously, within the food space, there are a lot of choices you could have made. So how did you decide where to go from there?
So when I came out of that hospital, I resigned as CEO of my software company. I told my wife I wanted a divorce. The spiritual message I got was: Work with a way to connect kids to real food, to get kids to understand what real food is. And real food for me is food that you trust to nourish the body, trust to nourish the farmer, trust to nourish the planet. It’s very simple. Processed food would be the opposite of that. There’s no nourishment there. The farmer gets hosed and it’s terrible for the planet. So I [looked into] farm-oriented work and cooking-skills training. Turned out giving kids knives isn’t a good idea.

What? [laughter]
Yeah. Exactly. But the thing that came back to me was the value of a school garden. I actually was pretty frustrated with school gardens. I had been a philanthropic supporter of them for a few years and found them to be expensive, hard to maintain — a passionate parent would put it in, and then their kid would graduate, and it would become this mess in the corner of the schoolyard. So we [created] learning gardens. They’ve got a beautiful Fibonacci sequence layout. They’re made in a factory, but they have a natural look and feel. These are totally food-safe and can go on any school ground. They’re [wheelchair] accessible, easy to teach in, and built into the irrigation system of the school. We go in and we do 100 of them at a time. Pre-COVID we got to almost 700 schools in Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Memphis, L.A.

How did you decide which cities to go into?
I believe this is useful anywhere, but what I found was low-income communities were the areas where you really needed it. Private schools or wealthier schools, they all have gardens — there’s not a private school out there that doesn’t embrace having a school garden. It’s actually the low-income schools that don’t have it. And that is also, coincidentally or not, where the obesity is. And so what I wanted to do is take what existed in private schools and put it into low-income schools and to do it in a way where it would be the most beautiful thing in the school. So instead of that sort of eyesore that was in the backyard, we said, “These have to be right next to the classroom, right next to the playground. You’re not allowed to build a fence around it. And if you don’t want to do that, great, we’ll just find another school. But these are the rules for learning garden.” And because we were doing 100 at a time, the districts would work with us, including maintenance and installation and curriculum and teacher training. Pre-COVID we were teaching almost 350,000 kids every school day.

And are there measurable effects?
Absolutely. Studies show that fifth grade in particular is the most effective grade. If you teach science in fifth grade to a kid, the exact same lesson in the garden versus in the classroom, you will get a 15-point increase on a 100-point score on their test scores.

And then if you teach kids 90 minutes a week in school, which is not hard to do because it’s beautiful and fun to be outside, you’ll double their intake of fruits and vegetables. Now they’re not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, so the base is low, but you’re still doubling. The way I like to look at it is you’re really not trying to make them eat vegetables all the time — that’s too hard — you just try to change the course of their life by a few degrees; if you can do it by third, fourth, fifth grade, they’re going to be a different adult when they grow up. We’re not here to claim that what we do changes everything. We believe that the cafeteria needs to improve, that we need grocery stores to exist in these food deserts. There are many legs of the stool, but the school garden movement is a critical leg.

Are there any other technological innovations in this space that are really giving you hope?
I think there’s a lot of cool things going on around carbon capture with regenerative farming, because if you do farming correctly, you’ve become a wonderful carbon sink. And there needs to be an economy around it. So what is the value of a carbon credit? They’ve got value for that in Europe, but they haven’t valued it in America. So I think there’s a lot of government policy that needs to work there. But it’s a fascinating area to look at.

It’s interesting, the concept of bringing innovation to agriculture, which is—
So old school! Yeah, it’s fun. I do get frustrated that it doesn’t move fast enough. Then I’m reminded of how big this is and I’ve got my whole life to work on it. So I’m learning to embrace going a little slower. If you are in the software world, it’s more “move fast and break things,” and I think with food, it’s something in between.

Yeah, you don’t want to break the food chain.
No, people need to eat. Exactly.

And I know you’ve been advocating, too, for policies that help farmers shift to organic methods.
Yeah, I’ve been a supporter of that, but I really have pushed my energy now to work with young farmers of any kind. I’m not against organic at all. I love organic. But I’ve kind of said, “You know, we just need young farmers.” Real food doesn’t require it to be organic. If it’s a zucchini that happens to be grown conventionally, I’m still in favor of that.

It’s still a zucchini.
Right. That being said, organic is better. Farmers make more money on it. But it’s really about young farmers getting them into the business.

If you don’t mind, let me take one minute to just talk about [another initiative called] Square Roots. So there was a sort of a turning point in indoor farming technology around 2014, where you could really do quality food. Indoor farming’s been around forever, but the quality was really terrible. It would taste like water. No real flavor. But the technology of lighting really changed in 2014, and so by 2016 we said, “You know, there is a way here.” And what got me going was I really wanted to create this generation of young farmers. I love technology and I love food. And I think that if we bring the two together, we will get young people interested in farming again. And so we started out Square Roots as really a training entity.

And with Square Roots, you’re growing food in shipping containers? There’s no soil?
Yeah, we refine the nutrients [through the water]. We’ve gotten very, very thoughtful about what the nutrients are so that we can re-create as best we can the soil that they would get normally. The shipping containers, what’s beautiful about them is the fact that we can totally control the climate. For example, we have found that Genoa in Italy is where the best basil in the world is grown. It’s four weeks in June that are the best, and actually, 1997 was the best June. And so we re-create the climate of 1997 Genoa, Italy, in each of those containers to create the tastiest basil you can possibly imagine. Using data, we can monitor the growth and how they work. And every square meter of the air in there is exactly the same. That’s why containers are so valuable. Plants factories have to grow basil or cilantro or whatever all in the same climate. We get to grow arugula, basil, parsley, cilantro or whatever each in their own climate. For example, we’ve discovered that mint grows best in the Yucatan Peninsula — superhuman, grows like a weed, delicious. And we re-create that climate.

Square Roots Basil Farm in Brooklyn.

Square Roots

And the shipping containers, the idea for that was, “Let’s use things that we can recycle”?
Well, they are recycled. But no, it wasn’t that. It was actually climate control. They’re actually like refrigerators. We can drop that temperature in there to 40 degrees Fahrenheit for a particular growth cycle. If we have any pests, we don’t use pesticides, we have something called Mojave mode where we turn it into the Mojave Desert for four days. We bring the temperature up to 120 degrees, drop the humidity down to four percent and nothing can survive. That’s how we remove pests. No one else can do that unless you use these kind of containers. So it’s really a technology solution.

You’ve referred to food as being the new Internet. Do you still feel that way?
Oh, my god. Absolutely. It’s showing itself. Food is different to social media and so forth. It takes a long time to build up supply chains, get consistent growing. It’s not as fast-moving, but it is a much bigger business. Software is a $400 billion business. Food is an $18 trillion business. So the opportunity is much, much bigger in food than it is in software.

What are the top two or three things that really bother you about the industrial food system right now?
The processing of food. For some reason back in the ’70s, America just started to idolize processed food. And so what you have is a high-calorie hamburger, for example, that is nutritionally irrelevant. In other words, people were just not thinking about nutrition. And they used laboratories to adjust the flavor, chemicals to adjust the flavor, artificial ingredients. The result was a very high-calorie, highly processed kind of a Frankenstein burger that did please the pallet, but it made you feel awful afterwards.

The other one that is absolutely ludicrous is ethanol. Forty percent of our corn fields are growing ethanol. That’s 25 million acres of land that could be used to grow real food. People keep feeding us bullshit that we need to try and feed the world. We have so much food that we are turning 40 percent of it into ethanol. It takes a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol. So it’s just a total boondoggle for the corn farmers and it’s terrible for the environment. In fact, it’s hilarious: It’s the only thing that both the oil industry and the environmentalists hate. Can you imagine there’s something that those two can agree on? And it’s ethanol.

Why the hell are we doing it?
It’s a subsidy for farmers. We do it because old people vote, and they control the farms, and they would all be devastated right now if the true demand of corn is what they had to deal with. And until a politician has the courage to make those hard decisions, we’re going to be stuck growing ethanol. Now, the good thing is we are all switching to electric cars, so ethanol is going to go away anyway. But for a while, the next five to 10 years, ethanol is going to be a part of what we do.

Let’s talk about the Million Gardens Movement. How did you get the idea that you wanted to do it?
Frank [Giustra] and his team pitched us on joining forces and doing the Million Gardens Movement. And we loved it. We thought it was a great idea. Because of Covid, we had been forced to pivot our model from the learning gardens because we couldn’t really teach people in the gardens anymore. And so we had done this trial of what we call little green gardens, which are round, beautiful sort of beige sacks, and you can come in and pick these up from a local school in your community. You can grow them on a windowsill as long as there’s some light. You can grow them indoors, which enables any city to be able to use them.

Say you get to a million gardens, are there any projections on what the environmental impact of that might be?
What we would be doing with these little green gardens is inspiring people to garden and empowering them to garden. The average garden generates about $600 to $700 worth of food a year. So it provides actual food to your family. You’re having a lower carbon footprint because you’re not shipping food around. It’s great for mental health. Think about Covid and how crazy we all are. This gets you out there. It connects you to your kids. Gardening is such a beautiful thing to do for yourself, for the community, for the environment.

It’s easy to think about what has been lost during this time, but I do like this idea of using COVID as an opportunity for change.
It’s obviously one of the worst things we’ve gone through as a society, but if we do this correctly, if we take this opportunity well, it could be one of the best things that’s happened to society — in a few years, we’ll look back and say, “OK, this was a good way to restart and focus more on climate change, focus more on gardening with your family, being connected to each other.” I think it has a lot of potential, as long as we take that potential and we leverage it. So the Million Gardens Movement is a part of that.

In This Article: covid-19, Elon Musk, food, gardening

Tanimura & Antle Acquires Boston-Based Green City Growers

March 9, 2021 - General News

SALINAS, Ca. (March 9th, 2021) – Employee-owned grower-shipper, Tanimura & Antle BB #:115075 announced today the acquisition of Boston, Massachusetts, based Green City Growers.

The merger of the two companies is based on a common commitment and passion to provide communities, organizations, and individuals with a hands-on educational experience to increase awareness, build engagement and provide education about where food comes from. By providing a path to engagement with hands-on experience, Green City Growers will assist Tanimura & Antle with reaching individuals of all ages, promoting a long-term healthy lifestyle with consumers.

The combined goal of this partnership is to access and serve individuals and local communities not ordinarily provided with the opportunity to connect with their food while strengthening the food supply by providing a supplemental, healthy, and independent food source.

Founded in 1982, the Tanimura and Antle families created a partnership centered on equality, trust and ownership. Since their foundation, Tanimura & Antle has been an industry leader in innovating how food is produced and delivered as well as their first-to-market product offerings.

The Company’s foundation on partnerships has built a culture that carries forward with its employees, customers and suppliers, creating an environment that fosters innovation and willingness to succeed or fail forward.

“Our investment in Green City Growers is our next level of engagement to continue our efforts to impact the lives of all. Our philosophy has always been a learning by doing approach. By reaching children, charitable organizations, corporations, wellness and community outreach programs, we can have a strong impact on promoting a healthy lifestyle,” said Scott Grabau, President & CEO of Tanimura & Antle.

“This partnership and acquisition will also provide our retail and foodservice partners their own opportunity to have an impact in the communities they serve by partnering with us on these programs.”

Founded in 2008 and a certified benefit corporation (B-Corp), Green City Growers started their business by installing and maintaining raised garden beds at people’s homes. From there, the business expanded to include schools, non-profits, corporate clients and real estate companies.

The company provides their customers with the infrastructure, tools, and educational tools required in order to grow their own fresh produce using the principles of organic, regenerative and pesticide free agriculture practices. Green City Growers also offers consulting on design, workshops, virtual engagement and educational opportunities.

With this certification comes a mission that combines bottom-line success with environmental and social responsibility. Green City Growers reaches thousands of children and adults with hands on educational programs about growing healthy food.

As of 2021, Green City Growers has installed hundreds of garden spaces using organic, regenerative and pesticide free agriculture practices and currently services over 150 unique farm and garden locations. The current farms and gardens range from small raised garden beds to rooftop farms and are located throughout New England, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York.

The Company is proud to service New England’s largest rooftop farm on top of Whole Foods Market in Lynnfield, MA, and be the Red Sox’s “other farm team”, maintaining the rooftop farm at Fenway Park since 2015.

In addition to these unique farm and garden locations, Green City Growers also manages garden education programs for Public Schools, Boys, and Girls Clubs and supports wellness and sustainability programs for property management, real estate companies, and corporations with their own gardens.

“We see innovation in the food production and distribution chains as a societal and environmental necessity. We are implementing creative and realistic solutions that help to meet the multiple challenges food systems currently face. We work towards this while at the same time providing local jobs, sourcing local materials, and supporting local economies”, said Chris Grallert, President and equity partner of Green City Growers.

“With a solid business foundation in our proven and robust soil growing technologies, we can now thoughtfully look into how we can expand our custom services in other areas of urban agriculture including vertical and other indoor technologies. I could not be more excited about this new partnership.”

Under the new ownership, the company will continue doing business as Green City Growers with Chris Grallert as President of this new partnership.

Lead photo: The 5,000-square foot Green City Gowers rooftop farm at Fenway Park is on the roof of the front office on the third-base side.

Tagged mergers & acquisitions, tanimura & antle

PHOENIX, ARIZONA: GCU’s Farm Fills Neighbors’ Plates, Students’ Souls

March 03, 2021

by Mike Kilen

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GCU Outdoor Recreation Club members plant greens in the Canyon Urban Farms raised beds.

Story by Mike Kilen -Photos by Ralph Freso - GCU News Bureau

Nathan Cooper looked across the farm in the middle of the Grand Canyon University campus, where spinach and tomatoes, melons, and broccoli were growing amid students tending them. It’s always easier for farmers to tell stories standing shoulder to shoulder, looking out.

“There was this old woman in my hometown in Minnesota …” the Manager of GCU’s Canyon Urban Farms began.

A smile appeared. Every year, the woman had grown a bountiful patch of tomatoes and gave them all away. Everyone in town knew it. There was a waiting list to get her tomatoes that came from a seed variety dating back decades in her family.

“She died a couple years ago,” Cooper said. “I want to get one of her seeds and dedicate a spot to her here.”

Students Savannah Miles and Gracie Grettenberger (from left) listen as Canyon Urban Farms Manager Nathan Cooper gives them planting tips.

Canyon Urban Farms has that woman’s sentiment at its heart — growing as an act of giving. Cooper had just delivered a batch of produce to Lutheran Social Services for the neighborhood refugee population.

A year into the project, he has the quarter-acre plot to the north of Agave teeming with life – and not just with plants: Students have found it a place of contemplation, a reminder of grandma and renewed growth during a rough pandemic year.

“This was rocky soil,” Cooper told group a half-dozen students from the GCU Outdoor Recreation Club, which arrives weekly to tend the garden and learn from it. “It is turning into the best soil you will ever find.”

The 35 raised beds are filled with it, and now several in-ground raised beds are teeming with organic matter, supplied by compost bins of rotting vegetables and other waste.

He urged the students to contribute to the garden by taking a small container, toss in it waste from their rooms – banana peels, coffee grounds, egg shells – and bring it to the compost bins, where it will be heated by bacteria’s hard work, turned and broken down into the magic of beautiful natural fertilizer.

“As you work, just pick up a handful of the dirt,” he told them. “You will see how much more living it is. You can feel it.”

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Students found there is nothing like the taste of a carrot fresh from the ground.

It reminded senior Payton Oxner of his grandmother’s garden in South Dakota.

“During the pandemic, that’s where they got a lot of their food,” he said.

During the pandemic, this is where the Outdoor Rec Club got a lot of its nature. With off-campus outings restricted, it was a welcome addition to step outside into new possibilities.

“COVID took so much from us, so we wanted to create community right here on campus,” said senior trip guide Gracie Grettenberger. “When you say, ‘We have a garden on campus.’ What? They want to be a part of developing it.

“Living in a dorm, we don’t have the opportunity to garden on our own. They miss this, and being able to do this on a campus is a mindful experience.”

It’s part of what brought freshman Savannah Miles to the garden, where she held a package of three different varieties of peppers to plant in an in-ground bed that Cooper called the “salsa garden,” where in weeks peppers and tomatoes can make a delicious addition to any meal.

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Gracie Grettenberger of the Outdoor Recreation Club plants seeds in the in-ground beds.

“It’s a meditative activity that wipes away the stress,” she said. “It’s beautiful to make your own produce. Plus, I like dirt. I like playing in dirt.”

Twenty-six vegetables of numerous varieties grow here in the shadow of the six-story Agave Apartments, and Cooper has had to learn which areas get just the right amount of sun for each type of produce.

Some of the broccoli has bolted, but he tells a student that even the leaves can be used to juice.

Kaleb Morrow said that’s also why he and other students are interested in a garden – to go back to the ways of healthy eating, fresh from the dirt outside your room.

“It takes some time to know the intricacies, but you can grow anything,” he said.

While a student’s mobile phone sat in the dirt, leaned against a Bluetooth speaker playing singer/songwriter tunes you’d hear in a coffee shop, Cooper talked of the appeal of this garden — not only as a place to reap the fruit of your labor but as a tool of education. He urged each student to take a package of herb seeds to put in a pot in their rooms.

“You throw a seed in the ground and it comes back a living thing,” he said.

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Savannah Miles prepares the ground for planting.

His goal is also to be a good steward of the earth with a self-sustaining garden, using the seeds to plant next year’s crop and using food waste to regenerate the soil.

Plans are growing as fast as the vegetables beyond its primary goal of helping feed the neighborhood.

New wheeled planters for maximizing growing location are planned for the University’s 27th Avenue office complex. A farmers’ market for community members is on his wish list, as are more gatherings on the east end of the acreage, saved as a place for teaching locations or for students to quietly gather among new life.

This virus, he said, created a lot of longing for a place like this.

“There is a lot of good that can be done from this garden.”

Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at mike.kilen@gcu.edu or at 602-639-6764.

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Related content:

GCU Today: GCU’s urban farms plant seeds to nourish neighbors

GCU Today: GCU students Serve the City by building a garden

Urban Farming In New Zealand

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craigfer

February 26, 2021

While New Zealand is renowned the world over for its farming systems, with world-class food and fibre being exported daily, it’s a little-known fact that Urban farming is starting to take off as well.

Urban farming is pretty much what it says on the can. Growing or producing food in a heavily populated area. One doesn’t have to be a business owner growing a product to sell to be an urban farmer. Anyone with a bit of area and a Kiwi can-do attitude can be an urban farmer.

Now more than ever, consumers are wanting to know where their food comes from, the story behind its provenance, and the story of the people producing it. Food security (especially in the future) and climate change are other big factors in our communities today. This poses significant opportunities (and equal challenges) for traditional farmers and growers who farm on large scales; but it also poses some opportunities for urbanites.

While the term urban farming and community garden tend to be used interchangeably in NZ, the essence is still the same; producing food in your own backyard. NZ is home to a number of urban farming groups like the Urban Farmers Alliance ( a national group), Farm Next Door (Taranaki region) to name a few.

While each have their own set of values and purpose, they all have the same key messages. Building local and national food security, using regenerative farming practices and the bringing together of communities. Climate change resilience is a key motivator for all, which is why many urban farms work on regenerative and organic principles.

In partnership with Massey University, Farm Next Door was awarded a $100,000 grant to fund research into the benefits and barriers to ‘hyperlocal community agriculture’. Many involved in urban farming in NZ say that urban farming could provide part of the solution for the vulnerabilities that exist within NZ’s current food system, including the reduction of productive land to residential areas. The idea of urban farms being dotted throughout the country complete with roadside honesty boxes is the goal for many, making food available to entire communities for affordable prices.

Regenerative approach

For many urban farmers, the regenerative approach is key to the whole system. Working with regenerative agriculture principles within an urban context. While there is still a lot of debate on a national level about the details of regenerative farming, with a lot of people calling for more research to be done on the claimed efficiencies of the system, in a general sense, the principles are simple, and mimic natural ecosystems. Working with the environment. Sun, water, soil, biodiversity and social make up the five key principles of regenerative agriculture. Soil in particular plays a large role in carbon holding and nutrient cycling, a growing topic of importance in traditional agriculture in NZ.

So it makes sense that those interested in urban farming would follow the regenerative route. After all the values align almost perfectly.

Community and people-centered model

This model increases food resilience by introducing more diversity into the system. Many stress that urban farms aren’t a replacement for larger scale producers, quite the opposite. By expanding and strengthening the local ‘food ecosystem’ will only support the nation’s export markets and add to their marketing story.

Telling their story aside, urban farms are also a unique way of educating locals about food production and passing on growing knowledge to the next generation. Increasingly people are becoming aware of the big separation we have between paddock and plate. This issue is why there are numerous initiatives in the traditional agriculture industry to get people out on farms. Open Farms NZ is one such initiative which invites farms from across the country, be them dairy, horticulture, beef or so on, to open up their farm gates for a day for locals to visit, learn and get back to their grass roots. Urban farming, in a way, is doing that, but on a smaller scale.

NZ is working on putting its own data together around the influence of urban farms on employment rates, but it’s thought that the data from the US (which suggests that urban farms focusing on local and regional markets employ four times as many FTE staff than farms not engaged in local markets), could hold somewhat true, if not to quite the same extent.

Kiwi’s are renowned for supporting independent and local brands which further supports the urban farming model.

Education

A key component of many of the urban farming groups is collaborative learning and education. Unlike many industries, each urban farm isn’t necessarily viewed as a competitor, rather an ally to work with. The more the merrier – so they say.

With a variety of educational resources on carbon, soil, regenerative practices, organic practices, composting, data collection, and more, wanna-be urban farmers have a plethora of tools available.

Organic Market Garden – Auckland

OMG is a collaboration between a number of local businesses which was first set up to show the huge potential of underutilized inner-city spaces to the benefit of the local community.

Locals can purchase a three-month subscription for fresh produce or volunteer in the garden. While being a productive garden that feeds the community, OMG is also about educating people and ‘creating a regenerative food system for Auckland’. Working off a community supported agriculture (CSA) model, they thrive off being part of the community and are working at getting market gardens all across Auckland city.

Freeman Farms – Taranaki

Situated in urban Taranaki, the Freeman family grows over 25 types of fruit and vegetables plus honey and eggs. The farm is part of Farm Next Door and Urban Farmers Alliance and makes a decent living off of the farm.

Kaicycle – Wellington

First established in 2015 Kaicycle is an urban farming and community composting project. It was first started to provide produce to a local smoothie business but has grown to selling to local restaurants. They are also trialing a CSA model.

It runs an ‘ebike-powered food waste collection and composting service’ which services 125 households and businesses. That compost then goes onto the farm to help build soil quality creating a nutrient cycle.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLJUWMPsS7p/

Cultivate- Christchurch

This urban farm functions in conjunction with a local youth programme. Over 25 young people so far have been supported into more positive outcomes (with education, employment and housing) through Cultivate with the aim of helping 12 young people every year. The farm supplies local hospitality businesses.

The above are just a sampling of the urban farms dotted around the country, with interest growing all the time. With NZ’s recent Climate Change Commission report out, it’s likely that more and more urbanites will follow the path of veteran urban farmers in a bid to do their part. Plus, growing food is good for the mind, body and soul.

Vertical farming in NZ – growing up, not out.

Vertical farming, along with urban farming, has become a popular reply to the question of land loss to urban development and population growth.

Vertical farms have popped up in a number of major urban centers. In high rises, derelict buildings and abandoned warehouses, this form of growing crops is reportedly helping to reduce carbon emissions and maximising unused spaces in cities. While similar to urban farms, vertical farms take it one step further. It’s a win win for many cities around the world, like China, that have a high monopoly on space and land use.

Under the system, layer after layer of crops are grown in trays, with mostly everything used being recycled for the next round of growing. The practice often incorporates controlled-environment agriculture to maximise crop yields. The aim of vertical farming in general is to conserve land area, control climatic conditions and maximise unused space. Some overseas believe its a great way of navigating the adverse effects of weather.

But in NZ, with their large focus on outdoor, pastoral farming, is there a need for it? Some say yes, others say no. NZ has some unique features to it, including high levels of sunshine hours and generally good growing conditions.

While it could be a great way for inner-city dwellers to get their green thumb, industry bodies like Horticulture NZ say it wouldn’t work. The problem is more that of current land-use vs land-use suitability. Not to mention the investment needed for start-up costs and urban development issues. Of the few vertical farms around, it’s suggested that all have been started up with investors or government funding, with it taking many years for the business to stand on its own legs.

Over the last 20 years, the amount of land available to grow fruit and vegetables in NZ has decreased, while the demand has gone up, and this gap is forecast to get larger. This change in supply and demand prompted many to suggest that vertical farming could offer a solution.

Vertical farming requires the replacement of natural, solar energy to be replaced with artificial lighting, most commonly LED lights, which are cool to the touch and are easier to control or hydroponic lamps. This alone led to the conclusion that the cost of lighting and temperature control would be too expensive, making it an unviable economic option. The limited number of crops able to be grown vertically (mainly leafy greens and herbs) wouldn’t fill the gap that’s required by the industry – that is, things like potatoes, rice and corn that are staples for millions.

While it perhaps wouldn’t fit the bill for supporting export demands, there is still the possibility, if economically viable, it could help fill local demand.

There aren’t many vertical farms around in NZ, but the ones that are around are trying to provide proof of concept.

Shoots microgreens

NZ’s very first vertical farm had humble beginnings housed in a former nightclub. The company started its journey in 2018 growing tiny crops mainly for restaurants with some sold through large supermarket chains. Microgreens are intense flavoured first shoots and leaves and are a popular garnish for meals and cocktails.

It’s thought that microgreens can contain up to 100 times more nutrients than fully-grown plants.

The company got investment to install special LED grow lights which conserve around 45% in electricity over hydroponic lamps. The lights are customistables and can be adjusted to optimise the growth of specific varieties of microgreens. They don’t produce heat so vertical layers can be done with no fear of heat damaging plants.

In 2020 the business kicked off a first-of-its-kind system by launching an in-store growing stand complete with automated LED lighting and watering technology in a supermarket. The system allows customers to see the growing of the produce in real time and purchase.

The idea behind the system was to ensure people were taking home produce that was fresh as possible. The business hopes more supermarkets will get on board with the system.

The supporters of vertical farming say that, like urban farms, the idea is not to replace existing horticultural systems, but create new opportunities in the form of retails and tourist experiences, add value, enhance education and provide hyperlocal plant production for affordable prices.

In major cities like Auckland, it can take hours to get out to farms to pick your own produce from the paddock. As the nation’s housing crisis seems to keep increasing, much of the country’s most productive horticultural and agricultural land is being snapped up and subdivided for residential and lifestyle block builds.

Aside from bringing food production closer to home, the social aspect of vertical farming, and urban farming for that matter, is that it offers opportunities to develop new careers in agriculture. Vertical farming in particular requires a complex knit of disciplines like computers, agronomy, economics, biosecurity, design, marketing – the works.

So, is there a future for vertical farming in NZ? Depends who you talk to. With the success of businesses like Microgreens, there’s a very strong argument for yes. However the economics of it, as they currently stand, might delay others in getting onboard the vertical train.

Categories: Urban Farming

Tagged: new zealand, urban farming

Little Leaf Farms Raises $90M to Grow Its Greenhouse Network

by Jennifer Marston

Image from: Little Leaf Farms

Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms has raised $90 million in a debt and equity financing round to expand its network of hydroponic greenhouses on the East Coast. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital as well as founding investors Bill Helman and Pilot House Associates. Bank of America also participated.

Little Leaf Farms says the capital is “earmarked” to build new greenhouse sites along the East Coast, where its lettuce is currently available in about 2,500 stores. 

The company already operates one 10-acre greenhouse in Devins, Massachusetts. Its facility grows leafy greens using hydroponics and a mixture of sunlight supplemented by LED-powered grow lights. Rainwater captured from the facility’s roof provides most of the water used on the farm. 

According to a press release, Little Leaf Farms has doubled its retail sales to $38 million since 2019. And last year, the company bought180 acres of land in Pennsylvania on which to build an additional facility. Still another greenhouse, slated for North Carolina, will serve the Southeast region of the U.S. 

Little Leaf Farms joins the likes of Revol Greens, Gotham Greens, AppHarvest, and others in bringing local(ish) greens to a greater percentage of the population. These facilities generally pack and ship their greens on the day of or day after harvesting, and only supply retailers within a certain radius. Little Leaf Farms, for example, currently servers only parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. 

The list of regions the company serves will no doubt lengthen as the company builds up its greenhouse network in the coming months.

How This Vertical Farm Grows 80,000 Pounds of Produce per Week

Bowery Farming uses technology to prioritize accessibility and sustainability in their produce growing operations

To some, the pristine growing conditions and perceived mechanical interference of a vertical farm can seem unnatural, but at Bowery Farming “interference” is actually not the goal at all. “We don’t really think about how people are involved in the growing process, but how to take people out of the growing process” says chief science officer Henry Sztul. “Our goal is actually to have as few people walking around our plants as possible.”

Bowery Farming is a network of vertical farms working to reengineer the growing process. Using a system of light and watering technology, Bowery is able to use 95 percent less water than a traditional outdoor farm, zero pesticides and chemicals, and grow food that tastes as good as anyone else’s. 

Bowery Farming uses vertical farm-specific seeds that are optimized for flavor instead of insect resistance and durability. Seeds are mechanically pressed into trays of soil, and sent out into growing positions, or racks within the building that have their own lighting and watering systems. Each tray gets its own QR code so that they can be monitored and assigned a customized plan for water and light until they’re ready to be harvested.

Irving Fain, Bowery Farming’s founder and CEO contemplates the prediction from the United Nations that 70 to 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in and around cities in the next 30 years. “Figuring out ‘how do you feed and how do you provide fresh food to urban environments both more efficiently as well as more sustainably?’ is a very important question today, and an even more important question in the years to come.”

Indoor Farming Company With Backing From Ubben Aims to Solve The Problems With America’s Produce

Image from: AppHarvest

Company: AppHarvest Inc. (APPH)

The agriculture technology company focuses on building an indoor farm in Appalachia. The company combines agricultural techniques with cutting-edge technology and including access for all to nutritious food, farming, and building a homegrown food supply. The company operates a 60-acre controlled environment, agriculture facility in Morehead, Kentucky, which grows juicy beefsteak tomatoes and tomatoes on the vine. It also operates a 60-acre indoor farm, outside Richmond, Kentucky, where it cultivates fresh fruits and veggies.

The company’s technological systems monitor the pollination across all 68 bays and 684 rows of plants. AppHarvest is only the fourth U.S. public Certified B corporation. A B corporation is a company that has (1) achieved a high standard of social and environmental performance as measured by the B Impact Assessment, (2) verified their scores through transparency requirements, and (3) made a legal commitment to consider all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Any company can apply to be one.

Stock Market Value: $3.3 billion ($33.26 per share)

Image from: CNBC

Activist:

Inclusive Capital

Percentage Ownership:  

12.05%

Average Cost: 

n/a

Activist Commentary: 

Inclusive Capital Partners was formed in 2020 by ValueAct founder Jeff Ubben, to leverage capitalism and governance in pursuit of a healthy planet and the health of its inhabitants. The firm seeks long-term shareholder value through active partnership with companies whose core businesses contribute solutions to this pursuit. Inclusive is a returns driven fund with a focus on environmental and social investing.

Their primary focus is on environmental and social value creation, which leads to shareholder value creation. It is the successor to the ValueAct Spring Fund, which was launched in January 2018 and merged into Inclusive in 2020.

Inclusive is building a huge network and has accessed experts in industries such as energy, electrification, water, agriculture, food production, particulates, education and human rights. Just like ValueAct’s constructive, patient investment style, Inclusive will seek to earn the trust of managers, board members and institutional investors.

Jeff Ubben serves as the portfolio manager and Eva Zlotnicka serves as vice president. Eva has a pre-existing relationship with ValueAct through their interactions with Morgan Stanley, where she served as a VP and U.S. lead for the Global Sustainability Research Team. At Morgan Stanley, she worked to help address and raise awareness of environmental and social issues both inside and outside of corporations.

What’s Happening:

Jeff Ubben was appointed to the company’s Board in connection with the company’s business combination with Novus Capital.

Behind the Scenes:

This was initially an investment of ValueAct Spring Fund, which was converted into Inclusive Capital in 2020. Jeff Ubben first met AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb in 2017 and has been involved with the company since the 2018 Series A round, working with Webb to put the management team together and develop a strong balance sheet. The company went public on February 1, 2021 through a $100 million SPAC transaction and a $375 million PIPE investment. Jeff Ubben is on the board where he can continue to help the company execute.

AppHarvest plans on having 12 facilities by 2025. The goal here is to make Kentucky the Netherlands of North America. The Netherlands (at 16,000 square miles) is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world, using greenhouse technology to feed two-thirds of all of Europe. In comparison, the state of Kentucky is 40,000 square miles and the US is 3.8 million square miles. AppHarvest’s motivation is first and foremost to benefit society, but if successful would have extraordinary financial returns as well.

As of 2018, 69% of fresh vine crops in the U.S. were imported, mostly from Mexico. These crops are pesticide-laden and grown using labor practices not up to U.S. standards. Moreover, they sit at the border for days and are driven 2,000+ miles to their destination, using tons of diesel fuel and resulting in less fresh produce. AppHarvest produces crops with no pesticides with greater nutrient density, and from their central location can reach 70% of the U.S. population in one day resulting in 80% less diesel fuel and much lower emissions. However, the larger environmental and economic benefit is in how the crops are grown — using 90% less water and yielding thirty times more per acre. 

Moreover, AppHarvest’s resources are nature based – the greenhouse structure allows them to use 12 hours of sunlight per day and they collect the heavy Kentucky rainfall for their system resulting in a much less adverse effect on the water supply while greatly decreasing their cost of production by not having to pay for water. The greenhouse system also eliminates any weather or seasonal constraints, allowing the company to grow more efficiently 365 days per year.

While the company has no historic revenue, they just made their first delivery of beefsteak tomatoes on January 19, 2021, to customers that include Walmart, Kroger and Publix

US - OHIO: Thinking And Growing Inside The Box

A brother-sister team has taken the mechanics of farming out of the field and into a freight container.

“We are growing beautiful plants without the sun; there’s no soil, and so it’s all a closed-loop water system,” Britt Decker, co-owner of Fifth Season FARM, said. “We use non-GMO seeds, completely free of herbicides and pesticides, so the product is really, really clean. In fact, we recommend people don’t even wash it, because there’s no reason to.”

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Fifth Season FARM is unique in many ways; the 3-acre hydroponic farm is contained in a 320-square-foot freight container that sits along 120 S. Main St. in Piqua, with everything from varying varities of lettuce, to radishes, to kale and even flowers in a climate-controlled smart farm that allows Decker and his sister, Laura Jackson, to turn crops in a six- to eight-week cycle. The crops spend 18 hours in “daytime” every day, and the farm uses 90% less water than traditional farming.

“It’s tricky because we’re completely controlling the environment in here. It’s kind of a laboratory more than a farm,” Decker said. “I think there’s about 50 of them around the world right now. These are really international, and they’re perfect for places that are food deserts where they can’t grow food because of climate or other reasons. It gives them a way to grow food in the middle of nowhere.”

Image from: Sidney Daily News

Decker and Jackson, along with their brother Bill Decker, also do traditional farming and grow corn, wheat and soybeans, but Decker said they were looking for a new venture that would help lead them to a healthier lifestyle and learn something new.

“Just with the whole local food movement becoming more and more important and food traceability, we just thought it would be a great thing to bring to our community to help everyone have a healthier lifestyle,” Decker said. “People love food that’s grown right in their hometown and the shelf-life on it, when you get it home, is remarkable. It’ll keep for two weeks.”

Image from: AgFunder News

Currently, Decker and Jackson are growing a half-dozen variety of specialty lettuces that include arugula, butterhead and romaine, as well as specialty greens like kale and Swiss chard, and even radishes and flowers. They received their freight container at the end of July and set up their indoor farm over two weeks; while the farm has been in operation for less than six months, Decker says that they’re growing beautiful product.

They have also started growing micro-greens, said Decker. Micro-greens are immature plants which are 1 to 3 inches tall and are in a 5-inch by 5-inch container.

“People will use them as garnishments and in smoothies,” said Decker. “Since they are immature plants, they have an intense flavor.”

Decker said they are growing wheat germ, broccoli and spicy salad mixes.

They’ve also started moving forward with sales and marketing. Fifth Season FARM has partnered with the Miami County Locally Grown Virtual Market to sell their products to the community. They also take orders through their website, customers can opt to pick up their orders between 4 and 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, or Decker and Jackson will deliver products up to five miles from the farm. Decker said that Fifth Season FARM is also in discussions with three restaurants in the area about including their specialty greens on their menus.

Decker said they also plan to attend the Sidney Farmers Market when it opens for the spring/summer season.

“We’re really just getting going,” Decker said. “While we were learning to grow products, we didn’t want to overcommit to a restaurant or grocery store before we knew we could really grow beautiful product, so we’ve been donating product every week to the food pantry at the Presbyterian Church. It feels good to plant the seeds and watch them grow, and it feels good to make sure that people who aren’t getting the proper nutrition are getting some.”

Democratic Mayoral Candidates Offer Ideas for Addressing Food Insecurity

Image from: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

Nine candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to become the next mayor of New York City gathered Tuesday morning in a virtual forum to discuss their visions for the city's food policy and serving the roughly 2 million New Yorkers who are food insecure.

At the "Town Hall on the Future of Food in New York City" -- hosted by Hunter College in partnership with City Harvest, CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, Food Bank for NYC, Hunger Free America, and other organizations, and moderated by NY1 anchor Errol Louis -- the candidates discussed the city's urgent need to manage rampant hunger during the pandemic and center it in the recovery effort. But the discussion also focused on the pre-existing problems of food insecurity, inequitable access to nutritious meals, and inefficiencies and lack of sustainability in the city's food use.

The participants, who were selected based on their polling and fundraising standings among a field of dozens of candidates, included Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former federal housing secretary Shaun Donovan, former city sanitation commissioner and "covid food czar" Kathryn Garcia, former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire, former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, former city veterans' services commissioner Loree Sutton, city Comptroller Scott Stringer, small business owner Joycelyn Taylor, and Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney and former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Louis pushed them to focus on how they would bring anti-hunger initiatives to scale to address the food crisis compounded by the pandemic.

Programs to help feed New Yorkers have often missed the mark, failing to meet adequate health standards and leaving many New Yorkers out entirely. A 2017 study from the Robin Hood Poverty Tracker found 1 in 4 eligible food stamp, or SNAP, recipients -- 700,000 New York City residents -- were not enrolled in the program, less than the statewide participation rate of 93 percent the same year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In September, the Poverty Tracker reporter 1.7 million New Yorkers were getting food stamps, over 200,000 more than last February. During roughly the same period the percentage of food stamp recipients who also used a food pantry doubled, from 27 percent of enrollees to 60 percent.

Nearly all candidates agreed on the need to increase SNAP benefits, and improve enrollment in the program; expand community gardens and urban agriculture; and improve access to nutritious food throughout communities and in institutional settings like schools and food pantries. There was also broad consensus around creating a more unified food procurement and distribution system in New York City by strengthening the Mayor's Office of Food Policy. Multiple candidates highlighted the frequent lack of coordination among the myriad city agencies that provide food as part of their services.

"One of the reasons why I needed to step in is that the Mayor's Office of Food Policy is incredibly understaffed," said Garcia, who managed the city's emergency food response last summer before leaving the de Blasio administration last fall and launching her campaign to succeed him.

"[Food Policy Director] Kate McKenzie does an amazing job but she doesn't have procurement authority, she doesn't have logistical authority...one of the clear things is how we approach food is very siloed, very fragmented," Garcia said, noting the separate food procurement activities of the Department of Education, Department of Correction, and senior centers. Garcia says the city provided 1 million meals a day and shored up food pantries last summer under her leadership. (Shortly after the forum, Garcia released a multi-pronged platform to fight food insecurity with an emphasis on enrolling more New Yorkers in SNAP and expanding what the benefits would cover.) 

Adams, who repeatedly discussed the need for nutritious food, criticized the nutritional value of many of the government-provided or -supported food services, including Garcia’s covid effort, and said increasing the size of the Mayor's Office of Food Policy would have a limited impact if the city did not also incorporate the new perspectives from food-access "visionaries."

"They don't share the values," Adams said of the city's food-oriented bureaucrats, historically. "I am amazed at the roadblocks, that organizations like Rockaway Youth Task Force are not able to scale," he said during a segment of the conversation on urban agriculture programs. 

Some of the candidates saw the city's food dilemmas rooted in job scarcity and low wages and frequently discussed the importance of building food policy into the city's economic recovery.

"We solve none of this if we don't recognize that fundamentally what is broken and why 30% of our people were not eating through the month before covid is because the rent was too damn high and people were choosing to pay rent instead of buying groceries," Wiley said, adding, "at the end of the day it is about the city's ability to generate new jobs." Wiley has announced a plan as mayor to create 100,000 jobs through a $10 billion capital investment and cited it as an example of how she would leverage existing city resources to bring her approach to scale.

"Fundamentally, food insecurity is about income and it is about the fact that we do not intentionally ensure that our young people have pathways to careers and are prepared for the careers of the 21st Century," said Garcia.

The conversation of workforce development dovetailed with another on building an urban agrarian economy in New York to create good jobs and ensure both sustainable and equitable food access for city residents.

"We need to also think about aligning not just food policy, but the resilience office that exists right now to work more in tandem with each other because we know that food justice is also climate justice," said Morales, who was the executive director of Phipps Neighborhoods in the South Bronx, a social services provider. As mayor, Morales said she would invest $25 million to food innovation and sustainability programs in communities of color.

Multiple candidates, including Stringer, Donovan, and Adams wanted to see a greater emphasis on local and regional food procurement. "If I'm mayor, I really want to create a Mayor's Office of Food Markets because we've got to link farming with communities and for a farm-to-table policy that brings the purchasing power of this city regionally, upstate, downstate, and create those relationships," Stringer said. "Farmers markets should be everywhere."

Image from: Square Roots

"There is huge potential to grow, so to speak, the power of locally-grown produce," said Donovan, who was the city’s housing commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg before spending all eight years in the Obama presidential cabinet. "We need innovative approaches to ensure we are using every inch of available space that we can." Like other candidates, he expressed support for ideas like more community gardens and vertical agriculture. Donovan also repeatedly stressed the need to support struggling restaurants and incorporate them into the city's food programs as well as its economic recovery.

While supportive of partnerships with upstate and Long Island counties, Garcia took issue with the notion that New York could achieve a sustainable food market locally. "If we want fresh, healthy food day in and day out, we're not harvesting today in this region, we are going to have to bring it in," she said following Donovan's comments. "We need to make sure the systems go beyond just this region so that we can still be getting lettuce even though it's February."

"That should not hold us back from starting to have a robust agrarian economy in New York City," Adams countered, echoing Donovan's statements about the importance of life sciences in city schools and connecting lessons about food production to healthy eating.

When asked directly whether they would use the city's power of eminent domain to force the sale of private land for the city to use, most candidates raised their hands affirmatively. Adams expressed his dissent, noting that the many existing city resources that he said are being wasted or under-utilized should be tapped before forcing land sales. (Others also raised the importance of better using available land, with Stringer naming a report he issued as comptroller on the number of vacant city-owned lots that could be used to develop housing and noting that many lots could also be used for community gardens.)

McGuire, who recently stepped down from one of the biggest jobs on Wall Street to run for mayor, also criticized the mismanagement of city resources and cautioned on the costs to the city that eminent domain could pose. "It gets expensive so you have to figure out when you exercise eminent domain at market rates who is going to pay for it," he said.

Equity was an overriding theme in a number of areas of the food policy discussion, from eradicating food deserts to ensuring healthy options in schools and pantries.

"I think we do have a moral obligation to ensure that every resident of the city has those basic needs of food and housing," said Taylor, who created the nonprofit NYC WMBE Alliance, according to her website. "We have to make sure that when we look at the budget we look things that are 'nice to have' and things that are 'needs to have,' and if it means that we have to reallocate funds from the things that are nice to have to the needs, then that's what I would do."

"We need to stop leaving communities out of the co-creation process," said Morales, who stressed participation of food advocacy groups.

Wiley and Taylor also discussed the need for community participation in the form of locally-based food councils to inform nutrition, per Wiley, and more active mayoral outposts in each borough, per Taylor. Both also discussed the importance of collecting more targeted data to better determine the outcomes of food programs. Other candidates outlined plans or past work to incorporate cultural sensitivity into food access, including then-Manhattan Borough President Stringer's 2008 "Go Green East Harlem Cookbook" and Garcia's discussion of halal and kosher options in meal services, something others mentioned as well.

The candidates agreed that compounded structural problems of food deserts and the reliance of low-income communities on the city's various food programs exacerbate malnutrition and health outcomes, but not all offered the same solution.

"Today food deserts are such that many of our people don't have access to healthy food. They have access to those institutions that provide food that is pretty low on the nutrition scale," McGuire said. He laid out a more corporate-friendly view of the path forward, that involved rezoning to allow big supermarket chains, hiring gig workers to deliver meals to seniors, and bringing refrigeration resources to bodegas in order to better store fresh produce.

As is often the case, Morales was at the other end of the spectrum, saying she supports community land trusts to create both better access to fresh produce and greater "food sovereignty" in poor communities. Sutton said the solution was to leverage public-private partnerships.

"It's one thing to talk about all these ideas, but in the same breath to disdain, disparage and disrespect the top 1 percent of New Yorkers who bring in nearly 40 percent of our tax base or reject and shun real estate as one example, as a number of my fellow candidate have during this campaign," said Sutton, a former Army psychiatrist who led de Blasio's Department of Veterans' Services. "We are absolutely shutting down those pathways to partnership and prosperity."

Recycling Solar Energy for Indoor Farming Use

New patented technology that recycles renewable energy is ready to revolutionize CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) and make indoor farming both more profitable and more attainable in remote rural areas. This upgrade in solar technology offers benefits for farmers, consumers, businesses, environmentalists and local governments.

Two businesses are building a prototype of the vertical farm of the future in Marquette, Kansas (pop. 620.) The indoor farm will recycle its own solar energy at night and during storms by absorbing LED light energy when it’s used to illuminate the interior growing spaces. The 60-unit, 11-acre prototype development will function independently of the local power grid using technology designed and built by Kansas native David Hinson, CTO of TSO Greenhouses.

Image from: Hortidaily

This technology will reduce burdensome costs of power, water, financing, real estate acquisitions, and property taxes. Such hurdles have often been the downfall of previous vertical farms, especially in urban areas. The forward-thinking pair’s plan addresses and solves all of these challenges.

The duo’s “ag tech campus” model includes accelerated growing of all-natural, clean food and protein fodder as well as reliable 5G internet for rural farmers, citizens and businesses. The entire system will be powered by renewable energy and make digital telecom deployment more practical.

Image from: Hortidaily

Hinson’s technology enables roof-mounted “solar trackers” to capture LED energy at night from the light reflected inside the structures that house hydroponic crops growing inside. These trackers rotate East to West when the sun is shining and then flip inward at night and during bad weather.

As a result, farmers can harness the energy generated “off-hours” to grow a variety of crops 24 hours a day in multiple vertical “stacks” based on bespoke microclimates. Growing by “zones” inside a multi-level structure boosts crop production and horticulture flexibility.  Traditional indoor farms and rudimentary greenhouses usually grow only 1-2 crops for local distribution.

In contrast, these new farms will be able to produce 10-15 different plant species simultaneously. Increased agility and production speed will also improve vertical farmers' ability to react to sudden demand shifts.

Image from: Hortidaily

5G Adds Lucrative Tech Payoff to Growth Cycle
Since the new 24/7/365 solar energy recycling technology only needs 33 percent to 40 percent of the harnessed energy, developers and farmers can sell excess energy for additional revenue. The local clean energy will power wireless 5G with the help of small rotating solar trackers with batteries. These trackers can be placed on community buildings, water towers, grain elevators, farm silos, bridge spans, existing cell towers and other permanent objects to ensure uptime and reliability. 

This new source of 5G will create emerging markets for renewable energy, boosting rural economies. In the past, 5G telecom has been difficult to install and deploy in remote areas.

Path Diversity will be a game-changer
The pair plan to locate data centers near 100GB digital fiber trunks to further reduce the cost and time required to deploy 5G wireless. High-end data processing groups pay premium rates for 5G, which is rated as Tier 5 (aka T5 or always-on) based on its reliability. T5 is far less subject to outages and service disruptions.

Such state-of-the-art data centers are expected to attract the largest data processing groups in the world based on their enhanced functionality and amenities. This market also provides another lucrative revenue stream for farmers and tax-equity entrepreneurs interested in sustainability.   

Investors Can Support Sustainability with “free money”
Freedom Farms CEO Geist and TSO Greenhouses Hinson have already raised nearly half a million dollars for Phase One, which will be the prototype of the vertical farming headquarters. They’re seeking an additional $2.5 million to finish the prototype by summer 2021.

Phase Two will be devoted to building 12 larger campuses that will fan out statewide from the headquarters in McPherson, Kansas. The entire $2 billion hub-and-spoke sustainability system is targeted for completion by 2030. Yields are expected to feed nearly 3 million residents statewide including many school lunch programs. Local hospitals, restaurants, colleges, universities, assisted living centers and public agencies are expected to become customers of the same-day harvests.

Investors will be able to reap these profits without ever risking their own money. Thanks to little-known U.S tax credit programs and clean-energy incentives, these projects don’t require a cash infusion. VC firms can "pool" their tax obligations, converting them to credits. This structure sets the project apart from previous urban farms or sluggish VC-funded startups.

Solar panels rotate with the sun so direct sunlight can reach inside the CEA facility and stimulate photosynthesis. Software allows the indoor farmer to create direct sun exposure on certain plants while creating shade for others, all based on each plant’s DNA preference.

The solar panels (modules) can be fully closed facing outward to create 100% shade inside if desired for any length of time controlled by the grower. By using TSO Greenhouses’ technology, vertical farmers and greenhouse growers can control and optimize sun and shade exposure simultaneously. This allows different crops to grow in zones inside the structure tailored precisely to receive the ideal light and shade to maximize plant life and production.

This 11-acre greenhouse will eventually serve as a headquarters to 12 smaller greenhouse hubs across Kansas. What makes this greenhouse unique is its ability to recycle solar energy to grow crops 24 hours a day while powering lucrative 5G data centers.

TURKEY: Vegetables Will Be Grown In The Geothermal Greenhouse Established on 60 Decares In Sivasta

The first seedlings were planted for the products to be grown in the geothermal greenhouse established on 60 decares of land in Sivasta Hot Çermik region.

120 thousand tomato seedlings were planted in a 60-acre glass greenhouse, which was started to be built a year ago in the region and will be heated by geothermal water, which cost about 40 million lira. Sivas Governor Salih Ayhan, Mayor Hilmi Bilgin and former Sivas Mayor businessperson Sami Aydın Stating that Sivas has gained a great value, Ayhan said: “I congratulate our company, which has brought a very high technology and a seminal service to Sivas, for its courage,”.

I can say that it is one of the projects that excites me the most. Sivas is developing in every field, but there is a completely different development in agriculture. I can say that Sivas has gained a very good momentum in agriculture. We use Thermal not only for health tourism but also for visual and cultural purposes. This place almost added value to the region. Saying that the greenhouse will open a vision for Sivas, Bilgin thanked Sami Aydın for bringing a modern, world-class greenhouse to Sivas. The Çermik Region has been distributing healing for years. I hope Sivas will be a cluster with this greenhouse project.

Sami Aydın also said that they have accomplished a first in Sivas and implemented the thermal smart greenhouse project. Stating that he was happy to realise the first seedling planting of such a facility, Aydın said, This is the first greenhouse project in Sivas, a smart greenhouse. While hot Çermik water has been healing for health until today, it will also be healing for agriculture from now on.

In the seedling planting done in accordance with the social distance rules, the protocol members passed through the disinfectant cabin one by one and were taken to the greenhouse area.

In Malahide, Two Friends Raise A Vertical Farm

Image from: Dublin Inquirer

When salesman Jack Hussey finishes his work day, he closes the laptop, leaves his home in Malahide and walks 10 minutes down the road. At the bottom of his friend’s farm sits an outhouse with a coldroom which now hosts his side business, Upfarm. A farm that goes upwards.

Imagine a shelf rack, says Hussey. “We’ve kitted the roofs of each shelf with an LED grow light. It’s to replicate the sunlight basically.”

A photo of the farm shows purple light beaming down on thick heads of lemongrass and basil, stacked on shelves. Yields from vertical farming are far more efficient than in-the-ground farming, Hussey said, on the phone last Friday.

He likens it to real estate. “You can have houses that are populated side by side or you can start going upwards with apartments.”

From Podcast to Table

Hussey always had an interest in food, he says. Last year he and a school friend, Bill Abbott, began to look into urban farming.

“But we were saying, is farming in the ground actually the best route to go?” Hussey says.

It’s labour intensive, which didn’t suit the two guys, who work other full-time jobs. Then, in March 2020, Hussey heard a podcast with American urban farmer Curtis Stone. He had an urban farm where he was using a spin-farming method, says Hussey. “It’s what they call it. You rotate crops out of the ground in a much more efficient way.”

“Essentially he was able to capitalise on a third acre of land. He was able to take in 80k a year,” he says.

Hussey was inspired by that, by somebody making the most of a small bit of land. So in June last year, in the middle of a pandemic and juggling working from home, Hussey and Abbot set about doing the same, albeit with a different model, and launched their vertical farm.

Image from: Farmony

How It Works

Farmony, which specialises in tech for vertical farming, sold Upfarm with the tools to get up and running – shelves, special LED lighting, a watering system and humidifiers. It is the ideal conditions for growing produce, says Framony co-founder John Paul Prior. Nutrients, hours of light, humidity and temperature are controlled in vertical farming, Prior says.

But Farmony is also a data company, Prior says. “So we capture data at all stages of the growing cycle. And we feed that back to the grower.”

This helps the grower to establish the optimum conditions, he says. “That’s not just in terms of plant growth, that’s in terms of workflow management.”

The size of an operation can be the small coldroom in Malahide that uses one Farmony module, and produces microgreens and wheatgrass for sale. Or it can be like a farm in Tipperary with 60 modules, he says. A module is 1 metre wide, 1.3 metres long and 2.5 metres tall, Prior says. Hussey says it is labour-intensive looking after a vertical farm module.

After work last Thursday, he and his dad replanted his microgreen crops into 30 different trays. “It took about two hours,” he says.

What Is the Benefit?

“So as long as you can control your temperature, your humidity, and your nutrient levels in the water, you can basically grow all year round,” says Prior. Vertical farming also means better conditions for workers, Prior says.

“If you’re working in a controlled environment, like a vertical farm, you’re working in a clean environment,” Prior says.

“You work between 18 to 22 degrees. There’s no harsh frost. There’s no extreme cold winters, equally there’s no burning-hot summers.,” says Prior.

The crop is consistent too, says Prior, thanks to the controlled environment.

“Let’s say I’m someone who loves basil and who makes a lot of pesto at home,” he says.

Getting basil of consistent quality from the supermarket can be difficult when it comes from different countries, or may have been sitting on a shelf for days after travelling thousands of miles, he says.

Image from: Farmony

Why Is this Important?

Soil quality is dropping, Hussey says. “What does that mean for outdoor growing?”

The answer, Hussey says, is vertical farming. It uses mineral-rich water so it doesn’t rely on nutrients from the ground, Hussey says.

Says Prior: “Vertical farming uses about 10 percent of the water of traditional farming.”

Prior says it takes less energy to get food from a nearby vertical farm than to ship it from afar. It was not always the case until a breakthrough in another industry, he says.

“Billions of dollars have been invested in the cannabis industry globally. It’s meant that the investment in grow-lighting technology has been huge,” he says.

“As a result, the price, the efficiency and most importantly, the energy efficiency of the lighting is really amazing” he says.

Says Hussey: “It’s not easy work but it is nice work. It’s good work.”

UNFI Picks Up Living Greens Farm Products in Midwest Expansion

I|mage from: Living Green Farms

Living Greens Farm (LGF), the largest vertical, indoor aeroponic farm in the US that provides year-round fresh salads, salad kits, microgreens and herbs, announced the addition of significant new retail distribution of its products in the upper Midwest to independent, specialty, and co-op retailers.

Starting February 2021, LGF’s full line of products featuring ready-to-eat bagged salad products (Caesar Salad Kit, Southwest Salad Kit, Harvest Salad Kit, Chopped Romaine, and Chopped Butter Lettuce) will be carried by UNFI Produce Prescott (formerly Alberts Fresh Produce). UNFI Produce Prescott is a division of UNFI, which distributes food products to thousands of stores nationwide. Their focus is on independent, specialty and co-op retailers.

UNFI has eight warehouses nationwide. LGF’s products will be carried by their upper Midwest location, located just across the river from the Twin Cities in Prescott, WI. This distribution center services hundreds of retailers throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska. UNFI is the first national Certified Organic distributor, something they take a lot of pride in. Their produce and floral businesses are rooted in local farms and seasonal import growers.

LGF’s proprietary vertical indoor farming method yields the highest quality and freshest produce available. This is because there are no pesticides or chemicals used in the growing process. And because LGF’s growing, cleaning and bagging process significantly reduces handling and time to the retail shelf, consumers enjoy the freshest product on the market. These benefits continue to attract new users and new retail distribution as UNFI Produce Prescott is the second UNFI location to carry LGF. In December, UNFI’s Hopkins, MN location began offering LGF products.

For more information on why Living Greens Farm products are the cleanest, freshest and healthiest farm salads and greens available, go to www.livinggreensfarm.com.