Agriculture Is Blooming In The Desert

August 9, 2021

Mainly produce and fruit, the UAE must import food because the arid environment is not conducive to growing a variety of leafy plants. While importing food ensures the population does not go hungry, it often results in more expensive, less fresh food, with a lower nutrient density. And, as we saw with covid-19 last year, food supply chains are fragile. Relying on other countries to grow your food is no longer always reliable.

Controlled environment agriculture, like greenhouses and vertical farming, offers a hyper-local alternative to importing food by making agriculture accessible in harsh environments. With the use of new technologies, companies can capitalize on the sprawling desert and sunshine. The UAE's three deserts offer a massive amount of real estate for building warehouses for vertical farms and an almost unlimited solar power supply. Although water is scarce, vertical farming uses over 90% less water than traditional farming.

Photo: an indoor vertical farm growing greens

Both the government and the private sector are funding an agricultural revolution

In 2018, the UAE government announced plans to be the top country in food security (measured by the Global Security Index) globally by 2051 and in the top ten by 2021--as of last year; it ranked 42. Like Singapore’s “30 by 30” plan, the government has since aggressively funded food startups and partnered with larger companies, including those from other agtech centers of excellence like the Netherlands and Korea.

In 2020, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office invested $100 million in agtech firms, including local vertical farm Madar Farms, US-based vertical farm AeroFarms, an irrigation company RDI, and a local fertilizer company called RNZ. The Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MOCCAE) teamed up with Shalimar Biotech Industries to build twelve vertical farms. The MOCCAE and partnered with the Majid Al Futtaim group to build vertical farms in their malls. And it’s not all controlled environment agriculture. The Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA) approved five investment projects, worth $142 million, to establish fish, vegetable, fruit, cattle, and poultry farms on a total land and sea area of approximately 43 million square feet.

Just this month, His Royal Highness Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Ali Al Nuaimi, aka the “Green Sheikh,” flew to the US to visit Gotham Greens and the Green Bronx Machine--a Bronx-based organization that brings urban agriculture into school. In the past, he partnered with Stephen Ritz, founder of the Green Bronx Machine, to bring agricultural education and plant science initiatives to Dubai. Longtime friends with shared values on education and wellness, the two will partner on building farms in the UAE and developing culturally specific educational materials for children.

The 'Green Sheikh' collaborates with the founder of the Green Bronx Machine to educate kids in Dubai about farming in the desert.

In the private sector, Dubai is home to many different agtech companies. Badia farms produces lettuce, herbs, and microgreens for chefs, caterers, and restaurants. Madar farms is experimenting with other agtech solutions like container farms and indoor “kitchen gardens” for chefs. Crop one is planning to build the largest vertical farm in the world and partner with Emirates airlines. Green Factory Emirates partnered with veteran indoor growing experts from the Netherlands, GrowGroup IFS, to develop the world’s largest indoor farm (including vertical farming and traditional farming techniques) that will yield 10,000 tons of food annually. & Ever is not building a farm in Dubai yet, but their headquarters is based there. In Abu Dhabi, Pure Harvest opened a ‘smart’ hydroponic tomato farm that utilizes bees in its greenhouses. Another excellent use of indoor growing, Al Aliyo Hydrofarms is a hydroponic farm growing organic fodder for livestock.

Aquaculture is also present. Fish Farm boasts the largest fish farm in the UAE, with three fish hatcheries providing a local, sustainable source of shrimp, hammour, sea bass, and sea bream.

The future is bright and green

Given its large swaths of desert and government commitment to food security, it is no surprise that agtech is becoming a booming sector in the United Arab Emirates. Vertical farming and other local food initiatives have the potential to bring fresher, more nutrient-rich food to the region, provide jobs, educate the youth and continue to show the world that the UAE is always on the cutting edge of new technologies.

Opening Large Vertical Farming Facilities in Europe

August 9, 2021

Infarm has signed a contract for a new Growing Centre in Bedford which will measure 9,760 sqm in size, offering more than 5500 sqm of growing space in Infarm’s cloud-connected farming units.

Jeremy Byfleet, UK Country Director at Infarm, said: “Infarm has a clear goal to expand in the UK market. Our second UK Growing Centre located in the “golden triangle” allows us to significantly increase the amount of fresh produce grown year-round in the UK. 

When fully equipped, the units - each occupying 25 sqm of ground space and 10 metres in height - are able to produce up to 18 million plants per year and generate the crop equivalent of 360,000 sqm of farmland. The Growing Centre is currently in construction and on track for a first harvest in Q4 of 2021.

Each Infarm Growing Centre can save up to ten million liters of water per year, reducing water consumption by 95% versus traditional agricultural methods. Pentadel, appointed by Infarm to select a site as well as design and manage the construction of the new Growing Centre, has also integrated rainwater harvesting into the design of Infarm's new facility. Implementing rainwater harvesting is expected to capture a further 2.5 million litres of water per year, which will be used for conditioning plants.

Infarm will continue to operate its existing Growing Centre in Edmonton, North London and is currently hiring. “We have already opened up new positions for our locations in London and Bedford and will continue to do so as we expand our Bedford operation,” said Byfleet. To establish this large vertical farming facility, Infarm has partnered with Pentadel Project Management.

The location of the facility enables us to serve 90% of the UK population within four hours, bringing the freshest plants just on time to our clients. Consequently, food mileage is substantially reduced. One of the largest indoor vertical farming facilities in Europe to date is going to deliver millions of plants and provide fresh and locally grown produce to even more consumers via our retail partners, restaurants and online food retailers.”

James Kemp, Managing Director of Pentadel, said: “We are thrilled to be supporting Infarm with the delivery of this innovative facility that we believe represents the future of sustainable, scalable and resilient farming. We are passionate about delivering projects just like this – projects that place the future of people and the planet at their heart – and I know the whole team is proud to play a part in Infarm's revolutionary story.” Pentadel has identified a suitable UK site, negotiated terms and is now designing and managing the construction of the facility.

In the UK, Infarm’s herbs and leafy greens are currently found at Whole Foods Market, Selfridges, Marks & Spencer, Fortnum & Mason and Budgens as well at online retailers Weezy and Farmdrop. The new Growing Centre will join Infarm’s expanding global network of vertical farms that all connect to a central farming brain that gathers data constantly to improve plant yield, taste, and nutritional value, while further reducing the use of natural resources. By the end of 2025, Infarm plans to expand to 100 locations worldwide.

For more information:
Infarm
press@infarm.com
www.infarm.com 

Singapore: Mega-Farm, Research Center To Open By December 2021

&ever

“We’re really happy to have launched in Munich and consumers really like our harvest-on-demand concept,” says Franz Drack, Chief Marketing Officer at &ever. "We just need to see how to increase the accessibility of our solutions. I’d love to see 200 vertical farms in Europe with this technology in the next five years."

Although it all started in Hamburg, &ever is currently headquartered in Munich which is also where the grow tower showroom is located. In 2020, &ever opened its first commercial farm in Kuwait, spanning 3,400 m2 and with a daily output capacity of 550 kg. The farm provides its leafy greens to Kuwaiti restaurants and retailers. The company also recently launched a grow tower in an EDEKA Stadler+Honner “Die Frisch-Nachbarn” supermarket in Unterfôhring near Munich. 

Mega-farm and research center 
&ever is currently building a mega-farm in Singapore with support from the Singapore Food Agency, SFA, and the Economic Development Board, EDB, and will be launched by the end of 2021. The mega-farm will be 15m high and have an annual production capacity of up to 500,000 kg of leafy greens.

In addition to the mega-farm, &ever will be establishing Singapore as its global R&D center to accelerate knowledge development and transfer to the mega-farm. The R&D center will focus on improving energy use efficiency through optimized lighting strategies and improving crop quality by evaluating different seed and substrate combinations. Moreover, &ever will be working to develop non-invasive crop monitoring processes through vision systems.

“We’re getting tremendous support from our local partners EDB, SFA and A*Star; everyone is keen to get this farm online. This farm is what we are most excited about this year,” Franz notes. To better address consumer demand, &ever conducted market research in Singapore by speaking with potential consumers and foodservice providers. This research has allowed &ever to explore the balance between western and eastern leafy green species to be grown in the mega-farm.

“Our team under the lead of our country manager, Kerstin Köhler, have worked with food service providers who are very good at telling us what products are needed and wanted. Some products are very interesting for certain segments of the value chain, so we try to talk to a lot of different people,” says Franz.

&ever is continuing to focus on leafy greens, microgreens and herbs for the time being. While there is a lot of interest in fruits (like strawberries), Franz explains that the company is focused on keeping its product range simple to perfect the growing process. 

&ever's growing tower 

Rebranding efforts 
In recent months, the vertical farming industry has seen major players taking a new approach to product branding by using brightly colored packaging. &ever is also focused on bright, enticing packaging designed to represent the company’s values and production process.

“We will start using colors that represent what we’re actually doing. Yellow for the light, blue for the water and green for our greens. It allows the brand to stand out and visually signals to consumers that things are changing. This shows that we are a new type of agricultural company. Stay tuned for that in the second half of 2021.” explains Franz.

Franz also notes that &ever’s products are also sold living, whereas many indoor farms sell cut greens, packaged in clamshells or other packaging materials. Moreover, &ever is also looking into direct-to-consumer sales of leafy greens. 

In building its mega-farm, putting its products on European shelves and rebranding, &ever is eager to continue growing by getting consumers excited and developing more farm projects across the world.

&ever is a German agtech company offering three growing solutions, each addressing a different level of production. The &ever grow box is a small-scale system that allows growers to produce 15-30 kg of leafy greens per day in a small footprint. The company’s medium-sized solution is the &ever grow tower which is a small room containing a circular cultivation module.

Young plants are first transplanted in the inner circle and are gradually pushed further to the outer circles as new plants are introduced to the system. In pushing the plants further, the older plants receive more available space to continue growing without crowding neighboring plants. The grow towers provide a customizable output of 20-50 kg of leafy greens per day. Finally, &ever also develops large-scaled production system which it calls mega-farms.

For more information:
Franz Drack, CMO
&ever 
local@andever.de 
www.and-ever.com 

Publication date: Tue 8 Jun 2021
Author: Rebekka Boekhout
© VerticalFarmDaily.com

New Vertical Farm In Oshawa Will Harvest Fresh Greens Year-Round

By Jillian Follert

May 22, 2021

A new vertical farm is open in Oshawa with plans to harvest local greens year-round.

Mighty Harvest Produce, located at 871 Wilson Rd. S., is growing leafy greens and herbs hydroponically, which means without the use of soil.

Founder Derrik Stevenson started the business as a way to follow his passions after being laid off from an office job as a result of the pandemic.

“I decided, I’m not going to look for a job. I’m going to create my own job,” says Stevenson, who is vegan and has an interest in sustainability and fresh food.

Right now you can find greens like kale and salad blends growing at Mighty Harvest as well as herbs such as parsley, marjoram, and anise basil. 

Stevenson says growing greens indoors has benefits for the environment as well as the people who eat them.

“The ultra freshness is what sets us apart from the grocery store,” he says, explaining how greens sold in Ontario often make a long journey from California or Arizona. “I can harvest on a Wednesday night and be selling the product on Thursday.”

Vertical farming uses 90 per cent less water than conventional agriculture and Mighty Harvest does not use pesticides or herbicides.

Stevenson says customers may be surprised to learn Mighty Harvest Greens are not certified organic — it’s because Canadian regulations don’t allow certification for produce that’s not grown in soil.

Mighty Harvest is open Thursday and Friday from 1 to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and can be found at the Whitby's Farmers Market on Wednesdays.

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

INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP: How To Make Your Network Part of Your Net “Worth”

Join Us Monday To Hear From

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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.

Indoor Farming Gains Ground Amid Pandemic, Climate Challenges

Investors say urban farming can boost food security despite rising inflation, trade tensions and global food shortages.

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

Investors used to brush off Amin Jadavji’s pitch to buy Elevate Farms’ vertical growing technology and produce stacks of leafy greens indoors with artificial light.

“They would say, ‘This is great, but it sounds like a science experiment,'” said Jadavji, CEO of Toronto, Canada-based Elevate.

Now, indoor farms are positioning themselves as one of the solutions to coronavirus pandemic-induced disruptions to the harvesting, shipping, and sale of food.

“It’s helped us change the narrative,” said Jadavji, whose company runs a vertical farm in Ontario, and is building others in New York and New Zealand.

Proponents, including the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), say urban farming increases food security at a time of rising inflation and limited global supplies. North American produce output is concentrated in Mexico and the US southwest, including California, which is prone to wildfires and other severe weather.

Climate-change concerns are also accelerating investments, including by agribusiness giant Bayer AG, into multi-storey vertical farms or greenhouses the size of 50 football fields.

They are enabling small North American companies like Elevate to bolster indoor production and compete with established players BrightFarms, AeroFarms and Plenty, backed by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos.

But critics question the environmental cost of indoor farms’ high power requirements.

Vertical farms grow leafy greens indoors in stacked layers or on walls of foliage inside of warehouses or shipping containers. They rely on artificial light, temperature control and growing systems with minimal soil that involve water or mist, instead of the vast tracts of land in traditional agriculture.

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

Greenhouses can harness the sun’s rays and have lower power requirements. Well-established in Asia and Europe, greenhouses are expanding in North America, using greater automation.

Investments in global indoor farms totalled a record-high $500m in 2020, AgFunder research head Louisa Burwood-Taylor said.

The average investment last year rose sharply, as large players including BrightFarms and Plenty raised fresh capital, she said.

A big funding acceleration lies ahead, after pandemic food disruptions – such as infections among migrant workers that harvest North American produce – raised concerns about supply disruptions, said Joe Crotty, director of corporate finance at accounting firm KPMG, which advises vertical farms and provides investment banking services.

“The real ramp-up is the next three to five years,” Crotty said.

Vegetables grown in vertical farms or greenhouses are still just a fraction of overall production. US sales of food crops grown under cover, including tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, amounted to 358 million kilogrammes (790 million pounds) in 2019, up 50 percent from 2014, according to the USDA.

California’s outdoor head lettuce production alone was nearly four times larger, at 1.3 billion kg (2.9 billion pounds).

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

The USDA is seeking members for a new urban agriculture advisory committee to encourage indoor and other emerging farm practices.

Plant Breeding Moves Indoors

Bayer, one of the world’s biggest seed developers, aims to provide the plant technology to expand vertical agriculture. In August, it teamed with Singapore sovereign fund Temasek to create Unfold, a California-based company, with $30m in seed money.

Unfold says it is the first company focused on designing seeds for indoor lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, spinach and cucumbers, using Bayer germplasm, a plant’s genetic material, said Chief Executive John Purcell.

Their advances may include, for example, more compact plants and an increased breeding focus on quality, Purcell said.

Unfold hopes to make its first sales by early 2022, targeting existing farms, and startups in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

Greenhouses are also expanding, touting higher yields than open-field farming.

AppHarvest, which grows tomatoes in a 60-acre greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, broke ground on two more in the state last year. The company aims to operate 12 facilities by 2025.

Its greenhouses are positioned to reach 70 percent of the US population within a day’s drive, giving them a transportation edge over the southwest produce industry, said Chief Executive Jonathan Webb.

“We’re looking to rip the produce industry out of California and Mexico and bring it over here,” Webb said.

Projected global population growth will require a large increase in food production, a tough proposition outdoors given frequent disasters and severe weather, he said.

Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest

New York-based BrightFarms, which runs four greenhouses, positions them near major US cities, said Chief Executive Steve Platt. The company, whose customers include grocers Kroger and Walmart, plans to open its two largest farms this year, in North Carolina and Massachusetts.

Platt expects that within a decade, half of all leafy greens in the US will come from indoor farms, up from less than 10 percent currently.

“It’s a whole wave moving in this direction because the system we have today isn’t set up to feed people across the country,” he said.

‘Crazy, Crazy Things’

But Stan Cox, research scholar for non-profit The Land Institute, is sceptical of vertical farms. They depend on grocery store premiums to offset higher electricity costs for lighting and temperature control, he said.

“The whole reason we have agriculture is to harvest sunlight that’s hitting the earth every day,” he said. “We can get it for free.”

Bruce Bugbee, a professor of environmental plant physiology at Utah State University, has studied space farming for NASA. But he finds power-intensive vertical farming on Earth far-fetched.

“Venture capital goes into all kinds of crazy, crazy things and this is another thing on the list.”

Bugbee estimates that vertical farms use 10 times the energy to produce food as outdoor farms, even factoring in the fuel to truck conventional produce across the country from California.

AeroFarms, operator of one of the world’s largest vertical farms, based in a former New Jersey steel mill, says comparing energy use with outdoor agriculture is not straightforward. Produce that ships long distances has a higher spoilage rate and many outdoor produce farms use irrigated water and pesticides, said Chief Executive Officer David Rosenberg.

Vertical farmers tout other environmental benefits.

Elevate uses a closed-loop system to water plants automatically, collect moisture that plants emit and then re-water them with it. Such a system requires two percent of the water used on an outdoor romaine lettuce operation, Jadavji said. The company uses no pesticides.

“I think we’re solving a problem,” he said.

Agritech: Precision Farming With AI, IoT and 5G

Image from: Photo by Mohd Izwan Mohd Nazam/The Edge

For a company that grows and delivers vegetables, Boomgrow Productions Sdn Bhd’s office is nothing like a farm, or even a vertical farm.

Where farms are bedecked with wheelbarrows, spades and hoes, Boomgrow’s floor plan is akin to a co-working space with a communal island table, several cubicles, comfortable armchairs, a cosy hanging rattan chair and a glass-walled conference room in the middle.

At a corner, propped up along a walkway leading to a rectangular chamber fitted with grow lights, are rows of support stilts with hydroponic planters developed in-house and an agricultural technologist perched on a chair, perusing data. “This is where some of the R&D work happens,” says Jay Dasen, co-founder of the agritech start-up.

But there is a larger farm where most of the work behind this high-tech initiative is executed. Located a stone’s throw from the city centre in Ampang is a 40ft repurposed shipping container outfitted with perception technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that mimic the ideal environment to produce more than 50,000kg of vegetables a year.

Stacked in vertical layers, Boomgrow’s vegetables are grown under artificial lights with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to detect everything from leaf discolouration to nitrate composition. This is coupled with AI and machine learning algorithms.

Boomgrow is the country’s first 5G-connected vertical farm. With the low latency and larger bandwidth technology, the start-up is able to monitor production in real time as well as maintain key para­meters, such as temperature and humidity, to ensure optimal growth conditions.

When Jay and her co-founders, K Muralidesan and Shan Palani, embarked on this initiative six years ago, Boomgrow was nowhere near what it is today.

The three founders got together hoping to do their part in building a more sustainable future. “I’ve spent years advising small and large companies on sustainability, environmental and social governance disclosures. I even embarked on a doctorate in sustainability disclosure and governance,” says Jay.

“But I felt a deep sense of disconnect because while I saw companies evolving in terms of policies, processes and procedures towards sustainability, the people in those organisations were not transforming. Sustainability is almost like this white noise in the background. We know it’s important and we know it needs to be done, but we don’t really know how to integrate it into our lives.

“That disconnect really troubled me. When we started Boomgrow, it wasn’t a linear journey. Boomgrow is something that came out of meaningful conversations and many years of research.”

Shan, on the other hand, was an architect who developed a taste for sustainable designs when he was designing modular structures with minimal impact on their surroundings between regular projects. “It was great doing that kind of work. But I was getting very dissatisfied because the projects were customer-driven, which meant I would end up having debates about trivial stuff such as the colour of wall tiles,” he says.

As for Murali, the impetus to start Boomgrow came from having lived overseas — while working in capital markets and financial services — where quality and nutritious produce was easily available.

Ultimately, they concluded that the best way to work towards their shared sustainability goals was to address the imminent problem of food shortage.

“By 2050, the world’s population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion people, two-thirds of whom will be in Asia-Pacific. Feeding all those people will definitely be a huge challenge,” says Jay. 

“The current agricultural practice is not built for resilience, but efficiency. So, when you think of farming, you think of vast tracts of land located far away from where you live or shop.

“The only way we could reimagine or rethink that was to make sure the food is located closer to consumers, with a hyperlocal strategy that is traceable and transparent, and also free of pesticides.”

Having little experience in growing anything, it took them a while to figure out the best mechanism to achieve their goal. “After we started working on prototypes, we realised that the tropics are not designed for certain types of farming,” says Jay. 

“And then, there is the problem of harmful chemicals and pesticides everywhere, which has become a necessity for farmers to protect their crops because of the unpredictable climate. We went through many iterations … when we started, we used to farm in little boxes, but that didn’t quite work out.”

They explored different methodologies, from hydroponics to aquaponics, and even started growing outdoors. But they lost a lot of crops when a heat wave struck.

That was when they started exploring more effective ways to farm. “How can we protect the farm from terrible torrential rains, plant 365 days a year and keep prices affordable? It took us five years to answer these questions,” says Jay.

Even though farmers all over the world currently produce more than enough food to feed everyone, 820 million people — roughly 11% of the global population — did not have enough to eat in 2018, according to the World Health Organization. Concurrently, food safety and quality concerns are rising, with more consumers opting for organically produced food as well as safe foods, out of fear of harmful synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, consumer demand for global organic fruit and vegetables was valued at US$19.16 billion in 2019 and is anticipated to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5% by 2026.

Meanwhile, the precision farming market was estimated to be US$7 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach US$12.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 12.7% between 2020 and 2025, states MarketsandMarkets Research Pte Ltd.

Malaysia currently imports RM1 billion worth of leafy vegetables from countries such as Australia, China and Japan. Sourcing good and safe food from local suppliers not only benefits the country from a food security standpoint but also improves Malaysia’s competitive advantage, says Jay.

Unlike organic farming — which is still a soil-based method — tech-enabled precision farming has the advantage of catering for increasing demand and optimum crop production with the limited resources available. Moreover, changing weather patterns due to global warming encourage the adoption of advanced farming technologies to enhance farm productivity and crop yield.

Boomgrow’s model does not require the acres of land that traditional farms need, Jay emphasises. With indoor farms, the company promises a year-round harvest, undisturbed by climate and which uses 95% less water, land and fuel to operate.

Traditional farming is back-breaking labour. But with precision technology, farmers can spend less time on the farm and more on doing other things to develop their business, she says.

Boomgrow has secured more than RM300,000 in funding via technology and innovation grants from SME Corporation Malaysia, PlaTCOM Ventures and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, and is on track to build the country’s largest indoor farms.

Image from: Boomgrow

The company got its chance to showcase the strength of its smart technology when Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) approached it to be a part of the telco’s Smart Agriculture cluster in Langkawi last October.

“5G makes it faster for us to process the multiple data streams that we need because we collect data for machine learning, and then AI helps us to make decisions faster,” Jay explains.

“We manage the farm using machines to study inputs like water and electricity and even measure humidity. All the farm’s produce is lab-tested and we can keep our promise that there are no pesticides, herbicides or any preserving chemicals. We follow the food safety standards set by the EU, where nitrate accumulation in plant tissues is a big issue.”

With TM’s 5G technology and Boomgrow’s patent-pending technology, the latter is able to grow vegetables like the staple Asian greens and highland crops such as butterhead and romaine lettuce as well as kale and mint. While the company is able to grow more than 30 varieties of leafy greens, it has decided to stick to a selection of crops that is most in demand to reduce waste, says Jay.

As it stands, shipping containers are the best fit for the company’s current endeavour as containerised modular farms are the simplest means of bringing better food to local communities. However, it is also developing a blueprint to house farms in buildings, she says.

Since the showcase, Boomgrow has started to supply its crops to various hotels in Langkawi. It rolled out its e-commerce platform last year after the Movement Control Order was imposed. 

“On our website, we promise to deliver the greens within six hours of harvest. But actually, you could get them way earlier. We harvest the morning after the orders come in and the vegetables are delivered on the same day,” says Jay.

Being mindful of Boomgrow’s carbon footprint, orders are organised and scheduled according to consumers’ localities, she points out. “We don’t want our delivery partners zipping everywhere, so we stagger the orders based on where consumers live. 

“For example, all deliveries to Petaling Jaya happen on Thursdays, but the vegetables are harvested that morning. They are not harvested a week before, three days before or the night before. This is what it means to be hyperlocal. We want to deliver produce at its freshest and most nutritious state.”

Plans to expand regionally are also underway, once Boomgrow’s fundraising exercise is complete, says Jay. “Most probably, this will only happen when the Covid-19 pandemic ends.”

To gain the knowledge they have today, the team had to “unlearn” everything they knew and take up new skills to figure what would work best for their business, says Jay. “All this wouldn’t have been possible if we had not experimented with smart cameras to monitor the condition of our produce,” she laughs.

Where Vertical Farming and Affordable Housing Can Grow Together

Some vertical farms grow greens in old warehouses, former steel mills, or other sites set apart from the heart of cities. But a new series of projects will build multistory greenhouses directly inside affordable housing developments.

“Bringing the farm back to the city center can have a lot of benefits,” says Nona Yehia, CEO of Vertical Harvest, a company that will soon break ground on a new building in Westbrook, ME, that combines a vertical farm with affordable housing. Similar developments will follow in Chicago and in Philadelphia, where a farm-plus-housing will be built in the Tioga District, an opportunity zone.

Inside each building, the ground level will offer community access, while the greenhouse fills the second, third, and fourth floors, covering 70,000 square feet and growing around a million pounds of produce a year. (The amount of housing varies by site; in Maine, there will be only 15 units of housing, though the project will create 50 new jobs.)

In Chicago, there may be a community kitchen on the first level. In each location, residents will be able to buy fresh produce on-site; Vertical Harvest also plans to let others in the neighborhood buy greens directly from the farm. While it will sell to supermarkets, restaurants, hospitals, and other large customers, it also plans to subsidize 10% to 15% of its harvest for local food pantries and other community organizations.

“By creating a large-scale farm in a food desert, we are creating a large source of healthy, locally grown food 365 days a year,” Yehia says.

Vertical Farming ‘At a Crossroads’

Building the right business model to balance resource usage with socio-economic conditions is crucial to capturing new markets, say speakers ahead of Agri-TechE event

Image from: Fruitnet

Although growing crops all year round with Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) has been proposed as a method to localize food production and increase resilience against extreme climate events, the efficiency and limitations of this strategy need to be evaluated for each location. 

That is the conclusion of research by Luuk Graamans of Wageningen University & Research, a speaker at the upcoming Agri-TechE event on CEA, which takes place on 25 February.

His research shows that integration with urban energy infrastructure can make vertical farms more viable. Graamans’ research around the modelling of vertical farms shows that these systems are able to achieve higher resource use efficiencies, compared to more traditional food production, except when it comes to electricity. 

Vertical farms, therefore, need to offer additional benefits to offset this increased energy use, Graamans said. One example his team has investigated is whether vertical farms could also provide heat.

“We investigated if vertical farms could provide not just food for people living in densely populated areas and also heat their homes using waste heat. We found that CEA can contribute to stabilizing the increasingly complex energy grid.”

Diversification

This balance between complex factors both within the growing environment and wider socio-economic conditions means that the rapidly growing CEA industry is beginning to diversify with different business models emerging.

Jack Farmer is CSO at vertical producer LettUs Grow, which recently launched its Drop & Grow growing units, offering a complete farming solution in a shipping container. 

He believes everyone in the vertical farming space is going to hit a crossroads. “Vertical farming, with its focus on higher value and higher density crops, is effectively a subset of the broader horticultural sector,” he said. 

"All the players in the vertical farming space are facing a choice – to scale vertically and try to capture as much value in that specific space, or to diversify and take their technology expertise broader.”

LettUs Grow is focussed on being the leading technology provider in containerised farming, and its smaller ‘Drop & Grow: 24’ container is mainly focussed on people entering the horticultural space.

Opportunities in retail

“This year is looking really exciting,” he said. “Supermarkets are investing to ensure a sustainable source of food production in the UK, which is what CEA provides. We’re also seeing a growth in ‘experiential’ food and retail and that’s also where we see our Drop & Grow container farm fitting in.”

Kate Hofman, CEO, GrowUp agrees. The company launched the UK’s first commercial-scale vertical farm in 2014.

“It will be really interesting to see how the foodservice world recovers after lockdown – the rough numbers are that supermarket trade was up at least 11 per cent in the last year – so retail still looks like a really good direction to go in. 

“If we want to have an impact on the food system in the UK and change it for the better, we’re committed to partnering with those big retailers to help them deliver on their sustainability and values-driven goals.

“Our focus is very much as a salad grower that grows a fantastic product that everyone will want to buy. And we’re focussed on bringing down the cost of sustainable food, which means doing it at a big enough scale to gain the economies of production that are needed to be able to sell at everyday prices.”

Making the Numbers Add Up

The economics are an important part of the discussion. Recent investment in the sector has come from the Middle East, and other locations, where abundant solar power and scarce resources are driving interest in CEA. Graamans’ research has revealed a number of scenarios where CEA has a strong business case.

For the UK, CEA should be seen as a continuum from glasshouses to vertical farming, he believes. “Greenhouses can incorporate the technologies from vertical farms to increase climate control and to enhance their performance under specific climates."

It is this aspect that is grabbing the attention of conventional fresh produce growers in open field and covered crop production.  

A Blended Approach

James Green, director of agriculture at G’s, thinks combining different growing methods is the way forward. “There’s a balance in all of these systems between energy costs for lighting, energy costs for cooling, costs of nutrient supply, and then transportation and the supply and demand. At the end of the day, sunshine is pretty cheap and it comes up every day.

“I think a blended approach, where you’re getting as much benefit as you can from nature but you’re supplementing it and controlling the growth conditions, is what we are aiming for, rather than the fully artificially lit ‘vertical farming’.”

Graamans, Farmer and Hofman will join a discussion with conventional vegetable producers, vertical farmers and technology providers at the Agri-TechE event ‘Controlled Environment Agriculture is growing up’ on 25 February 2021.

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

Yasai To Establish First Zürich Vertical Farm, Strategic Partnership Announced

Image from: Urban Ag News

iFarm with Yasai AG (Switzerland) and Logiqs B.V. (Netherlands) are proud to announce the beginning of a long-term cooperation.  

With the launch of the first vertical farm project in Zurich, Yasai AG announced the signing of a strategic agreement with equipment and tech suppliers. The company involved Logiqs and iFarm as technology partners in the construction of a pilot facility, with 673 sq. m of growing area and with a design capacity of 20 tons of fresh herbs per year.  

The Dutch company Logiqs will act as a supplier of automated shelving systems and grow lights. iFarm will supply the nutrient solution management system, climate control equipment, and the Growtune software platform which enables flow chart implementation and control over production conditions and processes. Going forward, the partners plan to scale up the experience of rapidly constructing an automated, compact, high-performance vertical farm, gained in a Swiss project, across the globe.

Image from: Urban Ag News

Mark Essam Zahran (co-founder Yasai):

The project will not just be limited to the testing and fine-tuning of state-of-the-art innovative solutions.  We expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale industrial vertical farming in smart cities and showcase the incredible benefits of a circular economy. A plantation in the largest Swiss city, one of the most expensive cities in the world, will help us assess the economic prospects and give other European cities an example of how to produce an abundant yield without harming the planet, plants, and people.

Gert-Jan van Staalduinen (owner Logiqs):

The Swiss project opens up interesting prospects for us. We expect a fruitful collaboration with Yasai experts and a beneficial exchange of best practices with iFarm. With our vast experience in implementing automation and logistics systems on farms, we will be able to build a technologically advanced farm in the very heart of Europe. 

Kirill Zelenski (CEO iFarm Europe):

We appreciate how meticulous and scrupulous Yasai is and are impressed by their passion and drive. We are just as inspired by the prospect of working with seasoned professionals from Logiqs. We hope that our software technologies will perfectly complement their hardware and the project as a whole will become a lasting benchmark for the industry and will serve as the beginning of a long-term cooperation.  

Bringing The Future To life In Abu Dhabi

Amid the deserts of Abu Dhabi, a new wave of entrepreneurs and innovators are sowing the seeds of a more sustainable future.

Image from: Wired

A cluster of shipping containers in a city centre is about the last place you’d expect to find salad growing. Yet for the past year, vertical farming startup Madar Farms has been using this site in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, to grow leafy green vegetables using 95 per cent less water than traditional agriculture. 

Madar Farms is one of a number of agtech startups benefitting from a package of incentives from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) aimed at spurring the development of innovative solutions for sustainable desert farming. The partnership is part of ADIO’s $545 million Innovation Programme dedicated to supporting companies in high-growth areas.

“Abu Dhabi is pressing ahead with our mission to ‘turn the desert green’,” explained H.E. Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, in November 2020. “We have created an environment where innovative ideas can flourish and the companies we partnered with earlier this year are already propelling the growth of Abu Dhabi’s 24,000 farms.”

The pandemic has made food supply a critical concern across the entire world, combined with the effects of population growth and climate change, which are stretching the capacity of less efficient traditional farming methods. Abu Dhabi’s pioneering efforts to drive agricultural innovation have been gathering pace and look set to produce cutting-edge solutions addressing food security challenges.

Beyond work supporting the application of novel agricultural technologies, Abu Dhabi is also investing in foundational research and development to tackle this growing problem. 

In December, the emirate’s recently created Advanced Technology Research Council [ATRC], responsible for defining Abu Dhabi’s R&D strategy and establishing the emirate and the wider UAE as a desired home for advanced technology talent, announced a four-year competition with a $15 million prize for food security research. Launched through ATRC’s project management arm, ASPIRE, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, the award will support the development of environmentally-friendly protein alternatives with the aim to "feed the next billion".

Image from: Madar Farms

Global Challenges, Local Solutions

Food security is far from the only global challenge on the emirate’s R&D menu. In November 2020, the ATRC announced the launch of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), created to support applied research on the key priorities of quantum research, autonomous robotics, cryptography, advanced materials, digital security, directed energy and secure systems.

“The technologies under development at TII are not randomly selected,” explains the centre’s secretary general Faisal Al Bannai. “This research will complement fields that are of national importance. Quantum technologies and cryptography are crucial for protecting critical infrastructure, for example, while directed energy research has use-cases in healthcare. But beyond this, the technologies and research of TII will have global impact.”

Future research directions will be developed by the ATRC’s ASPIRE pillar, in collaboration with stakeholders from across a diverse range of industry sectors.

“ASPIRE defines the problem, sets milestones, and monitors the progress of the projects,” Al Bannai says. “It will also make impactful decisions related to the selection of research partners and the allocation of funding, to ensure that their R&D priorities align with Abu Dhabi and the UAE's broader development goals.”

Image from: Agritecture

Nurturing Next-Generation Talent

To address these challenges, ATRC’s first initiative is a talent development programme, NexTech, which has begun the recruitment of 125 local researchers, who will work across 31 projects in collaboration with 23 world-leading research centres.

Alongside universities and research institutes from across the US, the UK, Europe and South America, these partners include Abu Dhabi’s own Khalifa University, and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first graduate-level institute focused on artificial intelligence. 

“Our aim is to up skill the researchers by allowing them to work across various disciplines in collaboration with world-renowned experts,” Al Bannai says. 

Beyond academic collaborators, TII is also working with a number of industry partners, such as hyperloop technology company, Virgin Hyperloop. Such industry collaborations, Al Bannai points out, are essential to ensuring that TII research directly tackles relevant problems and has a smooth path to commercial impact in order to fuel job creation across the UAE.

“By engaging with top global talent, universities and research institutions and industry players, TII connects an intellectual community,” he says. “This reinforces Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s status as a global hub for innovation and contributes to the broader development of the knowledge-based economy.”

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."

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.

Fifth Season Takes Vertical Farming to a Whole New Level

Image from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette

Fifth Season’s verdant baby spinach screams farm fresh even though it’s grown nowhere near traditional farmland. The sweet and slightly crunchy greens are grown in a Braddock warehouse on racks stacked 30 feet high. Located just a stone’s throw from U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works Edgar Thomson Plant, it is urban farming at its core.

What makes the vertical farming operation especially unique is that it is automated and robots call the shots. About 40 to 60 machines are involved in every step of the life of the spinach and other leafy greens, from planting the seed to providing nutrients to the final packing.

Fifth Season does employ local “farm workers” to assist the robots in seeding, harvesting, packaging, quality assurance and control using computer software, but there is no human touch involved through it all.

“The first time someone ever touches the spinach leaf with a finger is when the package is opened,” says Grant Vandenbussche, chief category officer.

Co-founded by brothers Austin and Brac Webb and Austin Lawrence, Fifth Season started a year ago. Within months it was rolling out its baby spinach, leafy greens and salad kits.

“We wanted a name that represents what we are doing,” says Austin Webb, 32, who also is the CEO. “It is a call to the fact we have created an entirely new season. It is 24/7, 365 with the technology we have built.”

None of them planned to become modern farmers, says the Carnegie Mellon University grad, but they turned to vertical farming because it was an efficient, economically sustainable way to solve land and water woes.

Image from: thespoon.tech

‘Fields’ of Greens

Fifth Season grows an equivalent production of 200 acres in 25,000 square feet of grow space. Its “fields” are stacked on top of one another in vertical shelves. When you add up all that surface area of grow space, it is more like 126,000 square feet.

“We also quickly turn crops at the farm,” Mr. Vandenbussche says.

While spinach takes about 40 days to grow outdoors and can be harvested only twice during its peak season, it takes the crop only three or four weeks to grow in the controlled environment and is harvested 19 times. Once the plants are harvested, a new cycle of reseeding begins with fresh media, seeds and nutrients.

“That’s why we get so much more productivity,” he says. “We are immediately reseeding our ‘land.’”

This controlled environment yields quality produce because it is always peak season at Fifth Season, says Chris Cerveny, who heads the Grow R&D division. Greens are grown in the same conditions year-round, getting the exact amount of nutrients and water they need. Because pests and airborne toxins also are kept at bay, crops can be produced without pesticides.

All that TLC comes through in the slightly curled baby spinach, which is sweet and not grassy. The leaf doesn’t wilt or get slimy or lose its slight crunch even after two weeks of refrigeration.

A lot of thought was given even for the curl, which gives the spinach a stronger volume, making it look full and bountiful. The curl also makes the spinach more forkable unlike its flat-leaf counterpart that is hard to stab on a plate.

Other leafy greens such as kale, mustard, Chinese cabbage, green tatsoi and purple pac choi are featured in two blends — Bridge City and Three Rivers. Fifth Season plans to roll out its Romaine lettuce in spring.

The greens also are found in four types of salad kits — Sweet Grains (blended greens, quinoa, chickpeas, corn, feta and poppy seed dressing), Crunchy Sesame (blended greens, farro, sesame sticks, dried cranberries and ginger-mandarin dressing), Toasted Tuscan (spinach, lentils, sun-dried tomatoes, bagel chips and vinaigrette), and Spiced Southwest (blended greens, black beans, pepitas, cotija cheese, corn-salsa sticks and chipotle ranch dressing) — which are available online and in Giant Eagle stores. A fifth salad kit is in the works and is being called “a shakeup of one of the most classic salads.”

While machines are a big part of what Fifth Season does, it seeks to keep human connection alive. It recently launched a recipe blog for those who have an appetite for cooking and writing, The Green Room is devoted to cataloging personal memories, dream meals and recipes via short stories.

Fifth Season also has partnered with the Penguins and is providing greens for the team’s pregame meals for the 2020-21 season.

“We want people in Pittsburgh to be able to eat the exact same delicious blend of greens that Sidney Crosby and company are eating,” Mr. Webb says. “We want people to know that there’s a new way to grow food and to eat and experience it.”

Image from: Next Pittsburgh

It’s All Under Control

Everything from seeding to packaging is done in four rooms. The process starts in the seeding and processing room, where seeds and growing media are placed inside black planter-like boxes called inserts. Each has a unique code that’s traced by a software system. The inserts go on white trays that pass through a photo station, feeding information to the computer system, and then glide into the bio dome.

There are two rooms in the bio dome, each with a grow space of 12,500 square feet. They’re lit up with a pinkish-purplish glow from high-efficiency LED light bulbs that mimic the different seasons of the year.

“They are positioned over the plants at different heights depending on stage of growth,” Mr. Cerveny says. “This is partly how we can provide consistently ideal growing conditions.”

As the plants grow, they are moved by a robot to optimize their growth cycle. Full-grown crops are transferred to the harvesting room by another robot.

“Harvesting is where it becomes like a Willy Wonka factory,” Mr. Vandenbussche says.

Long rows of trays filled with tiny plants are sent on a conveyor system to a station where workers inspect them for quality with surgical tools. After inspection, the plants are harvested by a robot and then immediately ride up a tall conveyor to be packaged and sealed in a 34- to 36-degree room so they remain fresh.

“Every crop we grow gets evaluated for maximum flavor, volume, crunch and color,” he says.

The plants’ intense, dark color is controlled by LED light bulbs, which are dialed up or down to get the correct hue. Although they never see the sun, the greens don’t get into a funk as humans might.

“What humans see in terms of light and how chlorophyll responds during photosynthesis are two different things,” Mr. Cerveny says. “Plants really only need red and blue light to grow effectively. We include some additional colors to help bring out other quality aspects of our crops, but providing the full sunlight spectrum is effectively a waste of energy, especially indoors.

“To the human eye, it looks like the plants live in a land of purple and pink lights, but they are perfectly happy there.”

Even though the environment is controlled and the software system is constantly updated, no two plants are exactly the same. Some fight for light more than others. Some might fail the quality control test and end up in a compost waste facility if their flavor is off or their color is not right.

“That is what is so amazing. We have more control than any other farmer, and yet we have limitations. Every seed is different,” Mr. Vandenbussche says. “They are plants. They are real living organisms.”