21 Reasons To Start Container Farming In 2020
January 3, 2020
The beginning of a new year is a great time to pick up new hobbies, interests and maybe even start a new career!
If you’ve been thinking about getting into container farming, there has never been a better time.
In this article, you’re going to learn 21 reasons why you should start container farming in 2020.
Let’s get started!
1. Be your own boss! One of the main benefits of container farming is that you make the rules. You decide what you grow, and how you grow it. Starting a container farm can be a side hustle to make a little more money or it can become a new career! It’s really all up to you.
2. Create your perfect lifestyle. Are you struggling with finding the right work/life balance? Starting a new career in container farming could be the perfect solution. You’ve probably heard the saying “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” With container farming, you can turn your passion into a real, sustainable business.
3. Stop sitting all day. It’s been said that “sitting is the new smoking.” Starting a container farm business will get you out from behind a desk. With container farming, you will be working in your container every day! Planting, harvesting, and monitoring your crops. Starting a container business is a great way to move away from a sedentary lifestyle towards a more active one!
4. Support your local community. Starting a container farm business is really starting a local food business. As a container farmer, you will be selling mostly to your local community at farmer’s markets, local restaurants, and even local grocery stores that want to add fresh local produce to their selections. Through this process, you will get to know your local community as you provide them with fresh, delicious nutritious food!
5. Help people eat healthier! Locally grown food is fresher, more nutritious, and safer! When you sell local produce, you grow in your container farm, you are improving the health of your community. Especially if you live in what’s known as a food desert. A food desert is an urban area where it can be difficult to buy affordable or good quality food. Food deserts happen for a variety of reasons from harsh climates that make it difficult to grow produce to communities not having good quality roads to allow in food trucks. With a container farm business, you can set up shop in a food desert and be the only supplier of quality affordable produce.
6. Save water. Container farms use less water than traditional farming techniques. Traditional farming is responsible for 80% of the entire US’s water usage! What you might not know is that growing a normal head of lettuce using traditional farming, uses a whopping 3.5 gallons of water! Now contrast that with a head of lettuce grown on a container farm which only uses about 1/10th of a gallon of water total! Every head of lettuce grown with a container farm saves more than 3 gallons of water! And as we all know water is a consumable resource, not a renewable one, so every gallon of water saved helps the planet in a big way!
7. Give people safer food. Remember when Chipotle had that E-coli outbreak in 2016? How about in November of 2019, when an E-coli outbreak got so bad that it lead to the recalling of Romaine lettuce in California? Just because the food comes from a supermarket or a fast-food chain doesn’t make it safe. In fact, a quick google search for “produce recalls” will show you exactly how unsafe some of the food you are being sold truly is. When you start container farming, you can be sure that you are providing safe food that won’t make people sick.
8. Save money on taxes. Starting a business is tax-deductible. That means that you can write off or depreciate a portion of all the money you spend on your container farm business.
9. Fill a missing niche in the market. Most produce is grown and sold seasonally, which is why cherries, for example, are only available for a very short time period. But when you use a container farm, you don’t have to worry about seasons or weather. That means that you can harvest crops that would normally be out of season, filling a niche in the existing food marketplace in your city.
10. Join the local food movement. According to Wikipedia “Local food movements aim to connect food producers and consumers in the same geographic region, to develop more self-reliant and resilient food networks; improve local economies; or to affect the health, environment, community, or society of a particular place. The term has also been extended to include not only the geographic location of supplier and consumer but can also be “defined in terms of social and supply chain characteristics.” For example, local food initiatives often promote sustainable and organic farming practices, although these are not explicitly related to the geographic proximity of producer and consumer.” By starting a container farm, you join with the local food movement in your city.
11. Provide jobs to your local community. When you start a container farm business, you’re going to need some help. Which means you will be providing jobs to your community. But more than that you will be creating a sustainable, beneficial job that helps bring safe, nutritious, healthy food to your community. That’s what we call paying it forward.
12. There are therapeutic benefits to farming! Gardening has long been renowned for its relaxing qualities but there are tangible therapeutic benefits to farming as well. “A ten percent increase in nearby green space was found to decrease a person’s health complaints in an amount equivalent to a five-year reduction in that person’s age” according to the Gardening Matters nonprofit of Minneapolis’ page, “Multiple Benefits of Community Gardens.” Farming also reduces stress! An experiment published in the Journal of Health Psychology compared the relaxation benefits of reading and gardening and found that farming subjects experienced more relaxation than those that read.
13. Grow food across generations. With a container farm, you can spread your love for farming to your parents, kids, and even grandkids. A container farm business is perfect for anyone of any age who wants to learn more about growing food. Some container farm owners we know even set up camps to teach kids how to farm and earn a nice profit in the process! Plus, you can pass down your container farm to your kids just like any other business.
14. Container Farms can be set up and ready to go in a few hours. With most business opportunities you must wait a long time to get started. For example, if you were to buy a McDonald’s franchise, you would need to wait for the permits, construction, hiring, and delivery of equipment like fryers and soda machines. But with a container farm, you can have everything set up and ready to deploy in just a few hours. No muss, no fuss.
15. Manage your crops from your smartphone. With regular farming you need to get out there and see what’s going on with things like pests, watering and monitoring ph. levels. With a container farm, you can monitor everything from your smartphone with the growlink app.
16. Grow more food in less space. Another reason to start container farming in 2020 is that you can grow a lot of food in a little space. With an 8 X 40 container farm you can harvest up to 400lbs of herbs or leafy greens per month!
17. Save on water and energy. Container farming is WAY more energy efficient than traditional farming! A report by Urban Agnews showed a Swedish based company Spisa Smaker saved 48% more electricity than when compared with traditional farming! Additionally, using a closed-loop irrigation system like those found in most container farms saves around 50% more water than traditional farming as well. Container farming helps you save money and consume fewer resources while producing high-quality food.
18. Reduce your footprint by planting without soil. One of the main reasons traditional farming uses so much space, energy and water is because it requires soil. Every crop planted using traditional farming monopolizes the land that they are planted on at least for the growing season if not forever. Soil can also affect where and when you can and cannot plant crops. For instance, areas with limited soil, icy or snow-covered soil or even soil that has become contaminated can be difficult for crops to grow in. But with a container farm, you don’t have to worry about the soil at all! With a hydroponic system like the ones, we use here at Pure Greens AZ plants absorb nutrients directly from a water-based nutrient delivery system.
19. Grow pesticide and herbicide-free crops! With traditional farming, you’ll need to use pesticides or herbicides to protect your crops from a variety of pests. Most farmers do this with pesticides or herbicides. Now some of these pesticides are natural and not that harmful, while others like Roundup have been linked to cancer. With container farming, you can use all-natural pesticides like Neem leaves, salt sprays, and Eucalyptus oil. Growing crops without harsh pesticides and herbicides is a great way to produce safer food for your community.
20. You can grow a wide variety of crops. With container farming, you are not limited to the crops that grow naturally in a location or crops that are seasonal. Container farming allows you to grow a wide variety of crops based on what you want to grow, not other factors like soil conditions or weather patterns.
21. Experience fast and consistent growth. Container farms can grow crops incredibly quickly as you can see in this video of the Pure Greens team harvesting 14 lbs. of Kale in an hr.! But it’s not just speed, container farming also allows you to grow crops consistently in areas where otherwise you would not be able to like areas with heavy winters or food deserts!
There you have it 20 great reasons why you should start container farming in 2020!
And if you need some help or want to learn more about the state-of-the-art turnkey container farms, we build here at Pure Greens head over to our website or give us a call at 602–753–3469.