Indoor Farms of America Bridges the Gap with Traditional U.S. Agriculture in Landmark Farm Sales
Indoor Farms of America Bridges the Gap with Traditional U.S. Agriculture in Landmark Farm Sales
NEWS PROVIDED BY | Indoor Farms of America
Indoor Farms of America corporate Farm Manager Anthony Randolph grows beautiful greens in the vertical aeroponics from IFOA.
LAS VEGAS, July 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- In what is a watershed transaction and a continuance of plans to integrate world-class indoor agriculture equipment into traditional farming, Indoor Farms of America announces that it has sold the first two "warehouse" style farms to Co-Alliance, LLP one of the largest, oldest and most respected major locally owned Farmer Cooperatives in the United States.
Unlike all other commercial scale Indoor Farm equipment, Indoor Farms of America patented equipment does not require ladders or skylifts to operate, and grows 40 plant sites per square foot in just 8 feet of ceiling height.
"With the sale of these farms, which will be up and running in the great state of Indiana in about 90 days from today, our company has achieved the first stage of the plans to have large scale indoor farming adopted by the very folks who have kept us fed in this country since its inception, and that is the traditional farmer," stated David Martin, CEO of Indoor Farms of America.
"Co-Alliance has been investigating several companies and the equipment available for the indoor agriculture space for some time," states Darren Radde, Business Development Manager at Co-Alliance. "Our team understands quality equipment, and after reviewing numerous growing platforms, we believe the equipment developed and manufactured by Indoor Farms of America will provide our Farmer Members with a viable means of supplementing their income, allowing them to farm new crops all year long, and be within 30 minutes to 2 hours delivery time to any major market they can serve from their existing farm."
John Graham, CFO of Co-Alliance, said: "When we visited with the team at Indoor Farms of America, they expressed to us that while their indoor growing equipment was designed to be superior in performance to anything else in the world, which makes them very 'disruptive' in that space, Ron and Dave have a real desire to see existing traditional farmers embrace the technology."
Graham went on to say, "This means our farmers can take advantage of all our existing channels to market, our inherent ability to be close to those markets, which means our farmers can deliver fresh produce every day of the year from their farms. When the fields are covered in snow, they can produce income for their families. We like that."
The first of the two farms will be owned and operated by a long-time family farming operation, who have an existing building as part of their farming operation in central Indiana, that will be converted to state-of-the-art indoor growing facility at pretty minimal expense.
Phil Brewer, VP of Marketing at Co-Alliance, sees new opportunities for member farmers to have a major impact on the "locally grown" food movement, never seen before. "By bringing scale production of a variety of crops such as premium herbs, for example, to within a very short distance of the actual consumption of those products, we are able to deliver on two fronts. First, the consumer wins by having truly fresh, locally grown and high quality products available to them from local farmers they know and trust. Second, our farmers win, as they are now able to operate during the cold winter season when the fields are out of operation. This creates meaningful additional income for themselves."
After seeing a solid first year in sales of its game-changing vertical aeroponic farm equipment, Indoor Farms of America is on a path to more than quadruple first year sales in 2017, which is year two.
"The largest food-related companies in the world are working with us at this point. They have compared every aspect of every available indoor platform and come back to us. We designed, patented with multiple patents, and now build a fundamentally and economically sound indoor farming product that scales to as large as may be required, anywhere in the world. Nothing grows in quantities that are even close to our equipment, in terms of robust, healthy, clean and nutritious produce," states Martin.
According to company President Ron Evans, "We have seen traditional farmers who purchased our equipment last year respond with praise for our equipment and how it performs. This year we are seeing them buy larger farms. When you get compliments from a farmer that operates 5,000 acres for a living, yet understands the real need and place for this in his own operation, the light bulb goes on for him and those around him."