Loan Approved For SB Indoor Farming Project

Loan Approved For SB Indoor Farming Project

By Mark Peterson | 

Posted: Thu 5:25 PM, Feb 23, 2017  | 

Updated: Thu 6:37 PM, Feb 23, 2017

This could be the year indoor farming comes to inner city South Bend.

Planning for a vertical farm began back in 2015.

Earlier this week, an $800,000 loan was conditionally approved for the project (from the City of South Bend’s Industrial Revolving Loan Fund) while a recent Crowdfunding campaign raised $640,000. That puts the for-profit company called Green Sense that much closer to breaking ground on a facility that would be located on the Ivy Tech Campus.

“They're going to have a partnerships with Ivy Tech where they can bring students who have an interest in agriculture into the building into their process train them have them be able to have an educational opportunity there to learn how this all works,” said Acting Director of South Bend’s Community Investment Department, Brian Pawlowski. “There's some private side financing that needs to happen that'll be on the order of an additional two or so million dollars for the entirety of the project to go up but once that's all in place I would anticipate maybe sometime around this summer or so, they could potentially start construction at that point.”

At the vertical farm, leafy greens would be grown indoors, 365 days a year, hydroponically, using artificial light. “You know rain, wind, snow, shine whatever it may be, they can get the job done and they can really cater their produce to what the market demand is,” said Pawlowski.

Green Sense is a for-profit company that would pay for the project—Ivy Tech would essentially be getting a lab for free.

The first vertical farm Green Sense built was in Portage, Indiana…the last was in China.