By AMY SOWDER

May 18, 2021

New York City-based vertical grower Bowery Farming has opened Farm X, an innovation hub for plant science in Kearny, N.J., next to Bowery’s original R&D Center of Excellence and first commercial farm.

Farm X will accelerate the commercialization of products specifically designed for Bowery’s indoor system, according to a news release. The hub will expand the company’s research and development capacity by almost 300%, including cultivation of strawberries, root vegetables, tomatoes, and peppers.

“From day one, our R&D team has been working tirelessly to unlock the next frontier in agriculture, and Farm X enables us to expedite the discovery of new vibrant crops and pioneering technological advancements that will further accelerate our momentum as the category leader,” founder and CEO Irving Fain said in the release.

At Farm X, Bowery’s plant breeders, plant physiologists, biochemists, and others will be able to test more, faster—ultimately accelerating the discovery of new crops, growing recipes, and efficiency improvements that can be replicated at scale across the company’s network of commercial farms.

Farm X also features a sensory lab where Bowery will seek ideal cultivars for indoor growing, as well as launch an onsite breeding program. In that program, Bowery’s team will develop varieties that thrive in its unique growing conditions and evaluate each one for optimal taste, quality and yield. Bowery’s controlled indoor environment and around-the-clock crop monitoring should increase the speed and efficiency of these goals.

Researchers are also developing new greens, such as the Farmer’s Selection category, which launched in January. Bowery plans to release a new, small-batch green every four months under this new category. The first, Bowery Mustard Frills — “hearty mustard greens with a tingly start and a fiery, wasabi-style finish,” according to the release — was available through April 2021. Green Sorrel, bright, tart baby greens with a zing and the next release in the series, is now available from May through August.

Farm X also serves as an experimental space for innovation in farm design, data science, computer vision, autonomous robotics, hardware, and software that can be deployed in Bowery’s growing network of commercial farms.

To further that mission, Bowery hired Injong Rhee, formerly vice president at Google and chief technology officer of Samsung Mobile, as its chief technology officer. Rhee will work on ensuring that every farm continues to benefit from the collective intelligence of the BoweryOS, the company’s proprietary operating system which integrates software, hardware, sensors, computer vision systems, machine learning models and robotics to orchestrate and automate the entirety of operations. The technological learnings discovered at Farm X will be integrated and applied at scale across Bowery’s network.

Bowery has experienced more than 750% brick-and-mortar sales growth, and more than quadrupled sales with e-commerce partners, including Amazon, since early 2020, according to the release. Bowery’s newest commercial farm in Bethlehem, Pa., will bring local produce year-round to a surrounding population of 50 million people within a 200-mile radius.