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Upward Farms Announces Rebrand From Seed & Roe and Plans to Open a New Headquarter Farm in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The coronavirus pandemic is significantly increasing consumer demand for organic, sustainable food, indicating heightened awareness for healthy, nutritious eating. Fresh produce sales have remained elevated during the pandemic period, with produce sales showing sustained double-digit, year-over-year growth March through June 2020
Upward Farms announced growth plans including a rebrand from Seed & Roe and construction of a new headquarter farm in Brooklyn that will significantly increase production. These announcements come following the company closing more than $15 million in new funding, including investment led by Prime Movers Lab.
The coronavirus pandemic is significantly increasing consumer demand for organic, sustainable food, indicating heightened awareness for healthy, nutritious eating. Fresh produce sales have remained elevated during the pandemic period, with produce sales showing sustained double-digit, year-over-year growth March through June 2020. As consumers continue to gravitate toward fresh, organic produce and purchase more groceries online, Upward Farms offers consistent product availability and quality, scalability, and a shortened supply chain for East Coasters to receive locally grown greens. Upward Farms' breakthrough approach to indoor aquaponics, using fish to fertilize crops in a complete ecosystem, results in increased yields, more control in disease prevention, and unprecedented food safety. This approach reconnects eaters with flavorful and nutritious local food, rather than relying on long haul distribution systems and imported food.
A look inside the new Upward Farms headquarters, an indoor aquaponic ecosystem growing leafy greens and fish.
“By cultivating complete ecosystems with a strong microbiome and leveraging the precision and control of indoor agriculture, Upward Farms not only grows thriving plants and animals but offers the potential for a sustainable food supply that is both scalable and safe,” said Jason Green, Upward Farms Co-founder, and CEO. “With the support of this capital investment, we will continue to expand the marriage of nature and nurture to produce affordable greens in abundance and make them accessible. Everyone should be able to easily and affordably nourish their body, family, and the planet.”
“As a leading investor in breakthrough scientific companies, we are honored to join Upward Farms' journey to transform billions of lives through next-level nutrition, safety, and deliciousness,” said Suzanne Fletcher, General Partner at Prime Movers Lab and now a member of the Board of Directors at Upward Farms.
Previously known as Edenworks and then Seed & Roe, the company has raised more than $20 million in total funding to date to provide a sustainable source of greens and fish for consumers. The new Upward Farms name and brand is an expression of the company’s mission to heal the broken food system. It also aligns with the company’s plans for expansion, including the opening of additional farms and broadening of its product portfolio for both retail and foodservice. The look for the redesigned logo, new product packaging and digital presence represent Upward Farms’ fresh, clean greens and forward-thinking approach.
In late 2020, Upward Farms plans to unveil a brand new company headquarters in Brooklyn that will demonstrate and advance the company’s next-generation technology through both commercial production and research and development facilities. The new operation is expected to increase production of Upward Farms greens by 20 times over its original facility, also located in Brooklyn. The expansion will enable the brand to supply its washed and ready-to-eat salads to grocery stores across New York City.
Upward Farms’ growing practices eliminate harmful bacteria like E. coli and other pathogens without the use of pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers to produce the safest leafy greens on the market. Grown from Non-GMO seeds, Upward Farms leafy greens are pesticide-free, washed, and ready to eat. “Recent events have highlighted what we at Upward Farms already know -- biology has a lifeforce all its own that must be respected. That’s why we are stewards of nature, learning from and building technology to enhance biology,” shared Green.
For more information:
Upward Farms
info@upwardfarms.com
www.upwardfarms.com
Publication date: Fri 10 Jul 2020
A Guide To Vertical Farming Techniques
If you don’t already, chances are you’ll be eating more produce from indoor farms in the near future. Learn what that means
If you don’t already, chances are you’ll be eating more produce from indoor farms in the near future. Learn what that means.
Our ancestors first learned to farm nearly 12,000 years ago. By cultivating and domesticating seeds, these once hunter-gatherers broke away from their nomadic lifestyles, settled down to produce controlled and reliable food sources (weather permitting, of course) and, little did they know, change the course of the planet’s future.
Fast forward to the 20th century when a group of architects started planning to alter food production in their own way. They aimed to decreased dependency on traditional land-based farms and harness spatial efficiency in our dense built environment; think less wide-open spaces with tractors and more structures growing stacked layers of crops. This practice—widely referred to as “indoor” or “vertical farming” (taken from Gilbert Ellis Bailey’s 1915 book of the same name)—is alive and booming today, and especially in the New York metro area.
Columbia University professor emeritus and ecologist Dickson Despommier helped to envision the modern vertical farm and indoor agriculture while teaching a graduate-level course in 1999. His students realized that simply using rooftop gardens would been grossly insufficient to feeding the population of Manhattan so inline with urban agriculture predecessors, he began researching different techniques and structures. Despommier is among several academics and vertical farming thought leaders who see vertical farming today as part of the answer to a range of global problems (many partly caused by agriculture) including climate change and water scarcity.
There are a lot of ways to farm indoors and below are three different soilless processes recommended by Despommier. Done properly at various scales, they’re as effective as at growing crops in skyscrapers as they are in 500 square foot studio apartments:
HYDROPONICS
One of the oldest and most common methods of vertical farming, hydroponics includes growing plants without soil and in a water solvent containing mineral nutrients. The simplest hydroponic method (called the floating raft system) suspends the plants in soilless raft like a polystyrene sheet and lets the roots hang to absorb the oxygen-aerated solution. Another common method is the nutrient film technique, which is popular for growing lettuce. Here, a stream of the nutrient-dissolved solution is pumped into an angled channel, typically a plastic pipe, containing the plants. This runs past the plants’ root mat and can then be recirculated for continuous use. New York’s Gotham Greens and Square Roots use hydroponics.
AEROPONICS
It’s no surprise that NASA has been backing research on aeroponic growth for the past two decades as it’s free-floating-roots aesthetic is typically used in futuristic sci-fi movies. With aeroponics, the dangling roots absorb a fine mist comprised of an atomized version of the nutrient solution sprayed directly onto the roots by a pump. Although aeroponics enables plants to grow much more quickly than hydroponics, it requires more solution and therefore is more costly. Newark’s Aerofarms uses aeroponics.
AQUAPONICS
Like hydroponic systems, an aquaponic system contains a soil-free plant bed suspended over a body of water containing nutrients necessary for plant growth. But within the body of water is a population of fish (typically herbivores) that produce waste that function as fertilizer for the plants. In turn, the plants help purify the water to make the water suitable for the fish.
Given that a balance must be achieved to ensure the system of both life forms, aquaponics requires greater attention than hydroponics or aeroponics although filtration and aeration systems can help manage these complications. Furthermore, the types of plants one can grow are much more limited as the necessary plant nutrients must be compatible with those necessary for the fish. Brooklyn’s Edenworks and Oko Farms use aquaponics.
By Matthew Sedacca | Edible Manhattan | May 3, 2017
Lead Illustration by Chamisa Kellogg
