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USA: VIRGINIA - Hull Street Indoor Urban Farm Launches Sales In September
In 2016, Ferguson started his tech-driven farming business Nouveau Farms in the quiet of his basement. An engineer by day, Ferguson says he began researching how to grow his own food after he realized that imported, out-of-season produce was not what he wanted to feed his family
Trevor Ferguson is now accepting orders from his Hull Street indoor hydroponic farm, Nouveau Farms. Scott Elmquist
While most farmers fight daily against the peccadilloes of ever-abrasive Mother Nature, Trevor Ferguson battles only market demands and water flow inside his hydroponic urban farm.
In 2016, Ferguson started his tech-driven farming business Nouveau Farms in the quiet of his basement. An engineer by day, Ferguson says he began researching how to grow his own food after he realized that imported, out-of-season produce was not what he wanted to feed his family.
Once the left-brained Ferguson started learning about hydroponics, he was hooked. For those unfamiliar with the ’ponic world, this type of horticulture forgoes soil and instead uses mineral nutrient solutions, light, oxygen and filtered, freshwater to grow plants as much as 50% faster than those grown in the great outdoors.
“When you start eating those greens and those herbs, you can taste the difference,” Ferguson says. “It sort of changed my whole perspective.”
Ferguson started with an eight-tower wall garden, growing microgreens, salad greens, and herbs like mint, chive, and basil. “I’m originally from the Bahamas and we had fruit trees in the backyard,” Ferguson says. “I would go and get mangoes right off the tree, so that’s where that connection comes from.”
While still working his 9 to 5 as a natural gas infrastructure development manager, Ferguson carved out time for hydroponic training courses, moving his small underground operation into his garage. He started the commercial rollout of Nouveau Farms in January. As of Tuesday, Sept. 1, you can order your microgreens and mint directly from Ferguson’s 800-square-foot Hull Street indoor farm.
“I surely hope this turns into a full-time thing,” Ferguson says. “I am building this for the long run, making long-term investments. People who go into farming know it isn’t to get rich quick, I won’t become a millionaire.”
Ferguson says when the business launched at the beginning of 2020, the goal was to provide major suppliers with bulk orders. “That sort of bottomed out for us.” Like the rest of the world operating during the pandemic, he readjusted his business model. And, a bit serendipitously, Ferguson says he likes this initial direct-to-consumer approach better.
“People have been so disconnected from their food for such a long time,” he says. “The pandemic has made people realize how important it is to have food security.” Ferguson wishes he were “further ahead” in his rollout plan, simply so he could meet the needs of the people in his community. “One of the things I’m hyper-focused on is that whatever we grow and supply, we need to be cost-competitive.”
So while his salad greens will damn sure be more flavorful than the imported grocery store stuff that’s grown primarily for hardiness, Ferguson isn’t going to charge people an exorbitant price. “If you’re buying a bag of red romaine from me, it will be the same price as any place else,” he assures.
The Hull Street farm is currently catering to individual consumers and pledges that all produce is harvested within 24 hours of delivery. Customers can place orders online (nouveaufarms.com) Sundays-Fridays, with free deliveries to those within 15 miles on Saturdays.
In addition to the Hull Street business, Ferguson also has his sights set on a truly halcyon, pastoral dream: a sprawling farmhouse located on 7 acres in Varina, situated amongst a vineyard, strawberry patches, and a space allotted to weekend farmers markets.
Only seven minutes from Richmond’s city center, Nouveau Farms & Vineyard consists of three abutting lots, with the farmhouse to the far left, the middle lot devoted to grape-growing, and the far lot serving as an active farm open to the public. A huge undertaking, yes, but Ferguson is ready for the challenge.
“The Varina farm is going to be strawberry heaven,” Ferguson laughs. He says that one impetus to grow his own food was to create the best berries for his daughter. “We would go to the grocery store and she loves strawberries and we would buy them on a weekly basis, but it was really hit or miss.”
The Nouveau Farms berries will all be hits, with Ferguson using “a bit of hydroponics” plus traditional farming methods to grow his fruits de terre. “We won’t be in the soil – we will use a hybrid version of soil with a mix of peat moss, plus good drainage. And we’ll be feeding nutrients straight to the berries.”
Ferguson says he will be experimenting with a couple of different berry varieties and will solicit help from the public to choose which berry is best — he’s hoping the farm will be able to institute weekend pick-your-own days for families, too.
By 2022, Ferguson plans to have weekend farmers’ markets in addition to events and weddings – the backdrop is a bridal dream. “We’ll have smoothies made of our fresh fruit, people can enjoy a glass of wine and play cornhole,” Ferguson muses.
He can see it now: a weekend reset on the farm before heading back into the city for the daily grind. Now all he needs are some mango trees.
Follow Nouveau Farms on Instagram for updates about produce, purchasing, and when the farm will be ready for strawberry picking.
As The Pandemic Continues, Urban Gardening Is Growing on New Yorkers
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, concerns over the food supply chain began increasing nationwide as popular food items flew off the shelves and grocery store lines grew to alarming lengths
JULY 27, 2020
BY MILI GODIO
Samuel’s Food Gardens (Photo courtesy of Samuel S. T. Pressman)
Samuel S. T. Pressman had wanted to build a food garden on the rooftop of his Clinton Hill apartment for years. The artist and sculptor had lived on a farm when he was younger and had studied Sustainable Environmental Systems at Pratt. But in a city with a “time is money” mentality, he never found the right moment to start his passion project.
That changed when New York underwent a statewide Pause order in mid-March. Now, Samuel’s Food Gardens is tackling the city’s food insecurity problem by providing fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs to community gardens that advocate for food security. “I wanted to explore what most people’s living situation is here,” Pressman said, “where they don’t have any land and have hardly any outdoor space that they own, and how they can still be able to grow some food using a system that is designed to actually make it possible to grow more food than you think per square foot.”
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, concerns over the food supply chain began increasing nationwide as popular food items flew off the shelves and grocery store lines grew to alarming lengths. This panic, along with a sudden abundance of time and collective distress over going to crowded supermarkets, contributed to a surge in backyard gardens and private farming initiatives. Even as the apocalyptic anxiety began to settle down, the gardening craze didn’t seem to stop. With at least 10 million more people unemployed in the United States compared to pre-COVID figures, feeding families continues to be at the top of everyone’s priority list.
Samuel’s Food Gardens (Photo courtesy of Samuel S. T. Pressman)
Despite its tiny living spaces and skyscrapers galore, NYC is no exception to the gardening trend. Residents like Pressman have begun to utilize spaces on rooftops, patios, and even the edges of classic Brooklyn-style buildings to create more green space in the area.
Having previously worked with Friends of Brook Park Community Garden in the Bronx and having designed and led construction for Newkirk Community Garden in central Brooklyn, Pressman has always found ways to support underserved communities and advocate for inclusive community food growing. He began Samuel’s Food Gardens not to sell the food that he grows, but to continue his work with community gardens and help individuals with private gardening areas maximize their spaces and get the most out of their crops in the long term.
New Yorkers are engaging with food in new ways. That has led to a spike in produce sales at the three green roofs operated by Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, and an increased demand for their services designing, installing and maintaining private green spaces. “I think that there’s, to some degree, a process of reconnecting with simple pleasures and when it comes to the kitchen, that means really high-quality, fresh ingredients that are good for you,” said Anastasia Cole Plakias, the urban farm’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “I think that there’s this realization that supply chains have a role to play in our recovery here.”
Brooklyn Grange (Photo courtesy of Anastasia Cole Plakias)
In its ten years of operation, Brooklyn Grange has sold over 400,000 pounds of produce through weekly farmers markets located in Sunset Park, Greenpoint, and Long Island City, a CSA program where people obtain the farm’s harvest through a seasonal subscription plan, and a seed-to-plate initiative that provides food to local restaurants and retailers.
Cole Plakias says Brooklyn Grange was set to sell roughly 100,000 pounds of produce this year, but once restaurants began closing across the city and in-person events came to a halt, the farm’s business model had to quickly shift away from restaurant crops and towards feeding and nourishing the community.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest from people in having us convert their outdoor spaces to food-producing spaces, or more habitable green spaces,” said Cole Plakias. “We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest in garden maintenance services because people are recognizing the value of urban green space.”
The company has managed to secure multiple partnerships that not only keep their farms in business, but also keep restaurants open and ensure food accessibility. Tasmanian footwear company Blundstone funded a full season of produce donations and kept farmers and staff employed. To deliver emergency food relief, Brooklyn Grange partnered with Rethink (their Brooklyn Navy Yard neighbors) and Food Issues Group, both organizations dedicated to providing equitable food systems in NYC and keeping restaurant workers employed, especially during a global pandemic.
With more New Yorkers cooking at home, the demand for fresh produce at farmers markets and through CSA programs has steadily increased during the pandemic, Cole Plakias says. Add to which, there has been a dramatic boost in demand for the farm’s virtual farming and composting workshops.
There have been a variety of online learning opportunities for prospective gardeners in the city. GrowNYC, which has been teaching city folks how to maintain urban gardens for years, offers virtual classes, and the New York Botanical Garden began hosting virtual workshops after it closed in March (the garden is set to reopen on July 28).
Union Street Farm (Photo courtesy of Garrison Harward)
The Union Street Farm, near the corner of Union Street and Rochester Avenue in Crown Heights, also offers free, in-person gardening classes and open volunteering, giving local residents hands-on experience with growing and maintaining a full-functioning garden. “We’ll do some tasks that need to be done in the garden and through that work, we talk about gardening,” said Garrison Harward, who began his work at the Union Street Farm in 2016. “It’s open for whatever anybody wants to learn.”
Harward’s love for gardening was influenced by his own family’s garden in his California hometown. In 2010, as a sustainable agriculture volunteer for the Peace Corps in Senegal, he began investigating regenerative agriculture and different methods of agricultural systems for economic gain and food security. The freelance lighting technician has maintained the Union Street Farm for the past five years, after it was given to him by two fellow neighbors who were too elderly to maintain it.
Harward favors no-till gardening, meaning he doesn’t turn over the soil or disrupt the structure built by bacteria and fungi. Aside from being healthier for plants, it leads to really great water infiltration, according to Harward. “Every drop of water that falls on the plant bed stays exactly where it is – I have zero runoff that goes into New York watersheds, which is environmentally friendly. Not putting nitrates into the watershed, all those ways in which agriculture contributes to algae blooms and fish die-offs.”
Union Street Farm (Photo courtesy of Garrison Harward)
Harward believes there has been a marked increase in gardening since the pandemic, which leads to more people reaching out to him for advice and resources. Initially providing seedlings to neighbors that were interested in growing their own food, he soon began giving them away to people all over the country. So far, he’s sent out eight varieties of seeds to roughly 120 people who reached out to him on Instagram. He even launched a Facebook group titled “NYC Gardening Resources,” where he virtually assists new and experienced gardeners alike.
The Union Street Farm’s harvest is free for anyone that visits or casually stumbles upon its gates. Although Harward holds free farmers markets every Sunday for people to take home the fruits, vegetables, and herbs that he grows, he welcomes people to take as much as they need, whenever they need it.
“I think there’s a lot of realization that we don’t have to tie everything to a financial transaction,” Harward explained. “There’s so many different ways that we can support each other. Like, we’re exchanging goods, we’re exchanging culture, we’re exchanging connections within our neighborhood and if it doesn’t have to be monetized, then why should it?”
This ethos is not uncommon in New York City green spaces, where avid gardeners like Harward and Pressman hope to make their hard work and agricultural talents accessible to all. Pressman and his Circular Communities team are currently developing projects such as the Micro Food Hub, which promotes social equity in the agricultural sphere and facilitates the production and exchange of food by connecting community gardens, food producers, restaurants, and consumers via a digital platform, and he hopes to host school tours at his food garden where he can spark a passion for food growing within students and young people. Pressman also intends to ship out DIY planting kits in the future and provide teaching tools that instruct the basics of utilizing small spaces – including greenhouses during the winter – to maximize food growth efficiently and cost-effectively.
“There’s this special relationship you have to have with the plants to be able to help them and train them,” said Pressman. “It kind of opens up a whole new door for how humans actually emotionally feel around nature and I think people are seeking that out right now, they just might not know exactly how to get it into their home.”
The Indoor Farm Revolution
Coronavirus chaos has spurred a grow-your-own food movement — and space-age hydroponic technology is rising to meet it.
Coronavirus chaos has spurred a grow-your-own food movement — and space-age hydroponic technology is rising to meet it.
NOTE FOR 2020 READERS: This is the eleventh in a series of open letters to the next century, now just 80 years away. The series asks: What will the world look like at the other end of our kids' lives?
Dear 22nd Century,
For all the pain, grief and economic hardship the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has sown, a handful of green shoots seem to have taken root in its blighted soil.
Green being the operative word, because many of these developments could be a net positive for the planet. In lockdown, many of us are seeing what our cities look like without smog. Office workers are experiencing office life without the office; just last week, Twitter announced that most of its employees could work from home forever, while much of Manhattan is reportedly freaking out about what could happen to commercial real estate. Thousands of companies just discovered they can still function, and maybe even function better, when they don’t chain employees to desks or force them to make a soul-crushing, carbon-spewing commute 10 times a week.
And what do more people do when they’re spending more time at home? Well, if you’re like my wife, you start literally planting green shoots. Our house is filling up with them as I write this: lettuce, chard, tomatoes, basil, strawberries, to name the first five shoots poking out of dozens of mason jars now taking up residence on every windowsill. She’s hardly alone; garden centers and seed delivery services are reporting as much as 10 times more sales since the pandemic began. Even the mighty Wal-Mart has sold out of seeds. If viral Facebook posts and Instagram hashtags are any guide, pandemic hipsters have moved on from once-fashionable sourdough starters to growing fresh fruit and veg.
Another one of our cyclical “back to the land” movements seems to be underway, just like during the 1960s and the Great Depression before that. Only this time, we don’t need land. We don’t need soil. We don’t need pesticide of any kind. We don’t even need natural light. Thanks to giant leaps forward in the science of hydroponics and LED lighting, even people in windowless, gardenless apartments can participate in the revolution. With a number of high-tech consumer products on the way, the process can be automated for those of us without green thumbs.
In previous letters I’ve discussed the inevitable rise of alternative meat, a process that has been accelerated by the pandemic. I talked about the smaller, more nutritious plant-based meals we're going to need for life extension; I assumed such meals would be delivered by drone. But now I see a future with no food deserts, in which every home is filled with rotating space-station-like hydroponics run by artificial intelligence — a cornucopia of push-button farming providing the side salad to your plant-based meat.
Even if you don’t grow your own, robot-run vertical farms and community “agrihoods,” now springing up everywhere, will make amazing-tasting produce abundant and cheap. The “locavores” of our era like to boast about their 100-mile diet. Yours will look more like a 100-yard diet.
Green, not soylent
It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The 2020s, in fact, is when we were slated for starvation, food riots, and big business quietly processing our corpses into food.
That’s the plot of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, set in the year 2022. Fruit and veg have all but vanished. In one scene, Charlton Heston's detective hero smuggles home a single tomato and a wilted stick of celery, enough to reduce his roommate Sol (Edward G. Robinson) to tears. On the other end of the future, in a lighter but equally depressing vein, the 2006 comedy Idiocracy showed the Americans of 2500 running out of crops because they couldn’t figure out that water, not "Brawndo" (a spoof on colorful sports drinks), is “what plants crave.”
But these dismal future visions are receding thanks to the science of hydroponics — which dates back to the 19th century, no matter its present-day association with growing marijuana. By the 1930s, we’d figured out that what plants crave is surprisingly minimal: nitrogen, a handful of minerals, something to anchor the roots like rock wool or coconut husks, and H2O. Early hydroponic farms helped feed U.S. soldiers as they hopped through the Pacific during World War II.
Minimalist methods multiplied, and are still multiplying. We’re tweaking the spectrum of LED lights for maximum growth, and figuring out ways to use progressively less water and nutrients. My wife’s mason jar seedlings use something called the Kratky method, where you don't even need to change the water. It turns out this method was invented by a Hawaiian scientist as recently as 2009. And it’s the closest science has yet given us to a free lunch.
Reinventing the wheel
I’m nowhere near as excited by hydroponics as my wife is. But during our quarantine time, even my head has been turned — by the Rotofarm, which I’ve come to think of as the iPhone of gardening. It’s a beautiful device inspired by NASA research on growing plants in space. It uses anti-gravity — literally, when the wheel rotates around its LED light source and the plants are hanging upside down — to grow plants faster. A magnetic cover reduces the glare and increases the internal humidity. You manage it via an app.
Humankind’s oldest technology turns out to be the most efficient use of space for growing plants; even in this 15-inch-wide wheel, you can really pack them in. At the bottom of the wheel, plants dip their roots into the water and nutrient tanks. An owner’s only job is to refill the tanks every week or so, and to snip off their dinner with scissors a few weeks after germination. Some leafy greens, like my favorite salad base arugula, can be regrown without replanting.
Still, to be fully self-sufficient, a future apartment is going to need to have multiple Rotofarm-style devices on the go at once — but they’re designed to live anywhere you can plug in, on coffee tables, on desks, on walls, as eye-catching as artwork.
The main problem with the Rotofarm: It isn’t actually on sale yet. “It feels like we’ve done everything in reverse,” Rotofarm creator Toby Farmer said when I reached him via video chat from his home in Melbourne. “We’ve got the patents, we’ve got the design awards, we’ve got the customers. Now we need to finish the prototypes.” (One key tweak: reducing Rotofarm’s energy requirements, which as it stands could double many users’ household electricity bills.)
Still, orders have come from as far afield as Japan and the Netherlands, from retailers and regular users alike. Farmer’s biggest regret: When Ron Howard’s production company called, hoping to use eight Rotofarms in an upcoming Nickelodeon show set in space, Farmer didn’t have enough to spare.
Rotofarm has been in the works for a few years, but a crowdfunded Indiegogo campaign that closed last month exceeded its $15,000 goal by a third of a million dollars. Farmer, despite his name, had no experience in this area; just 23 years old, he had been a web designer since the age of 12. But he’s scaling up fast, hiring teams in LA and Singapore, soaking up their knowledge (he was keen to assure me he’d hired a lot of 40-somethings for this very reason).
After a projected 2021 release date, Rotofarm’s business model involves making money on proprietary seed pods — though Farmer admits that “there’s a DIY aspect” where customers can make their own. His hope is that official Rotofarm pods will be competitive because they’ll have fewer germination failures, but he'd rather see a world where more people own the device itself. In that spirit, he’s making it modular — the LED light bar can be upgraded separately, for example, rather than making customers buy a whole new device. (As for cost, Farmer says he can't comment yet — though Indiegogo backers were able to secure one for $900 a pop.)
Might the Rotofarm fail? Of course, just like any other crowdfunded project. Much depends on its price point, as yet unannounced. But it’s far from the only next-level, set-it-and-forget-it hydroponic station taking aim at your kitchen. There’s a Canadian Kickstarter called OGarden that also grows food on a wheel, albeit a much larger wheel. The OGarden was funded in its first six minutes online and is set to cost around $1,000 per unit. There’s Farmshelf, a $4,900 pre-order hydroponic device that looks like a see-through refrigerator, backed by celebrity chef Jose Andres. Users will pay a $35 monthly subscription to get all the seeds they need.
One of these models is the future; maybe all of them are. Right now, these are high-end devices aimed at early adopters (and restaurants, which get a lot of benefit out of showing off how fresh their produce is as customers walk-in). But with scale, with time, and with the growing desire for grow-your-own food that Rotofarm and its brethren have revealed, they will get cheaper and more widespread.
After all, the first Motorola cellphone, in 1983, cost $4,000. It looked like a brick and had 30 minutes of talk time. Now sleek, supercomputer-driven smartphones are accessible to pretty much everyone. The same process will happen in-home hydroponics.
Rise of the vertical farm
Give it 80 years, and I can see apartments with built-in hydroponic farms provided as a standard utility, much as a fridge is seen as a standard feature today. As more humans move to urban environments — two out of every three people will be in cities by 2050, according to the latest UN estimate — the need for such devices will only grow.
“We strongly believe the future of gardening is indoor gardening and more individual gardens,” OGarden CEO Pierre Nibart told us last year. “Stopping mass agriculture and starting to produce their own little stuff at home.” He said this while demonstrating his family's daily OGarden routine: His kids harvest most of what they need for dinner from the spinning wheel.
Mass agriculture hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory where produce is concerned. And in the post-coronavirus age, we are surely going to become less tolerant of the disease its intensive farming methods have caused.
Food poisoning caused by romaine lettuce, which makes up a quarter of all leafy greens sold in the U.S., has become depressingly familiar. The 2018 E Coli outbreak was the worst — it sickened 240 people in 37 states, hospitalized almost half of them, and killed five. But the CDC has logged 46 E Coli outbreaks since 2006 and says that every reported case of infection is likely matched by 26 unreported ones. And they’re only just starting to figure out the most likely cause: groundwater contaminated by nearby cattle manure. There could also be an infection from passing birds, another major vector of bacteria.
Never mind the wet markets of Wuhan that likely caused the coronavirus pandemic. We’re already sickening ourselves on the regular with a problem that is baked directly into our food system — and it’s affecting vegans as much as meat-eaters.
I have no doubt you’ll look at our barbaric farming methods and shake your heads. Why did they use so much water? Why did they transport produce an average of 1,500 miles? Why did they grow it outdoors, where it’s vulnerable to pests, and then use pesticides that had to be washed off? Why did they think “triple washing” did anything to remove bacteria (it doesn’t)? Why did they bother using soil, for goodness’ sake? Didn’t they know what plants crave?
The force of legacy agriculture is strong, but an increasing number of companies are figuring out a better way: the vertical farm, so named because they can stack hydroponic produce in shelves or towers. As I write this, there are more than 20 vertical farm operations being constructed and tested around the country. They use around 90 percent less water than regular soil farms, can grow roughly 10 times more food per acre than regular soil farms, and using precision software they can harvest their produce 30 percent faster than regular soil farms.
Sure, they’re spending more on electricity, but they’re also spending nothing on pesticide. The economics seem irresistible.
Last year, less than 20 miles from where I write this, in highly urbanized South San Francisco, a company called Plenty unveiled its flagship operation, a vast vertical farm named Tigris. Its sheer scale invites the correct usage of California’s favorite word, “awesome.” Tigris can grow a million plants at once, harvesting 200 of them every minute. With $226 million in funding, Plenty says it has already farmed 700 varieties of produce. Right now, the cost to consumers is comparable to non-hydroponic products (I can get their baby arugula at my nearest Safeway for a dollar an ounce); in the long run, it should be cheaper.
And they are far from the only success story. A Chinese startup, Alesca Life, is turning disused parking lots into vertical farms as well as selling plug-and-play shipping container farms. Back in Silicon Valley, a company called Iron Ox is developing robot arms for indoor farmwork. The future looks green and bountiful, and mostly automated (which is yet another reason you’re going to need Universal Basic Income).
Fresh future: Inside Plenty's vast vertical farm in South San Francisco.PLENTY
Which is not to say that outdoor agriculture is going away completely; it’s just going to shrink to the size of a community garden. That’s the basis of new urban developments called “agrihoods,” or multi-home communities centered around a professionally managed farm; a just-published book called Welcome to the Agrihood represents their first directory.
Rooftop organic farms, urban allotments: These are places where city dwellers can connect to the land and feel the satisfaction of nurturing their seeds from scratch. Soil may not be necessary to feed us, but sometimes it’s good to feel the dirt in your fingers. Similarly, farmer's markets are unlikely to go away. In a world where grocery stores are increasingly becoming delivery centers for services like Instacart, there will still be value in meeting and buying direct from the growers of high-end produce.
With big agribusiness heading indoors, with our apartments growing much of what we need and vertical farms providing backup in every city, we’ll also be able to let most of our present-day farmland go fallow. That in itself should take care of a chunk of climate change, considering the amount of carbon-soaking vegetation that springs up on fallow land. Lab-grown and plant-made meat will remove the need for those disease-ridden feedlots. Aquaponics, another discipline where the science is expanding by leaps and bounds, may even let us grow our own fish for food, reducing the strain on our overfished oceans.
No doubt it won’t be all smooth sailing. No doubt we, as humans, will stumble upon fresh ways to mess up the planet and make life worse. But from where I’m sitting, surrounded by soilless germinating jars, the future looks very green and nutritious indeed.
Yours in leafy goodness,
2020
TOPICS: Tech, Tech, Food, Health & Fitness, dear 22nd century, Internet Of Yum, Indoor-gardening