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San Francisco Startup Plenty Takes Vertical Farming to New Heights
San Francisco Startup Plenty Takes Vertical Farming to New Heights
Nov. 14, 2017
Plenty, an indoor agriculture company based in San Francisco, claims it has found a way to make vertical farming scalable and profitable, according to Vox.
The company uses ultra-efficient grow methods to produce 350 times as much produce per acre as conventional farming, and using just 1% of the amount of water. According to Vox, this is more than twice as much production as the next leading production level in the vertical farming industry.
Plenty operates a growing warehouse in San Francisco and plants to build one outside Seattle next year capable of producing 4.5 million pounds of greens per year. The company ultimately hopes to place grow facilities near every city in the world with one million or more residents.
For years, vertical farms have been touted as the future of agriculture — a way to grow food efficiently using a fraction of the space of conventional farmland. And for years, startup operations have hemorrhaged money before eventually going out of business.
Labor and energy are the two main costs that vertical farms struggle to overcome. Startups also pay high real estate costs, often fail to adequately use data, and frequently have a shaky go-to-market strategy. There are, in other words, numerous ways to fail in the promising but very low-margin field.
Plenty doesn’t offer a new approach to vertical farming but rather a more refined one. As an example, Vox writer David Roberts highlights Plenty’s grow walls. Rather than use stacks of horizontal planters, as many vertical farms do, Plenty employs 20-foot grow walls packed with greens. Water and nutrients pour down the walls, meaning the company is using gravity instead of expensive pumps to feed its greens and makes sure to trap any water and condensation that filters down and recycle it.
Plenty uses automation whenever possible, including tiny robots called “Schleppers” that move seedlings around. The company is also obsessive about tracking and maintaining optimal growing conditions. Its San Francisco warehouse has 7,500 cameras and 35,000 sensors to monitor temperature and numerous other metrics.
As it scales, Plenty claims it will be able to offer competitively priced produce to stores around the country. It will also have the selling point of being locally grown and very flavorful.
But will Plenty deliver, or is it just another company making big promises? Potential pitfalls abound, including high real estate costs and quality control. Plenty’s model is built around achieving massive scale, and getting there will require lots of money and minimal mistakes.
As Roberts points out, if Plenty doesn’t succeed, another company likely will. Bright Farms and Gotham Greens are two other outfits that are refining the model, and that have partnered with retailers to offer branded locally sourced greens. Vertical farming carries the promise of local, flavorful, efficiently produced fruits and vegetables, and a large payoff for whoever can make it efficient and scalable enough.
This $40 Million Robotic 'Plantscraper' Will Feed over 5,000 People Per Year
By 2050, the world's population is expected to swell to 9.6 billion, with around 66% living in urban areas. This projection is leaving many cities wondering how they will feed all those people.
This $40 Million Robotic 'Plantscraper' Will Feed over 5,000 People Per Year
- Leanna Garfield
- Nov. 18, 2017
Plantagon
By 2050, the world's population is expected to swell to 9.6 billion, with around 66% living in urban areas. This projection is leaving many cities wondering how they will feed all those people.
A Swedish food-tech company called Plantagon is proposing that cities consider building what it calls "plantscrapers" — office towers that contain giant indoor farms. Plantagon is constructing its first plantscraper in Linköping, Sweden.
Called The World Food Building, the tower will operate hydroponically, meaning vegetables (mostly greens) will grow without soil in a nutrient-rich, water-based solution. The farm will largely be automated, Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle told Business Insider.
Construction of the $40 million building began in 2012, and it's set to open by early 2020.
Check out the plans below.
The World Food Building will produce approximately 550 tons of vegetables annually — enough to feed around 5,500 people each year.
Plantagon
Source: Helgi Analytics
The front of the 16-story tower will include the farm, while the back will include the offices.
Plantagon
About two-thirds of the building will be devoted to offices, while the other third will include a huge indoor farm.
Plantagon
Companies are now signing leases to move in when it's complete.
The crops will grow using both natural sunlight and LEDs.
Plantagon
The LEDs will be calibrated to specific light frequencies to maximize production.
Plantagon
Robots will perform many of the farm's processes. This will keep operational costs down.
Plantagon
Compared to an outdoor farm of the same size, the plantscraper will generate more food while using less land and water, Hassle said. He estimates the tower will save 1,100 tons of CO2 emissions and 13 million gallons of water annually.
Plantagon
Some meeting rooms, like the one below, will have a view of the farm.
Plantagon
In other areas of the tower, there will be eateries for office employees and the public.
Plantagon
In addition, the building will include a market where people can purchase veggies. Local restaurants and other food retailers will be able to buy directly from Plantagon, which will operate the farm, Hassle said.
Plantagon
Plantagon has designed another similar indoor farm with offices, though it's in the shape of a globe. There are no plans to build it yet.
Plantagon
This plantscraper will include a spiraled food production line, which automatically moves the plants from the bottom to the top and back again while they grow. The length of the cycle would depend on the crop, but would normally take around 30 days, Hassle said.
Plantagon
The designers hope Linköping's plantscraper will encourage other cities around the world to build large-scale indoor farms that have multiple uses.
Plantagon
Plantagon is in conversations with other developers in Sweden, Singapore, the United States, Hong Kong, and Shanghai to build similar structures.
Hassle believes that more cities should grow food closer to urban centers. "This project demonstrates how to feed cities of the future when they lack land, water, and other resources," he said.
Former Tesla Executive to Lead Vertical Farming Effort at Plenty
Former Tesla Executive to Lead Vertical Farming Effort at Plenty
The aim of startup Plenty is to generate more produce with less water.
Bloomberg 1 | Oct 16, 2017 | by Selina Wang
Tesla Inc.’s former director of battery technology has joined Plenty Inc. to lead the vertical farming startup’s plan to build indoor growing rooms around the world.
FEB 03, 2017
Kurt Kelty, who joined Tesla in 2006 and left earlier this year, was one of the longest-serving executives at the carmaker led by Elon Musk. He joins SoftBank Group Corp.-backed Plenty as the senior vice president of operations and market development. Kelty had previously spent more than 14 years at Panasonic Corp.
"At Tesla I was employee number fifty or sixty,” Kelty said in an interview. “It’s a very different company from when I joined. I wanted to figure out where I would contribute to the next big wave. I see my next 10-year-run as growing Plenty."
Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank led a $200 million investment in Plenty in July. The startup is betting that with its technology and the backing of SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son, it has the connections and capital to accelerate international development. Plenty says it can yield up to 350 times more produce in a given area than conventional farms -- with 1% of the water.
At Tesla, Kelty said he spearheaded the battery gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, with Musk. Kelty had spent a significant amount of his time in Japan and had previously focused on selling Tesla vehicles in that country. At Plenty, Kelty’s first priority is getting a mass production facility running in the U.S. Kelty compares the experience to bringing the Roadster -- an early Tesla model -- to production the first time.
To contact the reporter on this story: Selina Wang in New York at swang533@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net
Molly Schuetz, Alistair Barr
© 2017 Bloomberg L.P
Urban Farming 2.0
Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally.
Urban Farming 2.0
Jade Perry, 20 November 2017
Supermarkets are finding new ways to show their commitment to locally-grown food.
Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally. Five kinds of lettuce are currently being grown and tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini will be added next year. The farm will also serve an educational purpose, offering workshops to schools in 2018.
While urban farming has been discussed in the past, major supermarkets are now making these conceptual ideas a reality. There is a range of benefits to these kinds of farms. Indoor farming can give consumers access to fresh produce year-round—even those who live in dense, urban areas. In addition to greatly reducing carbon emissions, indoor farming also uses less water than traditional farming and doesn’t require pesticides.
“Developing a healthy and high-quality nutritional pattern…is one of the challenges of the Brussels region,” Brussels Minster for Environment and Energy Céline Fremault stated in a release. “This first city farm of Delhaize is therefore an excellent initiative, which fully fits into one of Brussels’ ambitions: to increase local production.”
Shoppers at the Living Herb Garden. © studiomfd
Earlier this year, French retailer Carrefour revealed a similar rooftop initiative to Delhaize which is managed by students of a local agricultural school. Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, similarly launched a “Help-yourself Herb Garden” in one of its shops that allowed customers to pick fresh plants. Meanwhile in Canada, IGA became the first store to sell store-grown produce in Montreal, offering 30 varieties of vegetables. Even Target in the US is piloting vertical gardens in its stores.
Infarm, a Berlin-based start-up, is trying to make this a reality for every supermarket. The company created an indoor “herb garden” for supermarkets which houses plants in a protected, nutrient-rich environment. The customer-facing farm connects to an app that monitors important factors such as pH levels and temperature.
“Behind our farms is a robust hardware and software platform for precision farming,” Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli tells TechCrunch. “Each farming unit is its own individual ecosystem, creating the exact environment our plants need to flourish.” Los Angeles-based start-up Local Roots has taken a similar approach, using shipping containers to bring urban farms to grocers, universities, and community centres. Their goal is to create a network of community-based farms across the US.
Local Roots at SXSW.
Ethically-minded consumers are becoming more health conscious and starting to question where their food comes from and the effect it has on the environment. It’s imperative that brands respond to this concern and continue to implement initiatives that reduce emissions. Brands that are creative in reducing their carbon footprint will reduce costs, tackle climate change and ultimately attract more consumers looking for fresh, high-quality food.
Main image: © studiomfd
INFOGRAPHIC: How Vertical Farming Could Help Cities Feed Themselves
As arable land decreases and urban populations increase, planners and designers worldwide have begun looking at vertical farming as a way to boost urban food security. Dickson explores vertical farming’s many benefits in an infographic packed with interesting data, including the estimate that a 30-story farm could feed 50,000 people a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet for an entire year.
INFOGRAPHIC: How Vertical Farming Could Help Cities Feed Themselves
As arable land decreases and urban populations increase, planners and designers worldwide have begun looking at vertical farming as a way to boost urban food security. Dickson explores vertical farming’s many benefits in an infographic packed with interesting data, including the estimate that a 30-story farm could feed 50,000 people a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet for an entire year. Click through to learn more about the advantages of vertical farming and some of the obstacles that are holding the non-traditional farming system back.
It's Called Vertical Farming, And It Could Be The Future Of Agriculture
The concept sounds like science fiction: instead of spreading out across acres and acres, the farms of the future will grow lettuce and strawberries inside climate-controlled, light-controlled cylinders. Less land, less water, but year-round light and perfectly controlled moisture.
NOV 4, 2017
It's Called Vertical Farming, And It Could Be The Future Of Agriculture
Ronald Holden, CONTRIBUTOR
A 20-foot vertical farm inside a climate-controlled cylinder. Courtesy Plenty.ag
The concept sounds like science fiction: instead of spreading out across acres and acres, the farms of the future will grow lettuce and strawberries inside climate-controlled, light-controlled cylinders. Less land, less water, but year-round light and perfectly controlled moisture.
The California company behind this concept, Plenty, announced this week that it will open a 100,000 square-foot farm in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, where it intends to grow pesticide-free, “backyard quality” produce for regional consumers. It's the start-up's first full-scale farm.
The plants (fruit, vegetables) grow in 20-foot tall towers inside a climate-controlled facility with LED lights without using pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or GMOs. Instead, thousands of infrared cameras and sensors collect data that is analyzed to optimize how the plants grow.
"Plenty claims its technology can achieve yields of up to 350 times greater than traditional agriculture while using 1 percent of the water and barely any land compared to conventional methods," according to a company press release.
This would sound like pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, except that Plenty has the eye of some savvy investors, including Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, who just spent $14 billion to take over Whole Foods.
Hydroponic farming already exists, albeit not on a large commercial scale.
"Research shows that hydroponic farming could well be the future of global agriculture, combining the benefits of local outdoor organic farming with the high yields of large-scale agricultural production," the company believes.
Backers of Plenty’s $200 million round, in July, in addition to Bezos, included SoftBank (via its Vision Fund); Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt (through Innovation Endeavors); DCM Ventures; Data Collective; Finistere Ventures; and Louis Bacon.
In an interview with GeekWire, Plenty CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard said Seattle’s "relative lack of access to local produce" and the region’s emphasis on healthy food made it a perfect place to expand.
“As we looked at the West Coast, Seattle was the best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally,” he explained.
But Seattle's extensive community of food lovers scoffed at the notion that the region does not have access to fresh, local produce.
"The Yakima Valley was known as America's fruit basket," one food writer complained and Puget Sound, the region surrounding Seattle, is one of the most fertile in the nation.
"I will personally organize a round table for the company with local farmers," said Audra Gaines Mulken, a photographer who works extensively with local farms. Her most recent book is the Female Farmer Project.
(By coincidence, I wrote just yesterday about experiments in Finland to incubate seeds in counter-top bioreactors.)
Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based food writer. His latest book is Forking Seattle.
I've lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest as a reporter and editor for the past 40 years, in print, broadcast, and online media. I've been writing reviews since I tasted my first Little League hot dog with yellow mustard; since then I've published five books about wine, and two about local food & drink. I think most food writers do a pretty good job describing flavors, but they don't pay enough attention to the bigger economic picture. (For example, Why suddenly all this kale? Why cider? Who's going to pick all those grapes?) Food is a business, and a big, global business at that.
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
This Is Why Jeff Bezos Is Spending Millions on an Indoor Farming Startup
At just 100,000 square feet, Plenty’s new facility will be 99 percent smaller than a typical American farm. But Plenty’s goal is to optimize every inch of that available space for ideal cultivation. Fruits and vegetables grow on 20-foot-tall towers, bathed in LED lights and connected to a wealth of data-collecting microsensors.
This Is Why Jeff Bezos Is Spending Millions on an Indoor Farming Startup
The results could very well change the way you eat fruits and vegetables
TEXT BY TIM NELSON | Posted November 3, 2017
A look at one of the 20-foot-tall towers which, bathed in LED lights, have the ability to grow fruits and vegetables. | All images are courtesy of Plenty
With the amount of farmable acreage seemingly shrinking all the time, access to fresh fruits and vegetables can be hard to come by. Small-scale produce can be prohibitively expensive, and cheaper options from far-flung corners of the globe carry a hidden environmental cost. But one well-funded startup called Plenty believes that its technology harbors the secret to bringing “backyard quality” produce to the masses, and hopes that its newest indoor growing facility in Kent, Washington, will prove it.
At just 100,000 square feet, Plenty’s new facility will be 99 percent smaller than a typical American farm. But Plenty’s goal is to optimize every inch of that available space for ideal cultivation. Fruits and vegetables grow on 20-foot-tall towers, bathed in LED lights and connected to a wealth of data-collecting microsensors
In essence, Plenty applies the latest in machine learning technology and big data processing to the age-old wisdom of crop science, continually optimizing the climate to ensure ideal flavor and nutrition. The end result is a yield of up to 300 different variants of pesticide and GMO-free produce that far outpaces traditional agricultural methods, all while using a fraction of the water or energy.
CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard hopes the new facility serves as further proof that Plenty’s mission to sustainably feed a planet of 7.3 billion is viable: “Seattle will be home to our first full-scale farm and help set the standard by which our global farm network makes locally grown, backyard-quality produce accessible to everyone.” The facility will be staffed by a team of around 50 indoor farming engineers, organic growers, and operations experts to make certain that the technological and agricultural sides of the facility work in concert.
Plenty's CEO and cofounder, Matt Barnard. | Francis Baker
While the concept of eating produce grown inside on a tower might strike the farmer’s market crowd as puzzling, a recent $235 million funding round from Bezos Expeditions (whose founder is Jeff Bezos, current CEO of Amazon and among the richest people in the U.S.) and other VC firms suggests that there might just be a future in internet of things-driven agriculture. How ’bout them apples indeed.
Urban Farming 2.0
07-11-2017
Supermarkets are finding new ways to show their commitment to locally-grown food.
Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally. Five kinds of lettuce are currently being grown and tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini will be added next year. The farm will also serve an educational purpose, offering workshops to schools in 2018.
While urban farming has been discussed in the past, major supermarkets are now making these conceptual ideas a reality. There is a range of benefits to these kinds of farms. Indoor farming can give consumers access to fresh produce year-round—even those who live in dense, urban areas. In addition to greatly reducing carbon emissions, indoor farming also uses less water than traditional farming and doesn’t require pesticides.
“Developing a healthy and high-quality nutritional pattern…is one of the challenges of the Brussels region,” Brussels Minster for Environment and Energy Céline Fremault stated in a release. “This first city farm of Delhaize is therefore an excellent initiative, which fully fits into one of Brussels’ ambitions: to increase local production.”
Earlier this year, French retailer Carrefour revealed a similar rooftop initiative to Delhaize which is managed by students of a local agricultural school. Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, similarly launched a “Help-yourself Herb Garden” in one of its shops that allowed customers to pick fresh plants. Meanwhile in Canada, IGA became the first store to sell store-grown produce in Montreal, offering 30 varieties of vegetables. Even Target in the US is piloting vertical gardens in its stores.
Infarm, a Berlin-based start-up, is trying to make this a reality for every supermarket. The company created an indoor “herb garden” for supermarkets which houses plants in a protected, nutrient-rich environment. The customer-facing farm connects to an app that monitors important factors such as pH levels and temperature.
“Behind our farms is a robust hardware and software platform for precision farming,” Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli tells TechCrunch. “Each farming unit is its own individual ecosystem, creating the exact environment our plants need to flourish.” Los Angeles-based start-up Local Roots has taken a similar approach, using shipping containers to bring urban farms to grocers, universities, and community centres. Their goal is to create a network of community-based farms across the US.
Ethically-minded consumers are becoming more health conscious and starting to question where their food comes from and the effect it has on the environment. It’s imperative that brands respond to this concern and continue to implement initiatives that reduce emissions. Brands that are creative in reducing their carbon footprint will reduce costs, tackle climate change and ultimately attract more consumers looking for fresh, high-quality food.
Source: Jwt intelligence
Unique Indoor Farm In Manhattan Grows Over 150 Crop Varieties
‘Farm.One’ is a unique indoor farm in Manhattan using technology to bring flavor and rarity year round
Unique Indoor Farm In Manhattan Grows Over 150 Crop Varieties
Linked by ilovewushu | Excerpt:
Tour Manhattan’s only indoor hydroponic farm, growing more than 100 varieties of rare herbs, edible flowers and microgreens. Sip complementary sparking wine as you taste new and unique flavors from around the world. A unique, fun experience for any local foodie or tourist in New York.
Inside our new, secret, larger facility in Tribeca, our unique farm uses LED lighting and hydroponics to grow a huge variety of culinary plants, numbering over 200 to date. The indoor grow room uses no pesticides or herbicides, and uses around 95% less water than a traditional farm. The farm supplies Michelin-starred restaurants in the city, including Atera, Daniel, Jungsik, Chef’s Table and others.
In this one-hour tour, you will have the chance to taste dozens of rare plant varieties, most of which are never available fresh in New York City. With expert guidance from our team, you will uncover the science of how plants thrive in completely-controlled conditions, and experience new flavors and ways of thinking about culinary plants.
High Schoolers Spawn Fish, Grow Lettuce on NYC School Rooftop
Philson Warner leads a tour through the hydroponics greenhouse and aquaculture facility at the Food and Finance High School in New York City.
High Schoolers Spawn Fish, Grow Lettuce on NYC School Rooftop
By Jon Craig
October 27, 2017
Jason Koski/University Photography
Philson Warner works with Teishawn W. Florostal Kevelier, a 2012 graduate of Food and Finance High School. Kevelier is now a 4H youth development associate and 4H research assistant.
Atop a roof overlooking Manhattan’s skyline at sundown Oct. 25, more than 300 public officials and proud parents of Food and Finance High School students toured a first-of-its-kind aquaponics greenhouse.
Philson A.A. Warner, founding director of the Cornell Cooperative Extension – New York City (CUCE-NYC) Hydroponics, Aquaculture, Aquaponics Learning Lab, offered lively, personal tours of the newly opened greenhouse. The structure is used to grow lettuce and fish through a natural process that conserves energy and the environment.
“The youngsters learn to do more with the sciences,” Warner said of his teenage students, whom he called “Cornell colleagues.”
Eight computers monitor “the weather situation above us,” to help control indoor temperatures, moisture and ideal humidity for growing vegetables, Warner said.
“This is what we call a green, green, green greenhouse,” he said, noting it produces “clean, safe, fresh foods. ... Nothing goes to waste.”
Even its solar panels are producing surplus energy that is fed into the grid.
Heads of lettuce that can take up to 10 weeks to grow outdoors are cultivated in just three weeks at the school on West 50th Street. About 8,000 pounds of tasty fish spawned monthly are another benefit of the scientific project.
As part of the greenhouse’s grand opening ceremony, dozens of high school students greeted guests and served crab cakes, vegan meatballs, fancy desserts and other hors d’oeuvres that they cooked in the school’s kitchens.
Jennifer Tiffany, Ph.D. ’04, executive director of CUCE-NYC, heaped praise on everyone who helped produce the hands-on learning environment and thanked the “brilliant students” who served as caterers and provided warm hospitality for the event.
“What an amazing, amazing community of young people,” Tiffany said during the ceremony.
Warner designed the 1,664-square-foot greenhouse, which is now part of the New York City Department of Education’s Park West Educational Campus. The project was financed through private donations, the New York City Council and the Manhattan Borough President’s Office.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said she was very proud to have been instrumental in approving and helping secure public and private funding for the project. “You are training people for the future,” she said.
“You could be in the Bronx and they are talking about the fish” produced at the Manhattan high school, Brewer gushed. “Without Cornell, this would not have been possible. This is a very exciting project.”
The Food Education Fund, a nonprofit foundation, also has been a key partner in developing and sustaining the learning labs. Nan Shipley, chair of the board of the Food Education Fund, proudly pointed out that the Food and Finance High School has a 91 percent graduation rate, with most of its students advancing to college or full employment in related fields.
About 400 students are enrolled at Food and Finance High School. The school’s curriculum includes paid internships at restaurants and other food service businesses. The opening of the greenhouse marked the latest expansion of ongoing learning lab programs in a long-standing partnership with Cornell University.
Jon Craig ’80 is a writer based in New York City.
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George Lowery
Vertical Farming: The Promise, Pitfalls And The Role of Pot
One opportunity will be the growing popularity of food delivery, said Sally Rockey, head of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, which recently awarded a $1 million grant to vertical farming company Aero Farms to improve the nutritional quality of leafy greens.
Vertical Farming: The Promise, Pitfalls And The Role of Pot
10/04/17 6:20 AM By Steve Davies
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4, 2017 - Vertical farming holds great promise, but it must overcome challenges – most notably the cost of energy – in order to feed the world’s growing population, attendees were told at the recent Association for Vertical Farming Summiton the campus of the University of the District of Columbia.
Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, said that when it comes to feeding the 9 billion-plus people estimated to occupy the earth in 2050, controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) “will be part of the toolkit,” including conventional, organic, livestock and urban agriculture systems.
Ramaswamy said that one of the chief advantages of CEA – broadly speaking, growing crops indoors, including using vertically stacked layers – is its potential to harvest crops more frequently than open-field agricultural systems. Research he cited from Purdue University shows that CEA systems can produce 15 lettuce crops and six spinach crops in the time it takes to produce two in the field, and five tomato crops and four potato crops compared to one.
Sonny Ramaswamy
But Ramaswamy also said CEA systems, which have become proficient at growing leafy greens such as lettuce, arugula and basil, cannot currently fulfill the entire range of humans’ nutritional requirements. He spoke about the problem of “nutritional security,” a term he began using a few years ago instead of “food security.”
“Globally tonight, 800 million people are going to go to bed hungry,” he said. In the United States, “we still have almost 16 percent of our households that are food-insecure at some time in the year. That is about 50 million people.”
At the same time, the United States and other countries that have significant percentages of food-insecure populations are dealing with an obesity epidemic, with 1.3 billion people taking medication daily for cholesterol, diabetes or some type of metabolic disorder.
“In the U.S., we know that one of five people has to take those drugs to have some semblance of normalcy in their lives,” he said.
It will take an “all of the above” approach to address the issue of nutritional security, Ramaswamy said, pointedly disagreeing with Dickson Despommier, a prominent vertical farming advocate (and honorary member of AVF’s board) who predicted in 2009 that “if climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist.”
“I have to disagree with Professor Despommier,” an emeritus professor of microbiology and Public Health at Columbia University, Ramaswamy said. “It’s not going to ‘not exist.’” The future of agriculture will continue to be mostly “horizontal,” he said.
The most basic goal CEA must meet is one common to all businesses: making a profit. “With apologies to Bill Clinton,” whose successful 1992 run for the presidency used the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” Ramaswamy said, “It’s the market, stupid.”
“It really is about connecting the producer broadly with the consumer,” he said.
One opportunity will be the growing popularity of food delivery, said Sally Rockey, head of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, which recently awarded a $1 million grant to vertical farming company Aero Farms to improve the nutritional quality of leafy greens.
“The estimates are that in the next 10 years, close to 30 percent (of food) will be purchased online,” Rockey said at the summit. “For controlled environments, this could be a real market opportunity because if you’re going to purchase vegetables, you want fresh vegetables and fresh fruits that are available quickly, this intersection between controlled environments production and online purchasing of food could be really, really vital. As this market grows, it’s a great opportunity for vertical farmers.”
Sally Rockey
While indoor growers, including vertical farming operations, have been the beneficiary of huge investments recently – Silicon Valley startup Plenty just got a $200 million boost – CEA still represents a drop in the bucket compared to conventional ag. Figures from the last Census of Agriculture in 2012 show greenhouse production at a little over $2 billion in sales annually, compared to the overall $400 billion in sales for agriculture.
One “big, big challenge” in CEA will be energy, Ramaswamy said. Presenting figures that showed even the best LED lighting systems are only 40-50 percent efficient, Ramaswamy said, “We’ve got to have significant innovations,” he said, citing promising research at Purdue in the area of targeted LED lighting.
CEA systems are becoming more efficient, thanks in part to the growth of the legal cannabis industry, Travis Williams, vice president of marketing at Austin, Texas, lighting company Fluence Bioengineering told attendees.
In fact, Williams said, if vertical farmers want to see technological advances in their sector, they should support reform of cannabis laws.
“We would not be able to give you the technology you need at the cost you need it if it was not for the cannabis industry fueling our growth,” he said.
Williams said the company’s work to help large-scale operations such as Shenandoah Growers in Virginia – which has increased production by 25 percent and efficiency by 50 percent – would not have been possible without the explosive growth of the cannabis industry.
Williams said cannabis legalization led to the collection of an estimated $559 million in state tax revenue this year, and the cannabis market as a whole is projected to be a $50 billion/year business in a decade.
Williams urged attendees to tell their state legislators to push for cannabis legalization. Twenty-nine states have legalized recreational or medical use – or both – which leaves 21 states without any cannabis legalization laws, though some are in the process of adopting them.
“When cannabis legislation comes to your state or your country, think about how it’s going to fuel the innovation you need to be successful,” Williams said. “Barriers in the way of cannabis will be barriers in the way for you.”
Another message: Make your voice heard in Congress. That came from Bob Van Heuvelen, founder of lobbying and consulting group VH Strategies in Washington, which runs the Agricultural Innovation Alliance and is pushing for the next farm bill to include language providing assistance to urban agriculture.
Both Van Heuvelen and Ramaswamy told the vertical farming advocates they need to engage on the issue of whether indoor growers can label their foods organic. At the next meeting of the National Organic Standards Board (Oct. 31-Nov. 2), that issue is expected to come up again.
“Some of your colleagues have applied for hydroponically produced foods to be designated as organic,” Ramaswamy said. “But the traditional organics community does not want to allow that,” arguing that only foods grown in soil can be designated organic.
Dell Takes a Fresh Look At IoT With Aerofarms
Dell Takes a Fresh Look At IoT With Aerofarms
Dell has joined forces with agtech start-up Aerofarms to propagate IoT and data science in the business of growing greens.
At Dell’s IQT event in New York this week, Andy Rhodes, vice president of IoT edge computing at Dell, was joined on stage by David Rosenberg, CEO and founder of AeroFarms, to discuss how a smart warehouse full of plants exemplifies a forward-thinking IoT strategy.
‘Disruptor’ is probably a term that’s thrown around too easily in the world of technology – but in the case of AeroFarms, it’s hard to argue with that description. The company is a specialist in what it calls ‘vertical farming‘, an emerging form of agriculture that combines data science with horticulture to grow crops indoors. The result is staggering: The warehouse is 130 to 390 times more productive than a conventional farm, while using 95 percent less water.
The Aerofarms system of vertical farming (Credit: Aerofarms)
AeroFarms’ IoT-enabled vision
AeroFarms CEO David Rosenberg is on a mission to disrupt traditional agriculture. But it’s not necessarily out of a love for innovation or a desire for profit. There are more important things at stake here. “We have big problems that, as a species, we have to solve,” he said.
“We’ve lost a third of our arable land in the past 40 years. Seventy percent of our fresh water goes into agriculture. Seventy percent of fresh water contamination comes from agriculture. If you want to address water security, you need to address agriculture. Technology and data science is a big way that we’re going to get there.”
Food waste is another issue that needs tackling. Rosenberg estimates that as much as 60 percent of greens in the US spoil before they are consumed. AeroFarms’s solution is to have vertical farms disrupting traditional supply chains around the world, providing fresh vegetables to major distribution routes and population centers.
Harvesting data is the perfect recipe
Instead of using soil, water and sunlight, AeroFarms’ vertical crops are exposed to the light spectrum through LEDs, to precise nutrients through a special kind of cloth, and to hydration through a closely monitored mist.
AeroFarms’ vertical farm in Newark, New Jersey, wouldn’t be anywhere near as efficient without help from Dell’s IoT team.
“If you think of the age-old question of nature vs nurture, the world of AgTech has focussed mostly on the genetics,” said Rosenberg. “Here, we don’t focus on the genetics as much as the environmental stresses. As funny as it sounds, we actually get a plant to eat differently, sleep differently and exercise differently to change their nutrient density and shelf life.”
“We’re a farming company, but we’re also a technology company. There are thousands of sensors in our warehouse, taking hundreds of thousands of data points. The details matter, the pennies matter, so we’re trying to understand how to optimize yield, and how we can stress a plant [in the right way].”
This notion of stressing plants to develop the perfect recipe wouldn’t be possible without Dell’s edge to core to cloud IoT architecture. “Stressing the plants drives tastes and textures, from temperature [changes] to humidity to PH,” said Rosenberg. “With the Dell team, we’re capturing this information. They asked us questions [that] we weren’t asking ourselves, such as what information needs to go to which people, at what time to be valuable?'”
“That information allows our R&D team to change our algorithm and the recipe of how we grow a plant. So what goes on the edge, what goes in the core, what goes in the cloud… going use case by use case to better develop our architecture and reduce costs.”
The system exemplifies Dell’s new distributed core IoT strategy, which seeks to move analytics closer to the ‘edge’, nearer to all of the various sensors in environments just like Aerofarms’ warehouse.
Antarctic Farm Could One Day Journey to Mars
Antarctic Farm Could One Day Journey to Mars
BY TRACY STAEDTER POSTED OCT 13, 2017
Illustration of the shipping-container greenhouse that'll be providing fresh produce to Antarctic residents from February 2018 to December 2018. LSG
Antarctica is no place for a tomato. But starting in January 2018, researchers at the German Antarctic research station, Neumayer III, will begin growing not only tomatoes but also lettuces, herbs, peppers, cucumbers, swiss chard, radishes and even strawberries inside a climate-controlled shipping container. Although other indoor gardens have existed in Antarctica, the EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility will be the most advanced indoor farm on the continent — an experiment meant to push the limits of indoor agriculture, so that the technology can hold up for a long mission to Mars.
"Some of my colleagues like to say, 'It's no longer your grandmother's garden anymore,'" says Matthew Bamsey, a research associate at DLR, also known as the German Aerospace Center, and a member of the EDEN ISS team, a multipartner project focused on developing plant cultivation technologies for future use in space.
Out on the Ekström Ice Shelf in the Atlantic sector, the greenhouse will stand against Antarctica's frigid temperatures, the long dark winter and extremely low humidity. From the outside it's a simple structure, just two 20-foot (6-meter) shipping containers placed end to end. But inside, it's a high-tech oasis capable of producing 661 pounds (300 kilograms) of produce annually. To give you an idea of how much that is, in 2013, the average U.S. person consumed 272 pounds (123 kilograms) of fruits and vegetables.
Fine-tuning the operation for space is one of the main goals of the project.
"We don't want an astronaut working 16 hours a day in the greenhouse," he says.
The experiment will allow them to figure out just how much time is needed to tend the garden. Over the next year, they'll get closer to that answer.
The indoor garden is based on a soil-free growing system called aeroponics. The system, first invented in the 1920s but advanced by NASA in the 1990s, is extremely water-efficient, using 98 percent less water than soil-based gardens. Plants grow in trays on racks, with their roots suspended within a protected chamber that prevents light from entering. At regular intervals, the hanging roots are spritzed with a fine water and nutrient-rich mist. Any water not taken in by the roots is captured and recirculated.
The Future Exploration Greenhouse pictured here (not in Antarctica) is the area where the plants grow in the EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility. The greenhouse has 135 square feet (12.5 square meters) available for cultivation | BRUNO STUBENRAUCH
Sensors monitor the nutrient levels and provide data to a computer that analyzes the mix and adjusts it according to the plants being grown and their stage of growth. Cameras monitor the plant's growth, while other sensors capture temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels, which are fed to a computer that keeps the ideal levels precisely tuned. Air filters keep the environment free of bacteria and fungus, while an ultraviolet light helps sterilize the air and kill any organism not caught in the filter. Because of the sterile environment, neither insecticides nor pesticides are required.
The plants grow beneath LED lights that illuminate the leaves in blue, red and white light, which when mixed together, bathe the room in pinkish-violet sci-fi glow, says Bamsey. The lights shine for 16 hours a day and then turn off for eight hours to simulate night.
As of this writing, the greenhouse, comprising two shipping containers, is making its way by ship to Cape Town, South Africa, where it will be transferred to another ship bound for Antarctica, and due to arrive on Dec. 24, 2017. Bamsey and several of his colleagues, including DLR scientist Paul Zabel, will be there to meet the shipment and oversee its transport by tracked vehicle approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) across the ice shelf. Bamsey says the shipping containers will be placed end to end atop an 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) tall platform that will prevent the greenhouse from becoming buried in snow. One shipping container, named the Future Exploration Greenhouse, houses the plants and the other, the Service Section, contains the control systems that keep them alive.
As this drawing shows, the greenhouse will be split into three separate sections: a cold porch/airlock, a service section and the actual greenhouse | LSG
All of the DLR scientists, including Bamsey, will return home after seven weeks, with the exception of Zabel, who will stay behind at Neumayer III, along with nine other researchers. There, Zabel will keep an eye on the greenhouse, which will sit about (1,312 feet) 400 meters away from the main station. Along with making sure all of the systems are running smoothly, he'll prune the plants, harvest them when they're ready and take samples that will be sent back to partner research labs. Having some interaction with the plants provides a psychological benefit, says Bamsey. And even though a fully autonomous system is possible, the engineers likely will not design one. Previous research has shown that for people stationed in remote areas like Antarctica, tending to plants, interacting with them and just observing them improves a person's state of mind.
Bamsey referred to a 2013 South Korean study, conducted after an indoor garden was installed at the King Sejong Station on Antarctica. It found that 83 percent of station crew members found the fresh produce to be "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful" to their mental health.
The psychological benefits of having greenery in Antarctica goes back to the 1902 Discovery Expedition of the continent, led by Robert Falcon Scott, where some of the crew members grew cress and mustard in the ship's ward under natural light, says Bamsey. In some of the crewmen's journal entries, they talk of the plants, the energy and time they took to care for them and the boost to morale they provided.
"Some of the crew members and explorers of that time talk about how this was the first green material they had eaten in two years," says Bamsey.
The greenhouse has funding until the end of 2018. Produce samples will be sent back to labs in Europe to test for their nutritional value and if all goes well, the researchers will be back again for another frigid growing season.
It’s The End of “Organic” As We Know It
It’s The End of “Organic” As We Know It
After a bitterly divisive battle, the USDA has ruled that hydroponic growers can continue to be certified organic. Some say it marks the end of a still-young movement. For others, it's a new beginning.
November 2nd, 2017
by Joe Fassler Kate Cox
In Jacksonville, Florida on Wednesday, a two-decade long controversy that has the potential to change organic food production hinged on a single vote: whether or not to keep the “soil” in certified “organic.” In a series of 8-7 votes, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted that hydroponic and aquaponic growers can continue to market certified organic products.
Most Americans probably don’t think about hydroponic farms (which grow plants inside soilless greenhouses in trays of nutrient solution), and aquaponic farms (which marry hydroponics and aquaculture—or farmed fish and other aquatic organisms—to produce plants and fish crops) when they envision an organic farm. That’s because we often associate the word “organic” with a more traditional, pastoral vision of crops grown under the open air, perhaps accompanied by a red farmhouse and some cows grazing in the background.
The vote was a clear signal that the “organic” label—one with a strong public reputation and powerful market clout—is going to continue to get more inclusive.
And while that vision is far from what organic—now a more than $50 billion industry in the United States alone—has become, many organic farmers, especially the older, more traditional sort, who pioneered and advocated for the certification in the first place, want to make sure that certification extends only to this more traditional interaction with a plot of land. They feel their business—and the very value of the word “organic” itself—depends on it.
For them, Wednesday’s decision was a deeply emotional blow.
“The vibe was not mellow,” says Phil LaRocca, an organic winemaker from Forest Ranch, California, who attended the proceedings in Jacksonville.
Meanwhile, outside, a coalition of traditional, soil-based organic farmers—including Eliot Coleman, founder of Four Season Farm, who many consider to be one of the fathers of the modern organic movement—protested, brandishing “Keep the Soil in Organic” signs. LaRocca says the atmosphere at times grew “hostile” as various organic stakeholders pressed their cases. And some of those stakeholders admitted that they themselves were deeply conflicted.
“It was actually—as a long-term, 45-year organic farmer—it was a little disturbing to see a bit of hostility in the room,” LaRocca says. “And I’m not putting a judgment on that. I understand the issue and I have friends with both sides of the argument and understood both sides of the argument. So it made it very difficult for me personally to have to go through it all.”
It’s not that this decision signals any kind of immediate change. Aquaponic and hydroponic growers were already selling certified organic products, and have been doing so for years. The vote was an attempt to stop them from doing just that. But it was also a clear signal that the “organic” label—one with a strong public reputation and powerful market clout—is going to continue to get more inclusive. For some, that’s a big step in the right direction. For others, it’s a betrayal of the very values that launched a movement.
Eliot Coleman, founder of Four Season Farm, who many consider to be one of the fathers of the modern organic movement
Nearly 80 years ago, a global movement coalesced in opposition to the rapid, post-war evolution of farming practices, from traditional methods used for millennia, to commercialized, industrial-scale manufacturing methods that required less manual and animal labor and more machinery, herbicides, and fertilizer.
That movement was termed “organic farming” and the basic concept was this: Nature does it better. The farmers like Coleman who helped launch organic farming into the mainstream drew on the writings of farmer-philosophers like Liberty Hyde Baily, Rudolph Steiner, John Muir, Sir Albert Howard, and Aldo Leopold, who felt that the small, diversified farm was a “closed loop”—a managed ecosystem, even a self-sustaining organism, that produced everything it needed to consume. Animals fertilized the plants with their manure, and the plants fed the animals, and the farmer reaped the excess. Nothing was brought in from outside. Nothing was wasted. The idea was that nature already provided farmers with everything they needed, if they were just willing to be resourceful and do a little extra work.
This ancient—but increasingly unfashionable—method was posited as an alternative to what organic-minded critics called “substitution agriculture”: namely, a system that brought in what it needed from outside the farm. Petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers nourished the plants. Chemical pesticides kept bugs away. Animals, if there were any, were fed with corn and soy grown elsewhere.
What happens when an organic grower uses all the right inputs, just without any soil?
For the organic-minded, soil quality—outside the quasi-religious belief in farming as a calling and the farm as a self-enclosed cosmos—was the chief argument against substitution agriculture. Rather than using chemicals to artificially nourish plants, and keep pests at bay, organic farmers focused first and foremost on building soil health. For them, the dirt was the beginning and the end: It was why they kept animals, why they cover-cropped, why they worked so hard to diversify crops that kept balanced nutrients in the soil.
Which is why, when the federal government first began to explore codifying organic standards into law, soil was an important focus of their efforts. Some would say it was the focus.
“Several of us on the board felt that soil health should be part of the requirement for certification,” says Fred Kirschenmann, a longtime leader in sustainable agriculture, distinguished fellow at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. “We had a lot of debates about that, but finally the board became convinced that this was an important part of the future of organic certification, and we made that recommendation to the National Organic Standards Board.”
But the attorneys at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) pushed back, according to Kirschenmann.
“They threw it out,” he says. “In the report they gave back to us, they said that regulations have to be answered with a yes or a no, and requiring soil health is too complex an issue.”
The soil-first ethos requires a leap of faith: to proponents, the benefits are tangible, but they’re in the eye of the beholder
Instead, USDA insisted on an input-oriented system: Regulation would be focused on what went into the soil or not, but not on the more nebulous idea of soil “health.” While the final organic standard does stipulate that “the producer must select and implement tillage and cultivation practices that maintain or improve the physical, chemical, and biological condition of soil,” certification requires that a farmer use only fertilizers on the approved list, and avoid completely any chemical on the banned list.
Which brings us to the confused system we have today, and the argument that finally came to a head this week: Organic is supposed to promote soil health, but the terms that the stipulation uses focus on the list of chemicals used (or not). What happens when an organic grower uses all the right inputs, just without any soil?
Karen Archipley thinks the suggestion that hydroponic farming is a newfangled interloper is just wrong. In an interview with New Food Economy on Thursday by phone, she cited some impressive—and ancient—precedents: the floating Aztec gardens and the hanging gardens of Babylon.
“Our methods are not new,” she says. “Our methods date back to 600 B.C.”
“It has outcompeted soil because it’s so cheap to do.”
Despite this distinguished ancestry, Archipley—who runs Archi’s Acreage, a small hydroponic farm in Escondido, California, with her husband Colin—says she’s long felt excluded from the organic movement’s soil-worshiping sector. In her view, the reason is simple: “This whole issue has been about market share,” she says.
It’s not hard to understand why the organic vanguard would feel threatened by hydroponics. According to organic winemaker Phil LaRocca, hydroponic operations are “quicker and easier” to set up than new soil-based operations; at the same time, they can skip the onerous three-year transition period required for soil-based conventional farmers who want to start selling organic.
Soil-based advocates don’t necessarily deny this. Organic tomato grower Dave Chapman of Long Wind Farm in Vermont notes that in Europe certain crops are virtually all grown hydroponically, a massive transformation that’s taken place over the last twenty years. “It has outcompeted soil because it’s so cheap to do,” he says. According to Chapman, the real eye-opening moment for many soil-based farmers was the fact that Driscoll’s, one of the country’s biggest producers of organic berries, had switched to hydroponic.
“That was a game-changer,” he says. “Before that we thought it was a relatively minor problem.”
But that “minor problem” is now a quickly growing industry—one that, according to critics, is antithetical to the very idea of organic.
According to California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a trade group representing organic growers within the state, “hydroponic systems are not inherently better or worse than in-ground systems”
“Organic has always been about the apparently magical things that happen as a result of building and maintaining the fertility of the soil. It’s not magic—it’s mother nature at her finest. But that is the belief of the organic movement: that you get plant health and animal health and human health that is unobtainable any other way if you can work with those ecosystems,” says Chapman. “Of course, hydroponic production is the opposite of this philosophy. Which is that you give the plant what it needs, and you get great plant growth. But the downside is that nutrition is inferior and the health is inferior, the system is more vulnerable to insects and diseases so you need more pesticides and fungicides. You end up in a downward spiral. It’s like eating a bad diet for a human, so you need more medicine, but the medicine is damaging to you so you get sicker. On and on it goes.”
Coleman puts it even more bluntly:
“They are growing in the spirit of greed,” he says. “The only reason these guys want organic certification is because these guys have known for a long time that hydroponic doesn’t make people’s mouths water and no one is lining up outside their grocery stores protesting for hydroponic vegetables. These guys know the organic label is the label people want. They want to illegally become part of it.”
For all its cultural success, the organic industry is still in its economic infancy.
It’s easy to see the reverence with which traditional organic farmers speak about the soil, and their way of thinking is powerful and compelling. The problem is that not everyone agrees they’re right. The soil-first ethos requires a leap of faith: to proponents, the benefits are tangible, but they’re in the eye of the beholder. The difference they describe can be observed, even tasted, in spite of the fact that it’s not necessarily measurable by the scientific methods currently in use.
The trouble is that not everyone agrees that this advantage exists. According to California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a trade group representing organic growers within the state, “hydroponic systems are not inherently better or worse than in-ground systems.” For CCOF, it’s the more, the merrier—each approach has its pros and cons, but they’re all essentially the same thing.
Coleman has a response to that: “The whole process of certifying organics is a scam to begin with,” he says, “because the certifiers only get paid if they certify something.” In other words, in his view, the certifiers themselves have an incentive to establish a big tent.
But hydroponic growers like Karen Archipley argue that attempts to keep the soil in “organic” are not an attempt to spread the wealth, but to hoard it. In her view, the old guard’s stance is inherently undemocratic, an attitude that confines organic—and the economic benefit it confers—to a group of people who have access to farmland (increasingly an expensive luxury) in the first place.
Hydroponics, according to Colin, make “it more financially feasible for small-scale growers to make a business…. [C]ommunities in the urban environment, who have been disenfranchised from the agriculture community, can now participate.”
For his part, Coleman says that’s a stretch.
For some, a multi-pronged, diversified approach to organic is the only feasible way forward
“How does a million dollar greenhouse allow people entry?” he says. “You can do what I do with a hoe, rake, seeds. All you need is a little piece of land. Talk about ‘allowing people entry’! Imagine all the peasant farmers being told ‘you’d have better access to food if only you built this million dollar greenhouse.’”
Part of what was surely painful about the vote in Jacksonville was the sense of how far the organic community—regardless of approach—still has to go to reach mainstream acceptance. Even as the word “organic” itself has proven to have demonstrable marketing power, the fact is thatonly 1 percent of U.S. farmland is certified organic. For all its cultural success, the organic industry is still in its economic infancy.
And for some, that means a multi-pronged, diversified approach to organic is the only feasible way forward. LaRocca says that one of CCOF’s slogans has been “Make Organics the Norm”—and he feels that the only way to do that is to proceed by any means necessary, as long as the essential spirit of the movement is kept intact.
For Karen Archipley, putting limits on organic amounts to a larger failure of imagination about what the label can do and be, a way of squelching upstarts who may actually have some pretty good ideas—if only the old guys would listen.
And there you have it, the two sides of this debate.
“Why wouldn’t we encourage innovation in farming, and especially as old as this innovation is?” says Karen. “Can you imagine if Timex tried to fight the Rolex coming out, or if Timex and Rolex could try to fight the iPhone or any smartphone from having time? That’s the difference. [They’re] really trying to stop the current and I don’t understand why anyone would do that. Why wouldn’t we try to encourage this next generation of growers and say, ‘let us show you good practices?’”
Last year, at the New York Times’ “Food for Tomorrow” conference, two unlikely antagonists sat beside each other on the stage. On one side was Dan Barber, the Blue Hill chef who, perhaps more than other modern culinary master, has promoted a vision for agriculture that mimics and mirrors nature. His book The Third Plate celebrates farmers who don’t merely grow food but “grow nature”—harnessing the power of dynamic, diversified ecosystems in the pursuit of maximum health, sustainability, and taste.
On the other side, you had Kimbal Musk, the cowboy-hatted, denim-clad brother of Elon, a venture capitalist with a sustainable food fetish—and a major investor in Square Roots, a vertical farm startup launching miniature vertical farms inside low-cost, portable shipping containers. After he finished enumerating the economic and sustainability benefits, Barber answered with a simple rejoinder:
Stories related to the National Organic Standards Board:
As no-soil systems take root, “organic” reckons with its earthbound past
Can soil-free farms ever be organic?
Organic industry watchdog calls for independent investigation of USDA organic program
Carrageenan: The missing ingredient
“It’s not making me hungry,” he said.
And there you have it, the two sides of this debate. One approach is rooted in place, and tradition, and terroir—in the belief that old-school farming, based in soil, not only tastes better but satisfies deeper human appetites, a form of stewardship that transcends the pursuit of profit. On the other hand are those who have tired of the old approaches to that, who feel that existing approaches to sustainable agriculture, for their virtues, have failed to become the norm. They’re united in a desire to bring better farming to as many people as possible, and make some money at it—even if it means fundamentally reorganizing our relationship with the land, and cloistering much of agricultural production behind closed doors.
This drama is going to continue to play out. But it’s a reminder that this argument—the fact that people care, and care so deeply—is a sign of organic’s ascent, one indication that the revolution started by what Coleman calls “a bunch of old hippies” has made a lasting impression on the culture. Maybe the current tangle, involving the pioneers who built the organic movement now threatening to abandon it, is a very natural—if also very painful—by-product of that. It’s the growing pains that inevitably come alongside success. The revolution after the revolution, perhaps.
On and on it goes, indeed.
FARMHYDROPONICSNATIONAL ORGANIC STANDARDS BOARDORGANICORGANIPONICUSDA
Joe Fassler is New Food Economy's senior editor. His food safety and public health reporting has been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. Follow him @joefassler.
Kate Cox is editor of the New Food Economy. In her former life, she was a freelance health policy reporter for radio and text. Follow her @thekatecox
FreshBox Farms’ CEO Welcomes Organic Ruling, but...
FreshBox Farms’ CEO Welcomes Organic Ruling, but...
Vertical farm innovator says that more consumers are looking “beyond organic” and choosing crops grown without soil
This week, the National Organic Standards Board finally made a decision on one of the most divisive issues in the organic world: should crops grown in water, containers, or otherwise not in the ground be allowed to call themselves organic?
The decision: hydroponic and container gardens will remain eligible for organic certification.
Sonia Lo, CEO of FreshBox Farms, the nation’s largest modular vertical farm, welcomes the new ruling, but notes that consumers already are moving “beyond organic.”
FreshBox Farms uses sustainable growing enclosures that use no soil, very little water, a rigorously-tested nutrient mix and LED lighting to produce the freshest, cleanest, tastiest produce possible. FreshBox Farms’ non-GMO certified products go from harvest to the grocer’s produce section in hours, rather than days.
Lo notes that FreshBox Farms yields are better without organic nutrient use, so the Millis-based farm is not impacted by the ruling. “As organic nutrients for hydroponics become more developed, we will, of course, consider using them.”
She points out, however, that consumers are quickly learning a distinction between organic field-grown greens and non-organic indoor-grown greens, what the industry calls Beyond Organic. “And we see that consumers ARE making the Beyond Organic choice.”
“We predict three categories will move forward - field grown organic, Beyond Organic hydroponic, and organic hydroponic."
Sonia can explain why consumers are choosing greens grown indoors, why this field is growing (*no pun intended) and how FreshBox Farms' template farm is among the nation's most efficient.
Freight Farms Expands Into International Markets and New Business Sectors
Freight Farms, manufacturer of commercial-grade hydroponic farms built inside of shipping containers, today reported company growth to accommodate the increasing demand from new business sectors, and international markets. As the company continues to thrive, Freight Farms also announced a corporate expansion to the South End Exchange neighborhood of Boston.
With the new office, comes a new company direction. Small business farmers have historically shown the most interest in the company's flagship product, the Leafy Green Machine™ (LGM™), to start or expand their business. However, over the past several months, Freight Farms has experienced widespread interest from larger entities. Restaurants, schools, universities, corporations, municipalities and non-profits are all buying LGMs™. In the past year, sixteen businesses and campuses launched Leafy Green Machines™. Additionally, Freight Farms has been working with major institutional food service providers Compass Group and Sodexo. By focusing on this channel, Freight Farms hopes to bring the LGM™ to many more communities, spreading sustainable farming methods to a broader audience.
"Local food is in high demand, and schools and businesses are prioritizing health, wellness and engagement now more than ever. The LGM™ fits seamlessly in with their goals, and we are re-focusing to meet the demands of a new market -- it's a very dynamic time to be in ag tech," said Brad McNamara, CEO and co-founder, Freight Farms.
"An important piece for Sodexo is our 'Better Tomorrow Plan,' which specifically focuses on individuals, our communities and our environment. Freight Farms has given us a great opportunity to have that engagement with students on a higher level, especially with sustainability," said Heather Vaillette, district manager of campus services and independent schools, Sodexo.
As Freight Farms continues to grow, it will not turn its back on the small business farmers who gave it its start. This channel is still growing as traditional farmers adopt Freight Farm's technology. With an LGM™, farmers can extend their business year-round and provide crop protection in the face of increasingly extreme weather patterns.
"There are significant environmental benefits to farming in a hydroponic system, which allows farms to use 90 percent less water than traditional methods," said Jon Freidman, President and co-founder, Freight Farms. "The contained environment also eliminates the need for herbicides or pesticides, and the ability to farm anywhere reduces the impact of food transportation. As our user base expands to larger organizations, we look forward to seeing sustainable produce spread to new markets."
For more information:
Brad McNamara
Freight Farms
Tel: 339-788-0128
Publication date: 10/31/2017
Groundbreaking Held for Upcoming Hydroponics Farm in Pee Dee
Groundbreaking Held for Upcoming Hydroponics Farm in Pee Dee
November 9th, 2017, By Nia Watson, Reporter
A groundbreaking ceremony for East Nile Farms was held Thursday in Dillon County. (Source: WMBF News)
DILLON COUNTY. SC (WMBF) - Dillon County held a groundbreaking ceremony for East Nile Farms’ new facility along Heritage Road in Lake View.
The company invested $15.5 million and will create 200 new jobs in Dillon County.
“We’re definitely excited. It’s been a long time coming for Lake View and Dillon County,” said Tonny McNeil, director of economic development for Dillon County. “This is a tremendous opportunity for us, but ultimately our goal is for every single person that wants a job to have one in Dillon County.”
East Nile Farms is an indoor farming facility that grows plants without soil, using only water. The method is called hydroponics.
The company plans to produce 622,000 plants per month at the new facility. East Nile chose Dillon County for its geographic location and its people.
“Lake View, Dillon County had the type of people that enjoyed farming, people that have the background, have the skills,” said Otis Neals, CEO of East Nile Farms. “So, with the technology of hydroponics, we can take technology and combine it with people that enjoy working on farms, but also enjoy working with technology.”
Neals said with indoor farming, there are so many different jobs available. McNeil believes the hundreds of new jobs will transform the community.
“It’s definitely going to bring us closer together. It’s going to lower the unemployment rate and folks are going to be able to provide for their families and that’s really what this is all about, said McNeil.
The project has been in the works since October. The facility is expected to be open in June 2018. The company is still accepting job applications. Anyone interested can visit Dillon County Economic Development.
An Ex-Tesla executive is Teaming Up With A Little-Known Vertical Farming Startup
Kurt Kelty, Tesla's former director of battery technology, is moving into a very different sector of the tech industry: indoor agriculture.
An Ex-Tesla executive is Teaming Up With A Little-Known Vertical Farming Startup
- Leanna Garfield | 10-16-17
A farmer at Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based urban farming startup that scored the largest ag-tech investment in history. Plenty
Kurt Kelty, Tesla's former director of battery technology, is moving into a very different sector of the tech industry: indoor agriculture.
He has joined vertical farming startup Plenty as the senior vice president of operations and market development, according to Bloomberg.
Kelty, who worked at Tesla for over a decade and left in early 2017, was one of the earliest executives at the vehicle startup founded by Elon Musk. Before that, he spent more than 14 years with the Energy Lab at Panasonic, a company known for consumer electronics (which also happens to run its own vertical farming division in Singapore).
At Tesla, Kelty worked on partnerships and material sourcing at the company's Gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, where it manufactures lithium-ion batteries for its cars. At Plenty, he will launch a mass production facility for growing produce in the US, he told Bloomberg.
Instead of growing greens outdoors, Plenty grows its greens on glowing, LED-lit 20-foot-tall towers inside a former electronics distribution center in South San Francisco. The towers don't require pesticides or even natural sunlight.
The technique is called indoor vertical farming — a type of agriculture in which food grows on trays or hanging modules in a climate-controlled, indoor facility. The process allows certain types of produce to be grown year-round,in small spaces. Produce could be delivered to consumers within hours of harvest.
Plenty, founded in 2014, claims to grow up to 350 times more greens than conventional farms of similar size, while using much less water and land. The goal, Plenty CEO Matt Barnard previously told Business Insider, is to revolutionize the way the world grows food — and sell that food for lower prices than typical produce.
A $200 million investment in the startup, led by SoftBank Vision Fund in August 2017, could help make that vision viable. One of the biggest struggles for the company is the energy usage cost from the LEDs, though the lighting technology has become more of a commodity in the past several years.
"I can’t predict what the venture industry will do, nor what the USDA will do given the current state of federal budgeting, but we’re confident that this will be a prominent form of agricultural practice for many crops much sooner than even we projected a few years ago," Barnard said.
SEE ALSO: Panasonic's first indoor farm can grow over 80 tons of greens per year — take a look inside
Softbank and Bezos Backed Vertical Farm Startup Has Global Expansion Plans
Softbank and Bezos Backed Vertical Farm Startup Has Global Expansion Plans
brian wang | November 11, 2017
Plenty is a startup that has big vertical farming expansion plans $226 million in total venture funding. They plan to build a 100,000 square foot (2.3 acres) vertical-farming warehouse this year in Washington state outside of Seattle. That farm is expected to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually.
Plenty grows plants on 20-foot high towers with vertical irrigation channels and facing LED lights.
In June 2017, California-based vertical farming company Plenty, previously See Jane Farm, acquired Bright Agrotech in an effort to reach “field-scale.”
Bright Agrotech is an indoor ag hardware company that’s focused on building indoor growing systems for small farmers all over the world, in contrast to Plenty, which is aiming to become a large-scale indoor farming business and currently has a 52,000 sq. ft farm in South San Francisco.
Plenty claims to use 1 percent of the water and land of a conventional farm with no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Like other large soilless, hi-tech farms growing today, Plenty says it uses custom sensors feeding data-enabled systems resulting in finely-tuned environmental controls to produce greens with superior flavor.
Plenty claims to get 350 times the crop yield per year over an outdoor field farm.
With the backing of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Plenty has the capital and connections build massive indoor farms on the outskirts of every major city on Earth, some 500 in all. In that world, food could go from farm to table in hours rather than days or weeks.
Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon CEO’s personal venture fund, has also invested. So Plenty could supply WholeFoods.
Early leaders in vertical farming (PodPonics in Atlanta, FarmedHere in Chicago, and Local Garden in Vancouver) have shut down. They had a mix of design issues and high hardware costs. Gotham Greens and AeroFarms have not been as successful with fundraising.
A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.
They are finding about 14-30% drop in various nutrients.
Made in the Lowcountry: Tiger Corner Farms
SUMMERVILLE, SC (WCBD)– Growing over 4500 plants in a 40 foot box may sound unbelievable. At Tiger Corner Farms they do it every month.
“Every single scientific discipline that I can think of is wrapped up into one box,” says chief engineer Evan Aluise.
It’s a partnership between nature and technology, and it all happens in recycled shipping containers. The innovative farm is operated by 3 sister companies.
One of those companies is Vertical Roots. A horticulture start up in charge of growing and harvesting the plants. Although they have experimented with many different plants, right now they primarily grow lettuce. They produce 7 different kinds.
Co-founder and operator, Matt Daniels, says they yield around 15 harvests a year.
“Right now we’re producing collectively 4000 heads a week, for the public and for Dorchester District 2 schools.”
It could be thanks to the perfect growing climate, the 20 second bursts of nutrient infused water, or the LED panels providing peak amounts of chlorophyll A and B.
All levels are monitored and regulated by a computer program, which was coded by the third sister company, Boxcar Central.
The aeroponic technology is manufactured by Tiger Corner Farms, a company in its infancy, but one with big goals.
“The container that we were in does not look like the next, or the next […] we’re continually evolving into a better product,” says Aluise.
The container itself also goes through a major transformation. It arrives as a bare bones shipping container at the end of its previous life. In two and a half weeks it will be revived and ready for a new purpose.
The crew installs insulation, shelving and a state of the art air conditioning unit. Then they install the technology that will power the project.
Stefanie Swackhamer, general manager of Tiger Corner Farms says watching the containers arrive never gets old. She and her father created the company after she saw a need for healthier food and farming population that is aging.
“It’s a big problem that we aren’t locally sourcing food and eating healthy food on a daily basis,” says Swackhamer.
She is a former Stall High School Teacher. Now her farm provides produce to schools in Dorchester County, and the aeroponic containers are used to teach students.
“We’re teaching kids about technology, we’re getting them excited about agriculture, and we are hopefully creating future farmers that would not have otherwise existed.”
To learn more about the company, you can head to their website: http://tigercornerfarmsmfg.com/