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Seed Supply Company Targets Growing Urban Farming Market
Seed Supply Company Targets Growing Urban Farming Market
June 18, 2018
East-West Seed prototype hydroponic unit for urban farming. -- ANNA GABRIELA A. MOGATO
VEGETABLE and flower seed producer and supplier East-West Seed Co. is planning to expand its portfolio by offering vertical farming solutions such as hydroponic units and smaller greenhouses to urban dwellers.
East-West Seed Co. Agricultural Engineer Pedro F. Dayag III, who designed the hydroponic unit prototypes, said that the company decided to target prospective urban farmers due to strong interest.
“We’re still more concentrated on farmers in the provinces. We rarely entertain urban. Now, since our technology has achieved scale, we will bring it to urban [farming],” he added.
“[For urban farming], we are trying to educate those who eat vegetables that they can also do it on their own. It doesn’t really have to come from big farms. It also has a lot of benefits — aside from eating vegetables, you know how it’s planted. It’s also therapeutic [to grow your own vegetables].”
Mr. Dayag said that while hydroponic units are not yet available for mass production, the company will accommodate individual orders.
“If there’s an inquiry and someone wants it made then we can probably accommodate because is what we are really selling here is the greenhouse [for urban farming]. Greenhouses have a repeat-buy but this one (hydroponic unit) is only a one-time buy,” he added.
East-West Seed Co. got into the business of manufacturing and installing greenhouses almost 10 years ago at the request of farmers who buy seeds from the company. Mr. Dayag said that while greenhouses can be customized, these usually come in two sizes, 3.5 meters by 18 meters and 6 meters by 24 meters.
If built and installed in Manila, the greenhouse can cost to about P50,000 to P55,000. This does not, however, include the hydroponics units inside.
The company last month exhibited a hydroponic unit which can cost around P6,000 to P8,000, which includes the aquarium pump to circulate a solution outsourced from the University of the Philippines-Los Baños. At a height of about four feet, the unit can accommodate around 72 receptacles for growing vegetables.
“I was thinking of a design [for hydroponics] that can be used in condominiums with its own lighting and aquarium pump,” Mr. Dayag said.
“All the end-user has to do [is] to choose what to plant — it can be lettuce, kangkong (water spinach), pechay (bok choy). And on the first week, they plant only on the first layer, and add another layer on the second week so that they won’t run out of vegetables. For a single person, that’s a lot.”
Field marketing representative Cusrome Loi S. Adaro said that aside from hydroponics, the company is also offer repurposed pallets for gardening.
“We had that idea because we had so many pallets in the office that remained unused. We also had another project, the “seed in the city,” where we conducted urban farming seminars to get ideas like that,” he added.
“It is now possible that the land needed for farming not be that big; that’s why we thought of projects such as container gardening. That it our focus right now but [rural] farmers are really still our main market.” — Anna Gabriela A. Mogato
Can Vertical Farms Reap Their Harvest? It’s Anyone’s Bet
Indoor-grown produce is available in more than 20 supermarket chains nationwide. But despite massive investment, questions remain about efficiency and costs.
Can Vertical Farms Reap Their Harvest? It’s Anyone’s Bet
Indoor-grown produce is available in more than 20 supermarket chains nationwide. But despite massive investment, questions remain about efficiency and costs.
BY STEVE HOLT | FARMING, Technology, Urban Agriculture
07.02.18
By now, the images of shelves full of perfect greens in hulking warehouses, stacked floor to ceiling in sterile environs and illuminated by high-powered LED lights, have become familiar. Food futurists and industry leaders say these high-tech vertical farming operations are the future of agriculture—able to operate anywhere, virtually invincible against pests, pathogens, and poor weather, and producing local, fresh, high-quality, lower-carbon food year-round.
That future seemed one step closer to reality last year when San Francisco-based indoor farming startup Plenty, which grows a variety of salad and leafy greens hydroponically (without soil) and uses artificial lighting in facilities in three locations, announced that it had raised a whopping $200 million in funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund, whose investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Flush with cash, Plenty quickly opened a 100,000-square-foot indoor farm outside Seattle that promised to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually—including some varieties not yet grown for the masses at scale, such as hydroponic peaches, carrots, and watermelon. To Plenty’s leadership and many observers, the cash influx signaled the economic promise of growing food indoors without sunlight and with less soil and water than field farming.
Photo courtesy of Plenty.
“My reaction [to the $200 million round] was both that of validation, excitement,” said Matt Barnard, Plenty’s co-founder, and CEO, over a manner of farming he says yields 350 times the produce per acre on one percent of the water used by dirt farming. “Now we must move with speed and efficiency if we’re to accomplish our mission of bringing people worldwide an experience that’s healthier for them and the planet.”
Not everyone is in agreement.
“My first thought was, ‘we could build a lot of greenhouses for $200 million,’” recalls Neil Mattson, a professor of plant science at Cornell and one of the country’s leading academic voices on indoor agriculture, who’s found that high-tech greenhouses that harness sunlight are more cost- and carbon-friendly than vertical farms that use artificial light.
Most vertical farmers are only hoping to claim a percentage of the conventional produce market, not replace it. To these founders and their investors, the market for lettuce and greens, especially—grown primarily in California and Arizona and shipped worldwide—is ripe for disruption. E. colioutbreaks like the one that hit Arizona-grown romaine lettuce earlier this year, killing a handful of people and sickening hundreds, only further their case.
But behind futurists’ fervent predictions about indoor agriculture, claims about product quality, and sexy technology lies a reality known by industry insiders but too often missing from media coverage: The future success of this nascent industry is still very much an open question.
The astronomical capital costs associated with starting a large hydroponic farm (compared to field and greenhouse farming), its reliance on investor capital and yet-to-be-developed technology, and challenges around energy efficiency and environmental impact make vertical farming anything but a sure bet. And even if vertical farms do scale, there’s no clear sense of whether brand-loyal consumers, en masse, will make the switch from field-grown produce to foods grown indoors.
Tricky Economics
Walking into any supermarket will reveal a small mountain of salad greens, carrying a price tag of between $9 and $12 per pound. They may be locally grown or organic, which will add $0.50 or $1 to the price tag. Meanwhile, a 4.5-ounce carton of Massachusetts-based FreshBox Farms’ spring mix—grown in the company’s hydroponic farm in Massachusetts—costs $3.99 for a 4-ounce box or $15.96 per pound. Or kale: the conventional variety will run you $1.33 per pound at Walmart; organic kale costs around $4.99 per pound at Whole Foods; and vertically farmed kale grown at Newark, New Jersey-based AeroFarms will cost you a whopping $14.18 per pound.
That dramatic price gap is due to the millions of dollars currently needed to build one large indoor vertical farm—and that price is not going to drop until the industry scales up. Agritecture Consulting, whose clients include current and prospective indoor farms, estimates that a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm growing leafy greens and herbs in the tri-state area around New York City requires nearly $4 million in startup capital—not including labor.
They should know: In 2016, Agritecture built farm.one in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, which supplies hydroponic greens and edible flowers to a number of the city’s top restaurants. Chefs have been quick to catch onto the value of consistent, year-round, locally grown produce.
A farm.one indoor farming operation. (Photo courtesy of farm.one.)
In 2016, AeroFarms, now considered an industry leader, spent $30 million on its flagship aeroponic farm in Newark. The majority of these costs lie in the equipment needed to grow greens without soil or sunlight—heating and cooling systems, ventilation, shading, environmental controls, and lights.
All of these costs add up to a hefty electricity bill: According to models compiled for Civil Eats by Agritecture, a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm in metro New York City should budget upwards of $216,000 annually for lighting and power, and another $120,000 on HVAC systems; costs will vary region to region depending on what each state charges for electricity.
Energy and equipment costs are, by far, the largest drivers of expenses that can bring the price of operating a vertical farm close to $27 per square foot. By contrast, Agritecture’s models show that the cost to run a 100,000-square-foot smart greenhouse is roughly a third as expensive, thanks to the use of natural sunlight and more advanced automation.
Vertical farms’ energy usage carries a significant carbon footprint. While vertical farm companies promise more-sustainable produce by growing it closer to consumers and using renewable energy to power their operations, the industry still has a long row to hoe.
Industry leaders acknowledge the energy challenges in the short term, yet tout continually improving lighting technology that has brought down costs. But Mattson, whose Cornell team studies the way plants respond to different lighting, predicts a plateau coming for improvements to LED technology.
LEDs lighting an indoor farming operation. (Photo courtesy of Agritecture.)
“The best LEDs are 40 percent more energy efficient than in 2014,” Mattson says. “There continue to be improvements; however, those improvements will start to slow down over time. There’s only a finite amount of light you can generate at a given wavelength, and in 2022, I’m not expecting new lights to be 40 percent more efficient than the current lights now.”
FreshBox Farms began shipping greens from its 40,000-square-foot hydroponic facility in Millis, Massachusetts, in 2015. The warehouse farm, located 30 miles outside of Boston, runs on a combination of renewable energy and non-renewables, and CFO Dave Vosburg admits his company is “not doing any better” than field-grown greens when it comes to carbon usage.
When it eventually expands outside of Massachusetts, Vosberg says that by introducing a cogeneration system—technology that recycles otherwise wasted heat into new energy—FreshBox Farms will eventually keep costs and carbon emissions down in expensive markets like Connecticut, where commercial users pay an average of more than 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. But Vosburg says the company’s priority is to use contextually appropriate renewable energy sources to power the farms, such as wind energy in the Midwest, hydro in the Northwest, and solar in the Southwest.
“Yes, it sounds crazy to take the sun and turn it into electricity and turn that electricity back into light. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s what we’ll be doing,” Vosburg says. “It’ll be really efficient and clean and create a better product, and it won’t have the same carbon impact that we’re having today.”
And energy isn’t even a vertical farm’s top ongoing expense. The companies Civil Eats spoke to say labor is actually their largest budget item. Vertical farms typically pay workers higher, more metropolitan pay rates than both dirt farms—many of which rely heavily on migrant labor—and the more automated smart greenhouses. The fast-food chain Wendy’s announced in June that it plans to source vine-ripened tomatoes exclusively from greenhouse farms by early 2019.
Moreover, no matter how automated the indoor growing system is, vertical farmers are discovering the constant need for a human eye—or several—on the process. In fact, some estimate that if indoor agriculture continues to grow at the pace it has in recent years, vertical farms will have to hire 100,000 workers over the next decade.
That continued growth is not a given, however. Because of the high cost to launch, operate, and scale up a vertical farming operation, the industry is highly leveraged, with each new farm requiring tens of millions of dollars in investor capital before it can grow a single plant. Between 2016 and 2017, investments in vertical farming skyrocketed 653 percent, from $36 million to $271 million. The lion’s share of that investment went to Plenty, but Newark-based AeroFarms has raised $80 million in recent years and Brooklyn’s Bowery Farming added another $27 million.
Sky Vegetables’ rooftop hydroponic farming operation in New York City. (Photo courtesy of Agritecture.)
Just last week, Manhattan-based BrightFarms announced it had raised $55 million. Shoppers can now find produce grown indoors by more than 23 large vertical farms in more than 20 supermarket chains in nearly every major metropolitan area in the country, according to Agritecture.
While industry leaders say scaling offers the best hope for profitability in this business, many vertical farms have encountered problems when they began planning to add additional production facilities. Before Atlanta-based PodPonics closed its doors in 2016, executives from the five-year-old hydroponic farm startup met with executives from supermarket chain Kroger.
Kroger indicated that it was ready to purchase 25 million pounds of produce from PodPonics annually if it would build the facilities to support that kind of production, founder Matt Liotta told a crowd at the 2017 Aglanta Conference. According to Liotta, who said PodPonics had lowered the cost to produce a pound of lettuce to $1.36, Whole Foods and Fresh Market also expressed interest in bringing PodPonics greens into their stores nationally.
“This was our wildest dream,” Liotta said. “Then we realized how much capital that was going to require, how many people we were going to have to hire. Every retailer told us the same thing: ‘We will buy it if you will build it.’ We realized we were incapable of building everything that they wanted.”
Unproven Demand for Food Grown Indoors
In early 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois-Urbana set out to determine whether consumers would spring for produce grown indoors. They asked a panel of 117 participants a series of questions about their perceptions of and willingness to pay for lettuce grown in fields, greenhouses, and in vertical farms. While vertical farming ranked fairly high in terms of produce quality and safety, the tech-heavy production method was rated less “natural” than both field farming and greenhouse and ranked last in participants’ willingness to purchase it.
For the vertical agriculture industry to eat into the profits of field-grown products—a roughly $140 billion industry—Agritecture Consulting founder and managing director Henry Gordon-Smith says it will first need to prove consumers are demanding produce grown indoors. He points out that because of a lack of demand, many vertical farming operations are not yet at full production year-round—despite touting the 12-month growing season as a main benefit of the industry.
His sense is that indoor farms that have achieved the sales to produce continually—such as Gotham Greens has with its New York City greenhouses, for example—have a customer base that’s responding to strong “local” branding rather than the technology behind the food. That may include vertical farms selling their produce using the USDA Certified Organic label, which the National Organic Board reaffirmed in January, much to the dismay of many organic dirt farmers.
“I think the automation and economics are all improving,” Gordon-Smith says, adding that the question of “whether consumers are going to pay more or whether the products coming out of vertical farms are going to align with their values” is still an open question.
But while many of the East Coast vertical farms built their business models around replacing greens being shipped cross-country from California and Arizona, Matt Barnard of Plenty hopes to add to the global population consuming fresh produce. A 2015 report found that where USDA guidelines suggest each of us in the U.S. should eat up to three cups of vegetables daily, current U.S. production is only providing enough for 1.7 cups per person. Barnard extends that supply gap to the rest of the world, especially the Middle East and Asia, where a lack of water and high pollution have hampered agriculture.
Plenty CEO Matt Barnard. (Photo courtesy of Plenty.)
“We believe the industry will be five times larger when there is supply to meet the demand,” Barnard says. “With the field unable to deliver consistent supply, new forms of agricultural capacity like Plenty must be added to the global food system.”
But as vertical farming companies like Plenty go city by city attempting to dominate local markets, it may be that small farmers get hurt the most. Barnard drew the ire of Washington State dirt farmers last year when he told GeekWire that Plenty expanded to Seattle, in part, because it was the West Coast’s “best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally.”
Not so, according to Sofia Gidlund, Farm Programs Manager at Tilth Alliance, which advocates for and supports local agriculture systems in Greater Seattle.
“We work with many hardworking local farmers who supply Seattle with high-quality, delicious, and nutritious food while caring deeply for our land. These farmers use sustainable farming practices, nurse the soil, create beautiful open green space and provide wildlife habitat,” says Gidlund, who adds that she does not speak for all area farmers on the issue of vertical farming. “Many consumers in Seattle choose to support local farmers, both urban or rural, because of this deep connection to the land. Providing that support is a point of pride for many Seattleites.”
Actual Data Is Coming
Peer-reviewed research into the business of vertical farming has been sparse, partly because the industry is so new. That’s set to change, however, when Mattson and a team of researchers at Cornell University finish a comprehensive study into the viability of this approach.
A three-year, $2.4 million research grant, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and kicked off in January, will compare the vertical farming industry to field agriculture in a slew of categories, including energy, carbon, and water footprints, profitability, workforce development, and scalability. The study will include one of the first nutritional analyses of food grown indoors, as well as comparing the price-per-pound to deliver strawberries, lettuce, and tomatoes grown vertically and outdoors to five U.S. metropolitan areas: New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.
A 2016 study conducted by a few of Mattson’s colleagues at Cornell found that the energy consumption and carbon footprint associated with a vertical farm (the study calls it a “plant factory”) is significantly higher than that of a greenhouse. Vertical farming leaders counter that they use significantly less water than field farms, are more space-efficient, and do not produce emissions from trucking produce across the country. Mattson says these factors were not considered in Cornell’s previous research but will be included in the current grant.
“[Vertical farming] is not a fad,” says Mattson, who wants to use data to help the industry become more sustainable over time. “I’m not sure to what degree it’s going to scale up, but this is happening. So we need to understand the economic and environmental implications—both the good and the bad.”
How To Grow Farm-To-Table Food And Where To Find It Ready-Made In Toronto
June 18, 2018
How To Grow Farm-To-Table Food And Where To Find It Ready-Made In Toronto
(All photos courtesy of Modular Farms Co.)
Let’s face it, none of us are Gwyneth Paltrow, the Goop guru and winner of everything organic and healthy. But with her inspiration and some easy life changes, we can come somewhat close. And in Toronto, this can be done thanks to Modular Farms Co. — a Canadian design and engineering company.
The company has made its mark by creating purpose-built container farms and delving into food research and development, using vertical farming solutions.
Its scalable and modular farming systems are capable of growing fresh foods virtually anywhere, in any climate.
Currently, Modular Farms is experimenting with vertically growing quinoa, blueberries, raspberries, lavender, and dandelion.
Dandelion processed with VSCO with fr4 preset.
Its CEO Eric Amyot is all about local eating.
He believes changing the global food system takes more than just funding from large corporations; it boils down to individuals.
Amyot says, “I want to not only expose people to the capabilities of what vertical farming can do but also teach others the tools that will enable them to grow local produce in their own backyards.”
Now that the weather is heating up, it’s time to get dirt stuck under your nails and bring hyper-local foods into your kitchen.
And so, we had Modular Farms, put together a grow guide so you can get started. Plus, we’ve rounded up some Toronto spots where you can eat a vertical farm-to-table meal.
Winterbor Kale
Whether you eat it in a salad, bake it in the oven, or add it to your morning smoothie, the kale craze is in full force.
Modular Farms grows a unique cool-season variety called winterbor kale, which features thick, curly, blue-green leaves, yielding 300-600 grams per eight-foot tower.
This hardy species of kale can be harvested in cooler months as a microgreen, baby greens (seedlings), mature leaves/leaflets or fully-grown plants, making it an excellent versatile plant to grow even at home.
It is an early-spring and late-fall species and is a popular choice amongst market growers. The variety is tastiest in a salad when the leaves are chopped finely and massaged or baked in culinary dishes.
Tip: Kale tastes sweeter with a touch of frost. Don’t be afraid to grow it through the winter months. Shield your kale during that time with row covers for extra protection.
Bull’s Blood Beet Microgreens
Bull’s blood beet microgreens stand out with colorful purple stems and bright green leaves. This plant is commonly used for garnishing and has a mild spinach-like flavor.
In Modular Farms, these sprouts are grown in trays using hemp mats as the substrate instead of soil or peat moss. However, feel free to use soil at home.
Luckily for all farmers (even home growers), microgreens have a very quick turnover rate (with each harvest taking place each time the plant reaches a height of four to five centimeters.
Tip: When watering, keep the water off the plants — only focus on the medium. This will help it last longer in the fridge. But since this plant degrades quickly, we recommend eating it as soon as possible once harvested.
Rosemary
Who doesn’t love to liven up their dishes with some fresh herbs?
Rosemary is a top choice amongst home growers with its ability to grow indoors and outdoors.
You can dry, freeze, preserve and even use the herb to flavor oil or butter. The best part? Once you cut rosemary, simply repeat the process and let it grow back in again. With ZipGrow towers, Modular Farms is able to grow up to five varieties of herb at a time.
Tip: Hang stems upside down in bunches to dry. Then, strip the leaves and store in a container to use in the kitchen.
Do want to grow? Then go vertical farm-to-table!
Not so into growing or growing impatient waiting for your plants to thrive? You can still make a difference by eating a vertical farm-to-table dish.
The Food Dudes have you covered as they currently receive a weekly batch of Modular Kale from the parking lot Modular Farm at the HQ to use in their vertical farm-to-table dishes. Find it at a couple of their restaurants, including OMAW and Rasa.
OMAW features a Rutabaga dish and chopped salad that contains fresh, modular kale grown in their parking lot (and is legit to die for).
The Food Dudes creative director Brent McClenahan wanted to install a Modular Farm to supply their restaurants because they saw Modular Farms Co. as a “manifestation of forward-looking companies actively trying to tackle the challenges facing our society.”
McClenahan says, “I saw the partnership as a way to get hyper-local food sources for a true farm-to-table experience and as a way to build a community who shares the same vision as my business — to create a food culture based on innovation and efficiency.”
With the capabilities of a Modular Farm, McClenahan and his team can grow produce and take it farm-to-table in a matter of hours. With this, diners are not only able to eat the freshest foods, but also will understand where and how their foods were grown.
This is yet another reason why I’m such a big fan of The Food Dudes — from their grade-A catering to their talk-of-the-town restaurants, they continue to shapeshift the Toronto food scene and set trends that help us grow and flourish.
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Indoor Farmers Are “Way Too Complacent” About Food Safety
Indoor Farmers Are “Way Too Complacent” About Food Safety
“If you mess up indoors, everything is magnified,” says Sarah Taber.
Taber is an independent food safety consultant specializing in indoor farming. Previously she served as director of food safety for The Aquaponics Association after earning a Doctorate of Plant Medicine. At the association, she saw startups pitch to investors a risk-free way of farming, and that’s where the worrying began, says Taber.
Since then she has worked with half a dozen hydroponic indoor farming operations of various sizes, funding sources, and technologies and her early worries are now full-blown concerns about the safety of the food grown on indoor farming for consumers. And with food safety scandals increasingly hitting the headlines — just last month thousands of pounds of romaine lettuce were recalled when 200 people became ill and five died — it’s time some indoor ag players stopped being “way too complacent” and woke up to the dangers, says Taber. (She chose not to name the farms due to non-disclosure agreements.)
Often called controlled environment agriculture (CEA), indoor farming is not new. Commercial greenhouses have been around since the 1920s, but in the last few years, CEA startups have started to raise large amounts of funding for high tech farming operations, often in urban areas. The basic formula is a controlled environment — where the temperature and ventilation can be controlled — soilless growing, using some form of hydroponics system, and in some cases, artificial light from specially designed LEDs. The promises of these farms are many: decrease the distance food must travel from farm to table, use less water and fewer agrochemicals, grow seasonal items all year round and in climates where it otherwise would not be possible.
Controlling every variable from temperature to humidity to plant nutrition while using artificial light perfectly calibrated for each plant is a pitch that has obviously sparked the imagination of the public and investors when you look at the more than $300 million invested in the space last year. And it can be a very good business. Just ask the Netherlands, which is second only to the US in food exports despite having 270 times less landmass thanks to its prolific CEA industry.
But a controlled environment does not automatically mean produce is exempt from food safety issues. And with investor appetite for big-ticket, high-tech indoor farms growing, particularly in the US, the sector is full of relatively new players growing plants and businesses very quickly — many spreading the idea that indoor farms are plant factories where the outcome is as assured as a Detroit auto assembly line.
The proclaimed dominance of technology over biology by this category of entrepreneurs has left some food safety experts concerned that consumers could be getting the wrong idea and startups may be drinking their own kool-aid.
“As a consultant, a lot of my time is spent grief counseling people over the loss of the innocence they had when they thought that food safety wasn’t a problem [indoors],” says Taber. “When you’re outside you have air circulation and sunlight that can brush back some of your mistakes. Temperature and humidity can get out of control indoors in a way it can’t outdoors and that can grow bacteria,” she continues.
What’s the risk? People and a lack of vigilance
It’s true; growing indoors inside a building or other structure can protect plants from contamination from above, like bird droppings and chemical drift. Isolated from other farming operations also means that the plants are safe from the inadvertent spreading of agrochemicals or animal waste — major causes of salmonella and e. Coli contamination in outdoor farming.
But, based on currently available CEA technology, indoor farmers are not immune to other food safety challenges, says Jeff Brandenburg. Vigilance is still very much needed.
Brandenburg is president of the JSB Group, a Massachusetts-based consultancy for every link in the produce supply chain. He has a masters degree in food safety and teaches good agricultural practices at various universities including UC Davis. He says that local farming, no matter the growing method, is often perceived as safer, not just by the public, but by the growers.
“You get these greenhouses and high tech operations that don’t have a fundamental understanding of food safety and how it works, and they think that it’s not their problem because of how their farms are built; that’s a problem,” says Brandenburg. “It might be slightly safer because you’re in a more controlled environment, but if that controlled environment gets out of control, then you’ve got a big problem. Bacteria is not biased. It doesn’t grow more on the west coast than it does on the east coast,” he adds.
All of the experts consulted for this report emphasized that people are the number one source of food safety problems in indoor farming. People bring in bacteria on clothes, shoes, and skin. With proper controls such as hairnets, face masks, foot baths, single-use or clean suits, the risk can be mitigated, but there is still plenty of room for error and these practices are not commonplace all over the industry.
Though eventual automation is part of the promise of the major indoor farming technology companies, it hasn’t become a reality in any meaningful way yet, so there are still a lot of people involved.
“Everybody’s talking about automation, but nobody is actually doing it, so there’s a huge amount of contact from workers. That’s the same as outdoor farming,” says Taber.
How is all this monitored?
The food safety of most commercial farms, indoor or outdoor, is monitored through audits and certifications where an outside body verifies that food safety practices and preventative measures are being carried out over varying lengths of time — sometimes several hours, sometimes several days.
The government body that oversees foods safety in the US is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but historically they have played a larger role in the aftermath of an outbreak than in its prevention.
The real pressure to keep up standards (other than the honest and genuine desire not to hurt people) comes from retailers that often require audits before they take on a new vendor and increasingly send their own auditors directly to farms.
The most stringent and widely-recognized family of audits are under the umbrella of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), which was established by the industry in 2000 to reduce food safety risks and streamline the audit process in an effort to lower costs for operators while improving overall food safety. GFSI certifications include Primus GFS Food Safety Management Systems, Global Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), Canada GAP, and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points — HACCP, and SQF – considered to be the most stringent audit of the group.
The USDA also offers a Good Agricultural Practices audit, which experts say is less stringent than the GFSI certifications, but is accepted by some retailers.
Venture-backed certifications
We asked some of the major venture-backed US indoor farms what certifications they had achieved. https://www.brightfarms.com/ and Bowery Farming both have SQF certifications. Plenty and Gotham Greens are both GFSI GAP certified (Gotham Greens manufacturing facilities for pesto and other products are comparably certified) and AeroFarms is USDA GAP certified.
A lack of advanced certifications does not necessarily mean that the practices required to pass such an audit are not in place, say several farmers consulted for this report. Farms often build their food safety capacity over time and only go through the time and expense of an audit when processes are finalized and unlikely to change.
Paul Lightfoot, CEO of Bright Farms, a hydroponic grower with four farms in four different US states, said that his company only underwent an SQF audit for each of its farms when the design of their farm was finalized and ready to be replicated in all new locations without alteration.
As many of the venture-backed farms are still iterating their technology, advanced certifications may be less likely, but food safety experts pointed out that one thing that makes high food safety standards much easier to achieve is ample funding.
“I don’t think the type of capital matters. I do think an insufficient amount of it might make a difference. Food safety requires investment. It changes the design of your facility. It changes how you staff your facility” says Lightfoot.
But funding is also no guarantee according to Brandenburg, “I’ve worked with a couple of startup operations that were venture capital-backed and the people had wonderful intentions, but knew nothing about the agricultural world. There’s a feeling of how hard can it be?”
On top of audits, farms are also subject to Food and Drug Administration regulation, most importantly the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) — a newly enacted policy that is intended to give the administration better tools for preventing outbreaks rather than simply responding to them.
The first compliance date for the FSMA Produce Rule was January 26, 2018, and farms with annual sales over $500,000 are affected.
The new rule establishes protocols for how produce farmers harvest, wash, package, and store fruits and vegetables usually consumed raw. Standards for microbial water quality, biological soil amendments, managing livestock and wild animals, health and hygiene, and equipment, tools and building make up the majority of the law.
Some experts doubt whether the rule will reduce instances of food-borne illness in a meaningful way, and many small-scale farmers worry about the costs of coming into compliance.
“In the past, it could be a dusty binder sitting on a shelf and when you think you’re going up for an audit you just backfill in information, which is really problematic,” says Allison Kopf, CEO of Agrilyst, a farm management software platform and app for indoor growers. She says that though many farms were ready for FSMA, some used it as on opportunity to digitize some very analog systems of food safety control.
She adds that farmers have a real fear of hurting people and they want regulation that will actually help with that. What they don’t want is regulation that will add to their workload without helping with that.
The CEA Food Safety Coalition
Indoor farming executives speak about the possibility of a foodborne illness stemming from the industry with palpable fear. In order to allay that fear, they’re teaming up – a big deal for an industry laser-focused on proving and registering unique intellectual property.
Next week a group of indoor farming companies will meet at the United Fresh FreshTEC trade show in Chicago to hash out details of a new organization: the Controlled Environment Agriculture Food Safety Coalition.
The group is the brainchild of Lightfoot and counts AeroFarms and Massachusetts hydroponic farm Little Leaf Farms as founding members. Eleven other indoor farms have expressed interest.
Lightfoot said the idea was inspired by the recent romaine lettuce scandal. Bright Farms went through its own scare in the Fall of 2017 when it voluntarily recalled all of its products from four midwest supermarket chains for potential e. Coli risk. No illnesses were reported.
Now the former software executive is working to spread the idea that food safety best practices should never be proprietary, with the knowledge that if one farm has a major food safety incident, all players in this young industry could feel the pain.
The goals of the coalition, according to Lightfoot, are to develop guidelines on food safety and protocols specific to indoor farming; to create a list of resources for coalition members; to establish a board of advisors to help members navigate food safety incidents; to build website to educate growers and address the public when needed.
But a lot is still yet to be decided before the work can even begin. At the conference in Chicago, the farms that have so far shown interest will meet to elect a steering committee. Eventually there may be a certain food safety certification requirement to join, but currently its open to all comers.
And while the industry is hoping and working to never see a major outbreak, Taber says that the outbreaks are the best teachers despite their sometimes tragic results.
“When you get down to it, the way people learn about fallibility, and that you can fail even if you didn’t mean to, is by seeing it happen. folks in the ag industry may not have had an outbreak on their farm, but they know someone its happened to. For them it is real.”
The 'Internet of Farming' Is Disrupting Traditional Agriculture
The 'Internet of Farming' Is Disrupting Traditional Agriculture
BY KAREN GRAHAM June 17, 2018 TECHNOLOGY
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Generations of farmers have relied on knowledge and family expertise to grow food, but the sector is set for a surge of disruption at the hands of made-in-Canada artificial intelligence-powered systems.
Investment in artificial intelligence is growing in Canada. In 2017, venture capital investment in AI nearly doubled - to $12 billion. And looking at the agriculture sector, AI is helping farmers to increase crop yields, save costs and reduce environmental damages.How is this possible? For generations - farmers have relied on their own knowledge of the land and past experience to get the most profit from their farms, regardless of if they had a dairy or raised food crops. With the new technologies available today, farmers can now target their use of fertilizers or herbicides, saving money and minimizing environmental damage.
Growing vegetables using robotics. Bowery Farms
With AI, dairy farmers now have the option of getting accurate information on the levels of progesterone in milk, providing them with reliable data on when a cow is in heat and the optimum time to inseminate. The technology can enhance farming practices, manage mastitis, reduce unnecessary antibiotic usage, and virtually eliminate the addition of low-quality, low-fat milk into bulk storage tanks.
SomaDetect - Technology for the dairy industry Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada-based SomaDetect, Inc. was founded in 2016 by Bethany Deshpande and her husband and business partner, Nicholas Clermont. In October 2017, the fledgling company was the $1 million grand prize winner of the fourth annual 43North competition, held in Buffalo, New York.
A photo of a cow being milked on a dairy farm in Girgarre, Victoria. JH
The technology allows dairy farmers to measure major indicators of milk quality and herd health, directly in the milking line. SomaDetect's technology does not require added chores or the use of chemicals, cartridges, or lost milk - It's all automatic.SomaDetect sensors are installed at each milking stall and will identify each cow, test their milk and quickly provide farmers an array of metrics such as protein and fat counts, indicators of disease, hormones (progesterone) that manage reproduction and antibiotic residuals.The company is now preparing to deliver commercial systems this fall that will test milk and use AI to maximize a dairy farmer's profitability through the "Internet of Cows."
SomaDetect
"We are in a fourth revolution in agriculture and AI is absolutely critical," said co-founder Bethany Deshpande. Deshpande points out that the technology is at an early stage - and farmers are just beginning to understand the power and full potential of AI."A lot of farmers have been demanding better technology, demanding better products for a long time and I think AI is a huge part of how they're going to get that."Motorleaf - AI for greenhouse and indoor operatorsFounded in 2015 by Alastair Monk and Ramen Dutta, Montreal, Quebec, Canada-based Motorleaf, Inc. has developed a system that acquires data from indoor growing operations and applies artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms to identify growing patterns.
Motorleaf Inc.
The Motorleaf system helps growers produce more, and a better quality product; by automatically adjusting to the needs of the crop. The company builds separate components, each of which has a specific set of functions. They can operate separately, or if you add onto the MotorLeaf HEART - operate as a larger whole. The technology has already been proven in vegetable production operations. California greenhouse SunSelect used Motorleaf’s technology in a trial that led to a 50-percent reduction in yield prediction error in tomatoes. These results were enough for SunSelect to adopt Motorleaf’s algorithms after a short trial. According to the Motorleaf website, "The Heart is the center of Motorleaf’s monitoring and automation system. It can operate separately to monitor air temperature, relative humidity, and light levels and it can connect to the Powerleaf, Droplet, Driplet, Space Sensor and Space Sensor Plus to monitor and control what’s important."
More about agriculture, technology, dairy, greenhouse crops, artificial intelligence
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/the-internet-of-farming-is-disrupting-traditional-agriculture/article/524885#ixzz5IiyxouUd
Autogrow Welcomes Technology Focused CFO
Autogrow Welcomes Technology Focused CFO
Rod Britton has been named Chief Financial Officer at global AgTech company Autogrow to help drive its ambitious growth plans.
Rod has worked for over 30 years in technology-led businesses in the United Kingdom, Europe and the U.S. His experience spans operational, strategic and corporate finance as well as partnerships with private equity, venture capital and other external finance providers.
“I believe in a strong customer focus and understanding what they will experience. This includes how we price something, the value proposition, how support is handled, and generally how the customer is handled through their time with us,” Rod explains.
“Autogrow has growers of every size, in multiple countries, growing different crops in a variety of different growing environments (greenhouse, protected cropping, indoors), and all of them have different challenges. The common language amongst them all is ‘financial’.”
“In the end, we are solving the challenge of increasing the financial returns to growers, which could be through higher yields, better quality, reduction in waste, reduction in operating costs, reduction in natural resources or increasing the predictability of harvest. By improving these drivers of improved grower performance, the customer benefits and there is more food to go around when people want it.”
For more information: www.autogrow.com
Publication date: 6/18/2018
China: "Hydroponic Lettuce New Favorite of Restaurants"
"We grow lettuce throughout the year without interruption. The process from seedling until mature plant takes roughly four weeks. Our weekly production volume is 13-15 thousand heads of lettuce. Our annual production volume is estimated at 700 thousand heads of lettuce.
China: "Hydroponic Lettuce New Favorite of Restaurants"
"The Pole Star Agricultural Science and Technology Park of Beijing Chengjian Liu Construction Group Co., Ltd. is located on an industrial terrain in Miyun District of Beijing. The greenhouses cover 3.3 hectares and include 2.2 hectares of tomato plantations and 2000 m2 of lettuce plantation, as well as 2000 m2 of nursery garden. Hydroponic lettuce is popular with a wide audience because of its short growing season, large production volume, lack of pollution, and high product quality." This is according to Xu Dan, the CEO of Beijing Pole Star Agricultural Co., Ltd.
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CEO Xu Dan (first left) guides Beijing VIP's on a tour of the plantation. The company includes Cai Qi (second left), secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and simultaneous committee member of the central political bureau, and Chen Jining (fifth left), mayor of Beijing
Hydroponic plantation
Hydroponic plantation
"We grow lettuce throughout the year without interruption. The process from seedling until mature plant takes roughly four weeks. Our weekly production volume is 13-15 thousand heads of lettuce. Our annual production volume is estimated at 700 thousand heads of lettuce. We work together with an advanced Dutch seed company to research and develop product varieties. We currently grow 8 product varieties that belong to the high-end Salanova series of Dutch company Rijk Zwaan."
Hydroponic plantation
Hydroponic plantation
Hydroponic plantation
"Our hydroponic lettuce is sold under the brand 'Polaris' in high-end supermarkets, high-end hotels, and high-end restaurants in first and second tier cities throughout China. The dietary habits of people have changed and lettuce has become a regular ingredient of salads that accompany the meal. More and more consumers, in particular young consumers, enjoy hydroponic lettuce."
Xu Dan
Beijing Hortipolaris
Company telephone: +86 138 1022 2990
Company e-mail: dan.xu@hortipolaris.com
The Future Of Farming
The Future Of Farming
by Mahak Mannan | June 19, 2018
Delivering micro-greens to commercial kitchens they day they are harvested, Badia Farms, the GCC’s first indoor vertical farm using hydroponics technology, is set to revolutionize local farming in the region andMahak Mannan caught up with the founder and CEO, Omar Al Jundi on what the new facility has to offer.
When you step into the Badia Farms facility in Al Quoz, Dubai, it is hard to imagine that it houses an indoor vertical farm full of leafy greens which are sowed, grown and harvested in house on a regular basis.
The process of building the facility which could sustain an indoor vertical farm and provide the plants with the required elements took over a year with Badia Farms breaking into the market in 2018, offering fresh leafy greens to a commercial kitchen in the UAE.
“The region that we live in is agriculturally challenged, it is a huge problem for us and we always hear about how the government is trying to address the issue of food security and self-sufficiency. Imagine if everything is flown in and suddenly there is an issue, how are we going to feed the people?” Al Jundi asks.
“When I realized what a big problem it was, I researched and saw that the UAE import 80% of its ingredients and can’t farm all year round due to the weather conditions. Also, when I was in Europe, I was introduced to so many different varieties and flavourful ingredients that explode in your mouth and I wondered why we don’t have it here.” Al Jundi says.
With this thought, the concept of Badia Farms was born aiming to introduce new and fresh products to the market offering the quality and flavor that imported ingredients may not be able to match.
THE OPERATION
Running an indoor vertical farm is a 24/7 job, according to Al Jundi, as the farm requires regular monitoring to ensure the crops get the perfect amount of water, light, and humidity to grow.
“Our seeds are all imported and not genetically modified. We sow them and ensure they germinate in the farm and that is when we move them to the system. Once they are have germinated we need to ensure they are getting the perfect amount of humidity, temperature, and spectrum of light so they can grow,” he explains.
“Since everything is high-tech, the operation is not an issue as much as monitoring is to make sure the plants do not turn yellow. It is a lot more data collection and monitoring to ensure the correct flow is taking place. The staff walks in every 10-15 minutes to monitor the plants as things could change very quickly. Everything is set up correctly but like any other operation it could go wrong like the temperature going up to 28° when it is set at 22°,” Al Jundi says.
The entire function of the farm is operated through a machine which controls the likes of water and temperature with the touch of a button.
“Everything has to work together, we need to ensure that the water that comes in the summer is cooled down before using it, the humidity outdoor does not get indoor and the temperature control stays in place,” he adds.
THE PRODUCE
Badia farms grow all types of leafy greens like kale, radish, coriander, lettuce, basil, mint, mustard, and arugula to name a few.
The seeds used are bred by farmers in Europe over the span of 10-15 years in order to make a master hybrid, which is how the farm can grow exclusive flavors like lemon basil, cinnamon basil, red basil, and chocolate mint.
“They would bring a basil plant and a lemon plant, marry it in a sense and have this hybrid produce seeds that would have the perfect mix of flavour, this is why it is such a long process, as there are so many varieties of basil and lemon, they need to get the perfect combination to produce these seeds,” Al Jundi says.
The best-selling product at Badia Farms is the Jumeirah Mix, according to the founder, which includes radish, kale, arugula, rocket and red cabbage. The products flown in from Europe have their own name and we are proud to be from the region so we named this product to celebrate Dubai. It is a satisfactory feeling when I see hotels use the Jumeirah Mix,” he adds.
Recently, Classic Fine Foods came on board with Badia Farms as the distributor for their products.
Currently, the same products that are grown at Badia farms can take up to a week to be flown into the UAE, “Micro-greens are delicate plants, when they are flown in from Europe chefs say there is already a 2% loss of the product. In our case, there is zero waste. If it is ordered today, the produce can reach your kitchen in a few hours depending on the location,” Al Jundi says.
“When you are comparing apple to apple, our product to the flown in product, our yield is higher because we can grow more and sow more seeds, they also last longer.”
THE BENEFITS
One of the most important factors about Badia Farms is that the method of farming is sustainable, saving up to 90% water when compared to traditional farming.
“On the open field, if you use water once, it is gone but here you could re-use the same water up to 10 times,” Al Jundi says.
“This is exactly what the region needs, it is also pesticide free, we use renewable energy and everything is designed in-house. Badia Farms is a home-grown concept and I believe that the problems of the region will be solved by its own people. We can always go out and learn from experience about best practices but when it comes to finding a solution, it is down to us.”
The selling price of the products at Badia Farms is lower than the price of importing the same, according to the CEO.
“In terms of pricing, ours is lower and as we grow we will be able to reduce the prices further,” he says.
Since the indoor farm can provide optimal conditions to grow the crop through any season, it has a higher yield too.
“As an example, lettuce can have three cycles per year in an open field, however indoor we can have up to 11 or 12. It differs from product to product but we have seen about 1000 heads of lettuce harvested here in a day,” he adds.
The farm is currently operating in zone one with zone two due to open soon that will enable the facility to produce in larger quantities.
“This is the future of farming. We are able to farm with the weather conditions in the UAE, combating through the tough summers, saving 90% of water in the process, grow all year round and not use any pesticides,” Al Jundi says
“The problem of agriculture in the region will be solved through modern farming. We need commitment, focus, dedication and set examples for others to follow. There is so much more than needs to be done and can be done, we do not need an answer to come from abroad.”
Tagged under:
agriculture, badia farms, Dubai, farming, indoor farming, micro greens
"Indoor Farms Could Fine-Tune The Flavours of Our Food"
"Indoor Farms Could Fine-Tune The Flavours of Our Food"
A new way to farm indoors using different wavelengths of light could boost the taste of fruits, salads, and herbs, while also increasing food supply and nutritional value.
Growing food inside brings many benefits to farmers by reducing the amount of land, fertilizers, energy, and water needed to cultivate the plants.
But it can come with a major drawback – produce grown indoors sometimes lacks the depth of flavor it would have if it was allowed to flourish and ripen outside.
And it is the controlled environment of indoor farming itself that seems to be at least partly responsible.
‘A plant that grows outside is stressed,’ said Alexander Penzias, co-founder of Ponix Systems, an agriculture company specializing in indoor farming based in Vienna, Austria.
Extreme temperatures, hailstones, torrential rain or too much shade all produce stress that affects the growth rate of food. But these trying moments also force plants to produce phytochemicals, the active compounds that give fruit and vegetables their distinctive flavors.
In the future, produce could be grown directly in supermarkets or restaurants. Image credit - infarm
Despite increasing yield, the carefully controlled climates used in indoor farming do not stress the plants enough for them to produce these flavorsome phytochemicals.
This is bad news for taste. But it is also a weakness that could prevent this form of sustainable food production ever achieving widespread acceptance by consumers.
Indoor farming techniques like greenhouses and hydroponics systems, a soil-free system that uses artificial sunlight, also produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional agriculture. But if consumers are not willing to buy food produced in this way, the environmental benefits will be impossible to realize.
‘If you have plants that come out of a hydroponic system, it is not a case of them tasting good or bad, it is that they don’t have a taste at all,’ added Penzias.
His team, however, have focused on tuning light emitting diodes (LEDs) to produce specific wavelengths of light that encourage indoor plants to release phytochemicals.
They have developed this into a series of light recipes for specific plants that not only enhance flavor but allow it to be tuned. Amber light, for example, can increase the flavor of basil, while ultraviolet light can boost the taste of tomatoes flavor and also make salad leaves thicker and therefore more palatable.
Subjecting plants to different wavelengths of light can induce the production of phytochemicals and help develop flavors. Image credit - Ponix Systems
On top of that, it can also boost the health benefits of the food.
‘If it tastes better, it means it has a higher nutritional content,’ said Penzias. Many phytochemicals can be classified as antioxidants, which are good for heart health and the immune system, he added.
Ponix Systems are currently conducting a feasibility study of their LED technology as part of the flexiLED project. Once it is completed, they hope to team up with researchers and farmers to develop a commercial product.
Currently, the indoor farming company specializes in a hydroponic system called Herbert, which are stackable modules that can be installed on walls in homes or larger premises like offices or restaurants. They have already installed some of these modules in a school and a hospitality academy in Austria.
‘At first, the cooks were skeptical of the system,’ said Penzias. ‘But as soon as the cooks started harvesting the food, the flavors were more intense than what they expected.’
Commercialisation
Ponix Systems are planning to introduce their new light recipe technology at the school within the next few months and at the hospitality academy soon after that. The chefs there are already eager to tune the flavors of their indoor-farmed food.
This is a significant achievement, Penzias believes, because overcoming the skepticism of notoriously picky chefs is a good insight into the challenge of convincing the public.
‘When consumers hear the term hydroponics they are immediately scared,’ said Penzias. He said the term can often sound too technical or chemical to appeal to environmentally conscious shoppers.
But one indoor farming business based in Berlin, Germany, may have found the secret to successfully addressing the taste issue on a large scale in Europe.
Infarm offers supermarkets monthly subscriptions to rent an indoor farming system alongside their optimizing growing services, such as algorithms that determine the most efficient use of light, water and nutrients. They also use specific wavelengths to enhance the flavour of the plants they grow.
Martin Weber, chief financial officer at Infarm said: ‘We are really able to show that people are buying our produce and prefer it over existing stuff that is out there.’
Infarm produce has already been used by Michelin star chefs in Germany, while their indoor systems have been installed in other restaurants and a Berlin supermarket, which allows the retailer to sell the produce grown directly to its customers.
‘Normally, they are buying at a specific margin for a lot of produce, but they throw away a big amount of it,’ said Weber.
At the same time, it eliminates the costs of importing salads or herbs from other parts of the world, greatly reducing the environmental impact.
Infarm’s technology is now being used in over 50 Berlin supermarkets and they are planning to expand to Paris, France, in August and then to London, UK, soon after. Their first farm in a French supermarket will also be their biggest one yet. Covering 100m2, it will produce five tonnes of herbs, allowing the retailer to become self-sufficient for this commodity.
‘The food we are consuming is traveling too far and its carbon footprint is devastating for the world,’ added Weber. ‘(In the future) we will be growing a lot of food in cities, or closer to the cities.’
Source: European Commission (Steve Gillman)
Publication date: 6/14/2018
Will High-Tech Indoor Agriculture Transform Local Food?
Will High-Tech Indoor Agriculture Transform Local Food?
By Rene Ebersole, June 12, 2018Photography by Liz Clayman
On one of those unseasonable 40-degree days this April when there was soaking ice-cold rain followed by umbrella-wrecking wind, the weather inside a miniature indoor farm near Manhattan’s City Hall was balmy.
Farm.One CEO and founder Robert Laing, in a black chef coat and jeans, surveyed the plants perfuming a 1,200-square-foot growing space, formerly a bicycle gym, in a building that also houses a veterinary clinic, a doggy swimming pool, and Atera, a two-star Michelin restaurant serving dinner for $275 a plate. Space-saving expandable library shelves were lined with dozens of hydroponic plants grown in a water-based nutrient system instead of soil: snap peas, green sorrel, lemon basil, red mizuna, lemon gem marigold. “Here’s one of my favorites,” Laing said, picking a leaf and a tiny flower snugly tucked beneath rows of bright LED lights. “It’s called “nepitella,” a flowering herb from Tuscany. Italian chefs are excited to see it in New York City because sometimes they haven’t seen it in years. It’s a little bit minty—the flowers have a powerful flavor for something so small.”
Laing specializes in selling such rare and unusual herbs, greens and edible flowers to mostly high-end restaurants—from Le Turtle on the Lower East Side to Daniel uptown and Atera upstairs. Those restaurants’ chefs are willing to pay a premium for hard-to-find produce harvested and delivered the same day. “The growing climate in New York is difficult,” Laing said. “So chefs here really have a tough time getting rare produce—they have to ship it from miles away and by the time it gets here it’s not at its best. I really wanted to create a way to grow interesting things in the heart of the city year-round.”
Mizuna growing at Farm.One.
In a town of eight million, Farm.One is part of a rising movement to cultivate produce where large numbers of people live by using high-tech systems and smart greenhouses placed at grocery stores, in basements and even inside cargo vessels. Leading restaurants have embraced these futuristic farms for a range of reasons, including variety, ingredient quality and virtually unlimited availability in all seasons.
Critics, however, question whether high-tech farming in confined spaces will be destined to cater only to elite restaurants, especially considering the much bigger national marketplace flooded with cheaper produce from California and Arizona. Chefs also debate taste. Some are grateful to have local hydroponic produce to flavor their dishes in all seasons. Others swear the produce is inferior to herbs and vegetables from a dirt farm with the characteristic flavor of the soil where they grow.
There are also questions about what will happen if these indoor urban farms really take off, including whether they might undercut local farms on the metropolitan fringe. “The need to protect and preserve that open space is real,” says Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York, and one of the pioneers of the farm-to-table movement. “To divert from that in any way seems to be a lost opportunity—even though I see the excitement of doing some salad greens in a shipping container.”
Urban farming business and distribution models vary almost as widely as the types of plants being cultivated. Farm.One’s website recently listed about 18 different types of produce ranging from a 10-count of yarrow or marigold leaves for $5 available to online customers to papalo (an ancient Mexican herb similar to cilantro) starting at $8.75 an ounce for restaurant orders only. “We’re doing this at the high end because that’s where we know we can make money and have a sustainable business,” Laing says. He envisions expanding Farm.One in New York and in other cities with a continued focus on providing produce to restaurants and being a model to make such produce more accessible to consumers. “It’s really cool to think in a city like New York there are thousands of spaces like this,” he says. “The technology is there. I think the applications can spread.”
Megan Waller, Harvest Captain at Farm.One, harvests dianthus.
Indeed, technology is the central focus of most city farms. Smallhold, founded in 2017, pre-grows gourmet mushrooms that are finished in restaurants and a grocery store in leased climate-controlled cases lit by blue fluorescent lights and monitored and operated remotely by the company’s growers in Bushwick. Also located in Brooklyn, Square Roots, recently launched by Kimbal Musk (younger brother of Tesla boss Elon Musk) and his partner, Tobias Peggs, is helping young entrepreneurs use the latest innovations to farm in cargo vessels; a 320-square-foot container can purportedly supply about as much produce as a two-acre farm.
Gotham Greens, with locations in New York and Chicago, uses automation and sensors that can detect light levels, carbon dioxide, temperature, and humidity to operate four rooftop hydroponic greenhouses producing about a dozen types of lettuces and herbs. The greenhouses represent 170,000 square feet of combined growing space. In 2014 the company opened a greenhouse atop a Brooklyn Whole Foods—the first commercial-scale rooftop greenhouse integrated into a supermarket. “Our growers are harvesting, packaging and then the product goes down to the store,” Gotham Greens director of marketing Nicole Baum says. “We’ve reduced food miles to food footsteps.”
Despite those lower transportation costs, investors are concerned about the profitability of so many start-ups. “Most urban farms are costly and therefore their prices are higher than what one can pay at a grocery store for a field-grown product trucked across the country,” says Dan Pullman, managing partner of Fresh Source Capital, a company investing in local food and agricultural systems. “You’ve got to make money on this stuff. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”
Baum said Gotham Greens’ prices are competitive with local and organic lettuce brands, about $3.99 for a 4.5-ounce container. Still, the company is a small-scale producer vying for consumers faced with a financial decision: pay the price for local organic, save 50 cents by purchasing a well-known organic brand, or a whole dollar for conventional greens from California or Arizona. “There is always a consumer who will pay for value,” Pullman says. “Gotham may be in a good position because they’ve got loyal regional markets, but replacing lower-cost producers will be tough.”
Freshly harvested edible flowers at Farm.One.
A puree of Gotham Greens’ basil spinach currently stars on one of the flatbreads served in Gramercy Tavern. “They’ve given us access to harvested greens in even the cold weather months,” executive chef Michael Anthony says. “That makes for exceptionally high quality from a restaurant perspective.”
But some chefs say hydroponic lettuce will never rival the taste of lettuce grown in the earth. “I’ve never tasted any hydroponics that I think are really that delicious,” says Dan Barber of Stone Barns, which grows some of its lettuce in a nearby greenhouse and sources more from local farms. “Sure, the quality in terms of the way the product looks and the yield can be more consistent by being contained because you’re not subject to the whims of nature—but that doesn’t mean it’s better.”
What’s more, Barber adds, “the side effect of the excitement about indoor farming takes away from the investment and intellectual capital in creating systems for agriculture that are still very viable surrounding major metropolitan areas.” For him, it’s important to preserve the farmscape, healthy agriculture and organic philosophies based on sustainable land use and feeding the soil, not just the plant.
Dave Chapman, the owner of Long Wind Farm in Vermont, is on the board of the Real Organic Project, an organization created to challenge the USDA’s recent decisions to certify hydroponic produce and scrap rules about animal welfare. While he’s not opposed to hydroponic farming—“some of my good friends do it”—he wants the methods to be transparent so consumers understand the produce isn’t grown in soil. “This is happening,” he says. “We can’t be food fascists—don’t grow that way! As long as farmers are being honest about how they’re growing, people will decide over time what they think.”
If the glow of LED lights in pockets around the city is an indicator of how much New Yorkers appreciate freshly grown local produce, the urban farming trend may continue to spread. As long as those farms are profitable, entrepreneurs will invest, restaurants will buy—and diners will clean their plates.
Lead image: Rob Laing, CEO of Farm.One, picks anise hyssop flowers in the company’s grow room.
The Wonderful Co. Named Fastest-Growing Company
The Wonderful Co. Named Fastest-Growing Company
JUNE 14, 2018
The Wonderful Co. has positioned itself as the No. 1 growth leader among all multibillion-dollar consumer packaged goods companies, as well as the No. 1 growth leader in produce in 2017. That’s according to data provided by market research firm IRI. In addition, a study released today by the Boston Consulting Group and IRI measuring growth across all CPG categories positions Wonderful as the top growth leader amongst all midsize companies in the U.S. ($1 billion to $5.5 billion in retail sales).
A deeper dive into the IRI data reveals that Wonderful ranks in the top five for adding dollars to the entire CPG industry and accounted for an astounding 5 percent of all CPG growth. As the only multibillion-dollar company with double-digit growth at 13 percent, it underscores that part of the reason for Wonderful’s success is the popularity of convenient nutrition and wellness products.
“More than half of U.S. households already buy a Wonderful product each year, and IRI data in concert with this study clearly demonstrates that our healthy offerings are resonating with consumers,” said Adam Cooper, vice president of marketing for The Wonderful Co. “The Wonderful Company is relentlessly focused on driving healthier eating options. Over the past 10 years, we’ve invested more than $3 billion in capital and $1 billion in marketing and brand building. With these investments, and consumers increasingly seeking nutritious choices, Wonderful is poised for even more growth in the future.”
The BCG report notes that Wonderful and a handful of other CPG leaders were able to buck the trend of declining sales experienced by most midsize and large companies. They did so by developing differentiated offerings for their core audience, targeting consumers with greater precision, and relying on inorganic as well as organic growth to bolster their portfolios and facilitate expansion into new markets.
The report’s findings were based on the growth performance of more than 400 CPG companies with annual U.S. retail sales exceeding $100 million. The analysis, which covered both public and private companies, focused on what consumers actually buy in measured channels, as opposed to what factories ship. Companies were ranked on a combination of three metrics: dollar sales growth, volume sales growth, and market share gains. The study also analyzed trends that drove performance in the sector.
Japan’s Indoor Ag Sector is Becoming More Collaborative
Ahead of her speaking slot at the Indoor Agtech Summit in New York next week, we caught up with Eri Hayashi, director of International Relations & Consulting of the Japan Plant Factory Association (JPFA), a non-profit organization devoted to academic and business advancements in Japan’s indoor ag industry.
Japan’s Indoor Ag Sector is Becoming More Collaborative
JUNE 14, 2018 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
Ahead of her speaking slot at the Indoor Agtech Summit in New York next week, we caught up with Eri Hayashi, director of International Relations & Consulting of the Japan Plant Factory Association (JPFA), a non-profit organization devoted to academic and business advancements in Japan’s indoor ag industry. Hayashi told us about the differences between the industry in the US and Japan, particularly around secrecy and collaboration.
What is the Japan Plant Factory Association?
We launched in 2011 with support from the Japanese government and are located in the campus of Chiba University, which is famous for agriculture studies and located in Kashiwanoha, an agri smart city. We have 130 local and international company members and 100 individual members, and our mission is to develop and introduce sustainable technologies to the world to solve three major global issues: food, energy, and resources. We want to do so in collaboration with research institutes and companies and currently have more than 20 research and development projects ongoing with different groups. There are around 10 greenhouses and vertical farms onsite that we manage. We focus on fostering collaboration between academia and industry.
We also provide workshops and training, technical business support as well as hosting an international conference. We have been providing these workshops and training courses every month for almost 10 years. We have different topics every month with roughly 100 people joining each session to share information and network with one another. This coming October, we will have an intensive course on vertical farms in English for beginners, covering what you would need to know before or after starting indoor farming business/research. Weekly sessions will include academic and practical classes, such as lighting, plant physiology, nutrient solutions, seedlings, and business case studies of commercial large-scale farms.
JPFA
Do members pay?
There are different categories and levels of involvement that incur different fees per year. Some members, for instance, will use our onsite greenhouses — which were originally partially funded by the government — and put their own system inside it depends on the research topic. We also have a vertical farm that members can use. But other members utilize JPFA for networking and information sharing, and we also have an onsite tour of more than 5,000 people a year of which 40% are international.
What are some of the technologies being used and tested on-site?
There are multiple technologies being developed and tested on-site, but a particularly notable collaborative R&D project started last year about using artificial intelligence, phenotyping-based environmental controls and breeding for plant factories. Apart from developing a smart module system, we are developing phenotyping units for plant factories.
How would you describe Japan’s indoor ag sector?
From a historical standpoint, the first “boom” for indoor agriculture was in the 1980s, the second in the 1990s and we’ve been in the third boom since 2009 with around 200 plant factories across Japan.
I think we are shifting into the fourth boom now, which will be the scalability boom and the introduction of new technologies from artificial intelligence to phenotyping to automation.
The industry has been largely in research mode since 1970 and now the technology is getting ready for application.
Which are the biggest indoor farms in Japan?
Spread or 808 Factory, for example, are some of the biggest with a couple more of a similar size at the construction stage, but the number of large-scale farms is growing and that’s characteristic of the fourth generation of indoor ag in Japan.
In the US, you see a lot of indoor farms building their own technologies in-house, instead of collaborating with one another to deploy third-party technologies. Is this the same in Japan?
I get to see a lot of indoor farms not only in Japan but in the US and other countries where I think each farm is doing great but they are rather secretive and protective of their intellectual property. Even if I have a good discussion with them about their farms, they will ask me not to tell anyone!
Is it not so secretive in Japan?
It’s been changing; each farm is now realizing that we will need to work together at some point while of course each running a business. At JPFA we have several committee meetings, one of which is really interesting as all the major large-scale farms get together in the same room to discuss profitability and defining the terms and terminologies we use in the industry such as efficiency in electricity, labor, cultivation area, and investment. They also discuss how to improve the profitability of farms so they are actually open to sharing their experiences and it’s actually neat; I love this meeting.
The point of these meetings, and JPFA in general is also to share data and facilitate research in the industry. Each R&D project has a different perspective on how to do research and this sharing can help to minimize the risk of starting a business. Standardization is also crucial to advance the industry. We also have been organizing LED committee meetings for some years together with leading researchers and LED companies, working on standardization and transparency of this technology. As we see the fourth boom increase the use of new software, AI, machine learning and other dynamic technologies and breeding techniques, there will be more overlap between the businesses.
How else do the US and Japan compare?
In general what’s different between Japan and US is the dynamics of the investment environment. Plenty was a huge investment which could lead them to have more chance to develop and hire more people, as well as develop innovation in-house. Also, Japan is more detailed-oriented while the US is rather more marketing-oriented, and full of entrepreneurial spirit.
What are the main challenges for Japan’s indoor ag sector?
Hiring talent, relatively high electricity costs, and diversity. We also need the industry to start taking more of a social design approach to the sector – not just agriculture and science – but more like an architectural approach to integrate with society and create something new.
Forget Farm To Table — This Salad Bar Harvests Your Lunch Before Your Eyes
'THIS IS THE FUTURE OF FAST CASUAL FOOD'
Forget Farm To Table — This Salad Bar Harvests Your Lunch Before Your Eyes
Israeli-Americans Liz Vaknin and Shelley Golan are revolutionizing the food industry with tasty, nutrition-dense microgreens grown right behind the counter
By DANIELLE ZIRIT - July 1, 2018
NEW YORK — When Le Cordon Bleu-educated cook Liz Vaknin worked in some of Manhattan’s most prestigious restaurant kitchens several years ago, she often had to fish inside a container of small green leaves and stems to garnish elaborate dishes.
Little did she know that the tiny shoots, also known as microgreens, would one day change her life.
“I was a steak and potatoes girl four days a week. I eat mostly microgreens now and I feel satisfied,” Vaknin tells The Times of Israel. “I think that says a lot.”
In early June, Vaknin and her business partner Shelley Golan, both Israeli-American New Yorkers who crossed paths studying at the IDC Herzliya some 10 years ago, opened the first-ever microgreen salad bar in the United States. It takes the trendy “farm to table” concept to a whole new level.
Vaknin and Golan’s revolutionary business is called Harvest2Order. Today it is a small booth located inside Brooklyn’s newest food hall, the North 3rd Street Market in Williamsburg.
Walking around the location, it is very clear that the area is a food lover's heaven: the Mast Brothers chocolate factory on one side; all-day breakfast spot Egg on the other; the popular Blue Bottle coffee shop around the corner; and many more small casual cafes on the way.
The stand itself is simple: a shiny white-tiled booth with a white counter and an iPad checkout. But the eye-catching attraction is on the back wall: seven shelves of potted plants with microgreens of different shapes and colors perfectly aligned and “tanning” under bands of pink and blue LED lights.
Vertically grown microgreens harvested from directly behind the counter at Harvest2Order salad bar in New York City. (Courtesy)
This intriguing vertical lab is not just a display: At Harvest2Order, the microgreens used in each salad are harvested on the spot, right in front of the customer’s eyes.
“It’s an experience, it’s not just getting the salad,” Vaknin says. “We brought the farm to the table. There is no bridging the gap anymore — this is the future of fast casual food. It’s the future of dining.”
Small but mighty
Although the mini plants are admittedly adorable-looking, it isn’t just a gimmick. Microgreens, Vaknin and Golan explained, carry a long list of benefits that other greens and vegetables can’t compete with.
Microgreens are in fact the shoots of salad vegetables such as arugula, Swiss chard, mustard, beetroot, carrots and others picked just after the first leaves have developed and long before they become fully grown vegetables.
The main advantage of consuming microgreens is the nutritional value they provide: These small leaves can be 40 times more nutritious than their fully matured counterparts, the women claim.
“Every little green is going to be a full stem of kale, or a full carrot,” Golan says, picking up a small pot from the shelf behind her.
“These are all going to be carrots,” she continues, gathering a few stems between her thumb and index finger. “So this a bushel of carrots worth of nutrition.”
And here lies the secret of microgreens: If one tiny stem is a whole vegetable worth of nutrition, then eating only a small handful can boost one’s energy dramatically without a too-full feeling, say the women.
Shelley Golan, left, and Liz Vaknin, owners of Harvest2Order microgreen salad bar in New York City. (Courtesy)
“I always say that microgreens are the Clark Kent of superfoods,” Golan tells the Times of Israel. “Because they are standing in plain sight. They are just vegetables — it’s a carrot, it’s a radish, it’s a broccoli, it’s all of those things. If you just harvest them earlier, they become a superfood. But they are nothing new.”
Along with the nutritional advantages, growing microgreens as opposed to full vegetables can make for a reduction of up to 98% less water and waste.
Microgreens are the Clark Kent of superfoods, because they are standing in plain sight. If you just harvest them earlier, they become a superfood
The microgreens that Vaknin and Golan are using at Harvest2Order are grown hydroponically. Without soil, they are planted in a sterile white substrate made of wood pulp that is pumped in liquid form into the small trays and then drenched in nutrient-dense water.
“So that creates a base for the roots of the plant to anchor into the substrate and then the nutrient-dense water feeds the roots,” Golan explains, holding a pot in her hand. “These are grown in the most efficient way which is using a combination of natural sunlight and also LEDs. It is the most energy-efficient way to grow things.”
“If you go to a farm in Long Island or out somewhere rural, there are a lot of fields. So they are growing bigger vegetables and fruits and things like that,” Vaknin says. “A lot of the work with microgreens is being done with urban farmers. It’s a small crop. They grow quickly, are suitable for indoor vertical farming, and probably do better in indoor vertical than traditional agricultural practices.”
Liz Vaknin in front of the microgreens growing at her new salad bar, Harvest2Order in New York City. (Courtesy)
Surprisingly, not only are these greens packed with nutrients, they are also packed with flavor.
“Here, try the tangerine microgreen,” Vaknin says, as Golan picks a single stem and hands it over.
The thin light green leaf does not go unnoticed by one’s palate. It provides an instant burst of citrus flavor, much like biting into an orange.
“If I harvested you a bowl of arugula microgreens and you tried to eat it, your mouth would be on fire in three seconds,” Vaknin says. “Because arugula tastes like pepper, it’s very strong.”
There are currently two toasted sandwiches and four salads on the Harvest2Order menu. Each contain a generous amount of decadent seasonal toppings, ranging from crunchy colorful watermelon radishes to fried cauliflower florets seasoned with a homemade “everything bagel” mix. There are also proteins, such as herb roasted chicken, and dressings change seasonally. Salads range from $10 to $14, including protein, and the sandwiches are $14.
Many of the toppings are clearly inspired by tastes found in Israel.
“You can take the women out of the Middle East, but you can’t take the Middle East out of the women,” they say, laughing almost in unison.
Microgreens are an unsung superfood, but are now the star at Harvest2Order. (Courtesy)
The pair have other innovations in store for salad eaters. “We don’t toss our salads here,” Vaknin says. “It’s not like every other salad — you don’t need to chop it, you don’t need to toss it, because the surface area ratio for these microgreens is a lot smaller, so if you drizzle the dressing, it gets in everything.”
A well kept secret
If microgreens are such a revolutionary food, the question remains: Why don’t we hear about them more often, and why can’t we order them at any other salad joint?
According to the Harvest2Order duo, chefs have been aware of microgreens at least since the 1990s and have been using them in restaurants. But still, the mainstream consumer has been kept in the dark.
Golan and Vaknin came across the superfood about two years ago, while running their five-year-old sustainable food branding company, Our Name is Farm. They started working with a New York City-based agriculture collective and started getting more exposure to urban-grown products.
“That’s kind of where we found out about microgreens, not just as this frivolous garnish that I would use when I was working at Bouley, but as a source of real sustenance, the main player in a meal,” Vaknin says.
Quickly enough, the two developed what they describe as an addiction to microgreens and became frustrated when they couldn’t find them at any place that serves salad.
Salads need not be tossed, and consumers need not worry about finding a pile of boring, soggy leaves at the bottom of their salads at Harvest2Order microgreen salad bar in New York City. (Courtesy)
“Basically I think that the reason why it hasn’t been done on a mass scale so far is because it’s very inaccessible price-wise,” Vaknin says. “The reason for that is because supply needs to meet demand. There is no demand, so there is no supply.”
The little supply that exists, she adds, is highly sought after because “the few people that know about it are addicted. They want a lot and they are willing to pay.”
“If you go to Whole Foods right now, two blocks away, you can get them. They are grown in Bushwick, they are great, they are delicious, but they are also $6 for a portion,” Vaknin goes on. “So it’s kind of hard to justify that when you are shopping for home and you can get a big thing of local greens that will feed you for a few meals and that’s $4.”
A wave of interest?
In the 16 months since Vaknin and Golan have begun working on their innovative concept, more companies have begun using microgreens and are giving them a place in the spotlight.
“We think there is a wave of interest in the environment, in our food security, in where our food is coming from, in how we are farming, how we are eating our food,” Golan says. “So this wave of interest and alternative agriculture is bringing renewed enthusiasm for vertical agriculture, urban agriculture, and this is the easiest thing to grow in that kind of environment.”
In a city where the wellness trend has boomed over the past few years, it seems only logical that microgreens are the next step.
Shelley Golan, left, and Liz Vaknin, serve a customer at Harvest2Order microgreen salad bar in New York City. (Courtesy)
“For me, microgreens are following the same trajectory that truffles are following,” Vakin adds. “There was a time when truffles were considered this elite product that you couldn’t touch, that weren’t in home kitchens, that nobody knew how to use, and today, everybody and their sister is using truffle oil, truffle salt, you name it.”
Still one main difference remains, Golan points out: Truffles are still a luxury product and microgreens are not.
“They are just vegetables,” she said. “They have been marketed as a luxury product and our angle is that it should be a product for the mainstream consumer and demand should be built so that it could be readily available.”
A well-rooted partnership
When asked about their partnership, Golan and Vaknin do not hesitate to call it a “marriage.”
“We have a written contract that is recognized by the government, and as anyone who is married will tell you — marriages are a lot of work,” Golan says.
Shelley Golan, left, and Liz Vaknin, owners of Harvest2Order microgreen salad bar in New York City. (Courtesy)
“Till death do us part. Literally, in this industry,” Vaknin adds. With their new endeavor, it is safe to say that the two diminutive women in their late 20s are becoming a true power couple.
“A lot of times people can underestimate us because we are these small women, we look young,” Golan tells The Times of Israel. “But one of the reasons we have been successful is because we keep on overturning people’s expectations and exceeding them.”
“The fact that our parents are both Israeli-Moroccan helps a lot,” Vaknin also points out. “I don’t really need to explain to Shelley why I have to go to Shabbat dinner every Friday. She knows. She comes from that environment, she understands.”
Liz Vaknin cuts microgreen with a pair of scissors at her restaurant Harvest2Order in New York City. (Courtesy)
Together, they hope to engage an audience and raise awareness of the benefits of microgreens in order to build demand from the ground up. The dream, they said, is to someday have their own urban farm.
When lunchtime rings in at the North 3rd Street Market, the first customers of the day walk up to the booth, appearing intrigued.
“Would you like to know what’s going on?” Golan asks.
As one woman orders her salad, Vaknin turns to the illuminated shelf and grabs a pot of reddish microgreens, which she cuts with scissors above a cardboard box. Slowly, she drops in the various colorful toppings, scooping them out of metal containers in front of her.
“Here you go,” she smiles, sliding the box with its clear plastic lid across the counter. “Enjoy.”
Leading The Way In Sustainable Growing
Leading The Way In Sustainable Growing
Lauren Stockam, University Communications student writer, For the News-Leader
Published June 10, 2018
Smelling like cilantro is normal for Missouri State University seniors Rachel Veenstra and Jennifer Rice.
“I’ve been in class before and people are trying to figure out why it smells like plants,” Veenstra said. “That gives me an opportunity to tell them about what I do.”
The students, both environmental plant science majors in Darr College of Agriculture, make up the Chartwells Green Team. They grow herbs and lettuce for the dining halls on MSU’s campus.
A different system
The Green Team was created to promote sustainability at Missouri State. It started with hydroponic grow towers inside the dining halls.
After receiving a student sustainability grant, the project expanded into a grow room in the basement of Kentwood Hall. The room used to be a utility closet.
With the expansion, the Green Team took hydroponic production to the next level.
“Hydroponics is growing plants without soil,” said Veenstra, a Hartville, Missouri, native.
Hydroponics growing is more efficient than traditional in-ground, soil-based growing. It uses less water, works well in small spaces and produces plants at a much faster rate all-year round.
In the grow room, the duo uses a vertical film technique, where a nutrient solution is dripped over the roots of the plants. That solution leads to a drainage trough that recirculates back through the system.
“We control the nutrients the plants are getting and the pH levels of the water,” Veenstra said, “so working in the grow room is very management intensive.”
Plants don’t take vacations
Veenstra and Rice dedicate many hours to the project.
“We have to monitor the operation as much as possible in case anything goes wrong,” said Rice, who is from Springfield.
This means coming in early every morning and staying late every afternoon. They work in the grow room during breaks, when other students are not on campus.
“Plants don’t take vacations,” Veenstra said, “even when we want to.”
Seeing the final product of their hard work makes the long hours worth it for Veenstra and Rice. They both love harvest day.
“The people in Kentwood always know when we’re harvesting because the smell is overwhelming,” Rice said. “But it’s wonderful.”
The duo grows roughly 20 pounds of fresh produce every 20 days for the dining halls on campus.
“They are always so happy to get the fresh herbs,” Veenstra said. “We bring it to them, they wash it, then immediately start cooking with it.”
Beyond the plants
As part of Chartwells’ sustainability initiative, the Green Team educates people about growing with hydroponics.
Both students have presented the grow towers at events and conferences. Veenstra gave a presentation in San Antonio, Texas, last year titled, “Taking Sustainability to the Basement.”
“That got people intrigued,” Veenstra said. “Once they figured out what it meant, we had a lot of people ask how they can bring a hydroponics system to their own campus.”
The duo also maintains a Green Team blog to keep people informed on their progress in the grow room.
“Since we were funded by a sustainability grant, we feel it’s important for people to know what we are doing with that money,” Veenstra said.
For both Veenstra and Rice, gardening and sustainability are fierce passions. They are grateful for the experiences the Green Team has given them.
“When I’m having a rough day, I go and work with the plants,” Rice said. “It’s my getaway.”
Giant Garden Comes To Food Desert – Growing Food, Jobs And More
Giant Garden Comes To Food Desert – Growing Food, Jobs And More
POSTED: June 22, 2018, BY ERIN IVORY
CHICAGO -- One of the Chicago's biggest food deserts now has one of the biggest gardens in town.
The project was a collaboration between Lawndale Christian Health Center and the Chicago Botanic Garden. It resulted in The Farm on Ogden, a 20,000-square foot facility built to grow produce to feed the community.
"The three pillars of this space is food, health, and jobs," said Botanic Garden Urban Agriculture Vice President Angela Mason.
The "Farm" is a massive indoor gardening space for Lawndale Christian Health Center patients, community residents, and urban farm trainees and entrepreneurs. It will also serve as the new home for Windy City Harvest's urban agriculture training programs for almost 300 youth and adults annually.
The Farm on Ogden will sell affordable produce year round and sponsor a Veggie Rx program that offers free produce and nutrition education for Lawndale Christian Health Center patients.
It has an opening celebration is Saturday, June 23rd from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. at 3555 W. Ogden Avenue.
More information on their website.
BrightFarms Doubles Funding with $55m Series D
BrightFarms Doubles Funding with $55m Series D
BrightFarms, the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company, has raised a $55 million Series D round, bringing the greenhouse grower’s total funding to more than $100 million.
BrightFarms grows salad greens and herbs in hydroponic greenhouses in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio. The new funds will largely go toward building more greenhouse facilities and expanding the company’s geographical footprint. A new farm in Ohio will open this summer, followed by a Texas facility in early 2019, according to a statement.
This latest round was led by communications, media, and automotive services companyCox Enterprises, with existing investors Catalyst Investors, WP Global Partners and NGEN Partners also participating.
Like other indoor farming operations, BrightFarms produces locally-grown fresh food to densely populated urban communities. But, BrightFarms has historically been more focused on business model innovation that technological innovation, especially compared to its set of high-tech indoor competitors like AeroFarms, Bowery, and Plenty. BrightFarmsCEO Paul Lightfoot said at the recent Indoor AgTech Summit in Brooklyn, NY, that using sunlight is a more sustainable choice than artificial light (as vertical, warehouse farms do).
Though Bright Farms’ funding hasn’t quite caught up to its higher raising counterparts in AeroFarms and Plenty, the company appears to be the closest US venture-backed CEA startup to being a national brand. The Texas farm will also bring BrightFarms closer to the center of salad green agriculture in the US, Salinas, CA and Yuma, Arizona.
“We have always competed directly with West Coast field grown products at the shelf. When we enter new retailers, we are replacing the shelf space of West Coast distributors. Our program drives incremental category growth while attracting our retailers’ most valuable consumers. We will deliver that growth in Texas and throughout the US as we expand. This is a huge category and we are just getting started,” Lightfoot told AgFunderNews.
It has made this progress by insisting on forward purchase agreements with clients, meaning retailers must commit to purchasing a certain quality of BrightFarms product over a period of time in order to sell it at all, which is not usual practice for most retailers, especially when buying produce.
“Our [forward purchasing] model has enabled deep and meaningful partnerships with retailers. We will continue to leverage that model as we scale,” Lightfoot said.
Neal Parikh, former vice president of finance at BrightFarms told AgFunderNews in 2016 that the upfront legal costs of drafting these contracts and convincing supermarket retailers to deviate from their usual buying patterns can prove difficult, especially when it comes to securing a long-term purchasing commitment. But, CEA means that prices and supply should be consistent and BrightFarms was able to convince some of grocery’s largest players. Current clients include Kroger, Wegmans, Walmart, ShopRite, and Jet.com among others.
Lead investor Cox Enterprises is a 120-year-old company with $18 billion in revenue. The company launched a national sustainability initiative in 2007 and has since invested more than $100 million toward environmental goals, according to a statement. The company is also an investor in FarmCrowdy, a digital agriculture platform focused on connecting farm sponsors with real farmers, based in Nigeria.
Cox Enterprise’s David Blau, vice president of strategy & corporate development and Lacey Lewis, senior vice president of finance, have joined the BrightFarms board of directors.
Vacant But Not Empty: New Hope Lingers As Abandoned Buildings Go Green In US Cities
Vacant But Not Empty: New Hope Lingers As Abandoned Buildings Go Green In US Cities
The idea is simple and inexpensive and with a little bit of creativity, these ghost towns can be turned into pushy green recreational areas.
By: Ambili S
Jun 9, 2018
US FlagReuters
- Empty houses and buildings abandoned across the US cities are not new, especially in legacy cities like Detroit and Cleveland, where the clusters of vacant buildings have reached "epidemic levels."
In a survey conducted by US Census Bureau, the number of vacant properties grew from 3.7 million in 2005 to 5.8 million in 2016. In addition, cities like Gary, Detroit, and Flint tops the list.
So why are these properties empty? Though it is difficult to jolt down one particular problem as the cause, an array of issues—right from property taxes to speculative real estate market to changing land policies to diminishing industrial growth—have contributed to this scenario.
A slew of other surveys in the past few years have further made the shocking revelation on this issue. According to City Survey, Gary, Indiana's Parcel Survey found more than 25,000 vacant homes that comprise more than 40 percent of the city's parcels. While in Philadelphia, the numbers rose to 40,000 empty lots. In another study by the local NGO, Detroit Future City, the city had more than 120,000 vacant buildings in 2017.
While the growing vacant buildings are definitely an eyesore for the citizens, other public safety hazards like crime management activities are also a cause for concern. UW–Madison Geography Department graduate student Elsa Noterman has conducted an in-depth analysis of the conflicts, causes, and histories of these deserted properties.
The research strongly affirms that the banks, which sell or allow the ownership of the vacant lots, have failed to hear different voices while confirming the land titling process. It has also raised different viewpoints of the urban community development process and urges officials to consider going beyond the market value to explore the real usage of abandoned spaces.
Setting such views apart, a small neighborhood in Philadelphia has gone in a different direction and tasted success. The local community has converted one of these neglected properties into a community garden for its residents. However, the site was lost against a developer recently, who purchased the land before the urban farmers could obtain the title. Similarly, midwestern steel town Gary, Indiana is also making a slow comeback with various community-based redevelopment activities.
Many cities and local nonprofits are turning to greener ideas to make the maximum use of these buildings—urban farms, pocket parks, and community gardens top the list. With a little support from the local authorities, these forgotten towns can be converted into community green spots, suggests the research report.
It may succeed elsewhere as the idea is simple and inexpensive. With a little bit of creativity, these ghost towns can soon be turned into pushy green recreational areas.
Why Growers Choose To Grow On Coconut Fiber
Why Growers Choose To Grow On Coconut Fiber
Loco About Coco
Growing on coconut fiber is common in many countries. Other than Rockwool, reuse of the product is possible and the discarding costs are significantly lower. Moreover, many buyers of fruits and vegetables value their product being grown on a plant-based substrate and appreciate that a ‘waste product’ of coconuts is being used for the production of vegetables. But, how does this growth work? Wim van Wingerden of Botanicoir informs us on the use of coco.
Uniformity
When using coir as the substrate it is important for the slabs to contain a consistent mix. The water content of the coconut fiber mats is also very important for controlling the crop. Wim: "A mix of 70/30 is often advised. Depending on the mixing percentages the grower gets drier or wetter mats."
Botanicoir though has moved away from these figures quite some years ago already. "We do make clear which mix is available to the grower and what the possible humidity of the slabs is. The grower gets a clear description of which parts the coconut fiber mats actually consist of. Depending on the size of the parts and in what percentages they are used, the grower gets the best mat for his crops."
Washing and buffering
It is also important to wash the coconut fiber properly. If this is not done in the correct manner, too much sodium and chloride will remain in the mats. It is also possible to buffer the coconut fiber mats. Wim: "This means that when using calcium nitrate, the coconut fiber parts will contain even less of these elements. The drain water will be cleaner and almost immediately available for reuse."
More generative
For many growths, generative control is necessary for a large part of the year. For this purpose, a coconut fiber mix has been developed with the name Dry XD, Wim shows. "This mat has a beautifully open structure in which the water content (in % of the mat volume) is around 46%. Experiences with this mat have shown that control is much better and that the extra oxygen supply leads to improved root development with more root hairs."
It is also important that the coconut fiber contains as little too fine parts as possible. "This makes the water content of the material much more constant throughout the season."
Wim: "Many grower experiences show there are no disadvantages of coconut fiber from a growth point of view. Various tests and growers registration have shown that there is no difference in production between coconut fiber and other substrates."
For more information, questions, or remarks:
Wim van Wingerden
Ripple Farms Inc. Wins Ontario’s Social Enterprise of The Year Award Presented By Startup Canada
Ripple Farms Inc. Wins Ontario’s Social Enterprise of The Year Award Presented By Startup Canada
Sault St. Marie, Ontario – June 20, 2018 –
"It is an excellent milestone in a long journey ahead, as we continue the pursuit of answering the question – ‘How Many Can We Feed?’”
Ripple Farms Inc. received the Startup Canada Social Enterprise of the Year Award in Sault St. Marie presented by the Centre For Social Innovation. As a proud sponsor of the fifth annual Startup Canada Awards, we are thrilled to recognize and celebrate outstanding achievement in Canada’s entrepreneurship and innovation community across Canada.
“Congratulations to the 2018 winners of the Startup Canada Awards,” said Victoria Lennox, Co-Founder & CEO of Startup Canada . “These winners represent the very essence of entrepreneurship. We are proud to celebrate their success with Canadians and our partners around the world.”
Steven Bourne, Co-Founder & CEO of Ripple Farms Inc., was very grateful after receiving the award, stating: “We would like to thank everyone who has supported Ripple Farms over the past two years, whether it was, engaging in our educational workshops, collaborating on agri-innovations, or - of course - eating our local greens and seafood! This award stands as a great validation of the hard work the Ripple team, mentors, partners, and supporters have invested in our enterprise thus far. It is an excellent milestone in a long journey ahead, as we continue the pursuit of answering the question – ‘How many can we feed?’”
Regional winners will now be evaluated by the National Adjudication Committee; comprised of some of Canada’s leading entrepreneurship and industry experts. The national winners will be announced and celebrated at the Startup Canada Awards Grand Finale in Ottawa on October 18, 2018 following Startup Canada Day on the Hill.
For more information, and to schedule media interviews, please contact:
Maddie Stiles Media Relations,
Startup Canada 613-295-4590 maddie.stiles@startupcan.ca
About the Startup Canada Awards The Startup Canada Awards can be likened to the Oscars for the Canadian entrepreneurship community. The awards celebrate and recognize individuals, communities, and institutions that demonstrate innovation, excellence, outstanding achievement, and impact in advancing entrepreneurship in Canada:
● Celebrate those working to advance entrepreneurship in Canada;
● Increase awareness of the importance of strengthening Canada’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and culture; and,
● Incentivize efforts and elevate the ambitions of the Canadian entrepreneurial and innovation community.
For more information, visit www.startupaward.ca.
About Ripple Farms Inc. Ripple Farms’ purpose is to reconnect urban populations with food by engaging people through hands-on workshops and educational material. Their aim is to tackle food insecurity one meal at a time. With a focus on traceability, Ripple Farms’ wants to make sure that consumers know what they are buying and eating.
Ripple Farms’ is a company that is always innovating in both their technological and biological operations with the intentions of becoming more efficient/productive, all while pushing the boundaries of biomimicry. By partnering with institutions and like-minded organizations, Ripple Farms looks to influence the industry in a positive way.
For more information, visit http://ripplefarms.ca/ .
About Startup Canada Startup Canada is the national rallying community and voice for Canada’s 2.3 million entrepreneurs. Since launching in 2012, Startup Canada has grown to represent more than 200,000 entrepreneurs and 50 grassroots communities from coast to coast to coast.
Through digital programs and flagship events, Startup Canada is the network promoting, inspiring, educating, connecting and giving a voice to Canada’s entrepreneurs; supporting them to start, operate and scale businesses that build a better Canada for the world today and for future generations.
For more information, visit www.startupcan.ca.
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Kennett Officials Look At Possibility Of Expanding Role Of Indoor Farming
Kennett Officials Look At Possibility Of Expanding Role Of Indoor Farming
MATT FREEMAN - DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA - Eric W. Stein, president of the Media-based Barisoft Consulting Group, tells the Kennett Township Board of Supervisors about his study on the feasibility of establishing a center to promote indoor agriculture in the area.
By Matt Freeman, Digital First Media
POSTED: 06/07/18
Kennett Township >> The Southern Chester County region has officially been found to be an ideal location for a center of excellence for indoor agriculture.
“Indoor agriculture,” also known as an indoor farming and vertical agriculture, is simply the large-scale growing of food plants indoors.
This is a burgeoning trend around the world, but it’s a long-familiar thing to area residents. Every time you drive past a mushroom house, you’re seeing a place where indoor farming happens.
Michael Guttman, director of Kennett Township’s the office of sustainable development, noticed this and wondered if the infrastructure and knowledge the mushroom industry had to offer could be used to make the region a center of indoor farming for a wider variety of crops.
Part of the ongoing effort to explore that idea was the presentation at Wednesday night’s meeting of the Kennett Township Board of Supervisors of a study done by Eric W. Stein, president of the Media-based Barisoft Consulting Group, that looked into the feasibility of establishing a center of excellence (COE) in the area.
As Stein explained them, centers of excellence exist in many industries and play many roles. They provide typically provide leadership and advocacy for the industry, identify best practices, offer services, do applied research, workforce training, and keep track of information in the field.
The township voted a year ago to contribute $13,383 to the cost of the feasibility study, and New Garden Township and the borough of Kennett Square contributed to it as well, in the end paying a total of about $18,000.
Stein said the study involved interviewing stakeholders, reviewing more than 60 survey responses, collecting data at indoor agriculture conference and meetings, and analyzing a wide range of other reports and studies.
According to Stein, broad trends in agriculture favor the development of indoor farming. Trends in population, water use, availability of usable land, costs to grow food and climate change all will contribute to price rises and scarcity, he said.
Traditional or “open-field” farming is reaching its production limits, according to Stein, and has drawbacks such as a release of pesticides and other pollutants into the environment.
Indoor farms have taken advantage of advances in lighting technology, environmental controls, robotics and other factors. The food grown can be pesticide-free, organic, free of the disruptions of climate change, droughts, and other problems with outdoor farming. The farms can be located closer to population centers, reducing transportation costs, and premium quality can raise profits to where indoor farmed produce can compete with traditional organics.
Stein said the study showed Kennett Township was “one of the best places to to put the center of excellence.” There’s a 100-year-old industry here based on it, local and state governments are supportive, numerous colleges and universities offer expertise.
Once established, Stein said, a COE could serve as an international hub for indoor agricultural training, research and development, investment, and advocacy. It could also serve as a knowledge base for the industry along with colleges and universities in the area.
A COE could promote economic development generally in the region, and in particular, could help mushroom growers diversify into other areas.
Stein said if local officials wanted to organize a COE for indoor farming in the region, the next steps would be to develop a communications plan about it, work on the design and implementation, attract supporters, and begin developing related businesses.