Buying The Farm

Buying The Farm

Alyssa Bereznak

Staff Writer, The Ringer

The future of agriculture is happening in cities. After years of experimentation, Silicon Valley may finally be making urban farming viable. But will residents be able to afford the crop?

The town of Kearny, New Jersey, is a small industrial desert, populated by warehouses, factories, and twisting freeways filled with hulking cargo trucks. Its natureless landscape and the decrepit remains of 19th-century textile factories make it so uninviting that it was occasionally used as a filming location for HBO’s The Sopranos. In other words, it’s the kind of place where you’d expect to see a mobster toss a dead body into a dumpster — it is not where you’d expect to see a nice man in plaid harvesting baby kale. But the day I visited a warehouse on a concrete lot in Kearny, I watched Irving Fain, the CEO of a new urban farm named Bowery, do just that.

“Are you a kale fan?” Fain asked me excitedly.

I met the 37-year-old Fain, who’s tall with messy brown hair and an enthusiastic grin, in a tidy waiting room at the back of the building. He was wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and comfortable tennis shoes. But that was not what he wore when we headed into the adjacent room. Instead, we zipped our bodies into papery hazmat suits, tucked our hair into nets, and placed protective booties over our shoes.

The moment we walked into the spotless, brightly lit room, occupied with rows of tall remote-controlled towers that contained trays of leafy greens under LED lights, Fain morphed into a giddy, considerably healthier Willy Wonka. A single attendant had ordered the farm’s autonomous robotic forklifts to lower the portable crops onto conveyor belts and send them toward us. We walked up to their landing table, and with a pair of mini scissors, Fain began snipping leaf after leaf for me to taste. First came the arugula (which he called “crisp and peppery”), then the purple bok choy (“It’s, like, amazingly good”), then the spicy mustard greens that the executive chef at the Manhattan restaurant Craft had specifically requested (the owner, Top Chef star Tom Colicchio, is an investor in Bowery). Each sample was a pristine vision of plant life, with zero sign of the unsightly deformities that come from bugs and dirt — the risks of being grown outdoors.

And then there was the kale.

“One of the compliments our kale gets a lot is: ‘Man, I never liked kale, but I had to like kale, and I actually really like your kale,’” Fain said.

A begrudging kale consumer myself, I took a skeptical bite and was pleasantly surprised. I tasted no hints of the bitter chalkiness associated with the superfood. It was light and sweet and unusually fresh compared with the produce at my local Key Food. All this, without ever coming into contact with the outside world.

But the kale wasn’t delicious simply because it was grown without pesticides, or because Fain, who previously ran a customer loyalty software startup, has a green thumb. The kale was delicious because, in addition to maintaining a mostly autonomous farming system, Bowery uses proprietary software that collects data points about what influences a plant’s health, growth rate, yield, and factors that affect its flavor. According to Fain, it analyzes the information in real time, and automatically pushes out changes to the treatments of crops as it sees fit. I liked the kale in part because its growing conditions were dictated to a microscopic degree by machine-learning software that Fain lovingly calls “FarmOS.”

(Bowery)

Bowery is the latest of a handful of urban farm startups attempting to reinvent how people, specifically city dwellers, get their food. In February, the startup announced that it had raised a healthy $7.5 million from a handful of venture funds, joining the likes of companies like BrightFarms, AeroFarms, and Square Roots that have caught the eye of tech investment firms over the past few years. The premise of these companies, as they tell it, is simple: America’s current farming system is wrought with inefficiencies. Climate change is threatening our ability to efficiently grow crops. And, on top of that, food must be hauled great distances to reach highly-populated city centers. In the process, taste, quality, and shelf life are sacrificed. By growing plants in warehouses, shipping containers, and city-adjacent greenhouses, these next-gen farmers claim they are able to eliminate the threat of unpredictable weather, waste less water, reduce transportation costs, and — most enticingly — stop basil from wilting within 30 seconds of landing in the refrigerator. And even if agricultural experts warn that their farming models might not be enough to ameliorate the world’s food-shortage issues, that has not stopped these companies from adding a utopian flair to their marketing efforts. The same way that Soylent has floated its product as a way to end world hunger, these farming startups are angling to be seen as the solution to our collapsing agricultural system.

Aside from the chance to, as one farmer I spoke to put it, “disrupt the industrial food system,” supporting urban farming is especially appealing to Silicon Valley investors. As mega tech entrepreneurs have colonized Northern California over the past few decades, they have internalized elements of its collective environmental conscience and crunchy farm-to-table culture. (After all, it’s hard to snag a reservation at Chez Panisse without first learning who the hell Alice Waters is.) When climate change skeptics questioned Tim Cook’s 2014 pledge that Apple would invest in renewable energy, the typically mild-mannered CEO reportedly became “visibly angry” and told them to sell their shares. Cafeterias at corporations like Google have long offered organic, hormone-free meals made with ingredients sourced from local farms. In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg even announced a new “personal challenge” to eat meat only from animals he’d killed himself. Tech industry titans are so enamored with healthy, tasty, ethical food, that they once invested $120 million to develop a $700 machine that makes an eight-ounce glass of organic juice. Silicon Valley’s decision to invest in urban farming startups is just about as inevitable as Steve Wozniakchecking in at the Outback Steakhouse in Cupertino on a weeknight. It comes with the territory.

(Bowery)

These new-age agricultural businesses have found it helpful to update the language of an ancient industry to emphasize their innovative approach, and better cater to their ideal audience. Along with naming his facility’s operating system “FarmOS,” Fain has also coined the term “post-organic” to describe Bowery’s completely chemical-free produce and elevate its cachet in the competitive world of gourmet salad. The difference, as he explains it, is that the United States Department of Agriculture technically allows organic farmers to use certain pesticides and organic produce is sometimes exposed to chemicals spread from nearby farms, while his product is completely “pure and clean.” Last year, Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal lifted the startup incubator model popularized by Y Combinator and applied it to farming, launching the Brooklyn-based company Square Roots. (In his obligatory Medium post announcing the endeavor, he cited evidence that microwave sales were declining and declared that “Food is the new internet.”)

Square Roots’ premise is vaguely reminiscent of the contest described in the opening credits of America’s Next Top Model: 10 individual farmers are given their own app-controlled, 320-square-foot steel shipping container to grow plants in for a year. In what the company’s cofounder and CEO Tobias Peggs has dubbed a “farmer-to-desk” model, individuals can receive weekly deliveries to their workplace in the size of a “nanobite” (one bag), “megabite” (three bags), or a “terabite” (seven bags) from individual farmers in the program. In the end the farmers are set free to start their own enterprises. Even AeroFarms, a New Jersey farm startup that waters its plants with patented aeroponic misting apparatus and is the most established U.S. company of its kind, describes its progress in terms of traditional software release iterations (i.e. “AeroFarms 2.0”).

Not only have these startups modernized agricultural terminology, their marketing teams have also cozied up to the altruistic image of America’s modern-day agriculture movement. The history of urban farming in the United States has always been inextricably linked to the availability of food, and a community’s ability to grow that food itself. The earliest modern American urban farms were plotted in 1893, amid an economic recession. To aid the swaths of industrial workers who had recently lost their jobs, the mayor of Detroit, Hazen Pingree, launched an initiative that provided unemployed residents with vacant lots, materials, and instructions that they could use to establish their own potato farms. “Pingree’s Potato Patches,” as they were known, were so helpful in feeding needy residents that both Boston and San Francisco modeled programs after them until the economy improved. Similar programs were recycled in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.

By the early 20th century, programs similar to Pingree’s began popping up at schools in urban areas, stoked by urban reformers who worried that kids would be ruined by growing up in industrial environments. Schools in cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia taught their students how to plant everything from sugar beets to rye as a way to impart individual responsibility, civic virtue, and — as one New York urban farm advocate from the time put it — “the love of nature by opening to their minds the little we know of her mysteries, more wonderful than any fairy tale.”

(Square Roots)

It wasn’t until the U.S.’s involvement in World War I began in 1917 that the federal government began pushing Americans to farm in the name of patriotism. In order to meet the export demands of food-starved Europe, the U.S. established the National War Garden Commission, a national organization that asked citizens to become “soldiers of the soil” by growing their own food. Posters encouraging agricultural action depicted gallant men and women working in fields, sometimes alongside anthropomorphic American-flag-toting potatoes. The campaign worked: The same year the government announced the program, it counted approximately 3.5 million war gardens.

Larger-scale agriculture had helped food supply become more reliable by 1939, but that didn’t keep the federal government from repurposing the movement at the beginning of World War II. The government’s updated campaign saw these “victory gardens” as a source of health and morale, even if the increasing growth of suburbs meant that people were planting them in the privacy of their backyards. Once again, patriotism took hold, and an estimated 18–20 million families had planted victory gardens by 1944, according to the Smithsonian’s digital archive of American gardening history.

In the 1960s and 1970s, activists began jump-starting their own urban-greening movements to ameliorate food deserts, benefit poor communities whose city neighborhoods were littered with vacant land, and educate locals on the benefits of healthful, seasonal eating. In 1969, a handful of UC Berkeley students and locals aimed to claim an empty lot owned by the university and transform it into what’s now known as the People’s Park. (“The University had no right to create ugliness as a way of life,” read an article in the alt newspaper the Berkeley Barb.) Organizers managed to mobilize thousands of people to convert the land into a green oasis, which conservative politicians and UC officials then attempted to bulldoze. Protesters stepped in to save the park and were promptly doused with tear gas. Governor Ronald Reagan called upon the National Guard to squash the conflict, but it only led to more chaos — including the death of a bystander, the permanent blinding of a protester, and injuries to more than 100 people. A fence school officials had put around the park before the riots began was promptly torn down. Eventually the university was forced to accept that its formerly empty lot would remain a park.

In 1970s New York — where a financial crisis had caused an uptick of abandoned buildings and lots in the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, and East Harlem — a nonprofit environmental group called the Green Guerillasbegan throwing “seed bombs” full of water, fertilizer, and seeds over fences and onto empty lots in an attempt to beautify them. One of the group’s founders, Liz Christy, eventually expanded its efforts by launching a campaign to remove trash and haul in soil to empty neighborhood plots. The legacy of environmental activists’ efforts has expanded in recent years, and neighborhoods feel encouraged to organize and contribute to local beautification projects, and build everything from chicken coops to beehivesin urban areas. It’s no wonder that the sight of flourishing green squares amid concrete buildings has since been symbolic of charitable, earthy activism.

The latest urban farming startups are not charities, though. They’re businesses. But they have not hesitated to co-opt some of the same talking points about local collaboration and healthy families heralded by their grassroots counterparts. The words “HEALTHY PEOPLE, HEALTHY COMMUNITY, HEALTHY PLANET” appear at the top of the BrightFarms website in all caps. Beneath them is the company’s mission statement: “For the health of the planet, by improving the environmental impact of the food supply chain. For the health of our society, by encouraging the consumption of whole and fresh foods.” AeroFarms goes one step further, declaring “We want to be a force for good in the world.” Square Roots’ explanation of why it exists is fittingly dramatic for a Musk brother’s operation: “Our cities are at the mercy of an industrial food system that ships in high-calorie, low-nutrient, processed food from thousands of miles away. It leaves us disconnected from the comfort, the nourishment, and the taste of food — not to mention the people who grow it. But people are turning against this system. People want real food — food you can trust to nourish your body, the community, the farmer, and the planet.”

Despite their admirable intentions, this new market is also exploiting a gray area in how people think about city-based farming. According to Raychel Santo, a program coordinator at Johns Hopkins’s Center for a Livable Future, the positive environmental, health, and community effects of independently run farms are now more frequently being lumped into the pitch decks of urban for-profit ventures.

“I do think people conflate the benefits of urban farms often: We can be less wasteful and improve food access and increase the number of jobs and things like that,” Santo said. “When people try to group all of the benefits together, you lose some of the granularity of the actual limitations of each type of urban garden.”

Even if the ultimate goal of these startups is to simply provide fresher, more nutrient-rich greens to urban areas, the messaging of many high-tech farming companies implies that their method of growing is a real solution to our future farming needs. “As the population grows, more food will need to be produced in the next four decades than has been in the past 10,000 years,” reads Bowery’s mission statement. “Yet resources like water are increasingly limited. There hasn’t been a practical path to provide fresh food at the volume and quality that people are looking for — until now.” When I spoke to Fain, he built on that statement, describing his business as the next logical stage for modernizing the world’s farms. “A lot of what the organic movement was about was how do we create a farming practice that allows better or slower regeneration and better protection of the land around us while also growing a higher quality food product,” he said. “And that was a great step. When the organic standards were written, a lot of the technology that we use today didn’t even exist. What we’re able to do at Bowery is the next evolution, the next step, from what organic was able to do from where industrial agriculture was before.”

Marc Oshima, cofounder of AeroFarms, also emphasized the company’s global ambitions by citing potential future projects in arid climates like Saudi Arabia. “It’s not just plants,” he said when I visited. “At the end of the day it’s about nourishing communities. It’s how we can build these responsible farms in major cities all over the world.” Musk made a similarly grand statement the day he announced Square Roots: “Our goal is to enable a whole new generation of real food entrepreneurs, ready to build thriving, responsible businesses,” he wrote. “The opportunities in front of them will be endless.”

Inreality, there are bigger food problems in the world than whether Manhattan grocery stores carry fresh arugula. The major challenges that our global agricultural system faces cannot be solved by urban farms alone.

According to Santo, whose research includes using climate change modeling to predict agricultural demand and supply, it’s projected that the global population will reach 9.6 billion people by 2050. As the effects of climate change set in and weather patterns become more volatile, farmers’ growing and harvesting seasons may be shortened or lengthened, depending on the circumstances, and they’ll be less certain of the amount of food they can produce year to year. Like many other countries, America’s food system is currently set up so that farms dedicated to specific foods — whether it be avocados, raspberries, or beef — are typically concentrated in a single location. So in a scenario in which different parts of the world are battling their own blizzards, droughts, or floods, the U.S. population would most likely experience frequent and significant shortages of specific goods. These shortages are already happening in different pockets around the world. At the beginning of March, a vegetable grower in southern Arizona that sells bags of baby spinach and “spring mix” announced that it ended its harvest earlier than usual because of an unusually damp season. This could mean a shortage of greens in early April. Similarly, snowfall in Spanish farming areas — a major source of England’s produce — has caused a temporarily low supply of zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, and celery that began in the winter of 2016 and stretched into this year.

“The whole global food system that we rely on is heavily dependent on imports from other places and [a] very centralized system which creates a lot of potential problems,” Santo said. “A lot of research has gone into how the really complicated interconnected system that we’re facing is not very resilient if something were to happen to it.”

So, to what degree can these startups actually help? Even if vertically grown warehouse operations like Bowery, Square Roots, and AeroFarms help supplement a salad shortage here and there, their considerable output thus far still couldn’t come close to feeding, say, the entire city of New York, let alone the United States. (Especially since the average American craves a considerable amount of meat and dairy.) Unlike your average community or rooftop garden, typical vertical farms are located indoors, so they do nothing to help what environmental scientists call the “urban heat island effect,” a phenomenon that shows cities tend to be warmer than their surrounding landscape because of human activities and concrete structures. So far, Santo says the most significant effect commercial vertical farms might have on global food system issues is influencing the culture of food consumption and encouraging communities to learn more about where their food comes from.

(BrightFarms)

When it comes to disrupting that increasingly fragile industrial farming system, Santo argues that we may be better off relying on regional farms strategically placed outside highly populated areas to avoid blips in our system. Peri-urban (urban adjacent) greenhouse operations like BrightFarms are able to produce higher crop yields, and therefore have much more potential to make a dent in the system, while also avoiding the significant environmental and monetary costs that indoor farmers are forced to incur from powering stacks of bright LEDs.

“Greenhouses have a much greater potential,” Santo said. “There’s very little evidence of the substantial benefits [of vertical farming], in terms of environmental impacts, partially because of energy input, but also because you can use those buildings in other ways. You can be productive on rural and peri-urban land in much greater volumes.”

The Brooklyn-based company Gotham Greens is a successful test case for shrinking the greenhouse farm format to fit smaller metropolitan spaces, but still harvest enough produce to turn a profit. As some early indoor vertical farming startups have shuttered Gotham Greens CEO Viraj Puri has slowly expanded his business. The eight-year-old company employs about 150 people among four greenhouses, the newest of which recently opened in Chicago. Though Gotham Greens’s leaf mixes cost more than your run-of-the-mill lettuce bunch, they’re tastier, and generally stay fresh in the fridge longer than their grocery-store competition. Puri is heartened to see a new collection of vertical farmers experimenting with LED growing, though he’s not yet convinced that their methods make for a viable business.

“Our goal at Gotham Greens is to produce the most consistent, reliable supply of premium-quality produce in the most cost-effective manner, and today greenhouse technology provides that,” he said. “But I’m glad they’re doing the research. I don’t necessarily have an appetite to do a lot of research and development and not be profitable. That’s why you have technology companies.”

Still, visionaries of vertical farming remain optimistic that whatever challenges the industry faces will be sorted out as technology advances, and the government recognizes their utility. When Dickson D. Despommier, an emeritus professor of public and environmental health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, wrote a book about the possibilities of vertical farming in 2010, he wasn’t aware of any vertical farms that actually existed. He has since become one of the movement’s most prominent advocates. Though the vertical farming industry is in its infancy, he cites the rapid development of more energy-efficient LED lights and a growing variety of business structures as evidence that we will inevitably rely on indoor growing.

“Eventually the virtues of this will become so apparent that people will say: ‘What the hell are we doing outdoors when we can do this indoors?’” he said. “Just like they’re saying: ‘Why the hell should we burn coal when it’s much more efficient to get all your energy from solar and wind power?’”

Despommier points to Japan as a success story when it comes to the rapid adoption of vertical farms. After a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami shook the country in 2011 and its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant contaminated about 5 percent of the country’s farmland, the Japanese government rushed to secure alternate food solutions. It was what Dickson described as “the perfect storm” to encourage full integration of urban farming. Now, he says there are hundreds of vertical farms across the region, sometimes even integrated into workplace cafeterias. In many cases they’ve solicited the expertise of technology companies like Panasonic and Philips to establish more efficient farming methods.

“There’s not going to be instant success here any more than there was in the beginning of, say, Nokia,” Despommier said. “You can go down the line and see how advances in technology and efficiency of using that technology results in replacing the original invention with something that’s much better. That’s what the human species is very good at doing.”

For all the discussion of growing healthy communities, often the only way to balance the expenses of indoor urban farms is to cater to people who already have the money to buy fancy lettuce. In other words, their customers are gourmet restaurants, health-conscious tech companies, and Whole Foods clientele. All this despite the fact that most urban warehouse farms set up shop in low-income communities, where empty buildings are more plentiful and cheaper to rent. A box of AeroFarms greens costs $3.99, while Bowery’s greens go for $3.49 — loads more than someone on a budget might be willing to pay, when they can just grab a much cheaper loose head of lettuce. As a May 2016 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future noted, “urban agriculture projects are not panaceas of social inclusion or equity.” According to Santo, disparity in access to more nutritious produce is a frequent pattern of for-profit city farms.

“Private companies like these put buildings in communities of lower income or communities of color,” she said. “Oftentimes they produce these really expensive greens for restaurants, but then go serve wealthy people for a different community in the city.” In short, the Whole Foods crowd simply has yet another option for fresh greens, and the communities housing the operations providing them can still afford only the same old wilted lettuce.

AeroFarms has come the closest to overcoming the many challenges of the modern vertical farm. The operation’s 70,000-square-foot facility in Newark, New Jersey, can grow 2 million pounds of food each year. It’s currently renovating a former steel supply company building half a mile away from its current headquarters, creating what will be its third major farm and a symbolic gesture of rehabilitation for the city. The startup has raised more than $70 million in venture capital from the likes of Prudential and Goldman Sachs.

“They’ve looked at our history, they’ve looked at our operating costs, and they’ve seen what the demand is,” cofounder Marc Oshima told me when I visited the farm. “They foresee why they want to be a part of this.”

The true question of Silicon Valley investors is almost always: Can a business scale up? Is it a Foursquare (doomed to mild popularity) or an Uber (able to expand at a near-terrifying pace)? The question is particularly tricky for something as intricately designed and finicky as a farm, which can’t simply be revamped by overhauling a portion of code or redesigning its user experience. But of all the vertical farming startups on the market at the moment, AeroFarms is closest to proving that its model is solid enough to be plopped in any urban center on the planet and still deliver the same amount of product on the same timetable. (In its case that product is limited to six different salad box mixes of leafy greens.)

The company was founded in 2004, thanks to the curious mind of Ed Harwood, an inventor and former associate professor at Cornell’s agriculture school, and AeroFarms’ current chief science officer. Harwood has toiled over refining each element of the company’s tightly coordinated growing process, from making LED lighting more energy efficient, to developing the best possible reusable fabric into which a variety of seeds can be sown to germinate and grow (his final iteration is patented). All of these elements are incorporated into each of the seven planting beds that fit into the Newark farm’s 20-foot-high, custom-designed towers.

The inventor’s secret sauce is a proprietary nozzle used to mist a plant’s roots with with nutrient-rich water, a method called aeroponics that cofounder Oshima says uses 95 percent less water than traditional farming, which is even less than hydroponic farming uses — and less than the average aeroponic farm uses. (He also made sure to mention it was “perfect” that I had chosen to visit the company’s HQ on World Water Day.) In addition to saving water, he claims the misting speeds up the growth rate of the plants themselves.

“The roots are able to get oxygen, which leads to a faster growing process, more biomass in a shorter period of time,” Oshima told me in a cold, messy meeting room that had a hole in the wall, a visual indicator of where this tech company’s priorities lie. “When we think about the business of farming, how do we have the right economics, how do we compete with that field farmer, in terms of scale, cost, and productivity? We think that aeroponics is part of that equation.”

AeroFarms’ plant beds aren’t mostly autonomous like Bowery’s. In fact, those tasked with examining plant life as it grows must stand upon adjustable accordion-like platforms to properly examine their subjects. But the company has collected a trove of data over the years from testing over 250 varieties of plants, and is developing predictive analytics and machine-learning softwares that are not unlike the kind Fain has advertised. Developers even made an in-house app to monitor the rapid progress of the crops. And when it comes to the taste of their greens, AeroFarms has earned the endorsement of chefs like Michel Nischan, a three-time James Beard Award–winning chef who also founded Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that aims to improve access to fresh produce in low-income communities. Though Nischan is partial to produce grown the old-fashioned way, he was pleasantly surprised by the taste of AeroFarms produce.

(AeroFarms)

“Purely from a flavor and texture perspective, the stuff that comes out of the dirt is still superior to everything I’ve tasted, other than AeroFarms,” he said. “In my mind they were the ones that finally cracked the code. The spinach leaves are hearty, really sturdy, they had a really great texture to them, a really deep color, and when I ate them I got the flavor intensity that you get from nutrient density.”

As for community outreach, AeroFarms has made an earnest effort to integrate with its neighborhood however it can. In 2010, when the company was in its infancy and headquartered in upstate New York, Harwood sold one of the farming towers to the inner city Philip’s Academy Charter School, and the company still holds educational sessions there. (Last year, Michelle Obama toured the setup as part of her #LetsMove campaign to promote healthy eating and exercise.) Every Wednesday, employees set up a farmstand on the empty street outside the warehouse, even if the stuff it sells might be out of the price range for AeroFarms’ neighbors. The company has only 120 employees, many of whom are engineers, software developers, and microbiologists. But Oshima has made an effort to hire locals whenever he can, and takes pride in the fact that he’s taught people a skill scarcely practiced in a withering industrial town where unemployment is high. The company works with a local employment group to ensure over 40 percent of its workers are from Newark. While he was showing me the latest farm, one of them approached Oshima to ask about a work program that would allow the employee to take classes relating to urban farming. Recently, AeroFarms set up an informational booth at the brand-new Newark Whole Foods to spread the word about its product. As Oshima tells it, a mother and her baby approached to sing the praises of the company. “Future customer?” the AeroFarms employee asked, pointing at her child. “Future worker,” the mother replied.

“We get excited about how we can be an inspiration to the community,” Oshima, an otherwise reserved man, gushed. “So that was exciting.”

Nischan agrees that providing jobs to low-income communities is central to helping them afford better food. Beyond that, he argues that for-profit food companies that want to make their product affordable must structure their business plans to accommodate the extra costs that come with subsidizing a product.

“What AeroFarms is doing in Newark … by really focusing on hiring people from the local communities is actually the best beachhead that you can establish,” he said. “But when it comes to getting into Whole Foods and doing farm stands, if you want to help an underserved community because you’re producing food, and you want some of that food to transform the health of underserved communities in the place that your business calls home, you generally have to take some kind of a haircut.”

AeroFarms’ modest effect on the surrounding area is still germinating. And it may still be far off from its goal of becoming a global presence in destinations as far-flung as Saudi Arabia. But given that the vertical farming industry is exploring uncharted territory, what little impact it’s had is promising.

“There’s no playbook, no traditional government land grant,” Oshima said. “Universities aren’t developing the next generation of farmers — we are.”

While all the farmers I spoke to were eager to bridge the gap between the customers who can afford their high-quality produce and those who can’t, Jonathan Bernard seemed especially contemplative about the issue. The 24-year-old former accountant from Long Island grows premium lettuce in one of Square Roots’ narrow shipping containers, an operation that costs about $3,000 a month to maintain. The large rectangular boxes are lined up in the parking lot of the Pfizer building in Bed-Stuy, now an office that houses movie props and a variety of local food startups. At one point during the tour of his farm, he opened the door and pointed to the Marcy Houses, a cluster of public housing buildings across the street.

“Jay Z grew up right here, like literally,” he said, pointing to a fence. “And this fence is pretty symbolic of what’s going on. There’s a true barrier to getting in there. They have food deserts that they can’t get over. I can go back to Long Island, get whatever I want. But inside these communities they’re not getting fresh stuff.”

Bernard admits that he’s not entirely sure how to bring affordable food into a low-income community like Bed-Stuy without going out of business. “That’s kind of what we’re here figuring out,” he said. His intended business, a farm that grows nutrient-rich plants for performance athletes, also relies on an elite customer class. He recently showed off his operation to a handful of NBA players, and is also mulling the possibility of selling some decorative nasturtium leaves on the side to chefs, who will pay up to $60 a pound for the rare and fragile plant. Ultimately he predicts that the only way he can offer affordable produce to the people who need it most is by doubling his output.

“It costs money to light this thing, it costs rent to put it on this land,” he said. “If all else is the same, how do you get it cheaper? You have to produce more.”

Bernard isn’t currently individually paired with a business for weekly salad bag deliveries, but companies that have signed up have been impressed by the Square Roots service. As soon as Brannon Skillern, the 33-year-old head of talent management at stock exchange startup IEX, gathered about nine people in her office to participate in the program, she was visited by Square Roots farmer Electra Jarvis. Jarvis dropped off her first delivery, explained the properties of her heirloom-seed bok choy and that there was no need to wash it, and opened an email thread to encourage feedback. Soon Skillern started seeing her coworkers snacking on the greens straight from the bag. Though some people from the company have opted not to join because they’ve said it’s cheaper to buy salad at the grocery store, Skillern says that she values building a relationship with a farmer who’s within a mile radius of her home.

(Square Roots)

“It’s neat to have that back and forth with your farmer,” she said. “I follow Electra on Instagram and I can kind of see like ‘Oh, cool. She’s harvesting this this week.’ It just feels like the personal-connection aspect is not anything that you can get anywhere else.”

Bernard values that personal connection with customers as well. And the day I visited, he was testing a strategy to up his yield rate, in the hopes that he could nail down a structure that would allow him to give back to his surrounding community. He’d been tinkering with the temperature, light cycles, pH, and nutrient levels of his shipping container’s humming apparatus — powered by programs like Freight Farms and Bright Agrotech and monitorable via a smartphone app — to speed up the growth rate of his heirloom red leaf lettuce. Space in his narrow container is limited, so plants are stuffed into multiple rows of white plastic towers, which are rigged with plastic tubes for water delivery, and hung on a bar from the ceiling. Above them sit strands of red and blue LED lights (colored that way to beam only a portion of the light spectrum onto plants and conserve resources). Mixed together they wash the room in a purple glow.

Bernard unclipped a tower and placed it on a hook to remove a single bunch of healthy-looking lettuce, which he then placed on a metal scale. He recently began weighing each lettuce plant to measure whether he could produce 100 pounds of food a week. His goal was to hit somewhere between 4 and 5 ounces per plant. He grabbed this one ahead of schedule, to test whether his amped-up settings could help it get there earlier. Before delicately placing it on the scale, he pointed to a few tiny leaves sticking out at the root, which he proudly explained to be the remnants of the plant’s very first growth, and something that would’ve been quickly decimated in a traditional agricultural setting. The plant clocked in at 4.69 ounces, and a smile spread on Bernard’s face.

“That makes me really happy,” he said. “It’s the size that I wanted three weeks earlier than I expected.” It was a small triumph for him, maybe a microscopic one in the larger industry of vertical farming. But it was progress. We celebrated with a tasting. The lettuce was flavorful, crisp, and juicy. He sent me home with a bunch, along with a baggie of his pricy nasturtium leaves. It lasted in my dinky fridge for well over a week.

'Vertical Farming' Brings Futuristic Growing Methods To Middle Tennessee

'Vertical Farming' Brings Futuristic Growing Methods To Middle Tennessee

Mona Hitch reaches for celery at the top of one of her vertical farm towers. 

CREDIT CAROLINE LELAND

Mona Hitch tends to one of her 8-foot vertical farming towers. She says she and her husband eat salads grown "vertically" in their greenhouse every day.

CAROLINE LELAND

Originally published on April 11, 2017 9:56 am

There’s a bit of science fiction sprouting up in greenhouses around Middle Tennessee. It’s called vertical farming, and it’s basically like growing vegetables in a greenhouse on steroids.

Vertical farming incorporates methods that seem futuristic — aquaponics, aeroponics, and hydroponics — that can provide locally grown vegetables year-round. And even if it won’t immediately solve food shortages around the world, vertical farming is predicted to reach almost $6 billion in revenues within the next five years.

Springfield resident Mona Hitch tends a greenhouse filled with rows of eight-foot PVC towers. Edible plants peek through dozens of holes drilled into the sides. Hitch’s greenhouse contains ten of these towers, though it has capacity for 50. Right now Hitch is growing multiple lettuce varieties, different kinds of kale, just about any herb you could think of, even edible flowers. 

“I fell in love with it for several reasons,” Hitch says. “I know where my food is; I know what’s on it. I’m my own pest control, and I can just step outside in flip flops and pearls or high heels and we have salad every day.”

Lisa Wysocky displays a model of the LED lighting system she plans to use in a vertical farm on her nonprofit's property.

CREDIT CAROLINE LELAND

Any non-root crop that’s not too tall can grow in a vertical farming system.

Hitch’s system cycles water with dissolved nutrients from 20-gallon tanks at the base of each tower, through the plant roots inside the vertical PVC pipes. There’s no soil involved. This method is called aeroponics, because the plants are suspended in the air.

All About Efficiency

Supporters of this system argue that it will become commonplace and even trendy, like cruelty-free factory farming for plants. Vertical farming uses 90 percent less land and up to 95 percent less water for a higher yield, with no pesticides.

Facilities can be built on rooftops and in empty warehouses, and certain plants can grow year-round regardless of weather, in less than half the time.

Lisa Wysocky, the executive director of an Ashland City nonprofit called Colby’s Army, plans to build a solar-powered vertical farm for charity on her property by May. Folks will be asked to pay what they can for the vegetables. 

“We can grow food very quickly,” Wysocky says. “We’re looking at 1400 heads of lettuce or tomato plants that we can turn around every three weeks…and get produce out to people who need it the most.”

Entrepreneurs also see big potential: like the full-scale vertical farm that’s being built in Springfield and is expected to top a million dollars in annual revenue.

This farm will license technology from a Canadian company that has used the same technique for growing cannabis. Nick Brusatore, a spokesperson for Affinor Growers, said in a webcast that he’s excited for international expansion.

“We believe that given the proper technologies added to this process, we can be pretty close to net zero, or almost off the grid, or independent of energy,” he said. “And we feel that if we can achieve this, then this should be able to be duplicated all over the world in a modular process.”

Niche Market Or Mass Movement?

It could sound too good to be true, but there are drawbacks. It takes lots of money, energy and materials to build and light indoor growing spaces. Because vertical farming is indoors, bees and other insects are left out of the pollination process. Since there’s no soil involved, there’s been a controversy over labeling. Vertical farms have struggled to get organic certification because the system is seen as too artificial, even if there are no pesticides. In terms of output, high-calorie crops like grains or potatoes can’t grow with vertical farming. 

Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Jai Templeton says state government doesn’t track vertical farming. Nor are there special regulations. Even companies looking to start commercial ventures say they won’t compete with traditional row crops. Their produce will cost more and be available in the off season. Templeton says he encourages the technique because of the limited impacts on water, air, and soil quality.

 “It's an environmentally friendly method in many ways to produce local foods for a segment of the population who wants to know where their food comes from,” Templeton says. “It's not going to replace the traditional agriculture, but it has its place because the population is growing.”

Vertical farming has taken off in population-dense countries like Japan, South Korea, and China. By comparison, Middle Tennessee remains relatively pastoral. But already, some local stores and restaurants have begun carrying vertically farmed produce.

Copyright 2017 WPLN-FM. To see more, visit WPLN-FM.

A Former Corporate Banker Plants New Roots in Urban Farming

Apr 11, 2017

A Former Corporate Banker Plants New Roots in Urban Farming

By MOLLY SMITH

Photography By LYNDA GONZALEZ

Reporting Texas

Alejandra Rodriguez Boughton carries seedlings that are ready to transplant. She founded La Flaca, an organic urban farm that grows rare produce for local needs. “Most people that live in cities don’t know a farmer, so people are always shocked when I tell them what I do for a living,” she said. Lynda Gonzalez/Reporting Texas

Like many graduates of MBA programs, Alejandra Rodriguez Boughton starts her day around 6 a.m. But she isn’t up early to check the financial headlines. Instead, the day’s weather is her primary concern.

Rodriguez Boughton’s office is a small two-bedroom house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Southwest Austin. There’s little shade or cover in the yard where she spends most of her work day, converting what once was grass into farmland.

Raised beds line the side of the house, where she has planted radishes, beets, peppers and bananas. Planters behind the house contain edible flowers, micro-greens and a wide array of herbs, including seven types of mint and 22 varieties of basil, one of which tastes like bubblegum. A large greenhouse contains seedlings to transfer to the yard, and racks of plants fill the garage.

On a half-acre, she’s managed to grow 195 types of herbs, edible flowers and vegetables, whose seeds originated from across the globe. There’s even a beehive and hens on the property.

Rodriguez Boughton pours a layer of topsoil to prepare a new area for seedlings. Lynda Gonzalez/Reporting Texas

When Rodriguez Boughton, 33, moved to Austin in 2012 from her native Monterrey, Mexico, to attend the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, she didn’t envision adding the title of farmer to a resume that includes nearly six years in corporate banking. But in July 2014, she founded La Flaca and has since worked to grow the business into a profitable urban farm.

She moves around the farm with an ease and quiet confidence that belie her relative inexperience. She’s been farming only for a couple of years.

“Most people that live in cities don’t know a farmer, so people are always shocked when I tell them what I do for a living,” she said.

She doesn’t fit the traditional image of a Texas farmer. For starters, she’s nearly half the average age of farmers in the state. She’s also a woman and Latina.

Rodriguez Boughton is part of a growing number of women turning to agriculture. Today, 30 percent of U.S. farmers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 21 percent in 2007. Some, like her, are embracing it as a second career.

Her first inkling of a future career change came when she received a promotion at Banorte, one of Mexico’s largest private banks. “I realized I didn’t want my boss’ job or my boss’ boss’ job,” she said. Yet she pursued an MBA anyway, hoping that it would reinvigorate her interest in the financial world.

It was during the final weeks of the program when Rodriguez Boughton was in the midst of final-round interviews with Microsoft and other companies in Austin that she realized her definition of success had changed. “I was not looking to work hard and get money as I was in my 20s,” she said. “I wanted a purpose.”

In times of stress, Rodriguez Boughton found herself in the kitchen and she sought comfort in recreating her favorite dishes, toying with the idea of starting a business around cooking high-end Mexican cuisine. But she couldn’t find the chilhuacle peppers she needed to make Oaxacan mole tamales. She started growing the peppers, rarely found outside of Mexico, on her apartment balcony.

“One day in the shower it just struck me: what if I started growing rare produce to address local sourcing needs?” she said.

Given that she had no background in farming, she started going to agriculture conferences and took online and community college classes to learn everything she could about sustainable, small-scale farming. She also hired her first and only employee, Ben Carroll, who studied horticulture in college and moved from Connecticut to join La Flaca after meeting Rodriguez Boughton through a mutual friend.

Rodriguez Boughton pulls weeds on her farm, where she grows rare produce for local customers. Lynda Gonzalez/Reporting Texas

Her business background, paired with Texas’ year-round growing season, attracted Carroll, 25, to the position. “Farms fail because farmers have no business experience,” he said. “Farmers need to think like bankers.”

La Flaca sources produce, including chilhuacles, to seven Austin restaurants, including Olamaie, L’Oca D’Oro and Mattie’s at Green Pastures. It also sells produces to its neighbors in the cul-de-sac.

Unlike Rodriguez Boughton, most women aren’t the principal operators of Texas farms – they run 15 percent of farms in the state, one point above the national average, according to the 2012 USDA Agriculture Census, the agency’s most recent survey. Nationwide, women only own 7 percent of farmland.

Nine percent of farms in Texas have operators who identify as Hispanic or Latino, which is slightly higher than the national average of 3 percent.

“To become a farmer is a capital-intensive business and like any other business it takes money to make money,” said Robert Maggiani, a sustainable agriculture specialist at the National Center for Appropriate TechnologySouthwest Regional Office in San Antonio. “If you don’t have collateral and assets and you can’t borrow money, then you can’t really get into land unless you inherit it.”

Maggiani said that many Latinos also associate farming with poverty because that’s the way their families have experienced agriculture for the last half-century. “It’s not something that’s been promoted” in younger generations, he said.

Rodriguez Boughton decided to embrace small-scale agriculture because she wanted to remain in Austin, where the cost of land is on the rise. “Millennials aren’t moving to the country,” she said.

She relied on savings from her previous career to reduce the financial risk of jumping into an industry in which she had no experience. She purchased a small home in Austin’s Maple Run subdivision and rents out the rooms to cover the farm’s cost. A $5,000 grant from UnLtd USA and another in the same amount fromthe Austin Food & Wine Alliance have helped offset costs.

“Agriculture is a business that takes time to be self-sustainable,” she said, adding that she hopes to break even by the end of this year.

La Flaca translates to “the skinny woman,” and it’s also one of the names given to the Grim Reaper. Rodriguez Boughton chose a sugar skull, a calavera, for her logo to represent Mexican culture and reflect the farm’s young, urban feel.

“One of my favorite things of Mexican culture is how we make fun of our fears,” she said. “The biggest fear I’ve faced so far in my life was quitting a stable, profitable career to leap into the great unknown. So that logo and that name is a constant reminder to shake off my fears and keep moving forward.”

Her three goals for the end of the year are to grow more, get more people in the community growing and avoid bankruptcy. She’s working to recruit the farm’s neighbors to turn their own yards into gardens and to expand the city’s community of first-time, urban farmers. In five years’ time, she hopes to have transformed five acres of urban soil into productive farmland.

Edwin Marty, the food policy manager for the City of Austin, hopes that La Flaca’s story will change people’s perceptions of what good food means and get more people interested in growing.

“How we get out of the idea that good food is only for rich white people is a real challenge,” he said. “In all honesty, nothing could be farther from the truth, but that’s certainly a perception.”

Rodriguez Boughton said the fear that farming will ultimately not be financially sustainable still causes her many sleepless nights.

Rodriguez Boughton plucks an unwanted caterpillar from one of her plants. Lynda Gonzalez/Reporting Texas

“The way I try to approach this is to think ahead. I have clear goals on key metrics [in terms of] customers, sales [and] expenses that I constantly track,” she said. “When things are not working according to plan, I already have a plan B, C and D lined up. If this business ends up not succeeding for any reason, I want to have peace of mind that I gave it my all.”

Urban Farmer Transforms Community Into Thriving Local Food Haven

Sheryll Durrant. Photo credit: Keka Marzagao / Sustainable Flatbush

Urban Farmer Transforms Community Into Thriving Local Food Haven

By Melissa Denchak

Most people don't move to New York City and become farmers. Sheryll Durrant certainly wasn't planning to when she left Jamaica for Manhattan in 1989. She got her undergraduate degree in business from the City University of New York's Baruch College and spent the next 20 years in marketing. Then, when the 2008 financial crisis hit, Durrant decided to leave her job and try something new: volunteering at a community garden in her Brooklyn neighborhood.

It wasn't exactly uncharted terrain for this farmer's daughter. Growing up in Kingston, Durrant regularly helped her parents harvest homegrown fruits and vegetables. "But it didn't dawn on me that that was what I wanted to do," she said. Volunteering in the Brooklyn garden reminded her of her roots. "I would plant flowers or melons and that sense of putting your hand in the soil and becoming a part of that green space flooded back to me," she explained.

Kelly Street Garden.Craig Warga

Fast-forward to today. Durrant is a leader in New York's flourishing urban farming movement, which includes more than 600 community gardens under the city's GreenThumb program, plus hundreds more run by other groups across the five boroughs. A food justice advocate with a certificate from Farm School NYC, she's also a "master composter" and a community garden educator and she does outreach work for Farming Concrete, a data collection project that measures, among other things, how much urban farms and gardens produce.

Durrant's early work at the Sustainable Flatbush garden taught her the crucial first step in initiating any community project: Know your neighborhood's needs.

"We started by asking people in the community, 'What do you want to see?,'" she said. This market-research approach turned out to serve her goals—and her neighbors—well. When community members, many of whom were immigrants, expressed a desire to grow the plants and herbs of their native countries, Durrant and her fellow green thumbs collaborated with a local apothecary to establish a medicinal and culinary herb garden and to organize free workshops on how to use the herbs. These garden sessions—which covered women's and children's health, eldercare, and mental health issues like depression—at times drew more than 100 attendees.

After Brooklyn, Durrant relocated to the South Bronx, a neighborhood that's notoriously polluted, underserved and disproportionately malnourished, with more than one in five residents considered food insecure. The borough's gardens, said Durrant, help fill a void, serving as "one way we can bring fresh fruit and vegetables to a community that doesn't normally have access."

At the Kelly Street Garden, a 2,500-square-foot space on the grounds of an affordable housing complex, she serves as garden manager. And at the International Rescue Committee's New Roots Community Farm, a half-acre garden whose members include resettled refugees from countries like Myanmar and the Central African Republic, she works as a seasonal farm coordinator.

Keka Marzagao / Sustainable Flatbush

Last year, the Kelly Street Garden produced 1,200 pounds of food, available to anyone in the community who volunteered at the garden (and even those who didn't), free of cost. It was one of the few purveyors of healthy food in the neighborhood, where local stores often carry produce that's neither affordable nor fresh, due to lack of turnover. "If I have a limited amount of income, why would I waste my money or benefits on food that is going to perish in no time—that's already rotted when I get there?" Durrant said. For this reason, she explained, people often resort to purchasing processed foods that come in cans and bags. The longer shelf life stretches a tight budget. It also demonstrates why hunger often goes hand in hand with obesity—a problem particularly prevalent in the Bronx.

"I'm not going to say that community gardens and urban farms can feed New York City. Please, it's a city with over eight million people," Durrant said. "But they can provide some relief." What's more, she added, "They give you access to grow the food you want. That's where the food justice part comes in."

Margaret Brown, a Natural Resources Defense Council staff attorney who works on food justice issues, echoes Durrant's words. "One garden isn't going to fix hunger in your neighborhood, but community gardens are a way for people to take ownership over the food system in a very tangible way."

Of course, community gardens give rise to much more than fruits and vegetables. Durrant explained that the Kelly Street Garden serves as a space for cooking workshops and on-site art projects and hosts its own farmers' market. Meanwhile, the New Roots Community Farm has helped some of its neighborhood's newest arrivals find one another. "It's a means of engagement that a lot of our refugees are familiar with," she said. "It's welcoming, safe and a place where people can learn at their own pace and get involved in the country where they now live." Participants practice English ("Food is an incredible tool to teach English—a great entry point," said Durrant); plant hot peppers, mustard greens, melons and other edibles from their native homes; and exchange recipes.

Keka Marzagao / Sustainable Flatbush

Urban gardens also play a role in nutrition education. "Anecdotally, we've seen that when kids go to a community garden and get exposed to fresh fruits and veggies, they're much more likely to eat them when they're offered on the school lunch line, salad bar, or at home," Brown said.

Perhaps most important, the community garden movement and its focus on food inequities help advocates raise awareness of broader, interconnected environmental justice issues—like low wages and lack of affordable housing—that get to the heart of why people struggle to access healthy food to begin with. "Community gardens form a good space for people to come together around those issues," Brown said, "and hopefully find great organizing allies."

Durrant is clearly one of them. As part of her community outreach work, she arranges events to bring new audiences (whether corporate employees on volunteer workdays, or visitors on a Bronx Food & Farm Tour) directly through the garden gates. These visitors get a glimpse of the power of a small green lot in a sea of concrete—and if they're lucky, they leave with a taste of it, too.

Melissa Denchak is a freelance writer and editor, and has contributed to Fine Cooking, Adventure Travel, and Departures. She has a culinary diploma from New York City's Institute of Culinary Education and loves writing stories about food.

An Interview With Architect Nona Yehia of Vertical Harvest by Christine Havens

An Interview With Architect Nona Yehia of Vertical Harvest by Christine Havens

04/10/2017 08:33 pm ET | Updated 19 hours ago

Jackson Wyoming is best known for its upscale resorts and breathtaking Teton mountain backdrop. It’s a city that averages 38 feet of snowfall annually, with a short four-month growing season. A playground for skiers and outdoor enthusiasts it may be, for gardeners not so much.

Thanks to the vision of architect Nona Yehia and her co-founder, Penny McBride, the two have transformed the way Jackson receives some of its vegetables. In a town that’s long been dependent on trucked-in produce, Vertical Harvest is a step in the direction of sustainability. Their innovative three-story greenhouse occupies a narrow 1/10th of an acre lot and turns out an astonishing 100,000 pounds of produce each year; that’s roughly the same yield as a conventionally farmed five-acre plot. And in doing so, Vertical Harvest provides jobs for the developmentally disabled, some of Jackson’s most vulnerable population.

Christine Havens: What prompted you to start Vertical Harvest?

Nona Yehia: “It’s funny, I never set out to be a vertical farmer. I’m an architect by trade, and I believe in the power of architecture to build community. I’ve always pushed the boundaries in design, I’ve always been engaged. It’s a labor of love,” she laughs and then goes on.

When we came to Jackson Hole, we were very committed to building whereas in New York, and we entered lots of competitions. In 2008, the economy tanked and it was kind of incredible — in those moments that’s where innovation and new thought can happen, when there are a lot of constraints. There wasn’t much building going on at the time, so I started getting involved in community projects. I helped conceptualize a park in the middle of town and I fundraised for the project; I started building more connections outside of the world of architecture.

CH: Wow, so at what point did Vertical Harvest materialize?

NY: Right when I finished the park project I connected with Vertical Harvest co-founder, Penny McBride. She spent a lot of time pushing sustainability in the community, and she’d worked on multiple community projects including a composting program. Penny had always had the desire to create a space for growing in Jackson. I’m a foodie, and while Penny was thinking of this, I was also exploring how to create a residential scale greenhouse that could last a Wyoming winter. We only have a 4-month growing season, and our produce is trucked in during the winter.

Jackson acts more like an urban community because of its proximity to a national park. Penny had a hard time finding a site, so we came together conceptually and started talking to a lot of stakeholders. Through that process, we met a woman named Caroline Croft. She was an employment facilitator working with developmentally disabled residents. I have a brother with a developmental disability, so growing up I’ve was acutely aware of how our society nurtures this population in school, but when it comes to adults and employment—they’re on their own. That doubled my commitment to the project. In 2009 we started exploring the concept of Vertical Harvest in earnest.

A town councilman who has a son with a disability came to us and proposed a site. Initially, he thought we’d install a simple hoop house that might employ a few people. We scratched our heads; the property wasn’t ideal for a hoop house. That’s where my training as an architect gave us the confidence to push the boundaries, and we thought “what if we go up” and “how can we do this year round?” Now looking back we have 15 employees, and they share 200 hours of work between them in the greenhouse, based on a model called customized development.

CH: That’s incredible. How much produce does the greenhouse currently produce?

YH: Essentially, we’re growing five acres worth of vegetables on 1/10th of an acre. Vertical Harvest is an example of how architecture can respond to community needs while serving a local population. The ultimate goal is that our model can be scaled and replicated by other communities around the globe. It’s pretty unique, and that’s what keeps us all very passionate.

CH: Tell me a bit more about your process in designing the greenhouse.

YH: Early on we were able to connect with a Danish engineer who is on the forefront of hydroponics. The Dutch have been perfecting this method of farming for generations. They have a lot of land but limited sunlight, and they’ve been using greenhouses to supplement traditional agriculture for centuries. They saw Vertical Harvest as an opportunity to enter into the American market. I get calls all the time from people who want to replicate this project; none of the manufacturers have embarked on a project like this before.

At its core, Vertical Harvest is a machine for producing food; it operates as a complete ecosystem. Our greenhouse model functions as three greenhouses stacked on top of each other. Each floor has its own microclimate. We have tomatoes and fruit on the top floor and lettuce on the second floor. While most greenhouses are mono crops, we use a mechanical carousel to rotate crops—it’s like a like dry cleaning carousel on its side—and spans the entire 30’ of the building. The carousel was one of our biggest pieces of innovation and reduces the amount of LED we would otherwise need; it balances natural and artificial light, and it also brings the plants right to the employees for harvesting and transportation. There are only two mobile systems operating in the world.

CH: In light of your success, what’s next?

YH: One of the reasons I’ve stayed on is to learn as much as I can, if we prove to be a successful model, we can take it on the road. Each greenhouse will be adapted to suit its climate, the environmental conditions in Jackson Hole are unique. We danced on the line of innovation, and we defaulted to typical greenhouse infrastructure when we thought we could save some money. At the time we didn’t have much of a budget, so there are some problems in the design. For example, we now know that there’s not enough ventilation for our tomatoes on the third floor. The next greenhouse we build, we’ll be able to correct these issues. As much as Vertical Harvest is a business, we see it as a demonstration project as well. We’re trying to get the information assembled so that others could learn from it.

I’ve always envisioned this as a model that could feed communities; it wasn’t designed for maximum productivity or revenue. Once we get all the zones dialed in more, we’ll be able to push forward. It’s always figuring out that perfect balance. It’s incredible — there was a huge team of people that came together to work on this project.

Vertical Harvest’s social mission is what makes us unique. That’s why our team is so dedicated; we’re helping communities and reducing food miles. And at the same time, we’re pairing innovation with an underserved population. The impact has been really profound, and it’s also changed me. Once you see the effect that a project like this can have in a community, it’s hard to go back. I don’t feel like this process has ended; we’re still designing the trajectory, we’re still expanding the notion of what it is to be an architect. We now have a lot of interested parties, but we’re dedicated to making sure it’s a model that will work.

When people hear about Vertical Harvest, they want information and they want it now. We’re trying to ride this momentum responsibly; we’re trying to continue the conversation. When I look back at our board and dedicated employees, and think about what we’ve accomplished, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come. We tend to be pretty hard on ourselves. We always have a goal in mind, and it took us eight years to get where we are today. We’re not in a rush; we want to get it right.

For more information about Vertical Harvest, click here.

Read more interviews by Christine Havens at Seed Wine. Seed Wine is a gold medal winning, single-vineyard, Malbec from the prestigious Altamira district of Uco Valley, in Mendoza, Argentina. It is a wine of unsurpassed complexity and balance, whose story is one of serendipity, adventure, and love.

This Farm In A Shipping Container Is More Than Just A Source of Local Produce

This Farm In A Shipping Container Is More Than Just A Source of Local Produce

Mats von Quillfeldt prepares lettuce seeds in the repurposed shipping container. He is one of the students participating in the Mason LIFE program. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

By Sarah Larimer April 10 

The repurposed shipping container is tucked in a parking lot, behind an office building and warehouse in Woodbridge, Va. From the outside, it might not look that special.

But on the inside . . . well.

Rows of seedlings poke out of trays that are nestled under a shiny workspace. More than 200 thin towers, packed with growing produce, stretch to the back. The lighting casts a purple glow, and visitors trade sneakers for shower slippers, to keep the space uncontaminated by the outside world.

The cramped container has a bit of a “Mad Scientist” vibe, or at least a “Mad Scientist Who Is Super Into Locally Grown Produce” vibe. This is Zeponic Farms, a hydroponic farm that is more than just a source of lettuce. The Northern Virginia farm also partners with a George Mason University program for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

“I’m really big on being a social entrepreneur,” said Zach Zepf, a founding partner of Zeponic Farms. “I think that if you’re going to start a product or a service, it should have something that’s meaningful.”

Lettuce grows in the converted shipping container in Woodbridge, Va. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

The farm, which grows lettuce, greens and herbs, works with Mason LIFE, a four-year program that offers educational and work experiences to a community with special needs. This partnership is still pretty new, but Zepf said he hopes for an expansion of the operation, and an expanded role for Mason LIFE.

“We bought this thing to be a life changer,” said Brenda Zepf, Zach’s mother. “Not only for our son but for other young adults like him.”

Brenda Zepf isn’t talking about Zach there. She’s talking about his brother, Nic, who has autism and other chronic health issues. The Zepf siblings would garden together in the back yard of their Springfield, Va., home, said Zach Zepf, growing kale, zucchini, tomatoes and chard.

“Not really lettuce, funny enough,” he said.

Now they have this farm, which is a really fancy upgrade. Nic, 23, is not a student in the Mason LIFE program, but Zach, who is 25, said he works there, too.

“It’s really special to be able to give my brother a career like this,” Zach Zepf said. “It’s an opportunity that he probably wouldn’t have unless someone created it for him.”

The LIFE program is not the farm’s only connection to the university. Lettuce grown at the farm is sold to Sodexo, the company that operates Mason’s campus dining services. It is served in a dining hall, said Caitlin Lund­quist, Sodexo marketing manager.

Nic Zepf, left, Mats von Quillfeldt and Zach Zepf prepare lettuce seeds in a tray. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

“We sell them everything we have,” Zach Zepf said.

The farm started a year ago. Zepf said he hopes one day to bring it closer to the public university’s campus in Fairfax County. He would also like to grow the farm, either with another container or by moving to a larger facility, which could accommodate more people.

“Whether we get more containers, build our own containers or expand into a warehouse setting, the goal is to expand our role with Mason LIFE and eventually provide employment,” he wrote in an email, adding that it would require the farm to move closer, “which we will be doing.”

This is the first full semester that Mason LIFE has sent a student to the Zeponic Farms container, which is about 14 miles from Fairfax. That student, Mats von Quillfeldt, is a 20-year-old from Charlottesville who has autism.

One of the characteristics of von Quillfeldt’s autism is echolalia, which means he repeats words or ­phrases that others say. That doesn’t really matter at Zeponic Farms, where he works solo as he goes through the seeding process.

“Mats has got a very brilliant mind, and he’s got a lot going on in his mind,” said Andrew Hahn, a Mason LIFE employment coordinator. “But because of the echolalia, it makes it a little bit more difficult to have a conversation, for example. But Mats does exceptionally well in his academic program. It’s just a little bit of a communication barrier.”

When Mason LIFE started in 2002, there were about 12 other postsecondary programs like it in the nation. Now, there are about 250, said Heidi Graff, the program’s director.

“It’s really quite a movement within the field of education,” she said.

About 50 students participate in Mason LIFE, taking courses and developing skills through a work specialty. Students work in fields that include child development and pet grooming, she said, and some, like von Quillfeldt, are placed in farming roles.

“For our students, what makes farming in particular a good skill is the repetitive nature,” Hahn said. “For different plants, obviously, there’s different seasons to plant. But as far as the routine goes, for most things, it’s pretty typical. They can build an easy routine.”

That’s true. Hydroponics can seem like pretty scientific stuff, but really, all hydroponics has to work through is a simple, step-by-step guide. The tasks can be therapeutic, Hahn said.

“It’s good for our students to be able to see the work that they’re getting done,” he said. “And it keeps them motivated.”

Brenda Zepf said that she has taken her son Nic to a dining hall on Mason’s campus and shown him the salad bar. She told him the lettuce was his — that he had picked it himself.

“Kids with special needs and young adults with special needs have the right to work,” Brenda Zepf said. “They need to reach their full potential and have the same work opportunities as anybody else, and to have a true sense of purpose when they wake up in the morning, just like anybody else.”

Sarah Larimer is a general assignment reporter for the Washington Post.

  Follow @slarimer

You Want Fresh? Dallas' Central Market is Growing Salad Behind The Store

You Want Fresh? Dallas' Central Market is Growing Salad Behind The Store

April 10, 2017

Written by: Maria Halkias

Fresh is a word that’s used loosely in the grocery business.

To the consumer, everything in the produce section is fresh. But most fruits and vegetables are picked five to 21 days earlier to make it to your neighborhood grocery store.  

Central Market wants to redefine fresh when it comes to salad greens and herbs. It also wants to make available to local chefs and foodies specialty items not grown in Texas like watermelon radishes or wasabi arugula.

And it wants to be both the retailer and the farmer with its own store-grown produce.

The Dallas-based specialty food division of H-E-B has cooked up an idea to turn fresh on its head with leafy greens and butter lettuce still attached to the roots and technically still alive.

Beginning in May, the store at Lovers Lane and Greenville Avenue in Dallas will have a crop of about half a dozen varieties of salad greens ready for customers to purchase.

The greens will be harvested just a few dozen steps from the store’s produce shelves.

They’re being grown out back, behind the store in a vertical farm inside a retrofitted 53-foot long shipping container. Inside, four levels of crops are growing under magenta and other color lights. In this controlled environment, there’s no need for pesticides and no worries of a traditional farm or greenhouse that it’s been too cloudy outside.

Central Market has been working on the idea for about a year with two local partners -- Bedford-based Hort Americas and Dallas-based CEA Advisors LLC -- in the blossoming vertical and container farming business.

Plants are harvested inside a vertical farm in the back of the Central Market store in Dallas, Thursday, April 6, 2017. Central Market is trying out indoor growing, and the crops will be sold in the store beginning in May.  (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News) 

“We’re the first grocery store to own and operate our own container farm onsite,” said Chris Bostad, director of procurement, merchandising and marketing for Central Market.

There’s a Whole Foods Market store in Brooklyn, New York with a greenhouse built on the roof, but it’s operated by a supplier, urban farmer Gotham Greens.

The difference, Bostad said, is that “we can grow whatever our customers want versus someone who is trying to figure out how to cut corners and make a profit.”

Central Market’s new venture is starting out with the one Dallas store, said Marty Mika, Central Market’s business development manager for produce. “But we’ll see what the customer wants. We can do more.”

This has been Mika’s project. He’s itching to bring in seeds from France and other far off places, but for now, he said,“We’re starting simple.” The initial crop included red and green leafy lettuce, a butter lettuce, spring mix, regular basil, Thai basil and wasabi arugula.

The cost will be similar to other produce in the store, Bostad said.

Why go to so much trouble? Why bother with lighting and water systems and temperature controls in what’s become a high-tech farming industry?

“Taste,” Mika said. “Fresh tastes better.”

And the company wants to be more responsive to chefs who want to reproduce recipes but don’t have ingredients like basil leaves grown in Italy that are wide enough to use as wraps.

Tyler Baras, special project manager for Hort Americas, said with the control that comes with indoor farming there are a lot of ways to change the lighting, for example, and end up with different tastes and shades of red or green leafy lettuce.

Butter lettuce is harvested inside a vertical farm in the back of the Central Market store in Dallas, Thursday, April 6, 2017. Central Market is trying out indoor growing, and the crops will be sold in the store beginning in May. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News) 

Staff Photographer

In Japan, controlled environment container farms are reducing the potassium levels, which is believed to be better for diabetics, Baras said. “We can increase the vitamin content by controlling the light color.”

At Central Market, the produce will be sold as a live plant with roots still in what the industry calls “soilless media.”

Central Market’s crops are growing in a variety called stone wool, which is rocks that are melted and blown into fibers, said Chris Higgins, co-owner of Hort Americas. The company is teaching store staff how to tend to the vertical farm and supplying it with fertilizer and other equipment.

“Because the rocks have gone through a heating process, it’s an inert foundation for the roots. There’s nothing good or bad in there,” Higgins said.

Farmers spend a lot of time and money making sure their soil is ready, he said. “The agricultural community chases the sun and is at the mercy of Mother Nature. We figure out the perfect time in California for a crop and duplicate it.”

Growers Rebecca Jin (left) and Christopher Pineau tend to plants inside a vertical farm in the back of the Central Market grocery store in Dallas, Thursday, April 6, 2017. Central Market is trying out indoor growing, and the crops will be sold in the store beginning in May. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News) Staff Photographer

He called it a highly secure food source and in many ways a level beyond organic since there are no pesticides and nutrients are water delivered.

Glenn Behrman, owner of CEA Advisors, supplied the container and has worked on the controlled environment for several years with researchers at Texas A&M.

“Technology has advanced so that a retailer can safely grow food. Three to five years ago, we couldn’t have built this thing,” Behrman said.

Mika and Bostad said they also likes the sustainability features of not having trucks transport the produce and very little water used in vertical farming. They believe the demand is there as tastes have changed and become more sophisticated over the years.

The government didn’t even keep leafy and romaine lettuce stats until 1985.

U.S. per capita use of iceberg, that hardy, easy to transport head of lettuce, peaked in 1989. Around the same time, Fresh Express says it created the first ready-to-eat packaged garden salad in a bag and leafy and romaine lettuce popularity grew.

In 2015, the U.S. per capita consumption of lettuce was 24.6 pounds, 13.5 pounds of leafy and romaine and 11 pounds of iceberg.

Consultant: Erie Urban Farming Plan Must Engage Community

Consultant: Erie Urban Farming Plan Must Engage Community

Charles Buki is the founder and principal of Alexandria, Virginia-based consulting firm CZB, which authored the city of Erie's comprehensive development plan. [KEVIN FLOWERS/ERIE TIMES-NEWS]

Posted Apr 9, 2017 at 2:00 AM

Charles Buki, whose firm authored the city’s comprehensive development plan, says urban agriculture could be a good fit for Erie with planning and citizen input.

By Kevin Flowers 

Charles Buki believes the practice known nationwide as urban farming could be a good fit for Erie — if several important things happen.

The city’s zoning rules must clarify and outline what urban agriculture is and where it is allowed.

There should be clearly defined goals, such as creating green space, reducing blight, providing education and growing healthy foods for inner-city residents.

And city officials, community groups and citizens must collectively discuss the issue, including how best to develop urban farming management plans and what funding needs to be secured.

Public meeting May 3

The Erie Planning Commission's recommendations regarding zoning changes that would permit or clarify the rules for small crop farming in the city on residential properties and vacant lots, particularly in targeted areas, will be the subject of a May 3 public hearing in the Bagnoni Council Chambers at Erie City Hall, 626 State St.

The meeting will begin at 9:30 a.m.

The Planning Commission's recommendations include:

•Defining "urban garden, " "market garden" and "farm stand" in city zoning ordinances, and making them permitted uses within areas of the city now zoned medium density residential, high density residential and residential/limited business.

•Creating a specific zoning ordinance section that permits urban gardens on vacant lots in medium density residential, high density residential and residential/limited business areas, and making market gardens a "special exception" on vacant lots on those same districts.

•Requiring fences around urban gardens and urban markets.

•Including rules governing "accessory structures" associated with urban farming, and limiting them to 100 square feet in size. A storage shed would be an example of an accessory structure.

•Stipulations on how and where produce from urban farming can be sold; the proximity of urban agriculture sites to one-family and two-family houses; signs, traffic volumes, parking and compost use in those areas; and maintenance.

City Council must approve the zoning changes before they can take effect.

“Engage the community and help residents understand what’s possible,” said Buki, the founder and principal consultant at Alexandria, Virginia-based CZB, the consulting firm that authored Erie Refocused, the city’s first comprehensive development plan in decades.

Some local officials believe that creating an urban agriculture framework complements that plan, which addresses Erie’s future needs in terms of transportation, housing, land use, economic development and other areas, to combat decades of systematic decline.

Advocates say urban agriculture provides ways to effectively reuse properties that have been long vacant, and it can help reduce crime, promote neighborhood unity, provide education and job-training opportunities and increase access to healthy foods for city residents.

Buki this past said urban agriculture can benefit and help improve Erie, if the plan is forged carefully and includes significant community input.

“The interim goals can be interim banking of land until demand returns, interim beauty, interim stability,” Buki said, adding that “right-sizing the city” and “durable beautification” should also be key objectives.

“If you actually get food, too,” Buki said, “all the better.”

Erie City Council plans to launch that public engagement soon.

Council has scheduled a May 3 public hearing at Erie City Hall regarding a series of proposed amendments to city zoning ordinances that would permit or clarify the rules for small-crop farming on residential properties and vacant lots.

The zoning changes, right now, focus on a targeted area that includes the city’s east and west bayfront neighborhoods; Little Italy, on the city’s west side; and the areas near Pulaski Park, at East 10th Street and Hess Avenue, and the Land Lighthouse at the foot of Lighthouse Street.

The targeted areas are specified because they include large numbers of vacant property or dilapidated housing stock.

Matthew Puz, the city’s zoning officer, said the zoning changes are necessary because urban farming is only permitted in areas of the city zoned for light manufacturing, and that excludes many residential neighborhoods.

City Council must approve the zoning changes before they can take effect. The public meeting will give residents a chance to learn more about urban farming from city officials, and speak for or against the proposed changes.

“Different neighborhoods have already been doing this on certain lots,” said City Councilman David Brennan, who formally requested that the city examine the urban agriculture-related zoning changes. “Opening the door for this could help the city solve a lot of its current issues.”

Detroit, Boston, Portland, Cleveland, and Austin, Texas, are among cities that have revamped zoning rules or created new ones to encourage the production of local food, community gardens, farmers markets, food trucks, small urban growers and local businesses as a way of stabilizing neighborhoods.

A nonprofit in Detroit, the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, created a 2-acre urban farm, 200-tree fruit orchard, children’s sensory garden, water harvesting cistern and more in Detroit’s lower North End that grows more than 300 produce varieties and provides fresh vegetables, free of charge, to about 2,000 city households, churches, food pantries and others in that area.

“Thoughtful initiatives like this have a large impact in community revitalization,” Katharine Czarnecki, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s vice president of community development, said of the nonprofit’s work in a recent news release.

Brennan said he believes urban agriculture will be an effective tool to “reuse a lot of these vacant properties, that’s in line with the comprehensive plan recommendations. And it can help stabilize a lot of these neighborhoods.”

Buki said that ideally the city should look to develop three large parcels of vacant property “downzoned into green space” for urban farming.

“Then you are right-sizing land at a volume that can stabilize land prices,” Buki said. “Then you are getting a critical mass suitable for commercial use. ... Then you have the basis for stabilizing blight.”

Brennan has said that City Council could vote on the zoning changes as soon as the panel’s May 17 meeting.

Kevin Flowers can be reached at 870-1693 or by email. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNflowers.

NYC Luxury Condo Owners Want To Play Farmer

NYC Luxury Condo Owners Want To Play Farmer

April 08, 2017 - 03:30PM

It may sound like a bad SNL sketch about Brooklyn hipsters, but it’s no joke. A luxury condo building in Brooklyn comes with a working farm.

Eight floors above the ground at Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, workers at the condo building at 550 Vanderbilt Avenue are installing plots of soil on a south-facing terrace, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But not just anyone can farm. Owners will have to pay to play. And the building already has one high-profile farmer. Ian Rothman, a farmer and co-owner of the restaurant Olmsted, plans to grow hot peppers for the restaurant’s homemade aji dulce sauce at the building.

“We plan to develop a substantial amount of our space to peppers,” Rothman told the Journal.

Building residents can sign up each season for plots that are seven feet by 10 feet at the 1,600 square-foot “farm” — enough to harvest “a significant edible crop,” Ashley Cotton, executive vice president for external affairs for the developer Forest City Ratner Cos., told the Journal.

And while it may seem strange to garden high above the ground, there is one advantage: light.

“As a general rule,” Rothman said, “the more sun, the more vegetables you are going to get.” [WSJ] —Christopher Cameron

Good Food 100 Restaurants List to Highlight Sustainable Restaurants

Good Food 100 Restaurants List to Highlight Sustainable Restaurants

Starting in June, consumers will be able to choose a place to eat based on a restaurant’s sustainability rating, indicated by a number of “links.” These links are the mark of a new restaurant survey, rating system, and list called The Good Food 100 Restaurants™. The project aims to increase transparency surrounding sustainable business practices that benefit the environment, plants and animals, producers, purveyors, restaurants, and eaters.

The Good Food 100 Restaurants rating system measures chefs’ purchasing practices and determines the extent to which they are supporting local “good food” economies. The ratings are determined based on self-reported annual food purchasing data from a survey completed by participating chefs and restaurants. Any restaurant or food service operation in the United States, ranging from fast casual to fine dining, is eligible to take the survey.

A number of links—from two to five—will be awarded to each restaurant based on their performance as compared to similar survey participants. The inaugural list and ratings will be available to the public, along with an economic analysis report by the Business Research Division of Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, in June 2017 on The Good Food 100 Restaurants website.

Food Tank caught up with Sara Brito, the co-founder and president of The Good Food 100 Restaurants, to find out how this new system will affect the food world.

Food Tank (FT): Can you explain how the Good Food 100 Restaurants rating system works?

Sara Brito (SB): The Good Food 100 Restaurants is an annual list of restaurants spanning from fast casual and fine dining to food service that seeks to redefine how chefs, restaurants, and food service businesses are viewed and valued. The ratings focus on the quantitative measurement of chefs’ purchasing practices, which are based on the percentage of total food purchases spent to support local, state, regional, and national Good Food producers and purveyors compared to similar-type participating restaurants in the same region.

FT: Why did you see a need for the rating system now?

SB: Chefs are among the most trusted influencers in society today. According to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, chefs are more trusted than doctors or lawyers. Until now, most of this recognition and influence has been based on the subjective standards and opaque criteria designed to reward chefs and restaurants (including food service) for how their food tastes.

I believe that good food is good for every link in the food chain. Now, more than ever, with sustainability and transparency being at the center of the industry and mainstream cultural conversation, eaters are demanding to know where their food comes from.

FT: How will this tool affect diners?

SB: The Good Food 100 will educate and inform eaters about the restaurants that are transparent with their purchasing and sustainable business practices.

FT: What will chefs gain from participating?

SB: By participating in the Good Food 100 Restaurants survey, chefs will be recognized and celebrated for being transparent with their purchasing practices. In addition, they will be contributing to a new, first-of-its-kind national economic assessment that aims to measure how restaurants are helping to build a better food system by supporting local, state, regional, and national ‘good food’ economies. Their participation will also help establish benchmarks for different types of restaurant and food service businesses across the country in order to help them understand and evolve their purchasing practices to help build a better food system.

How many chefs and restaurants will be included in the inaugural rating? Any notable names?

SB: The list of chefs and restaurants that have committed to taking the survey includes: Mike Anthony (Gramercy Tavern, Untitled, Union Square Hospitality Group), Rick Bayless (Frontera, Tortas by Frontera), Alex Seidel (Fruition, Mercantile & Provisions), Kelly Whitaker (Basta), Suzanne Goin (Lucques, A.O.C., Larder), Hugh Acheson (5 & 10), Jennifer Jasinski (Rioja), Jonathon Sawyer (Team Sawyer Restaurants), William Dissen (The Marketplace Restaurant), Stephen Stryjewski (Cochon, Butcher, Herbsaint, and Peche), Steven Satterfield (Miller Union), Paul Reilly (Beast + Bottle and Coperta), David LeFevre (Manhattan Beach Post, Fishing With Dynamite, and The Arthur J), Andrea Reusing (Lantern and The Durham), Renee Erickson (Walrus & Carpenter, The Whale Wins, Barnacle Bar, Bar Melusine, Bateau, General Porpoise), Bill Telepan (Oceana), and many more.

FT: Do you see this rating system changing the way the restaurant industry works? How?

SB: The Good Food 100 Restaurants ratings aim to redefine how chefs, restaurants, and food service businesses are viewed and valued. The rating system will also help establish benchmarks for different types of restaurant and food service businesses across the country in order to help them understand and evolve their purchasing practices to help build a better food system.

FT: What do you hope will happen with Good Food 100 Restaurants in the next 5 or 10 years?

SB: Like the Inc. 100 and Fortune 100, the Good Food 100 Restaurants is not limited to 100 restaurants. In the future, the full list could be 100 to infinity.

No Dirt, No Problem: A Revolution In Growing

No Dirt, No Problem: A Revolution In Growing

• BY KELLY ARDIS kardis@bakersfield.com
• Apr 7, 2017 Updated Apr 7, 2017

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

Shari Rightmer has started a new business in Taft called Up Cycle Aquaponics. Organic produce is grown using fish-produced nutrient-rich water; microbes convert the water to fertilizer for plants, which are grown in small pods. “Most people really have to scratch and sniff to really understand it,” Rightmer said. “That’s (one) reason it was so important to have a showroom.”

Courtesy of EcoCentric Farms

Shanta Jackson sells kale and other produce grown at EcoCentric Farms in Bakersfield. She and her wife, Kimberly, farm using aquaponics, a method of farming that uses a symbiotic relationship between the produce and the fish who help grow it. The Jacksons started EcoCentric in 2011 and made it their full-time job last year.

Shari Rightmer shows one of the first plants growing in her storefront aquaponics farm. Unlike produce bought at a chain grocery store, people can know exactly where and how their Up Cycle produce was grown. “Here, we have trust through transparency. It’s all right here.”

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

Shari Rightmer holds one of the small pods with organic clay pebbles that help distribute nutrients to plants in an aquaponics garden. Aquaponics has many benefits, like produce that grows faster and with less water. “It’s easier to ask ‘What’s the downside?’” Rightmer said over the phone days before the interview. “It’s zero.”

•  

Courtesy of EcoCentric Farms

In aquaponics, produce grows in little pods without dirt, as in this photo of a plant grown at EcoCentric Farms in Bakersfield. It is one of many pods that sit in a vertical column. In aquaponics, the water that is used to hydrate these plants is a pond with fish in it. The fish fertilize the produce, and the produce filters the water back to the fish.

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

A poster encourages healthy eating in Shari Rightmer’s office at Up Cycle Aquaponics.

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

Rows of tubes hold hundreds of pods that will each grow organic produce in Shari Rightmer’s storefront organic farm, Up Cycle Aquaponics in Taft. “When I came across aquaponics doing research four years ago, I said ‘This is it. I don’t know how but I’m going to do this,’” she remembered. “I knew it was meant to be an offering to everyone, not just me.”

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

With more than 20 pods in each tube, the potential to grow organic produce such as tomatoes, microgreens, leafy greens and herbs in Shari Rightmer’s storefront farm in Taft is tremendous. “Once we have the koi fish, this will be popping,” Rightmer said.

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

Shari Rightmer outside her new business, Up Cycle Aquaponics in Taft. The business is a storefront farm that uses aquaponics to grow organic produce. “People stop and drive by; they look in the windows, like ‘What in the world?’” Rightmer said. “Once the green shows up, they’ll be blown away.”

For the moment, Up Cycle Aquaponics is nearly all white. But that changes by the day, with shoots of green sprouting here and there, hinting at the leafy oasis Shari Rightmer hopes is still to come. Orange and black koi fish also add color, breaking up the stark white monochrome that imparts the vague impression of a laboratory.

Up Cycle is an aquaponics farm, a concept of growing produce that depends on a symbiotic relationship between plants, fish and the elements. A large part of Rightmer's vision for the Taft start-up is about opening it up to the public. She knows plenty of people won't get aquaponics until they can see it for themselves.

Now they can.

"Most people really have to scratch and sniff to really understand it," Rightmer said. "That's (one) reason it was so important to have a showroom."

Walking through the small solarium that has been built onto her home, Rightmer explained aquaponics in part by pointing out her all-white outfit: Since her plants don't grow in dirt, Rightmer can tend the crops without worrying about getting her clothes dirty. Growing food without dirt might be a hard thing for people to wrap their brains around, but that's where the other key part of aquaponics comes in: fish.

"I'm just going to say it: Everything grows in poop," said Rightmer, who will turn 60 in a few days. "You've just got to pick the poop your food is grown in."

Unlike the fertilizer that comes from warm-blooded animals, what comes from a cold-blooded animal like a fish is less likely to have bacteria like salmonella or e. coli, and the food lasts longer, Rightmer said.

As the fish help the plants grow, the plants help the fish by acting as a filter. In the columns, each plant grows in a small pot with organic clay, getting water from the pond via a tube that goes to the top of each column and trickles down to each plant before the last drops reach the lava rocks at the bottom, becoming a biofilter for the fish.

Though the hard work of building Up Cycle is over, now it's time to be patient. Rightmer had to wait for the added nutrients in the pond's water to balance to make it perfect for the koi fish that will live there. Then it will be time to wait for the leafy greens to grow.

"Once we have the koi fish, this will be popping," Rightmer said from inside the solarium last month.

An 'offering'

Rightmer first heard of aquaponics about four years ago and opened her doors to the public in late February after about a year of planning. She was hooked from the start because aquaponics combines her three loves: food, gardening and cutting-edge technology. 

"When I came across aquaponics doing research four years ago, I said 'This is it. I don't know how but I'm going to do this,'" she remembered. "I knew it was meant to be an offering to everyone, not just me."

Rightmer's "offering" is a chance for the community to see a new way of growing food and the opportunity to eat and cook with what she believes is some of the best produce around. Since the fish are less likely to introduce bad bacteria and the temperature-controlled room where the veggies grow is air-filtered, the result is super-pure produce, she said.

Growing in the showroom are baby springs, microgreens and lettuce, all of which will grow in less than a month once the water is ready. In a shed behind the house is another aquaponic set-up where Rightmer is growing tomatoes, though that area is not open to the public. She didn't yet know specific prices for the greens and tomatoes but said they will be around farmers market prices. Anyone can walk into Up Cycle to buy produce, whether it's a single head of lettuce for a family dinner or several for a chef to use at a restaurant.

Aquaponics uses 10 percent of the water typically used for similar plants grown in soil, and aquaponic produce grows two to three times faster than in soil and three times larger in less space than in soil, Rightmer said, citing a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Each column in the three rows of aquaponic tubes holds more than 20 individual plants. There are nearly 2,000 plants at Up Cycle.

"It's easier to ask 'What's the downside?'" Rightmer said. "It's zero."

Just about anything can grow in aquaponics, other than plants like blueberries, whose acids or oils are harmful to the fish. Though many have wondered, possibly with a raised eyebrow, if Rightmer was growing marijuana, she said she couldn't grow it with aquaponics even if she wanted to because of the oil in THC. They might be confusing aquaponics for hydroponics, a similar soil-free farming technique that, yes, some people use to grow marijuana. Unlike aquaponics, hydroponics doesn't involve fish.

"The concept is simple but it has such a beautiful balance," she said. "If anything is off, it throws the whole thing off."

There are five aquaponic farms from Kern County to San Diego, she said, but the showroom aspect of her business is a first in the country, as far as she knows. Usually aquaponic farms are not open to the public. 

At Up Cycle, produce is sold on a first-come, first-served basis. If there ever is unsold produce, Rightmer will dehydrate and sell them for soup mixes or spices or freeze-dry them.

Not the only fish in the pond

For insight and advice into aquaponics, Rightmer didn't have to look far. Essential to her starting Up Cycle were Kimberly Jackson and her wife, Shanta, who have been running their own aquaponic business, EcoCentric Farms, since 2011. Since Aquaponics is still so new, the Jacksons learned primarily through trial and error, reaching out online to other DIY aquaponic farmers for tips. Now the couple have become local experts on all things aquaponics. They built the columns and structures where Rightmer will grow her produce, and they're happy to help anyone who might want their own aquaponic set-up, be it for a new business or a backyard.

The Jacksons have found from experience that all the praise Rightmer gives aquaponics is true: the kale, arugula, chard and spinach EcoCentric produces is long-lasting, fast-growing and, based on how well it all sells at farmers markets, great-tasting.

"A lot of our customers say the produce just lasts so much longer because it’s picked the day before market," Kim Jackson said.

In the last year, the Jacksons have even been able to make EcoCentric Farms their full-time job. They sell their produce at local farmers markets on the weekends and their kale chips are available at Sully's convenience stores. It was Kim Jackson's mother, Deborah Jackson, who funded most of the start-up expenses, though Jackson declined to share how much. Today, anyone can support the farm with a loan through kiva.org.

"For some reason, we knew it would work," said Jackson, 31. "We kept seeing signs of improvement that encouraged us to keep going with it."

Aquaponics, in vertical structures like Up Cycle and EcoCentric or horizontal form like the system in place at Epcot in Orlando, is "extremely scalable," Jackson said. Because of its adjustability in size and scale, anyone can start an aquaponic farm with a little help and insight from those in the know. The science involved is complex to explain but simple in practice — essentially, aquaponic farmers need to get the water just right for the fish and plants. That can take time, so patience is important.

"Definitely (don't) rush it," Jackson said. "Establishing a really healthy nitrate cycle is the basis of the whole thing. You see the fish and see the plants and think that’s most important, but the beneficial bacteria is doing all the heavy lifting."

Sharing the vision

Because aquaponics requires a bit of explaining, the hardest part of starting Up Cycle might have been convincing the city of Taft and other entities to get on board. It was hard to get a loan at first, Rightmer said, but eventually everything came together, with the help of the Small Business Development Center, the United States Department of Agriculture, architects, designers and, of course, EcoCentric Farms.

"Each entity that came in truly got the vision," Rightmer said. "The city of Taft approved and that was huge, for them to trust me."

For the new front of the house and the aquaponic equipment, Up Cycle took an investment of about $150,000 to $175,000, Rightmer said.

Though she's only just put the finishing touches on Up Cycle, Rightmer is already thinking to the future. She doesn't know how or what exactly, but she'd like to expand the business to be able to grow more produce. She's also open to franchising, she said. But at the moment, it's a one-woman operation.

At the grand opening on Feb. 25, Rightmer got to show off the completion of her vision and serve guests some food grown through aquaponics, though not from Up Cycle. She said many of the guests were more excited about the food than the building, which is still a win for aquaponics.

Before its official opening, the people of Taft took notice of the construction going on at 610 Kern St., whether they knew what it was or not. Now the curious can come inside and see for themselves.

"People stop and drive by; they look in the windows, like 'What in the world?'" Rightmer said. "Once the green shows up, they'll be blown away."

While working on Up Cycle, Rightmer will continue her nonprofit Shar-On Corporation, which helps people transitioning through life changes by offering classes and free meals. Rightmer herself was homeless for about two years following her husband's 2007 death. She spent around four months at the Bakersfield Homeless Center. Now back on her feet and already giving back through her nonprofit, Rightmer is eager to share her business with the community.

What she's giving to the community this time is an opportunity to learn and the chance to buy some great fresh produce. It won't be like shopping in a grocery story. Rightmer remembered a time she was once at a chain grocery store and picked up a head of lettuce.

"I asked myself, 'What do I really know about this lettuce I'm about to put in my body?'" she said. "Here, we have trust through transparency. It's all right here."

Kelly Ardis can be reached at 661-395-7660. Follow her on Twitter at @TBCKellyArdis.

Tiger Corner Farms Produces Full-Scale, Aeroponic Crops In Recycled Shipping Containers

Tiger Corner Farms Produces Full-Scale, Aeroponic Crops In Recycled Shipping Containers 

The Future of Farming

By Mary Scott Hardaway

Tiger staff: Robert Phillips, Matt Daniels, Evan Aluise, Eric Shuler, and Stefanie Swackhamer

They don't sound like farmers. With a team comprised of a former high school Latin teacher, a systems engineer, a mechanical engineer, and two technicians, they sound more like characters on the Big Bang Theory than a group of land-tillers. And while Tiger Corner Farms general manager Stefanie Swackhamer will concede that, "we're probably the biggest bunch of nerds you'll ever meet," she also assures us that looks can be deceiving.

The genesis

It all started on a whim. Swackhamer's father, Don Taylor, former chief technology officer at Benefitfocus and owner of software development company Boxcar Central, heard about aeroponic farming from a friend in Pennsylvania. Not to be confused with hyrdoponics, aeroponics is the process of growing plants in an air or mist environment without the use of soil. Hyrdoponics, a subset of hydroculture, also forgoes soil, but instead of mist uses a water solvent and mineral solutions. While many would be averse to tackling one of the 'ponics sans an agricultural background, Taylor was simply fascinated by the technology, plus he knew that he could use his company's software as part of the growing process. Starting to sound a little like The Martian? Spoiler: Matt Damon doesn't appear, but the rest is pretty damn close.

Taylor solicited help from Swackhamer in establishing their Summerville "farm" — picture a handful of shipping containers situated a few hundred yards behind a nondescript rancher (Boxcar Central headquarters) off Summerville's main drag. Not exactly the halcyon landscape of our farmer forebearers, but a farm nonetheless. The shipping containers are recycled from Carolina Mobile Storage, also located in Summerville; one container serves as an office-like space, another houses tools, and then there are the farms, 320-square-foot contained environments growing upwards of 4,000 plants at a time. The plants receive no direct sunlight, and they are not gently tucked into the Earth's rich soil, but they're not subjected to mercurial Mother Nature, either. With the right LED lights, CO2 levels, and proper mix of nutrients, Tiger Corner Farms can grow a full head of lettuce — a beautiful, perfectly formed specimen — in approximately 30 days. For comparison, growing a full head of lettuce in the ground can take any where from 55 to 70 days. Now, try telling them they're not farmers.

The nitty gritty

Swackhamer, the former Latin teacher, is at the helm of day-to-day operations. Also lacking a traditional ag background, Swackhamer is here, farming, for a lot of reasons; when she was a teacher at Stall High School in North Charleston, she says "those kids didn't know what a good head of lettuce looks like. To know we're part of the solution of [food deserts] and not part of the problem, that's huge." On our farm visit, Matt Daniels, the team's systems engineer, is finalizing the lighting in one of the containers. A couple of years ago Daniels and a friend started Vertical Roots, a small-scale hydroponics operation. He connected with Tiger Corner Farms through GrowFood Carolina. GrowFood's general manager Sara Clow was working with both Daniels and TCF separately when she saw the opportunity for a serendipitous pairing. Clow says that she asked the two companies if they would be OK working together: "It's been a really neat process to watch. One of the reasons that Stefanie and her dad got into it was for charity, and I love that [the companies] ended up collaborating instead of competing."

Upon entering the "farm" we are asked to put on special glasses because of the LED lights; the purple haze may transport you to a Jimi Hendrix concert, but the 300 feet of hanging plant panels before you will remind you that you are in fact inside a shipping container turned farm. To the right is a propagation table where the growing process begins; atop the table is a computer, the brains of the entire operation. The software — the code was developed from scratch at Boxcar Central — keeps track of everything from "seed to sale." The propagation table holds about 2,800 plants per cycle. After 10 days in the table, the plants are transported to the hanging panels. A holding tank, hanging overhead to the left, pumps the nutrients through a chiller to keep the water temperature consistent. The resulting mist is sprayed from hundreds of tiny sprayers onto the plants' roots three to four seconds every 10 minutes. "At the end of the day," says Swackhamer, "a lot of what we're doing is an analytics project. We're trying to get the best possible produce in the shortest amount of time." As a former teacher, Swackhamer says she loves this problem-solving, data-driven approach to growing. And the best part? TCF can share this technology with other farmers.

"The end goal," says Swackhamer, "is that a customer will ask us, 'OK, how do we grow blank?' and we can tell them 'here's the framework, if you want bok choy you need to use this light integral, for arugula set these CO2 levels.' We're taking the automation of an algorithm and breaking it down." Sound complex? Well, it is, at first, but TCF wants to work out all the kinks and provide customers with a product that is pretty straightforward to use, "my goal is for people to understand that it's not that complicated," says Swackhamer. "At the end of the day, it's still growing, they are plants that need light, water, and nutrients."

Tiger Corner Farms operates in a handful of cargo containers in Summerville

Aeroponics in action

So who is the customer base for these atypical farms? At $85,000 a pop, the containers aren't cheap, but, says Swackhamer, they really aren't that pricey when you look at most farm equipment. "This is a turnkey system," she says, "plus, there are endless grant opportunities, whether it be for STEM, sustainability ... so many categories that this could fall under. When we come across someone who we think is the perfect fit, we let them know we can help them figure it out. Money is never the problem. Plan and execution is the only real issue. And it's not just a piece of equipment, it's a whole farm."

The Citadel has already purchased one of the farms; it will be run by cadets as part of a sustainability/environmental studies minor — working in the farm will be an optional Capstone project. The resulting produce will go into the mess hall's salad bar. Another farm is being shipped to a family in Athens, Ga. who will use it for a roadside stand. "We've had all kinds of inquiries," says Swackhamer, "and we're just rolling with it."

Daniels' has his own Vertical Roots farm onsite, and once he has a consistent framework in place, he plans to start selling boutique plants direct to chef. Should local farmers be worried about competition in the kitchen? No, says Clow: "Chefs are pretty loyal to the farmers they use. I think TCF has the ability to hit other markets that folks aren't hitting now, and chefs will make room for the TCF products because they will be unique."

While venturing into this new market may be high-risk (this is, at least according to TCF and GrowFood, one of the few full-scale aeroponic farms in a region populated by pretty successful traditional farms), Swackhamer says there are so many safety nets in place when it comes to potentially interested yet hesitant customers. "While a traditional farmer might struggle attaining GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) certification — the certification is key, allowing you to sell anywhere, anytime — our environment is so controlled because of what the software collects, we know where the seed came from. So, God forbid there were some sort of outbreak, we'd be able to trace back to the exact seed." And, while traditional farms inevitably waste water, TCF actually makes water-harvesting condensation from the AC unit.

Altruistic farming

While the technology TCF is creating and using is both groundbreaking and fascinating by any standards, it's the charitable bent of the company that's the linchpin, says Swackhamer: "Our mission is to get really good food into the community. We want to be a more self-sustaining community. Even though we're techy and some of what we do sounds so complex, at the end of the day we want to grow good food and get it into the hands of as many people as possible."

TCF has one farm, the community container, that is used solely to grow food for donations to local nonprofits, most recently including about six harvests worth of lettuce, spinach, kale, collard greens, and herbs for the Sea Island Hunger Awareness Foundation; the rest is donated to the South Carolina Aquarium to feed the aquatic residents. "It's such an important part of what we do," says Swackhamer, "especially in Charleston with the lack of available land, this is such a good alternative."

In addition to funneling their product free of charge back into the community, TCF will also be bringing on an apprentice this May through Lowcountry Local First's Growing New Farmers Program. "With the area farmers getting older, it's important to get a younger group of people involved with farming," says Swackhamer. Brian Wheat, who runs the LLF's New Farmers Program, agrees. Through the grapevine, Wheat heard about this shipping container farm out in Summerville and had to see it for himself. "I did a site visit with Stefanie and we are both former educators so we understand the value of that and how these containers could be applied in a school setting," says Wheat. Wheat, impressed by the farms and by Swackhamer's genuine enthusiasm about the company and its educational component, decided to incorporate TCF as a mentor for the New Farmers Program. The program, run through the school of professional studies at College of Charleston, places participants with a farm that matches their interests for six months of hands-on, experiential learning. "The aging farmer population is not being replaced," says Wheat. This program provides a new generation with the tools to tackle the challenges of farming in a changing world. And Wheat thinks that students will be particularly interested in the "super specialized and streamlined" concept that TCF is working on, especially those who aren't attracted to the "old vision of farming." There are people who feel a need to contribute to the food system or their neighborhood in some way, says Wheat, and an apprenticeship with one of these progressive farm models allows us to expand the definition of "farmer," reaching a wider and more varied group of young minds.

The future is now

So what's next for the less than a year old company? Swackhamer says Tiger Corner Farms is in the process of building a warehouse off of Clements Ferry Road so that they will have a bigger facility than their current backyard space. Even though the company seems to be evolving at a rapid pace, Swackhamer says they want to continue forward with baby steps. "We want to start with the Lowcountry first and foremost. I think there is plenty of need here," says Swackhamer. In such a new market, Swackhamer knows that soon there will be competition as other nontraditional farms start to crop up. But she says Tiger Corner Farms isn't concentrating on how to be the market leader. They just want to show up and grow good food. "Part of the fun when people come out, they don't know what to expect," says Swackhamer, "It's exciting that it's been such a short period of time and we're already here. We're putting a different face on a farmer."

Studio Visits: Go Inside Square Roots’ Futuristic Shipping Container Farm In Bed-Stuy

Studio Visits: Go Inside Square Roots’ Futuristic Shipping Container Farm In Bed-Stuy

POSTED ON WED, APRIL 5, 2017BY DANA SCHULZ

In our series 6sqft Studio Visits, we take you behind the scenes of the city’s up-and-coming and top designers, artists, and entrepreneurs to give you a peek into the minds, and spaces, of NYC’s creative force. In this installment we take a tour of the Bed-Stuy urban farm Square Roots. Want to see your studio featured here, or want to nominate a friend? Get in touch!

In a Bed-Stuy parking lot, across from the Marcy Houses (you’ll know this as Jay-Z’s childhood home) and behind the hulking Pfizer Building, is an urban farming accelerator that’s collectively producing the equivalent of a 20-acre farm. An assuming eye may see merely a collection of 10 shipping containers, but inside each of these is a hydroponic, climate-controlled farm growing GMO-free, spray-free, greens–“real food,” as Square Roots calls it. The incubator opened just this past November, a response by co-founders Kimbal Musk (Yes, Elon‘s brother) and Tobias Peggs against the industrial food system as a way to bring local food to urban settings. Each vertical farm is run by its own entrepreneur who runs his or her own sustainable business, selling directly to consumers. 6sqft recently visited Square Roots, went inside entrepreneur Paul Philpott‘s farm, and chatted with Tobias about the evolution of the company, its larger goals, and how food culture is changing.

Kimbal outside one of the farms

Tell us how you got interested in and involved with the urban agriculture movement? And how did you and Kimbal start Square Roots?

I came to the U.S. from my native UK in 2003 to run U.S. operations for a UK-based Speech Recognition software company (i.e. a tech startup). I have a PhD in AI and have always been in tech. Through tech, I first met Kimbal Musk–he’s on the board of companies like SpaceX and Tesla–who at the time was setting up a new social media analytics tech company called OneRiot, which I joined him on in 2006.

Since then, Kimbal’s been working on a mission to “bring real food to everyone.” Even while I was working with him in tech, he had a restaurant called The Kitchen in Boulder, Colorado that sourced food from local farmers and made farm-to-table accessible in terms of menu and price point. His journey in real food started in the late ’90s, when he sold his first tech company, Zip2, and moved to NYC and trained to become a chef, his real passion. When 9/11 happened he cooked for firefighters at Ground Zero. It was during that time – where people would come together around a freshly cooked meal – that he began to see the power of real food and its ability to strengthen communities, even in the most awful conditions imaginable.

In 2009, while we were both working at OneRiot, Kimbal had a skiing accident and broke his neck. Realizing life can be short, he decided to  focus on this idea of bringing real food to everyone. So he left OneRiot to focus on The Kitchen, which is now a family of restaurants across Chicago, Boulder, Denver, Memphis, and more. That organization ploughs millions of dollars into local food economies across the country by sourcing food from local farmers and giving its customers access to healthy, nutritious food. They also run a nonprofit, The Kitchen Community, that’s built hundreds of learning gardens in schools across the country, serving almost 200,000 school children a day.

After Kimbal’s accident, I became CEO of OneRiot, which was acquired by Walmart in 2011, where I ended up running mobile commerce for international markets. I learned a lot about the industrial food system there by working with huge data sets of the groceries people were buying across the globe and researching where those foods were being grown. I began to visualize food being shipped across the world, thousands of miles, before consumers bought it. It’s well known that the average apple you buy in a supermarket has been traveling for nine months and is coated in wax. You think you’re making a healthy choice, but the nutrients have all broken down and you’re basically eating a ball of sugar. That is industrial food. I left Walmart a year later and became CEO of an NYC photo editing software startup called Aviary, but I couldn’t get this map of the industrial food system out of my head. When Aviary was acquired by Adobe in 2014, I re-joined Kimbal at the Kitchen and we started developing the idea for Square Roots.

What we saw was that millions of people, especially those in our biggest cities, were at the mercy of industrial food. This is high calorie, low nutrient food, shipped in from thousands of miles away. It leaves people disconnected from their food and the people who grow it. And the results are awful – from childhood obesity to adult diabetes, to a total loss of community around food. (Not to mentioned environmental factors like chemical fertilizers and greenhouse gases.)

We also saw that these people were losing trust in the industrial food system and wanted what we call “real food.” Essentially, this is local food where you know your farmer. (This isn’t just a Brooklyn hipster foodie thing. Organic food has come from nowhere to be a $40 billion industry in the last decade. “Local” is the food industry’s fastest growing sector.)

Meanwhile, the world’s population is growing and urbanizing quickly. By 2050 there will be nine billion people on the planet, and 70 percent will live in cities. So if we have more people living in the city, demanding local food, the only conclusion you can draw is that we’ve got to figure out how to grow real food in the city, at scale, as quickly as possible. In many ways NYC is a template for what that future world will look like. So our thinking was: if we can figure out a solution in NYC, then it will be a solution for the rest of the world as it increasingly begins to look like NYC. The industrial food system is not going to solve this problem. Instead, this presents an extraordinary opportunity for a new generation of entrepreneurs – those who understand urban agriculture, community, and the power of real, local food. Kimbal and I believe that this opportunity is bigger than the internet was when we started our careers 20 years ago.

So we set up Square Roots as a platform to empower the next generation to become entrepreneurial leaders in this real food revolution. At Square Roots, we build campuses of urban farms located in the middle of our biggest cities. The first campus is in Brooklyn and has 10 modular, indoor, controlled climate farms that can grow spray-free, GMO-free, nutritious, tasty greens all year round. On those farms, we coach young passionate people to grow real food, to sell real food, and to become real food entrepreneurs. Square Roots’ entrepreneurs are surrounded and supported by our team and about 120 mentors with expertise in farming, marketing, finance, and selling–basically everything you need to become a sustainable, thriving business.

Why did you choose to set up at Bed-Stuy’s Pfizer Building?

We believe in “strengthening community through food,” and hopefully by joining forces with all the awesome local food companies already in Pfizer, we’re doing our part towards that. Next, in the lead up the first World War, that factory was the U.S.’s largest manufacturer of ammonia, which at the time was used for explosives. Post war, the U.S. had excessive amounts of ammonia, and it started being used as fertilizer. So in many ways, that building is the birth place of industrial food. I like the act of poetic justice that we now have a local farm on the parking lot.

Paul Philpott’s company is called Gateway Greens. His membership-based business model is that his members pay a premium to subsidize food for low-income New Yorkers.

He grows oregano, parsley, sage, thyme, and cilantro, as well as swiss chard, collard greens, and kale. 

You received more than 500 entrepreneur applications; how did you narrow it down to just 10?

Lots of late nights watching video applications! We were looking for people with shared values and mission – a belief in the power of real, local food. And we needed to see a passion for entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur in Square Roots is hard and we needed to make sure that first 10 were coming in with eyes wide open. They are really kicking ass now!

Each farm can produce 50,000 mini-heads of lettuce per year.

The greens are grown hydroponically, meaning the nutrients are mixed with the water that feeds the roots, since the system is soil-free and uses LED lights. Each farm uses about 10 gallons of water a day–less than a typical shower. 

For someone who’s not familiar with this type of technology, can you give us a basic rundown of how it works and compares with traditional farming?

The first thing we’ve got to do is build farms in the middle of the city. In Bushwick, these are modular, indoor, controlled climate, farms. You can put them in the neighborhood right next to the people who are going to eat the food. To set this up, we literally rent spaces in a parking lot and drop the farms in there. It’s scrappy, but they enable year-round growing and support the annual yield equivalent of two acres of outdoor farmland inside a climate-controlled container with a footprint of barely 320 square feet. These systems also use 80 percent less water than outdoor farms. That’s the potential for a lot of real food grown in a very small space using very few resources. Each of our ten farms is capable of growing about 50 pounds of produce per week. Most of that today goes to customers of the Farm to Local program, where a local farmer will deliver freshly harvested greens direct to your office (people love having a farmer show up at their desk with freshly harvest greens right before lunch!) Some of the farmers sell to local restaurants also.

Why do you think consumers in general respond so well to this type of local farming?

This generation of consumers want food you can trust, and when you know your farmer, you trust the food. There are so many layers between the farmer and the consumer in industrial food–agents, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, the list goes on. And every one of them takes their cut, leaving the farmer with paper thin margins and the consumer with no connection to the food or the people who grow it. That’s 20th century food, where it takes weeks to get to you and the food has to be grown to travel. Square Roots farmers can harvest and deliver within hours – meaning food is grown for taste and nutrition.

Moving forward, how do you hope urban farming will coincide with more traditional agriculture?

The consumer wants local food where they know the farmer and the food tastes great. Whether that’s grown on a no-till organic soil farm or in a container on a parking lot, if it’s local food it’s food you can trust – and we’re all on the same side. The common enemy here is industrial food.

Where do you hope Square Roots will be in a year from now? What about 10 years?

We grow a ton of food in the middle of the city and sell locally. So we see revenue from direct-to-consumer food sales and we’re building a very valuable local food brand. But as we replicate campuses and our program to new cities, we’re building that local food brand at a national and then ultimately global scale. At the same time, our model unleashes an army of new real food entrepreneurs who will graduate from Square Roots and start their own amazing businesses, who we will invest in.

I’ve been quoted on this before, but I’d like to think I can open Fortune Magazine in 2050 and see a list of Top 100 Food Companies in the world, which includes Square Roots and 99 others that have been started by graduates of Square Roots, who all share our same values. That would mean we’re truly bring real food to everyone.

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All photos taken by James and Karla Murray exclusively for 6sqft. Photos are not to be reproduced without written permission from 6sqft.

New School Students Research and Rethink Rooftop Urban Gardens

New School Students Research and Rethink Rooftop Urban Gardens

Apr 5, 2017

In 2014, Vice Media, having just moved into its their new offices in Williamsburg, worked with Brooklyn Grange to turn their expansive rooftop into a vegetable garden and recreational space for their employees to enjoy.

From the natural meadows to the delicious vegetables, the perks of Vice’s rooftop urban farm seem fairly obviously. But what benefits might this green infrastructure have to the broader environment?

Students at The New School are trying to find that out.

Over the last three semesters, students in the Green Roof Ecology undergraduate course have conducted research at rooftop farms throughout New York City to measure, and think about ways to enhance, the ecological benefits — increased biodiversity, mitigation of urban heat island effects, and absorption of stormwater — of green roofs such as Vice’s.

The class —  which includes students from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College and is supported by the Lang Civic Liberal Arts program — is a reflection of The New School’s dedication to cross-disciplinary learning, design for social good, and real-world experiences.

“In the Green Roof Ecology class, we’ve managed to pull together students who are interested in ecology — very science-oriented students — together with students studying graphic design, information design, communication design, and architectural design all together in one space to really consider how you re-think a green roof,” said Associate Professor of Urban Ecology Timon McPhearson, who teaches the class and co-founded it with faculty member Kristin Reynolds.

To learn more, visit Vice Green Roof x New School on Instagram.

Redefining Urban Farming

Redefining Urban Farming

by Ronni Wilde, for The Bulletin Special Projects

Published Apr 4, 2017 at 11:56AM / Updated Apr 4, 2017 at 11:57AM

As Central Oregon grows in population, more and more of its residents are living in homes and apartments with tiny yards, and in some cases no yard at all. While that can be a challenge to those interested in growing food, all is not lost. Container gardening can be a fun and simple way to put a green thumb to work and grow a few veggies on a patio, deck or even inside on window sills.

Benjamin Curtis, urban farmer and founder of Full Rotation Farms Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, began his operation without a budget, and suggests that anyone can do the same.

“You can go to landscape companies and get free black pots, or offer to do some work for them in exchange for pots,” he said. “I was so broke, I started with yogurt containers. You can also make planter boxes out of wooden pallets.”

If a garden will be in window sills, Curtis recommends putting the containers in south-facing windows for maximum sunlight. If it will be created in a small space outside, a “greenhouse” can be made out of large sheets of plastic, he said.

For watering outside, rows of containers can be lined up on a patio or dirt patch, or raised beds can be created. Lining up the containers in rows simplifies the watering process, he said, which can be done with a watering can or hose. A watering device can even be made out of a milk jug by poking holes in the top, he said. If the garden is inside, Curtis recommends using drip containers that won’t leak onto the floor, or taking care to use something to catch the water that flows out of the pots after watering.

When you are ready to plant, Curtis said seeds can be purchased online, or at home improvement or farm and garden stores such as Wilco.

“Seed packets tell you what to do,” he said. “Just follow the directions. Growing only one item, like tomatoes, may be a good way to start.” If you don’t have a sunny location, he suggests looking for plants that like shade, such as spinach. To create a larger variety of vegetables or a continued harvest, he recommends staggering crops by planting a new row of seeds every two to three weeks.

With a little work and a few months’ time, having homegrown vegetables without a yard can be a reality.

“I grow food in my indoor nursery year-round,” said Curtis. “Right now, I have leeks, tomatoes, broccoli, pea shoots, kale, spinach and lettuce. I am eating a salad a day out of my winter crop.”

Full Rotation Farms, a successful urban farming operation created a year ago by Bend massage therapist Benjamin Curtis, is testament that with determination and grit, anything is possible. In early 2016, Curtis had a box of seeds, $7.13 and a vision. But that February, he launched his Full Rotation Farms Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, and has since grown 1,500 pounds of vegetables on 2,100 square feet of land, supplying as much as 50 pounds of food to an average of 50 people a week during last year’s growing season.

For eight months last year, Curtis worked six days a week, he said, and during peak season, he worked 12-hour days for six straight weeks.

“Urban farming is complicated due to having multiple plots,” said Curtis. “It can be difficult and filled with logistical challenges. However, even though I wanted to quit many times, I did not. The pros outweigh the cons.

“Farming for my outstanding CSA has given me deep fulfillment, more courage and less depression, and there is a smaller carbon footprint (than with traditional farming),” he added.

With a CSA, money supplied by the members builds the farm, so they each own a share.

Despite the challenges in operating a CSA, Curtis remains passionate about growing for himself and others because he believes there is a global crisis due to the shortage of fresh food grown without chemicals.

“We have a serious food problem, and people don’t even know,” said Curtis, who is a U.S. Navy veteran. “If it were a perfect world with healthy food, I would not be so passionate. I want to help solve this problem, be a man of action, and put my money where my mouth is.”

The mission statement for Curtis’ CSA reads, “Full Rotation Farms is determined and committed to doing whatever it takes within the framework of integrity to change our food system by building and educating a healthier food culture, empowering people through direct contact and practicing small-scale organic methods so we can consistently serve your family with the freshest cut produce possible.”

Curtis began taking an interest in farming while growing up in small towns around Oregon, he said, and while attending school and living in Utah, where he worked alongside his stepfather in a fruit stand. He said he learned entrepreneurial skills at that time, and began growing food for himself.

“I’ve been feeding myself for my entire adult life, and I knew I wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to live off grid, fully in nature. I’m really into self-reliance, because it teaches self-esteem. I lacked that in the past.”

Over the years, he practiced small-scale farming techniques, planting garden boxes on rooftops in Portland in 2002, working and managing a half-acre vegetable plot in Hawaii from 2008 to 2010, and growing food on a half-acre mini-farm in Alsea, Oregon in 2011.

In recent years, Curtis said he has been inspired by Bend urban farmer Jim Fields, who has a 10-acre plot right in the middle of town off Pettigrew Road. Fields Farm also offers a CSA program, and has been supplying produce to Central Oregonians since 1989.

Though there are other urban farmers in the region, what makes Curtis’ approach unique is that he does not own the land he uses. He farms in other people’s yards. With the blessing of participating homeowners, Curtis cultivates lawns, gardens and unused land and turns those spaces into productive food-producing plots. In 2016, he utilized three yards on the Westside of Bend, and was feeding 13 Full Rotation Farms member families by April 15. By June, he was in peak season, and continued to supply vegetables through December.

“On those 1-degree days, the veggies survived because I used a special cloth and greenhouse materials,” said Curtis. When the snowpack became too thick, he stopped harvesting. “But in spring, some of those vegetables will still be OK,” he said.

“This has been a big ordeal,” said Jason Friedman, owner of Center for Life Chiropractic and Wellness in Bend and a Full Rotation Farms member. “Benjamin and I have been friends for a long time. He spoke to me about urban farming awhile ago, and he really decided to go for it. I’m very proud of him, because besides the physical burden, he also had to learn about major farmer juggling, like rotating crops and dealing with the weather.

“It’s like he got a master’s degree in organic farming in one season,” Friedman added.

Among the vegetables Curtis provided through his CSA last season are kale, chard, an assortment of beets, salad greens, carrots, Pac Choi (Asian greens) and tomatoes. He also hunted and cultivated mushrooms to add to the food baskets. To participate in the CSA, members pay an upfront fee of $150, which entitles them to a weekly pick up for four to six weeks depending upon the quantity of vegetables supplied. Curtis customizes baskets for members based on family size and preferences.

“I’ve been a member of a CSA before, and there isn’t usually this much variety,” said Friedman. “You get to choose what you want each week, so you’re not stuck with food you don’t want. It’s hard to grow things here, which makes this even more impressive. It’s pretty amazing to become so adept at growing so much food for so many people in this climate.”

For the coming season and into the future, Curtis has set lofty goals, and is working hard to make them happen. As of early 2017, he has 15 members in his CSA, and hopes to grow that number to 30 by this year’s peak season. He plans to start distributing food as early as the end of March, and has been growing an assortment of food over the winter in his indoor nursery to accomplish that goal. He has also recently acquired a three-year lease on a one-acre plot on the Westside, and hopes to secure one more yard for this season.

To move forward on the one-acre plot, Curtis estimates that the cost for fencing, irrigation, equipment and insurance will be in excess of $10,000. To procure the needed money, Curtis has established an online crowd funding account on Go Fund Me and a loan campaign through Kiva, an international nonprofit group money lending program.

“I will continue to farm multiple yards if I get them, but the focus is the acre,” he said. “I am looking for investors. I want to make some money and reinvest it, pay off the loans within a year, and then get a bigger loan to grow the business.”

To date, Curtis supports himself with his massage therapy practice, but hopes to be able to make a living off Full Rotation Farms eventually.

“I started this with no money — I don’t suggest that,” he said with a laugh. “It’s best to have at least $6,000 to start with, and don’t quit your job. Doing therapeutic massage has allowed me to invest in Full Rotation Farms and survive as an urban farmer in my first year.”

In addition to retaining a CSA membership, Friedman has invested in Full Rotation Farms to help Curtis grow the operation.

“I wanted to support a friend who is very forward-thinking. I’m honored to be a part of that,” said Friedman. “Growing food instead of grass is a very green thing to do. Curtis went out on a limb and literally removed someone’s yard to do this. It takes a forward-thinking homeowner to do this.”

While Curtis’ desire is to grow Full Rotation Farms as his business, the other side of his passion lies in teaching others how to grow food.

“The barriers to entry in farming are astronomical,” he said. “That’s why I want to teach young people how to farm a yard with real-time training. At my first location, it was not unusual to have young people show up wanting to help. But due to time constraints and land restrictions, I was forced to turn them away, which broke my heart.”

To offer mentoring and training to those who want to learn urban farming techniques, Curtis hopes to establish “Farm Fit Day” events on Saturdays during the 2017 growing season. During these programs, volunteer participants will work the land alongside Curtis while he trains them. They will gain skills, and may walk away with some fresh veggies too, he said.

Friedman said he has found purchasing vegetables from Curtis to be beneficial in many ways.

“It’s less expensive than going to the store and buying organic produce because there are no middlemen involved between the farmer and the store, and the vegetables are fresher,” he said.

“His vegetables are much more bio-available for our bodies because they are grown right here and are acclimated to our climate like our bodies. For those of us who understand that food is medicine, you understand that there is good medicine and bad medicine. This food is more suitable for us than organic food grown far away.”

Because of their membership in Full Rotation Farms, Friedman said his family tends to eat more vegetables.

“My 8-year-old son loves rainbow chard,” said Friedman. “Getting your kid to eat greens is really great. I didn’t even know he liked chard until we became members.”

The ultimate benefit, Friedman said, is how good the vegetables taste.

“He picks the food a couple of hours before he distributes it, so it’s fresh, alive and delicious,” said Friedman. “It tastes like nature intended it to taste. It just couldn’t be better.”

For more information about Full Rotation Farms CSA or its funding campaigns, call 541-241-4101 or visit fullrotationfarms@gmail.com .

This story originally appeared in the spring 2017 edition of Central Oregon Living. For the complete edition click here.

Man Of Tomorrow: Metropolis Farms Founder Jack Griffin’s Revolutionary Technology Aims To Empower Communities Through Vertical Farming

Man Of Tomorrow

Metropolis Farms Founder Jack Griffin’s Revolutionary Technology Aims To Empower Communities Through Vertical Farming

March 23, 2017

Written by Karen E. Varga • Photography by Jeff Wojtaszek

Griffin in his second-floor production area

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jack Griffin didn’t start his professional career with farming on the mind. He studied economics and physics, not horticulture, and ended up working as a Wall Street executive. However, it’s the combination of his experience and skillset that led to him opening a revolutionary vertical farm in 2014 in his native Philadelphia, Penn. — Metropolis Farms, the first to be located on the second floor of a building. Griffin and his team, including business partner Lee Weingrad, are in the process of opening the first solar energy-powered vertical farm on the fourth floor of the same building and producing the equivalent amount of produce as a 700-acre outdoor farm. Produce Grower sat down with Griffin to find out how he made the successful transition from Wall Street to deep water culture, how his technology differs from other systems currently available, and what he’s doing to make vertical farms more accessible to potential growers.

Produce Grower: Describe your career path and how it led you into vertical farming.

Jack Griffin: My educational background is in physics and economics. … I [was] the president of Merchant Banking on Wall Street, [at] The Capital Resource Group, a company that focuses on small to mid-sized companies from their initial financing through the private placement market. Two extremely wealthy folks came to [me] and wanted to raise $25 million for [a vertical farming project] when the industry was three years old. I’m the guy that said no … because the math that I was given made no sense. There was no proof.

I’m looking at this and I go you know what? This is a phenomenal idea, but it doesn’t work on paper. It’s not economically sustainable. Obviously, the project failed.

It was something that always bothered me. I started messing with it as a hobby, and then one day it became an obsession and I quit my job. I bought the equipment they had and spent years refining it, correcting it, studying it, looking at the errors. Once I had an enormous list of everything that was wrong, that was my work product.

PG: When did Metropolis Farms officially launch?

JG: As my excellent science project it started before this, but as a corporation Metropolis Farms started in 2014. We started selling crops about six months after we started.

PG: How did you choose the name Metropolis Farms?

JG: I saw a really cool name — it was a company called Gotham Greens. So I said if you’re going to pick Batman, I’ll pick Superman.

PG: What is the company’s tagline, and how does it reflect your overall goal to expand vertical farming’s reach?

JG: It’s not one I think people are likely to expect from us — “Join the revolution.” Because we need to feed the revolution and find better ways of [growing food]. I’m not saying our way is the only way, but it’s one of them. We’re more than a vertical farm. We’re an indoor growing technology company. How do you grow it better? How do you make it more accessible? How many people want to be farmers that can’t? How many empty buildings are there in cities? How do we access that? How do we rebuild these places? If we’re all moving back to cities, which is what the demographics all show, what’s it look like in 20 years if we don’t have this infrastructure in place? You never get to [vertical farming advocate] Dickson Despommier’s dream [of large buildings with multilevel farms]. You never get to the glass tower because no one has the building blocks to build it because no one [can] access capital markets to afford it.

PG: What barriers do you see for growers to get into vertical farming?

JG: The first physical barrier is energy cost. The second physical barrier is BTU management cost. The more energy you put out, the more light you put out, the more energy you have to manage in terms of getting rid of that heat.

Growers can license the patented technology that Griffin developed, and he encourages users to suggest possible improvements.

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

The third barrier to entry is scalable modularity and [the fourth is] cleaning and maintenance. It’s really easy to build a vertical farm and watch it fall apart. The day you build it, it starts to degrade because of the bacteria that’s in the system. A lot of our patents relate to maintenance.

The fifth is the economic modalities. Where are you going to sell it? It’s not “if we build it they will come,” because they won’t. [We focus on] institutional purchase — universities, colleges, schools, prisons. We’re pre-selling our produce to those groups because they’re a virtual bottomless pit against our demand. [We also sell to supermarkets], but those relationships take a great deal of time to develop.

PG: There are many functional vertical farm systems already. Why did you “recreate the wheel” with your own technology?

JG: If I took whatever you're driving for a car right now and said, “I guarantee you if you give me enough money, I’ll make it go 200 miles an hour. It won’t be efficient. You’re not going to like your car when I’m done, and it’s probably going to break in a couple of hours, but it will go 200 miles an hour.” It’s the beginning of the learning curve [for vertical farming].

I pulled out my brick phone at a meeting and explained it. In 1984 [it] cost $4,000, which is the equivalent today of almost $10,000. It's the most expensive cell phone ever made and makes phone calls for half an hour and then it dies. That's it. But at the time it was the most advanced phone in the world. Because we spent the money on that, today we have iPhones. But you had to go through it.

Now you're into the commercial era where you've got a number of people like myself who are looking at [vertical farming] and saying, “If it’s not economically viable, then it’s not viable.”

PG: Tell me more about Revolution Vertical Farming Technology, the manufacturing division of Metropolis Farms that's responsible for building and licensing the proprietary vertical farm systems.

JG: “The Science of Indoor Growing” is the tagline. [If you think of Metropolis Farms like a triangle], you put food production at the top of the triangle, and at the base of the triangle are two other pieces: [Revolution Vertical Farming Technology] manufacturing, and food optimization, which is research and development. From a profitability perspective, [manufacturing brings in more capital because] you’ve got to sell a lot of lettuce to equate to a $20,000 tower. So clearly you can build towers and make money on them, but I’m really focused on building towers that other people can make money on, too.

I probably have close to $20 million in letters of intent right now. We have so much demand for the product and our current production [space] gets swallowed up by opportunities really fast.

[Our question is] do you have the most advanced technology in the world, or the optimum technology? Because we have the optimum technology. Our technology brings price, value and everything to one point. If it’s not optimum, it’s not advanced — it’s over-engineered. We’re not growing for NASA. We’re growing for people in north Philly that need food. And if we never build a system because it’s too expensive, nobody gets to eat. The reason we managed to get so many patents is because no one thought about these things from this perspective.

Also, because we control the hardware, we can control what goes on it. We have a couple of wacky ideas. One, no GMOs. Two, if you’re going to work with our equipment, you agree to equal pay for equal work. Three, you can’t discriminate against people for any reason. There is a social component to it.

PG: What makes your technology different from existing systems?

JG: Every component in our [vertical farming] system can be hot swapped in less than two minutes. That makes it so much easier to work with. Being able to build them [ourselves], our systems are modular. The typical time to build a vertical farm takes nine months to a year. We prebuild everything and they go up in a matter of days.

Metropolis Farms is the first vegan-certified vertical farm and has successfully grown a wide variety of crops, including microgreens, leafy greens, strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, small carrots and radishes, and is researching growing anything from “corn to calla lilies to tulips to stevia” and other root vegetables.

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

We created a factory where we could prebuild all of the parts and all of the components and bank them so that they go up like Legos, and they can all be disconnected and broken down the same way. If you lose a pump in a [traditional] vertically stacked farm, you’re pretty much out of business for a day by the time you remove all the water, get everything out, replace your pump and so on. We isolated every major component.

If all your components are prebuilt and all you’re doing is making the connections, the other difference is everybody else is building a farm, which is a construction project. What we’re doing is we’re providing a device because it’s a patent.

It’s built for production. It’s built for the ability to maximize the profitability and the ability for workers to do meaningful work versus drudge work. Part of our technology allows us to slow down or speed up growth by 15 percent either way. So I can create a supply chain.

My system works as deep water culture (DWC). It works as a shallow. It works as a nutrient film technique (NTF). It words as a flood-and-drain. It works as a trickle. You can do all of the various major systems of growing. It’s a matter of a few adjustments. We [also] have a system that has aeroponic elements as well as hydroponic elements that’s in it. I think it’s the best of both worlds.

We developed our own lighting using a common [ceramic metal halide] bulb and reconfigured it. We added robotics, too.

We built them for the real world. I’m trying to build an industry. I want to make sure we get the technology out there.

PG: You consider your technology to be open architecture and encourage users to share problems and suggestions for improvement. How do you think this approach will benefit the system’s development?

JG: Our goal is to create a [standardized] system that anybody can touch. Our model works, and the more people that touch our stuff, the easier it is to [develop it and] grow more. I can use a stable platform that can cost effectively do all this and then throw resources at optimizing that platform rather than everyone having a home-brewed, separate platform that only they know how to work.

You have to have a standard platform. That’s the most important thing. But you have to be brave about it as well. You have to be willing to accept that there’s always the guy that’s going to steal your stuff because of that. And you’re going to have to spend the time to protect it. I don’t even want to patent half this stuff, but if I don’t patent it, some SOB is going to do it and block everybody from using it.

This whole thing of “Leave it alone. It’s mine and I have the secret sauce, and you can’t have it unless you pay me mad money” — that’s not how you create an industry. You create an industry by creating a ubiquitous platform that everybody can use.

I’ve spent a career apologizing to people for the fact that when I talk I’m not actually angry, I’m from Philadelphia. This is how a Philadelphian talks. — Jack Griffin, Metropolis Farms

PG: How do you reduce pest and disease pressure in your vertical farm?

JG: You make your systems hostile to anaerobic bacteria and you don’t have to worry about [that]. Now if you’re referring to mold spores, that sort of stuff, my HEPA filter takes care of that. We have, in going on three years, never gotten a disease, and we don’t have bugs.

People do bring in bugs, but [we use a trap plant] we created, [called] the Terminator. It’s voracious. We also use pitcher plants and things like that. But the nice part about these ones is they’re ever blooming. They don’t die. We’ve never had a major bug problem.

The accelerated rate of growth takes care of most disease-based problems. The major disease-based problems you have in vertical farms relate to poor cleaning habits and poor maintenance habits associated with most vertical farms. Our entire array of patents revolves around a modular system that allows you to take it down and clean your entire tower in about a half an hour. If you’re not clean, you’re done because your farm is a time bomb. I generally like to see them done once every three months because it just takes minutes.

PG: You’re not the only new produce grower in the area. Is there enough demand to sustain the addition of new growers?

Metropolis Farms’ systems can be operated by workers after basic training.

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

JG: The food market is so large, respectfully, that it’s a bottomless pit. Are you familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? What’s your first need? Air. Second is water. Third is food. We’re not worried about energy, housing, status, anything else if you don’t have food, right?

It may not be the largest by dollar volume, [but] how many people buy diamonds and how many people eat food? Transactionally, [food] is larger than almost everything [unless] they start selling air and water.

PG: How do you see food and vertical farming as a vehicle for social change?

JG: Go to the Bible. Go to the Talmud. Go to the Koran. Go to any book or religion and I guarantee you you’re going to see a centric thread on food. Nothing touches us as much as that because nothing is more communal. Sunday dinners. Going out with mom. How much of our lives centers around food?

So to me if you want to create social awareness, social change, if you want to impact society, this is the space. There are people out there that aren’t going to [care about] the value of these strawberries we have. They just want a really good-tasting strawberry. But when they bought it [from our vertical farm], you know what they did? They supported the potential for solar [energy]. They supported local people working. They supported disadvantaged veterans and felons working.

PG: How exactly are you supporting veterans and felons?

The proprietary deep water culture systems used at Metropolis are designed to accommodate a wide variety of crops, including some that aren’t typically grown in hydroponic systems.

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

JG: Thirty percent of my staff [of about 10] are felons and 60 percent of my staff are veterans — and there's an overlap between those numbers.

[Also,] we’re creating a program to train [prisoners so] that when they get out of prison they’ll have a job. I’m already talking to the Department of Corrections. The guy that started me on the concept was a guy named Joe Sibilia, a social entrepreneur out of Massachusetts. How many people can we get involved that we can all at least try and row in the same direction and do something effective? If you’re going to make ubiquitous systems you’ve got to make something that somebody with a high school background could do. Make something that somebody that’s getting out of prison can do.

PG: What would you say the biggest failure of Metropolis Farms, if there has been any, has been so far?

JG: Everything. Our whole model is based on failing forward. We continue to try things that other people won’t try. For example, density. You’re not supposed to be able to grow plants as close as we do. They’re all supposed to die. We’ve actually had botanists come out and tell us we can’t do it. Here it is. It’s working.

How many times have you had something blow up in your face and have to deal with it? That’s what I said. Failing forward. Getting that experience. In my company failing is not a bad thing — failing and giving up is. That’s the truth of it. Just don’t quit. And that’s how we’re able to find the solutions we found.

We didn’t find them because we had super geniuses running around. We found them because if I have one characteristic that has value here it’s I’m stubborn. I’m going to get it done. I’m going to continue to focus on it until I get what I need to get done.

What it really comes down to is [you spending] those couple of years getting yuck under your fingernails, figuring out how you’re going to make it work and you screw up over and over … I learn far more from failure than I ever do from success.

Also, failure gives you a backbone. Talk to farmers who’ve got to get out every day. There is no Sunday. If anybody in the world has a work ethic it’s the farmers.

I’m going to make Philadelphia the vertical farming capital of the world. I know that’s a bold statement, but that’s what’s coming. — Jack Griffin, Metropolis Farms

PG: On the flip side, what do you consider Metropolis Farms’ biggest success?

JG: Our relationship with the city of Philadelphia. It’s remarkable. There’s two things Philadelphians never get to say: (1) The Eagles have won the Super Bowl. (2) City government is doing a good job. We had every resource laid at our feet. And that’s because we have a real symbiotic relationship with them. I didn’t go to the city government and say give me millions of dollars. We’ve never taken a single dime of government money. I funded a lot of it myself.

[I said] I’ll do the heavy lifting, but these are the doors I need you to kick in — and they kicked them in. Major food providers, the universities, the colleges. They have brought all of these people to our farm [to see what we’re doing and potentially develop a relationship].

The systems developed by Griffin and his team are modular, which means they’re simple to build and it’s easy to swap out parts without having to shut down the whole system.

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

Why are cities so willing to work with us? We’re pushing for a movement towards “green-collar” jobs. How much money did you spend for food at our local prison? It’s an awful lot of money. How many of those people you bought that [California] food from are spending money in Philadelphia?

If demand can choose where it gets its supply, it should always get it where it benefits society the most. And the benefit for us is local farmers. And not just us. They should also be focusing on the farms around us and buying as much food as possible from them.

Then you extend it year round with [Metropolis Farms]. Now if it costs the same why wouldn’t we want to create local jobs versus jobs in California? No offense to California. I love California, but jobs in California and 3,000-mile truck rides? It doesn’t make sense [now]. The economic term for it is comparative advantage. They had better sun and a comparative advantage growing outdoors. But comparative advantage can be eclipsed by technological enhancement or technological innovation, which is essentially what’s happened.

The technological innovation has moved us past the comparative advantage so we now need to, as a society, look at how we’re going to grow more and more of our food locally. I love the idea that Dickson Despommier puts out, which is we are going to have these enormous buildings and these buildings are going to themselves be farms growing on multiple floors. But what we’re doing now is how you get there. Somebody has to build this stuff in the first commercial, viable way so that we can get to the next level.

I have no illusions about what I’m doing. We’re going to be completely forgotten in the future. But there’s some kid that’s going to be able to use the infrastructure that we’re [creating] right now and do something amazing. And that kid will save the world.

Old MacDonald To Have A Farm In Wellesley’s Linden Square?

Old MacDonald To Have A Farm In Wellesley’s Linden Square?

April 4, 2017 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

Freight Farms, a Boston-based company that retrofits shipping containers with vertical farming technology, is partnering with Federal Realty Investment Trust, the people who brought you Linden Square. Together, they hope to transform the asphalt jungle of unused parking spaces in Linden Square into productive “farmland” capable in a 320 square-foot shipping container of producing the same amount of food as two acres of traditionally imagined fields.

Freight Farms says that its flagship product, the Leafy Green Machine, can grow 2 acres worth of food in 320 square feet. Photo credit, Freight Farms.

This is all in the very early stages, but if there are any local farmers out there who are interested, perhaps this is the opportunity you’ve been looking for.

Activating Land For Freight Farming With Federal Realty Investment Trust

March 28, 2017

32 Shopping Centers Will Soon Be Home To The Leafy Green Machine

Securing land can be a big hurdle for freight farmers looking to start growing food in their communities. That’s why today, Freight Farms is thrilled to announce a partnership with Federal Realty Investment Trust to help remove this barrier to entry into farming by making space available on 32 properties across the United States for the Leafy Green Machine.

Federal Realty owns, operates and redevelops prime community and neighborhood shopping centers all across the country. Check out a list of their properties here, you may live near one! Starting this month, freight farmers will be able to lease parking spaces at select shopping centers in CT, FL, IL, MA, MI, MD, NC, NJ, NY, PA and VA for the Leafy Green Machine.

What’s really exciting is that each property offers a unique set of benefits for new freight farmers, from opportunities to partner with restaurants and grocery stores to increased brand awareness and local marketing initiatives. For farmers just launching their small business with the Leafy Green Machine, this is a great opportunity to reach new markets!

Federal Realty has always been committed to sustainable development and green initiatives, which is why this partnership is a no-brainer. It empowers anyone to use the Freight Farms technology while activating Federal Realty's unused parking spaces as a place to sustainably produce local food that benefits the shopping centers' tenants, customers and community.

“Federal Realty is committed to minimizing and reducing environmental impact not only through sustainable development and operations, but through strategic partnerships that bring value to the communities we serve. We are thrilled that we can help provide future farmers with opportunities for their new businesses to thrive.”

— Chris Brown, Federal Realty's Director of Sustainability

We’re rolling out this program in strategic locations at first, and we look forward to expanding the partnership nationwide to empower more individuals to grow fresh produce in their communities year-round. We’re eager to get farmers growing in these new locations, so if you’re located in one of the states we listed above and want to start growing with the LGM, contact us now for more information here.

OpenAG: Urban Farming With Computers

OpenAG: Urban Farming With Computers

via pixabay.com

The “Food Computer,” invented by MIT agricultural researcher Caleb Harper, can progress urban farming by making it more sustainable. Amy Bentley, co-founder of the NYU Farm Lab and Professor of Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt, is thinking about using the “Food Computer” at the NYU Farm Lab.

Geomari Martinez, Contributing Writer
April 3, 2017

Computers can now control the weather, thanks to MIT Principal Investigator and Director of the Open Agriculture (OpenAG) Initiative Caleb Harper. His invention, the Food Computer, uses the artificial to create the natural. Ranging in scale from the desktop-sized Personal Food Computer to the industrial-scale Food Data Center, these glass chambers are monitored by computerized systems to make them grow, sustain and harvest crops.

“It will all be monitored; the food will not need pesticides or chemicals, and it’ll be predictable 365 days a year,” Harper said of his Open Agriculture, or Open AG, initiative in a 2015 interview with National Geographic. “We also envision things like corporate cafeterias doing more of their own growing or school cafeterias growing their own food.”

This new mode of urban farming would reduce water waste, utilize less land and eliminate the need for food transportation.

Associate Professor at the NYU Steinhardt Department of Nutrition and Food Studies Carolyn Dimitri said the method by which this initiative grows plants is nothing new, but its application is.

“There is a production method called ‘precision agriculture,’” Dimitri wrote in an e-mail. “It seems this food computer is a form of that practice. In general, precision agriculture can help farmers increase their productivity and lower costs, so, in principle, I think it is a terrific method for the tech-savvy farmer.”

However, Dimitri questioned how widely adopted this technology could be within the farming community.

Amy Bentley, co-founder of the NYU Farm Lab and professor of Food Studies at Steinhardt, believes this small plot of land – located on the south side of the Silver Towers on Houston Street – will be a valuable educational tool not only to students but also to the New York community as a whole.

“It’s great, because it has multi-uses,” Bentley said. “We have an urban agriculture class here in our department that’s run three times a year: spring, summer, fall. It’s used by faculty who live in Silver Towers, it’s used by the nursery school there as part of their enrichment program, and we get a lot of community buy-in by passersby on the way. They’re very interested in it – they think it’s a great thing.”

The Farm Lab is a great way to discover new ways of farming and agriculture, similar to how Harper discovered new options for farming with his computer.

Bentley is also open to the possibility of using Harper’s “Food Computer” at the Farm Lab.

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, April 3rd print edition. Email Geomari Martinez at dining@nyunews.com.

Wurtsboro OKs 48-Acre Indoor Agriculture Complex

Wurtsboro OKs 48-Acre Indoor Agriculture Complex

Sunday - April 2, 2017

By Pauline Liu 
Times Herald-Record 

WURTSBORO - A new project is underway that could make the village of Wurtsboro area famous for an important product: fresh, leafy green vegetables.

Last week, the seven-member Town of Mamakating Planning Board unanimously approved BE-ECO, LLC’s mixed-use indoor agriculture complex.

The farming project is to be located on 48 acres at McDonald Road and Route 209, just south of the Kohl’s Distribution Center.

The company has acquired all of the local assets of Yukiguni Maitake Corp. of America.

Despite receiving planning board approval nearly nine years ago, the controversial Japanese mushroom plant planned for the location never got off the ground.

Edward Maier, 93, a neighbor of the site, said the project sounds like good news for the region.

“We need something around here,” said Maier. “All of the farms are gone, and when I was a kid, there were farms all along Route 209.”

Managing member Lex Heslin of BE-ECO, which is part of the Beautiful Earth Group, a Brooklyn-based sustainable energy company, said up to a dozen large greenhouses will be built on the site, followed by a one-story 44,100-square-foot “pilot” building, and eventually a larger, one-story 214,500-square-foot main facility.

The large facility will have numerous uses, including indoor growing or “controlled environmental agriculture.”

“It’s a new style of high-tech, indoor growing, which is important in a place like the state of New York where there are very short, unpredictable growing seasons,” said Heslin. “This project is very unique, and there is nothing like it out there.”

According to Heslin, no pesticides or GMOs (genetically modified organisms) will be used in the growing process.

Key to the marketing is not just the fact that it’s a locally grown product, but also that it uses fresh, mountain filtered water.

Heslin said his project will use far less water than the proposed mushroom plant would have and will be half the size.

He plans to market some of the vegetables locally and ship some to New York City.

The green vegetables are to be grown in a clean-energy environment using solar power, small vertical access wind turbines, geothermal energy and a large energy storage system.

Heslin described the construction project as worth “tens of millions of dollars.”

He expects work to begin next year.

In addition to the indoor farm, the buildings will provide space for research and development, processing, packaging and distribution, a marketing center and office space.

Mamakating Building Inspector Mary Grass, who is also on the planning board, called the project “very exciting.”

“It’s about making people healthier with fresh vegetables from our area,” said Grass.

“This is the sort of healthy project that the people of Mamakating want, and what they definitely don’t want is more big-box stores, ” said Mamakating Supervisor Bill Herrmann.

In addition to the agriculture complex, Heslin has also purchased the old Homowack resort outside of Spring Glen, with the goal of turning it into an “eco-resort” that would serve farm-to-table food, including locally grown vegetables.

He said he hopes to have the businesses up and running by 2020.

“Freshness is key to delicious produce,” said Heslin.

“If you’re getting it shipped from California or a foreign country, it’s not going to taste that good, and that’s something this project will correct,” he said.