Growing Power Vertical Farm

Growing Power Vertical Far

LOCATION: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
SIZE: 27,000 square feet
STATUS: In Progress
PROGRAM: Highly sustainable urban five-story vertical farm including greenhouses, conference / training and retail spaces

Growing Power, Inc. is an internationally-recognized non-profit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environment in which they live by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food. This mission is implemented by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach, and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.

Growing Power currently operates six greenhouses on a historic two-acre site that is the last remaining farm and greenhouse operation within the City of Milwaukee. As the organization has expanded, the need for additional space to support production, classes, meetings, meal preparation, offices, and on-site warehousing has grown exponentially. Growing Power and TKWA have worked together to develop plans for an ambitious new facility, the world’s first working urban Vertical Farm.

Five stories of south-facing greenhouse areas will allow production of plants, vegetables, and herbs year-round. Expanded educational classrooms, conference spaces, a demonstration kitchen, food processing and storage, freezers, and loading docks will further support Growing Power’s expanding mission as a local and national resource for learning about sustainable urban food production.

Growing Power was founded by Will Allen, one of the world’s leading authorities in the expanding field of urban agriculture. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and he is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. In May, 2010 Time Magazine named him one of the Time 100 World’s Most Influential People.

Tear Down the Barriers to Urban Farming

Tear Down the Barriers to Urban Farming

by: Dwane Jones Special to the AFRO

January 11, 2017

When applied to scenic farms nestled in quiet rural country-sides, the maxim “good fences make good neighbors” might ring true.

But that’s not always the case when you’re trying to build an urban farm. As essential as they can be, we actually find more than a few barriers in their way.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about fences and barriers in my role as Director of the University of the District of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development & Resilience inside the Columbia College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability, and Environmental Sciences. We call it “CAUSES” for short. In that role, I work on introducing urban agriculture to some of Washington, D.C.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Given the large amount of vacant properties and unused space in many underserved urban areas (cities like Baltimore and Detroit come to mind), it may sound easy.  But it’s not. Case in point: In 2015, CAUSES leased three acres of vacant property directly across the street from a Metro stop in D.C.’s struggling Ward 7 to construct the East Capitol Urban Farm. A partnership between several agencies and organizations, East Capitol Urban Farm is the District’s largest-scale urban agriculture and aquaponics facility. It’s an ambitious effort to bring healthy produce to an underserved area of the District.

We began planning the project in early 2015. During the University’s initial site visit, the first order of business was to determine how we would actually walk the vacant parcel — considering the 8-foot high chain link fence surrounding it. Residential properties surround the site on the south and west. The Capitol Heights Metro stop is on the east and a vacant parcel is to the north.

That parcel, incidentally, was under construction at the time for use by Wal-Mart. That project was shelved and the lot stayed empty.

What seemed like a straightforward walk through the site became much more complicated since we didn’t have a key to the gate. Searching for a way in, the team eventually climbed over a wall and through a small opening to access the site. But the physical barrier of the fence and our valiant attempts at scaling it led to much deeper questions. What social implications did such a fence have in Ward 7? What was the purpose of erecting it? How was it interpreted or perceived by the community?

We came to realize that the chain link fence, while probably erected as a safety measure, sent a powerful message of exclusion to people in the neighborhood. It’s a message that echoes the larger story of access and food security in places like Ward 7. For a long time, society has sent a message (intentional or not) to underrepresented populations that fresh, local produce, as well as access to community-oriented landscapes, is out of reach – or, at best, a real challenge to access.  The nature of fencing, in this case, may play a role in how the urban farm is perceived and utilized.

So, in our first major site planning for East Capitol Urban Farm, when someone asked “Where do we start?” I couldn’t help but recall those now-famous words from former President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech to West Berliners: “Tear down that wall!” I quickly responded: “Let’s tear down the fence. It sends the message to keep out or stay away.

“That’s the very opposite of what we intend.”

Rather than continue limiting community access, we eventually erected a 4-ft. high wrought iron fence to encompass a portion of the farm which set a boundary around the different zones contained within the space. Since then, the gates are always unlocked and the community has access to the farm from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week.

East Capitol Urban Farm is now embraced, supported, and operated by its community. Removing barriers has afforded Ward 7 residents the opportunity to: plant over 3,600 produce plants; operate 70 garden spaces; engage over 300 D.C. Public School Students in over 2,500 hours of trade learning; launch a Farmers Market; and employ (part-time) three residents and three UDC students.

At the East Capitol Urban Farm, the fence merely delineates a boundary, a line that outlines the zones of each portion of the farm. It does not represent limitations on a better quality of life. For the people of Ward 7, this is a very crucial and important distinction that removes one barrier at a time.

Dwane Jones, PH.D., is the director of the Center for Sustainable Development and Resilience, a division of the University of the District of Columbia College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability, and Environmental Sciences. Dr. Jones conducts research and teaches courses in Urban Sustainability, Urban Design, Urban Planning and Low Impact Development. He is a member of the Urban Resilience Project.

SoCal Urban Farming Org Increases Supply of Fresh Produce to Homeless Shelter by Healing Soil and Residents

SoCal Urban Farming Org Increases Supply of Fresh Produce to Homeless Shelter by Healing Soil and Residents

January 11, 2017

Charli Engelhorn

Prior to the establishment of the GrowGood urban farm on a lot across the way from the Salvation Army Bell Shelter located in Bell, CA, the shelter, which serves nearly 6,000 meals per week, incorporated very little fresh produce into its menu.

“They were spending cents per meal on fresh produce. Food was donated, so no one was going hungry; but the nutritional quality was often low,” says Brad Pregerson, co-founder of GrowGood, a CA-based nonprofit that has been working with the shelter since 2011 to develop a garden-based program to not only increase the supply of fresh produce to the shelter, but also to provide its residents with meaningful work and act as catalyst for healing.

The Salvation Army Bell Shelter, which opened in 1988, was established with help from Pregerson’s grandfather, Harry, a federal judge and veteran, who perceived the dire need to provide housing for the growing population of homeless veterans in Los Angeles County. Today, it houses up to 350 men, women, and veterans, who are able stay for up to two years and receive comprehensive treatment.

After volunteering in the shelter’s kitchen one summer after his college graduation, Pregerson recognized an opportunity to solve the fresh produce deficit at the shelter and improve the health and well-being of its residents.

“Bell is in an industrial part of the county. It’s only eight miles from Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA), but there aren’t a lot of green spaces,” says Pregerson.

To tackle this environmental challenge, he and his partner in GrowGood, Andrew Hunt, installed several raised bed gardens on the property across from the shelter using imported soil.

“The soil on the property was dead, and we were worried about contamination, something that urban farmers have to contend with,” says Pregerson. “We did extensive soil testing and found there was no toxicity but also no life, so we’ve worked really hard to rehabilitate the soil.”

The farm, which now occupies close to two acres of land, has been able to rehabilitate the soil through the process of biodynamics, a farming ideology that posits that a diversified and balanced farm ecosystem will generate nutrient-rich, self-sustaining fertility, and health.

“We want to grow as much food as possible on this space, but it’s not an exploitative angle, rather a nurturing one of how we can maximize the potential that is here for the sake of the space we have,” says Corinne McAndrews, the head farmer. “The more we grow, the more we learn, and we find that a bigger diversity of life supports a larger soil biology, which supports more plants being grown.”

This diversity includes animals, perennials, native plants, medicinal herbs, and livestock along with the other crops grown on the farm, such as carrots, radishes, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and hard-neck squashes, to name a few. The farms no-till system acknowledges the interaction of these variables, lending to the notion that the systems in the soil work better when left alone, something McAndrews calls the ultimate humility.

“We see everything that happens here as being part of that essential process,” McAndrews says. “The less we till, the better things grow. In just 18 months, we’ve already seen a vast improvement of soil organic matter and available nitrogen, water retention, and calcium ratios.”

The improvement of the soil is one of the major factors in the farm’s ability to produce more food for the shelter. In 2015, the farm was able to provide 2400 pounds of produce to the shelter’s kitchen, and they are on pace to break 7000 pounds in 2016. McAndrews believes that number will more than double for 2017, estimating close to 20,000 pounds.

Another part of this essential biodynamic system is the human factor, which McAndrews says contributes to the therapeutic objectives of the farm.

“When somebody comes here and views themselves as part of an essential system, it is incredibly healing,” says McAndrews. “What I see is this deep acceptance of the world as a complex place and this desire to be more involved. People come out here day to day and share their time and stories, and it’s really beautiful.”

Inevitably, the human factor also involves inefficiencies in the way the farm is tended, but those inefficiencies are intentional and part of the biodynamic process.

“Often, we see something not go the way I’d planned or hoped, but when you step back, you can see that the failure gave way to something that might be beautiful or necessary,” says McAndrews. “There is just so much potential.”

The hope for the future is to maximize that potential by creating systems to bring more people from the shelter to the farm to participate as stewards of the natural process. A new grant from the Disney Foundation will be used to support that mission by enabling the creation of a commercial greenhouse on the property.

The greenhouse will increase GrowGood’s revenue by allowing it to grow and sell micro greens and specialty greens to restaurants in Downtown Los Angeles. This revenue will in turn help to pay some of the shelter’s residents for their work on the farm, and provide additional funding to increase educational and job-training opportunities.

“The job training and being able to put money in the residents’ pockets is so critical, and the components of our program will really grow once the greenhouse is up,” says Pregerson.

Currently, much of the job training involves helping residents develop awareness about their limitations for work and understanding of what they need to succeed in the workforce, such as communicating, being on time, conflict resolution, accountability, and confidence. With the implementation of the commercial greenhouse enterprise, Pregerson will increase that training to include every stage of the business, from sales to delivery.

GrowGood is also looking to create more revenue through Farm-to-Table dinners as outreach fundraising marketing events, the first of which will be held in February.

The hope for the future is to create a sustainable and replicable model that can be used for more sites like the one at the Bell shelter and engage more foundations and donors.

“We’re motivated about the potential to have this sustain itself and show other people that it can work. We want to continue to connect with the philanthropic world, but also with chefs who want to build a resilient food future, where we have small-scale farms all over the country that can support people,” McAndrews says. “It’s only going to be true if we make it possible.”

Blue Planet Consulting 2016 Annual Report

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Blue Planet Consulting 2016 Annual Report

• Published on January 11, 2017

Henry Gordon-Smith

Urban Agriculture Consultant

2016 was a year of notable growth for Blue Planet Consulting. For one, we successfully acquired over 15 new client projects, many of which have already been fulfilled to completion. Servicing these clients has strengthened our core team with relevant skills and experience to keep Blue Planet Consulting (BPC) on the forefront of building a thriving urban agriculture industry.

Further keeping our team in the catbird seat of the industry is our continued management of both Sky Vegetables and Stonebridge Farms. Managing these commercial farms for our partners has supplied BPC with more of the relevant knowledge and experience to be able to provide our clients with data-driven and first-hand operator insights. Our involvement with these facilities proved highly useful in multiple client engagements in 2016. Typical urban agriculture problems surrounding waste, labor, energy, sales, and marketing are being overcome by our growing team every day.

Related: Blue Planet Consulting 2015 Annual Report

Another major 2016 development for BPC is that my blog, the Agritecture platform has signed an agreement to be added into the Blue Planet family. This move has diversified BPC’s capabilities, giving the company access to quickly communicate to a growing community of urban agriculture professionals. Agritecture’s strong audience growth in 2016 gives me confidence that BPC will continue to develop its ability to influence the industry. This partnership also allows us to grow the amount and quality of knowledge we share through the platform as we have now hired our first employee: Community Manager Andrew Blume.

2016 was a year where BPC sharpened the methodology we use to help our clients overcome the challenges of developing urban agriculture businesses. Whether those challenges are zoning complexity, site and crop selection issues, recruiting strategies, yields and waste calculations, or implementing a new sales strategy for your product – BPC has likely serviced clients with similar issues facing your team.

In the report below, we showcase some of our work in 2016, from client engagements to industry events and partnerships we have supported. These activities depict how we have helped entrepreneurs and large companies navigate the uncharted waters of planning, implementing, and operating their urban agriculture business.

Thank you for your time and interest in our company’s 2016 endeavors. On behalf of my whole team, I wish you a warm, healthy, productive, 2017!

Sincerely,

Henry Gordon-Smith

Our 2016 Client Engagements

Farm.one

We conducted a feasibility study for Rob Laing, CEO of Farm.one and helped turn his brilliant idea of growing rare culinary herbs in Manhattan into a reality. We assisted Farm.one with crop selection, site selection, design, and economic analysis. We even assisted with the installation of Farm.one. We also helped Rob recruit his head grower, the talented David Goldstein. We are happy to hear that Farm.one is expanding its operations to another facility in 2017!

CDSC

The Child Development Services Corporation (CDSC) is one of the only food banks with a vertical farm within it, providing fresh and clean produce to Clinton Hill residents in need. The farm was originally installed by Boswyck Farms 5 years ago and was in need of a retrofit. We assisted CDSC with a retrofit of the lighting, plumbing, and nutrient dosing systems. We also made the vertical farm more ergonomic for its users. CDSC benefitted from an updated management manual of the farm we developed as well as a training we conducted for their volunteers.

Foxconn

A large Chinese manufacturer wanted to explore how converting some of its facilities into a “green campus” could improve worker health and wellbeing. We provided a rapid concept development service including sketching out four interventions to their existing facilities that would improve oxygen within the factories, provide some produce for consumption, and improve overall well being. The final results were a set of renderings which we pitched to some of the companies executive team who continue to discuss the possibility of developing the green campus in 2017.

Josh Smith

Our storefront office in Brooklyn certainly catches the eyes of pedestrians passing by. Josh Smith is a local resident and world-renowned artist that saw the +FARM in our window and ask us to design a custom system for his basement. We consulted with Josh what he wanted to grow and designed a system that fit his space and budget. Now Josh and his wife can enjoy leafy greens and microgreens year-round from their home.

Los Surres

Another community group in Brooklyn that has a system originally set up by Boswyck Farms requested our services to update the system. We advised them on means to improve their management of the farm and also recommended certain equipment upgrades.

REED Academy

This organization serves special needs students and families in New Jersey. We conducted a feasibility study on the costs and benefits of converting an unused ~3,000 sf warehouse into a commercial vertical farm for the purposes of generating additional revenue for the school. Our team completed design of the farm and even conducted focus groups with local residents to determine crop selection and packaging choices. The Reed leadership and board are considering funding options and partnerships to develop the vertical farm in the near future.

Global LED Company

We were hired by a global LED manufacturer to conduct market research and analysis to understand the potential for a new product they were considering developing. Our team developed a thorough document reviewing the potential for the product, target customers, pricing, and marketing strategy recommendations.

Square Roots

We assisted Brooklyn’s newest urban farmers and its only urban agriculture accelerator Square Roots launch their first campus. Our primary contributions were on recruiting, curriculum development, and horticulture planning. Now, many of our team serve as mentors to the 10 entrepreneurs that are growing real food in shipping containers in Brooklyn. Read more about Square Roots here.

Grownex Salad Wall

Grownex USA chose us to help them launch their brand and new product Salad Wall at NYC AgTech Week. We were happy to assist them by building their first US website, social media accounts, and marketing strategy. We also displayed their system in our office getting them their first customer as a result of the exposure we provided them. Grownex is growing its sales to the US market in 2017 and Blue Planet Consulting is excited to continue to help them share their unique product Salad Wall with the US market.

Phillips Programs (Phase II)

Two years after helping our first client Phillips Programs in Maryland install a hydroponics learning lab (pictured), we were able to help them design their next phase: an additional six vertical microgreens systems. For this project we partnered with our local contacts at Modernature and co-designed cultivation systems that were appropriate for the Programs’ special needs students. Phase II of the Phillips’ Growing Futures Program is set to launch in Spring 2017.

BMoreAg

Also in Maryland, this client is interested in making a big impact on jobs and food security in Baltimore. We are assisting this client with concept development for now and eventually a full feasibility study. The plan is to convert a large vacant lot into a productive mix of vertical farming and greenhouse operation with an on-site market.

Goler CDC

We are very excited to be working with Goler CDC, one of Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s well known community groups. Our role in their latest project is to provide a comprehensive feasibility study on converting a vacant lot into a series of greenhouses. This project is currently in progress with the site visit complete and crop selection underway. We will be providing Goler CDC with everything they need to get the project moving forward including equipment selection, economic analysis, management planning, and recruiting. The project is set to break ground in 2017.

Global Investor

We provide a benchmarking and case study report to a global investor interested in understanding the ins and outs of vertical farming. The list was comprehensive and included both case study data and analysis from our team of consultants and the investment climate of the emerging vertical farming industry.

Entrepreneur in Dubai

CJ is a young Dubai-based Indian entrepreneur looking to launch a model for vertical farming in Mumbai, India. We are developing a vertical farming concept for CJ that considers the opportunities and challenges of the local market and climate. Crop selection, pre-sqf costs, and a pitch deck are in progress to help CJ raise money for his unique vertical farming idea.

2016 Agritecture Workshops

In 2016 we conducted three Agritecture workshops:

·     Fresno, CA (Feb)

·     London, UK (June)

·     Boston, MA (Dec)

These three 2016 workshops have brought the total number of Agritecture workshops to seven (7). Agritecture workshops match interdisciplinary teams of architects, growers, entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers, designers, and sustainability managers together for a shared mission: to develop a viable “agritecture” concept for the host city. 

The Agritecture Design Workshops comprise of three teams, each matched with the goal of demonstrating creativity, sustainability, and feasibility when integrating agriculture into cities. On-site mentors from Blue Planet Consulting guide participants through urban agriculture project planning, hydroponic agriculture, and sustainability. 

In the past, Agritecture Workshops were typically planned in partnership with the Association for Vertical Farming. For the Boston Agritecture Workshop, and for future workshops, this will no longer be the case. The AVF has indicated they will seek to develop their own proprietary workshop series, although they may still occasionally promote future Agritecture workshops.

We would like to thank our main sponsors for the three 2016 workshops included the following companies:

Agritecture also began offering sponsored content packages in 2016. These packages helped innovative companies showcase their products or services to our audience of 30,000+ vertical and urban farming enthusiasts. Contact Andrew@agritecture.com for more information on how you can reach our primarily millennial and gen-X audience.

2016 Milestones 

January

• Hired new Engineer Jeffrey Landau
• Acquired new client Farm.one

• Visited the first installed Growtainer in NYC
• Completed DIY vertical farming kits for 2016 client Bergen Academies

February

• Hosted Agritecture Workshop in Fresno, California
• Attended GFIA conference in Abu Dhabi
• Attended FarmTek CEA Workshop
• Acquired new client CDSC

• Acquired new client Foxconn
• Became an Autodesk Entrepreneur Impact Partner

March

• Attended U of A CEAC Short Course
• Attended and Spoke at Thought For Food Summit in Zurich, Switzerland

April

• Attended Indoor Ag Con
• Participated in Urban Agriculture Roundtable with Brooklyn Borough President’s Office
• Acquired new client Los Surres

• Acquired new client Reed Academy
• Initiated the California Urban Agriculture Collective
• Attended Food + Future CoLab event @ IDEO in Boston
• Acquired new client Josh Smith

May

• Attended Silicon Valley AgTech Conference
• Spoke at first AgroHack conference in Puerto Rico
• Acquired new client Global LED Manufacturer
• Hired West Coast Representative David Ceaser

June

• Sponsored AVF Summit 2016
• Conducted first international Agritecture Workshop in London, England

July

• Acquired new client Square Roots Urban Growers

August

• Acquired new client Grownex USA
• Hired Djavid Abraham as our new Lead Systems Designer

September

• Participated in 2nd annual NYC AgTech Week

• Acquired new client Global Investor
• Started phase II for client Phillips Programs
• Hired MIT CityFarm veteran Elaine Kung to join our team as a designer

October

• Spoke at the Canadian Greenhouse Conference, offering the first talk on Vertical Farming to ever be featured at the event.
• Attended Chicago LED Magazine Event
• Attended and spoke at Fluence Bioengineering PhotoX event in Austin, TX
• Attended LARTA Institute Urban Agriculture event in Los Angeles
• Whitehouse announces our DIY vertical farming system +FARM on its website

November

• Hired Andrew Blume to join our team as our Community Manager for Agritecture.com
• Spoke at Building Success event sponsored by Microdesk in San Francisco
• Acquired new client Goler CDC
• Attended Seedstock Grow Local OC event

December

• Acquired new client based in Dubai
• Launched Aglanta: the South’s first CEA conference together with the Mayor’s Office of Atlanta and with platinum level sponsor, Southern Company

Our 2017 Strategy & Outlook

2016 was a big year for proving that Blue Planet Consulting’s methodology and team are capable of meeting industry challenges. Our acquisition of high-profile customers such as Foxconn, Square Roots, and Southern Company are evidence that as urban agriculture becomes more mainstream in 2017, BPC will play a role in assisting more high-profile organizations to enter the space successfully.

While we are ecstatic to have worked with these influential customers, we are also proud that we continued our practice of servicing school and institutional clients at a reduced rate. We’re excited to continue working for these small niche customers and adding more value to their installations with the introduction of the +FARM in 2017. We work with these clients because corporate social responsibility is a major motivating factor for our team. Thus, we fully intend to continue devoting resources to communities and clients of all shapes and sizes in 2017.

I can’t think of a more perfect example of how we will engage with big and small, business and education, industry and community, then the Aglanta Conference on February 19th, 2017. Aglanta will be organized by BPC, the Mayor’s Office of Atlanta, and by the conference’s platinum level sponsor, Southern Company. Alongside these entities will be Aglanta’s keynote speaker, Stephen Ritz, who is the undisputed champion of growing in schools.

I encourage you to purchase tickets to Aglanta here or contact me to get your company involved. There are still some exciting opportunities to exhibit or sponsor the event!

Only a crystal ball with tell us exactly how urban agriculture will manifest in 2017. While there are challenges and risks, we are confident that this is the year lucrative and impactful businesses will emerge. If you intend to pioneer and develop alongside the industry, we encourage you to contact us to see how we can work together to turn your growing aspirations into growing operations.

Request your urban agriculture, greenhouse, or vertical farming feasibility study here.

Innovative Neighborhood Farm Adjacent to Housing Complex Increases Food Access and Grows Community​​​

Innovative Neighborhood Farm Adjacent to Housing Complex Increases Food Access and Grows Community

 

January 9, 2017 | Trish Popovitch

“Beyond growing vegetables, beyond growing soil, we’re building community through agriculture,” says Dave Victor of Orchard Gardens Neighborhood Farm and Community Garden. “That’s a big part of the mission, a big part of the vision for the farm. It’s all about providing healthy fresh local food for low income people.”

Dave Victor, after five years honing his growing skills with Garden City Harvest, became the manager of Orchard Gardens Neighborhood Farm just last year and he couldn’t be happier with his new position.

“Just like any sustainable agriculture farmer the focus is on building soil,” says Victor. “I tell people that I’m a vegetable farmer but first and foremost it’s all about growing soil and building that soil ecology.”

Using a diversity of growing techniques and products, Victor and his team integrate urban food growing with urban community growing focusing on building a firm relationship with the local youth.

The farm sits against the fence of the Orchard Gardens Apartment Complex on the west side of town in Missoula, Montana. Founded in 2005, the farm covers two acres of historically agricultural land in an area now occupied by housing projects and busy roads. The farm is a partnership between Garden City Harvest—Orchard Garden’s umbrella organization firmly established in Montana’s community and urban agriculture movement—and Homeword, a sustainable housing construction company. Together they planned the construction of the farm in unison with the construction of the apartment complex. The land needed for the farm meant that some of the complex’s parking space went underground.

Three paid staff positions, two long term interns and 20 volunteers made up the bulk of the farm’s work force this year. In the last growing season, Orchard Gardens produced 19,000 pounds of food using bio-intensive growing methods on half an acre of land. In addition to growing seasonal vegetables, the farm contains a small fruit orchard, herb and flower gardens, and a community garden.

The farm produces over 30 different varieties of vegetables for its 25 CSA customers and also sells culinary herbs and orchard fruit. CSA members can also participate in a u-pick flowers program during the 18 weeks of their CSA program. Orchard Gardens is a “combination site” also housing a community garden with rentable 15 x 15’ plots. One of those plots is ADA accessible with raised wooden garden beds. ADA plots are common among Garden City Harvest community farms.

The produce is distributed to members of the farm’s CSA as well as to the local community through its farmstand outside the apartment complex every Monday and Thursday night. The CSA operates on a sliding scale and runs from June through October. The surplus produce is sold to the community at a vastly reduced rate. Children living in the housing complex, ranging in age from 3 to 13, spend a lot of time on the farm and around the farmstand helping with set up and learning about the vegetables.

“As soon as they all see us out there setting up, they’ll all come running over immediately,” says Victor. “They like to help us carry out boxes of food or help us set up our tables, spread out the tablecloth and in return we give them carrots and peas and green beans and they just love that.”

The children are a core piece of the puzzle for Victor and one of the main reasons he goes to work in the morning. The opportunity to educate and build relationships while instilling a love of fresh food is important to the mission of the farm and Victor hopes all of its farmers.

“We’re in a cool position where we can take these kids under our wing and teach them more than just farm stuff. We can teach them about being polite, being respectful…you know, just every day lessons. And that’s very unusual for a farmer to have that opportunity to do that but it’s very rewarding,” says Victor. “Even if we can’t make a huge impact on the adult’s life, we’re starting fresh with this young generation, giving them access to fresh food. I think they’ll carry that with them in their life. I think that when they have kids they’ll incorporate that into their kid’s life.”

In addition to the usual urban farm amenities, Orchard Gardens has occasional cooking classes and is a popular field trip location. They operate a program with local physicians where patients trade prescriptions for fresh vegetables. Several veterans took part in this pilot program this past year and Victor believes its success will precipitate growth.

In regards to the farm’s future, Victor is hoping to put in a few more fruit trees this coming season and is researching growing seeds for one of the well known organic seed companies. “It would help raise some income for our program, but also to share our seeds with our community, with our community gardeners, just with Missoulians in general to be able to have locally produced locally adapted seeds for the community…it gives our gardeners another leg up,” he says.

Kimbal Musk Just Launched A Revolutionary Shipping Container Farm Initiative In Brooklyn

Kimbal Musk Just Launched A Revolutionary Shipping Container Farm Initiative In Brooklyn

by Jennifer Lauren, 01/06/17

 

Near Jay Z’s childhood home and an old Pfizer factory, you will find a set of ten steel shipping containers. Inside those seemingly innocuous containers lies a lush urban farm. Launched by Tobias Peggs and Kimbal Musk, brother to Elon, the containers are part of a project called Square Roots, an urban farming incubator created to support emerging entrepreneurs as they develop their own vertical farm start-ups, which Musk hopes will create a food revolution.

 Square Roots is an interactive campus of sorts, where each entrepreneur accepted to the one-year program is able to leverage hands-on experience and receive guided mentorship in running a vertical farm and agriculture business. Vertical farms are ideal for urban settings because they require less space, are able to grow soil-free crops indoors under LED lights and expend markedly less water than traditional outdoor farms.  Each 320 square foot shipping container-turned-farm can yield crops that would be the equivalent of two acres of farmland. For all these reasons, exploring the potential of vertical farms is a priority for many –including Square Roots investors such as FoodTech Angels and the USDA.

RELATED: Wind-powered vertical Skyfarms are the future of sustainable agriculture

This November, 10 applicants were selected out of over 500 applications, each coming from different backgrounds and experience levels. While each entrepreneur will not only be able to access invaluable farming know-how and business expertise, the incubator also can serve as a testing ground for the future of vertical farms. For example, exploring how to utilize solar power rather than LED lights, which some say is a drain on electricity. Entrepreneurs received funding and loans from the USDA, Powerplant Ventures, GroundUp, Lightbank, and FoodTech Angels.

The endeavor is one of several of Kimbal Musk’s that are designed to shake up the way we grow and eat food. His other projects include The Kitchen and Next Door, both restaurants that serve dishes from local sources only, and the non-profit The Kitchen Community, which has installed “learning gardens” in over 300 schools.  While Square Roots is currently only underway in Brooklyn, the founders aspire to bring the concept to more cities in the near future.

How Elon Musk's Brother Kimbal Musk is disrupting Farming With 'Food Revolution'

How Elon Musk's Brother Kimbal Musk is Disrupting Farming With 'Food Revolution'

• Leanna Garfield and Sarah Jacobs

• Kimbal Musk - the brother of Tesla Motors chief executive Elon Musk - is trying to change the way we eat by creating what he calls a "real food revolution".

For over a decade, he has run two restaurant chains, The Kitchen and Next Door, which serve dishes made strictly with locally sourced meat and veggies.

Samsung started off its CES event in Las Vegas with a mea culpa over its exploding Galaxy Note 7 smartphones.

In 2011, he started a non-profit program that has installed "Learning Gardens" in more than 300 schools, with the intention of teaching kids about agriculture. 

His latest food venture delves into the world of local urban farming. 

In early November, Musk and fellow entrepreneur Tobias Peggs launched Square Roots, an urban farming incubator program in Brooklyn, New York.

The setup consists of 10 steel shipping container farms where young entrepreneurs work to develop vertical farming startups.

Unlike traditional outdoor farms, vertical farms grow soil-free crops indoors and under LED lights.

Six weeks into the 12-month program, just after the entrepreneurs completed their first harvests, Business Insider got a tour of the farms.

They are vertical farms — everything grows inside 320-square-foot (30 sq m) steel shipping containers. Each container can produce about 50,000 mini-heads of lettuce a year.

• The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave the Square Roots entrepreneurs small loans to cover preliminary operating expenses.

 

Other investors include Powerplant Ventures, GroundUp, Lightbank, and FoodTech Angels.

The Square Roots farms sit between an old Pfizer factory and the apartment building where rapper Jay-Z grew up in Brooklyn. Photo: Sarah Jacobs, Business Insider

On four parallel walls, leafy greens and herbs sprout from soil-free growing beds filled with nutrient-rich water. Instead of sunlight, they rely on hanging blue and pink LED rope lights.

About the size of the standard one-car garage, each shipping container can produce the same amount of crops as two acres of outdoor farmland. 

Musk and Peggs chose Square Roots' first class of 10 young entrepreneurs from over 500 applications.

Peggs says they represent the next generation of farmers — though not all came to NYC with farming experience.

Another 27-year-old farmer, Electra Jarvis, comes to Square Roots three days per week. On Wednesdays, she spends four hours meticulously placing 800 seeds inside small troughs. Photo: Sarah Jacobs, Business Insider

Before Josh Aliber, 24, moved from Boston to Brooklyn to join Square Roots, he had never farmed. Now he's starting up his own specialty herb business and running a vertical farm.

Last year, while Aliber was recovering from a concussion, he learnt about urban farming from a podcast. He started researching it from his bed, and found out about the Square Roots program.

His shipping container farm runs on 10 gallons of recycled water a day, which is less than the average shower's worth.

Aliber can monitor everything from the oxygen level to the humidity — which affects the plants' taste and texture — using "the computer panel" near the door and sensors in the growing beds.

If he wants a tropical or northeastern climate, he can control that too.

Aliber is selling his specialty herbs and basil primarily to upscale Italian and pizza restaurants in NYC.

All the Square Roots farmers sold their first harvests at a recent local farmer's market. Through the program, he has had the opportunity to work with numerous mentors. Square Roots has 120 mentors so far.

"Yes, I have the ability to make money, but yes, I also have the ability to change the world," he says.

Another 27-year-old farmer, Electra Jarvis, comes to Square Roots three days a week.

On Wednesdays, she spends four hours meticulously placing 800 seeds inside small troughs.Two weeks later, she transplants them to the walls.

"We should be growing closer to us in cities," she says.

Aliber, Jarvis, and the other eight entrepreneurs are not just learning how to grow plants, but also how to grow their businesses. A large part of the program is learning about branding and "how to tell our stories", Jarvis says.

The larger goal of Square Roots, Musk tells Business Insider, is to create "a real food revolution".

In the late 1990s, following the tech boom, the Musk brothers moved from South Africa to Silicon Valley. They invested in X.com, which later merged with PayPal and was acquired by eBay.

Kimbal Musk has known Peggs, who previously worked on tech start-ups sold to Walmart and Adobe, for a decade.

Before Square Roots, they worked together at The Kitchen, where Peggs served as the "President of Impact" and helped expand the chain to new cities.

When asked how his experience in tech translates to running a vertical farming accelerator, Peggs says the two fields share the same motivation.

"You learn how to execute impossible dreams. This was all just a Powerpoint presentation six months ago," says Peggs, pointing to the farms behind him.

"Today's consumer wants to know they are supporting companies that are doing something good for the world," Peggs says. "This not just a Brooklyn foodie trend."

The world's largest vertical farm, Aerofarms, launched this year in Newark, New Jersey. In late 2015, urban farming company Gotham Greens opened the world's largest rooftop farm in Chicago.

Square Roots hopes to expand to 20 cities by 2020.

Vertical farms can grow all year, using significantly less water and space than outdoor farms.

Critics of vertical farms point out that the LEDs drain a lot of electricity. Peggs says Square Roots is exploring how the farmers can switch to solar power in the future, since electricity is the biggest cost for the farms.

Square Roots' lights are only on in the evening and night, so they don't run 24-7 like some other vertical farms.

Square Roots will build offices inside the Pfizer factory in the coming months. In its past life, the building produced ammonia, a chemical that's sprayed on plants and became vital to the industrial food system after WWI.

In 2017 and beyond, sustainable food start-ups will do business there. "It's an act of poetic justice," Peggs says.

This story first appeared in Business Insider. Read it here or follow BusinessInsider Australia on Facebook.

A Detroit Urban Farm Preserves Black History In Jam Form

A Detroit Urban Farm Preserves Black History In Jam Form

January 6, 2017 - 10:49 AM ET

Martina Guzman for NPR

On the north side of Detroit, a community farm teamed up with a local arts and culture nonprofit to put its summer harvest to best use — while also honoring the legacy of the city's black families. Their answer: Afro Jam, a line of preserves based on old family recipes.

In the kitchen at Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, just north of downtown Detroit, Linda Carter and Shawnetta Hudson are in the final stages of making their newest jam creation: cranberry-apple preserves. Carter is meticulously wiping down tables while Hudson seals the lids on jars. Then comes the logo — a beautiful graphic of a black woman with afro hair made of strawberries. The kitchen is small and basic, but for the past year it has served as the hub of a community-based product called Afro Jam.

"The name Afro Jam and the logo are empowering, independent and strong," Carter says. "That's what we want our community to be."

Carter, the food safety manager at the farm, recruited Hudson from the local community to help her keep up with making and selling the product. Strawberry, peach and blueberry are Afro Jam's best sellers.

"Strawberry jam, that's my thing," says Hudson. "And when Linda and I work together, we're on point at all times."

Staying "on point" is a goal of Carter's. The jam venture has to be profitable. So in the past year the small group of about a half-dozen women, rotating volunteers and three paid employees has made an aggressive push to sell the spreads at summer festivals and farmers markets.

Afro-Jam is a product of One Mile, a neighborhood arts and culture organization, and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating healthy local food sources for the surrounding community. The farm is a project of Northend Christian Community Development Corporation — both are managed by Jerry Hebron. It has a vegetable garden and an apple orchard. Hebron also oversees a weekly farmers market in the summer.

Roughly 83 percent of Detroit's population is black, an aftereffect of white flight that began in the 1950s. As the people left Detroit, so did the supermarkets — especially in poorer, blacker neighborhoods.

Fresh fruits and vegetables became much harder to come by for many city residents. As a result, gardens started popping up in Detroit, which currently has roughly 1,500 urban farms. Some are large and operate at an industrial scale; others are single lots that have been turned into vegetable gardens for a few families.

The idea for Afro Jam was born out of a need to generate revenue year round while also keeping the community involved, says Hebron. "The community is at the root of everything we do," she says.

So Hebron began spreading the word at the farmers market: They wanted to start a new line of jams using old family recipes. Recipes for making preserves poured in – including some that had been handed down for generations.

Constance King, 67, heard the call and was excited to share her mother's recipe with the folks from Afro Jam.

"My mother brought her jam recipe [from the South] with her — it belonged to her mother and to her mother's mother," King says. "I felt proud about being able to share that recipe. It's a beautiful way of keeping my mother alive."

A lifelong resident of Detroit, King loves the city's rich African-American history. Making biscuits and jam, she says, was part of the Southern black experience – they've been a staple at the Southern supper table since at least the mid-18th century.

"This [growing fruits and vegetables] is a good idea, it's something we can do with all of this empty land," King says. "Our neighborhood used to be full of families — there was not a vacant block. There were hardware stores, delis and grocery stores. It was a Jewish/Black community."

King's family is originally from Georgia but moved to Detroit in the 1940s during the Great Migration, when millions of African-Americans left their homes in the rural South in search of better jobs and an escape from harsh segregationist laws.

Hebron says that among black Detroiters, the tradition of making homemade jams has largely fallen by the wayside in the modern era.

Oakland Avenue Urban Farms used heritage recipes from seven different families – unearthing them from hiding places in attics and long-forgotten recipe boxes.

In the fall of 2015, the ladies of the farm set out to make their first batch of jam. Some of the recipes they received took days to make and weren't practical for production.

Carter and Hebron settled on strawberry jam as their first batch, which took several days and four people to make. "We bonded over making jam, laughing and sharing old family stories," Hebron says.

"Gathering is what it's all about," Carter says. "There is nothing greater than bringing people together over food."

Proceeds from the jam venture go to Northend Christian CDC, a nonprofit that's aimed at revitalizing Detroit's North End historic district, where One Mile and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm are based.

For Hebron, Carter and the rest of the women who make Afro Jam, this is a way to preserve the legacy of Detroit's black families.

"It's one of the most amazing projects I've ever worked on," Hebron says.

Martina Guzman is a journalist based in Detroit. She's currently the race and justice journalism fellow at the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University.

Feel-Good Story About The Future of Vertical Farms

Feel-Good Story About The Future of Vertical Farms

There's really nothing not to love about vertical farms -- multi-story hydroponic operations, usually sited in dense urban areas -- they borrow their best tech from the space program, they're water-conserving, they don't have runoff, they're energy efficient, and they're super land-efficient, meaning we don't need to turn forests or wetlands into fields.

The New Yorker's profiles of the inventors of modern vertical farming has the usual New Yorker lyricism and slightly-too-long-ism, and is a little short on technical details, but it left me with a warm glow this morning. It's a good example of bright green tech, the kind of thing we'll need as our population stabilizes at 9 billion -- the alternative being the "de-growth" dystopia that starts with 4-6 billion people somehow departing the planet.

For now, vertical farms focus on selling high-margin/high-ticket baby greens in fancy grocery stores, but its proponents argue that they'll scale up through luxury goods, then Moore's Law their way down to the rest of the world. There's also a curious note about a secret process for misting or steaming the veggies that uses a proprietary and unpatented system that the inventor believes no one will ever be able to figure out, which is a claim that the writer allows to pass without comment, despite its extreme implausibility.

AeroFarms occupies three other buildings in Newark aside from the main vertical farm, on Rome Street. At 400 Ferry Street, it has a thirty-thousand-square-foot space whose most recent previous use was as a paintball and laser-tag entertainment center called Inferno Limits. The graffiti-type spray-painted murals and stylized paintball splatters of that incarnation still cover the walls. AeroFarms’ headquarters—sometimes referred to as its “world headquarters”—are in this building, some of which is taken up by a multiple-row, eight-level vertical farm that glows and hums. Technicians in white coats who wear white sanitary mobcaps on their heads walk around quietly. Some of these workers are young guys who also have mobcaps on their beards. The salad greens, when you put on coat and mobcap yourself and get close enough to peer into the trays, stand in orderly ranks by the thousands, whole vast armies of little watercresses, arugulas, and kales waiting to be harvested and sold. For more than a year, all the company’s commercial greens came from this vertical farm.

Nobody in the building appears to have an actual office. Employees are distributed in more or less open spaces here and there. In a dim corner of the area with the vertical farm, where the fresh, florist-shop aroma of chlorophyll is strong, young graduates of prestigious colleges confab around laptop screens that show photos of currently germinating seeds and growing leaves. Folding tables burgeon with cables, clipboards, and fast-food impedimenta. David Rosenberg, the C.E.O., who hired Ingrid Williams last year, is the boss. This distinction is hard to notice, because he looks more or less like anybody else.

Planned Vertical Farm in East Baltimore Aims To Train Ex-Offenders

Baltimore Business Journal

Morgan Eichensehr Reporter

Planned Vertical Farm in East Baltimore Aims To Train Ex-Offenders

A Canadian agriculture technology company is partnering with CBO Financial Inc. and Volunteers of America Chesapeake to develop a $6 million indoor urban farm in East Baltimore, part of a new program to give workforce training to ex-offenders.

Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc. signed a letter of intent last month to lease 25,000 square feet from local nonprofit Volunteers of America Chesapeake at one of its centers at 5000 E. Monument St. Part of the building will be renovated to accommodate Arcturus’ "controlled environment agriculture" technology, which uses LED lights to grow plants indoors on vertically-stacked levels. The farm will vertically grow produce like lettuce, basil, cilantro and oregano.

And though the company is involved with marijuana growing efforts in other markets like Florida, Russell Snyder, CEO of Volunteers of America Chesapeake, said that will not be part of the Baltimore operation.

The renovation is expected to be finished in 2018.

Volunteers of America Chesapeake currently uses the building as a residential re-entry center to help ex-offenders rejoin society and the workforce after serving prison sentences. The new partnership will be utilized to provide workforce development opportunities for residents of the re-entry program — the center serves about 150 residents at a time — in the area of urban farming, Snyder said.

"The job training and jobs created by this social enterprise will allow the resident to gain a skill that can be applied in the workplace once they successfully leave our program," he said. "VOAC is all about empowering individuals who have struggled in life to be independent and inspire hope in a new direction with their lives."

Columbia-based CBO Financial Inc. is helping to arrange financing for the project. Financing will be sought through the federal New Markets Tax Credit program, a $65 billion program designed to incentivize private investment in low-income communities.

The Baltimore farming operation is expected to serve as a model for expansion of Arcturus' technologies and training programs across the country and one of several projects Arcturus, CBO and Volunteers of America will work on together going forward.

William Gildea, CEO of Arcturus, said if the program is successful, it could serve as a bellwether for other public-private partnerships within the urban farming industry.

“Our goal was always to create impactful social and corporate programs that are mutually beneficial for all involved, from the community, to the company and our shareholders," he said in a statement. "Partnering with Volunteers of America Chesapeake and CBO Financial puts us in the position to achieve that goal.”

Morgan is a reporter for the Baltimore Business Journal. She covers technology, education and health care.

To Grow Community and Jobs of the Future, Suburbanite Launches Vertical Farming Enterprise in Detroit

To Grow Community and Jobs of the Future, Suburbanite Launches Vertical Farming Enterprise in Detroit

January 3, 2017 

Trish Popovitch

After spending time with street children in Brazil as part of a missionary trip, Jeff Adams, founder of Detroit, Michigan-based urban vertical farming enterprise Artesian Farms, felt compelled to change his community. “If we can go 7,000 miles to work with young people we won’t see again, what can we do in our own backyard?”

13 years ago Adams moved from the suburbs of Detroit to the urban neighborhood of Brightmoor—roughly four square miles on the outskirts of Detroit full of abandoned homes and derelict industrial buildings.

“My wife and I sold our house in the suburbs and moved to the Brightmoor neighborhood in the city of Detroit. What I noticed was in our community there was a lack of jobs for people who are 18 to 30 years old that had some limited skills and limited availability to transportation to get to a job,” says Adams. “I started looking for opportunities to employ people. I set up a business incubator and started looking around to see what we could do.”

What Adams discovered is what many have found in the rehabilitated Motor City – a well established urban farming movement with support from local businesses and city officials that was growing jobs and revitalizing communities. Adams wanted more opportunities like that for the neighborhood of Brightmoor.

After researching the state of urban agriculture in the city and determining that seasonal jobs wouldn’t cut the mustard, Adams bought a warehouse in August of 2014, unoccupied since 1998, on a local industrial complex and set up the shell of a indoor vertical hydroponics farm. “We set up this business as a social enterprise, a limited liability corporation with the social cause of employing people who are difficult to employ, bringing blighted structures back to life and making a vibrant opportunity for our neighborhood,” says Adams.

By March of 2014, the warehouse was renovated enough to set up shop. The farm sits inside a 7,000 square feet warehouse. Using artificial light and seven 20 foot high vertical towers and racked trays, Adams’ workers produce around 75 pounds of lettuce and kale a week, and approximately 40 pounds of basil per week. Adams has recently received funding to install an additional 35 vertical growing systems in the rest of the space, which will serve to increase output as well as his customer base.

Adams sells to local businesses, mostly restaurants and grocery stores. With some proactive self promotion and good old fashioned cold calling, he managed to get Artesian Farms produce into a regional chain with 15 stores as well as one local branch of Whole Foods. One growing contract took an hour while another took 18 months to negotiate. For Adams it’s about having the right product and understanding how to sell your company’s narrative.

“You have this product that people consume, but you also have this background story about growing local and what it means to the city of Detroit. It makes for a compelling combination of good food with a social cause behind it and people gobble that up,” says Adams. “Our branding is all about growing in Detroit for ‘goodness’ sake.’ It’s a great product offering great services to our community.”

Adams introduced his product to the local community on Earth Day last year, gathering locals to celebrate and experience their growing unit’s food. The positive feedback provided the farm with early momentum. Artesian Farms also markets through the local farmers’ markets.

Currently Artesian Farms has two full-time workers, one part-time, and Adams. Having felt the brunt of the mass layoffs in Michigan on a personal level after leaving his job in tech after 30 years, Adams can relate to many of the social and emotional stresses his workers and the locally unemployed face and feel. “There are a lot of issues that go along with hiring under resourced folks. I tell people as long as you can read and follow directions you can do this job. It’s a great way to make a salary.”

Artesian Farms is very aware of the potential issues facing urban employees such as lack of transportation, child care, and background checks that prevent many people from making a fresh start or finding gainful employment.  Adams offers his employees a salaried wage and accommodates their scheduling needs as much as possible.

Just recently, Adams installed 15 additional growing towers although they are not yet active. “Now is the time for us to go out and create the volume to fill that up,” says Adams. “Then as we fill this up, then we will look for another space in Detroit to be able to continue that growth.”

Urban Farming Org Transforms 9 Empty Greenhouses to Tackle Food Insecurity and Grow Meaningful Jobs

Urban Farming Org Transforms 9 Empty Greenhouses to Tackle Food Insecurity and Grow Meaningful Jobs

January 2, 2017 | Vanessa Caceres

When Lynchburg, Virginia resident Paul Lam’s beloved garden was destroyed inadvertently in 2003, residents rallied around him to find a new space. With the help of community members, Lam, who is disabled, eventually found a seven-acre site with nine empty greenhouses on it that had been the home of a large rose supplier.

The farm site needed a bit of rehab, so a call was put out for volunteers. Hundreds showed up from local area schools and universities to help clean it up. From this community outpouring for Lam, Lynchburg Grows, a nonprofit urban farming organization whose dual mission is to increase access to healthy food in the community and provide meaningful jobs to individuals with disabilities, was born.

Lynchburg Grows cultivates 54 raised beds that grow tomatoes, greens, and the occasional specialty item. The raised beds are 90 to 100 feet long and 3 feet wide. They are of varying depth–some are about a half-foot deep for lettuce and others are deeper for root veggies. The organization can grow greens year-round and is especially known for its spring mix, says Farm Manager Shelly Blades. Items that fare well in the heat, such as okra, grow prominently in the summer. The greenhouses are neither heated nor cooled, and that affects what they can produce at certain times of the year.

Much of the produce grown in the greenhouses is destined for distribution to the residents of Lynchburg, a designated food desert in which nearly 24% of the population lives in poverty and where 18% of residents are not sure where their next meal will come from, says Blades.

To help further alleviate this food insecurity, in 2015, Lynchburg Grows in collaboration with Live Healthy Lynchburg launched a mobile produce delivery service called Veggie Van. The van now makes deliveries to 10 locations in the city, three days a week, and through a partnership with USDA SNAP program accepts WIC and EBT card payments. Lynchburg Grows leaders worked with area churches to map out the places most in need of healthy food access.

In addition to selling affordable produce via the Veggie Van, Lynchburg Grows also supplies about five area restaurants, and maintains a summer CSA with about 90 members and a winter CSA made up of approximately 40 members. Any leftover produce is donated to local food banks and homeless shelters.

Although there’s an interest in higher quality food among Lynchburg chefs and residents, the foodie scene in town is not as developed as in bigger cities. So, Blades and others on staff often find themselves introducing “designer veggies,” such as Hakurei turnips. Blades became familiar with such specialty items while working as a garden coordinator for Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City before coming to Lynchburg about a year ago.

She feels that the farmers and staff at Lynchburg Grows should relish their role in educating others—be it top area chefs or everyday residents—about produce items as it solidifies their role as a food and nutrition resource in the area.

Lynchburg Grows employs 11 people, three of whom are full-time. All but two employees live with disabilities and came to Lynchburg Grows from local placement agency, Stand up, Inc., which specializes in vocational training programs. Some of the employees are in wheelchairs, while others have Down syndrome, or are capable of performing farm work, but have trouble with logic. Job coaches from the placement agency often work beside them. The jobs that they do include caring for plants, bagging lettuce, and cleaning. “We like to find what works for one person and help them become an expert at it,” says Blades.

In Kakaako, A Growing Urban Farm Reaches New Heights

In Kakaako, A Growing Urban Farm Reaches New Heights

Between the high rise buildings and industrial warehouses, a farm is the last thing you’d expect to find in urban Kaka‘ako. But one business is creating a space for growing food in an unexpected 

From the outside, this looks like just another building in Honolulu’s developing neighborhood of Kaka‘ako. But step inside a door on the second floor and you’re greeted with stacks of red and green lettuce glowing under rows of LED lights. This is Hawai‘i’s first indoor vertical farm.

“This is an ice plant, or crystal lettuce,” said Kerry Kakazu, the owner and operator of MetroGrow Hawai‘i. “It gives a little bit of a salty taste, nice as a garnish with poke or oysters.”

His love of technology and plants led him to research the growing field of vertical farming.

“Vertical farming just means it’s grown indoors and in multiple levels,” said Kakazu. “People have done vertical farming that’s soil based, but most of it is hydroponics.”

Kakazu uses a method he calls aeroponics, where the roots are suspended in air and bathed in a nutrient-rich mist, instead of soaking in water or planted in soil. This environment gives Kakazu more control of his crops. And since it’s indoors, he doesn’t have to worry about weather, pests and other agricultural challenges.

“This shows that you can do this kind of farming,” he said. “I don’t know if this would ever be enough to supply a large amount of food, like a more traditional farm. But for specialty crops or to grow things that are hard to grow outdoors, I think this is an ideal setup.”

Kakazu started MetroGrow Hawai‘i in 2014. He produces about 100 heads of lettuce a week and a couple dozen containers of microgreens. His clients range from high end restaurants in Chinatown to an herbology store that buys medicinal plants grown by Kakazu.

He’s looking to expand out of his 800 square foot space, but has run into challenge other urban dwellers are familiar with: high rents.

“That’s the one thing with urban food. There’s so much competition for the space, so costs can be high,” Kakazu explained. “Whether it can continue to survive this way, or if it has to be subsidized, somebody’s going to have to want food grown in the urban core. So we’ll have to see.”

Kakazu said eventually he’d like to be able to grow enough produce to feed the flow of residents who are moving into his neighborhood. 

World's Largest Vertical Farm Grows Without Soil, Sunlight or Water in Newark

World's Largest Vertical Farm Grows Without Soil, Sunlight or Water in Newark

AeroFarms has put $30m into a green revolution that seeks to produce more crops in less space, but whether it’s economically viable is an open question

Malavika Vyawahare in Newark, New Jersey

Sunday 14 August 2016 13.00 BST Last modified on Friday 11 November 2016 11.38 GMT

An ambitious, almost fantastical, manifestation of agricultural technology is expected to come to fruition this fall. From the remains of an abandoned steel mill in Newark, New Jersey, the creators of AeroFarms are building what they say will be the largest vertical farm, producing two million pounds of leafy greens a year.

Whether it even qualifies as a “farm” is a matter of taste. The greens will be manufactured using a technology called aeroponics, a technique in which crops are grown in vertical stacks of plant beds, without soil, sunlight or water.

“I ate some of the arugula here,” said New Jersey governor Chris Christie after a recent visit to a smaller AeroFarms facility in the neighborhood. “It tastes fabulous. No dressing necessary.”

The farm, built in the economically depressed New Jersey city promises new jobs, millions of dollars in public-private investment, and an array of locally grown leafy greens for sale. The company has spent some $30m to bring to reality a new breed of “green agriculture” that seeks to produce more crops in less space while minimizing environmental damage, even if it means completely divorcing food production from the natural ecosystem.

AeroFarms and other companies developing similar controlled growing climates claim to be transforming agriculture. Proponents of vertical farming call it the “third green revolution”, analogizing the developments to Apple and Tesla. They tout the potential of such technology to address food shortages as the world population continues to grow.

AeroFarms touts their products as free of pesticides and fertilizer, an attribute that investors think will attract customers who buy organic produce. “We definitely see the need for healthy food in the local area and Newark in particular,” said Lata Reddy, vice-president for corporate social responsibility at Prudential Financial, one of the investors in the project. 

But, food that is not grown in soil may not be palatable to many, even those who are opting for organic substitutes. “If you take the soil out of the system, is it a legitimate organic system?” questioned Carolyn Dimitri, director of the food studies program at New York University. The US Department of Agriculture does not consider the question of organic certification for growing methods that do not use soil, according to AeroFarms’ website.

“Urban farming is trendy,” Dimitri said. It remains an open question, she said, whether it will be economically viable. Prudential Financial has invested “patient capital” in the venture, which is used to finance social impact projects that are unlikely to yield benefits right away. There are no aeroponics projects of this scale but AeroFarms has piloted the technology at Philip’s Academy charter school in Newark, where students are served greens grown at the school.

Seventy times the yield of traditional farms

Marc Oshima, the chief marketing officer at AeroFarms, yanked open a tiny grey door in a back alley in downtown Newark that leads into an old nightclub with vividly painted walls. In 2014, AeroFarms converted the space into a research and development facility. “Out there, in nature, we don’t have control over sunlight, rainfall,” Oshima said, “here, we are giving plants what they need to thrive.”

The moist sanitized air that envelops the R&D lab is missing one ingredient: the earthiness that permeates any agricultural operation.

At the repurposed sites, AeroFarms is pushing the limits of what David Rosenberg, the company’s CEO, calls “precision agriculture”. The scheme ditches the romanticized ideal of farming, acres and acres of open fields dotted with men and women toiling in the sun, getting their hands dirty, in favor of enclosed urban spaces where engineers, electricians and harvesters mill about, wearing protective clothing, masks, and gloves.

With its multicolored LED lights, computer screens lining the walls, and faithful preservation of club decor, AeroFarms’ research facility could easily pass off as a sci-fi themed club. It makes a befitting setting for a company that is promising to increase crop yields by as much as 70 times compared to traditional field farms, without using any pesticides or fertilizers.

The fine print is that the productivity is calculated using square footage occupied and not the vertical space utilized, making comparisons with ground floor-only traditional farms fraught. And critics point out that no traditional farm that size comes with a price tag of over $30m.

Much of the funding is coming from impact investing arms of big-ticket investors like Goldman Sachs and Prudential Financial. AeroFarms has leveraged its social impact goals to attract investments, promising to create jobs in a languishing economy and supplying fresh local produce to the community in Newark.

For New Jersey, where unemployment rates have been persistently above the national average, the promise of new jobs and fresh investment has ensured buy-in from the state. Christie, visiting the smaller aeroponics facility in March lavished praise on the “public-private” partnership.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority provided nearly $9m in incentives, stretched over 10 years, which includes a $2.2m grant under the Economic Redevelopment and Growth program and $6.5m in tax credits.

AeroFarms currently employs close to 100 people, and is promising more jobs in the months to come as the company grows. Like other companies in this space, it is relying on productivity gains to offset high cost of expensive technology and emerge as a successful business.

But even growing success isn’t a sure thing, let alone profit margins.

‘More like a factory than a farm’

AeroFarms has grown over 250 types of leafy greens and sells more than 20 varieties of greens such as arugula, kale and spinach but hopes to expand their offering in the future. The scheme imposes height constraints; as of now, everything grown at vertical farms is a type of short-stemmed leafy green. And while controlled growing allows year-round production and protects these new-age farmers from the vagaries of nature, they still contend with the possibility of crops dying from human error or technological malfunction.

Rising from the middle of what used to be a dance floor is a gargantuan growing machine about 20-feet tall. The rectangular apparatus is a stack of growing beds, each about 20-feet long. It resembles a gigantic fridge missing its outer casing, but instead of being used to store greens, they are growing inside. Inhabiting patches on the seven-tier machine, are leafy greens of all ages: seedlings, shoots and fully grown plants. Freshly minted leaves fluttering gently in an artificially conditioned breeze.

Above each bed are columns of LED lights, bathing the plants in a sharp white glow. When plants photosynthesize they convert light of certain wavelengths into chemical energy, and store it for future use. This light does not necessarily have to come from the sun, Oshima explained.

Under the bright lights the plants appear to be embedded in crumpled soggy blankets. The use of growing mediums other than soil is not unique to aeroponics; planting seeds in cotton has been a popular idea for many a school science project. In recent years a related technology called hydroponics, that uses water as a medium to grow plants, has caught on. But Oshima is quick to distinguish aeroponics from hydroponics emphasizing that their technology is superior. And the key to the technology, is what happens under the microfleece membrane. If peeled it would reveal bare roots enveloped by nutrient-rich mist.

Farming in artificially created conditions is itself not an entirely novel idea. Similar techniques are used in extreme environments where growing food the traditional way is not possible, including the United States South Pole Station, where researchers live in a isolated hostile conditions for months at a stretch, and the International Space Station has its own space garden deploying a growing system called Veggie.

The rationale for using similar methods in places where land has for centuries been tilled to grow food emerged at the turn of the century in response to urbanization and population growth. The world’s population will bloat to 9.7 billion by 2050 and 70% of people will reside in urban areas, according to the World Health Organisation. Using large swathes of land for growing food will not be an option, supporters of vertical farming argue.

Dickson D Despommier, a microbiology professor and a top proponent of vertical farming, sees the agricultural technology not just as a response to food crisis but also as a means of returning land that was previously used for agriculture to its natural state.

“We are just academics, we just sit here and watch these ideas grow,” Despommier said on a podcast he hosts on urban farming, marveling at the scale of the new operation.

AeroFarms has built its sales pitch to investors around more pressing and concrete concerns like land and water shortages, meeting the demand for locally grown greens, and climate change. Growing and selling locally means emissions associated with transportation are reduced. What remains unclear is how the company accounts for emissions arising from the farm’s substantial energy needs.

Vertical farming cropping up around the world

In the last decade a few bold schemes have built on this seminal idea, with the first commercial vertical farm set up in Singapore in 2012. Japan boasts of its own semiconductor factory-turned-lettuce farm, an idea that gained some traction after the Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011 exposed the susceptibility of arable land to long term contamination. In the UK Growing Underground has converted a second world war bomb shelter in London into a hydroponics farm.

In the US at least five new commercial vertical farming operations have emerged over the past five years that use a range of controlled growing technologies to allow year-round harvests of crops that typically have a short growing season in Michigan, and more efficient water use in California. At Ouroboros Farm in California, for example, hundreds of fish are fed organic feed, the waste produced by them is used to nourish seedlings and plants floating on raft beds above the fish tanks.

Some experts like Dimitri believe that such large urban farms are so far afield from traditional ones that “farm” may not be the word for them. “It is more like a factory than farm,” she said, “almost like broiler production, very controlled and regimented.”

Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests

“People want to be hopeful, they want a solution that works,” Dimitri said. “Some people think it is the way of the future. I think it is just another production technology, I don’t think it is going to turn agriculture on its head.”

New agricultural technologies like aeroponics are unlikely to make a dent in the global food crisis, for now. Countries which face the highest food insecurity don’t dabble in expensive new technology, and even if they do, the produce may not reach underserved populations. “It is a technology whose time has come for the rich,” Despommier argued, noting that “it is already popular in Japan, and countries in the Middle East that want to reduce dependence on food imports have also shown interest.”

Reddy was also measured in her assessment: “What we see here will not disrupt the entire farming industry but a particular niche.”

But proponents like Despommier see enterprises such as AeroFarms as a way forward. “There is no limit to what you can do,” he said, while acknowledging that one of the biggest challenges going forward will be growing other crops like rice and wheat, crops that could feed the world.

Urban Agriculture: A New Way to Look At Green

Urban Agriculture: A New Way to Look At Green

The exit from Interstate 280 South onto the Guadalupe Parkway is not a bad-looking off-ramp, as freeway exits go. Still, the last thing a driver might expect to see adjacent to it is a one-acre farm featuring tidy rows of corn, eggplant, okra and squash with the added zest of chickens and bees. Welcome to San Jose’s Taylor Street Farm, a colorful corner amidst the concrete that exemplifies a hot new California trend called Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones.

Though the name is unwieldy—Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone is often shortened to the acronym UAIZ—the purpose is foodie- friendly. As outlined in the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone Act of 2013—California Assembly Bill 551—the law gives tax breaks to property owners who transform empty lots, for at least five years, into working gardens or farms.

“It has the potential to give residents access to affordable, fresh produce in their own neighborhoods,” says Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager, a fitness buff who bikes to work and who shepherded the measure to county approval in 2015. Eligible counties and cities must opt in to the legislation in order to gain its benefits. San Francisco became the first jurisdiction to do so in 2014.

Historically, growers did not need extra incentives to cultivate the rich soil south and west of San Francisco Bay. Thanks to mild winters, spectacular summers and easy access to transportation, Santa Clara County—to cite one example in the region—was home to more than 25,000 farms and orchards during the middle of the 20th century. But after World War II, the county’s population began to double every decade. By 1964, the number of farms had decreased by 90%. “The growth of cities,” say experts Paul Starrs and Peter Goin, “pushes away profitable agriculture at the urban fringe.”

This has proven true in the Bay Area. The region lost 200,000 acres of agricultural land to development, just between 1984 and 2011. The study that ploughed up those numbers was completed five years ago, before the latest boom created more multimillion-dollar motivation for growers to sell.

Which is where UAIZs come in. The concept accepts the reality of lofty land values and accelerating assessments and uses tax savings as a motivator. New taxes on UAIZ plots are calculated to reflect, not soaring residential rates, but the average value of California cropland.

“When I look around San Jose I see a city peppered with vacant lots ripe with potential for new urban gardens near our homes,” says Zach Lewis of Garden to Table, the non-profit that operates the Taylor Street Farm. His research uncovered 585 parcels of land in urban San Jose totalling 371 acres. It is worth noting that this is a tiny amount of land in a state that produces two-thirds of the nation’s fruits and cultivates 800,000 acres of almond trees alone. Still, many of the small parcels in urban areas are in neighbourhoods, and that’s important, says San Jose City Councilmember Raul Percales, a former police officer. “This program not only helps decrease crime and blight on that land, but it can turn it into vibrant green space.”

Barry Swenson Builder is on board. The company owns the Taylor Street property and had no immediate plans for it when Lewis approached them four years ago with his urban farm idea. “Why let vacant land sit idle and pay to maintain it when it can be productive space for growing food?” says company executive Case Swenson.

Growers like Andy Mariani, proprietor of Andy’s Orchard, remain skeptical. He has found it increasingly complicated to continue producing his acclaimed stone fruits on his once-rural land in Morgan Hill. His acreage is gradually being surrounded by homes: farm tractors, dust and spraying don’t always please the neighbors. “Agriculture and urban uses are inherently incompatible,” he says.

But behind the new idea is a vision of change in the way food systems operate. “Yes, it may be challenging,” says Deborah Olson, a friend of Andy’s, who sells his produce at her family’s historic farm stand on busy El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. “But it might be a way we can continue to buy fresh and buy local. Isn’t that really our goal?”

When advocates like Zach Lewis look out on the region, they celebrate its ability to embrace new concepts of green. “I see a growing city,” he says, “with endless potential to improve the local food system and the lives of everyone in it.”

New York City Feeds Itself Tonight!

New York City Feeds Itself Tonight!

10/15/2015 04:45 pm ET | Updated Oct 15, 201

Karin Kloosterman flux founder

It’s the middle of NYC AgTech Week.

. Tonight there will be a fish taco dinner prepared with fish raised on a roof in the city; the rest of the food was grown in urban farms in locations throughout the Big Apple. Dining starts tonight at Farm on Kent, pictured below, in Brooklyn.

A host of tours from 12 noon to 4 tomorrow Friday will show of off the city’s coolest urban farming technologies and I’ll be there giving a demo on how my hydroponics technology flux works.

Leading a global trend to grow hyper-local food close to home, New York entrepreneurs have innovated their food well beyond tomorrow using bold applications from the world of high-tech.

Tonight Manhattan Agriculture chefs will do the chopping and cooking and at the event meet 21 of New York’s leading urban agtech companies planting roots for a vision that New York will produce up to 40% of its food locally.

Sample pesticide-free food or see how food is grown on “water” or hydroponically — one of the most sustainable ways to grow fresh, tasty food in cities.

The event is hosted by the New York City Agriculture Collective (www.farming.nyc).

Henry Gordon-Smith, from Blue Planet Consulting, one of the city’s leading consultants on urban farm projects using technologies like hydroponics says: “I am getting calls on a daily basis from Real Estate developers wanting to know how they can make use of rooftops to grow both food and a new source of income.

“On the flipside I am seeing nothing short of a revolution driven by young entrepreneurs across the globe. Farming in the city has become the next big career: Post-degree, college students from various disciplines are asking me how they can switch careers and they are moving to NYC to make it happen. They want to quit everything and start growing food in their cities. This week will give answers to everyone who is curious about the industry,” he says.

The crunchiest carrots, the coolest connected cucumbers

And just like each New York neighborhood has its own flavor, the same is true for urban farms in the city. Urban farming can mean growing fish for families on a roof in Brooklyn, using hydroponic greenhouses in the Bronx to grow greens in the winter, or using connected sensors and software to optimize yield in the smallest of space — even if you live in a small rental in Soho.

It’s no surprise that when a movement to “grow local” sweeps across the nation that New York City picks it up and takes a firm stance and a bold leaf, ahem, lead in urban farming.

Meet the breadth of New York City’s agriculture leaders in industry and products for the connected garden at New York’s first AgTech Week where investors will connect to educators, backyard farmers, large-scale commercial growers, community activists, and city officials.

The full program is found here. Or email hello@farming.nyc for more.

Follow Karin Kloosterman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/karin_flux

Grow Your Own Fresh Food In The Middle of Manhattan — Ask Henry!

Grow Your Own Fresh Food In The Middle of Manhattan — Ask Henry!

06/24/2015 02:41 pm ET | Updated Jun 24, 2016

Karin Kloosterman flux founder

It’s a natural thing for every human being to want: the ability to grow fresh, healthy food anywhere we call home, even if that’s in the concrete jungle of New York City. That’s where I’ve been spending the last couple of months as I build up my business to help people grow fresh and healthy food anywhere, even inside an apartment in Tribeca.

Yes, we may spend our days and nights plunking away at keyboards or talking into little plastic boxes but who doesn’t yearn to eat the freshest food in the world? Food that’s been grown by your own hands? This desire is multiplying. There is a shift in cities across America, and urban farming is something that’s taking root.

Young men and women are graduating college with ambitions of going on to be farmers. Horticulture schools are filling up with young people wanting to farm. They want to be a part of the Farm to Table movement. To make matters better for future urban farmers, Quartz reports that most Americans could be sustained on local foods alone, except for the cities of LA and New York.

If you are thinking even for a second about growing food on your patio, rooftop, basement, restaurant or little plot between buildings, Henry is here to help. Henry, or Henry Gordon-Smith is an urban agriculture consultant for Blue Planet. While his passion is hydroponics, or growing food on water, Henry can help you decide what, where, how and what technology you should use to maintain and enhance your urban yield.

“I like to look at the whole spectrum of urban agriculture with my clients from soil-based to hydroponics and high tech vertical farms,” Henry tells me. “Then, based on if their goals are yield, education, or job-training, our team recommends design, technology, and operations strategies.”

Will it be cucumbers, strawberries and Swiss chard? Or potatoes, lettuce and carrots?  Henry is here to help. I ran into Henry at the AlleyNYC, a co-working space in New York. He graciously lends contacts, makes introductions and shares best practices on what’s happening in the city.

We know that Whole Foods in Brooklyn now operates a large (20,000 sq/ft hydroponics farm on its roof). And New Jersey’s Aerofarms is about to get something real big.

What’s next?

Formally as part of Blue Planet a company that makes nano-bubble aerators to increase hydroponic crop yield, Henry works to grow urban farms so they can be a mainstay in New York, even if you don’t use his company’s equipment.

He’s currently consulting a number of big deal projects for Sky Vegetables, an 8,000 sq/foot growing vertical farm in the city, for Coop Tech, a training rooftop greenhouse at 96 and 1st. And he’s helping develop a shipping container food art project, hopefully one that will be replicated around schools in the region.

You can say that Henry’s putting hydroponics on the map in New York City. Hydroponics or vertical farming, is a way to grow food and high value crops using water and nutrients alone - no soil. There are plenty of reasons for the planet as to why hydroponics could work as a great supplement to convention agriculture: using up to 95% less water, more vitamins, greater yield, no pesticides and the use of unconventional space are some benefits.

As for what’s hot in hydroponics in New York City, Henry plugs three projects:

1. Harlem Grown at 134 and Lennox: “With a thriving soil-based farm and a hydroponic greenhouse surrounded by buildings on three sides, this urban farm is a one-of-kind demonstration,” says Henry.
2. EdenWorks in Brooklyn, which is a data-based company working on making aquaponics feasible. Aquaponics is hydroponics with the addition of fish to provide nutrients in a closed-loop system.

3. New York Sunworks which is developing rooftop greenhouses for schools, and which plans to have 100 hydroponics food labs in the next 5 years around NYC. They’ve built 17.

If you are looking for inspiration, Henry also produces the Agritecture blog which helps people envision future hydroponics and vertical farms. He says: “It’s both utopia and real world placed side by side. My hope is that it will inspire others to be bold but also act feasibly.”

Get inside some of his inspiration by reading Dr. Dickson Despommier’s The Vertical Farm if you want to learn more about the practice and economics of hydroponics, and be in touch with Henry if you want to start an urban farm in your city.

I love how Henry is creating both a business and a business climate for hydroponics and mother earth. He’s a citizen of the world, who was born in Hong Kong, but who travels as a Canadian. A man of my own heart. He’s also super friendly.

Connect with Henry at henry@agritecture.com and join the Association for Vertical Farming to scale your vision and connect with like-minded companies in the industry.

Follow Karin Kloosterman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/karin_flux

Will Indoor, Vertical Farming Help Us Feed The Planet — Or Hurt It?

Will Indoor, Vertical Farming Help Us Feed The Planet — Or Hurt It?

By Tamar Haspel 

Columnist, Food June 17, 2016 

How Can We Feed A Population That’s Growing On A Planet That Isn’t? Grow Up!

Outdoors, an acre of land can grow an acre of lettuce. Indoors, an acre of building with plants stacked floor to ceiling can grow many acres of lettuce. Which is why, in cities around the country, entrepreneurs are turning warehouses into vertical farms. They promise local produce, responsibly grown. Do they deliver?

There are big pluses to vertical farming, the most fundamental of which is its verticality. Traditional horizontal farming is limited by its two dimensions. But if you stack plants 10 or 100 high, that acre can do the work of 10 or 100 farmed acres. On top of that, the plants grow faster: You’re not limited to the hours of daily light the sun delivers, so you get even more lettuce per square foot.

Less land is a win.

Because indoor plants are fed by fertilizer either delivered through water (hydroponic) or misted directly onto dry roots (aeroponic), they get only what they need. There’s no extra, and there’s no runoff, which translates to no algae blooms in rivers, lakes and estuaries.

Less fertilizer is a win.

Then there’s less water. As that commodity is in increasingly short supply in many parts of the world, a system that can cut water use by up to 95 percent should command our attention.

Less water is a win.

Because the climate is controlled, and there’s no soil to harbor pests or disease, indoor farming requires few pesticides. Workers are exposed to fewer toxic substances, and there are no threats to honeybees or other desirable plants or animals.

Fewer chemicals is a win.

Lettuce grown indoors can also be fine-tuned nutritionally by adjusting the fertilizer, but studies comparing indoor and outdoor lettuce nutrition find little difference, so I’ll call that a wash.

Still, that’s four non-trivial wins, and they are part of the reason vertical farming seems to have captured the imagination of urban food growers and consumers.

But before you shell out for the microgreens, there are a couple of disadvantages. The first is that you’ll have to shell out a lot, and the second gets at the heart of the inevitable trade-off between planet and people: the carbon footprint.

If you farm the old-fashioned way, you take advantage of a reliable, eternal, gloriously free source of energy: the sun. Take your plants inside, and you have to provide that energy yourself.

In the world of agriculture, there are opinions about every kind of system for growing every kind of crop, so it’s refreshing that the pivotal issue of vertical farming — energy use — boils down to something more reliable: math.

There’s no getting around the fact that plants need a certain minimum amount of light. In vertical farms, that light generally is provided efficiently, but, even so, replacing the sun is an energy-intensive business. Louis Albright, director of Cornell University’s Controlled Environment Agriculture program, has run the numbers: Each kilogram of indoor lettuce has a climate cost of four kilograms of carbon dioxide. And that’s just for the lighting. Indoor farms often need humidity control, ventilation, heating, cooling or all of the above.

Let’s compare that with field-grown lettuce. Climate cost varies according to conditions, but the estimates I found indicate that indoor lettuce production has a carbon footprint some 7 to 20 times greater than that of outdoor lettuce production. Indoor lettuce is a carbon Sasquatch.

But wait! There are ways to make up some of that. Shipping lettuce (usually from California) also has a climate cost. If your lettuce is grown in a warehouse in a nearby city, you cut that way down. But transport savings aren’t even close to bridging the gap, unless your field-grown lettuce is being flown in. The carbon cost of air freight is so high that indoor farms would be a fine substitute.

We’re not done yet.

Lighting is getting more efficient, and that will help, but there are significant limits to improvement. A spokesman for Philips Lighting said the company expects that eventually its LEDs will become 10 percent more efficient, but not much more. Albright theorizes that something like 50 percent more is possible. The theoretical maximum is that all electricity flowing to the bulb is converted to light; right now, the best bulbs convert only half of it.

There’s another way to make lighting more efficient: Pump carbon dioxide into the air. Plants photosynthesize CO2, so if there’s more of it in the atmosphere, plants can grow better with the same amount of light. According to Albright, that’s another 20 percent savings.

Combine the lighting and CO2 savings, and you’re looking at something like a 40 percent efficiency improvement in the near term. Substantial, but not enough to make indoor farms climate-competitive.

For that, we need to look at the source of the energy. Not the source at the farm; even with perfect efficiency, solar panels on the roof of a warehouse can’t come anywhere near providing enough energy for stacks and stacks of plants. It’s the source at the power plant that matters.

The carbon footprint of your lettuce depends almost entirely on the carbon footprint of your electricity. If your farm is in coal country, the carbon cost is high. Natural gas, it’s lower. About a fifth of the electricity in this country is generated by nuclear plants, which have a carbon footprint close to zero, making indoor farms a clear win. And, as renewable energy sources such as solar and wind start to contribute more to the grid, the carbon cost of vertical farms will go down.

Nate Laurell thinks about that a lot. He’s the chief executive of FarmedHere, one of the nation’s largest vertical farms, growing organic basil, microgreens, arugula, kale and more in a warehouse outside Chicago. From a climate standpoint, going vertical is making a bet that renewable energy is coming. Laurell acknowledges the high carbon cost of his products today, but says that “reducing the carbon footprint of the grid is a solvable problem over time.” In the long run, he says, “electrifying agriculture” will be a climate win because the grid will go green faster than the farm.

I can see a future where the carbon cost of indoor lettuce comes down. Whether the dollar cost comes down commensurately is hard to predict. One of the problems with vertical farming is that it’s expensive. Maintaining a building, setting up hydroponic infrastructure and paying big-city rent or real estate taxes is a wallet-thinning enterprise. To date, all the vertical farms I’m familiar with grow herbs and greens, high-value crops that they sell to well-heeled urban consumers.

I asked Laurell whether that kind of farming can break out of the basil-for-rich-people model, and he said he’s confident that it can. Although his products are now priced to be competitive with other organic greens and herbs, he’s working to reduce that price point. “Our intent is to get to a point where you have cleaner food with less chemicals that gets to the grocery store within 24 hours at a price point that isn’t just for Whole Foods,” he says. He’s aiming to be competitive with conventionally grown lettuce and expects to get there within three to five years. “A high-priced organic product that’s sold to rich consumers isn’t that interesting of a business,” he says. “To me, the interesting business solves the problem of feeding people.” Laurell was unwilling to share details of his cost-cutting plan — understandable in a competitive industry — but I wish him luck.

The bottom line on vertical farms is that today, indoor lettuce has a huge climate cost, but it’s not hard to envision a world where a transformed energy grid changes that equation. For so many reasons, let’s hope that world comes soon.

Tamar Haspel writes Unearthed, a monthly commentary in pursuit of a more constructive conversation on divisive food-policy issues. She farms oysters on Cape Cod. Find out more about her at www.tamarhaspel.com.

  Follow @TamarHaspel

Urban Aquaponic Farmer and Chef Redefines Local Food in Orange County, CA

Urban Aquaponic Farmer and Chef Redefines Local Food in Orange County, CA 

AJ Hughes

In a county named for its former abundance of orange groves, chef and farmer Adam Navidi is on the forefront of redefining local food and agriculture through his restaurant, farm, and catering business.

Navidi is executive chef of Oceans & Earth restaurant in Yorba Linda, runs Chef Adam Navidi Catering and operates Future Foods Farms in Brea, an organic aquaponic farm that comprises 25 acres and several greenhouses.

Navidi’s road to farming was shaped by one of his mentors, the late legendary chef Jean-Louis Palladin.

“Palladin said chefs would be known for their relationships with farmers,” Navidi says.

He still remembers his teacher’s words, and now as a farmer himself, supplies produce and other ingredients to a variety of clients as well as his restaurant and catering company.

Navidi’s journey toward aquaponics began when he was at the pinnacle of his catering business, serving multi-course meals to discerning diners in Orange County. Their high standards for food matched his own.

“My clients wanted the best produce they could get,” he says. “They didn’t want lettuce that came in a box.”

So after experimenting with growing lettuce in his backyard, he ventured into hydroponics. Later, he learned of aquaponics. Now, aquaponics is one of the primary ways Navidi grows food. As part of this system he raises Tilapia, which is served at his restaurant and by his catering enterprise.

Just like aquaponics helps farmers in cold-weather climes grow their produce year-round, the reverse is true for growers in arid, hot and drought-prone southern California.

“Nobody grows lettuce in the summer when it’s 110 degrees,” Navidi says.

But thanks to aquaponics, Navidi does.

Navidi also puts other growing methods to use at Future Foods Farms. He grows San Marzano tomatoes in a greenhouse bed containing volcanic rock (this premier variety was first grown in volcanic soil near Mount Vesuvius in Italy). Additionally, he utilizes vertical growing methods.

For Navidi, nutrient density is paramount—to this end, he takes a scientific approach in measuring the nutrition content of his produce. In the past, he and his staff used a refractometer, but now rely on a more precise tool—a Raman spectrometer. This instrument uses a laser that interacts with molecules, identifying nutritional value on a molecular level.

With a Raman spectrometer, Navidi measured the sugar content of three tomatoes—one from a grocery store, one from a high-end market, and one that he grew aquaponically. Respectively, measurements read 2.5, 4.0 and 8.5.

Navidi wants his customers to know about these nutritional differences, so he educates his Oceans & Earth diners through its menu and website. Future Foods Farms also offers internship opportunities to students from California State University, Fullerton. Interns conduct research and learn about cutting-edge ways to grow food.

Navidi believes aquaponics and other innovative growing methods can lead to a more robust local food system in Orange County. But he also sees some of southern California’s undervalued resources—namely, common weeds such as dandelion and wild mustard—helping the region become a major local foods player.

“We need more research on nutrients in weeds,” he says. “Dandelions and mustard are power weeds, and need little water.”

While these wild plants are important, they’re no substitute for policy. Navidi would like to see farmers in the county pay lower rates for water, and believes that a revised zoning code is needed for a county that is urban and becoming more so.

“Now, urban farming is happening all over,” he says. “We need changes to our zoning laws—politicians realize that.”

New zoning rules could help others in Orange County venture into aquaponics, something Navidi feels is necessary not only for the county, but for the country.

“For America to be sustainable, it needs aquaponics,” he says.

Ultimately, Navidi’s goal is to provide the best product possible, with an eye toward simplicity, health and wholesomeness.

“Any fine-dining chef is concerned with the quality of their product,” he says. “There’s nothing better than real food. I try to grow the most nutrient-dense tomato possible. Just add sea salt and black pepper—that’s all you need.”