This Vertical Farm Wants to Pioneer ‘Post-Organic’ Food

This Vertical Farm Wants to Pioneer ‘Post-Organic’ Food

by Jan Lee on Wednesday, Mar 1st, 2017 FOOD & AGRICULTURE

Once upon a time, every farmer on earth practiced something called organic agriculture, although they never bothered to coin the phrase.

The cultivators of this amazing pre-industrial concept spent their days diligently tending and harvesting their crops without the aid of manufactured products. They protected their plants with things no longer in abundance: worms, snails, ladybugs, and a full arsenal of homeopathic concoctions passed down from hundreds of years of ancestral heritage. And it was, for sure, a tough row to hoe.

Today’s natural agriculture is still organic by definition, but the mechanics to raising that chemical-free produce are a world away from what your parents might have tried in their backyard.

Most states have regulations and long lists that define organic agriculture and what can, by law, be used during large-scale organic farming. And while today’s organic farms may skillfully manage to avoid the use of controversial chemical sprays with complicated names like permethrin and thiamethoxam (which have both been suspected of contributing to the decline in bee colonies), they typically rely on concentrated non-chemical fungicides and pesticides for large-scale production.

An entrepreneur in Kearny, New Jersey, thinks he’s found the next evolution for agriculture: post-organic. If that doesn’t sound like a very inventive name for a process, the system itself makes up for it.

Irving Fain’s concept of farming does away with the swaths of green space we normally associate with wholesome agriculture. He traded acreage for an urban warehouse, a carefully-managed environment and a proprietary technology that produces food 100 times faster than conventional farming. And all of that without pesticides, soil stimulants or other additives, Fain and his company claim.

Warehouse-based vertical farming isn’t entirely new. Farmers have been dabbling in various versions of indoor farming for centuries, finding new ways to capitalize on its water-saving techniques and, in so doing, finding faster ways to ensure quality production.

But Fain’s company, Bowery Farming, uses its own self-automated technology to respond to and manipulate the environmental factors upon which plants rely.

And unlike most full-scale indoor farming operations, Bowery’s system can “sense” when it’s time to pluck the crops – something that is usually done by sight and schedule in conventional farms. That means less wasted product and more predictable harvesting seasons. It also means a more predictable bottom line.

So far the company’s ‘post-organic’ greens are available in two Manhattan restaurants, a pair of Whole Foods Market stores in New Jersey, and Foragers Market in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.

With increasing concerns about drought and climate change, vertical farms that can operate in limited space with less water and virtually no natural sun may become the next stage in agriculture.

Whether the ‘post-organic’ concept will eventually be able to overtake the organic market’s sizable revenues ($43 billion yearly), remains to be seen. But in there’s something to be said for an industry that uses 95 percent less water than conventional farming and won’t wither with climate change.

Property Tax Breaks Aim To Help Urban Farms Crop Up

Property Tax Breaks Aim To Help Urban Farms Crop Up

By Tara Duggan

Updated 4:47 pm, Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Kevin Bayuk (left) and Dorsey Kilbourn of the Urban Permaculture Institute of San Francisco work at the 18th and Rhode Island Permaculture Garden in S.F. in 2014. The garden is owned by a private landowner who later received a property tax break for allowing the land to be used for agriculture under the state’s Urban Agricultural Incentive Zones act. less

Up and down the state, property owners can receive tax breaks for allowing their unused, and often blighted, urban lots to transform into commercial or noncommercial farms under a law that went into effect in 2014. It hasn’t yet resulted in a rash of urban farming, as just four property owners in the state have enrolled so far, including one in San Francisco. But state Assembly member Phil Ting D-San Francisco, wants to extend the law so more cities, and landowners, can take part.

“Urban farming needs more time to take root and help more Californians access nutritious food in their own neighborhoods,” Ting said in a press release. “An urban farm can be an oasis. There is great interest to tame the concrete jungle with green spaces that transform blight into bounty.”

Since the law was enacted, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose and San Diego have all passed local ordinances providing financial incentives to turn unused lots into urban agricultural zones for a range of uses, including vegetable farming, beekeeping and nonprofit teaching gardens. The law expires in 2019, and with AB465, Ting proposes extending it to 2029 to allow more cities and counties — which must have a minimum of 250,000 residents — to follow suit.

One of those is Los Angeles, which is working toward passing an ordinance. Unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County, as well as Santa Clara County, already offer the tax breaks.

To apply, property owners must allow farms to stay at least five years to receive the tax break and have property of 0.1 acre to 3 acres in size, with no dwellings on-site. The law assesses the plots’ property value at about $11,000 per acre, the same as irrigated farmland, which can greatly reduce the owner’s property taxes.

In San Jose, a property owner with two adjacent parcels has just turned the land over to Valley Verde, a nonprofit that gives low-income families tools and training to grow their own vegetables in planter boxes.

“It’s a win-win for the owners,” said Art Henriques of San Jose’s planning department. “And the nonprofit gets at least a five-year opportunity to do something productive for some people in the community.”

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan

Vertical Future: London Based Start-Up to Launch Device to Tackle Air Pollution In Major Cities

Vertical Future: London Based Start-Up to Launch Device to Tackle Air Pollution In Major Cities

The World Health Organisation estimates air pollution annually costs the UK £62bn

• Zlata Rodionova 
• 
  The Independent Online

This year London reached its annual limit for pollution in just five days, according to data from the capital’s main monitoring system. Reuters

A London-based tech start-up is developing a secretive tool designed to limit the impact of air pollution in major cities.

Husband-and-wife team Jamie and Marie-Alexandrine Burrows this week launched Vertical Future, a company backed by HSBC, which aims to tackle the negative effects of urbanisation and make our cities a “healthier place to live”.

The company’s digital product to monitor and reduce air pollution is currently in development with a prototype expected by August 2017.

“We want to make cities better for our children,” Mr Burrows said.

“Our various urban initiatives are long-term responses to tackle the negative effects of urbanisation. To promote fast and sustainable growth, we are looking to work with research organisations, investors, government, and third sector organisations that share similar views on health and urbanisation” he added.

Vertical Future’s overall mission focuses on three themes: food, digital and living.

The company’s first step will be to launch a network of so-called vertical farms across London in disused buildings and recycled shipping containers. 

Vertical farming refers to a method of growing crops, usually without soil or natural light, in beds stacked vertically inside a controlled-environment building.Each farm promises to provide year-round produce for school and local communities, create jobs and improve awareness of food sustainability as well as reducing the distance that food travels from crop to plate.

The first site in South East London will be operational from April 2017 and plans are being drawn up for a second site.

This year London reached its annual limit for pollution in just five days, according to data from the capital’s main monitoring system.

The World Health Organisation estimates air pollution annually costs the UK £62bn, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan has made tackling the problem a priority of his administration.

The Indoor Farming Compound Founded by Kimbal Musk — Elon's Brother — Now Delivering Greens

The Indoor Farming Compound Founded by Kimbal Musk — Elon's Brother — Now Delivering Greens

Leanna Garfield

Business InsiderMarch 1, 2017

Farmers from Square Roots — a Brooklyn-based urban farming accelerator program co-founded by Kimbal Musk (brother of Elon) — are now delivering their produce to local offices. 

The farmers are growing greens inside 10 steel shipping container farms. Unlike traditional outdoor farms, these vertical farms grow soil-free crops indoors and under LED lights.

While Square Roots mainly sells greens at farmer's markets in New York City, in late February, the accelerator started delivering directly as part of a weekly subscription service for companies in the area, including Vice Media, Kickstarter, and WeWork. According to Metro,  subscribers can order bags of Square Roots greens online, and the farmers will drop them off. One bag costs $7 per week, and a seven-pack costs $35.

The farmers have experimented with a number of business models since their first harvest in January. With the new delivery service, they are hoping to meet consumers where they are, Square Roots' cofounder, Tobias Peggs, tells Business Insider.

"What the farmers heard time and time again was that a lot of people in New York wanted local food, and wanted to play their part in the real food revolution — but they only ate at home once or twice per week," he says.

In fall 2016, Peggs and Musk launched Square Roots — one of Musk's many food ventures. 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. In 2011, he started a nonprofit program that has installed "Learning Gardens" in over 300 schools, with the intention of teaching kids about agriculture. 

Square Roots hopes to expand to 20 cities by 2020.

D.C.’s Urban Farms Wrestle With Gentrification and Displacement

D.C.’s Urban Farms Wrestle With Gentrification and Displacement

Urban farmers often hold high-minded ideals about food justice and access; they’re also often unwitting vehicles for driving out communities of color.

BY BRIAN MASSEY  |  Commentary, Food Justice, Urban Agriculture
02.27.17

If you’ve lived or worked in Washington D.C. over the last decade, the scale and pace of gentrification there has been impossible to miss. Over the last decade, the city has experienced a rapidly increasing demand for, and cost of, housing, similar to that in other knowledge hubs and “superstar cities” like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston.

In addition to all the good things that come with increased interest in density and urban living, those cities have been the hardest hit by displacement, a process that disproportionately affects poor folks of color. Everyone who lives or works in D.C. can palpably feel this slow-motion injustice, and we are all forced to grapple with it, whether we want to or not.

“Everybody—wherever you go, no matter the educational background—sees what’s going on,” Xavier Brown told me. Brown is the founder of Soilful City, an urban agriculture organization in D.C. with the justice-centered mission of healing “the sacred relationship between communities of African descent and Mother Earth.”

Last year, I managed an eight-year-old urban farm in the neighborhood of LeDroit Park. LeDroit is just down the hill from Howard University and next to the super-hip neighborhoods of Shaw and Bloomingdale. The farm itself is surrounded by public housing, Howard dorms, and renovated row houses selling for over $800,000.

Farming in the middle of all that created a sort of socio-economic whiplash. On good days, it felt like the best that a city can be, a glorious melting pot, with the farm as a gathering place for folks to celebrate commonality. But on bad days, when I had to clean up vandalism, or when I couldn’t for the life of me get my neighbors of color to visit the farm, it felt like an exclusive resource designed to make newcomers feel comfortable and long-term residents feel alienated. It felt like I, a bearded white dude, was actively contributing to an injustice. Or, just as bad, like I was pretending to be neutral, while standing by and watching it happen.

In my experience, most urban farmers are justice-minded folks who enter this profession with high-minded ideals. But in D.C. we are increasingly finding that our work is being associated with, and even coopted by, the forces that are driving extreme gentrification and displacement, forces viewed negatively by many working class communities of color.

As I slogged through the harvest season, I realized that I couldn’t be the only farmer wrestling with this conundrum. So I set out this winter to have some frank conversations with others in my community about how to address displacement, and how to position our industry in relation to the larger forces at work.

Urban Agriculture’s Role in a Gentrifying City

During the first decade of the 21st Century, D.C. became much more young, single, and white. The city’s white population jumped by 31 percent, while its Black population declined by 11 percent. A city that peaked at 71 percent Black in 1970 lost its Black-majority status in 2011.

All of this makes Brown think about displacement every day. “A lot of urban ag is based on working in stressed and distressed communities. These communities are getting pushed out, and once [they’re] pushed out, they’re gone, and it turns into something else,” he said. “Then your mission is gone.”

Dominic Pascal is the production manager at THEARC Farm, an urban farm in the city’s Ward 8 that provides food access and education for the low-income and working-class families that live nearby. He was initially inspired by the community-based feel of the urban agriculture scene in D.C., but he worries that quality could get lost as the city changes.

“Hopefully it never becomes something where kids look at a farm in a community where their parents and grandparents grew up and feel like it’s not for them,” he said. As a Black farmer, he understands that his presence and that of others like him “is an important symbol for the community to see.” He hopes to be able to say, “I look like you, I’m related to you, and this space is for you.”

“I’ve seen a lot of maps where it looks like we’re increasing food access [in D.C.], when we’re actually just pushing poor people out,” Josh Singer, executive director and founder of Wangari Gardens, told me. Wangari is an innovative community garden near several rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, and was designed explicitly to promote responsible community development in the face of this displacement.

“Say you have a neighborhood that is a food desert,” Singer, who is white, said, starting a story about a hypothetical project in which someone crafts a narrative, gets a big grant, builds a big garden, and does most outreach and organizing through social media. “All of a sudden that garden is just full of people who recently moved to the neighborhood, who are all good people, but who aren’t really food insecure.”

Singer and I both know many projects like this in D.C., projects that raise a good deal of money and garner glowing profiles from the press at their launch, but don’t work with the community in the planning stages, and don’t end up serving the people they say they’re going to serve.

Lauren Shweder Biel, executive director of DC Greens, a food justice organization focused on food education, access, and policy, argued that urban agriculturalists need to address these “intersectional pressures on the communities that [they] serve.”

“We know that urban ag is a tool for neighborhood revitalization and beautification, and we know that those are catchwords for gentrification,” Schweder Biel, who is white, said. That’s why she believes urban ag groups should also work to “guarantee affordable housing in areas where we’re putting in urban farms, recognizing that these urban farms will be tools of displacement.”

According to many urban farmers, projects like this end up backfiring not only because they replicate the oppressive patterns of most urban development, but also because they cement the belief in the minds of many long-term residents of color that urban agriculture is not for them. When that happens, those projects are seen as part of the problem.

Creating Community Ownership

“The legwork is the work. The work isn’t growing food,” Chris Bradshaw said bluntly.

Bradshaw is the founder and executive director of Dreaming Out Loud, an organization that is preparing to open one of the most ambitious urban farms in the city, the Kelly Miller Farm. It’s ambitious not just because of its size—two acres of flat land behind a DCPS middle school—or its location—Lincoln Heights, a neighborhood untouched by the city’s farm-to-table restaurant and organic grocery store boom.

Rather, its most lofty ambitions lie in the process that has preceded it, how it is attempting to be deeply collaborative and interwoven with the community that surrounds it from day one.

“Our work has been about relationship building over the course of a year with folks that are from the neighborhood, in the community, [folks] that we’d previously known and went deeper with, and some that we discovered along the way,” Bradshaw, who is Black, told me. He recalls sitting outside the farm listening to one older resident for two hours, getting bitten by mosquitos while she told him every single thing that had gone wrong [with previous development projects].

“The projects that are helping … are the ones that don’t just assume that they know what’s best for the community and force it on them,” Josh Singer said. “They listen to these communities, they build relationships, and they allow these communities into every aspect of decision-making.”

Shweder Biel said that if you accept that urban agriculture should be community-centric and if you follow that concept to its logical conclusions, then there are implications for how projects and organization should ultimately be structured.

“If what [urban agriculture] does is create a richer sense of community,” she told me, “it requires that there be investment by the communities that are surrounding the farm… there need to be the indicators that this is for me, for us, for the community members.”

This alternative vision of urban agriculture—one that is more intentional about how it interacts with the race and class dynamics of the city in which it operates—has had a very tangible impact on how DC Greens handles its business.

“We’ve been doing a series of anti-racism trainings internally, just to make sure that the real point of the work is very front and center for all of us,” Shweder Biel told me. As a result, the farm has hired more people of color and D.C. natives as core staff members and worked with them to design programming and outreach. They’ve also hired more people from the neighborhood to run their farmers’ markets, and they regularly invite neighborhood representatives to join them when meeting with power brokers around D.C.

Christian Melendez pointed out that “urban ag, with its ear to the ground, could be a form of preserving and building community.” Melendez, who is Latino, was the lead farmer for many years at ECO City Farms in Edmonston, MD, and recently left to start his own bicycle composting business. “You can automate greenhouses, which has some value, but what kind of culture do we want to build?”

“I’ve met so many people in the shadows of D.C. who were farmers back home in their country,” he told me. “What are the stories and the foods that we’re losing because people are being displaced? That [displacement] can be from Mexico to D.C., or it can be from D.C. pushed out to Prince George’s County.”

Soilful City’s Brown looks at urban agriculture in under-resourced urban environments as an organizing tool. “A lot of communities that I work in are powerful, but people feel like they’re fighting against a giant,” he explained. His goal is “to help people find power within themselves,” turning the energy required to organize around something tangible like a garden into energy for organizing around whatever other issues are affecting their lives. “It’s about food,” he says, “but we gotta be a little bit bigger than food.”

Joining the Larger Movement for Social Justice

In the wake of the recent election, progressive groups all over the country have been reflecting and rebuilding, redesigning strategies to reflect our new political reality, and the Food Movement’s been no exception.

In D.C., this political and media capital of the world, some in the urban agriculture community are seeking to weave their work into the larger struggle for justice.

“[We’re] making those broad based alliances where we’re connecting food to land to housing to everything else,” Brown told me.

“Coalitions are necessary, because then it’s not just one voice, it’s multiple voices,” Chris Bradshaw added. “And it’s not these disjointed calls in the wild. It’s a coordinated and multiplied voice around justice as a platform.”

Dreaming Out Loud explicitly aims “to have the broader conversations about housing, poverty, healthcare, justice, race, gender, class, all those things, through this vehicle” of urban agriculture,” Bradshaw told me. But, in the meantime, he thinks that we can do “some pretty cool things that do help the physical circumstances of food access, job creation, community wealth building.”

At the end of this process, after the last of these many profound conversations, I found myself returning to something I discovered at the beginning, the last line from the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance’s position statement on gentrification:

“…While we’ve got our heads down, hands in the dirt, cultivating a new world into existence, we must think of everyone who we want to be in that new world, and what we can do to get there with them—lest we look up to find that those potential allies have long since disappeared.”

Urban farmers in D.C. are increasingly looking up. I know I am.

Technology Hits The Fields

FEB 27, 2017 @ 09:12 AM 

Mike Montgomery, CONTRIBUTOR

Technology Hits The Fields

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

During a recent blizzard in Massachusetts, Sonia Lo, CEO of FreshBox Farms, was in a grocery store suggesting to skeptical patrons that they sample her leafy greens. “They were picked yesterday,” is what she told tasters. She also told them no, they weren’t picked elsewhere and flown in that morning. Lo’s greens — over 30 different types — grow year-round in an airtight modular box in Millis, Massachusetts. Every plant’s tray is attached to a sensor to determine just the right amount of water, nutrients and LED lighting the plant needs.

“We have an algorithm for every plant variety,” says Lo. They measure around 10,000 data points per plant for factors such as environment, nutrients, plant stress and LED light. “We have our own software intended to identify if the plants are unhappy. We don’t use chemical controls — we rely on these digital points to pre-empt plant stress and allow for extraordinary things like faster grow times.”

As corporate investors start putting their money into agriculture technology (ag tech) startups, shoppers might just start seeing a lot more fresh crops at their local stores, even in the dead of winter.

Ag tech — from hobbyist to huge commercial farms — is taking off. CB Insights defines ag tech as “technology that increases the efficiency of farms (in the form of software), sensors, aerial-based data, internet-based distribution channels (marketplaces) and tools for technology-enabled farming.”

A recent report from Boston Consulting Group says that “new technologies are revolutionizing agriculture.” In fact, according to this report, venture capital firms have upped their ag tech investments by 80% since 2012 — even though commodity prices remain volatile.

Cleveland Justis, the executive director of the Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of California, Davis says his campus is seeing a lot of traffic from venture capitalists as well as big industry companies who are looking for fresh agricultural technologies. Researchers at UC Davis are working on food growth technologies such as gut microbiome innovations, precision farming and drought-friendly cultivation.

“Companies are seeing this as a hub of science around how we feed people and make more resilient crops with less,” Justis says. “How are we going to feed 9 billion people in the future? Not with a simple software program. We’re going to have to use really deep, cutting-edge research to inform these processes.”

The software market for precision farming (such as yield monitoring, field mapping, crop scouting and weather forecasting) is expected to grow 14% between 2016 and 2022 in the United States. Dale Jefferson, president and COO of CropZilla Software Inc., says that in less than two years, his precision farming startup’s software has been installed in farms across the U.S. and Canada, and it is even being tested in Italy. His software takes into account every aspect of a farm, from the types of seeds planted to the number of workers and combines in use.

“We create a digital model,” he says. Farmers can use the software to play with variables and see how potential changes — such as an expensive combine purchase or hiring 10 new field hands — can affect their forecast. For instance, a Midwestern farmer recently used CropZilla to see what would happen if he took his soybean planting schedule from one 12-hour shift to two 10-hour shifts. “The numbers worked out to a five bushel-per-acre increase,” Jefferson says. The farmer made an additional $170,000 from his soybean yield after making this change.

“With corn and bean prices down, farmers are turning to technology to help them survive,” Jefferson says.

On the Heels of EcoFarm, Farm Lot 59 Issues Call to Action for Urban Agriculture

On the Heels of EcoFarm, Farm Lot 59 Issues Call to Action for Urban Agriculture

by SASHA KANNO 

 FEBRUARY 27 2017 14:42

Farm Lot 59 is the definition of a community farm. As a food hub that serves the greater Long Beach area and beyond, we create an outdoor community space where skills grow, healthy ideas take root and people become inspired.

I’ve met and worked with thousands of people in the eight years I have been in local agriculture. Our visitors often don't know the basics, so I teach the basics, like how to use a shovel or push a wheelbarrow. I often teach what real food looks like as well, with lessons like how to find a tomato amidst its green leaves.

We work hard, and the soil shows it. We just so happen to get amazing produce out of that soil, which then creates jobs and many other opportunities for our visitors and the farm.

I just returned home from the 37th annual EcoFarm Conference in Monterey County and am deeply inspired by the great work being done. Santa Cruz-based "Food What?!" is a program that empowers youth to be proud of themselves, embrace their voice and understand their food rights. Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley is phenomenal. They joined forces with a local high school and other community partners for training programs and to provide a safe place for people to be and learn. 

San Francisco's Bi-Rite market is a farm, creamery, and retail store. They offer training programs to the community and welcome back everyone who has gone through their programs. San Francisco Unified School District is totally on board, and supports real world garden classrooms, cooking schools and farming academies, and is dedicated to forming programs that directly benefit the youth. 

When I come across programs like these, I see people who choose work that provides love and dignity in a field of crucial relevance to community health and I appreciate the transformative mutual power of vital partnerships. When we train others, we are no longer reaching the few around us; we are empowering those around us to pass along a critical life skill—a knowledge of food—to thousands more people who we may never know.

Farm Lot 59 is our amazing place to come to. It's a peaceful oasis surrounded by nature and varieties of plants from around the globe. It’s a safe place where people of any race and gender can share and receive full respect. It's not about farming—well, it is—but it's more. It's about food policy, transparency, the restaurant industry, retail, chemistry, soil science, education, food culture... it's endless. Your local farm is a hub for all kinds of good things.

Community farms like Farm Lot 59 are not meant to grow massive food crops. Instead, we teach people where food comes from, how to grow it, how to cook it and how make a living doing so. Humans have been cultivating crops for about 12,000 years, but many people today have forgotten their connection to food. Local farms are keeping this knowledge alive, and bringing people together through good hard work.

We need to come together as a city and put an end to food insecurity and food ignorance, and Farm Lot 59 is here to help. Dial in and stay informed, participate and give back. Learn about building a cooperative market, supporting our local economy and eating at locally owned restaurants that support their local farm. Reach out to Farm Lot 59 to explore a new partnership. You live here, work here and raise your family here. Let's work together to be the change that Long Beach needs.

Sasha Kanno is the founder of Long Beach Local, an agriculture-based nonprofit. She is the farmer and vision behind Farm Lot 59. She teaches at Farm Lot 59 and Maple Village Waldorf School. She has been awarded numerous grants and awards for her work in the community as a leader, innovator and driving force in the local food movement. She lives in Wrigley with Nelson, Nalu, some fish and a few chickens.

For more information about Farm Lot 59, visit the Facebook page here. 

Farm Lot 59 is located at 2714 California Avenue

Bowery Farming Raises $7.5M For It's High-Tech Indoor Farms

Bowery Farming Raises $7.5M For It's High-Tech Indoor Farms

The startup establishes vertical farms indoors within urban areas. Consumers get access to fresh produce and not stuff that's been packaged and shipped over a week as a result.

 PRATEEK JOSE February 27, 2017 • 2 min read

Last year, we found out we’re in the post-truth era (a claim that I am not going to back with evidence). Apparently, we’re also in the post-organic era, or at least that’s what New York-based Bowery Farming would have us believe. The operation is based on the assertion that it isn’t just enough to grow organic produce but to revamp foundational practices in the growth and distribution of crops. The result is a farming methodology executed indoors, underpinned by high-tech systems. Investors seem to confident in betting the farm on the startup – to the tune of $7.5 million in venture funding recently.
 
Bowery Farming’s product deals with every stage of the agriculture lifecycle. It starts right from the seed stage, during which partner companies that have spent almost a decade in research and development provide the ideal seeds. These seeds are planted in indoor vertical farms. These artificial environments are lit using LED lights; they can be used to mimic the full spectrum of incident sunlight. Pesticides, of course, are a big no-no. The farms are constantly monitored using computer vision, and the analytics obtained from the process are used to fine-tune results like flavor or texture of the produce.

The novel farming methodology is not just a gimmick; it has a number of important benefits. The first is that the produce always reaches consumers while it is still fresh. That’s because these indoor farms can be set up within urban areas and don’t need to be tucked away on the outskirts of cities like most other farms. The short delivery distance ensures that the produce can be consumed on the same day it is harvested, while its flavor and nutritional value are still intact.
 
Bowery Farming has a few other numbers to quantify the benefits of its system. For starters, it makes 95 percent less use of water than traditional farming. The vertical arrangement of crops makes the process 100 times more efficient in terms of volume of produce per area. The easily modifiable indoor environment ensures that growth is not dependent on the seasons or weather.

The startup also handles the distribution of the produce it grows. Vegetables currently on the roster are baby kale, butterhead lettuce, arugula, and basil, with more expected to be added in the future. The product is sold to restaurants and grocery stores. Those in the New York metro area can find Bowery Farming’s produce at certain Whole Foods and Forager’s Market. It is also sourced by the restaurants Craft and Fowler and Wells in New York City.

“Post-Organic” Produce Uses 95-Percent Less Water Than Traditional Farming

“Post-Organic” Produce Uses 95-Percent Less Water Than Traditional Farming

A newly launched modern farming company, Bowery, is growing what they call the world’s first “post-organic” produce. Their concept breaks from traditional agricultural practices by growing plants indoors in vertical rows without any pesticides. With the help of proprietary technology, Bowery can closely monitor the growth of their crops and meticulously manage the resources needed. More than 80 types of crops are currently being grown at the company’s farm in Kearny, New Jersey, and they are selling several types of greens and herbs in stores in the New York region.

The idea for the company spawned when co-founder and CEO Irving Fain discovered a promising trend in LED lighting cost and efficiency that could improve indoor farming. “The pricing of LED lights dropped dramatically a little over 5 years ago,” Fain says. “We’ve also seen the efficiency more than double. What makes this even more exciting is that research suggests that this trend will continue. This means that not only are LED’s a viable solution for indoor farming today, but this solution continues to scale out in the future.”

“While traditional farming methods waste resources and endanger our future food supply, advancements in indoor farming make it possible to address a wide range of agricultural issues,” Fain adds. He teamed up with co-founders David Golden and Brian Falther to start Bowery.

“Agriculture consumes 70 percent of available water globally, and we use over 700 million pounds of pesticides each year in the United States alone,” Fain says. “Bowery is working to change that.” As the population grows, Fain and his team believe their company can provide more efficient food to help meet increasing demands around the world. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reportsthat food production will need to increase by 70 percent to feed an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050.

Bowery’s model begins with non-GMO seeds that are planted in vertical rows in an indoor growing environment to optimize space and eliminate the need for soil. According to the company, Bowery’s system is more than 100 times more productive on the same footprint of land. FarmOS, a technology system built by the Bowery team, allows crops to grow year-round, at a faster rate, and using 95-percent less water than traditional agriculture. FarmOS creates ideal conditions using automation, LED lighting that mimics the sun, and a 24-hour monitoring to ensure a reliable yield without wasting resources.

Fain calls these “post-organic” crops the next evolution of produce. Unlike organic products that might utilize organic pest management products, Bowery crops are grown without using any pesticides at all.

Another part of Bowery’s process is growing the produce close to the point of consumption. Their farm in Kearny currently distributes to Foragers Market locations in New York City, with plans to expand into select Whole Foods in the tri-state area. Bowery products are also used at Tom Colicchio’s restaurants, Craft and Fowler & Wells in New York City. This proximity ensures that produce will reach stores and restaurants within one day of being picked, when it is at the height of freshness and flavor. The company has plans for future farms following the same model.

Bowery’s packaged greens start at US$3.49. “As we scale, we plan to drive down our costs and deliver the highest quality produce at a price that makes it even more accessible to all,” Fain says. The products available now include kale mix, baby kale, basil, arugula, butterhead lettuce, and mixed greens. Additional items will be offered soon.

Bowery has been in the works for more than two years now, but their official launch on February 23, 2017, marks their formal introduction to consumers. “We’re very proud of the work we’ve done and are excited for consumers to learn more about what Bowery is doing to address some of the complex issues in agriculture,” Fain says.

Here's Why Your Winter Produce Tastes Better

Here's Why Your Winter Produce Tastes Better

By PETER FROST 

 Nearly 7 million pounds of hydroponic tomatoes will be harvested this year from two 7.5-acre greenhouses in Rochelle, about 80 miles west of Chicago. Another new greenhouse in that small town is delivering greens, herbs and tomatoes year-round to all Mariano's supermarkets in the Chicago area. And on the South Side, a greenhouse atop a soap factory is producing 25 crops of leafy greens a year, the equivalent yield of a 50-acre farm in just under 2 acres of space.

The amount of local, sustainably grown produce available throughout the year in Chicago has never been greater. But it's still not enough, as health-centric millennials assert their dominance over the U.S. food chain. While greenhouses have long been a mainstay of fresh produce in Europe, the industry is still nascent in North America, where open, irrigable land is more plentiful. Substantial capital requirements and slim margins—especially in the early days of a controlled farming operation—can stymie startups and, in fact, recently caused one high-profile vertical farm to shut down in suburban Chicago. Still, an influx of venture and private-equity money is funding the erection of more greenhouses and indoor farms, mostly around big population centers like Chicago.

North America is expected to be the fastest-growing commercial greenhouse market worldwide through 2020, according to a report from market research firm Research & Markets. Globally, the industry is projected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 8.8 percent, reaching nearly $30 billion by 2020, the report says.

"It reminds me a bit of solar 1.0, where capital intensity is unknown or varied, and the industry is immature and unproven," says Sanjeev Krishnan, managing director of Chicago-based S2G Ventures, which invests in food and agriculture companies focused on healthy, sustainable and local food. But like solar panels, whose costs have come down substantially over the last decade, Krishnan thinks what he calls "controlled agriculture" is well on the way to proving itself as a sustainable business model. "We believe in the trend of growing closer to your demand center. It makes sense for logistics costs, (spoilage) and a product quality perspective."

Nearly 7 million pounds of hydroponic tomatoes will be harvested this year from two 7.5-acre greenhouses in Rochelle, about 80 miles west of Chicago. Another new greenhouse in that small town is delivering greens, herbs and tomatoes year-round to all Mariano's supermarkets in the Chicago area. And on the South Side, a greenhouse atop a soap factory is producing 25 crops of leafy greens a year, the equivalent yield of a 50-acre farm in just under 2 acres of space.

The amount of local, sustainably grown produce available throughout the year in Chicago has never been greater. But it's still not enough, as health-centric millennials assert their dominance over the U.S. food chain. While greenhouses have long been a mainstay of fresh produce in Europe, the industry is still nascent in North America, where open, irrigable land is more plentiful. Substantial capital requirements and slim margins—especially in the early days of a controlled farming operation—can stymie startups and, in fact, recently caused one high-profile vertical farm to shut down in suburban Chicago. Still, an influx of venture and private-equity money is funding the erection of more greenhouses and indoor farms, mostly around big population centers like Chicago.

North America is expected to be the fastest-growing commercial greenhouse market worldwide through 2020, according to a report from market research firm Research & Markets. Globally, the industry is projected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 8.8 percent, reaching nearly $30 billion by 2020, the report says.

"It reminds me a bit of solar 1.0, where capital intensity is unknown or varied, and the industry is immature and unproven," says Sanjeev Krishnan, managing director of Chicago-based S2G Ventures, which invests in food and agriculture companies focused on healthy, sustainable and local food. But like solar panels, whose costs have come down substantially over the last decade, Krishnan thinks what he calls "controlled agriculture" is well on the way to proving itself as a sustainable business model. "We believe in the trend of growing closer to your demand center. It makes sense for logistics costs, (spoilage) and a product quality perspective."

SHAKEOUT

S2G in August put about $4 million behind a combination greenhouse/vertical herb farm in Harrisonburg, Va., called Shenandoah Growers, and it's studying minority investments in unconventional growers. But placing bets in the field remains risky, Krishnan says, noting that many of the early players in greenhouse and vertical farming either have gone out of business or changed their business models. He expects additional shakeout over the next three years.

One local casualty was Bedford Park-based FarmedHere, which shuttered last month, largely because it didn't have enough capital to expand production and spread out its costs, says Nate Laurell, its former CEO. Laurell relaunched the company as Here, which turns would-be discarded produce from other growers into juices, salad dressings and spreads that have longer shelf lives.

Despite the demise of his farming operation, Laurell remains bullish on indoor and greenhouse farming's place in the food chain. "I really think it's like energy. It's not solar or wind or natural gas, it's all of it," he says.

He and others say there's plenty of room for smart operators that are backed with sufficient capital, due in large part to intractable secular trends in the industry.

"Right now the demand in the marketplace exceeds our supply," says Viraj Puri, CEO of New York-based Gotham Greens, which operates four greenhouses, including the 2-acre greenhouse on the roof of the Method soap factory in Chicago's Pullman neighborhood. The company, which sells lettuces to restaurants like Gibsons and Honey Butter Fried Chicken as well as grocers Jewel and Whole Foods Market, has raised more than $30 million and is exploring an expansion in Chicago.

Then there's MightyVine, which built a 7.5-acre greenhouse in Rochelle in 2015 and almost immediately after opening began an expansion that would double its size. It has invested about $20 million in the project.

Its tomatoes have earned their way into some of the city's higher-end kitchens, such as Rick Bayless' and those of Italian restaurants Il Porcelino and Monteverde. They're also sold in Whole Foods and Jewel in Chicago and supermarket chains in Iowa and Wisconsin and just launched in 49 Fresh Thyme stores this month, says CEO Gary Lazarski. "If we waited on the expansion, we knew we'd be in a shortage situation rather quickly," he says.

Its neighbor in Rochelle, BrightFarms, invested $10 million into a 3.7-acre greenhouse that grows lettuces, tomatoes and herbs, all earmarked for Mariano's stores. The company, which has raised more than $70 million since 2011, also has greenhouses in Virginia and Pennsylvania and is finalizing plans to build in Ohio and near Kansas City, Mo., says CEO Paul Lightfoot. "We expect more competition and more investors," Lightfoot says. "In the hot part of any market, you'd be a fool not to assume more capital will come in and more competitors will arrive."

​​​​​​​​​​​​​Inside The Vertical Farm Growing What It Calls "The World's First Post-Organic" Produce

Inside The Vertical Farm Growing What It Calls "The World's First Post-Organic" Produce

Without using any pesticides or chemicals, Bowery—a new vertical farming startup outside of New York City—delivers fresh leafy greens within one day of harvesting, with some help from agricultural AI.

EILLIE ANZILOTTI 02.23.17 9:00 AM

Before leading people through the heavy metal doors and into the vertical farm Irving Fain has recently opened in a warehouse in Kearny, New Jersey, he asks visitors to take off their jewelry. He hands them a disposable jumpsuit and a hairnet to put on; bright blue sleeves must be slipped on over shoes. "It’s about protecting the integrity of the environment," Fain says. Jewelry could fall off and into the beds of leafy greens; shoes and clothes could track in unknown germs.

For Bowery—the farm that Fain, a former marketing entrepreneur, first conceived of two years ago—contamination is a particular concern. Bowery is growing what it calls "the world’s first post-organic produce," meaning that all of the leafy greens in the warehouse—which range from kale to Thai basil to wasabi arugula—are grown completely without pesticides, and completely under the control of a comprehensive, proprietary operating system that oversees the entire growing process. "We fully own our process from seed to store," Fain says—the "post-organic" designation derives from the fact that the founders view Bowery's farming and tech integration as the next frontier in agriculture. Though the startup doesn't release exact capacity or operating cost figures, Bowery estimates that it is 100 times more productive on the same plot of land than traditional farms.

Organic produce has grown into a $43.3 billion industry in the U.S., and its popularity is largely driven by two beliefs: that organic food is healthier, and that it’s grown without pesticides. The former is not necessarily true; the USDA organic certification refers to growing methods, not nutritional value. But the growing methods remain the source of some confusion. One survey found that 95% of consumers believe organic produce is grown completely without pesticides. That is definitely not true: Large-scale organic farms make liberal use of pesticides—the pesticides themselves just have to be organic, too. (The USDA maintains a list of synthetic substances like ethanol and chlorine dioxide allowed for the use in organic crop production, provided that "the use of such substances do not contribute to contamination of crops, soil, or water.")

Bowery, like many other vertical farms (like one that also recently opened in New Jersey) bypasses the use of chemicals entirely. Inside the warehouse, greens are grown in vertical columns stacked five high; LED lights deliver a full spectrum of light mimicking the sun, and because the water is delivered efficiently and recycled, Bowery requires 95% less water than traditional agriculture. Because the environment has to be carefully controlled to minimize threats of food-borne illnesses, Bowery complies with the highest standards of food safety protocols, including Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points, which ensures safety at every step of the growing and delivery process.

"It doesn’t take much to see that agriculture is at the epicenter of so many issues facing the world today," Fain tells Co.Exist. Around 70% of the world’s water supply goes to agriculture, and on top of the fact that nearly 11% of the world’s population struggles with access to food, we’ll likely need 50% to 70% more food to feed the 9.5 billion people estimated to be on the planet by 2050. Most of that population growth will happen in cities, and Fain says he was drawn to figuring out how to provide fresh food to urban environments in a way that’s efficient and sustainable. With his two cofounders David Golden and Brian Falther, who also have experience in the business and tech worlds, they "dove in and approached the issue from the standpoint of: What’s the best technology we can use to solve this problem?" Fain says.

Indoor and vertical farming are not new concepts—a robot-run indoor farm in Kyoto, Japan, that recently opened will produce around 10 million heads of lettuce per year, and a warehouse in Alaska houses a vertical farm that delivers leafy greens to a region that struggles with access to fresh produce. But Bowery, Fain says, is taking it a step further with its proprietary technology, developed specifically to support the venture. Called FarmOS, the fully integrated technology system uses machine learning and vision to understand and respond to all the variables that go into how the plants are grown. The sensors installed all around the farm track the optimal levels of light and nutrients for each variety of produce, which can be adjusted to effect things like taste and flavor (Fain says that the way the system is manipulated can ramp up or diminish the wasabi-like kick of a certain type of arugula grown in the farm).

FarmOS also detects when plants are ready to be harvested—something Fain says that traditional farmers tend to determined by eyeballing, which is "a hard method to scale." By tracking the growth of plants 24/7 and sending data back into the operating system, FarmOS learns the optimal point of harvest for each crop. The system flags when each plant has reached its peak, and stores what it has learned about optimal light and nutrients for the next round of growing. Once Bowery produce is harvested, it’s delivered out within one day and travels no more than 10 miles (for traditional produce, delivery can take weeks). Since the farm started producing last summer, it has delivered produce to a handful of New York City area restaurants, among them Tom Colicchio’s Craft and Fowler & Wells, and Foragers, a market specializing in high-quality, local produce. At the beginning of March, Bowery will start selling at local Whole Foods. A box of Bowery greens will retail for $3.49—comparable to a similarly sized box of organic greens but more expensive than a bag. (It's cheaper, though, than some of Whole Foods' pricier leafy green offerings, which push $6 per box.)

To date, Bowery has raised $7.5 million; First Round Capital provided the first round of seed funding, and a variety of food-industry professionals, from Blue Apron CEO Matt Salzberg to Plated chairman Sally Robling, are on board as angel investors. Though the Bowery venture is just getting off the ground, Fain sees a lot of potential for his model to do a great deal of good. The efficiency of Bowery’s technology enables the startup to sell produce at prices comparable to traditionally grown crops, and Fain hopes to be able to drive the prices down further as the company grows. He also says that he and his founders are looking into developing a charitable arm to the startup—in New York City, where more than 16% of residents are food insecure and lack access to good-quality produce, Bowery could fill a real need.

For now, Fain is already at work on another Bowery farm in the New York City area, but he says there’s no stopping how this model could expand to serve a wider range of communities. "That’s one of the beauties of this place," Fain says of the Kearny outpost. "This was just a completely empty warehouse, and now it’s a fully functioning farm. There’s no shortage of unused industrial space across the world that could be put to similar use."

Bowery Launches AI-Enabled Indoor Farming Business with $7.5m in Seed Funding

Bowery Launches AI-Enabled Indoor Farming Business with $7.5m in Seed Funding

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR

There’s a new indoor farming company in town.

Today, New Jersey-based Bowery comes out of stealth to announce that it has raised $7.5 million in angel and seed funding to launch its new vertical farming business.

Founded by tech entrepreneur Irving Fain in October 2014 with co-founders David Golden and Brian Falther, Bowery has built a vertical farming facility in New Jersey that uses automation, machine learning, and vision systems to monitor and tend to its crops.

The business will start by selling baby kale, basil, Bowery blend, Bowery kale mix, arugula, and butterhead lettuce, which it grows without any pesticides or agrichemicals.

Fain and his team of engineers and agriculture scientists built the farm from the ground up to create a proprietary growing system that Fain believes is a scalable way to provide fresh, local food more efficiently and sustainably.

Bowery’s vertical farms are driven by LED and hydroponic technology. The farm is stacked vertically in a completely controlled environment that’s monitored by Bowery’s farm operating system. The “brains of the farm”, as Fain calls it, draws in data from a network of sensors across the facility that are measuring a variety of data points that impact the growth of the plant.

These sensors include cameras and the FarmOS uses computer vision to detect changes in the plant. By correlating these images against other variables detected by the sensors such as humidity or temperature, the software can determine the drivers of changes in plant health, taste or quality, according to Fain.

“Through machine learning, the system can learn how the various variables within the farm can drive changes in the flavor and health of the plants, and the system can also be automated to make any necessary changes to the environment in which the plant is growing,” he told AgFunderNews.

This operating system is not necessarily new — motorleaf is building a similar sensing and automation tool for indoor farmers — but Bowery has built the technology as a vertically integrated farming business.

“We made the decision to be a vertically integrated company because we want to have control from seed to store to ensure a high-quality product that we can stand behind,” said Fain. “And we want to build a brand.”

Bowery is very focused on the flavor profile of its crops and has the endorsement of celebrity chef and restauranteur Tom Collichio. Collichio is an angel investor in Bowery and is also serving Bowery produce in two of his restaurants, Fowler & Wells, and Craft.

“We can make our arugula spicier or more peppery by tweaking certain variables including the intensity of light, the amount of light, the nutrients it receives and so on,” he said. “There are various stresses that can have an impact on the flavor profile of a crop.”

(Bowery treated me to a tasting and I had arugula that tasted of wasabi!)

Fain likened it to the production of wine where a certain amount of rain, a poorly-timed frost, and temperature variations will impact whether it’s a vintage year or not.

“Wine growers might know the certain drivers for a vintage year, and they might be able to predict if one year will be, but they can’t control it,” he said. “We can and it’s much more than lighting recipes.”

Bowery produce will soon hit the shelves of Whole Foods and Foragers in the New York tristate area and the company will continue to target retailers and restaurants as its core customer base.

The company raised $7.5 million in seed funding back in October 2015 with First Round Capital leading the round. Box Group, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel, Homebrew, Flybridge, Red Swan, RRE, and Urban.us also participated. As well as a group of angel investors: Matt Salzberg (founder and CEO of Blue Apron), Sally Robling (chairman of Plated, 30 years of experience in the food industry), Tom Colicchio, and Adam Eskin (founder and CEO of DigInn).

Loan Approved For SB Indoor Farming Project

Loan Approved For SB Indoor Farming Project

By Mark Peterson | 

Posted: Thu 5:25 PM, Feb 23, 2017  | 

Updated: Thu 6:37 PM, Feb 23, 2017

This could be the year indoor farming comes to inner city South Bend.

Planning for a vertical farm began back in 2015.

Earlier this week, an $800,000 loan was conditionally approved for the project (from the City of South Bend’s Industrial Revolving Loan Fund) while a recent Crowdfunding campaign raised $640,000. That puts the for-profit company called Green Sense that much closer to breaking ground on a facility that would be located on the Ivy Tech Campus.

“They're going to have a partnerships with Ivy Tech where they can bring students who have an interest in agriculture into the building into their process train them have them be able to have an educational opportunity there to learn how this all works,” said Acting Director of South Bend’s Community Investment Department, Brian Pawlowski. “There's some private side financing that needs to happen that'll be on the order of an additional two or so million dollars for the entirety of the project to go up but once that's all in place I would anticipate maybe sometime around this summer or so, they could potentially start construction at that point.”

At the vertical farm, leafy greens would be grown indoors, 365 days a year, hydroponically, using artificial light. “You know rain, wind, snow, shine whatever it may be, they can get the job done and they can really cater their produce to what the market demand is,” said Pawlowski.

Green Sense is a for-profit company that would pay for the project—Ivy Tech would essentially be getting a lab for free.

The first vertical farm Green Sense built was in Portage, Indiana…the last was in China. 

Ever Thought of Growing What You Eat? These Chennai-Based NIT Grads Are Enabling Urban Indoor Farmers To Do Just That

Ever Thought of Growing What You Eat? These Chennai-Based NIT Grads Are Enabling Urban Indoor Farmers To Do Just That

SINDHU MV

22 FEBRUARY 2017
This announcement is sponsored by Tissot

When Deepak Srinivasan and Ashish Khan were studying at NIT Trichy, they were driven by a passion to solve some of the most basic problems the world faces today. Life, though, had other plans for them after they graduated. Deepak, a chemical engineer, worked as a product analyst and Ashish, a mechanical engineer, as a design engineer. The idea of creating something that would have immense impact remained. The duo – friends for over six years – experimented with various ideas before deciding to collaborate with a group of friends on a DIY project to localise food production.

Eventually, Deepak and Ashish narrowed this down to explore the possibilities offered by aquaponics, and began developing a prototype. Aquaponics is a system of aquaculture in which the waste produced by farmed fish or other aquatic creatures supplies the nutrients for plants grown hydroponically, which in turn purify the water.

Nine months down the line, in March 2016, they quit their jobs to begin their entrepreneurial journey, and launched their startup – Crofters. The startup’s flagship device is an intelligent, self-cleaning, indoor aquaponics ecosystem that helps to grow completely organic food even from inside a living room.

Deepak says, “Crofters helps people farm their fresh, healthy food in a sustainable manner. We are making urban indoor farming a reality for a lot of passionate gardeners living in houses without a backyard or a terrace of their own.”

This innovation won them the Tissot's Signature Innovators Club award for January 2017.

The young entrepreneurs are very upbeat about their product and the impact it is likely to create. In Deepak’s words, “We are innovating mankind’s oldest industry –  agriculture, by combining it with the power of technology. Through our product, we feel we are making it practical for people to grow what they eat.”

‘Grow light’ an integral component of Crofters’ journey

Crofters has created hardware and software that integrates with a device and enables people to grow their own food. It took them six months of prototyping to develop their first product and another three months to make it ready for the early adopters.

Together, with 15 early adopters, who are beta testing the product, Crofters is gathering and incorporating user feedback to make the product market-ready. Deepak says, “We are aiming to launch the product by the end of February 2017.”

The product’s greatest strength is their LED grow light technology, which has been developed in-house. The co-founders say that this technology will help to convert indoor farming areas in urban living spaces into farms and reduce water consumption by 80 percent, paving the way for practical vertical farming making optimal use of available spaces. “The grow light technology and the product design makes farming possible in areas previously considered unsuitable for farming. These are our unique strengths,” says 23-year old Deepak.

While the LED grow light is one of their key product highlights, a few months ago, in the prototyping phase, it was the biggest challenge for the team. Ashish says, “Initially, we found it challenging to develop world-class LED grow lights that mimic sunlight for efficient growth of plants indoors. Through our continuous R&D, we now have created grow lights that use only the red and blue spectra to mimic sunlight in an efficient manner.”

A year that could define Crofters’ market success

The Crofters team comprises six members, who work on automation, design, and engineering. As far as the co-founders’ key responsibilities are concerned, Deepak handles operations and management, while Ashish handles product development.

As the Crofters team continues to fine-tune the product for its market launch, they are seeing regular visitors at their office in Chennai, who are all keen to experience the product. Deepak spends his afternoons in client meetings and interacting with suppliers for sourcing raw materials, followed by product deliveries in the evenings.

Crofters’ products are currently only available online with door-to-door delivery and service. They also have a consumables model where people order add-ons and additional accessories regularly. In the past three months, since the launch of their early adopter programme, apart from successfully onboarding 15 early adopters, they have been getting queries from across the globe. Deepak says, “We are hoping to have at least 200 clients in the next six months and make the product globally shippable by the end of the year.”

Sharing details of their marketing, sales, and product development plan, Ashish says, “We are currently partnering with online distributors to make our product available on other online platforms as well. We are also coming up with a series of products available at various price ranges to help us increase the reach. And, the option to buy add-ons from our own online platform will enable to push up our revenues.” As a near long-term plan, Crofters is also looking at collecting system data that will help them scale for larger urban farms. “In the next two years, Crofters will be launching large-scale urban farm products to make fresh healthy food locally available.”

Talking about the growth potential for Crofters, Deepak says, “Vertical farming is expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2020.The factors driving the growth of the vertical farming market include the demand for high-quality food with no use of pesticides, less dependency on the weather for production, a growing urban population, and interest in farming with reduced negative environmental impact, among others. And Crofters fits in beautifully here.”

He adds, “While the concept of indoor farming, be it small scale or large scale, is yet to catch up in India, we are seeing a lot of conversations around it. And soon, the conversations will convert into interest and thereby demand for a product like ours.”

Making indoor farming simple

Among the many things that make the Crofters team happy is seeing their customers happy. Narrating a customer story that the team considers has been part of Crofters journey, says Ashish. “When we were designing the Crofters Ecosystem, one of our friends gifted our ecosystem to his dad, Shanmugam, who after retiring, was exploring indoor farming but facing difficulties with conventional methods.” Ashish calls Shanmugam ‘a dream customer any startup would want’, because, “he was patient and understanding, kept answering the questions that the Crofter’s team were continually seeking to improve their ecosystem.” And, in the past five months, Shanmugam has been successfully growing various leafy greens and herbs using Crofters’ product. “For him and his family, the Ecosystem has become part of their life. He spends his evening around the Ecosystem enjoying nature right inside his home. This is a highlight for us,” says Ashish.

Delving on the role of innovation for Crofters, Ashish says, “We have built an intelligent, self-cleaning, aquaponics systems that helps people grow completely organic food in the comfort of their homes. We have combined nature and technology to build intelligent systems with a mobile app and sensor units that help control and monitor all ecosystem parameters remotely. And all this comes with zero-maintenance. Innovation plays a major role; in fact, innovation forms the core of our business.”

The two youngsters feel every inch of their effort has been worthwhile. “The idea that we will empower people to grow their own food is exciting. The idea motivates us to keep going.”

He explains that people have been able to grow varieties of leafy greens, herbs, and other small plants for their consumption in an effortless manner, which previously was a cumbersome process. “We have bought food home again,” gleams the young entrepreneur. “Products like ours will play a role in shaping the lifestyle of the generations to come and take notice of the quality of food we eat.”

A Farm In Shipping Containers Grows In Brooklyn

A Farm In Shipping Containers Grows In Brooklyn

POSTED:FEB 21 2017 06:50PM EST

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - It's farm to table with a twist. A parking lot in Brooklyn isn't the first place you'd expect to see spinach and arugula sprouting up but here they are. Hydroponic vertical farms are growing crops inside 10 steel shipping containers in the same neighborhood where Jay Z grew up.

But that is not where the cool factor ends. Square Roots takes things one step further by sending a farmer to your office with snack-sized bags of salad the same day the greens are harvested.

Square Roots CEO Tobias Peggs thought up the idea with co-founder Kimball Musk, brother of entrepreneur and innovator Elon Musk. The duo raised $3 million in seed capital to build out this campus, and recruited 10 young farmer entrepreneurs from a pool of 500 to work for a year. The idea is to grow their own careers with Square Roots and in turn help the company grow, too.

A farm in shipping containers grows in Brooklyn

Square Roots aims to expand to 20 metropolitan areas by 2020.

Urban Farmers Grow Crops in Brooklyn Parking Lot

Urban Farmers Grow Crops in Brooklyn Parking Lot

• ERIC GIRARD
• February 21, 2017

Square Roots farmers grow crops in 10 steel shipping containers converted into hydroponic farms.

Square Roots first broke ground by financing and mentoring local entrepreneurs who are growing tasty, nutritious greens in, of all places, a Brooklyn parking lot. Now it’s taking things a step further — right to your New York City office. 

Lunch, anyone?

The new “Farm to Local, by Square Roots” initiative delivers snack-size bags of salad greens to workplaces. It already has subscribers at Vice Media and Kickstarter, said Square Roots CEO and cofounder Tobias Peggs.

“Your farmer will literally come to your desk and drop off same-day-harvested greens,” he said.

These farms aren’t your traditional sprawling upstate acreage tended by laborers or a guy on a tractor in bib overalls. Set up near where Jay Z grew up, they’re 10 steel shipping containers converted into hydroponic vertical farms, meaning crops grow in tower formation with recycled water and without soil.

Inside the LED-lit modular containers are rows of panels sprouting pesticide-free plants in a controlled climate — so freezing temperatures and snow pose no problem. Each container produces an annual harvest equivalent to an estimated two acres of land.

Square Roots raised seed financing to build the campus, which cost more than $100,000. Then, 10 young farmers were chosen from more than 500 applicants for a yearlong stint that started in November.

One of them is Electra Jarvis, 27, an Alphabet City resident who grows kale, mustard greens, and Salanova lettuce and is working on cilantro.

“At farmers markets, people are always impressed with the shelf-life and the taste,” said Jarvis, who had been a master’s student in sustainable environmental systems at Pratt Institute and interned with a hydroponic research and development company and an urban farming consulting firm.

The farmers work about 30 hours per week, splitting their time between working on the crops and sales, Peggs said.

“They build a big network of mentors and learn how to build a sustainable business,” said Peggs, whose background is in technology. “Then they are in an incredible position to go off on their own entrepreneurial journey.”

Germination of the idea

Peggs, 44, arrived in the U.S. in 2003 from the United Kingdom. A few years later, he met Kimbal Musk (whose brother is the entrepreneur Elon Musk). Musk, a chef, had cooked for firefighters at ground zero after 9/11. “That’s when he began to see the power of real food and its ability to strengthen communities,” Peggs said.

Peggs and Musk worked together in social media analytics, until Musk broke his neck in a skiing accident and, “realizing life can be short,” shifted his focus to The Kitchen, a farm-to-table restaurant group that started in Colorado, Peggs said. In 2014, the duo began developing the idea for Square Roots.

“What we saw was that millions of people, especially in our biggest cities, were at the mercy of industrial food,” Peggs said. “This is high-calorie, low-nutrient food, shipped in from thousands of miles away. The results are awful, from childhood obesity to adult diabetes to a total loss of community around food.”

For example, Peggs said, a supermarket apple may have been traveling for nine months and is coated in wax. “You think you’re making a healthy choice, but in that time the nutrients have broken down, and you’re basically eating a ball of sugar.”

Square Roots aims to expand to 20 metropolitan areas by 2020.

Until then, in Brooklyn, they’re growing mainly leafy greens (spinach, arugula, chard) and herbs (basil, shiso). Peggs believes berries and tomatoes could follow.

“At the end of the day, if the food doesn't taste amazing, no one will buy it,” Peggs said. “So we focus every day on making sure the food tastes amazing. And it does.”

Nation’s First ‘Sustainable Urban Agrihood’ Being Built In Detroit

Nation’s First ‘Sustainable Urban Agrihood’ Being Built In Detroit

February 21, 2017 10:38 AM

DETROIT (WWJ) – An effort has launched in Detroit to build something unique: what they’re calling “America’s First Sustainable Urban Agrihood.”

The centerpiece is a vacant three-story building near Brush Street and East Grand in Detroit. In addition, it includes a two-acre urban farm, 200-tree fruit orchard, children’s sensory garden, water harvesting cistern, and more.

“(It is) formerly an apartment complex that we purchased in the tax auction of 2011,” explained Tyson Gersh, with the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative.

“It is the physical center of our agricultural campus that we’ve been operating in Detroit’s north-end neighborhood…An urban residential development strategy. You position a working farm as the centerpiece of a large development, and we sort of see our agricultural campus as collectively that centerpiece.”

The urban farm grows more than 300 produce varieties annually, according to MUFI.  The fresh vegetables are provided for free to about 2,000 households, churches, food pantries and others within two-square miles of the farm.

If successful, the new building will offer educational, nutritional, and other programs. MUFI also has plans for a new healthy food cafe, which will be located next to the community center and will also contain a commercial kitchen.

To help complete the project, Auburn Hills-based BorgWarner is kicking in $10,000. But Gersh said they’re turning to the public and the state in hopes of raising the rest.

They have until Sunday, April 2 to raise another $40,000 to qualify for a matching grant through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s (MEDC) Public Spaces Community Places program.

For project details and to donate via an online crowd-funding campaign, visit this link.

Here's What Success In Building Local Food Systems Looks Like

Here's What Success In Building Local Food Systems Looks Like  

This article is part of Michigan's Agricultural Future, a series of stories about Michigan’s agricultural economy. It is made possible with funding from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Read more stories in the series here.

Ten small Upper Peninsula farms are U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA) food safety certified. About $250,000 in local food products purchased by U.P. schools, hospitals, and restaurants. Hundreds of individuals educated on the benefits of local food, and a strong, growing distribution network to connect local farms with local buyers. 

These successes are all the work of the Upper Peninsula Food Exchange, an effort spearheaded by the Marquette Food Co-op with grant backing from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The co-op applied for and received, grant funds totaling $165,000 through the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University in November 2012. The goal was to put the money to the best uses possible, building and strengthening the U.P.'s local food systems and networks. And that's just what they did. 

Along with the co-op, two other main partners, MSU Extension in Sault Ste. Marie and the Western Upper Peninsula Health Department in the five westernmost U.P. counties, Marquette Food Co-op began work to connect local food systems, from farms to restaurants, all across the U.P.

Matt Gougeon, general manager of the Marquette Food Co-op, says as soon as the co-op started looking at ways to bring local food initiatives together, they linked up with Michelle Walk at MSU Extension in the eastern Upper Peninsula.

"We realized a lot of what she was doing and what we were doing dovetailed nicely," he says.

At times, says Gougeon, there were major challenges involved. The U.P. has a harsh climate and limited food production, the geographic differences from one end of the peninsula to the other are large, and then there's the lack of connection to lower Michigan food distribution networks. The grant allowed the partners to zero in on those problems and take steps to address them.

Their work started with education. To increase awareness of local and regional food, the partners conducted a series of local food summits out of which came the idea to create three regional cold storage sites -- east, central and west -- to make distribution easier to commercial and institutional buyers such as hospitals, schools, universities, and restaurants. 

The cold storage, or aggregation sites, as they're called in food network terms, allow small farmers to deliver their products to one site. Large clients can pick up an order from several different small farms at once, rather than arrange for separate transport and delivery from each individual farm to each client.

The next step was to create the online U.P. Food Exchange website -- a virtual ordering system and marketplace for the sale of all those local farm products. Once the infrastructure was in place, the online market made food distribution even easier by overcoming obstacles for small farms and automating the invoicing system across the board.

"Small farmers put their available inventory up for sale to institutional clients," Gougeon explains. "A hospital or university can go to the site and place orders, then farmers see these orders, can fill them, and deliver them to physical food exchange aggregation sites." 

The U.P. Food Exchange website is not set up for sales to individuals, says Gougeon, but local farmer's markets in cities and towns across the U.P. are already filling that market need well.

To learn about transport issues, the co-op conducted a study of existing distribution channels and trucking routes so they could develop a workable plan to connect with companies that already distribute food throughout the U.P. The goal was to create a self-sustaining local food network for the region.

"It would have been cost-prohibitive for just the co-op or MSU to do any of this by themselves," Gougeon says. "What we have now are lots of people talking to each other, trying to pull the oars in the same direction."

The results have been good. In 2015, upwards of $250,000 in food moved through the online U.P. Food Exchange. Gougeon says the plan is to continue to increase that number. Part of making that happen is getting more institutional and commercial food buyers trained and educated on how to access and use local food. There's a continuing need for farmers to list inventory and for online buyers to use the marketplace, he says.

"There's a lot of interest in local and regional food, but part of this work is helping purchasers understand it's not just clicking a button and the food appears," says Gougeon. Seasonal, or a limited supply of specific foods, and the possibility of changing costs from month-to-month, can present obstacles to institutional markets. But, Gougeon says, education on how money spent locally improves the economic conditions of the region and other benefits of buying local and regional food products, has helped convince big clients to buy in. 

"Sometimes, it's just getting them to use some local foods, instead of looking for everything locally," Gougeon says. "If they can get just a few, like local potatoes, that's still good."  

Another major part of the grant went to educating farmers about food safety, which was an important step toward getting U.S. Department of Agriculture certification, called Good Agricultural Practices, or GAP. 

The MDARD grant funding allowed the co-op to connect with the USDA and the education-focused Wallace Foundation to organize funding for an ambitious new pilot project called Group GAP, which would make it easier for small farms to achieve food safety certification.

"One of the barriers to small farmers entering institutional markets is getting food safety certifications," says Gougeon. "We worked on this concept called Group GAP. It was hard for small, multiple-product farms to get certified." The GAP program generally is designed for larger, one-crop farms.

Using the Group Gap, farmers shared resources and management systems. The group of small farmers also shared the costs of the required federal audits. In 2015, 16 small U.P. farms signed on as pilot project participants to test the guidelines and process for Group GAP certification that the co-op and its partners had hammered out. 

During the pilot, the farmers got assistance with audits, record-keeping, and formal food safety training. At the end of the pilot, 10 of the 16 farms were GAP certified, a big step in their ability to sell their food products. 

"Once the farm attains that certification, they're good to go to sell their products pretty much anywhere," says Gougeon.

The Michigan Group GAP Network is now working on extending the process developed in the pilot program to more Michigan small farms. 

Phil Britton, a former Marquette Co-op staffer now working at Cherry Capital Foods in Traverse City, was instrumental in writing those Group GAP guidelines, and now works with the Michigan-wide network. "He's taken what was learned and the whole system we developed and is applying it to groups of small farms in lower Michigan," says Gougeon. 

The goal is to eventually get all small Michigan farms Group GAP certified, perhaps audited by random selection each year, with all the farms sharing the cost of the audit, something that's typically a major burden for a small farm on its own. If that can be accomplished, Gougeon says, "it would be a tremendous boon to getting food into regional markets. That barrier would then be gone for everyone."

Overall, the MDARD grant was used to remove obstacles at the local, regional and state levels, obstacles like certification processes, lack of infrastructure, and lack of knowledge. In the case of the U.P. Food Exchange, removing the obstacle of the need for ongoing funding has been key. The end goal is to make the network self-sustaining.

"The food exchange was set up for anyone to use it," says Gougeon. "It's a shared structure, not owned by the co-op. That's why we brought in all our partners and created it as a resource for anyone to be able to find small farmers in the U.P."

Other funding is, in fact, now carrying the exchange, including a grant from the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians that connects Marquette Food Co-op and MSU Extension resources to tribal members and their greater communities through classes on working with local food and connections with tribal food networks.

Gougeon says there have been "huge gains" since the food exchange came into existence and the network is setting the stage for further food systems development. 

There's also been an impact on local policy and planning. A new committee, the Central U.P. Food Policy Committee, was formed as part of the grant work and it has developed an educational document for municipalities to use in infrastructure, policy, and zoning and planning decisions. They hope the result will be more informed decisions regarding local food networks and lowering obstacles to farmers and buyers.

In the meantime, the Marquette Food Co-op, MSU Extension, small farms, the Western U.P. Health Department all can be tapped for their expertise through their connections with the U.P. Food Exchange, which in turn helps the exchange become a self-sustaining resource. 

"There's been significant development in a network of agencies, growers, businesses, all connected in a way they weren't before the grant took place," Gougeon says

The exchange and its related networks have grown and strengthened local food systems. The impact is one that should improve the future of the Upper Peninsula for years to come.

Kim Eggleston is a Marquette, Michigan-based freelance writer and editor.

Farming Meets High Tech When Natural History Museum Kicks Off Food Lecture Series

FEB 19, 2017

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Farming Meets High Tech When Natural History Museum Kicks Off Food Lecture Series

By KATHY STEPHENSON | The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Feb 18 2017 12:24PM    •    Last Updated Feb 18 2017 10:19 pm

They say you can't fool nature, but hundreds of "nerd farmers" around the globe are tapping technology to control climate and create the perfect conditions for growing food.

They are doing it with a personal food computer created by Caleb Harper and his team in the Open Agriculture Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harper, the principal investigator and director of the lab, leads a diverse group of engineers, architects and scientists in the development of future food systems.

Their climate-controlled box, which can sit on a tabletop, has a computer brain and sensors that allow users to manipulate temperature, carbon-dioxide levels, humidity, light and pH. The plants are grown in minimal amount of water — no soil — using hydroponics.

Anyone, in any part of the world, can grow food, no matter the season, said Harper. Imagine growing water-loving tropical fruits in the middle of the Utah desert or sun-loving summer berries in the midst of a harsh winter.

Harper will talk about this blending of agriculture and technology Tuesday, when he kicks off the Natural History Museum of Utah's annual lecture series. Food is the theme of the five presentations, which include a keynote address by TV personality, chef and author Andrew Zimmern. Tickets for his talk go on sale Wednesday. (See box for details.)

Harper's lecture is free but requires a reservation.

There are nearly 400 "nerd farmers" around the globe who have built personal food computers — using Open Ag's open-source technology — collecting and sharing data with other users, Harper said.

"Every food computer that comes online, whatever they grow is recorded and in the future can be replayed as many times as we want," he said.

Farmers create their own growing "recipe" such as programming in more light or less humidity to see what happens. "As people explore, we are decoding that plant and getting a clearer map of a plant's ability to express itself," he said. "It's pretty phenomenal."

Eventually, Harper hopes the data can be used to create economically viable farms — possibly in shipping containers — that can be placed anywhere to create "hyperlocal food production."

"We need better food-supply chains, which are notoriously complex," he said. "This technology could be a new tool in the chain."

Interest in the personal food computers has grown beyond just the research stage, so Harper recently formed the nonprofit Open Agriculture Foundation, which will protect the open-source data and intellectual property and foster the growing community of farmers.

Harper and Utah entrepreneur Daniel Blake also have started Fenome, a small business that has begun assembling kits the community can buy that have everything needed to build a personal food computer.

The Fenome lab in West Valley City also houses large indoor growing tents, where Blake and the staff experiment with varieties of plants, learning which ones grow best in the personal food computer environments.

The personal food computers have other applications, as well. Many schools are using them to teach about biology, botany and climate change as well as coding, computer programming and engineering.

And Blake recently returned from Jordan, where he visited Azraq, a camp for refugees of the Syrian civil war. He said the United Nations World Food Organization is interested in food computer systems that could help supply at least a portion of the food to those living in the camps. Currently, all food and water are shipped.

"We are in the beginning stages of the process," Blake said, "but food computers could be deployed anywhere, especially harsh environments where food security is a problem."

kathys@sltrib.com

Indoor Farms of America Brings Customers The Most Innovative Farm Management Platform Available With Award Winning Agrilyst

Indoor Farms of America Brings Customers The Most Innovative Farm Management Platform Available With Award Winning Agrilyst

LAS VEGAS, Feb. 17, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Indoor Farms of America announces today that all of its vertical aeroponic farms, from the most productive container farms in the world, known as GrowTrucks, to the highest yield indoor farms for warehouse or greenhouse applications, will now come standard with the award winning farm intelligence platform from Agrilyst.

“In our desire to bring our customers the best-in-breed for each component of our farms, we recognized that Agrilyst has developed the most comprehensive tool we have studied for effectively managing an indoor farm,” says David Martin, CEO of Indoor Farms of America.

With data tools that help the farm operator easily focus on creating the highest yields from their farm, all managed from a thoughtfully laid out Dashboard, the Agrilyst platform makes the most of the farm on a daily basis.

“Every element of the farm, along with the business side, was taken into consideration by the team at Agrilyst,” states Martin, “and the team at Agrilyst is thrilled to have joined with us in the implementation of their amazing product within our farm offerings.”

“The ability to collect data in real time, analyze that data, display it in a way that the user receives the most benefit from, and to then have that translate into an action plan to guide the farmer to successful yields and harvests, while controlling costs, well, we believe our operators will greatly appreciate that,” said Martin.

In an impressive debut, Agrilyst won the TechCrunch Disrupt competition in September of 2015, and now has a solid amount of time with real world farms under their belt, operating using the Agrilyst platform.

According to Allison Kopf, CEO of Agrilyst, “We are excited to have been chosen as the platform to help make every farm sold by Indoor Farms of America the best it can be,” and “we look forward to working with their team and customers.”

Indoor Farms of America has a showroom with demonstration farms operating in Las Vegas, Nevada where their patented vertical aeroponic equipment is on display, including a container farm, with a primary model that has over 6,800 plant sites in standard configuration, over double the nearest competitor in the container farm segment.

“Our farms represent tremendous value to the purchaser, offer a superior R.O.I. potential than anything else on the market, and with the addition of the Agrilyst platform, our farmers now have the upper hand in total farm management,” stated Martin.

Each week the company hosts business owners, growers, and farm managers from around the U.S. and the world who want to see for themselves the equipment that can grow more crops in any given space that any other brand or type of equipment in the world.

“We will now have the Agrilyst platform operating and on display for our potential farmers to see first-hand, at the first of March, and we are excited for this addition to our end to end indoor farm solution,” according to Ron Evans, President of Indoor Farms of America.

For more information, visit the company website at indoorfarmsamerica.com

This press release was written by Indoor Farms of America and is shared in its original form. For more information on Agrilyst, please visit: www.agrilyst.com.