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Little Box Farms Turns Vacant Crown Heights Lot into Container-Farming Facility
October 31, 2017
Little Box Farms Turns Vacant Crown Heights Lot into Container-Farming Facility
The operation can grow up to an acre's worth of produce in vertically stacked shipping containers
Photo: Little Box Farms
Your next serving of fresh greens could come from the back of a shipping container.
Tech investor Travis Ally has leased a plot of vacant land at 827 Bergen Street in Crown Heights for an urban farm concept called Little Box Farms, housed in repurposed freight containers that have been converted in growing pods.
While greenhouses and rooftop farms operate throughout the city, Little Box Farms uses the containers, which are equipped with LED lights and hydroponic technology, to cultivate microgreens, such as sprouts and baby chard, as well as larger leafy vegetables like kale. The plants are rooted in burlap sacks and placed on shelves that run the entire height of each container.
"These shipping containers can each produce an acre of farming land while using 90% less water," Ally said. "Plus we're producing as close as possible to the consumer so we can cut super fresh and organic produce, and deliver it for consumption the same day."
The urban farm is designed to scale easily—two containers are currently in operation at the site, but Ally envisions bringing in more and stacking them vertically up to five containers high. Ally procured the growing containers from two companies, Growtainer and CropBox—two players in an expanding urban farming industry.
Ally, who has invested $150,000 into launching the venture, admits it's not yet profitable due to the large start-up costs. He said he hopes the vertical concept will help him maximize revenue and beat the costs of the land he is now leasing, which is pricey relative to the economics of farming.
Little Box Farms leased the 5,400 square foot site for five years. Asking rents for the space were around $7 per square foot.
"In the future consumers will care more about how and where their food is grown and water will become more scarce," Ally said. "We don't have the transit costs because we're growing for the local market and we don't have to pay for fertilizers or fighting insects or worry about weather because we're growing organically in a controlled environment."
So far, Ally has been selling his produce to restaurants. He eventually plans to reach more consumers through stocking stores such as Whole Foods.
Peter Schubert, a leasing broker at TerraCRG, arranged the deal on behalf of the property owner, Saeed Fakir.
"There are other urban farm sites in the city but this concept was something unique and an amenity for the neighborhood," Schubert said. "On the weekends, Little Box Farms plans to host a greenmarket, which is something Crown Heights hasn't had."
Urban Agriculture Advocates Flock to NYC City Hall in Support of Groundbreaking Legislation
URBAN AGRICULTURE ADVOCATES FLOCK TO NYC CITY HALL IN SUPPORT OF GROUNDBREAKING LEGISLATION
New York City, NY, October 26 – Supporters of new legislation to create a comprehensive plan for urban agriculture in NYC packed today’s public hearing at City Hall. The turnout to endorse Intro No. 1661, introduced by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Council Member Rafael Espinal Jr., is a testament to the significance of Urban Agriculture in the lives of the city’s workers, residents and business owners.
The global urban farming industry has an estimated valuation of $5.8 billion in the next five years, and NYC boasts the largest existing Urban Agriculture system in the country. NYC urban farmers expressed that the city’s lack of cohesive regulation and oversight has stifled the local marketplace, while other cities like Atlanta and Boston have gained a competitive edge. The legislation aims to address this concern by developing NYC’s first Urban Agriculture plan, which includes a feasibility assessment for creating an office of Urban Agriculture.
“Today's hearing was a success”, said Council Member Rafael Espinal. “Urban Agriculture has endless potential to grow local, fresh food, increase access to healthy produce for low-income New Yorkers, create jobs, and support our environment. With more frequent floods and droughts ravaging our planet, including the recent devastating hurricanes we have seen first-hand, we must do everything we can to reduce climate change. Urban farming uses the technology of our day to reduce our carbon footprint, use less water than traditional farm systems and cultivate nutrient-rich food. NYC must come into the 21st century and create a plan to harness the great potential of this industry.”
Among the 46 individuals who offered testimony in support of the bill were private sector CEOs, university professors, chefs, nonprofit leaders, environmental advocates, tech entrepreneurs, farmers, job seekers and local food supporters. The lone opposition came from the Department of City Planning, which would be charged with developing the plan if the legislation passes.
“Urban Agriculture has many applications and potential impacts. Thus, it can be easily labeled as ‘complicated’ by the DCP and other city agencies,” said Henry Gordon-Smith, founder of Agritecture Consulting and member of the NYC Agriculture Collective. “However, this is not a reason to oppose the development of a plan. In fact, this is the exact reason why I support Intro No. 1661, to develop a clear plan to foster urban agriculture in all its variation, sustainably in NYC.”
Numerous members of the NYC Agriculture Collective were in attendance to speak as proponents for the bill. Members discussed the wide-ranging benefits to NYC of nurturing the Urban Agriculture marketplace, including job creation, economic development, food security, community involvement and environmental impact.
Liz Vaknin, founder of Our Name Is Farm, and also a member of the NYC Agricultural Collective added, “It’s a shame that no one is looking at this as a means to growing the City from numerous socio-economical perspectives. Yes, access to local food is the top priority, but if that’s not good enough, the DCP should be motivated by the influx of capital, the infrastructural growth, the added jobs, the growing agri-tourism, etc. that developments in Urban Agriculture will undoubtedly bring to this City”.
About the NYC Agriculture Collective
The NYC Agriculture Collective is a coalition of stakeholders devoted to achieving an ambitious vision for New York City agriculture. We do this through several activities: regular events where you can experience urban farms, taste our produce and meet members; advocating for the right policy at a city, state and federal level to support urban agriculture; making it easy for interested people to get involved through volunteering, or finding jobs in urban agriculture in NYC; providing data and information about NYC’s urban agriculture. We also run the annual weeklong event: NYC AgTech Week. Get to know us better at www.farming.nyc.
Kimbal Musk Defends His Container Farming Accelerator
Musk’s solution is simple, if a tad controversial: The accelerator’s first yearlong field experiment did away with the need for a field entirely. Instead, its 10 farming containers are located in a Brooklyn-based parking lot. “So far, we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm if you can bring the farm to the farmer,” Musk added.
Kimbal Musk Defends His Container Farming Accelerator
Dan Barber of Blue Hill fame took Musk’s Square Roots project to task during Fast Company’s Innovation Festival.
In 2016, Kimbal Musk cofounded Square Roots, an accelerator that teaches farmers how to raise crops with LED lighting in climate-controlled shipping containers. He quickly received more than 500 applications for 10 spots.
This year, that number more than doubled to 1,100.
“It’s extraordinary how much interest there is in farming among young people,” the food-tech entrepreneur said during a Fast Company Innovation Festival panel about remaking the U.S.’s food system. “But I can’t get them to go to Iowa.”
Musk’s solution is simple, if a tad controversial: The accelerator’s first yearlong field experiment did away with the need for a field entirely. Instead, its 10 farming containers are located in a Brooklyn-based parking lot. “So far, we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm if you can bring the farm to the farmer,” Musk added.
Kimbal Musk
Square Roots’s vertical farms prize the idea of growing locally in small but incredibly bountiful little biodomes as a way to cut food miles and production costs–and encourage year-round access to healthier food. That’s something he has championed in a different way at his upscale Colorado restaurant, The Kitchen, and in his growing base of Next Doorrestaurants, which are more affordable. Both of these restaurants source their ingredients heavily from local farmers.
There’s no silver bullet to fix America’s food production problem, which involves agricultural, manufacturing, and even restaurant systems designed to create cheap, calorie-dense, and highly processed stuff to eat. But Musk can afford to take risks and stray from conventional models: He made millions in the late ’90s by selling an online city guide service that he cofounded alongside his brother, Elon.
As the New York Times recently reported, however, Kimbal Musk’s swashbuckling entrance into hydroponics has upset some farm-to-table chefs and sustainable farming advocates, who see his approach as Silicon Valley-style industrialization. Growing plants in a sci-fi-like way–in Musk’s method, there’s no soil required–might scale quickly, delivering certain foods more cheaply to grocery stores, restaurants, and people in need. At the same time, the container method doesn’t address rising concerns from environmentalists about how to fix the U.S.’s reliance on resource-intensive and pollution-causing commodity cropland. Or how to create farms with the sort of wide-variety of offerings that can remain resilient if weather shifts, or more apocalyptically, the power cuts out.
At the Innovation Festival, Musk’s fellow panelist, Dan Barber, one of the food world’s most prominent local and sustainable eating advocates, echoed those concerns. “The future of produce from a container, whether or not it’s next door to Jay-Z, doesn’t make me [excited],” countered Barber, after Musk playfully noted that Square Roots was located in the rapper’s old Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Barber is concerned that the rise of container farming could lead to new-age produce with inferior flavor and potentially lower nutrient content, depending on what seeds and conditions future farmers simulate to grow their compartment-based foods. At the same time, Barber told the crowd, he worries that Musk’s smart sales pitch might steal both funding and mindshare from other viable agricultural options. There are plenty of nonprofit farmer training programs that offer education to encourage more back-to-the-landers to just get started and adopt more holistic farming methods.
Dan Barber (right)
“[Take] your whatever square footage of kale,” Barber said to Musk. “On a half acre, we could do the same thing, but we could also grow a cover crop, we could grow tomatoes, we could grow a series of grains from which to make bread and porridge, and probably run some cattle over to graze, and have a whole cuisine on that half acre versus just producing the kale.”
Musk, defending his practice, talked about solving the “salad in January” problem. Currently, Next Door restaurants located in cold-winter climates have to source greens from as far off as California or even Australia, which results in a higher carbon footprint for the meals he serves in his establishments. That might change if Square Roots graduates–or others entering the container farming space, and there are many–can create closer, more available substitutions.
Of course, his restaurants could also just stop serving salad in January, but Musk isn’t into that idea. At Next Door, he argued, having a salad consistently on the menu is important–it’s a gateway to healthier eating in general. “I also don’t know if not eating a salad in January is the right answer, because I like a salad in January,” he said.
That get-it-when-I-want it mentality is widespread among consumers, at the expense of a variety of seasonal alternatives like Brussels sprouts or winter squashes. Meanwhile, container farming operations are increasingly efficient. A year ago, it was possible to grow about 50 pounds of kale per week in a shipping container, Musk noted. Today, with upgraded lighting and the right light recipe, he suspects you could theoretically produce 300 pounds of kale in the same time period. “Or you could say, I’m going to really make this super delicious and make 150 pounds of kale,” he said, an acknowledgement that at scale, there are always trade-offs when it comes to food quality.
Ultimately, it will be up to the next wave of farmers to help decide what kind of harvest they’re supplying to their customers.
As Fast Company has reported, Square Roots has already received $5.4 million in seed funding to take their concept to other cities. That’s not a lot of money for a hot startup backed by an established entrepreneur, but each entrant represents a future business owner. And Musk is already planting his own potential vendors in those places. Musk announced, on Medium in January, plans to open 50 Next Door eateries across the country by 2020.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Paynter is a senior writer at Fast Company covering social impact, the future of philanthropy, and innovative food companies. His work has appeared in Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the New York Times, among other places.
Urban Farm, Set to be Largest In The US
Urban Farm, Set To be Largest In The US
By Katy Mumaw - October 25, 2017
The Hilltop Urban Farm in South Pittsburgh has plans to be the largest urban farm in the nation. (Submitted image)
PITTSBURGH — A farm in the city? Yes, and just like other farms, the first step in converting land to fields is removing the “rocks.” This fall volunteers are doing just that, preparing part of a 107-acre plot to be Hilltop Urban Farm, by removing rocks and debris from the land and cutting down trees and shrubs on the ungroomed acres. It is soon to be the largest urban farm in the nation, said Sarah Baxendell, the farm’s manager.
In August the Hilltop Alliance, a nonprofit organization, hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony to make the official opening of the Hilltop Urban Farm in South Pittsburgh.
Discussions began in 2012 about what do with the space, which was once used for subsidized housing, that was demolished in 2010. After a feasibility study was conducted, Baxendell was brought on to serve as the alliance’s green space manager in 2015.
“You can tell where the buildings were in some places — rocks, foundations and pipes still exist,” Baxendell said.
Land access
There are 107 acres, in Pittsburgh’s St. Clair neighborhood, owed by the city’s Housing Authority. The Hilltop Alliance has started to clean it up under an expanded site access agreement.
The Allegheny Land Trust will eventually hold the property in perpetuity and will have a lease agreement with Hilltop to operate. The project is projected to cost $9.9 million, said Baxendell. The plan is for 23 acres to be farmland, 12 acres to be used for green spaces and the rest potentially for new housing.
Andy Collins of Penn Hills, one of the 11 communities part of the Hilltop Alliance. The alliance is managing an urban farm project Southern Pittsburgh. Collins chops at a tree, as he volunteers his time to clear the farm. (Katy Mumaw photo)
Baxendell is the seventh generation to live in this neighborhood. Her father grew up three doors down from the gate of the farm. She has a degree from the University of Delaware in business administration and marketing. She has also worked with the University of Indiana in their urban agriculture programs.
Big plans
The land has been surveyed and divided into different areas.
The Hilltop Alliance has big plans, which include; a three-acre community supported agriculture farm (CSA), three-acre farmer incubation program, one-acre youth farm, a farmers market building, 5,000-square-foot event barn, stormwater retention ponds, fruit orchards, community gardens and an education center. The events barn will serve as a revenue generating resources to offset the costs, she said.
Youth farm
The youth farm will be the first focus.
“Across the road from the site are 665 elementary students within our reach,” Baxendell said. “We plan to partner with the school, teach the kids about horticulture and get their hands dirty.”
The plan is for the youth farm to provide after-school and summer programs for families to learn about raising food, nutritional information and get a chance to work outside.
Farm incubator
In the farm incubator program, the alliance plans to divide the area into 16 plots and start with eight people interested in farming.
They are working with the Penn State Center at Pittsburgh and the College of Agriculture as they already have farm training programs.
“We are taking some of PSU’s existing programs and curriculum and making some adjustments for our needs,” she said.
In the farm incubator program, participants will pay a nominal fee to be provided land and resources to start a farm. “The goal is to give them a test run at farming to see if it is something they want to do long term.”
There are several hurdles, like city zoning, Baxendell has to overcome first. Right now, she can’t create any permanent structures or do any digging.
The Hilltop Alliance represents 11 South Pittsburgh neighborhoods, each neighborhood has a seat on the board.
The alliance focuses in three areas; green space, property stabilization and business development.
Volunteers
Sept. 29 was the first volunteer day. More than 20 volunteers picked up rocks from the fields, mowed, trimmed weeds and worked to chop down bushes and trees.
“All of the trees and bushes will be chipped and then the chips will be spread back over the field as compost,” Baxendell said.
Volunteers work to mow untamed land. This was once the site of subsidized housing, and is soon to be part of a youth farm to help educate the community about horticulture and food production. (Katy Mumaw photo)
Andy Collins, a volunteer, who lives in Penn Hills, a neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, worked to clear the site of the future youth farm.
“I heard about the project and thought it was pretty cool. I wanted to come out and do my part to make it happen,” he said.
Some areas have been tilled and compost spread and cover crops planted.
Progress
The Hilltop Alliance and contractor Go Supreme, owned by Amy Mangham of Beltzhoover, another Pittsburgh neighborhood that is part of the alliance, have cleared more than five acres of brush, laid compost and planted cover crops.
“I just can’t wait to see the entire thing come together,” said Mangham.
Today, in cleared fields you can see rye, radishes, oats and winter peas growing as cover crops.
Funding for the project has come from Hillman Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, Birmingham Foundation and Neighborhood Allies.
“I’ve been working on this for three years — 60 hour weeks — and this isn’t my only project,” she said.
“Success will be having an infrastructure established in a year, so in five years we have farmers ready to go out on their own and be successful financially.”
The farm will focus on food-production education and youth engagement, a huge value to communities like these, Baxendell said, with youth who may have never seen a tomato on the vine.
Shanghai’s Edible Rooftops
Atop Red Star Macalline Group’s headquarters sits a rooftop farm called Yiyun, which translates as “leaning on the clouds.” Chilies, white gourd, eggplant, chives, and other vegetables flourish across the 4,600-square-meter garden cultivated by the company, which is China’s largest national furniture retailer. The harvested produce is used in the staff cafeteria, and the farm also provides thermal insulation for the building’s top floor, which houses expensive rosewood furniture.
Shanghai’s Edible Rooftops
Urban farmers cultivate fresh produce and pockets of nature above the teeming metropolis.
Oct 24, 2017
SHANGHAI — Row upon row of buildings cast their looming shadows as the city yawns and stretches to accommodate more than 23 million residents. The metropolis has eaten up the surrounding farmland over decades of growth — but these days, a few small operators are finding ways to bring agriculture into the urban skyline.
Atop Red Star Macalline Group’s headquarters sits a rooftop farm called Yiyun, which translates as “leaning on the clouds.” Chilies, white gourd, eggplant, chives, and other vegetables flourish across the 4,600-square-meter garden cultivated by the company, which is China’s largest national furniture retailer. The harvested produce is used in the staff cafeteria, and the farm also provides thermal insulation for the building’s top floor, which houses expensive rosewood furniture.
“There is a great contrast between a land of greenery and a land of concrete,” the project’s instigator, Zhou Qun, told Sixth Tone. “It adds some glamour to the cityscape.” In Shanghai — the nation’s leading city in the field of rooftop farming — there are currently around 20 well-established farms, said Tongji University professor of landscape design Liu Yuelai.
Sky Farm in Shanghai uses rooftop agriculture to help urban residents experience nature up close. By Daniel Holmes and Shi Yangkun/Sixth Tone
With approximately 10 billion square meters of exposed roof space across Chinese cities as of September 2011, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the concept has plenty of capacity to grow. But with little government support for costly maintenance, the farms are difficult to sustain. Several funding models have popped up in the industry, including high-tech marketing that brings virtual connectivity into urban agriculture. More and more people are realizing that vacant roofs can provide not only aesthetic delights, but also numerous economic, ecological, and social benefits.
When properly maintained — or designed to maintain themselves — green roofs absorb heat and rain. The insulation properties of the soil layer can significantly reduce a building’s energy consumption, according to Li Wengeng, an agriculture expert who runs a few rooftop farms across China. “It also helps alleviate urban drainage disasters caused by torrential rainfall,” Li added.
There is a great contrast between a land of greenery and a land of concrete.
- Zhou Qun, Yiyun rooftop farm project instigator
In recent years, central and municipal government bodies have recognized that exposed roofs waste energy and have huge ecological potential. But the government has yet to issue guidance on rooftop farms. Though government subsidies are available for greening efforts, none focus on urban agriculture.
Zhou, who heads Red Star Macalline Group’s labor union, initiated construction of the rooftop farm in May 2015 after being inspired by a visit to a similar site in the nearby city of Wuxi the previous year. Yiyun opened a few months later, but it took a year to start turning a profit. According to Zhou, in the first year, the company invested 800,000 yuan ($120,500) into the rooftop farm. “A smaller company would not be able to afford it,” Zhou said.
There is little potential to fund the farm’s operations by selling produce. Despite plenty of attention given to domestic food safety issues, relatively few Chinese consumers are willing to pay premium prices for organic produce. Meanwhile, construction and maintenance costs for rooftop farms are high — even the soil must be brought up from somewhere.
One common business model is to charge for visits from nature-poor city-dwellers: Children can learn about nature and agriculture, while adults can relax and escape from the bustle of urban life. Visits don’t come cheap: Yiyun’s entry fees begin at 119 yuan per group.
A young girl visits a rooftop farm in Shanghai, Oct. 13, 2017. Shi Yangkun/Sixth Tone
The company was also recently awarded a one-year subsidy of 350,000 yuan for all its environmental programs in the district, including the rooftop farm and other greening initiatives. “If the nation implements concrete policies to lead [the growth of rooftop farms], others will be happy to follow,” Zhou said. “If not, it could be very hard for enterprises to take sole responsibility and promote it little by little.”
Some urban farms have employed innovative tactics to involve a wider community. Sky Farm, an internet-connected operation on the 700-square-meter roof of the Guan Sheng Yuan Group industrial park, offers 300 planters for rent via an app they developed themselves.
The government promotes roof greening, but greening is something that you have to throw money into maintaining every year.
- Ke Fangfang, Sky Farm staff member
Customers can see their vegetables’ real-time growth over a livestream and can simply tap the interface to give their plants more water or light. Others come to tend to their plants in person. “It is very easy to lose the sense of novelty if you’re just playing on your phone,” Sky Farm staff member Ke Fangfang told Sixth Tone.
The Sky Farm project is the brainchild of a makerspace operated by Guan Sheng Yuan Group, a century-old state-owned enterprise that is best known as the former manufacturer of White Rabbit candy. But in 2012, the company transferred all its food production businesses to a sister company and, in 2014, turned to incubating startups that bring web-based innovations to conventional industry.
The rental planters sit in one of Sky Farm’s two greenhouses, set up to circumvent the difficulties of farming in Shanghai’s dramatic climate: hot and humid in the summer, and damp and cold in the winter. Each planter costs 99 yuan per month, with seasonal discounts available. Since few users commit to renting long term, the company recommends choosing plants with short growth cycles. Meanwhile, less weather-sensitive species grow in an outdoor space that can be booked for events.
According to Ke, the only government grant that the rooftop farm has received was a one-off construction subsidy as part of a greening program. “The government promotes roof greening, but greening is something that you have to throw money into maintaining every year,” she said. “Yet it ends up providing no income at all.” The team switched to cultivating produce for this very reason.
Sky Farm has also looked to community partnerships, event hosting, and education programs to diversify its income sources.
“Kids growing up in the city have only seen the vegetables their mothers buy at the market,” said Cai Donglei, the mother of a 7-year-old. She appreciates the opportunity to give her daughter more exposure to the cycle of life. “Through the farm,” Cai said, “children learn that plants grow from seeds, that they need water and sunshine to sprout and slowly grow into their familiar forms over several months.”
Editor: Qian Jinghua.
(Header image: Ke Fangfang checks the plants at Sky Farm’s rooftop garden in Shanghai, Oct. 13, 2017. Daniel Holmes/Sixth Tone)
UGA Professor: Today’s Students Will Live to See Food Shortages
Posted October 24, 2017 03:02 pm
By Lee Shearer | lee.shearer@onlineathens.com
UGA Professor: Today’s Students Will Live to See Food Shortages
University of Georgia students will see food shortages in their lifetimes, UGA professor David Berle predicts.
It’s impossible to tell how a future of food scarcity might play out, or how deep that scarcity could be, Berle said in a recent talk in the auditorium of UGA’s Odum School of Ecology.
A 2011 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated world food production would have to increase by as much as 70 percent to feed the expected world population of about 9 billion in 2050, Berle said.
Scientific and demographic studies have also predicted water shortages.
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A revision of the report suggests agricultural production may not have to increase that much, but it’s clear change is coming, Berle explained.
Various solutions have been proposed, but none of them is a magic bullet, and some may not even be good ideas, according to Berle, a professor of horticulture who helped begin and now oversees the student-run organic UGArden on university land near the State Botanical Garden of Georgia.
Indoor farming is energy-intensive, for example, and vertical agriculture — or wall growing — still requires the delivery of water and nutrients to plants.
Some companies and people tout the use of genetically-modified crops, but it’s unclear how much if any more yield genetically-altered plants can provide.
Cutting back on food waste is another proposed solution, but one with uneven applications. Some have estimated we throw away up to 50 percent of food in the United States. But in less wealthy parts of the world, waste is much less.
Growing food locally is a good idea, but that also can only go so far, Berle said. Many of the foods we eat aren’t suitable for growing in the local climate.
Climate change is also altering growing conditions in many places.
The still-growing organic agriculture movement is a bright spot.
A few years ago, when the idea of growing crops with minimal use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers and pesticides began taking hold, studies showed that organic farming was less productive.
But more recent studies show, said Berle, that organic farming can come close to high-output farming in yield.
Follow Lee Shearer at www.facebook.com/LeeShearerABH orhttps://twitter.com/LeeShearer.
Saudi Arabia Is Building a Futuristic Mega-City That Will Cost $500 Billion
Saudi Arabia Is Building a Futuristic Mega-city That Will Cost $500 Billion
It'll be 33 times the size of New York City.
TALIA AVAKIAN
OCTOBER 25, 2017
Saudi Arabia is building a mega-city that will span three different countries.
The country’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, announced the $500-billion plan, which will create a futuristic city in the northwestern region of the country.
Dubbed NEOM, the mega city will cover 26,500 square kilometers in total, spanning territory within Egypt and Jordan as well.
The city is set to be the world’s first independent economic zone, operating with its own laws, taxes, and regulations.
NEOM will be powered completely by renewable energy from solar and wind panels, with its transport system also running on 100 percent green energy.
Vertical urban farms, seawater farming, and solar-powered greenhouses will help provide residents with fresh food supplies, and the zone will also be a space to test out new technological advances like passenger drones and self-learning traffic systems.
Located next to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, the massive city will also provide a serene landscape composed of more than 290 miles of coastline and vast desert terrain.
The city's coastline includes a variety of untouched beaches and coastal reefs and its valleys are cradled by mountains, creating a more moderate climate than that of nearby areas.
Plans also include the creation of sports and visual arts venues, a variety of marinas and waterside restaurants, record-breaking theme parks, natural parklands, a water park with a wave pool where Olympians will practice, and what officials say will be the world’s largest garden.
The move comes as the world’s largest oil exporter looks to boost its economy after falling oil prices.
Construction is already set to begin, with the first phase planned for completion by 2025. You can follow the progress of NEOM’s development through an interactive map on the project’s website.
IKEA & Top Chef David Chang Round Out Financing for $40 Million Series D Round for AeroFarms
AeroFarms just built its ninth farm to date in Newark, New Jersey that is the world’s largest indoor vertical farm based on annual output. Having raised in total over $100 million in corporate and project financing, AeroFarms will used the latest round of funds for continued investment in leading R&D and technology and additional farm expansion around the world.
IKEA & Top Chef David Chang Round Out Financing for $40 Million Series D Round for AeroFarms
October 27, 2017
AeroFarms, the pioneer and leader for indoor vertical farming since 2004, closed $40 million in Series D financing led by an international
Urban Farms Gain Support
In this 2014 photo, urban gardener Jo Bartikoski picks dill from her garden patch at the Dundee community garden in Omaha, Nebraska. Some are looking to expand so-called urban farms to produce more healthy food for city residents. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
Urban Farms Gain Support
October 15, 2017
New York City is known for its tall buildings, financial markets and centers for the arts.
But America’s most populated city is becoming known for something you might not expect -- farms.
New York City’s government announced last month that it is providing $500,000 to create two urban farms. Both will use space in New York public housing developments. The new farms will join four other farms already operating with city government help.
The idea is to get more fresh fruits and vegetables to communities in the city. City officials see it as a public health issue.
“These new urban farms will not only provide access to healthy produce, but also provide jobs to young residents,” said New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres.
The new farms will be in the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and the Bronx.
Farming businesses in the city?
These farms are supported by the local government. But, there are also privately run farms in the city.
In the New City neighborhood of Tribeca, Robert Laing has opened up a privately-run indoor farm called Farm.One. He grows many kinds of herbs. His customersinclude well-known restaurants in New York City.
The restaurants can pick up fresh herbs hours before they are needed for that night’s dinner because his “farm” can be reached by bicycle from much of the city. Laing's website tells customers that they can buy fresh herbs, even in a snowstorm.
Farm.One is very different than farms in less populated communities. The major difference is size. It is only 112-meters. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the average farm in America is 176 Hectares.
Farm.One’s crops are grown on vertical shelves so more can be grown in less space.
“The nice thing about farming vertically indoors is that you don’t need a lot of space,” Laing said. “I can see some bodega (a small grocery story) setting one up on the roof.”
Robert Laing of Farm.One.
Urban farms are growing in other cities besides New York City.
The website Inhabitat.com recently released a list of the top four U.S. cities for urban farms. They are Austin, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan.
Urban farms still need to develop more
The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future released a report on urban farms in 2016. It said there are important benefits to turning unused land into sources of healthy food.
But it said that urban farming still has a long way to go to produce the environmental and health benefits claimed by supporters.
“In some cases, the enthusiasm is ahead of the evidence,” the Johns Hopkins research said.
For example, the report said that supporters of growing food close to the people who eat it claim that it reduces pollution compared to transporting food long distances.
But the researchers found that smaller farms do not do as a good a job as larger farms in reducing use of water and other natural resources.
Indoor farms: a controlled environment
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research based in Washington D.C. wants more urban farms. It said the benefits are almost unlimited.
The group announced last month that it will give $2 million to help pay for a new farm in Newark, New Jersey, just outside of New York City.
Aero Farms will work with scientists from Cornell University in New York State and Rutgers University in New Jersey. The goal is to grow salad greens with improved taste and color.
The funding announcement said that because the farm is indoors the farmers can control the environment, including temperature, to improve their crops.
Sally Rockey is executive director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture.
She said that more than half the world’s population lives in cities and that it is important to provide healthy food to this population. Whenever possible, Rockey said, food should be “grown locally.”
Brian Massey writes and farms. He recently wrote about managing an urban farm in a Washington D.C. neighborhood near Howard University. His report appeared on the website, civileats.com.
He said that a lot of people liked the fresh fruit and vegetables his farm produced. But he said others worried the farm was there to help the newly arrived, wealthier residents, not the poor.
There was a concern that the farm would add to Washington’s continuing shortage of low-income housing, Massey wrote.
I’m Jill Robbins.
And I’m Bruce Alpert.
Bruce Alpert reported on this story for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.
Farm Bill Discontent: Urban Ag Supporters want Changes
Danielle Marvit is production manager for Garden Dreams Urban Farm and Nursery in Pittsburgh. She has serious concerns about conventional agriculture. Here, she talks with journalists during the recent annual convention of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Pittsburgh. (Jonathan Knutson/Agweek)
Farm Bill Discontent: Urban Ag Supporters want Changes
By Jonathan Knutson / Agweek Staff Writer on Oct 16, 2017
PITTSBURGH — Sonia Finn, Danielle Marvit and Raqueeb Bey are passionate about agriculture. And they believe U.S. farming practices are dangerously off course and need to be corrected, starting with the 2018 farm bill.
"The farm bill isn't right for agriculture. People need to get involved and work to change it," Finn said.
Finn is chef and owner of Dinette restaurant in Pittsburgh. Marvit is production manager of Garden Dreams Urban Farm and Nursery in Pittsburgh. Bey is project director of Black Urban Gardeners and Farmers of Pittsburgh Co-op, or BUGS-FPC, as the group calls itself.
They spoke with Agweek Oct. 4 at Garden Dreams Urban Farm and Nursery during the annual convention of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The event included a day-long session on the farm bill and urban agriculture; Finn, Marvit and Bey were among the presenters.
Though some in mainstream agriculture are skeptical of urban ag, attention is growing for the concept. U.S. local food sales totaled at least $12 billion in 2014, up from $5 billion in 2008, and experts anticipate the figure to reach $20 billion by 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Urban ag consists of "backyard, rooftop and balcony gardening, community gardening in vacant lots and parks, roadside urban fringe agriculture and livestock grazing in open space," according to USDA.
Urban ag has at least one powerful champion.
Michigan's Debbie Stabenow, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee and a key player in U.S. ag policy, last year introduced the Urban Agriculture Act of 2016. The proposal — at least some of which she hopes will be included in the 2018 farm bill — would increase research funding for urban ag, provide more access for urban farmers to USDA loans and risk management programs, and boost the development of urban farming cooperatives, among other things.
Get involved
Finn has both professional and personal interest in promoting urban ag; she grows much of the produce used by Dinette on the restaurant's roof and relies on local farms for as many ingredients as possible.
She's also determined to transform the farm bill, the centerpiece of federal food and agricultural policy. She's gone to Washington, D.C., repeatedly to lobby for her beliefs.
She insists that the existing farm bill — and mainstream ag in general — is tailored to the wants and needs of powerful corporate interests, not what's best for the overwhelming majority of Americans.
"Most people just don't understand how important the farm bill is," Finn said.
Marvit, for her part, is critical of much of America's conventionally raised food.
"It's not real food," she said.
The quarter-acre Garden Dreams Urban Garden and Nursery, established about a decade ago, seeks to promote urban ag, giving neighborhood residents more and healthier food options. It also wants to help community residents learn more about gardening and give them a peaceful place to visit.
The organic operation specializes in tomatoes, raising more than 70 varieties of tomato seedlings. It also has peppers, eggplant, flowers and other fruits and vegetables.
Local control
Bey stressed that urban agriculture gives residents of local neighborhoods greater influence over both their food supply and their lives in general.
"Neighborhoods need more control over what happens to them," Bey said.
Her own Pittsburgh neighborhood has been without a grocery store for decades, forcing its residents to travel several miles by bus to buy food, she said.
BUGS-FPC is establishing a 31,000-square-foot urban farm that will use hoop houses, also known as high tunnels, to grow food to sell at its farm stand and its farmers market, at restaurants and at a community cooperative grocery that it wants to open.
Though interest in, and awareness of, healthy food is growing, supporters of urban ag and local foods need to focus on improving the farm bill and making it friendlier to consumers, Finn said.
"It's just so important we do it," she said.
USDA's "urban agriculture toolkit" is a good starting place to learn more about urban ag:www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/urban-agriculture-toolkit.pdf.
Kimbal Musk Has a Silicon Valley-Style Plan to Feed America
Kimbal Musk Has a Silicon Valley-Style Plan to Feed America
Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk's brother, is aiming to foment an agricultural revolution in America. With scalable projects that include healthy low-cost fast food and urban farms in parks and shipping containers, he's made an impressive start.
“REAL FOOD” PHILOSOPHY
Kimbal Musk is Elon’s younger brother, who made his first money working in tech and went on to invest in his brother’s other businesses. He serves on the board of both Tesla and SpaceX today. However, Kimbal Musk’s first love is food, cooking, and how we eat. He opened his first restaurant, The Kitchen, in Colorado in 2004. But after a skiing accident into 2010 left him temporarily paralyzed, he had an epiphany: he would devote his life’s work to changing the way we eat in America.
Musk recently opened a satellite to his upscale Kitchen restaurant inside Shelby Farms, a 4,500-acre park in the urban center of Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently testing a small takeout spot there, offering well-prepared, locally-grown meals for around $5—an antidote to fast food. He also made 300 nearby acres, formerly used to grow cotton, part of that deal, and is now transforming that land into an organic farm.
Kimbal Musk’s food philosophy —that “real food” should sustain not just the human body, but also the planet and the food producer—is actually very similar to the community garden or farmers’ market philosophy. Musk’s difference, promoted by him under The Kitchen brand, is that he wants to bring Silicon Valley scalability and innovation to the food system.
“My way of working is very practical,” Musk said to the New York Times. “There are many wonderful solutions to real food, but I focus on what we can scale. The Slow Food guys were right, but what they didn’t know was how to scale. If you can’t scale, it doesn’t matter.”
For example: Musk is interested in school gardens, but criticizes the traditional school garden model—because it doesn’t scale. Although he purports to care most about cooking and eating food, and says he does not place scalability above those concerns. In several areas, this isn’t clear.
The nonprofit arm of the company, The Kitchen Community, has installed learning gardens along with materials and staff in 100 Memphis schools. They also exist in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh, and Musk aims to have them in at least 1,000 schools by 2020.
CRITICS AND CHALLENGES
Not everyone working in food is a fan of Kimbal Musk’s food philosophy, or the way he acts on it. His remarks have often been called tone-deaf, or lacking in broader knowledge about food systems.
After Musk suggested in an interview that food hadn’t yet seen the benefits afforded by technology, Ontario farmer Lawrence McLachlan tweeted in response: “You might want to visit a Farm Progress show. Or even a farm. I think you might have missed 70 years of Ag history. It’s Hi-Tech stuff bud.”
"Food is one of the final frontiers that technology hasn't tackled yet. If we do it well, it will mean good food for all." @kimbal#foodtank pic.twitter.com/6cyv0VsW8Q
Lawrence McLachlan @LMcLachlan60
You might want to visit a Farm Progress show. Or even a farm. I think you might have missed 70 years of Ag history. It's Hi-Tech stuff bud
Musk has, mostly by happenstance, become symbolic of a divide between people working in the modern American food justice movement, where largely “old school” values such as growing food in soil take precedence, and those with “new school” values that emphasize business and tech-focused practices.
“It’s the divide between the technophile cornucopians and the techno-skeptic redistributors,” Krishnendu Ray, New York University nutrition and food studies department chairman, said to the New York Times. For some, like Bay Area chef and and school garden activist Alice Waters, Musk is a Johnny-come-lately who simply doesn’t have enough information.
“I don’t want to hear another word about scaling,” Waters told the Times. “He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He’s very earnest about what he’s doing, but he doesn’t know enough about farming and about the soil. He wants to do the right thing, but he just hasn’t done his homework. Not everything has to be scalable.”
That won’t stop Musk, however. His Square Roots project, which trains young farmers to grow greens for sale with nothing but LEDs and enhanced water in Brooklyn shipping containers, yields about as much produce per box as two acres of soil. Musk wants to start a similar program in every major American city.
While the program has its critics, it is part of a larger vertical farming trend. Other programs like Musk’s, which grow faster than soil in less space, are flourishing, even in warehouses. Big cities like Shanghai are creating vertical farming districts, and even Antarctica is getting in on the action.
Philosophy aside, in a time of need and changing climate, even food staples we depend on may grow short; growing more food in less space might be the winning strategy.
References: NYTimes - Tech, TedxTalks, Square Roots
Toronto Entrepreneur Brings Vertical Farms to Windsor
The old Forster high school’s computer lab houses the steel frame work for four vertical farms, including one that’s teeming with several types of kale and lettuce along with thyme, arugula and Italian dandelion. It has the potential to grow 70 plant varieties year round.
Toronto Entrepreneur Brings Vertical Farms to Windsor
MARY CATON
Published on: October 18, 2017 | Last Updated: October 18, 2017 8:27 PM EDT
Vertical Farm Inside Old Forster H.S. Click Here to View Video
The future of indoor farming is held together with zip ties, powered by extension cords and aerated by bathroom exhaust fans.
Toronto area entrepreneur Zale Tabakman has brought his budding vertical farming business to Windsor through a collaboration with Canada South Science City and support from Unifor Skilled Trades.
Tabakman’s agriculture and technology company — Local Grown Salads — is taking root inside the Forster Community Hub.
The old Forster high school’s computer lab houses the steel frame work for four vertical farms, including one that’s teeming with several types of kale and lettuce along with thyme, arugula and Italian dandelion. It has the potential to grow 70 plant varieties year round.
Because of the density of the plantings, each 32-square-foot unit can produce the equivalent of one acre of land over the course of a year.
“So I’ve got four acres of land here that don’t even take up a classroom,” Tabakman said.
Tabakman is fiddling with prototypes which is why the units still feature zip ties and bathroom fans.
“There’s nothing fancy here,” he said.
The roll-up shades contain the LED lighting necessary for growing while the base holds water and the white square-shaped towers contain an organic soil mix and the root system. The exhaust fans mounted at the top attach to flexible vent hoses punctured with holes so that air is pushed down on the plants.
It’s almost a closed-loop system that recycles water and nutrients to make it environmentally sustainable.
Eventually, Tabakman hopes to grow, harvest and package all in one location — so you can serve a salad harvested that morning.
Zale Tabakman checks on seedlings at Local Grown Salads, a business specializing in vertical growing located inside the Forster Community Hub on Oct. 18, 2017. NICK BRANCACCIO / WINDSOR STAR
Bill Baylis, left, of Science City, and Zale Tabakman, owner of Local Grown Salads, a business specializing in vertical growing, examine fresh lettuce, thyme and kale inside the Forster Community Hub. NICK BRANCACCIO / WINDSOR STAR
Zale Tabakman samples lettuce, thyme and kale at Local Grown Salads. NICK BRANCACCIO /WINDSOR STAR
At Science City, he will offer an education component explaining the process and even providing information on how to set up a home hydroponic growing unit.
Plans also call for a commercial grade farm in the old school cafeteria. Produce could be sold at local markets with the proceeds helping to sustain the Forster Hub.
A second non-profit community farm would be operated elsewhere in the building to provide fresh produce at low cost to the Sandwich community.
“It’s got a lot of potential,” Science City president Bill Baylis said.
“This food initiative captured Unifor’s attention,” said Ken Lewenza Jr. “There’s no pesticides, it’s more nutritious and better for the environment because it’s not being transported to Windsor-Essex from California.
“This is not your grandpa’s farm.”
LiUNA is another supporter of the venture and Lewenza Jr. anticipates a number of partnerships being forged in the coming months to bring vertical farming to different sectors.
“I think academic institutions could play a role in developing this,” he said. “We can develop interconnected strategies for social, economic and ecological development and think about how new technology can be owned, operated and directed by communities.”
Lewenza Jr. wants to work in partnership with traditional agricultural and green house sectors.
He calls the vertical farm “a game-changer in terms of thinking about schools and under-utilized community spaces we can make into sustainable hubs.”
Tabakman’s system economically grows vegetables free of insecticides or herbicides.
As for its home inside the Forster Hub, it’s been a slow ramp up since the idea of a community-based co-op first surfaced in May 2016.
The building is owned by Matty Maroun’s Canadian Transit Co.
Baylis said all the legal details have yet to be finalized and the 94-year-old building is still in need of a new roof.
That’s prevented Baylis from re-launching all of Science City’s exhibits, although he is hopeful he will be able to accommodate school tours by the end of November.
“The schools are still calling, so it’s nice that they remember us,” he said.
Growing Urban Agriculture
Growing Urban Agriculture
To feed the world’s growing population, we must do more to promote the success of urban farms through better tracking, financial incentives, land use, and support systems.
By Esther Ngumbi Oct. 23, 2017
In Paris, post office workers have successfully raised chickens and grown vegetables on the rooftop of a mail-sorting center. In Chattanooga, the city council just loosened zoning rules to allow urban dwellers to keep livestock. And in Ekurhuleni, South Africa, an urban resident is successfully growing vegetables including chilies, spinach, and onions to supply restaurants.
These urban farmers are part of a global revival. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 800 million people around the globe grow their own fruits or vegetables, or raise animals in cities, accounting for 15-20 percent of world’s food production. And while people have grown food in cities for a long time, urban farming has recently gained renewed attention for its social, health, environmental, and economic benefits. It can help farmers and consumers save money, increase year-round fresh food access, and promote healthy lifestyles in urban settings. It also gives people more control over the production of the food they eat, which has benefits like reducing the use of harmful pesticides.
Onions and greens on the Siyakhana Urban Farm in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Esther Ngumbi)
Some urban farms and farmers are pushing the limits of innovation, using technology and controlled environments that allow them grow food all year-round while avoiding challenges like erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease. Some of these enterprises are sustainably meeting year-round food needs for people living in cities. In Detroit, for instance, urban farms have the potential to supply 31 percent of the fresh vegetables that Detroiters eat each year. Urban farming can be productive, sustainable, lucrative, and profitable.
So how do we tap into this renewed attention and help further expand the urban farming movement to feed our growing population? We can do more to promote its growth and success through better tracking, incentives, land use, and support systems.
Create inventory
To keep moving in the right direction, we must have firm grasp on the state of the current landscape. In Chicago, for example, a group of individuals, organizations, businesses, and educational institutions have collaborated to map urban agriculture initiatives across the metropolitan area. Their database identifies more than 890 farms. More areas need to create this kind of information, which can help connect urban farmers with each other and with other stakeholders including potential funders. Such databases can also be used to inform governments, urban city planners, and policy makers.
The United Nations has previously published reports detailing the state of urban and peri-urban farming across the African Continent and in Latin America and The Caribbean. These resources and broader global inventories are valuable and updating them would be useful to all stakeholders interested in seeing urban agriculture continue to scale in cities around the world.
Lobby for more land
Many cities have zoning regulations that exclude agriculture or related activities in urban areas. Until June 2010, the City of Los Angeles, for example, prohibited residents from growing crops in residential zoning districts. And until June 2012, Portland, Oregon, also banned agriculture as primary use in some zoning districts. Thus, to allow urban farming to happen in urban areas, we need more municipal governments to set aside land for urban agriculture. Depending on how cities prioritize land for food over other development initiatives, advocacy groups and local citizens can step in. Making the case to governments requires that these groups present compelling narratives that describe the benefits of supporting urban farming. Agriculture Advocates Work Group in Detroit and the Urban Agriculture Working group in Los Angeles are examples of coalitions that have successfully convinced city governments to pass ordinances allowing people living in urban areas to farm. In Motherwell, South Africa, farmers are lobbying their municipal officials to allocate more land to allow them to expand their urban pig farms.
Increase support systems
Urban farmers need up-to-date knowledge about growing methods, innovative business models, and indoor farming best practices to thrive and remain sustainable. As urban farming continues to grow around the world, universities, colleges, nonprofit organizations, and funding agencies need to step up to support urban farmers’ needs. For example, through its Purdue Extension urban agriculture programs, Purdue University provides technical expertise, education resources, networking, and business development programs for people wanting to venture into urban farming. In 2016, 35 urban agriculture entrepreneurs participated in their urban farm business planning course. Established and successful private urban farms can also serve as mentors, sharing best practices and business models with new farmers. Growing Power is a nonprofit that offers training, as well as educational and technical support to urban farmers. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has a website dedicated to urban farming, which offers several resources to support dedicated to urban farming, and in 2016, it supported and funded dozens of urban farms. These efforts should continue.
Create incentives for farming
Increasing financial incentives could encourage urban farming to grow. Some public schools, hospitals, and other public institutions like universities receive tax breaks for obtaining a certain percentage of their food from urban farms. Such arrangements can create guaranteed markets for produce from urban farms. Some states and municipalities have programs to help such institutions redesign their procurement policies to increase the percentage of locally grown produce. Food retailers could also get tax incentives from the government for carrying products from urban farms. In addition, urban farms could receive tax breaks for donating excess produce to food banks and pantries. Most importantly, government could provide tax incentives to urban farms that work with food pantries and food banks in an effort to ensure that people receiving public assistance can buy fresh food from urban farms using food stamps.
Efforts to promote urban farming around our world must be intensified. African Development Bank President and 2017 World Food Prize laureate Akinwumi Adesina has for years emphasized that making agriculture modern, profitable, and appealing to young Africans could be the key to lifting millions out of poverty. Other countries, including those in Africa, can learn from some of the incentives and advocacy efforts happening in the United States. With the right supports, urban farming offers a promising approach to help feed the world’s growing population.
Esther Ngumbi is a postdoctoral researcher at Auburn University’s College of Agriculture and a Food Security Fellow with Aspen Institute's New Voices Fellowship. She advocates for urban farming and food security and has published articles on those subjects for outlets including Reuters, The Conversation, Aljazeera, SciDev.Net, and Inter Press Service.
New Urban Farm in D.C. Is About More Than a Food Desert
The lack of access to fresh food is a factor in great health disparities in D.C. Residents of Wards 7 and 8 are several times more likely to be obese, and have diabetes and other food-related illnesses than are residents of wealthier communities just across the Anacostia River.
New Urban Farm in D.C. Is About More Than a Food Desert
BY STEPHANIE CASTELLANO | OCTOBER 24, 2017
Kelly Miller Farm is scheduled to open in spring 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chris Bradshaw)
On Oct. 14, hundreds of people marched in Anacostia, in southeastern Washington, D.C., to a Giant supermarket. Some held carrots in the air; many carried shopping bags filled with groceries. They were marching to raise awareness of what it’s like to live in a food desert, an area where full-service grocery stores are scarce or nonexistent. In Ward 8, where the march took place, just one supermarket — the Giant — serves about 70,000 people. In Ward 7, directly north, two grocery stores serve another 70,000.
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The lack of access to fresh food is a factor in great health disparities in D.C. Residents of Wards 7 and 8 are several times more likely to be obese, and have diabetes and other food-related illnesses than are residents of wealthier communities just across the Anacostia River.
The problem — which some officials have deemed a public health crisis — is starting to galvanize people, and several nonprofits are working on creative solutions. Perhaps the most promising approach links many of those solutions together, and it’s currently unfolding on a stretch of vacant land behind a middle school in Ward 7. What’s destined to be the Kelly Miller Farm will not only grow food for the neighborhood, but will also boost its economic well-being through job training programs and a food business incubator.
A year ago, the lot was one of the city’s 300-some vacant plots of land on the government’s list of places with potential for urban agriculture. Chris Bradshaw, founder and executive director of Dreaming Out Loud, a nonprofit that runs community gardens and farmers markets in low-income D.C. communities, saw the potential in the Ward 7 property. While the Kelly Miller land is owned by D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation, the farm — which will be the District’s largest — is now managed by Dreaming Out Loud. With the help of a $250,000 federal grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, the group broke ground on the site in late September, and expects the farm to be fully operational come spring.
Josh Singer, who manages the Partner Urban Farm program for D.C. Parks and Recreation, says that Kelly Miller will be a model for future urban farms. Though he says he’s often skeptical of nonprofits that move into communities to implement urban agriculture projects, noting that they can be disconnected from the needs of the people living there, Singer is enthusiastic about Dreaming Out Loud’s efforts so far.
“Their partnerships are what’s most exciting,” he says. The group has joined together with other local food nonprofits, including DC Central Kitchen, City Blossoms, Compost Cab, Beet Street Gardens and FoodCorps, to engage the local community through free public programming that will cover everything from gardening, food preservation, and composting, to nutrition, cooking, carpentry, and entrepreneurship.
Possibly the most fruitful partnership Bradshaw has formed so far, however, is with two longtime residents of the neighborhood surrounding the farm, Boe Luther and Wallace Kirby. Bradshaw says that Luther and Kirby have been instrumental when it comes to community outreach.
“I’m an outsider, I’m not from the community,” he says. Luther, however, was born in Clay Terrace, a public housing project close to the farm site. He owns an ice cream truck that is parked in front of Clay Terrace most afternoons.
“Kids get out of school, they go to the ice cream truck, parents, everyone gathers there,” Bradshaw says. Being at the center of a community hub has helped Luther get the message out about the Kelly Miller Farm, and has drummed up more interest and enthusiasm among neighbors than Bradshaw could have managed.
Luther and Kirby connected with Dreaming Out Loud because of a shared interest in agriculture as a path to entrepreneurship and self-reliance. The two men make up Hustlerz 2 Harvesters, which aims to teach young African-Americans entrepreneurial skills. Luther was inspired to form Hustlerz after his experience attempting to return to the workforce after serving a 13-year prison sentence.
“I didn’t have no help when I got out, not even from my parole officer,” he says. With Kirby, at Kelly Miller Farm, he’ll be teaching workshops on gardening, composting and carpentry, skills he learned while incarcerated. Passing those skills on to others, Luther says, won’t just lead them to jobs, it will help them become entrepreneurs.
“We don’t just want jobs, we want careers,” he says. “The farm’s not just about growing, it’s about making money, and that’s something many people in this community don’t have.”
That entrepreneurial spirit is running largely untapped through D.C.’s low-income communities. Bradshaw says that, at farmers markets run by Dreaming Out Loud, people would often ask the staff how they might sell their own products there. Yet there are few commercial kitchens in the District and they are expensive to rent, which presents a barrier to low-income people looking to start a food business.
Bradshaw and his staff plan to raise awareness of the newly implemented Cottage Food Act, which allows D.C. residents to run food businesses out of their home kitchens, provided their annual revenue doesn’t exceed $25,000. Through outreach and classes at the Kelly Miller Farm, Dreaming Out Loud and its partners will educate residents about the act’s regulations and help them get their businesses off the ground. Bradshaw says this will be one of their most important metrics for success: how many cottage food businesses they can discover and nurture into profitability.
The team will also gather data around its programs — the number of participants, their satisfaction level, and even what they do with the skills they learn. Every year, the Department of Parks and Recreation will review feedback from the community to see if the farm is meeting its needs.
Bradshaw hopes the data will help build the case for more urban farms like this to be built on public lands. “There are more conversations now around protecting public lands for the public good, versus privatization,” he says.
Singer agrees, and though he says that urban agriculture is no “magic solution” to community development, it should play a role: “Urban farms won’t solve hunger in a community, but they can get people access to healthy food.”
Healthy food, and perhaps for a few enterprising individuals, a much-needed source of income.
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Stephanie Castellano is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C. She has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor, Civil Eats, Tallahassee magazine and other outlets.
What Will it Really Take For Vertical Farms To Succeed?
What Will it Really Take For Vertical Farms To Succeed?
Funders and proponents say vertical farming is the future. But consumer demand may change the nature of what it means to "grow."
October 24, 2017
by Paul Adams
ENVIRONMENT FARM OUTLIERS PLATESCIENCE SHELF TECH
AeroFarms, the world’s largest industrial farm, is contained within a windowless, gray building in Newark, New Jersey. In its 70,000 square feet of floor space—not all of it yet in use—kale, arugula, baby salad greens, and herbs grow in trays without soil; their roots grow down through water-misted air. It’s a clean, painstakingly engineered facility, where outside visitors must go through the hygienic paces before entering, moving through a series of antiseptic footbaths; into a sanitary uniform complete with booties, shopcoat, and hairnet; and finally through a particle-removing blast of pressurized air. Only then can one take in the sight of thousands of plants growing under neon lights in 80-foot-long racks stacked 36 feet high, arranged in aisle after aisle.
Vertical farms like AeroFarms, of course, have their critics. But proponents say they are the future, and judging by the sheer volume of vertical farm-related headlines, you might conclude that those proponents are right—that all we need to do is sit back and watch while conventional agriculture withers away, farms revert to wildland, and sparkling, non-polluting growing facilities become a new part of our cityscapes.
AeroFarms,
It was this summer, after all, that the SoftBank Vision Fund, whose investors include the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Apple, Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Sharp, anted up $200 million—said to be the largest ag-tech investment ever—to help San Francisco-based company, Plenty, realize its vision of building vertical farms in every city with a population of greater than one million. Meanwhile, Global Market Insights, a research firm, recently predicted that the vertical farming market will be worth $13 billion dollars by 2024, with more than 70 percent of that value coming from indoor farming operations like AeroFarms and Plenty.
It’s easy to see the appeal. By isolating themselves from the outside environment, vertical farms can go pesticide-free. They use very little water; AeroFarms claims that it can grow its greens using only five percent as much water as a conventional farm. They can shorten food’s voyage from farm to plate from hundreds or thousands of miles to mere steps. On the downside: Facilities are expensive to build, and they mostly replace free sunlight with expensive electricity—so much electricity that it may well wipe out the carbon advantage of fewer food miles.
Something is going on here. The question is, what?
But they are fabulously productive. That’s partly because they operate year-round, explains Marc Oshima, chief marketing officer of AeroFarms, and partly because they stack growing plants ten or 20 deep. But it’s also that today’s high-tech vertical facilities can fine-tune variables such as airflow, humidity, and the intensity, wavelengths, and duration of light, as well as piping nutrient-enriched water directly to the roots. That allows each plant to “get what it needs, when it needs it. That lets us grow our greens in 12 to 16 days. It takes 30 to 45 days in a field,” Oshima says. “Annualized, we’re 390 times more productive than a field farm.”
Impressive, but not enough to trigger a collapse of conventional agriculture. To date, vertical farms have grown only a limited array of crops. They seem to be nowhere near to growing the corn and soybeans that make up more than half of American ag. And as for the idea of replacing the output of America’s roughly 400 million acres of cropland with indoor facilities, it’s not particularly credible. Let’s say we could reduce the necessary acreage by a factor of 400 because of the increased productivity of vertical farms. (We probably couldn’t, once we started moving into grains and beans and other vegetables.) We’d still need a million indoor acres, or roughly as much space as a thousand World Trade Centers.
So the death of outdoor agriculture isn’t going to happen. But there’s a lot of smart money behind vertical farming, and a lot of tech-trained guys, whose best skill is shifting gears as they learn the ins and outs of a market.
Low light, high density, short turnover
For Chris Higgins, the founder of indoor-farming industry publicationUrban Ag News, the current formula for vertical farming success includes “a low-light-intensity, high-plant-density, short-turnover crop.” That is, a crop that doesn’t use much electricity and produces a lot of pounds of product per unit of space and time. What that means is that, for the foreseeable future, the salad market, with its clamshell boxes of dollar-an-ounce greens harvested as young as possible, is the place to watch for vertical farm growth.
“We’re going to see a lot of failures before things take off.”
Baby greens, says Marc Oshima, “is an $8 billion market – and it’s considered one of the most dangerous to be in.” Leaf vegetables grown in fields, he points out, are highly dependent on vicissitudes of water availability and vulnerable to microbial contamination. Growing them in a controlled indoor environment has the potential to change that equation.
That makes differentiating one’s lettuce in the market more of a challenge, but, according to Robert Colangelo, CEO of Green Sense Farms, the way to succeed in a difficult market is to keep the quality of the end product in the foreground. And the vertical farms, with their tight environmental controls and local delivery, may well have an advantage there.
But is there life beyond greens? There are a handful of crops that may soon be added to the greens-and-herbs rotation, notably strawberries. But, as Higgins points out, the game could change as growers develop strains of plants adapted to indoor farming. “Right now,” he says, “we’re just using field varieties. We won’t see a ton of growth in our industry until we breed lower-light-requiring crops. And that’s very feasible, but people won’t start really developing them until the industry hits a certain critical mass, and it’s hard to say when that will happen. We’re going to see a lot of failures before things take off.”
Strawberries may be the next crop that vertical farm companies aim to grow northward
And Colangelo foresees development beyond the conventional food market in the near future: “The next areas are plant proteins and botanicals for biopharmaceuticals. And crops grown for home delivery, to completely go around brick-and-mortar stores. That will be a huge change over the next five years.”
In search of a business model
Part of that change will be in crops grown. But equally important will be the changes that come as vertical farmers discover business models that work.
At the moment, that is a crying need. Think of AeroFarms, the world’s largest vertical farm at 70,000 square feet. A year ago, the world’s largest vertical farm was even larger: a company called FarmedHere, which grew greens in a 90,000-square-foot warehouse space on the outskirts of Chicago. That farm shuttered in January. The ChicagoTribune wrote that, given the costs of energy and labor, the company’s bottom line “looked significantly better by giving up the farm.” Last year, Atlanta’s PodPonics, which both sold turnkey farm “pods” and grew its own produce, went bankrupt, unable to scale up fast enough to stay afloat.
“The large-scale, that’s where most of the investment is going,” says Henry Gordon-Smith, co-founder of the Association for Vertical Farming. “But in a lot of cases, they’re too new to make profit. You can have all the size and efficiency in the world, but you still have to sell millions of units of produce.”
Numerous containers can be networked together in a single warehouse, to benefit from the economies of scale of a larger installation.
And once you’ve landed a big investment, you’ve lost some freedom. Robert Colangelo’s Green Sense is about to build its fourth farm, in Las Vegas, at a cost under $5 million. “With big investments, you get big investors watching everything you do,” says Colangelo. “Just because you have money doesn’t mean you can expedite your way through the learning curve; you still have to go through the same trial and error, and that takes patience.”
Higgins concurs. “With a bigger farm, logistics becomes more important: distribution, trucks, inputs. If you streamline with automation, and put in the crop that works with your automation, now you need to get access to shelf-space at key grocery stores and focus on sales to turn around on the shelf very quickly.”
By Gordon-Smith’s estimate, there are about 25 vertical farming companies in the United States, with 5,000 or more square feet of growing space, and only about half a dozen, like AeroFarms, operating with 20,000 or more.
Of those 25 medium-scale farms, some are “very healthy,” says Higgins. “It helps that they can live on lower profit margins.”
In a more mature industry, says Colangelo, the larger farms will have some undeniable advantages, but today, with the technology evolving as rapidly as it is, “if you build smaller farms, you’re not as committed. If you bought two million dollars’ worth of lights two years ago, in a short time your big farm will be obsolete.”
A smaller operation is nimbler as well. Green Sense’s business model is to build each of its farms to supply a particular customer, growing the specific crops they want, in the required amount, in the right location. A customer might be a supermarket chain, a college campus, or a military base. “We find out the exact count and cultivar of greens that they use each day, and then we back-build the farm.”
Ideally, vertical farms will would move beyond the herbs-and-leafy-greens outputs
Gordon-Smith cites FarmOne, based in downtown New York City, as another operation that succeeds by focusing heavily on demand. FarmOne targets a specific, finicky niche: high-end restaurants. The farm’s web store lists such grow-to-order specialty crops as micro anise hyssop and over 20 varieties of basil.
FreshBox, near Boston, is proudly among the only commercial farms that are “gross margin positive” according to its CEO, Sonia Lo. Her farms are modular, built in 320-square-foot shipping containers, each with its own temperature, humidity, and airflow customized to the needs of a crop. Numerous containers can be networked together in a single warehouse, to benefit from the economies of scale of a larger installation, while maintaining the flexibility of smaller ones. “There’s a 20-degree difference between what romaine grows at and what basil grows at, so in a single space, you’re not optimized for any one plant. Containerization is our solution for that,” Says Lo. This approach allows crop yields per square foot as much as 2,000 times that of field farms, she says.
And, she adds: “We’re also fortunate to have very patient investors.”
Beyond greens
The next major shift might happen when major fresh produce brands start to move into vertical farming.
Vertical farms are still in their infancy. The presence of high-tech investors and the tech-oriented approach many of them have taken virtually guarantees that many will take the tech industry’s approach to finding their feet—shifting target markets, techniques, and business models fluidly as opportunities present themselves. Some, surely, will end up taking what they’ve learned about small-scale operations and use it to build high-output farm “machines” for restaurants and grocery stores. Some will gravitate to restaurants or growing specialty products. Others will wander further afield.
In the short run, though, to remain sustainable, they need to be good at their current business—growing greens. And that’s not easy.
Colangelo says, “People come in from a tech background and they understand it academically but not from a production standpoint; or they come from the business world, and they don’t understand science and growing.”
“These farms aren’t run by robots, despite what you may believe,” says Gordon-Smith. “Some people think they’re going into the farm business and they create a tech company. You need a grower with a personal touch, and you need that person to be treated with respect, and to stick around.”
Chris Higgins predicts that the industry will continue to grow with cautious investment, but that the next major shift might happen when major fresh produce brands start to move into vertical farming. “They’re paying very close attention. If a big traditional farming company gets in, that will really start to bring it mainstream.”
“Extremely smart people run all of these companies, and they know how to access financing, even based on the small amount of sales they have,” says Gordon-Smith. “Five years from now, if they’re not profitable, they can keep getting that money. Maybe not for 20 years, but for five years.”
ENVIRONMENT, FARM, OUTLIERS, PLATE, SCIENCE, SHELF, TECHVERTICAL FARMING
The Future of Farming May Be Below The Soil
By IRINA IVANOVA MONEYWATCH October 16, 2017, 5:15 AM
The Future of Farming May Be Below The Soil
Think of urban farming and the images that may come to mind are a community garden, vertical greenhouse or even a rooftop garden.
The farm Steven Dring operates in south London isn't like that. In fact, it's not even visible from street level. The operation is situated in an air raid shelter 100 feet underground that has been left vacant since World War II.
Dring, his co-founder, Richard Ballard, and a team of a dozen people grow lettuce and microgreens hydroponically, year-round, in the shelter, which includes two tunnels. The produce is then sold to restaurants and stores around London.
"It does seem completely counterintuitive to build a farm underneath the soil, but it's actually one of the best environments to do it," Dring said.
"You've got that duvet of 100 feet of soil, which insulates the tunnel—it's like someone's built a greenhouse for us. You have LED lights and hydroponics, which has been around forever. We just put it all together and re-purpose an unloved space."
The operation, called Growing Underground, is competitive with traditional farming because their model excludes many of the costs large agribusiness has to contend with, Dring said. The startup sells locally, meaning it doesn't have to ship produce long distances. Another advantage is they don't have to heat or cool the underground tunnel, which stays at steady temperature because it's so far under the earth.
"The one cost that we have consistently all year round is our energy cost, the cost for the LED lighting," Dring said. "Our seeds cost the same, our water costs the same, our nutrients cost the same."
Rows of microgreens at the Growing Underground facility in London | GROWING UNDERGROUND
Hydroponic agriculture grows food without soil, suspending plants in water filled with nutrients. Because the water can be captured and reused, hydroponics uses only about one-third of the water consumed in traditional farming. That's especially important these days because industrial-scale agriculture has severely depleted the soil in many places and caused other environmental harm.
Until recently, hydroponics usually came with high start-up costs, meaning a farmer could wait for years before seeing a profit. Dring, who recently reached a distribution deal with Marks and Spencer, one of the U.K.'s largest retailers, expects Growing Underground to break even later this year.
"I'm going to get drunk for a week when that happens," he joked. "I've already told my investors."
Beyond the novelty of growing food in the bowels of London, Growing Underground's approach shows that it's possible to feed a growing population without the carbon-intensive effects of conventional industrial agriculture, which is in many ways unsustainable.
"They can grow food under deserts, they can grow food in old salt mines, they can grow food in old World War II bunkers," said Daniel Epstein, CEO of the Unreasonable Group. "They can port this model to any town in the world."
The Unreasonable Group incubates and invests in companies tackling social issues, including Growing Underground and other startups growing food with hydroponic and aquaponic technology.
"Urbanization is the largest movement of humans in the history of humankind," Epstein said. "Urban environments are also food deserts, because all the food is grown on the outskirts. That has to stop."
Dring is already scoping out sites in other parts of England, and said he has his sights set on a number of U.S. locations. He doesn't see the group as competitors to traditional farming, but rather as a compliment.
"Farmers are looking at the future," he said, "and they start to look at us, and say, 'Well, if you can use agricultural technology and intensify the yields when you grow produce, can you start to grow in different spaces?'"
Urban Farming? It's Operations, Stupid
Everything in its right place
Urban Farming? It's Operations, Stupid
Published on October 12, 2017
Robert Laing
CEO & Founder at Farm.One
Contrary to most press, the challenges of urban farming are mostly not about high-tech LEDs and patent-pending hydroponics designs - they are about efficient operations.
When you see images of vertical farms, you shouldn't think "Woah, cool" - you should be asking "Does it actually work well?", and "Is it a sustainable operation?"
Vertical farming, and urban farming at small scales, are new practices. There is no rule book. There is no workforce of managers with prior experience to draw on. Everything is being rewritten from scratch.
In this new world, the farmers who will be successful are those who are obsessed with operational efficiency.
The McDonald's brothers established the first rulebook for an efficient, replicable fast-food operation by laying out their draft kitchen over several iterations with chalk on a tennis court (as immortalized recently in The Founder).
Urban farmers should be starting to think in similar terms, understanding how they can operate in new forms of physical space most efficiently, safely and easily.
In our Commercial Urban Farming class, this is one of the aspects we touch on, showing how important efficient operations can be in ensuring you have a profitable farm.
Farm Design
Designing the physical space of a farm is as important as specifying the right pumps and ventilation systems. While building vertically is incredibly space-efficient, it creates problems when it comes to worker access, safety and airflow. Overall, designing with humans in mind is vital. When looking at a farm design, some of the following questions are important:
- Is there wasted space?
- Are crops easily accessible for plant care and harvesting?
- Does equipment require especially tall or skinny staff? (Really!)
- Does everything have a clear place to go?
- Is everything that could be automated, that can be?
- Are spaces designed to facilitate quick movement?
- Are workers able to move items efficiently, without "dangerous carrying"?
- Is it always clear when something is wrong?
- Is it easy to check if equipment is working?
- Is the farm a pleasant place to be?
Managing the team
Managing the workforce is an important practice, both when it comes to tactical efficiency, but also safety, training and other considerations. A poorly-designed, low-tech, but well-managed farm may out-perform a sexy high-tech mess. Think about some of the following questions as you build your idea for farm:
- Is training standardized? How is training assessed?
- Are workers expected to be generalists, or specialized?
- Are there written instructions in relevant places?
- Are there visual or video guides for complex processes?
- Are workers empowered to ask questions?
- Are there clear safety protocols? How are they enforced?
- Is there a culture of safety that encourages honest, prompt feedback?
- Are workers taught how to move efficiently?
Task Management
On a working farm there are dozens or hundreds of specific tasks to perform, in terms of maintenance as well as normal daily operations like planting, transplanting, harvesting. Inexperienced teams may not treat these as carefully as they need. Questions such as the following can expose potential issues:
- Are processes clearly defined and understood?
- Is the state of the farm clear to all workers and management?
- Are problems fixed or escalated at the right levels?
- Are there metrics/SLAs in place for speed-of-answer for problems?
- Are checklists in place for complex tasks?
- Is record-keeping digital? If not, why not?
- Can tasks be tracked back to specific times and individuals?
Ensuring long-term staff retention
Farm work can be physically taxing, under difficult conditions such as elevated temperature, humidity and noise. If farm workers are not motivated sufficiently, this can become a short-term gig rather than a long-term career - which is bad for morale, bad for company training costs, and bad for keeping knowledge within the organization. So careful attention should be paid to questions like these:
- Do management understand the true nature of farm tasks?
- Do management regularly go 'back to the floor'?
- Is the hiring process effective at identifying the right personnel?
- Are farm workers listened to? Are there concerns acted on?
- Are farm workers given a clear career progression roadmap?
- Are farm workers paid an appropriate (not just minimum) wage?
- Are staff retention problems addressed tactically and strategically?
Of course, this is a general, non-exhaustive list. But these kinds of considerations should be on the mind of any team that wishes to build a successful urban farming business. Operations is key!
Find out more about our Commercial Urban Farming class. Next class October 28/29.
Houston’s Urban Container Farm Unfazed By Harvey
A 320-square-foot container just north of downtown Houston is not where you would expect to find a farm, but that’s exactly where is located at. Acre in a Box consists of two shipping containers retrofitted to grow leafy greens.
Houston’s Urban Container Farm Unfazed By Harvey
While many Texas crops got flooded, one unconventional Houston farm was able to supply restaurants with fresh lettuce after Harvey
POSTED ONOCTOBER 16, 2017, 10:15 AM
A 320-square-foot container just north of downtown Houston is not where you would expect to find a farm, but that’s exactly where is located at.
Acre in a Box consists of two shipping containers retrofitted to grow leafy greens.
“All of our seeding goes through a germination process,” the young company’s CEO, Andrew Abendshein, explained.
After that, the seeds are planted into 256 hanging towers where they grow – vertically – to lettuce, kale or mustard greens.
Abendshein and his team then distribute them to local restaurants and farmers markets. The container is manufactured by Boston-based Freight Farms.
Besides the convenience of having this more or less mobile farm in an urban setting, the concept proved useful during Harvey because the water didn’t get to it. So they were able to provide a restaurant that was open with fresh lettuce.
“We were the only salads on their menu that day,” Abendshein said. “And it was great because people, I think it was the first real day people could kind of get out, and we had fresh produce for everybody.”
Abendshein hopes to expand and eventually serve markets and grocery stores in Houston’s food deserts.
Seven Miles to Heaven // Katie Martin
Seven Miles to Heaven // Katie Martin
KATIE MARTIN OCT 06, 2017 | CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Driving to the Landscape Lab at Yale’s West Campus requires getting on I-95, getting off I-95, taking the ramp to get back on I-95, then veering off to the right moments before you get sucked back into the vortex of traffic. Yale runs two regular shuttles out to West Campus, but I missed the one I needed to catch, so I made my boyfriend rent a Zipcar and drive me there.
Of course, I was late to my meeting with Justin Freiberg, the director of the Landscape Lab. Fortunately, Freiberg is one of the nicest people on Earth, which is probably what happens to you when you spend as much time communing with nature as he does.
In 2007, Yale bought the 136-acre Bayer Pharmaceuticals campus in Orange, Connecticut for $109 million, which sounds like an exorbitant sum but was apparently a pretty good deal. Ten years later, West Campus houses seven institutes dedicated to biology, chemistry, energy sciences and cultural heritage preservation, plus analytic and imaging technology centers that serve the whole Yale community.
It’s also home to 80 acres of greenspace, which is where Freiberg comes in. His job description on the Lab’s website says he “oversees the development, design, planning and execution” of the Lab’s initiatives, but he functions just as much as a human Rolodex/mentor/jack-of-all-trades as he does an administrator. He is involved in practically every project at the Landscape Lab, and everyone I spoke with told me that he had made their work infinitely easier and more successful.
The Lab is two years old, but it’s built around a quarter-acre urban farm that’s now in its fifth growing season. Since the Lab’s inception, Freiberg, a team of volunteers, student interns and partner organizations in New Haven have built a barn, a patio and a “WikiHouse” (more on that later); terraced a hillside to create a medicinal herb garden; installed beehives; and begun cultivating mushrooms. The timber barn, adjacent to an agroforestry orchard, is built with wood from the Yale Forest, and serves as the site for courses, workshops and gatherings.
“The Landscape Lab has developed a lot since I started going. When I first went it was just a farm and a couple of trails. But in the past three years we’ve built so much, and now I’m taking leadership on developing a rainwater collection system for the barn,” said Holden Leslie-Bole ’18, who’s been working at the Lab since the beginning of his sophomore year. “The barn is off the grid and we want to get some water to it so we can use it for events. So we could either run a water line from the street for about $20,000, or we could have a cool student design opportunity and develop a rainwater collection system for a couple hundred bucks.”
Leslie-Bole emphasized the value of doing simpler tasks around the Lab as well. “I’ve also spent time building trails, whacking back brush, and laying down wood chips, and I built the fire pit so we could gather around a campfire. It’s a little overwhelming sometimes doing academics at Yale, so it’s nice to get outside and do something physical.”
The Lab’s work isn’t limited to the barn’s immediate surroundings — it extends across West Campus. Thanks to a Seedling Award (a grant that supports student projects at the Landscape Lab), Rachel McMonagle FES ’18 studies the effects of perennial wheatgrass on soil erosion, and she managed to obtain permission to convert an unused hillside between two parking lots into a group of research plots. “That’s a real tribute to the collaboration between the Landscape Lab and West Campus, that they were able to take this unused space and make it productive both generally and in a research sense,” she said.
Another Seedling Award recipient is Jonathan Simonds ’18, an environmental engineering major who used his grant to build a biogas digester and develop preprocessing techniques that will allow more kinds of food scraps to be digested into methane. “Methane is basically identical to natural gas,” Simonds said, “and there’s so much natural gas infrastructure already in place that if you can make methane without fracking, with a renewable material like food scraps, you can use that methane without having to start from scratch.”
Along with Lillian Childress ’17, Simonds applied for the grant after hearing about it from Freiberg, whom he’d met while working on an Engineers Without Borders project at the Landscape Lab. And, as he tends to do, Freiberg helped Simonds and Childress expand their project further than they’d initially imagined. “We really thought we were just applying for some money, because we already knew what we wanted to do — it was just expensive! But the award has been way more than that, way more than what we expected. We’ve gotten so many resources in terms of mentorship, both from Justin and people he’s connected with us. This award is worth so much more than the money,” Simonds said.
Other Seedling Grant recipients include Project Bright, a student-run group that works to install more solar panels at Yale, and a team of Forestry and Environmental students using drones to monitor and analyze various terrains.
The Landscape Lab’s commitment to student projects and entrepreneurship dates back farther than the year-old Seedling Awards. The aforementioned WikiHouse was a 2014 project spearheaded by Peter Hirsch FES ’15, who wanted to test whether houses could be built quickly to serve as temporary shelter in disaster zones or refugee camps. WikiHouse provides open-source building plans that can be downloaded and used to cut pieces out of plywood, which then snap together to assemble without nails or special equipment, making them faster and easier to build than a traditional structure. The WikiHouse organization promises that one can be built in less than a day, so Hirsch enlisted 40 volunteers and picked a day to assemble the parts.
It ended up taking a lot longer than he expected. “We thought it would go up really fast. We had brought a GoPro with 4 hours of film to capture the whole process. It ended up taking a month,” Freiberg said. “But that process of trying and failing taught us about the limitations of this design. The humidity warped the wood so the pieces didn’t fit together properly, and of course that would be a challenge in lots of areas. So it took longer than expected, but Peter learned some valuable things, shared them with the community and now we have this really beautiful structure.”
Cass Walker-Harvey, the program director for social entrepreneurship at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, pointed to the WikiHouse project as a great example of the Landscape Lab’s contribution to entrepreneurship at Yale. “You need to test ideas like the WikiHouse out somewhere, and you couldn’t do that on main campus,” Walker-Harvey said. “Having a space for trial and error and hands-on experimentation is incredibly valuable. When I hear about any sustainability initiatives, or really any initiatives that need space, from storing prosthetic limbs to testing irrigation systems, I tell my students to go to the Landscape Lab.”
Another project that benefited from West Campus’ spaciousness is Poda Foods, a cricket-based culinary startup founded by Yale students that now operates (unsurprisingly) out of Portland. The company needed somewhere to breed the crickets that it would then use to make cricket flour, a sustainable source of protein. (There are a lot of crickets in the world, and unlike cows, they do not, uh, produce methane in significant volumes). “It addressed a critical food need and a critical sustainability challenge,” Walker-Harvey said. “And they couldn’t have done it without that space and that support.”
More established New Haven companies have also partnered with the Landscape Lab. Junzi Kitchen was founded by two FES students, Yong Zhao FES ’15 and Wanting Zhang FES ’11, and a School of Art student, Ming Bai ART ’13. It is partnering with the Landscape Lab, Dwight Hall and Colombian restaurant Roia to present this Friday’s installment of Beyond Food, a “monthly-ish culinary experience dedicated to interrogating the role food plays in our society.”
“When I think about service and social justice, one way to have greater civic engagement is to have people come together and talk and build empathy,” said Onyeka Obiocha, Dwight Hall’s director of innovation. “And one way Dwight Hall chooses to do that work is through food, which is a great way to bring people together.”
“Junzi and Roia actually forage from the farm at Beyond Food — they use produce and herbs from around the Lab to create the food they’ll serve,” Obiocha continued. “Working around the limitations of the Landscape Lab and the farm, using an open fire and foraging — that speaks to the way Northern Chinese and Colombian cuisines have influenced and continue to influence the culture of New England. The Landscape Lab is really a laboratory for people to get their hands dirty and build things.”
And the farm’s produce is used not just for culinary purposes, but for educational ones as well.
Sanjeet Baidwan first saw the farm’s potential when she visited it in 2015. Baidwan, a clinical instructor at the School of Medicine, had cold-emailed Freiberg (“when I hear of someone interesting that I’d like to collaborate with, I tend to just do that”), and their first meeting consisted of them wandering around the Landscape Lab’s grounds.
Baidwan’s interest in the link between food and health was first sparked when she served on the board of directors for local nonprofit New Haven Farms during her residency. New Haven Farms converts parking lots into urban farms, and partners with neighborhood clinics to identify low-income patients with a high risk of developing diet-linked diseases like obesity and diabetes. These patients and their families are then provided with a 16- to 20-week Community Supported Agriculture share, which includes not only weekly delivery of fresh, locally-grown fruit and vegetables, but also a two-hour weekly nutrition and cooking class offered in both Spanish and English that focuses on recipes using that week’s produce. “You can give people fruits and vegetables,” Baidwan said, “but if they don’t know what to do with them they won’t use them at home. So having a nutritionist give cooking lessons addresses that problem.”
Baidwan saw the success of the program, and realized it was filling a serious gap in the health care system. “I wanted to teach health care practitioners about these issues, because these preventable lifestyle diseases, like obesity, diabetes and some cancers, are a huge burden on the health care system,” he said. “Being in the clinics and seeing patients and physicians who are desperate for answers and help — that kind of brought about this idea.”
So she took a walk with Justin Freiberg, and since no walk with Justin Freiberg ends without him finding a way to help you, Yale Cultivate Health was born. YCH now hosts regular workshops for health care professionals at the Landscape Lab that combine short lectures on nutrition with “Iron Chef-style” cooking competitions where the participants harvest and then use produce from the Landscape Lab’s farm. Baidwan also teaches a required first-year course at the School of Medicine that focuses on food and its impacts on health.
The School of Nursing offers courses in partnership with the Landscape Lab as well: a plant-based medicine class teaches students at the School of Nursing about the uses of medicinal herbs grown in the Lab’s gardens, as well as about food and nutrition.
Undergraduate students also have opportunities to get involved in growing and producing food.
Y Pop-Up, a student-run pop-up restaurant that creates four-course fine-dining experiences in butteries, recently hosted a meal at the Landscape Lab. “Especially when you’re doing something like a dinner where the focus is on sustainability and contextualizing where food comes from, it helps to be surrounded by nature,” said Rhea Teng, the co-president of Y Pop-Up. “I recently went on a foraging tour with Justin for this past Y Pop-Up opening. Justin is one of those people that seems to know the name and use of nearly every plant, and it was a surreal experience to go walking into the wilderness and have things pointed out that you would normally never think to eat.”
Teng is also the president of Bee Space, an undergraduate club that runs the Lab’s beehives and uses the hive’s products, including their honey. “Because the Lab grows so much beautiful produce, it’s the perfect place to have hives to help with pollination,” she said.
“We’re pretty involved. We go to West Campus about every two weeks, once a month in the winter,” said Grace Cheung ’20, a hive coordinator for Bee Space.
“We’re not trying to train professional beekeepers,” said Freiberg, “so it’s less about the practice of beekeeping and more about creating opportunities for students to get a sense of the practice as it stands, and then be inventive and try to build improvements.” Cheung said Bee Space is currently investigating ways to help the bees survive the winter, and exploring nontraditional hive designs.
Another sweet project at the Lab is Maple Fest, an annual celebration of all things maple. “Of course, sharing the maple syrup we’ve tapped from our trees is great. But Maple Fest also offers an opportunity to talk about some of the tangible effects of climate change, like the reduction in harvestable days for maple trees as our area gets less of the weather needed for sap flow,” said Freiberg.
Other projects at the Landscape Lab are also in service of larger social and environmental causes. The Agroforestry Collaborative was founded three years ago by Nathan Hall FES ’17 SOM ’17, who was born and raised in a coal-mining region of Eastern Kentucky. The Collaborative now uses a plot of land at the Landscape Lab to explore how strip-mined land can be reforested, and Hall used his joint degree with the forestry school and the School of Management to investigate alternatives to his home’s mining-centric economy.
Another project, the GrassX Experimental Grassland Competition, challenges teams to design and implement strategies that hold back invasive plants, create pollinator habitats and improve the health of the soil. The competition is held in partnership with Ucross, an organization that works on land stewardship in the American West. “Projects like grassland management need to be executed at scale, and this competition gives people the opportunity to do that. And then, once they’ve had experience managing even an acre of land, that makes them much more prepared to work with the millions of acres out west,” Freiberg said. “And hopefully, we’ll hear about some solutions for pollinator habitat that could be useful locally.”
But not every student’s involvement in the Landscape Lab’s work needs to be so formal (or competitive). “We have programming almost every single day,” said Freiberg, before rattling off a list of recent events including a foraging workshop, farm volunteering sessions and a nature walk. “I wish everyone at Yale would come out here, because there are so many opportunities and so many ways to connect.”
Students who’ve spent time at the Landscape Lab echo Freiberg’s sentiments. “It’s a hidden gem of Yale’s campus. It’s a super cool place that feels almost like a retreat in the middle of the forest, but it’s just a couple minutes away on the shuttle,” Leslie-Bole said.
Though the drive may have been confusing, I could practically feel the stress melting off me as I walked along the Lab’s wooded paths. If the peaceful atmosphere isn’t worth the commute, the diversity of opportunities certainly is — especially if you catch the shuttle.
Katie Martin | katherine.d.martin@yale.edu
U of M Secures $2.5 Million Grant to Improve Quality of Life in Cities
U of M Secures $2.5 Million Grant to Improve Quality of Life in Cities
October 12, 2017
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today that it has awarded a $2.5 million grant to a multi-disciplinary team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota for a new project to advance access, wellbeing, health, and sustainability in cities. The project will focus on multiple “smart” infrastructure sectors—water, energy, food, shelter, transportation, waste management—that converge in cities.
The grant is part of the NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities initiative, which is investing $19.5 million nationwide to develop interdisciplinary and community-engaged research to revolutionize the nation’s cities and communities with more responsive and adaptive infrastructures, technologies and services.
The research effort will be co-directed by lead investigator Professor Shashi Shekhar, a computer science and engineering professor in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering, and co-investigator Professor Anu Ramaswami, a professor in the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The project spans four academic institutions and includes co-investigators Florida State University Professor Rick Feiock, University of Washington Professor Julian Marshall, and Purdue University Professor Venkatesh Merwade.
With transformative new infrastructures coming on the horizon—such as autonomous vehicles, smart and distributed energy systems, novel green infrastructure, and urban farms—the physical fabric of our future cities will be very different from what exists today. The research team will provide new insight on how the future spatial deployment of these new infrastructures in cities will shape access, wellbeing, health, and environmental sustainability in different neighborhoods in the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., as well as Tallahassee, Fla.
The new project will advance basic research in multiple disciplines including environmental and civil engineering, computer science, urban planning and public policy. It will create a unique public database, establish citizen science protocols, and advance the science of smart sustainable urban systems through knowledge co-production with cities engaged in infrastructure planning.
“Infrastructure is one of the pillars of our economy—and sustainable, smart infrastructure systems allow our cities, towns, and communities to thrive as 21st century hubs of innovation and prosperity,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a news release about the NSF grant.
He was joined by other members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, including Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representatives Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum, in adding their political support behind the goals of the initiative.
The research team will also engage K-12 students, university researchers, and citizen scientists to develop the first comprehensive public database on infrastructure, environment, health, and wellbeing at the neighborhood level in cities. They will use innovative techniques such as crowdsourcing campaigns using low-cost sensors to characterize air pollution and flooding risks, K-12 engagement in mapping well-being and infrastructure satisfaction at the neighborhood level, and the development of related cyber-infrastructure.
The rich database then will be analyzed to identify novel, interesting, and useful spatial patterns and to develop urban models. Researchers will work with city partners to help better plan future cities considering emerging smart grid, smart mobility, and smart food system transitions.
The project’s educational activities will also connect graduate students from the fields of engineering, urban planning, policy, and sustainability with K-12 teachers and students, with particular attention to underserved populations. Research insights will be broadly disseminated to U.S. cities through partnerships with ICLEI-USA, the National League of Cities, and the MetroLab Network, a city-university collaborative, and through the National Science Foundation’s Sustainable Healthy Cities Network.
“Minnesota leads the nation in STEAM education that integrates the creativity of the arts with science, technology, engineering and math to address our critical infrastructure needs,” Rep. McCollum said. “This grant reflects the excellence of the University of Minnesota in educating the next generation to meet these challenges.”
Additional collaborators at the University of Minnesota include professor Julie Brown of the College of Education and Human Development, Diana Dalbotten of the College of Science and Engineering’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, Len Kne of U-Spatial, along with professor Jason Cao and senior fellows Frank Douma and Robert Johns of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities initiative is part of a multipronged strategy for investing in foundational research and education on smart and connected communities. For more information about NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities, visit the NSF website.