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This Stylish Table Is the “Next Generation” of Automated Urban Farming
One of the more promising urban-farm concepts is not in New York, Los Angeles, or any other major city. It’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, courtesy of one University of Virginia alum and a very small team of employees.
This Stylish Table Is the “Next Generation” of Automated Urban Farming
By Jennifer Marston December 29, 2017
One of the more promising urban-farm concepts is not in New York, Los Angeles, or any other major city. It’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, courtesy of one University of Virginia alum and a very small team of employees.
Recent grad Alexander Olsen started Babylon Micro-Farms in 2016, as part of the UVA student entrepreneurial clubhouse, HackCville. An early prototype won $6,500 from Green Initiatives Funding Tomorrow, part of the UVA student council.
Now, Olsen and six other employees are working to get the hydroponic farms inside the homes of consumers, billing them as “the next generation home appliance.”
The concept is pretty straightforward. You start by selecting crops from Babylon’s online menu. Pre-seeded plant packs are then delivered to your door. Right now, pod pack choices include: wellness (kale), spicy peppers, pesto, a mini romaine crop, herbs, edible flowers, a cocktail mix, Asian greens, and arugula.
Once seed pods are set up, the farm regulates itself—you may occasionally have to top off the water or nutrients, but otherwise, the process is automated. A corresponding app provides live data about crop health, notifies users when water and nutrients are needed, and tells you when it’s time to harvest your crops. Once the latter is done, you can order another round of crops and start the process all over again. For the extra-ambitious (and restaurants), the app can control multiple farms at once.
One thing setting Babylon Mirco-Farms apart from other urban farming products is its emphasis on visual design. To that end, the system takes the form of a table with a UV light hanging overhead and is small compared to its industrial counterparts: 6 feet wide by 3 feet deep and 6 feet tall. And instead of seeing wires and buttons, everywhere, pinewood hides those operational things and makes the farm as much a stylish conversation piece as it is a food supply.
The company isn’t alone in their mission to marry urban farming with, uh, urban style. The Ava Byte also uses soil-less grow pods, which come in a slick, space-age-looking container that would blend into a lot of modern kitchen designs. Verdical calls itself “a living food appliance” and is also small enough to fit into most homes. Farmshelf is more geared at serving restaurants and retail spaces, but as of November, they were considering a move to more residential markets.
UVA has given Olsen and Co. considerable support for the project, from grants to advice about the next phase of business. Farms are also installed at university dining halls, where students are encouraged to harvest what they need. According to Olsen, the farms are “a massive hit” amongst the students.
Babylon is now focused on bringing the farms to consumers outside of universities. Currently, a the micro-farm farm goes for $1,799. Pre-order one here. East Coasters get free shipping.
The company also wants to eventually offer a smaller system for less than $1,000, which would be a hit for both cost-conscious consumers and those of us living in shoebox-sized apartments. Neither price tag is pocket change, but I suspect with the right amount of dedication, an investment in one of these would pay for itself pretty fast. Stay tuned.
Photo credit: Dan Addison, University Communications, UVA
How An Ecological Approach to Architecture Can Help Reinvent Urban Food Systems
Fish, plants, and water are combined in Aqualoop, a continuous loop of cleaning, growing and eating.
How An Ecological Approach to Architecture Can Help Reinvent Urban Food Systems
By weaving together infrastructure, urbanism, and ecology, architecture is a perfect medium to envision the sustainable food systems of the future.
By Amale Andraos, Dan Wood / The Monacelli Press
December 20, 2017
Fish, plants, and water are combined in Aqualoop, a continuous loop of cleaning, growing and eating.
Photo Credit: Monacellii Press
The following is an excerpt fromWORKac: We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, published by The Monacelli Press, 2017. WORKac (WORK Architecture Company) is a New York-based architecture firm founded by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, known for their re-inventions of the relationship between urban and natural environments.
Infoodstructure
Dan Wood (DX): PF1 [Public Farm 1, a completely off-grid, biodegradable, and recyclable cardboard-tube farm] started off as almost an academic exercise: let’s build Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and put a farm in it. At the beginning it was such an abstract idea. Farm was just a four-letter word on a page. It just meant green space, a pattern. . . .
Amale Andraos (AA): . . . and by the end it became a whole world. What 49 Citiesbrought forward was that while these visionary cities had been extensively analyzed from the perspective of politics, ideology, or their social context, no one had looked in detail at their shades of green: how they engaged with open space, with parks and forests but also with systems of farming and food economics.
DX:It’s not that the future of food is to grow it in cities, but that engaging food systems opened up a different and more holistic way to talk about infrastructure. Embracing systems and food was simply the catalyst that allowed us to open up our thinking.
AA: At the same time, you could say that our interests in these infrastructural systems—whether through urbanism or ecology—were increasingly woven together and brought into architecture. Architecture’s boundaries became porous, not by blurring the skin, but literally, by collecting water from the roof and drawing it into the building, for example. Architecture became a medium to organize all of these systems and ideas as part of a larger infrastructure and ecosystem, which connected it back to its context.
DX: At the time a lot of people were asking us if we were looking at the work of Dickson Despommier, who designs vertical farms that are completely interiorized in power-sucking, multistory buildings that are embedded in an urban landscape.
AA:Our network was farmers, eager to produce food in new ways. In contrast, Despommier’s propositions prioritized engineering over farming. And while our position is certainly guilty of being nostalgic for a more rustic era, reading Michael Pollan made us quite critical of that kind of technological superfluity.
DX: We made a counter-proposal, Locavore Fantasia. Going vertical can be about more than engineering food to grow indoors; you can design for in-soil growing, have every farming floor open to the sun, and rather than isolate the farm from the city, make the farm a part of it.
AA: It’s actually only doubling the ground once, that’s an achievable level of urban density. Think of community gardens or rooftops. Infoodstructure was a similar idea—what would happen if streets were turned into farms, assuming fewer driverless cars. It was about transforming what is already there rather than putting faith into a new kind of skyscraper.
DX: We were interested in how people were developing new ideas about farming, at a time when architecture seemed to have exhausted itself. That led to a fascination with aquaponics: a system where fish, plants, and water are combined in a continuous loop of cleaning, growing, and eating. You can use the same water over and over again. That loop for us had incredible formal possibilities. A lot of our inspiration was—
AA: —making the loop visible! That became our Aqualoop project—fish and plants combined with a sushi restaurant and a playground. The systems are generative of the architecture. You take the lines of the system and at some point you thicken them.
Fish, plants and water are combined in Aqualoop, a continuous loop of cleaning, growing and eating.
DX: I always say that one of the most exciting things about architecture is that someone’s floor is another person’s ceiling. There are these relationships that translate through the section, whether it’s transforming the Guggenheim into a lazy river and hydroponics tower for the Flow Show or enlarging a typical core to contain new ecological infrastructure and public spaces as we did for the Plug Out project. In embracing all of these systems it becomes so clear. A sloped roof collects water naturally, and it is collected in a cistern, which becomes a curved wall. The section becomes a system in itself.
Installed at New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2010, "Flow Show" was a water slide using rainwater filtered on the museum's roof.
AA: Soon after we won PS1 we had an interesting conversation with Winy Maas of MVRDV, who had also been looking at food systems and cities, especially with their—
DX:—Pig City—
AA: but the conversation made us feel somewhat more American, and less in tune with that kind of Dutch engineering, pragmatism, and the stacking of pigs. Maybe we’re more romantic or dangerously nostalgic.
DX: But our pigs would be much happier.
Amale Andraos is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has taught at numerous institutions including the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania Design School, and the American University in Beirut.
Dan Wood leads international projects for WORKac. He holds the 2013-14 Louis I. Kahn Chair at the Yale School of Architecture and has taught at the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture, and the UC Berkeley School of Environmental Design, where he was the Friedman Distinguished Chair.
Farmers of The Future at Urban Organics
Farmers of The Future at Urban Organics
December 26, 2017 by Morgan Mercer0 Comments
The interior fish incubation room of Urban Organics // Photo by Tj Turner
An inconspicuous white tube travels along the length of the ceiling, connecting two very different rooms. The first room is a cool 60 degrees and smells slightly fishy. Gray concrete floors and colorless walls make the space appear colder than it is. The neighboring room couldn’t be more different. The air smells sweet and vaguely earthy. When you open the door, it feels like stepping into the glow of a warm spring day.
This is a farm of the future.
In the middle of St. Paul, tucked inside a brewery that sat empty for years, life is thriving in the dead of winter. No soil. No natural light. Just a white pipe that carries the lifeblood of the entire operation from room to room: water. Kale, red romaine, and other leafy greens grow on racks stacked five planters high. In an adjacent room, tens of thousands of Arctic char swim in 26,000-gallon tanks. Thanks to the fish, the plants at Urban Organics grow all year long.
With a new 87,000-square-foot space at the Schmidt Brewery complex, Urban Organics is one of the largest commercial aquaponics facilities in the world. The company converts waste produced by fish to fertilize thousands of pounds of produce a month. The farm, which is certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is 10 times larger than Urban Organics’ first facility at the historic Hamm’s Brewery complex in St. Paul.
An Arctic Char pool, racks of leafy greens and an Arctic Char // Photos by Tj Turner
“When we would tell people our plan, we still joke about the number of people who thought we were nuts. They would say, ‘Don’t quit your day job,’” says Dave Haider, who did just that when he closed down his construction business to launch the original Hamm’s site with three other partners in 2012.
Since then, the team has built a worldwide reputation as a pioneer in year-round urban organic farming. In 2014, the Guardian dubbed Urban Organics one of the 10 most innovative farms in the world. The company sets itself apart with a state-of-the-art design, courtesy of an ongoing partnership with Pentair, a global leader in water technology. At a time when the agriculture industry faces increasing environmental challenges like climate change and water shortages, Urban Organics is out to prove there is a more sustainable way to produce fresh food—one that uses less water, and stays close to home.
“People want to know where their food is coming from and that it is being farmed in this safe, sustainable manner,” says Dave, who has seen aquaponics transition from a largely unknown concept to more of a mainstream idea in recent years. “We’re still trying to prove to people that we’re not nuts, but it’s not as many as it was.”
A game-changing partnership
Fred Haberman examines rows of Romaine Lettuce // Photo by Tj Turner
Limp. Tasteless. Old. Too many stores in the Twin Cities stocked bad lettuce, and Fred Haberman was fed up. The problem was shipping. By the time his salad greens arrived from California and hit local shelves, they were already days old. That’s when Fred remembered Will Allen, a former professional basketball player who started an urban farm in Milwaukee. That’s what the Twin Cities needs, Haberman thought—food grown where it’s consumed. Coincidentally, Dave had the same idea, too.
With two other partners, they formed Urban Organics. At the time, there were only a handful of companies testing hydroponic growing methods in urban areas, and even fewer trying aquaponics. A partnership with Pentair helped the company break into the fledgling industry.
“When they reached out to us it seemed too good to be true,” says Dave of the water tech company. “They saw it as a way to address some of these food concerns we’re facing now. This was their way of not only supporting a local company like ours, but catalyzing an industry as well.”
Pentair supplied all of the pumps, filters, and aerators needed to get the state-of-the-art aquaponics facility up and running. The system converts wastewater from the fish tanks into plant food. First, solid waste is filtered out. Then, bacteria convert the remaining ammonia into nitrates. This nitrate-rich water is what nourishes the 12 varieties of leafy greens Urban Organics grows.
Not only is the company’s organic produce free of pesticides and chemicals, but it also uses significantly less water than traditional soil-based farming practices. Nitrate-rich water is pumped underneath plant beds to minimize evaporation and deliver nutrients straight to the plant’s roots. All the water—except what evaporates on the plant side—is continually recycled and reused through the facility’s closed-loop system, too.
Last April, Co-op Partners Warehouse started selling the St. Paul-grown greens to stores and restaurants across the Midwest, including Wedge Commuity Co-op, Mississippi Market, and Seward Co-op. For a company that often buys and transports large volumes of California-grown salad mixes throughout the Midwest, Co-op Partners Warehouse was happy to finally have a local option.
“Urban Organics is using a sustainable system for production. Our customers want to support this type of innovation in the food industry,” says Lori Zuidema, the sales manager at Co-op Partners. “It reduces the need to transport food across the country [and] our year-round reliance on California produce.”
Packaged greens at Urban Organics ready to be shipped to stores // Photo by Tj Turner
By the time California lettuce makes it to stores, Lori says it’s already often six days away from expiring. Thanks to Urban Organics’ proximity, its products last seven to 10 days longer on the shelf. Plus, the St. Paul company offers unique salad mixes—like the rosé blend, a mix of red lettuces—that she can’t find anywhere else.
Right now Urban Organics harvests up to 15,000 pounds of produce a month. That’s enough to fill 45,000 pre-packed salad containers for stores like Lunds & Byerlys. Annually, the St. Paul farm will also harvest 275,000 pounds of fish—either Atlantic salmon or Arctic char—for restaurants like Birchwood Cafe that want a local and sustainable protein option. Beyond food, Urban Organics is an investment in a neighborhood. By rehabbing spaces at two defunct breweries, the St. Paul business leveraged urban farming to create jobs and spur economic development.
“We don’t want to replace traditional farming. It should be complementary,” says Dave, who sees smaller, local farms like Urban Organics as an opportunity to conserve water, save on distribution costs, and expand traditional growing areas. “I think we can do a lot better.”
High-tech food, designed by data
An Urban Organics seed planting machine // Photo Tj Turner
Aside from leafy greens and fish, Urban Organics is a data farm. Hidden throughout Urban Organics’ facility are more than 100 probes and sensors programmed to measure the slightest shifts in water temperature, pH levels, and dissolved oxygen. From seed to shelf, Urban Organics can track a single plant throughout its 35-day life cycle. Harvest logs allow the team to monitor growing trends and see how the fish influence the plants and vice versa. Every day, each probe in the facility shoots off a report to the company’s central computer. Those small slices of information help Dave and his team understand how to improve the farm’s design to raise fish and grow produce in the most sustainable and efficient way possible.
“We’re still in some ways pioneering an industry. There is no playbook for this. We learn something on a daily basis,” says Dave. “Everything we’re doing here is being recorded, which is going to help us design the next better facility.”
That’s in part what made the first site at Hamm’s Brewery so valuable. After farming that location for more than two years, Urban Organics knew how to upgrade the blueprint of the Schmidt Brewery site. First, Urban Organics scaled up in size—from 8,000 square feet to 87,000 square feet. Then, it switched out its grow lights from compact fluorescents to LEDs. That change alone helped the company cut down on its biggest cost, electricity, by 40 percent. Last, Urban Organics got smarter about its water. At the Hamm’s site, water flowed from the fish tanks, to the sump, to the plants, and then back to the fish again. But Dave found that wasn’t ideal. If the pH in the water from the fish tanks spiked, it could cause the plants’ leaves to yellow. So Urban Organics devised a solution that allowed him to separate the system into two continuously looping water cycles. Dave can pump nutrient-rich water from the fish to the plants as they need it, giving him greater control to create the best water conditions for both sides.
“This is a world that requires a lot of iteration because it’s new,” says Fred, who credits the engineering strength and aquaponics experts at Pentair for putting Urban Organics in a league of its own. “Even though this idea of leveraging the symbiotic relationship between fish and plants has been around for millennia, the idea of using technology to do it is new.”
Urban Organic’s seedlings // Photo by Tj Turner
By early 2018, Dave plans to have the Urban Organics farm in St. Paul running at its full potential. His team hopes to harvest the first of the Arctic char this spring, and more than triple the amount of greens it cranks out each month. But that’s just the beginning. Dave and Fred are already plotting the next city they want to expand to and brainstorming the next iteration of Urban Organics: a facility powered entirely by solar energy.
“I don’t think we can stay the course with traditional farming as our population grows in hopes that we’re going to have healthy food 50 years from now,” says Dave. “I’m not saying we’ve cracked the code and others haven’t. We’re just doing our part to come up with a perfect solution.”
Filed Under: Arts and Culture, Homepage Featured, MakersTagged With: Aquaponics, craft culture, Dave Haider, Fred Haberman, Schmidt Brewery, Urban Organics
Elon Musk's Brother Is Helping Millennials Quit Their Desk Jobs And Become Farmers
Elon Musk's Brother Is Helping Millennials Quit Their Desk Jobs And Become Farmers
December 20, 2017
- Young people are returning to farming: the number of farmers between the ages of 25 and 34 increased 2.2 percent between 2007 and 2012, according to the USDA's last farming census.
- Kimbal Musk has an accelerator, Square Roots, that teaches millennials how to farm out of a shipping container in Brooklyn.
- Musk says today's millennial farmers are trying to make a difference in how food is produced.
Millennials are changing the face, and practices, of farming.
According to the USDA's most recent census of farmers from 2012, the number of principal farmers between the ages of 25 and 34 increased 2.2 percent from five years before.
In addition, a new survey by the National Young Farmer Coalition finds that millennial farmers are different from previous generations: they are more likely to be college-educated, not come from farming families, use sustainable practices and produce organic food.
Among those recruiting millennial foodies into farming is Kimbal Musk, brother of tech billionaire Elon Musk. His project Square Roots is an accelerator incubating vertical farming startups inside a shipping container in Brooklyn.
Musk says millennials, who are driving the growth of organic food sales to record highs, are increasingly drawn to farming to make a difference in the way food is produced.
"If you look at just five years ago, farming was considered, you know, this is what your grandparents did. And over the past few years, there's been this extraordinary demand and desire to be a farmer amongst the younger generation," says Musk.
Chris Hay is a 34-year old farmer who made the switch from a desk job to a farm. Hay, who studied philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, worked at a food management group, but was unfulfilled.
"It didn't jibe with a lot of the goals I had for myself professionally," says Hay, who bussed tables at the legendary restaurant Chez Panisse during college. "I enjoyed working with food, and all those things kind of just meshed into why not try farming?"
Despite never working at a farm before (or having grown up on one), Hay quit his job and got a job at a farm on California's Central Coast. That eventually led him to start Say Hay Farms.
Hay hopes his farm, which produces organic fruits and vegetables and uses sustainable practices, will have a broader impact.
"We're out here to help move the ball forward. And it's a whole system of change that needs to take place," says Hay.
While the increase may appear incremental, some of the older age brackets saw double-digit decreases over the same time period.
Robbinsville Officials Hope New Hydroponic Farm Becomes Community Hub
Robbinsville Officials Hope New Hydroponic Farm Becomes Community Hub
By Rob Anthes December 26, 2017
Nestled at the municipal complex just yards away from the Little Red Schoolhouse—an icon of Robbinsville’s past—rests a repurposed shipping container officials say is a symbol of the township’s future.
This 40-foot white metal container is a Leafy Green Machine, described by manufacturer Freight Farms as “a farm in a box.” One 320-square-foot container can produce two to four tons of food every year. Farmers can churn out one yield per week in the Leafy Green Machine, with produce going from seed to a plant on your plate in eight weeks or fewer.
It does this using hydroponics, which simply is the science of growing plants without soil.
With hydroponics, growers use solutions with necessary minerals in place of soil. Roots can either be bare or placed in supportive inert materials, like starter cubes. Hydroponics allows plants to grow year round, indoors using artificial light. Proponents say hydroponics allows for healthier plants and better, more consistent yields. Hydroponic gardeners use the same seeds as a conventional outdoor gardener, but many clone grown plants to skip much of the growing process and save time.
Some cities have ventured into hydroponics, but Robbinsville is the first municipal government in the world to acquire a Leafy Green Machine. Robbinsville Mayor Dave Fried said hydroponics has intrigued him for awhile, and views it as a way to solve food insecurity as farmland disappears and human population increases.
The township’s Leafy Green Machine—a hydroponic farm in a repurposed shipping container—sits outside the senior center.
Freight Farms’ product impressed Fried so much upon first viewing it two years ago he tasked the municipal recreation department with bringing one to Robbinsville. The township government completed the purchase in 2017 for $104,000, which included delivery, shipping and set-up costs. It arrived in town Nov. 28, put into place next to the township senior center. Now, the hard work begins—turning a shipping container into a productive farm and a community hub.
Growing started immediately, with township officials hoping to have first yield in February. Initially, the container will be only at one-quarter to one-third of its capacity, with greens like lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, basil, oregano and cilantro growing. By summer, Robbinsville’s hydroponic farm will be closer to full production, as well as—the township hopes—certified as fully organic.
In the Leafy Green Machine, the rows of plants are lined up vertically, a 90-degree rotation from typical farming. They are fed via LED lights and nutrient-rich solutions. It uses 90 percent less water than conventional farming, and no pesticides or herbicides.
Yields will come as often as once per week, with the farm providing fresh greens for senior nutrition program, Meals on Wheels and food pantry clients. It will be used daily for the seniors and Meals on Wheels, and twice a week at the food pantry.
Plans are in the works for other partnerships and programs, some of which would generate money for the township. The township has researched the potential for a CSA program run from the hydroponic farm, as well as coupling with nonprofits to provide low-price veggies and help feed those in need. Fried said although the container would not compete with area farms and farmers’ markets, the township still expects the farm to pay for itself in five years. It has a lifespan of 20 years.
But township officials view the shipping container as much more than a food producer. So high are hopes that the township has hired Kyle Clement, a recent Rutgers University plant science graduate and past state president of the New Jersey FFA Organization, to serve as hydroponic farm coordinator. Clement started in the recreation department part-time in October, and moves to full-time in January. He estimated he initially will spend as much as 30 hours a week getting the farm up and running.
The township’s hydroponic farm upon delivery Nov. 28, 2017.
Some of that labor would be of a traditional farmer. But Clement and Kevin Holt, municipal recreation activities coordinator and community relations specialist, have worked just as hard to explore all the possibilities for the farm as a community feature. This part actually may be the most challenging since there’s no blueprint to follow. Robbinsville’s the first.
The township’s two main focuses for the farm’s recreational angle currently are students and senior citizens. It presented the plan for a hydroponic farm to seniors at the senior center prior to purchasing the Leafy Green Machine, and interest was so high, the township nixed a plan to locate the container at the municipal building, instead putting it at the senior center. It also envisions partnerships with the school district for class trips and other student opportunities. Fried said the high school’s robotics club has expressed interest in exploring the technology within the Leafy Green Machine. The schools’ gardening clubs also seem a natural fit.
“There are just as many kids who don’t play sports,” Fried said. “When’s the last time we did something for the robotics kids or the kids who are interested in farming? And then for the kids to be able to share the experience with the seniors, how cool is that?”
There’s also a potential for broader community classes, as well as other grant-funded programming. Right now, the future is a blank slate.
Because of this wide-open frontier, the township has set out to develop a replicable, easily sustainable program that other municipalities can copy. Fried said he believes governments will get more involved with hydroponics as its potential comes out as a recreational program, a revenue producer and a consistent source of food. It’s the rare government initiative that can be all three.
“There is a really good end user,” he said. “We can paint things and make pottery, but this will have a really good benefit at the end.”
Robbinsville may stand on the forefront of municipally sponsored hydroponics, but it does have a model for its program in the Beth Greenhouse at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. Clement worked with Molly Fallon, a dietitian at the hospital who helps run the Beth Greenhouse, to get ideas for Robbinsville’s hydroponic farm.
Newark Beth Israel built the Beth Greenhouse a year-and-a-half ago across the street from the hospital. As its name suggests, the Beth Greenhouse is a greenhouse that uses hydroponics to grow fruits and vegetables. The walls are translucent, unlike Robbinsville’s container. In one small building in Newark, the greenhouse yields the same as a 5-acre farm.
What a container like it looks like with growing plants.
The hospital, of course, uses some of what’s grown at the greenhouse, but it has been used mostly to solve food access issues in Newark. The Beth Greenhouse now can take SNAP benefits (food stamps), and sells its produce at a farmers’ market at the hospital every Thursday. The surplus is donated to local food pantries, church groups and the hospital’s cancer patients.
The hospital also has used the Beth Greenhouse for community education, running classes with registered dietitians to teach people in the city what to do with the produce, how to cook healthy and what to look for while grocery shopping. It has also offered kids’ cooking classes, so area students have a foundation in healthy eating.
Fallon suggested Robbinsville partner with local organizations or hospitals to do something similar, saying looping education and community involvement into the farm has been vital to the Beth Greenhouse’s success. It has connected people with the greenhouse and the food that grows there. Those people—many of them immigrants with agricultural backgrounds—have become the biggest champions of the farm.
“It’s something they related to,” Fallon said. “When we first opened, everyone wanted to see what this thing was. People will walk in and share their feelings on what we’re doing.”
In fact, the Beth Greenhouse has adjusted to better reflect its community, growing what Fallon called “culturally relevant plants.” They are items grown in Africa, South America and Asia that are not found in American markets. It has given community members a place to find those items, and a stake in the greenhouse itself.
There also has been buy-in from hospital staff, many of whom will volunteer during their lunch breaks. While a conventional farm would require a change of clothes and a substantial amount of time, the hydroponic greenhouse allows people in professional attire with only a few minutes to spare the opportunity to help.
“Here we can have people in work clothes come over and volunteer,” Fallon said. “It’s not as intimidating.”
But the Beth Greenhouse wasn’t a success right away, and those involved with Robbinsville’s hydroponic farm have taken a lot of optimism from the potential Beth Greenhouse has shown hydroponics has.
“This is going to be so much more than lettuce,” Clement said. “I see the opportunities that can come out of this.”
Local Company Partners With Dockery's To Offer True 'Farm-To-Table' Experience
Local Company Partners With Dockery's To Offer True 'Farm-To-Table' Experience
12/20/2017
BY: KATIE ESTABROOK
If you have been to the new Dockery’s restaurant on Daniel Island over the last week, you may have noticed large white shipping containers sitting outside the building.
These shipping containers, which are operated by local sustainable farming company Vertical Roots, are not what they seem. Inside the structures are panels filled with fresh leafy greens grown using an automated aeroponic farming system.
In partnership with Dockery’s and sister Summerville company Tiger Corner Farms, which repurposes the shipping containers and builds the aeroponic farming systems, Vertical Roots has set up shop in the heart of downtown Daniel Island to give residents a true “farm-to-table” experience.
The average head of lettuce found in a grocery store travels up to 2,500 miles before it reaches its destination, explained Vertical Roots General Manager Andrew Hare, but with the one-of-a-kind partnership between Vertical Roots and Dockery’s, the produce will be harvested just hours before hitting the plate.
“What we always say is, ‘Know your food. Know your farmer,’” said Hare. “If you look at statistics, the average head of lettuce and most produce travels anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 miles. You don’t know where it came from. You don’t know what kind of chemicals have been sprayed on it or how they harvested and kept it looking good until it’s getting to your plate a couple weeks later. With this partnership, the chefs are able to walk across the patio here and pull out what they need for the day.”
Since partnering with Tiger Corner Farms and local nonprofit Grow Food Carolina, Vertical Roots has grown exponentially, explained Hare. In April of this year, the company operated one shipping container that held 4,500 plants. As of today, they are operating six containers in the area and have four more in production.
“To give you an idea, we went from about 4,500 plants to now, if you combine everything we have from plants that are propagating as little seedlings to what are actually in the panels for sale, it’s about 70,000 plants,” said Hare.
Although the system can be set up to grow various types of produce, the company’s current focus is leafy greens, added Hare. For their initial rollout with Dockery’s, the greens harvested will be utilized in the spring mix and any dish with arugula.
“Almost everything we do right now is different style head lettuces—a lot more than your traditional bib lettuce,” said Hare. “We have some gorgeous reds and purples and some different, what we call, European style mix greens. Dockery’s will actually be using that in their spring mix. We also do things like arugula, bok choy, and kale.”
In addition to the partnership with Dockery’s, Vertical Roots also has plans to roll out a membership program in the upcoming weeks. The plan will allow residents to come by once a week and pick up a box of mixed greens, explained Hare.
“It’ll have their salad mix that they can use, but then they’ll have rotating herbs or different leafy greens, or things that they’ll have that will kind of be a surprise each week,” he said.
The unique aeroponic farming system not only offers residents access to fresh produce, it is also environmentally-friendly, continued Hare.
“The panels have misters that go off every few minutes, so that allows us to use about 97 percent less resources than you would with traditional farming,” he said. “It allows us to maximize our plants. Each month we’re able to harvest about 4,500 plants out of each farm.”
According to Daniel Island Company President Matt Sloan, who made an appearance at the inaugural harvest at Dockery’s, these aeroponic farming systems could have a large impact, not only on the Daniel Island community but communities around the world.
“We’re so excited to have this type of innovation here on Daniel Island,” said Sloan. “It’s a great opportunity to educate the community. This type of product can have such a meaningful impact on communities throughout the world. The plan is in Third World nations, they muster enough funds to buy a few of these and can feed a village.”
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3 Cities That Are Reinventing The Urban Farm
3 Cities That Are Reinventing The Urban Farm
DECEMBER 25, 2017READING TIME: 5 MINUTES
Urban farmers in Paris, Tokyo and Rotterdam are finding ways to make locally-grown produce more accessible by reinventing the urban farm.
Leena ElDeeb | JUNIOR JOURNALIST
A Cairo-based free spirit, with a growing passion for anthropology.
As global food insecurity rises, companies and cities are looking for ways to transform the urban farm into something more than a yuppie pastime. But urban farming isn’t confined to agriculture; urban farmers are looking to cattle-rearing and organic dairy production to reduce food miles and produce locally-grown alternatives for communities as well. These three cities are allowing innovative companies to exploit every nook and cranny to secure locally-grown goodness.
Farming Under A Parisian Neighborhood
Courtesy of La Caverne.
Cycloponics, a local indoor urban farming startup based in Strasbourg in France and harvesting lettuce, herbs and mushrooms, recently expanded its operations to subterranean Paris. The startup has made a home for its seedlings under the city’s eastern La Chapelle neighborhood, calling it “La Caverne” or the cave.
The underground urban farm is cultivated in a garage under a 300-unit affordable housing complex, encompassing 37,700 square feet (3,502.4 square meters). Production varies from two kilograms per square meter per month for aromatic herbs, to 300 kilograms per square meter per month for endives. “We aim at providing [the tenants above La Caverne] with our products at a preferential tariff, at making educational workshops and we also want to hire local people,” reads La Caverne’s website.
La Caverne has ten members working together to maintain hydroponics systems (a system where crops are cultivated in water) to grow vegetables, ensure the optimum growth of the farm’s mushroom crop and sell their products on the market. The farm’s oyster and shiitake mushrooms are grown on composted manure bricks. The farmers at La Caverne also harvest chicory, a root often used in coffee, which does not need sunlight to grow. The team aims to ultimately produce 54 tons of vegetables and mushrooms per year.
Courtesy of La Caverne’s Facebook page.
The absence of sunlight underground is not a problem for the urban farmers. “We opted for cultivations adapted to our underground environment. Mushrooms do not require a lot of light to grow and chicory grows without any light: our energy consumption is actually rather low,” the website reads. For leafy vegetables which need light such as salads, microgreens and aromatic herbs, the urban farmers use Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lamps. “[These] consume less energy than usual lamps and produce also less heat: we can adjust the light spectrum for an optimized development,” they write.
They are using what they call the “underground market gardening” to cultivate, within the same space, different species of vegetables that interact in a positive way. “The [carbon dioxide] generated by the mushrooms is used by the microgreens to grow up, the natural materials are composted for our cultivations… Those methods are widely inspired by permaculture!”
Urban Farming Under The Tokyo Metro
Tokyo’s underground subway. CC: Philippe L PhotoGraphy
“I never thought that I would be growing vegetables when I joined a railway company,”says 33-year-old Tokyo Metro overseer Remi Takahara, reflecting on the trial-and-error process that led to the subway operator’s greens’ cultivation. Under the name “Tokyo Salad,” Japanese subway operators Tokyo Metro Co. and Metro Development Co. have taken it upon themselves to grow an urban farm of lettuce, assorted salad greens and even herbs in a cultivation warehouse under the elevated train tracks of the Tokyo Metro Tozai Line.
Seeds are placed on a sponge with tweezers, and the young seedlings are moved once they begin sprouting. Similar to the Parisian underground urban farm, LEDs provide the plants with light for 16 hours a day and the liquid nutrients are cycled through the system 24/7. It takes roughly three to five weeks for a plant to reach maturity.
The urban farm uses neither fertilizer nor soil, and the seven rows of plants grow hydroponically instead. Frill lettuce, basil along with rare finds such as red coral lettuce and red kale are among the 11 varieties regularly grown, with roughly 400 plants being grown per day. The urban farm’s lettuce and other products have been on the market since April 2015.
Rotterdam’s Floating Urban Farm
In 2016, Peter van Wingerden, Carel de Vries and Johan Bosman of property development company Beladon transformed the Dutch port city of Rotterdam through the construction of a €2.5-million ($2.9 million) dairy farm floating on the Rhine–Meuse –Scheldt river, making Rotterdam home to the world’s first floating farm – dubbed Floating Farm.
“Dutch farmers were asking themselves: ‘Do cows get seasick?'” says Minke van Wingerden of Beladon, explaining that a trip on the floating farm will be as still as that on a cruise ship. “The world’s population is rising, and most cities in deltas are sinking because of more and more concrete,” adds van Wingerden, who is married to Beladon CEO Peter Wingerden. She explains that her husband happened to visit New York during Hurricane Sandy, and when there, he saw empty shelves and what food remained would suffice for just two days. “He thought we had to do things in another way, and the idea came: why not build a floating farm?” The architects’ idea is to bring food production as close as possible to the consumer, even when the available space to do so is limited.
Beladon’s farm shelters a total of 40 cows on a 1,200 square meter floating platform, producing 800 liters (211 gallons) of milk a day, which are pasteurized and processed into yogurt in a dairy on the floor below. The cattle pasture is lit by LEDs and the seeds are germinated on special beds in short cycles. The cattle can eat fresh food every day since this system ensures that pasture is produced everyday. The cattle should find themselves comfortable just like they would at the meadows. The cows themselves determine when they want to be milked by the milking robot; creating a system based on free choice, in terms of being inside or outside, getting milked, eating or resting under the trees.
The walls of the floating farm are transparent so that the dairy farming cycle can be viewed by passersby with the aim of educating them.”People often don’t know where their food comes from, and I’d like to show them close up. But I also want to create awareness among farmers so that they know where their produce goes,” said Albert Boersen, one of the floating farm’s operators. “My parents sell their milk through [dairy collective] FrieslandCampina so it’s an anonymous project. I think that’s a shame.”
Whether it is venturing underground or putting cattle on water, if these projects indicate anything, it is that farmers are seizing the opportunity to be endlessly imaginative as they forge new grounds to feed the world’s population.
Before ‘Plantscrapers’ Can Grow Food in The City, They’ll Need to Grow Money
Before ‘Plantscrapers’ Can Grow Food in The City, They’ll Need to Grow Money
By Dyllan Furness — December 24, 2017
When Hans Hassle imagines the future, he sees urban farms and office spaces growing side-by-side. He sees half-green high rises providing Stockholm with lettuce, spinach, and swiss chard. Herbs grow underground. During winter, heat from grow lamps is recovered to help heat the buildings. Employees might not smell the crops growing across the hall, but they breathe their filtered air and they’ll probably eat them for lunch.
“If we will farm the same way we do today, we will have to grow food in cities.”
Hassle envisions a similar scene in every big city. There might be more bok choy grown in Singapore or napa cabbage in Seoul. Crops may differ depending on a city’s tastes preferences and population density. But no city is exempt for being too tropical or too temperate. Hassle hopes his company, Plantagon, can provide solutions for any climate.
With the right infrastructure, major cities around the world may someday grow a fraction of their produce in towering “plantscrapers,” hybrid buildings that combine vertical farms with residential or business spaces. In fact, Hassle thinks they’ll have to.
GROWING CROPS FOR A GROWING WORLD
Agriculture accounts for over 37 percent of all land area use on Earth, according to the World Bank, and that figure is set to increase as the global population continues to rise, particularly within cities, where 80 percent of the population is projected to live by 2050.
“If we will farm the same way we do today, then the lack of land issue will be one reason to try to grow food inside cities,” Hassle tells Digital Trends. “That would put food as close to consumers as possible.”
Urban agriculture is practically as old as civilization itself, but locally-grown food movements have increased interest, as communities search for more sustainable ways to feed themselves.
Bringing crops closer to consumers means eliminating much of the financial and environmental strain caused by transportation, sometimes including thousands of miles between farm and table. But, since few cities have the real estate available to convert buildings into conventional farms, a handful of innovators are looking for solutions upwards and underground.
One such innovation is multilayered greenhouses called vertical farms, which can be erected in urban areas like skyscrapers.
“There’s little land [in cities] because most is already used,” Hassle says. “And you don’t want to use, for example, recreational areas. So if you start to discuss how to grow food with little land inside a dense city, then you end up talking rooftops, basements, and vertically.”
Unfortunately, real estate comes at premium in cities, even when a building’s footprint is relatively small. And that makes finding a profitable solution difficult.
Thomas Zöllner
“Making a commercial viability out of growing food in an urban setting is primarily challenged by the expense of the land that your building on,” Thomas Zöllner, Vice Chair of the non-profit association of Vertical Farming, says. “When you’re doing that calculation and you talk to real estate developers, they’ll quickly tell you that you have to generate quite a good return on investment with whatever you do in order to pay for this square footage.”
Plantagon plans to address that problem with by leveraging the proven side of real estate to support the economically risky urban agriculture side. Rather than developing buildings that are strictly dedicated to vertical farms, Plantagon is pushing for hybrid structures that could integrate with our living spaces, satisfying a number of needs and functioning as a symbiotic system. In other words, the main tenants might be office spaces or residences, while a portion of the building would be reserved for crops. The company uses the term “agritechture” to describe the process of weaving urban agricultural interests into contemporary architecture in an effort to meet local food demands.
THE PLANTAGON APPROACH
There are a lot of startups focusing on urban vertical farming in cities around the world. Besides its agritechture idea, Plantagon brings to the table a series of techniques to make the process more efficient. For example, the company has introduced a vertical production line that rotates crops from floor to ceiling as they grow. Working something like a merry-go-round, the system brings crops back to floor-level once they’ve grown for ease of harvesting. Its other innovations relate to energy and climate control.
“If you can’t reuse the energy that the LED lamps use, it’s difficult to compete with normal prices,” Hassle says. “But if we can reuse the energy if the supply chain is short enough, then we can compete with wholesale prices.”
“Vertical farming has still not been proven to be commercially viable.”
Vertical farms won’t replace conventional farms anytime soon. They’ll be limited by the kinds and quantity of crops they can grow while still turning a profit. For now, Plantagon has focused its efforts on leafy green and herds, but Hassle says, “We don’t want to develop all this technology to only grow herbs for people. That won’t solve the upcoming food crisis.”
Plantagon boasts that its technology has “infinite scalability,” which is to say it’s constrained only by the size of the buildings themselves. Still, implementing such systems is expensive and developers proably won’t be very keen to allocate half of their shiny new building to food production without proof of profitability.
“Vertical farming has still not proven that you can make a living growing food on multiple layers,” Zöllner says. “It’s proven that you can do it on a single layer with the help of LEDs or other lights sources, but it hasn’t been proven that you can do this from a grower’s perspective on a multilayer.”
Other experts agree that vertical farming shows promise but lacks evidence as a sustainable, large-scale approach for the future of food. To Hassle’s own calculations, vertical farms may only supply ten to fifteen percent of our future produce needs. While that helps, it certainly won’t feed the planet.
GROWING PAINS
At least two more challenges face Plantagon and the vertical farming industry at large, according to Zöllner — the needs for labor and food safety standards.
“Today, the real challenge for a vertical farm trying to scale is finding people to run, direct, and operate it,” he says. “And to find enough people willing to stick to the job, doing simple things like harvesting.” Still, in the not so distant future, automated machines may well take on the workload.
As for food safety, Zöllner thinks that a vertical farm’s apparent cleanliness could lull operators into a false sense of security.
“The vertical farm space is a very clean space, it will be less chemically intensive than a lot of the conventional agriculture, but it also creates and environment where you have a lot of issues with bacteria growth,” he says. “The moment a company sells something that gets a consumer sick, that will be a real blow to the industry. They’ll have to start planning now with conventional food safety on hand to try to prevent a disastrous outcome like that.”
Zöllner has followed Plantagon for a few years and says he’s been impressed with the company’s unique approach, but is careful not to get too enthusiastic.
“It’s interesting,” he says, “the dimension of a vision combined with resources and translating them into something feasible. The sad part is they haven’t yet built their building.”
Despite the buzz it’s created, Plantagon has struggled to erect its plantscrapers in the real world. The company broke ground on its “World Food Building” in 2012, but the project remains in slow progress. Located a couple hours south of Stockholm, in the city of Linköping, the World Food Building is designed as a massive greenhouse and office space that Plantagon says will produce 500 metric tons of food annually once fully functional. Earlier this month, the company also launched a crowdfunding campaign called CityFarms, a series of underground farming operations in Stockholm.
The world might not yet need Plantagon and its technology, but Hassle plans to be there once it does. “The challenge for us being so early in development, is to implement the technology with the market now before it really needs these big scale vertical farms,” he says. By then, Hassle hopes to see his vision come to fruition.
How This Startup Produces 700 Tonnes of Fruits and Vegetables Without Soil
Triton Foodworks started as an experiment in urban farming in September of 2014 by four friends — Deepak Kukreja, Dhruv Khanna, Ullas Samrat, and Devanshu Shivnani.
How This Startup Produces 700 Tonnes of Fruits and Vegetables Without Soil
Foraying into urban farming, a group of friends has set up a green enterprise that is based on hydroponics.
There is growing concern in urban and semi-urban areas about the dangers of the pesticide-ridden food that is sold in the market.
Following the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s, the use of pesticides in India has increased. Although the period saw the boom in agriculture like never before, the flip side of this revolution has left the country consuming poisonous food. Food production in large quantities at the cost of their health has made people wary and look for alternatives.
In the confines of an urban setting, four youngsters from Delhi are venturing into hydroponics to provide an organic and healthier option for the urban populace.
Hydroponics is the method of growing plants in a water-based, nutrient-rich medium, without the use of soil. This method essentially cuts down the amount of water being used compared to the method in which plants are grown in soil. In some cases, up to 90 percent less water is used in the hydroponics method compared to the traditional soil-based agriculture — a boon for water-starved urban areas. One can plant four times the number of crops in the same space as soil farming.
An Experiment In Urban Farming
Triton Foodworks started as an experiment in urban farming in the September of 2014 by four friends — Deepak Kukreja, Dhruv Khanna, Ullas Samrat, and Devanshu Shivnani.
In early 2014, Ullas was exploring ways to develop his agricultural land in Mohali for his mother, who suffers from ILD, a degenerative disorder of the lungs. When the doctors told him that life on a farmhouse would in fact be counterintuitive for his mother due to dust and other issues related to farming, he became obsessed with finding a way to farm in a clean and hygienic manner.
Dhruv, who was in Singapore at the moment working on his tech startup, wanted to come back to India and start something here. On a catch-up call, the two got discussing how much fun it would be to start a business together; especially something that made sense economically and ecologically. Following a lot of research, they zeroed in on hydroponic farming, something that connected with both of them. Dhruv visited a few hydroponic farms in Singapore to see firsthand how it works. Ullas met Deepak online while researching on hydroponics. The team quickly realized that to make this thing big, they needed a formal structure and a financial disciple — which is when Devanshu was roped in.
“We were just a bunch of friends who wanted to do something in the space of food and agriculture. We were very excited by the opportunities of rooftop farming and farming within the limits of the city. We did a pilot to grow strawberries in Sainik Farm of Delhi. We used an open system with vertical towers to grow eight tonnes of strawberries out of 500 sqm of land. Eventually, we decided against setting rooftop farms due to feasibility issues. Instead, we set up full scale, commercial farms in the outskirts of cities,” says 38-year-old Deepak, technical Co-founder, who takes care of the farming aspect of the business.
Like any bootstrapped startup, Triton Foodworks also faced a huge number of issues at every step. Their farm at the Sainik Farm was demolished by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) because the team refused to pay a bribe.
“We went to the Delhi government to ask for some sort of help in setting up farms in Delhi; we were called ‘food terrorists’ to our face. Quite a few vendors still owe us money for our early projects, something which is a huge issue in this industry. We had no previous data to map our progress against, no previous players who could be used as a yardstick in the field,” says 27-year-old Devanshu, who takes care of the finances and the financial modelling for the business.
Taking Hydroponics Ahead
“Toxic food is the biggest issue we are trying to resolve. People don't realise how toxic their food really is. We don't use chemical pesticides for our plants. The second issue is the fact that we are running out of land and water to grow food. Lastly, we are addressing the problem of traceability, consistency and, by extension, accountability in farming. You buy a bag of chips and you can trace it back to the field in which the potatoes were grown, but if you pick up a tomato from your vegetable vendor, there is no way to know where it came from, who harvested it, when was it harvested, and what all did he put in it to grow. We are teaching people to ask these questions by offering them answers even before they realise this information is important,” says 27-year-old Dhruv, who looks after operations and marketing.
The team relies on Ayurvedic recipes and bio control to fight off pests and other infections, as an alternative to pesticides and insecticides. The team grows the same amount of food grown under conventional farming with just about one-eighth of the area and using 80 percent less water.
The team has successfully set up more than 5 acres of hydroponic farms across three locations in India. The strawberry farm in Mahabaleshwar grows 20 tonnes of strawberries a year and a 1.25 acres facility in Wada district of Maharashtra that produces about 400 tonnes of tomatoes, 150 tonnes of cucumbers, 400 heads of spinach, and over 700 bunches of mint.
Triton also operates an acre facility in Shirval, Pune that grows tomatoes and cucumbers, which are used to feed farmers' markets in Pune. The team also advises companies in Hyderabad, Manesar and Bengaluru that are interested in incorporating hydroponics.
Triton currently has over 200,000 sqft of area under hydroponic cultivation in various locations in the country. Using hydroponics, it produces more than 700 tonnes of residue-free fruits and vegetables every year.
“Our systems enable us to save around 22 crore litres of water per year as compared to traditional agriculture. In terms of volume, our vertical systems grow food comparable to 10,00,000 sqft of land when using traditional agriculture methods, which translates into a saving of more than 800,000 sqft of land to grow the same amount of food. Since our farms are located within a 100-km radius from cities, our produce carries lesser food miles,” says 27-year-old Ullas.
The team is currently in the process of setting up stalls in farmers' markets in Pune and Mumbai.
Tokyo Rail Operator Explores 'Train To Table' Urban Farming
As urban farming becomes increasingly popular across the globe, Tokyo's most-used rapid transit system, Tokyo Metro, is dabbling in hydroponic farming in an unused warehouse space below the system’s elevated transit lines.
Tokyo Rail Operator Explores 'Train To Table' Urban Farming
BY TESSA LOVE
December 20, 2017
As urban farming becomes increasingly popular across the globe, Tokyo's most-used rapid transit system, Tokyo Metro, is dabbling in hydroponic farming in an unused warehouse space below the system’s elevated transit lines.
The project, called Tokyo Salad, takes the idea of urban farming to the next level. Celebrated as a way to save resources by bringing food closer to the people who consume it, urban farming often takes place on rooftops or the walls of hip restaurants. Tokyo Salad, however, is both using an under-utilized space and growing food where millions of people pass through every day.
The Tokyo Salad facility houses 400 plants of 11 varieties of greens, including basil, kale and lettuces. The greens are grown without the use of soil or fertilizers under LED lights that shine on the plants 16 hours a day. The plants are watered with a mist that contains necessary minerals such as zinc, phosphorous and potassium.
Hydroponic farming has many benefits. It reduces energy and water use, creates a perennial food system, and can be done anywhere. But Tokyo Salad says it's system is even more sophisticated: It can turn seeds to greens in just five weeks with a method that it's calling a "trade secret," and though the plants are growing beneath a railway system, its operation is "uber-hygienic."
Like in most parts of the world, urban and hydroponic farming is just getting off the ground in Japan and won't change the food system on a mass scale quite yet. For now, most of Tokyo Salad’s customers are high-end restaurants in Tokyo, not the food halls and mom-and-pops that make up most of the country's food system. But nonetheless, this style of farming could help solve some of the problems that are unique to Japan.
Japan's population is decreasing and is expected to continue decreasing in the coming years. The country's farming population is aging out of the business, but a new generation of farmers isn't stepping to take their place. Farm lands are being abandoned as more young people move to the urban centers, creating a shortage of home-grown food in the country.
Innovations like Tokyo Salad offer solutions to these problems on several fronts. By taking place in a city, urban farming can attract a new generation of workers that don't want to live in rural areas while also regenerating the supply of locally grown food. On top of that, the fact that Tokyo Metro is taking this on shows an innovation for a business that is based on high populations—with the popultion dropping, metro ridership will drop, forcing railway operators to consider supplemental businesses to stay up-and-running.
"Technology could help Japan scale up its local food production, especially if unused spaces long assumed hostile to raising food, like old warehouses, can increasingly do so cost effectively and at a profit," according to Triple Pundit. "And if that technology transfer can move across borders and become affordable, urban farming could feed the world and create a new wave of jobs."
Growing lettuce in unused parts of a train station just might be the answer.
Urban Farms Can Help Plant Seeds For Cities’ Growth Around Them
Since 2011, Gotham Greens has operated a 15,000- enclosed rooftop greenhouse in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, N.Y., that produces over 100,000 lbs of leafy greens annually.
Urban Farms Can Help Plant Seeds For Cities’ Growth Around Them
In Detroit, an “Agrihood” takes shape.
GAME CHANGERS | DECEMBER 20, 2017 | JOHN CAULFIELD, SENIOR EDITOR
On two acres within Detroit’s North End, the Michigan Urban Farm Initiative grows 300 varieties of leafy vegetables that it distributes free to 2,000 families who live within two miles of the farm. Like many urban farms around the country, MUFI has spurred redevelopment in its surrounding communities. Photo: Michelle and Chris Gerard
Urban farms have been impacting cities’ agribusiness—and, on some cases, their redevelopment—for decades.
In Philadelphia, for example, the success of Greensgrow Farms—whose 6,000-sf flagship greenhouse celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017, and whose three locations (which include a retail garden center and farmstand) draw 15,000 people per year—has spurred numerous competitors, and has helped gentrify its surrounding working-class neighborhoods.
Since 2011, Gotham Greens has operated a 15,000-sf enclosed rooftop greenhouse in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, N.Y., that produces over 100,000 lbs of leafy greens annually. The greenhouse is a tenant of the Greenpoint Manufacturing Design Center, a nonprofit developer dedicated to revitalizing Brooklyn’s industrial spaces for small-scale entrepreneurial manufacturing.
Gotham Greens also operates a 20,000-sf greenhouse in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn that grows over 200,000 lbs of greens, herbs, and tomatoes; a five-story, 60,000-sf greenhouse in the Hollis section of Queens, N.Y., that employs 50 full time workers and produces over 5 million heads of leafy greens; and a 75,000-sf greenhouse on two acres of Chicago’s south side that opened in 2015 and now produces 10 million heads of greens and herbs annually.
MUFI is developing what it’s calling America’s first “Agrihood,” which will include the adaptive reuse of several buildings on its three-acre complex. A now-vacant, three-story apartment building that dates back to 1915 (pictured) is being converted into a 3,200-sf Community Resource Center. Catalyst Partners is supervising these rehab projects for MUFI, and Integrity Building Group is the AOE and CM. Other Building Team members include Ingalls Engineering Group (M/PE and net-zero energy consultant), IlluminArt Lighting, a division of Peter Basso (EE), Insite Design Studio (design and CE), Jeremy Ziegler (architect). Photo: Michelle and Chris Gerard
Several urban farms operate in Detroit, including the six-year-old Michigan Urban Farm Initiative (MUFI), which grows 300 varieties of vegetables on two acres in the Motor City’s North End. Since 2012, MUFI has produced more than 50,000 lbs of produce, which it distributes free to 2,000 households within two square miles of the farm.
In November, during the Greenbuild Expo, MUFI announced its plans to develop what it’s calling the first sustainable “Agrihood” in the U.S., as an alternative neighborhood growth model.
Working with such high-profile partners and sponsors as BASF, Herman Miller, and General Motors, MUFI is converting a vacant 102-year-old three-story apartment building across from its urban garden into a 3,200-sf Community Resource Center. The Center will include two commercial kitchens on the first floor and allow for future production and packaging of valued goods.
On land next to the CRC, MUFI intends to open a healthy food café. It also plans to convert an existing single-family home on the farm’s premises to housing for the farm’s interns. The foundation of another single-family home has been fortified to support a two-bedroom home made from a shipping container. And the basement of a recently fire-damaged and deconstructed home on the farm’s border is being converted into a 12,000-gallon rainwater harvesting cistern that will be used to irrigate the farm and prevent runoff into Detroit’s sewer system.
Integrity Building Group is AOR and provides architecture services and construction for the farm. One of MUFI’s partners, Sustainable Brands, will debut the CRC and café at its conference in Detroit’s Cobo Arena next May.
“Cities are the future, but we can’t just rebuild the same inefficient buildings of the past,” says John Beeson, LEED AP BD+C, EBO+M, a project manager with Catalyst Partners in Grand Rapids, Mich., which is supervising these reconstructions for MUFI. “The question we’re trying to answer is whether we can do urban infill better.”
Tyson Gersh, MUFI’s cofounder, says that while urban redevelopment “was not on our radar screen at first,” it has become a priority, partly for political reasons, but also because “it’s hard for an urban farm to justify itself on its own.”
Gersh observed “quite a few people” who were buying blighted homes around the farm. (He’s identified at least $3.5 million in purchases so far.) Several of those new owners told Gerson they wouldn’t have heard of this neighborhood were it not for the farm.
MUFI is now working with several developers—including The Platform, Basco, Terranova Development, and South Oakland Shelter—on another residential project that would be two blocks from the farm.
Photo: Michelle and Chris Gerard
Salad Made in Panasonic's High-Tech Indoor Farm Hits The Market
Salad Made in Panasonic's High-Tech Indoor Farm Hits The Market
From left: Panasonic Factory Solutions Asia Pacific managing director Tatsuyoshi Ishii, Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore CEO Lim Kok Thai, Panasonic Singapore managing director Paul Wong, Tong Chiang Group’s CEO Lisa Zou and group executive chef Gary Wu.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG
December 1, 2017
The SingaSalad mixes locally grown vegetables with dressings inspired by two Singaporean dishes
Catering company Tong Chiang Group has come up with a new salad using locally grown vegetables supplied by Panasonic, and salad dressings inspired by two popular local dishes - chilli crab and Hainanese chicken rice.
For a start, the SingaSalad is now available only on the menus of eight of Tong Chiang Group's subsidiary catering companies. Consumers will be able to buy retail packs at selected supermarket outlets sometime next year.
The company's chief executive Lisa Zou, who prefers to eat healthily, says it has always been her goal to give customers healthier food choices.
She says: "Now that we have a supply of fresh and pesticide-free vegetables from Panasonic, we created the SingaSalad to encourage consumers to eat healthier and support home-grown produce."
Panasonic's vegetables are grown at the company's high-tech indoor farm located at the Panasonic Factory Solutions Asia-Pacific's premises in Jalan Ahmad Ibrahim. The Japanese electronics giant ventured into vertical farming here in 2013. Its 1,154 sqm indoor farm, about the size of 11/2football fields, now produces 81 tonnes of vegetables annually, which are sold to restaurants and supermarkets.
Vegetables supplied to Tong Chiang Group's central kitchen are harvested and delivered the same day, directly from Panasonic's indoor farm.
Mr Paul Wong, managing director of Panasonic Singapore, says: "We are happy to have a collaboration with Tong Chiang Group which shares our vision of promoting locally farmed produce which contributes to Singapore's food security."
The SingaSalad vegetable selection includes green leafy lettuce, red leafy lettuce, mizuna, mini red radish, mustard wasabi and a range of microgreens.
The salad dressing recipes are developed by Tong Chiang Group's group executive chef Gary Wu. He says: "By providing our Chilli Crab and Hainanese Chicken Rice dressings, we want to encourage consumers to eat healthier without missing out on the flavours of our local classics."
Vertical Farming Concept to Help Food-Insecure Community
Vertical Farming Concept to Help Food-Insecure Community
Company looking to build its SQF vertical farm in Ontario
A Toronto, Ontario-based company has brought his proof of concept vertical farming system to be part of an initiative to grow food for the non-profit community in Windsor.
Zale Tabakman with prototype unit.
Local Grown Salads, in a partnership with Science City, set up the indoor farm in an under utilized high school building built in 1922. Zale Tabakman, president of Local Grown Salads, says the initiative hopes to create a systemic change in the community. “Windsor-Essex is a very agricultural integrated, manufacturing environment. The ag component of what I’m doing is very interesting to everybody here,” says Tabakman, founder and owner of Local Grown Salads.
Windsor doesn’t have the same property value in other parts on Ontario, such as Toronto and surrounding area. “Rent and property is incredibly inexpensive. It’s a very good use of space but we’ve designed our systems to be cost competitive even in Toronto,” says Tabakman.
Local Grown Salads’ vertical farm grows greens, peas, cucumbers, cherry/heritage tomatoes and strawberries. “Future consumers of this (food from the project) in the community will be able to benefit from nutritious high calorie food,” he says.
The community members involved are currently fundraising for the farm and hoping to have it up and running in early January 2018. They already have the space and people to manage the project; Tabakman says the only thing remaining is a matter of getting funds together. “The execution will be very quick.” Once established the community itself would be producing the vegetables, the community will be responsible for harvesting, cleaning, prepping the food. The 2,000 sq. foot facility would be able to create about 500,000 salad meals a year “possibly more depending on operations. They can decide how to maximize the space to grow the appropriate type of foods possible for their clients.”
English thyme grown on the vertical farm
One of Tabakman’s favorite things to grow is sorrel, a Russian green. “It’s like having a little drop of lemon. You can imagine how you can create a very tasty high calorie meal just using vegetables. From a nutrient dense point of view kale and arugula are almost as dense as meat.”
The ultimate goal for Science City is to create community not-for-profit hub, which will include the Local Grown Salads vertical farm. Food would be consumed by community members who are food insecure and also sold to traditional retailers and food service companies to support the operation of the building.
According to Tabakman, 1.2 billion pounds of leaf lettuce was grown in the US last year and 2.5 billion pounds of romaine. “If I were to set up my farms doing salads and vegetables I could produce I would need 1,600 farms just to support the city of Toronto – that’s the benefit of indoor vertical farming.” Moving forward into the for-profit sector, Local Grown Salads is focused on a SQF standard ready-to eat-salad. (HCAP). The food-safe ready grow unit system is designed to fit into a standard 14-foot ceiling warehouse.
Tabakman is currently doing presentations to investors and groups across the country and overseas to generate interest to raise money to set up his first SQF vertical farm, which will be located in Ontario between Windsor and Toronto.
For more information:
Zale Tabakman
Local Grown Salads
Publication date: 11/28/2017
Author: Rebecca D Dumais
Copyright: www.freshplaza.com
Pure Harvest Rakes In $4.5 Million
Pure Harvest Rakes In $4.5 Million
- November 16, 2017 | ABU DHABI
- By Iris Dorbian
Abu Dhabi-based Pure Harvest Smart Farms, an arid climate agribusiness, has raised $4.5 million in funding. Shorooq Investments was the lead investor.
Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Pure Harvest or the Company), a tech-enabled arid climate agribusiness based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, announced today a historic Seed investment of USD $4.5 million in a financing round that was significantly oversubscribed. This follows an earlier USD $1.1 million pre-Seed round led by Abu Dhabi-based Shorooq Investments. Venture financing was provided by a leading federal government-backed fund, the Company’s technology partners, and a consortium of angel investors from around the world, all of whom were strongly aligned with the Company’s mission—to offer a true & tangible food security solution to the region by deploying advanced and sustainable controlled-environment agriculture technologies in order to grow premium quality local fresh fruits & vegetables year-round; overcoming the region’s harsh, arid climate and increasingly scarce freshwater resources.
Proceeds from the financing will be used to fund the construction of Pure Harvest’s inaugural high-tech, fully climate controlled greenhouse facility in Nahel, United Arab Emirates. The Company expects to complete the facility by mid-year and to begin selling its products in the second half of 2018. Following the demonstration of its technology and its ability to serve the fast-growing demand for fresh local produce, Pure Harvest intends to quickly expand in the region, recognizing that other GCC countries are facing the same challenges that the UAE faces with regards to import-dependence, water shortages, and climate-driven production constraints.
Pure Harvest also announced the appointment of a new Advisor and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) Local Partner, Sultan bin Khalid Al Saud. “Sultan is a fellow Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus and is a trusted advisor who brings a wealth of experience to the Company, having worked for Saudi Aramco, McKinsey, and Passport Capital. He will be working closely with the Company to enable near-term expansion into the attractive Saudi market,” said Sky Kurtz, Co-Founder & CEO of Pure Harvest. “We are extremely pleased to welcome Sultan to our family.”
A member of the Pure Harvest board and a participant in both the pre-Seed and Seed rounds, David Scott, who is also a well-known economic and strategy advisor to regional governments and state-owned enterprises, emphasized the impact that Pure Harvest could have on several pressing regional challenges. “Pure Harvest’s tech-enabled approach to arid climate agriculture and its strong project team offer a realistic and much-needed solution for improving food security across the Gulf, as well as a means not just to maintain domestic agriculture, but to profitably expand it – all while preserving the region’s precious remaining fresh water aquifers. Ultimately, I see this kind of sustainable domestic agriculture as a critical component of any successful post-oil diversification strategy and I’m excited to be a part of this effort,” said Mr. Scott.
Commenting on the successful conclusion of the Seed round, Mr. Kurtz said: “This financing is an important milestone for the Company. We now have sufficient capital to deploy our solution on a commercial scale and to demonstrate to our many stakeholders a future where high quality, sustainably grown, fresh local produce can be abundantly available every single day… and at a lower cost & environmental impact than current imports. We are humbled that such an esteemed group of investors, advisors & partners share our vision and are willing to back us to transform food production in the Middle East.”
“Shorooq Investments is thrilled to see Pure Harvest closing the largest Seed financing to-date in the MENA region. When evaluating investment opportunities, we try to think from a broader regional & macro perspective and to create a positive social impact,” said Mahmoud Adi, Co-Founder at Pure Harvest and the Founding Partner of Shorooq Investments. “With Pure Harvest, we hope to address food security concerns and to take a giant step forward to be less dependent on international imports for fresh produce, which will directly contribute to the UAE’s long-term sustainability. We are proud to have backed this important venture since its inception and to support the strong founding team whom we believe has the right capabilities and core values to succeed”.
In addition to receiving investment from Shorooq Investments, Mr. Scott and Sultan bin Khalid, Pure Harvest is backed by the following (non-exhaustive) list of visionary Angel investors: Magnus Olsson, Founder and Managing Director of Careem; Hazem Abu Khalaf, CFA, Director at The Abraaj Group; Jim Finnigan, Co-Founder of SoFi; Peter Satow, Founder & CEO of PESA Advanced Hydroponics; Abdulrahman Kaki; Anmol Budhraja, Founder and CEO and Arnab Chatterjee, Managing Director of Three Comma Financial Consultancy; Charles Anderson, Founder & CEO of Currency; Florian Weidinger, Fund Manager at NESTOR Far East Fund; Douglas Kelbaugh FAIA, Professor and former dean at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Mohammed Khudairi, Managing Partner of Khudairi Group; Troels Andersen, CEO of Mondo Ride; Husam and Muhammed Al Zubair of The Zubair Corporation; Bina Khan and James Joy, Co-Founders and Managing Partners of Summit Venture Partners; Edmund Ang, CFA, Vice President at First Energy Bank; and Theodore Cleary, Director at Crito Capital, among others.
About Pure Harvest
Pure Harvest Smart Farms (“Pure Harvest” or the “Company”) is a regional innovator in sustainable agriculture focused on the production of premium quality fruits & vegetables in the extreme climates of the Arab Gulf region, using world-leading high-tech, climate controlled greenhouse production technology to deliver vine crops (tomatoes, capsicum, strawberries, cucumbers, eggplants, etc.). The Company will soon deploy a wider portfolio of best-in-class controlled-environment agriculture technologies (e.g. vertical farms, container-based growing solutions) to deliver a wide variety of fresh produce. Pure Harvest seeks to leverage innovative technology solutions to pioneer year-round production of affordable, premium quality fresh produce. In recognition of regional vulnerabilities associated with water scarcity, food import dependence, and sustainability, Pure Harvest is committed to resource efficiency and overcoming climate challenges to deliver European standards to customers with always-available, high quality, farm-to-fork products.
US Businesses Making Farming Technologies for Cities
Cam MacKugler waters a seedsheet at the Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, Nov. 3, 2017. (T. Trinh/VOA)
US Businesses Making Farming Technologies for Cities
November 25, 2017
How do you get the freshest, locally grown fruits and vegetables in a big city?
For an increasing number of Americans, the answer is to grow the fruits and vegetables themselves.
Businessman Cam MacKugler can help. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Seedsheet.
MacKugler was at the Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, New York, earlier this month. He was showing off Seedsheet products, which are for people who live in high-rise buildings or other homes with little space for growing plants.
Seedsheet products come with fabric sheets and small pods, each filled with a mix of seeds and soil. The fabric is placed on top of dirt in a home planter or in the ground. When watered, the pods soften and eventually break up as the plants start to grow.
The seed groupings on any given Seedsheet provide vegetables or herbs for salads and other meals. Pricing starts at $15 for the factory-made sheets. But you can spend up to $100 for a larger, made-to-order outdoor covering measuring 1.2 by 2.4 meters.
Efforts like Seedsheet come as Americans increasingly want to know where their food comes from. Many are looking for socially and environmentally responsible growing methods.
MacKugler told VOA that most of the company’s sales come from young people living in cities.
American consumers are not giving up on the low cost and ease of packaged and prepared foods. But new products and technologies are playing a part in helping Americans understand where their food comes from.
“Consumer education is really progressing,” said Nicole Baum of Gotham Greens, a grower of hydroponically grown produce.
Baum said consumers were less familiar with the term “hydroponics” -- growing plants in water instead of soil -- when Gotham Greens first started in 2011. But more and more Americans have since heard about this form of agriculture.
Baum said she has also seen an increase in competing companies.
“We’re definitely seeing a lot more people within the space from when we first started, which is awesome,” she said. “I think it’s really great that other people are coming into the space and looking for ways to use technology to have more productive, efficient growth.”
Gotham Greens provides leafy greens and herbs grown on buildings to supermarkets and top-rated New York restaurants like Gramercy Tavern.
Companies like Smallhold also advertised their services at the Food Loves Tech event. Smallhold manufactures mini-farms – small, self-contained structures -- for growing mushrooms. The mushroom mini-farms are meant to be used in restaurants, not homes.
Smallhold sets up the devices and services them at restaurants, with restaurant workers harvesting mushrooms when they are ready. Hannah Shufro, operations lead at Smallhold, said the mini-farms help cut down on pollution that comes with transporting and shipping produce.
Shufro also noted that produce begins to lose its nutritional value right from the time it is harvested.
"When you’re harvesting food right out of a system that’s growing onsite, it does not get fresher than that, she said.”
I’m Susan Shand
Tina Trinh reported this story for VOANews.com. George Grow adapted her report for Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.
Farming Gains Ground In The City
City Farm marketing director Looi Choon Beng demonstrates how little space is needed for an urban garden. – The Malaysian Insight pic by Kamal Ariffin, November 26, 2017.
Farming Gains Ground In The City
Asila Jalil | 26 Nov 2017
THE notion that farming is an activity that requires a huge land area has been clearly debunked as urban farming gains ground among Malaysian city dwellers.
In the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Wong Min Lik has co-founded Moutou Art Space on the rooftop of a building at Lorong Panggong.
The 35-year-old Wong said the rooftop was empty space before they took over in December last year. Today, it has a bar and a garden which brimming with fresh vegetables and herbs such as lemongrass, ginger, mint, lemon, passionfruit, and bitter gourd.
"This is the first time we tried (growing a garden). This is a new experience, growing an edible garden in this city area," said Wong, who didn’t have any prior farming experience.
The full-time artist said the idea to grow their own garden was prompted by concerns about pesticide contamination.
Wong said the produce they gain from the garden is currently used for their own consumption, but they are eventually planning to distribute to communities around their area.
"We hope to influence others to do this, because the more people joining the initiative, the better for the environment," she said.
Growing interest
CityFarm Malaysia, a company specialising in indoor and vertical farming using the hydroponics method, said that demand for their hydroponic kits has increased almost tenfold since the company launched last year.
Run by engineering graduates Looi Choon Beng, Johanson Chew, and Jayden Koay, CityFarm was borne out of a hobby for the trio, who whose gardening kits are priced from RM13.90 for a beginner’s kit to a few thousand ringgit.
City Farm marketing director Looi Choon Beng, an engineering graduate, says the rising interest in urban farming may be due to greater health awareness as well as concerns over food shortages. – The Malaysian Insight pic by Kamal Ariffin, November 26, 2017.
Looi, 28, said the public’s rising interest in urban farming could be due to greater health awareness as well as growing concerns over food shortages as the world population increases.
"All these factors will contribute to need for urban farming. Indoor farming promotes high utilisation of land.
"This will help to sustain the world in the future. Somebody needs to do this thing now, or else we will not be ready for a possible crisis in the future," he said, adding that the company also holds urban farming courses.
To address the lack of space and soil in the city, Plant Cartridge has come up with an ingenious method for city folk to grow their own vegetables without the need for any land.
The company has come up with a cartridge that acts as the growing medium for seeds. Essentially, growers need only to water the cartridge which contains nutrients and seeds, and watch their “farm” grow.
"Soil has three functions which are to hold the root so the plant doesnt fall, to retain water, and to house bacteria that will provide nutrients to the plant,” said company CEO Channing Liang.
"If you can replace these three functions, you don't need soil," Liang told The Malaysian Insight.
Food sustainability
Environmental consultant Eats, Shoots and Roots believe that urban farming is a trend that is here to stay.
The key to sustaining the interest is education and support, and the group does not only provide gardening courses and workshops, it also helps to design gardens for city dwellers with with limited land space.
Strategy director Beatrice Yong said they have built 30 to 35 gardens since they started in 2012.
"I think food plays a very big part of taking care of your family so naturally you see people turning lawns into gardens," said Yong.
Yong, who grows spinach, sweet potato, chilli, and brinjal in her own garden, said having a personal garden at home does not only ensure the plants are safe to be consumed but also reduces one's spending.
"I think it's (urban farming) a trend but it's not going to die anytime soon.
“It will become a need in the future due to increasing prices of produce and other factors such as general health scares. People will prefer to grow their own food." – November 26, 2017.
Urban Farming Technologies Crop Up in Homes, Restaurants
How do you obtain the freshest, locally grown produce in a big city? For an increasing number of urbanites, the answer is to grow it yourself. Cam MacKugler can help. MacKugler was at the recent Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, New York showing off Seedsheets, roll-out fabric sheets embedded with seed-filled pods.
Urban Farming Technologies Crop Up in Homes, Restaurants
Cam MacKugler waters a seedsheet at the Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, Nov. 3, 2017. (T. Trinh/VOA)
Tina Trinh | 2017 | NEW YORK
How do you obtain the freshest, locally grown produce in a big city? For an increasing number of urbanites, the answer is to grow it yourself.
Cam MacKugler can help. MacKugler was at the recent Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, New York showing off Seedsheets, roll-out fabric sheets embedded with seed-filled pods.
The sheets are placed atop soil in a home planter or an outdoor garden. When watered, the pods dissolve and plants sprout in 10 days (for pea shoots) to 70 days (for dragon carrots).
An exhibitor displays a Seedsheet product at the Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, Nov. 3, 2017. (T. Trinh/VOA)
The seed groupings on any given Seedsheet provide ingredients for specific dishes like salads or tacos. Pricing starts at $15 for pre-made sheets and go up to $100 for custom outdoor sheets measuring 1.2 by 2.4 meters.
"Someone that's never gardened before might say, 'I want to know where my food comes from but I don't know how to do it, but I like salads so I'm going to buy the salad kit,' " said MacKugler, Seedsheet's CEO and founder.
Efforts like Seedsheet come as consumers increasingly want to know where their food comes from and are more interested in socially and environmentally responsible growing methods.
MacKugler told VOA that most of the company's sales come from urban millennials.
Comparing Seedsheets to meal kit delivery companies like Blue Apron, MacKugler said Seedsheet took an experiential and educational approach to gardening, while making it user-friendly for customers.
"I view it as a way to not only help them grow food, but also help grow their skill sets of knowing how to curate their food, how to actually bring food from seed to supper. It's a life skill," said MacKugler, "It's the same thing that you get from using Blue Apron and learning how to cook."
Gotham Greens hydroponic lettuce on display at Food Loves Tech in Brooklyn, Nov. 3, 2017. (T. Trinh/VOA)
Consumers aren't giving up on the convenience and low cost of packaged foods, but new products and technologies are playing a bigger role in helping them understand where their food comes from.
"Consumer education is really progressing," said Nicole Baum, senior marketing and partnerships manager at Gotham Greens, a New York-based provider of hydroponically grown produce.
Baum said consumers were less familiar with the term "hydroponics," growing plants in water instead of soil, when Gotham Greens started in 2011. Perceptions have since changed, and she has seen an increase in competing companies.
"We're definitely seeing a lot more people within the space from when we first started, which is awesome," said Baum. "I think it's really great that other people are coming into the space and looking for ways to use technology to have more productive, efficient growth."
Gramercy Tavern sous chef Kyle Goldstein with attendees at the Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, Nov. 3, 2017. (T. Trinh/VOA)
Gotham Greens provides rooftop-grown leafy greens and herbs to supermarkets and top-ranked restaurants like Gramercy Tavern, which uses seasonal vegetables but also depends on the reliability of produce from urban hydroponic farms.
"When we write our menus, we know that there are staples that we can continue using," said Gramercy Tavern sous chef Kyle Goldstein.
Companies like Smallhold were also on hand at the Food Loves Tech event to promote their mushroom mini-farms — self-contained, vertical farm units that are intended for use in commercial kitchens.
Smallhold's mini-farms are installed and serviced by the company at restaurants, with chefs harvesting mushrooms directly on-site. Hannah Shufro, operations lead at Smallhold, said the mini-farms minimize the environmental footprint that comes with transporting and packaging produce for delivery.
An attendee examines mushrooms inside a Smallhold vertical farm unit, Nov. 3, 2017. (T. Trinh/VOA)
"A lot of chefs these days, I think, are more concerned with sustainability" and have always been concerned with freshness, she said.
Shufro noted that produce starts to lose its nutritional value from the moment it's picked or harvested. "When you're harvesting food right out of a system that's growing on-site, it does not get fresher than that," she said.
This Shipping Container Is A High-Tech Growing Machine | Editorial
The township recently laid claim to being the first New Jersey municipality to take delivery of a portable, hydroponic box farm. It's basically a 40-foot-by-80-foot metal shipping container that has been converted into a high-tech growing machine.
12-07-17
By Times of Trenton Editorial Board
Robbinsville is thinking inside the box as a way to go green.
The township recently laid claim to being the first New Jersey municipality to take delivery of a portable, hydroponic box farm.
It's basically a 40-foot-by-80-foot metal shipping container that has been converted into a high-tech growing machine.
Plants are grown in nutrient-rich water that requires no soil. Indoor lighting takes the place of sunlight to produce the photosynthesis needed to grow leafy green vegetables. An added advantage is that plants can be grown year-round in a temperature-controlled environment that is regulated by computer software. And no pesticides are needed to raise fresh organic food.
The box farm, called a Leafy Green Machine, is made by Freight Farms, a Boston company, and costs $104,000, according to Kevin Holt, Robbinsville's recreation activities coordinator.
He sees a bright future for the box farm. Initially, the town plans to grow lettuce and other greens for the benefit of township programs, such as Meals on Wheels and the senior center, where the box will be set up.
Town sees big future in small, hydroponic box 'farm'
The box farm - located in a portable shipping container - can grow lettuce, leafy greens and kale
Once food production is up and running, Holt expects it will produce nutritious greens such as lettuce, mustard greens, Asian greens, endive and an assortment of herbs for nonprofits and other organization that feed the needy.
The hope is that the township will eventually start a community share garden and sell greens to residents to help pay for the initial investment. If all goes according to plan, the township will pay off the farm box in five to seven years.
Robbinsville is breaking new ground with this food-growing experiment. If it is successful, it will pave the way for other towns and organizations to follow its example.
The beauty of a self-contained food growing system is that it can be placed in just about any urban lot, where it can produce about 1,000 heads of lettuce a week, according to box farm manufactures.
Imagine what this could mean for "food deserts," poor areas where fresh, healthy vegetables at reasonable prices are scarce.
Of course, this small-space farming is no panacea for solving world hunger, but it certainly could put a dent in it, especially if scaled up to bigger proportions.
Robbinsville is starting out small, but it is paving the way for a possible food revolution.
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Whole Foods Helping Backyard Growers Grow
Whole Foods Helping Backyard Growers Grow
Pigeon Cove plant worker nominated group for grant
- By Joann Mackenzie Staff Writer
-
- Nov 30, 2017
Gloucester’s Backyard Growers has grown yet another garden, this one with the help of Whole Foods Markets' Whole Cities Foundation.
Backyard Growers was awarded a $5,000 Community First Grant by the nonprofit foundation, one of three founded to support thriving, self-sustaining local community food systems.
The money, received earlier this fall, has helped add a garden of raised beds — this one in Willowood public housing on Maplewood Avenue — to Backyard Growers' 67 edible garden beds already in place and thriving in low-income housing communities throughout the city.
Aria McElhenny, Backyard Growers' development director, who was a participant in the development of nearby Burnham’s Field Community Garden, says the Willowood plot, which she described as formerly a wasteland of weed, scrub and rubbish, “has been transformed” — with the help of Whole Foods volunteers— into fertilized beds that will be ready for planting in the spring.
One of those Whole Food’s volunteers, Lee Kane, who goes by the title “Mission, Culture and Higher Purpose Coach” told the Times that despite his 66 years, he loved rolling up his sleeves and “getting down and dirty with the kids digging the garden beds.”
Kane says that “Backyard Growers is the kind of organization that is very much in line with our vision.”
Whole Foods learned about Backyard Growers through staff members at its Pigeon Cove fish processing plant, in particular, Gloucester resident Carol Styczko, who recommended it for the grant.
“Gloucester is a fascinating place for a bunch of reasons,” said Kane, "and Lara (Lepionka, founder and executive director of Backyard Growers) is amazing, an absolute dynamo.”
Lepionka could not be reached for comment, says McElhenny, because she is doing what comes naturally: living in a tent and building an edible garden for a community in some remote, unknown location.
Like Lepionka, Kane says that Whole Cities Foundation — which has built stores in economically challenged cities including Detroit and Newark, New Jersey — likes to gets its hands dirty.
“Our model is to go into communities with limited access to healthy food and work from the ground up, learning what they need. We say, 'It’s your community, you know it, you tell us what you need.'" In Gloucester, he says, it was easier because “we knew the community from working with the Pigeon Cove plant for so many years.”
With a staff of about 55, the Pigeon Cove processing facility distributes seafood throughout Whole Foods' Northeast region of 40 stores. “We buy as much as we can from day boats,” Kane told the Times, “and we have the highest sustainability standards.”
Kane says that Whole Foods is looking for more ways to help Backyard Growers. “You can tell by the way I'm talking that I'm passionate about this when I say that we want to be more to the Gloucester community in any way we can.”
McElhenny, who has been writing grants for Backyard Growers since its founding some 10 years ago, and recently joined the staff as the organization’s first official development director, sees Whole Foods, through its Whole Cities Foundation, supporting the expansion of its innovative programs in Gloucester schools, including one “exciting one” at O’Maley Innovation Middle School.
“The kids will be growing wheat, milling and thrashing it, turning it into flour and baking bread with it.”
"There are so many ways kids can learn from a program like this,” says McElhenny.
McElhenny says that Whole Foods has always been supportive of Backyard Growers. With support like theirs, she says, “Backyard Growers just won’t stop growing.”
Joann MacKenzie may be contacted at 978-675-2707, or jomackenzie@gloucestertimes.com.
What’s It Like to Be a Vertical Farmer?
What’s It Like to Be a Vertical Farmer?
As the Shift Manager for Farm.One’s Tribeca farm, Tom Rubino juggles early mornings, a fast pace, and a high attention to detail. Here’s how he does it.
You’ve probably seen enough videos and photos of vertical farms: Racks and racks, levels and levels within LED-lit warehouses, growing ‘perfect’ produce year-in, year-out. You might see a white-jacketed figure in the distance, tiny against the equipment. The focus is firmly on the technology, not the people.
What’s more, it’s especially hard to find out what it’s really like to work on an indoor farm, because many companies are extremely secretive — hardly letting anyone past their air-curtained doors.
But don’t let that fool you. Like any other business, urban farms live or die on their people. And real people work in them, like Tom.
Tom Rubino, Farm.One Tribeca
Farm.One is kind of unusual in the world of vertical farms. Most grow just a few crops — normally bulk salad greens. Instead, we grow hundreds of rare herbs, edible flowers and micros (581 at last count) for chefs in some of the best restaurants in New York. Often our product is the last thing a chef puts on the plate, and the first thing a customer sees.
Our leaves and flowers, on a dish by Ronny Emborg for Atera
Our farms are very small (Tribeca is just over 1,200 square feet, and our farm at the Institute of Culinary Education is around 300). But we use the latest LED lights and hydroponics to grow year-round in the heart of the city, giving us an outsized level of production for such a tiny space.
As Shift Manager for Farm.One’s new farm in Tribeca, Tom oversees all day-to-day operations from seed to harvest. The buck stops with Tom.
Tom has always had a love for food and how it’s grown
A Love of Food & Farming
“I spent five months on a family farm in Sicily — and it was the time of my life. It was a huge farm, over 500 acres, growing wheat, almonds, olives, grapes and more—kind of the opposite to this! I’d also done a lot of gardening at my house, starting with a small window box and progressing to a 10x20' planter on the roof, growing common herbs.
“I just feel very at peace when I’m around plants.
“It makes me very happy to see a plant through from germination to the point you harvest it — it’s real satisfaction. And to see someone using it in a dish is even better.
Early Mornings
AtFarm.One, mornings start early — often around 6:30am—as we harvest everything on the day of delivery. Tom likes to get a head start.
“I open up the farm early. This is my chance to get ahead of the day, prepping everything for the beginning of people‘s shifts.
“I’ll have a look at the harvest, and print out the harvest tickets [Farm.One uses our own ticketing system, a little bit like a restaurant] — if there’s anything I think one person will harvest better than someone else, faster than someone else, I’ll assign them that ticket.
Running two farms 15 minutes walk from each other is … interesting, logistically. Tom has to stay on top of this, and any special instructions.
“I’ll have a look at what we need from ICE versus here. I’ll try to get ahead of the harvest, looking at what customers need what, and any special packing or cutting requirements ahead of time before it gets busy. In my mind the harvest is finalized at 8am — ready for everyone to come in.
Thai Red Stem Basil
Unlike most farms, Farm.One plants seeds almost every day of the week — so that our customers get the perfect leaf size for their product.
For example, many microgreens are grown for just 12 or 14 days, meaning that even one day off can mean a product isn’t right.
This means every day has a mixture of planting, transplanting and harvesting, as well as general farm maintenance tasks.
“I’ll look at the planting schedule too — so that I know at what point during the harvest I can peel people off the harvest and onto planting so that we get everything done in time.
“We usually have a big planting scheduled. The key is getting everything prepped—seeds, medium, everything before the full effort starts. We’ll have Farm Hands coming in at different times — either starting their shift or from ICE, so it’s key to be ready. I’m constantly corresponding with our Head of Operations if we are short on something or there are last-minute changes.
“When I get the planting underway, I can think about what I need to do, either re-allocating space in the system, receiving consumables.
“On a busy day, there are also unexpected things happening. New orders, problems with a particular crop. Being able to jump in and troubleshoot problems, being flexible is important.
Important qualities
Tom talks through some of the essential traits you need to succeed on a busy indoor farm.
“Anticipation—you’re not always going to know before there is a problem, but you need to think about what you might do if there is one, and be ready for different things to happen. You want to see a few moves ahead and be ready for a variety of scenarios.
“It’s a rush on busy days. When everything goes smoothly, you can be going through huge quantities of tickets and look back at the end of the shift to see a lot of product done, and that’s very rewarding. But that only happens if you’re thinking in advance.
“We’re always looking for new ways to improve, and figuring out the most efficient ways to do things. Not necessarily the fastest, but the correct way.
Food adventures
“Igrew up in a family where eating was a huge business. We start Thanksgiving at around 11:30 in the morning, and have like a nine-course meal! A constant steady stream of food throughout the day. Some of my best memories from my childhood are from waking up and smelling my mom’s garlic for breakfast. Eating is a very social thing, it’s about enjoyment, very much about pleasure and having a good time.
I’ll often tell a waiter when I go into a restaurant ‘We’re going to be here a while, and we’re going to have fun!’.
“I like all different cuisines, and my fiancée and I get a lot of pleasure out of it.
What’s it like visiting a restaurant where you’ve grown the product yourself?
Since starting at Farm.One, Tom has visited our customers like Daniel, Butter, Mission Chinese Food and Le Turtle.
“That is a lot of fun! The first thing I ever ate in a restaurant from this farm was nasturtium, when I was at Butter. My girlfriend ate most of it while I was texting David (Farm.One’s Head Horticulturalist) about it! The second was Le Turtle — and that’s where we got the full experience; Chef Victor hit us with a lot of things that we grow. He did it on purpose, I know!
“I try everything growing often on the farm so I know how it’s doing, but one of the plants I tasted rarely before was Bull’s Blood. On that occasion, at Le Turtle it stood out though, because we had had a nightmare with a lot of failed batches of that product — getting just two trays-worth out of 6 planted trays by painstakingly picking through it for what felt like hours. So when I saw it on a dish at Le Turtle I had to laugh— that was definitely the fruits of my labor! It tasted that much better.
What’s the best part of the job?
“It’s a lot of fun to visit restaurants, but it’s even better to hear from Sales the compliments we’ve had from chefs. I take a lot of pleasure from giving chefs the best product possible. So when I hear back from chefs, it gives me a huge amount of satisfaction.
Tom deep in the Nepitella
Any advice for wannabe urban farmers?
“Patience and persistence. Despite all the work we put in to systematize and automate, at the ground level it’s a very exact science.
“The smallest of details can throw off germination and maturation of any plant. A tray of Dragon’s Tongue might dry out if you have a slightly elevated side of a tray. Flood height might vary. New trays don’t always fit perfectly with the old trays. Even a few millimeters can make a difference sometimes.
“Attention to detail is vital. I’m meticulous. It’s the only way you can have success with this kind of farm. Constantly adjusting and improving as a farmer and pushing that back to the business is essential.
While automation and software helps, a close eye ensures nothing slips through the gaps.
“I love the challenge and I enjoy the work. I don’t mind the extra effort. You have to have a love for it, and an ability to learn from your mistakes.
Find out more about our farming team and how they work with the overview video below, narrated by Head of Operations, Dana.
Inspired? You can now own a piece of Farm.One at http://farm.one/invest.