Is Boston The Next Urban Farming Paradise?

The city’s healthy startup culture is contributing to Boston’s rapidly growing reputation as a haven for organic food and urban farming initiatives

The inspiration for Boston-based Freight Farms was launched after co-founders and friends Jon Friedman and Ben McNamara realized that New England currently gets almost 90% of its food from outside the region. Photograph: Freight Farms

Sunday 16 April 2017 10.00 EDT | Oset Babur

For those seeking mild, year-round temperatures and affordable plots of land, Boston, with its long winters and dense population, isn’t the first city that comes to mind.

But graduates of the city’s nearly 35 colleges and universities are contributing to the area’s growing reputation as a haven for startups challenging and transforming age-old industries, from furniture to political fundraising. The city’s strong entrepreneurial spirit, combined with progressive legislation like the passing of Article 89, has also turned Boston into one of the nation’s hubs for urban agriculture.

The inspiration for Freight Farms, an urban farming business headquartered in South Boston, was launched after co-founders and friends Jon Friedman and Ben McNamara realized that New England currently gets almost 90% of its food from outside the region, yet 10-15% of households still report that they don’t have enough to eat. The over reliance on imported produce drove Friedman and McNamara to launch a Kickstarter campaign in 2011 for their farming business, which sells freight containers to would-be farmers, many of whom aren’t necessarily farmers by trade, but are interested in contributing to sustainable living. A Freight Farms container is designed to be largely self sustained, and uses solar energy to provide the majority of electricity required to grow the crops. Julia Pope, who works in farmer education and support at the organization, says people can find the freight containers squeezed between two buildings, in a parking lot, under an overpass, or virtually anywhere in the modern urban terrain.

Freight Farms has spread north from Boston to Canada, and Pope says there are over just over 100 of the company’s container farms operating in the US alone. The company outfits each 40-ft container with the equipment for the entire farming cycle, from germination to harvest. This set of equipment, which the company calls Leafy Green Machine (LGM), creates a hydroponic system, a soil-free growing method that uses recirculated water with higher nutrient levels to help plants grow. Vertical growing towers line the inside of the shipping container, with LED lights optimized for each stage of the growing cycle. Farmers can manage conditions remotely using a smartphone app called Farmhand, which connects to live cameras inside the container.

Freight Farms has spread north from Boston to Canada, and Pope says there are over just over 100 of the company’s container farms operating in the US alone. Photograph: Freight Farms

Pope says that of customers who have purchased the LGM, over 50 have started small businesses, each consistently producing two acres worth of food year-round. One of these businesses is Corner Stalk Farm, which sells locally grown leafy greens – including kale, mint and arugula, as well as over twenty varieties of lettuce, to cater to demand at various farmers markets in Boston and Somerville, the city’s landmark Boston Public Market, and through orders from produce delivery services (such as Amazon Fresh) that are increasingly popular in cities. It’s no small feat to own and operate the LGM: purchasing one of the containers will run an aspiring business $85,000, with operating costs adding up to another estimated $13,000 per year.

Luckily, steady consumer demand, evidenced by over 139 farmers markets across the state of Massachusetts alone, help to offset the high costs to starting and running an urban farm. Hannah Brown, a resident of Boston’s North End, regularly shops at the Boston Public Market, which sells locally sourced goods from over thirty small businesses. “There aren’t many stores with really fresh produce in the immediate area, so it’s definitely filled a need for me,” she says. Brown also finds the small business owners who sell their produce at the market to be an invaluable resource: “It’s great to be able to talk with the people working the produce stands, because they can recommend what’s freshest and how to prepare it.” As a result, she says she’s taken to only buying produce that’s in season and adjusting her habits to align with what’s available to her locally.

The growing popularity of urban farming owes much to a former mayor, Thomas Menino, and one of his final acts while in office. He signed into law Article 89, expanded zoning laws to permit farming in freight containers, on rooftops, and in larger ground-level farms. Article 89 made it possible for those practitioners to sell their locally grown food within city limits.

One business that has taken advantage of Article 89 is Green City Growers, which runs Fenway Farms, is a 5,000-sq ft rooftop farm above Fenway Park. The rooftop is lined with plants grown in stackable milk crate containers, which are equipped with a weather sensitive drip irrigation system that monitors the moisture of the soil in the crates to make sure plants get just the right amount of water. Although the farm isn’t open to the general public, it is visible to fans from the baseball park, and a stop on the Fenway Park tour.

In late 2013, the landscape for urban agriculture in Boston got a lot greener with the passing of Article 89, which made it possible for those practitioners to sell their locally grown food within city limits. Photograph: Freight Farms

Boston is far from alone in passing legislation that makes farming a possibility for city-dwellers. In Sacramento, there are even tax incentives for property owners who agree to put their vacant plots of land to active agricultural use for at least five years, while the city council of San Antonio voted just last year to pass legislation that makes urban farming legal throughout city limits. And while Boston boasts home to various agricultural startups and nonprofits, entrepreneurs in other parts of the country are contributing to a national farming movement in their own ways: Kimbal Musk, brother of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, recently set up a container farm in an old Pfizer factory in Brooklyn, while Local Roots Farms is turning shipping containers into urban farms (using the same hydroponic method that the LGM uses) across the Los Angeles area.

As Bostonians now find themselves with a slew of new options to grow and profit from fresh produce on rooftops and in alleyways, some nonprofit organizations are looking to use urban farming as an educational asset. CitySprouts was born in Cambridge in 2001 after executive director Jane Hirschi identified what she calls “an immense need for children to understand where their food was coming from”. CitySprouts teams up with educators to set aside class time for students to cultivate gardens on school property that they can grow their own food in. There are now over 20 public schools using CitySprouts gardens in the Boston area, and more than 300 public school teachers participating in the fresh food program.

Caitlin O’Donnell, who teaches first grade at Fletcher Maynard Academy in nearby Cambridge, says the program does a great job of giving urban kids the opportunity to interact with their environment in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise, she adds. “Whether students are digging for worms, sketching roots structures, crushing apples for cider, or sampling chives and basil, their hands are busy and their senses are engaged ...what makes City Sprouts most effective (and exceptional) is that it is collaborative and flexible by design.”

Boston’s rise in the national urban farming movement also has helped to make locally grown produce more available to low-income residents. Leah Shafer recalls that she was able to use food stamps at a farmer’s market to receive half-off of her purchases of kale, blueberries, and more.

“It made it possible for me to buy organic, local produce that I otherwise just wouldn’t have been able to afford. I don’t think I would have been able to support local farmers without that discount,” she says.

Kimbal Musk's Tech Revolution Starts With Mustard Greens

A leafy green grows in Brooklyn. (Photo by Natalie Keyssar)

The other Musk is leading a band of hipster Brooklyn farmers on a mission to overthrow Big Ag.

Farmers have always had a tough time. They have faced rapacious bankers, destructive pests, catastrophic weather, and relentless pressure to cut prices to serve huge grocery suppliers.

And now they must compete with Brooklyn hipsters. Hipsters with high-tech farms squeezed into 40-foot containers that sit in parking lots and require no soil, and can ignore bad weather and even winter.

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No, the 10 young entrepreneurs of the “urban farming accelerator” Square Roots and their ilk aren’t going to overthrow big agribusiness — yet. Each of them has only the equivalent of a two-acre plot of land, stuffed inside a container truck in a parking lot. And the food they grow is decidedly artisanal, sold to high-end restaurants and office workers who are amenable to snacking on Asian Greens instead of Doritos. But they are indicative of an ag tech movement that’s growing faster than Nebraska corn in July. What’s more, they are only a single degree of separation from world-class disrupters Tesla and SpaceX: Square Roots is co-founded by Kimbal Musk, sibling to Elon and board member of those two visionary tech firms.

Kimbal’s passion is food, specifically “real” food — not tainted by overuse of pesticides or adulterated with sugar or additives. His group of restaurants, named The Kitchen after its Boulder, Colorado, flagship, promotes healthy meals; a sister foundation creates agricultural classrooms that center a teaching curriculum around modular gardens that allow kids to experience and measure the growing process. More recently, he has been on a crusade to change the eating habits of the piggiest American cities, beginning with Memphis.

“This is the dawn of real food,” says Musk. “Food you can trust. Good for the body. Good for farmers.”

Square Roots is an urban farming initiative which allows “entrepreneurs” to grow organic, local vegetables indoors at its new site in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. (Photo by Natalie Keyssar)

Square Roots is one more attempt to extend the “impact footprint” of The Kitchen, says its CEO and co-founder Tobias Peggs, a longtime friend of Musk’s. (Musk himself is executive chair.) Peggs is a lithe Brit with a doctorate in AI who has periodically been involved in businesses with Musk, along with some other ventures, and wound up working with him on food initiatives. Both he and Musk claim to sense that we’re at a moment when a demand for real food is “not just a Brooklyn hipster food thing,” but rather a national phenomenon rising out of a deep and wide distrust of the industrial food system, a triplet that Peggs enunciates with disdain. People want local food, he says. And when he and Musk talk about this onstage, there are often young people in the audience who agree with them but don’t know how to do something about it. “In tech, if I have an idea for a mobile app, I get a developer in the Ukraine, get an angel investor to give me 100k for showing up, and I launch a company,” Peggs says. “In the world of real food, there’s no easy path.”

The company is headquartered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, right next to the Marcy Projects, which were the early stomping grounds of Jay Z. It’s one of over 40 food-related startups housed in a former Pfizer chemicals factory, which at one time produced a good chunk of the nation’s ammonia. (Consider its current role as a hub of crunchy food goodness as a form of penance.) Though Peggs’ office and a communal area and kitchen are in the building, the real action at Square Roots is in the parking lot. That’s where the company has plunked down ten huge shipping containers, the kind you try to swerve around when they’re dragged by honking 18-wheel trucks. These are the farms: $85,000 high-tech growing chambers pre-loaded with sensors, exotic lighting, precision plumbing for irrigation, vertical growing towers, a climate control system, and, now, leafy greens.

Musk and Peggs (center) with the Brooklyn growers. (Photo by Steven Levy)

Each of these containers is tended by an individual entrepreneur, chosen from a call for applicants last summer that drew 500 candidates for the 10 available slots. Musk and Peggs selected the winners by passion and grit as opposed to agricultural acumen. Indeed, the resumes of these urban farmers reveal side gigs like musician, yoga teacher, and Indian dance fanatic. (The company does have a full-time farming expert and other resources to help with the growing stuff.) After all, the idea of Square Roots is not about developing farm technology, but rather about training people to make a business impact by distributing, marketing, and profiting off healthy food. “You can put this business in a box — it’s not complicated,” says Musk. “The really hard part is how to be an entrepreneur.”

Peggs gave me a tour late last year as the first crops were maturing. The farmers themselves were not in attendance. Every season is growing season in the ag tech world, but once you’ve planted and until you harvest, your farms can generally be run on an iPhone, and virtually all the operations are cloud-based. Peggs unlocked the back of a truck and lifted up the sliding door to reveal racks of some sort of leafy greens. Everything was bathed in a hot pink light, making it look like a set of a generic sci-fi movie. (That’s because the plants need only the red-blue part of the color spectrum for photosynthesis.) Also, the baby plants seemed to be growing sideways. “Imagine you’re on a two-dimensional field and you then tip the field on its side and hang the seedlings off,” Peggs says. “That means you’re able to squeeze the equivalent of a two-acre outdoor field inside a 40-foot shipping container.”

Square Roots didn’t have to invent this technology: You can pretty much buy off-the-shelf indoor farming operations. We owe this circumstance to what once was the dominant driver of inside-the-box ag tech: the cultivation of marijuana. The advances concocted by high-end weed wizards are now poised to power a food revolution. “Cannabis is to indoor growing as porn was to the internet,” says Pegg.

Using light, temperature, and other factors easily controlled in the nano-climate of a container farm, it’s even possible to design taste. If you know the conditions in various regions at a given time, you can replicate the flavors of a crop grown at a specific time and place. “If the best basil you ever tasted was in Italy in the summer of 2006, I can recreate that here,” Peggs says.

So far, the Square Roots entrepreneurs haven’t achieved that level of precision—but they have jiggered the controls to make tasty flora. And they’ve used imagination in selling their crops. One business model that’s taken off has the farmers hand-delivering $7 single-portion bags of greens to office workers at their desks, so the buyers can nibble on them during the day, like they would potato chips. Others supply high-end restaurants. Occasionally Square Roots will run its version of a farmer’s market at the Flushing Avenue headquarters or other locations, such as restaurants in off hours.

The prices are higher than you’d find in an average supermarket, or even at Whole Foods. Peggs doesn’t have to reach far for an analogy — the cost of the first Teslas, two-seaters whose six-figure pricetags proved no obstacle for eager buyers. “Think of it as the roadster of lettuce,” he says. Later, Musk himself will elaborate: “The passion the entrepreneurs put into it makes the food taste 10 times better.”

The Musk Who Wants to Change the Way We Eat
Kimbal Musk serves on brother Elon’s boards, but his passion is making Americans healthier — even in BBQ-soaked Memphis…backchannel.com

One selling point of the food is its hyperlocal-ness — grown in the neighborhood where it’s consumed. The Square Roots urban growers often transport their harvest not by truck but subway. While this circumstance does piggyback on the recent mania for crops grown in local terroir, I wonder aloud to Peggs whether food produced in a high-tech container in a dense urban neighborhood, even if it’s a few blocks away, has the same appeal as fresh-off-the-farm crops that are grown on actual farms. In, like, dirt. Can you tell by a grape’s taste if it came from Williamsburg or Crown Heights? I’m having a bit of trouble with that.

Peggs brushes off my objection. Local is local. It’s about transparency and connectedness. “Here’s what I know,” he says. “Consumers are disconnected from the food, disconnected from the people who grow it. We’re putting a farm four stops on the subway from SoHo, where you can know your farmer, meet your farmer. You can hang out and see them harvest. So whether the grower is a no-till soil-based rural farmer or a 23-year or dream-big entrepreneur in a refurbished shipping container, both are on the same side, fighting a common enemy, which is the industrial food system.”

Plants grow in Nabeela Lakhani’s container. (Photo by Natalie Keyssar)

Square Roots is far from the only operation signing on to an incipient boom in indoor agriculture. Indeed, ag tech is now a hot field for investors — maybe not so much that founders can get $100k for just showing up, but big enough that some very influential billionaires have ponied up their dollars. I spoke recently to Matt Barnard, the CEO of a company called Plenty. His investors include funds backed by Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos. In its test facility in a South San Francisco warehouse, Plenty is developing techniques that it hopes will bring high-tech agriculture to the shelves of the Walmarts of the world.

In Barnard’s view, indoor agriculture is the only way we will feed the billions of new humans predicted to further crowd our planet. “We have no choice,” he says. “We are out of acreage [of productive land] in many places. In the US, the percentage of imported produce keeps growing.”

Going indoors and using technology, he says, will not only give us more food, but also better food, “beyond organic quality.”

As its name implies, Plenty wants to scale into a huge company that will feed millions. Barnard, who previously built technology infrastructure for the likes of Verizon and Comcast, has a vision of hundreds of distribution hubs — think Amazon or Walmart, near every population center, putting perhaps 85 percent of the world’s population within a short drive of a center. Without having to optimize crops so they can be driven thousands of miles from farm to grocery store, almost all food will be local. “We’ll have food for people, not for trucks,” he says. “This enables us to grow from libraries of seeds that have never been grown commercially, that will taste awesome. These will be the strawberries that beforehand, you only got from your grandmother’s yard.”

As far as that goal goes — better-than-organic crops grown near where you consume them — Plenty is aligned with Square Roots. But Barnard insists that the key element in ag tech will be scale. “Growing food inside is the easy part,” says Barnard. The hardest part is to make food that seven billion people can eat, at prices that fit in everybody’s grocery budget.”

Green Acres? Try Pink Acres! Pictured here, Square Roots farms — and in background is Jay Z’s boyhood home, the Marcy Projects. (Photo by Natalie Keyssar)

Peggs and Musk themselves are interested in scale. They see Square Roots as grass roots — seedlings of a movement that will blossom into a profusion of food entrepreneurs who subscribe to their vision of authentic, healthy chow grown locally.

Earlier this year, Musk dropped by Square Roots to show it off to investors and friends, and then to give a pep talk over lunch to the entrepreneurs. Midway through their year at Square Roots, these urban ag tech pioneers were still enthusiastic as they described their wares. Nabeela Lakhani, who studied nutrition and public health at NYU, described how her distinctive variety of spicy mustard greens had gained a local following. “People lose their minds over this,” she says. Electra Jarvis, who hails from the Bronx, has done a land-office business in selling 2.5-ounce packages of her Asian Greens for $7 each to office workers. (That’s almost $50 a pound.) Maxwell Carmack, describing himself as a lover of nature and technology, packages a variety of his “strong spinach.”

After a tour of the parking lot — the 21st century lower forty — the guests leave and Musk schools the farmer-entrepreneurs as they feast on a spread of sandwiches and salads featuring their recently harvested products. It’s a special treat to hear from the cofounder, as he not only has that famous surname, but also is himself a superstar in the healthy food movement, as well as an entrepreneur who’s done well in his own right. And unlike his brother, who can sometime be dour, Kimbal is a social animal who lights up as he engages people on his favorite subjects.

“Are you making money?” he asks them. Most of them nod affirmatively. Only recently, they have discovered that the “Farmer2Office” program — the one that essentially sells tasty rabbit food for caviar prices — can be a big revenue generator, with 40 corporate customers so far. Peggs guesses that by the end of the year some of the farmers might be generating a $100,000-a-year run rate (the entrepreneurs pay operating expenses and share revenue with the company). But of course, because Square Roots is covering the capital costs of the farms themselves, it’s hard to claim they’re reaping huge profits.

Musk, in cowboy hat, gets back to his roots. Peggs is standing behind him. (Photo by Steven Levy)

“It’s a grind building a business,” Musk tells them. “It’s like chewing glass. If you don’t like a glass sandwich, stop right now.” The young ag tech growers stare at him, their forks frozen in mid-air until he continues. “But you choose your destiny, choose the people around you,” Musk continues.

And then he speaks of the opportunity for Square Roots. This year may only be the first of many cycles where he and Peggs pick 10 new farmers. Within a few years, he will have a small army of real-food entrepreneurs, devoted to disrupting the industry with authentic crops, grown locally. “The real problem is how to reach everybody,” he says. “We’re not going to solve that problem at Square Roots. But there are so many ways you can impact the world when you’re out of here.”

“Whole Foods is stuck in bricks and mortar,” he continues. “We can become the Amazon of real food. If not us, one of you guys. But someone is going to solve that problem.”

The urban farmers look energized. Lunch continues. The salad, fresh from the parking lot, is delicious.

Steven LevyFollow

Editor of Backchannel. Also, I write stuff. Apr 14,2017

Creative Art Direction by Redindhi Studio
Photography by Natalie Keyssar / Steven Levy

Lifelong Farmer Looks East: CEA Farms Wants to Bring Indoor Farm to Eastern Loudoun

Don Virts in his hydroponic greenhouse at CEA Farms in Purcellville. CEA stands for Controlled Environment Agriculture, and Virts says it yields much more produce for much less water, fertilizer, and pesticide. (Renss Greene/Loudoun Now)

Lifelong Farmer Looks East: CEA Farms Wants to Bring Indoor Farm to Eastern Loudoun

 2017-04-14 Renss Greene  0 Comment

Don Virts is a new type of farmer.

His family has worked the land in Loudoun for generations, growing beef and produce. But things have changed now. The old ways aren’t sustainable for a small farm anymore, especially with Loudoun’s pricey land values.

In fact, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, farm households bringing in less than $350,000 annually make far more from off-farm income. Although the USDA has very broad definitions for what makes a farm. Perhaps more telling, large-scale farms bringing in more than $1 million a year make up only 2.9 percent of farms, but 42 percent of farm production.

Don Virts saw that his family’s farming business wouldn’t survive without adapting, and in 2015 he started one of the county’s first commercial hydroponic greenhouses. There, he says he gets ten times the yield from his plants, year-round, using 50 percent less fertilizer, 50-80 percent less water, 99 percent less pesticide and fungicide, and zero herbicide. He says if he could afford to build a higher-tech greenhouse, he could do away with pesticide and fungicide altogether.

“I have no desire to be certified organic, because I fully believe that this is better than organic,” Virts said. “Anything grown organically outdoors, you throw a lot of stuff on it to control those problems. It might be approved for organic use, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe.” He said that every year, more and more chemical treatments are approved for organic use.

His greenhouse has a much higher up-front cost than a traditional patch of tomatoes, but after that, costs are lower and production is much higher, on a much smaller footprint.

And he says he can do it in Loudoun’s increasingly urbanized east.

“I had to ask myself, what does Loudoun offer that I can take advantage of?” Virts said. “And what it boils down to is, the same thing that’s putting me out of business is going to turn around to be the thing that’s going to keep me in business.”

By that he means Loudoun’s booming, highly educated, high-income population. He says he can’t keep up with the demand at his CEA Farms Market and Grill in Purcellville, and thinks he can set up another one in the east, bringing the produce closer to the consumer.

“What I’m trying to do is place these things all over the place, and then we have these islands of food production,” Virts said. Instead of the traditional model of produce packed and shipped in from far away, even other hemispheres, Virts wants people eating food picked that morning only a stone’s throw away. So far, it’s working at his greenhouse in Purcellville.

“I built this as a proof of concept, so people would come out there and see this, and see I don’t have a crazy vision,” Virts said. “It’s practical.” He said he knows a landowner in eastern Loudoun who is “very interested” providing him space for a growth facility but hasn’t signed a contract yet.

It’s not just an evolution of how food is grown, but an evolution of the business of growing food.

“This is something one small family farmer cannot do by himself,” Virts said. “I don’t have the resources. I don’t know the restaurant business, I don’t know the renewable energy business.”

The USDA calculated that in 2015, for every dollar spent on food, only 8.6 cents went to the farmer. For every dollar spent in a restaurant, only 3 cents went to the farmer.

Source: USDA Economic Research Service

Virts figures that by growing food close to where it’s eaten, using renewable energy, and cutting out middlemen, he can reclaim most of the money spent on food processing, packaging, transportation, wholesale and retail trading, and energy to bring food to the plate. Those account for 47.6 cents every dollar spent on food.

All that may add up to helping offset the high cost of land in eastern Loudoun. It would give consumers certainty about where their food came from.

His idea would also keep almost all the money spent on food in the local economy, and by cutting down on long-distance transportation and using renewable sources of energy, he can do his part to combat global warming. He has a farmer’s practical, pragmatic outlook on that topic—it has made it more difficult for him, with changing weather patterns and more intense storms.

“I’ve witnessed it on this farm,” Virts said. “When I was kid in high school, we used to take our pickup trucks on this pond [on his farm.] I haven’t been able to go ice skating there in years.”

Along with his other ideas—such as a restaurant with tiered seating overlooking his existing greenhouse—Virts is trying out all kinds of ways to make his family farm work.

“At some point, everybody has to wake up and think about this: Could you do your job, could anybody out there do their job, if they were hungry?” Virts said. “And that’s what it all boils down to, so somebody’s got to figure out that these five acres are worth more money in the long run with a self-sustaining business like this, producing something that everybody needs two or three times a day, than to build townhouses or apartments on it.”

Ultimately, if he can get food production up and running somewhere in eastern Loudoun, it will be another proof-of-concept for the future of small scale agriculture.

“As we get bigger and better, as we build our first one,” Virts said, “there’s going to be some lessons learned there.”

rgreene@loudounnow.com
@RenssGreene

First European Vertical Farm To Open in Holland

First European Vertical Farm To Open in Holland

News item | 14-04-2017 | 11:56

Soon, the lettuce in your salad may come from a so-called vertical farm. Vertical farming, growing fruit and vegetables in tall buildings without daylight, is on the rise around the globe. This year, the Dutch town Dronten will be home to the first European vertical farm. Staay Food Group is building a nine-story-building, in which their company Fresh Care Convenience will cultivate various types of lettuce.

Lettuce with LED lighting - Image: Staay Food Group

Climate Chambers

Each floor in the flat will have specially designed climate chambers with LED lighting, which will produce 30,000 crops of rucola, lollo bionda, lollo rosso and curly endive a week. That’s twice as many crops as can be grown in traditional farms in a week, at a rate about 3 times as fast.

Staay Food Group is investing 8 million euros in the project. A large part of the costs is for special LED lighting. Philips is developing lights that change colours, to influence the taste and the vitamin count.

The first crops of lettuce will be processed by Fresh Care Conveniencefor ready-to-eat meal salads for the German market. They will hit Dutch supermarkets soon after.

Sustainable

Vertical farming has several advantages and is sustainable. With multiple floors to grow crops, a high-rise has a large surface area in a relatively small space. In a multi-floored building, all crops are sheltered from bad weather and insects, so farmers can grow them without insecticides.

Some vertical farms use a circular system, expanding their business with fish and adding fish farms to the building. The fish excrement is then collected and used to fertilize the vegetables.

The climate chambers in Dronten are energy efficient, using less water, electricity and fertilizer than traditional farming. They aim for CO2 neutral production.

City Farming

The fact that high-rise buildings can be built in city centres is an added benefit. Fresh products can now be grown very close to the consumer. Which answers the increased demand for sustainable, locally grown products.

Faith-Based Organization Alleges Vertical Farm Operator Breached Contract

Faith-Based Organization Alleges Vertical Farm Operator Breached Contract

by Philip Gonzales | 

Apr. 12, 2017, 10:23am

CHARLESTON — A faith-based organization is suing a vertical farms operator, alleging breach of contract and conversion.

Kanawha Institute for Social Research & Action Inc filed a complaint March 21 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia against Green Spirit Farms LLC of New Buffalo, Michigan, alleging failure to fulfill its obligations under the contract.

According to the complaint, on Dec. 22, 2014, the parties entered into a contract, and Green Spirit agreed to develop an initial vertical farm using its vertical growing system. Despite payments totaling $222,830, no multiple vertical growing systems were delivered to the institute and no services in connection with the development of the vertical farm were provided. 

The plaintiff alleges Green Spirit Farms has not provided the services and the growing systems, failed to refund the plaintiff's payments as promised and wrongfully retained and exercised dominion over the institute's property.

Kanawha Institute seeks trial by jury, to recover the payments made to the defendant, with interest, punitive and consequential damages, attorney fees and court costs and all other just and equitable relief. It is represented by attorney Mark Goldner of Hughes & Goldner PLLC in Charleston.

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia Case number 2:17-cv-01963

Organic Entrepreneur in Ripon Focuses on Fresh

Organic Entrepreneur in Ripon Focuses on Fresh

Nate Beck , USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin 8:53 a.m. CT Aug. 22, 2016

Brian Ernst, owner of Ernessi Organics in Ripon, grows microgreens and veggies in his basement urban farm.(Photo: Nate Beck/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)Buy Photo

RIPON - In a basement below Bluemke’s appliance shop in downtown Ripon, thousands of vegetables sprout every week, bound for the aisles of one of northeast Wisconsin’s biggest grocers.

Since it was founded two years ago, Ernessi Organics has grown to supply its greens to 16 grocery stores, including 13 Festival Foods locations across Wisconsin. Basil, amaranth and other veggies grown here can be found nestled in entrees at The Roxy, Primo Italian Restaurant and other eateries in the Fox Valley.

Ernessi’s fast success turns on consumer appetite for fresh and wholesome ingredients prepared locally, and retail’s efforts to catch up.

Ripon approved a $60,000 loan to the company last summer that helped pay for custom-made lights and other infrastructure. With a facility that produces 3,000 packages of fresh greens weekly, Ernessi can hardly keep pace with demand so the company recently launched an expansion that will double how much it can produce this fall.

So what does it take to start a blossoming company like this?

It’s about charging forward, head down, at the hurdles before you, said company founder Brian Ernst. “As an entrepreneur, you see a vacuum in the market and you go for it,” he said.

A geologist educated at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Ernst found work after college at a large company, but soon tired of the work. He began tinkering with hydroponics, the process of growing plants without soil, in his basement. Ernst and his friend Tim Alessi began testing how light affects the growth of herbs and vegetables, settling on a combination that tricks plants into thinking that spring has just sprung, causing them to sprout faster.

In 2014, Ernst’s employer laid him off. Rather than shopping his resume around to other companies, Ernst, at the urging of his wife, decided to turn this hydroponic hobby into a company.

At Ripon's Ernessi Organics, a variety of microgreens and vegetables grow in a basement urban farm. (Photo: Nate Beck/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

But to do that would require cash.

So he and his wife sold everything they could: TVs, furniture, Ernst’s 401(K), all of it. With $10,000, the company was born, three months after he and his wife had their second child, while raising a 3-year-old.

So, no. Starting a business isn’t about safety.

The draw about this breed of farming is that it can be done anywhere. Inside the Ernessi operation, floor-to-ceiling steel racks support rows of budding plants on trays. One four-foot-by-eight-foot palate of veggies yields 576 plants in just 35 days, using much less water than a typical farm would. And here in Wisconsin, with its brutal winters, there’s no end to Ernessi’s growing season.

This latest expansion will allow the company to double its production and deliver its plants faster, with a new refrigerated truck. The company’s business is built on supplying plants to grocery stores or restaurants less than 24 hours after they are cut, for the same price as producers elsewhere.

To meet this, Ernst said expanding the company to different parts of the Midwest will likely require him to franchise the company. These veggies are no longer local, he said, if they travel more than two hours to their destination. So in the next five years, Ernst hopes to start a location in Duluth, Minnesota, for example, that would supply produce to grocery stores and others in that market.

For now though, Ernst is focused on the company’s expansion, and growing new products, lettuce, gourmet mushrooms and more. He plans to use leftovers from the beer-making process at nearby Knuth Brewing Co., a Ripon-based brewery, for the soil to grow mushrooms. Lately, he’s been wheeling a blue plastic drum two blocks up Watson Street to the brewery to collect the stuff.

“If you have the drive, starting a business is not a hard decision,” Ernst said. “Any entrepreneur will tell you, there’s never a good time to start a business.”

The harder you work, the smaller these hurdles seem.

Reach Nate Beck at 920-858-9657 or nbeck@gannett.com; on Twitter: @NateBeck9.

At Ripon's Ernessi Organics, a variety of microgreens and vegetables grow in a basement urban farm. (Photo: Nate Beck/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

Buying The Farm

Buying The Farm

Alyssa Bereznak

Staff Writer, The Ringer

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

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

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

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

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

And then there was the kale.

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

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

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

(Bowery)

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

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

(Bowery)

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

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

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

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

(Square Roots)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(BrightFarms)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(AeroFarms)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Square Roots)

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

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

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

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

'Vertical Farming' Brings Futuristic Growing Methods To Middle Tennessee

'Vertical Farming' Brings Futuristic Growing Methods To Middle Tennessee

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

CREDIT CAROLINE LELAND

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

CAROLINE LELAND

Originally published on April 11, 2017 9:56 am

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

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

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

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

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

CREDIT CAROLINE LELAND

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

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

All About Efficiency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niche Market Or Mass Movement?

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

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

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

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

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

Africa Needs Its Own Version of the Vertical Farm to Feed Growing Cities

Africa Needs Its Own Version of the Vertical Farm to Feed Growing Cities

April 10, 2017

ANALYSIS By: Esther Ndumi Ngumbi, Auburn University

The Netherlands is building its first large-scale commercial vertical indoor farm. It's expected to serve Europe's largest supermarket chains with high quality, pesticide-free fresh cut lettuce.

Vertical farms use high-tech lighting and climate controlled buildings to grow crops like leafy greens or herbs indoors while using less water and soil. Because it's a closed growing system, with controlled evaporation from plants, these farms use 95% less water than traditional farms. At the same time, most vertical farms don't need soil because they use aeroponics or hydroponic systems - these dispense nutrients needed for plants to grow via mist or water. This technique is ideal for meeting the challenges of urbanization and the rising demand by consumers for high-quality, pesticide-free food.

They're not unusual. In recent years, there's been a gradual increase in the number of vertical farming enterprises, especially in North America and Asia. In the US, Chicago is home to several vertical farms, while New Jersey is home to AeroFarms, the world's largest vertical farm. Other countries such as Japan, Singapore, Italy, and Brazil have also seen more vertical farms. As the trend continues, vertical farming is expected to be valued at US$5.80 billion by 2022.

Africa faces similar trends that demand it considers vertical farms. Firstly, it's urbanizing at a fast rate. By 2025 more than 70% of its population is expected to live in the cities. Secondly, many of these urban consumers are demanding and willing to spend much more to buy high quality, pesticide free food.

Yet, despite sharing trends that have fuelled the vertical farming movement, Africa is yet to see a boom in the industry.

A few unique versions are sprouting up on the continent. These show that the African versions of vertical farms may not necessarily follow the same model of other countries. It's important to establish what the barriers to entry are, and what African entrepreneurs need to do to ensure more vertical farms emerge.

Barriers To Vertical Farming

Initial financial investments are huge. For example, a complete modern (6,410sqm) vertical farm capable of growing roughly 1 million kilos of produce a year can cost up to $80 to $100 million.

There also needs to be an upfront investment in research. Many of the successful vertical farms in the developed world, including the one launching in the Netherlands, invest in research before they go live. This ranges from studying the most appropriate system that should be used to the best lighting system and seed varieties, as well investigating the many other ingredients that determine the success or failure of the farm.

Access to reliable and consistent energy is another barrier. Many African cities frequently experience power cuts and this could prove to be a big challenge for innovators wanting to venture in vertical farming business.

Faced with these challenges, entrepreneurs thinking of venturing into vertical farming in Africa need to put in more thought, creativity, and innovation in their design and building methods.

They need to be less expensive to install and maintain. They also have to take into consideration the available local materials. For example, instead of depending on LED lighting system, African versions can utilize solar energy and use locally available materials such as wood. This means that entrepreneurs should begin small and use low-tech innovations to see what works.

As innovators locally figure out what works best for them, there will be further variations in the vertical farms between African countries.

African Versions

In Uganda, for instance, faced with lack of financial resources to build a modern vertical farm and limited access to land and water, urban farmers are venturing into vertically stacked wooden crates units. These simple units consist of a central vermicomposting chamber. Water bottles are used to irrigate the crops continuously. These stacked simple vertical gardens consume less water and allow urban farmers to grow vegetables such as kale to supply urban markets. At the moment, 15 such farms have been installed in Kampala and they hope to grow the number in the coming years.

In Kenya, sack gardens represent a local and practical form of a vertical farm. Sack gardens, made from sisal fibres are cheap to design and build. One sack costs about US$0.12. Most importantly, they use local materials and fewer resources yet give yields that help farmers achieve the same outcomes as vertical farms in the developed world. As a result, many have turned into sack gardening. In Kibera, for example, over 22,000 households have farmed on sacks.

Also in Kenya, Ukulima Tech builds modern vertical farms for clients in Nairobi. At the moment it's created four prototypes of vertical farms; tower garden, hanging gardens, A-Frame gardens and multifarious gardens. Each of these prototypes uses a variation of the vertical garden theme, keeping water use to a minimum while growing vegetables in a closed and insect free environment.

The continent has unique opportunities for vertical farms. Future innovators and entrepreneurs should be thinking of how to specialise growing vegetables to meet a rise in demand of Africa's super vegetables by urban consumers. Because of their popularity, startups are assured of ready markets from the urban dwellers. In Nairobi, for example, these vegetables are already becoming popular.

Feeding Africa's rapidly growing urban population will continue to be a daunting challenge, but vertical farming - and its variations - is one of the most innovative approaches that can be tapped into as part of an effort to grow fresh, healthy, nutritious and pesticide-free food for consumers.

Now is the time for African entrepreneurs and innovators to invest in designing and building them.

Disclosure statement

Esther Ndumi Ngumbi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Growing lettuce at a vertical farm.

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

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

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

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

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

Christine Havens: What prompted you to start Vertical Harvest?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information about Vertical Harvest, click here.

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

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

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

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

By Sarah Larimer April 10 

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

But on the inside . . . well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Follow @slarimer

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

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

April 10, 2017

Written by: Maria Halkias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Photographer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Dirt, No Problem: A Revolution In Growing

No Dirt, No Problem: A Revolution In Growing

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

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

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

Courtesy of EcoCentric Farms

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

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

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

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

•  

Courtesy of EcoCentric Farms

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

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

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

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

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

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

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

Henry A. Barrios / The Californian

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

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

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

Now they can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An 'offering'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not the only fish in the pond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing the vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indoor Growing Is ‘Bringing Back Failed Varieties’

Indoor Growing Is ‘Bringing Back Failed Varieties’

Urban farms are allowing Rijk Zwaan to grow varieties that fell short in past crop trials due to weak disease resistance

Indoor growing with LEDs is allowing salad breeders to bring back high-performing varieties that didn't have strong enough disease resistance in crop trials, a city farming expert has revealed.

Indoor growing at facilities such as GrowUp Urban Farms in London has allowed plant breeder Rijk Zwaan to reinstate certain salad varieties and boost product quality and consistency, said Philips’ programme manager for city farming, Roel Jansson.

“Growing in indoor climate cells means there are no pests, no weather changes, no bugs,” he said. “Everything that was developed by Rijk Zwaan in previous years but maybe didn’t have enough disease resistance can be used indoors because here we don’t have disease. We can get better taste, better colouration, faster growth.”

Philips has a programme with fellow Dutch company Rijk Zwaan to screen different varieties to find out which are best for indoor growing and which LED light spectrum they respond best to.

While he accepts that indoor growing will never fully replace traditional salad outdoors or in polytunnels, he sees big potential for vertical growing in fresh-cut pre-packed salads.

“Indoor growing is the future for growing processed produce like fresh-cut pre-packed salads because you can grow bug-free and with stable nitrates,” he said. “You can predict shelf life, texture, quality because you always get the same product.”

In wholehead lettuce, Janssen believes opportunities are more limited since consumers are already used to washing the product before eating it.

“In Europe we could produce a full head of lettuce that you don’t need to wash anymore,” he said, “but people are used to washing it anyway so the added value would probably be limited.”

He added: “There is already a market [for wholehead lettuce you don’t have to wash] in North America and Asia Pacific but in countries with really high horticultural standards like the UK, Netherlands and Scandinavia I don’t think we would easily replace a greenhouse.”

Produce from indoor farms is typically twice the price, costing around the same as organic produce, however this could reduce in future as LEDs become cheaper and more efficient and higher-yielding varieties are developed.

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

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

The Future of Farming

By Mary Scott Hardaway

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

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

The genesis

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

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

The nitty gritty

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

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

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

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

Aeroponics in action

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

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

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

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

Altruistic farming

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

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

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

The future is now

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

How Vertical Farming Reinvents Agriculture

How Vertical Farming Reinvents Agriculture

Instead of growing crops in sunny fields or greenhouses, some companies stack them and grow them in old, dark warehouses with UV lights — saving water and harvesting produce faster.

• By Chris Baraniuk

6 April 2017

In an old carpet factory on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Kortrijk, an agricultural upheaval is being plotted: growing crops indoors, not out on a farm, stacked layer after layer under candy-coloured lights in an area the size of a studio flat.

It’s called vertical farming, and several companies have sprung up over the last 10 years or so, filling old warehouses and disused factories with structures that grow vegetables and herbs in cramped, artificially lit quarters out of the warm glow of the sun.

A firm called Urban Crops is one of them. In its case, a large frame is designed to hold conveyor belt-shunted trays of young plants under gently glowing blue and red LEDs in this former carpet factory.

But their system, largely automated, is still a work in progress. When I visit, a software update, scheduled at short notice, means that none of the machinery is working. Chief executive Maarten Vandecruys apologises and explains that, usually, the hardware allows the plants to be fed light and nutrients throughout their growing cycle. Then they can be harvested when the time is right.

“You don’t have the risk of contamination,” says Vandecruys as he points out that the area is sealed off. And each species of crop has a growing plan tailored to its needs, determining its nutrient uptake and light, for instance. Plus, in here, plants grow faster than they do on an outdoor farm.

Some companies are turning to vertical farming, which they say uses less water and grows crops faster than outdoor farms or greenhouses (Credit: Urban Crops)

Urban Crops says that vertical farming yields more crops per square metre than traditional farming or greenhouses do. Vertical farming also uses less water, grows plants faster, and can be used year-round – not just in certain seasons. The facilities also can, in theory, be built anywhere.

At Urban Crops, eight layers of plants can be stacked in an area of just 30sq m (322 sq ft). It’s not a commercial-sized operation, but rather a proving ground intended to show that the concept is viable.

“Basically, inside the system, every day is a summer day without a cloud in the sky,” says Vandecruys.

Stacks and stacks of vegetables and herbs are grown under UV lights, with individual stacks fitting in spaces just 30 sq m (Credit: Urban Crops)

But can you really grow anything in a building, with the right technology at your fingertips?

Vandecruys says it’s possible to grow practically anything inside – but that’s not always a good idea. He explains that it’s more cost-effective to stick to quicker-growing crops that yield a high market value. Herbs, baby greens for salad and edible flowers, for instance, fetch a lot more per kilogram than certain root vegetables, which are more likely to be grown outdoors the old-fashioned way for some time yet.

Basically, inside the system, every day is a summer day without a cloud in the sky - Maarten Vandecruys

By growing plants indoors, you get a lot of fine-grained control you get over the resources your crops need. It allows for rapid growing and predictable nutrient content. The LEDs, for example, can be turned up or down at will and, because they do not give out lots of heat like old filament bulbs, they can be kept close to the plants for optimal light absorption.

Of course, it’s possible to produce the same amount of veg that you might get from an outdoor farm – but with far less land at your disposal.

So, how does it actually work? There are a few main models for indoor agriculture that vertical farmers tend to choose from: hydroponics – in which plants are grown in a nutrient-rich basin of water – and aeroponics, where crops’ roots are periodically sprayed with a mist containing water and nutrients. The latter uses less water overall, but comes with some greater technical challenges. There's also aquaponics, which is slightly different, in that it involves breeding fish to help cultivate bacteria that's used for plant nutrients.

Urban Crops has opted for hydroponics. Vandecruys points out that they recycle the water several times after it is evaporated from the plant and recaptured from the humid air. It’s also treated with UV light to curb the spread of disease.

Perhaps the key benefit of vertical farming is that it uses far less water. “We made an estimation with oak leaf lettuce and there we are actually at, say 5% [water consumption], compared to traditional growing in fields,” explains Vandecruys.

But Urban Crops doesn’t plan to make its money from the sale of crops. It plans to make money on the sale of its vertical farms.

Vertical farm companies hope to one day sell consumers indoor kits of their own for the ultimate 'farm to table' experience (Credit: Urban Crops)

It has designed contained growing systems as a product in and of themselves – people will be able to buy them in order to grow food in relatively confined spaces – potentially bringing farming to urban areas or complexes like the campus of a university. The apparatus can also be installed alongside existing plant production lines at greenhouse farms.

One of the biggest names in vertical farming, however, has a different business model. AeroFarms in New Jersey, USA, has opened what they say is the world’s largest indoor vertical farm – with a total of 7,000 sq m (70,000 sq ft) floor space – and they’re hoping to produce tasty greens in massive quantities.

Ed Harwood is the inventor and agricultural expert who came up with the technology that has made this possible. He got the idea years ago while working for Cornell University, where aeroponic systems were being used to grow plants in a lab setting. Why, he wondered, was this approach not being used on a bigger scale?

“I kept asking, ‘how come’ – people said, ‘Oh, it would never make money, the sun is free, it’s expensive to add lights and everything else, it won’t happen’,” recalls Harwood.

But he wasn’t satisfied with that. After years of experimentation he came up with a system and nozzle design for spraying the aeroponic mist onto his plants’ roots. At AeroFarms, the roots grow through a fine cloth rather than soil. But the details of how he solved the key problem – keeping the nozzles clean over time – remain a trade secret.

“Every nozzle I purchased off the shelf had significant issues,” says Harwood. “I had to do something about it – it was just a cool moment of, I guess, serendipity.” But he’s not telling anyone how he did it.

Like Urban Crops, AeroFarms is prioritising the cultivation of fast-growing salad veg and greens. Harwood believes there is a demand for such produce grown locally in big facilities like theirs that could one day be a feature of city suburbs. And he also promises the guaranteed crunchiness and freshness that consumers want.

Despite futuristic appearances, some vertical farming facilities are built inside old factories or abandoned warehouses (Credit: Chris Baraniuk)

Harwood is firm in his belief that the business he and his colleagues have put together can be profitable. But there are still those who remain sceptical.

Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University, is one of them. He points out that vertical farms depend on constant supplies of electricity, much of which will come from fossil fuel sources.

“Why waste that energy to produce a whole lettuce, when you can get light from the sun?” he says.

And he points out that it just doesn’t make economic sense to grow some crops this way: “At 10 cents a kilowatt hour, the amount of energy it would take to produce wheat would [translate to] something like $11 for a loaf of bread.”

There’s been a spike in home beer brewing – might we see a spike in farming at home, too?

He does acknowledge a few of the benefits, though. If the indoor systems are well-maintained, then the technology should in theory allow for reproducible results with every harvest – you’ll likely get the same quality of crops every time. Plus, while it costs a lot of money to set up a vertical farm in the first instance, it’s potentially a more attractive option to people getting into the agriculture business for the first time – they won’t need to spend years learning how to contend with the vagaries of the sun and seasons. For that, there’s no substitute yet for experience.

With the development of vertical farming technologies, and the likely fall in cost associated with them in coming years, some are betting that all kinds of people will want to start growing their own greens – even at home. There’s been a spike in home beer brewing – might we see a spike in farming at home, too?

Neofarms is one start-up based in Germany and Italy that is anticipating this. Its founders, Henrik Jobczyk and Maximillian Richter, have developed a prototype vertical farm about the size of a household fridge-freezer.

“We designed it in standard kitchen closet sizes,” explains Jobczyk, who adds that their plan is to make the device available as an integrated or standalone design, depending on the customer’s preferences.

People who choose to grow their salad veg at home will pay about two euros (£1.71/2.13) per week in energy costs with this system for the privilege, the pair calculate. And they would also have to keep the Neofarms device clean and constantly topped up with water. But in exchange they will have the freshest produce possible.

“With the plants growing in the system, you know about the conditions they were raised in – that gives you control and knowledge,” says Jobczyk. “But also it’s the freshness, one of the biggest problems with fresh veg – especially the greens – is the field to fork time, the time between harvest and consumption.”

Future supermarkets, though, might be filled with miniature vertical farms of their own

If you pick the plants yourself and eat them straightaway, you might enjoy a richer wealth of vitamins and other nutrients – which can be lost during packaging and transportation. Many consumers already grow their herbs on a window box, but that is a low-cost and low-maintenance activity. It remains to be seen whether the same people would be interested in making the conceptual leap that comes with bringing a mini vertical farm into their own kitchen.

Jobczyk and Richter will have to wait to find out – they’re planning more testing of their device later this year, with a public launch potentially following sometime after that.

Ed Harwood, for one, thinks vertical farming technologies might help to bring agriculture closer to the consumer. But he also sticks by his belief that farming on giant scales is here to stay.

“Irrespective of the number of recalls, I think we’ve improved food safety over all, we’re feeding more people with fewer resources,” he says.

One of the downsides of this is that children have to be introduced to the idea that their food is grown somewhere – it doesn’t come from the supermarket, but a field or factory. Future supermarkets, though, might be filled with miniature vertical farms of their own.

“For the child who says their food comes from the grocery store,” says Harwood, “they might one day be right."

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

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

POSTED ON WED, APRIL 5, 2017BY DANA SCHULZ

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

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

Kimbal outside one of the farms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man Of Tomorrow

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

March 23, 2017

Written by Karen E. Varga • Photography by Jeff Wojtaszek

Griffin in his second-floor production area

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

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

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

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

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

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

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

PG: When did Metropolis Farms officially launch?

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

PG: How did you choose the name Metropolis Farms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PG: What makes your technology different from existing systems?

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

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

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

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

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

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

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

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

PG: How exactly are you supporting veterans and felons?

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

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 4, 2017 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

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

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

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

2017: President Barack H. Obama Guest of Honor at The Global Food Innovation Summit

Seeds&Chips

2017: President Barack H. Obama Guest of Honor at The Global Food Innovation Summit

4/3/2017

The 44th US President Barack H. Obama will be the guest of honor at 2017 Seeds&Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit, taking place in Milano (Italy) from Monday 8 to Thursday 11, May 2017 at Fiera Milano-Rho. The President will be at Seeds&Chips on Tuesday May 9, where he will hold a keynote speech as well as a conversation together with Sam Kass, Senior Food Policy Advisor to President Obama and promoter of White House’s health-conscious revolution.

Created and organized by Marco Gualtieri, Seeds&Chips this year celebrates its third edition and aims to establish Milano as an international capital of food innovation, by carrying the torch of Expo’s legacy to face one of the greatest global challenges: climate change and the issues linked to food supply in an increasingly populated world with progressively scarce resources. Seeds&Chips will address all aspects of these challenges, from new food production techniques and nutrition to food security and the right to healthy, sustainable and accessible food for all.

"We are deeply honored that President Barack H. Obama will be visiting Milano for the first time to attend Seeds&Chips. This undoubtedly shines the spotlight on Milano, on Italy and on the journey that began with Expo 2015. Thanks to President Obama’s participation at Seeds&Chips, the city of Milano once again plays the leading role in the creation of food policies at an international level. With Expo 2015, Milano was the center of these important issues. Today we have the responsibility of carrying this important legacy forward,” stated Marco Gualtieri, founder of Seeds&Chips. “It is essential to find solutions to tackle the major challenges linked to global population growth, food security, sustainability and to climate change. I believe that Milano and Italy can become an international reference point for innovation and research in this field," Gualtieri concluded.

The Global Food Innovation Summit brings together hundreds of startups, companies, universities, institutions, investors, accelerators and incubators, opinion leaders and policy makers in the food and food-tech industry and will feature exhibition pavilions and a conference area. In the exhibition areas, major companies, institutions and startups will present their innovations and solutions. The full schedule of conference features influential industry experts who will exchange points of view on the most significant scenarios concerning food production and supply. Among the main events, the special conference "Feeding the Cities - Urban and Vertical farming" dedicated to sustainable farming in big cities, with the participation of the mayors of major world capitals. Keynote speaker Giuseppe Sala, Mayor of Milan, will open the event. The conference “Food Security for developing countries "will address instead the issue of food supply in developing countries.

"I'm really proud that, after welcoming Michelle, Milano will host Barack H. Obama, a man I greatly admire”, stated Mayor of Milan Giuseppe Sala. “Seeds&Chips offers a unique opportunity to focus everyone's attention on an extremely important issue that has close links with our city. With the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, we have shown we have the ability and strength to guide and speak up for a change that is more necessary than ever. The document that was able to translate the food policies at the heart of Expo 2015 into actions is based not only on concrete projects aimed at reducing waste and ensuring access to healthy food. Another one of the document’s pillars is promoting cooperation between all the great cities of the world. These are two key ingredients that will enable all of us to achieve this goal, and the presence of President Barack H. Obama can only lend more strength to our message," Sala concluded.

Additional distinguished international and Italian guests include Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, committed activist and fervent supporter of human rights and of safe and affordable food; Sam Kass, Senior Food Policy Advisor to President Obama and promoter of the White House’s health-conscious revolution; Italian Minister of Economic Development Carlo Calenda, Italian Minister of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Maurizio Martina, Livia Pomodoro, President of the Milan Center for Food Law and Policy, Fabio Gallia, CEO of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti; Luigi Bonini, Senior Vice President, Global Product Innovation of Starbucks; Andrea Illy, President of Illycaffè; Giuseppe Caprotti former CEO of Esselunga; Edward Mukiibi, Vice President of Slow Food International and Danielle Nierenberg, founder and President of Food Tank. Several members of the European Commission and the European Parliament will also be attending Seeds&Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit.

In-depth sessions will range from hi-tech hot topics, such as big data, applications of 3D printing in food or technological solutions for the restaurants and supermarkets of the future, to marketing and trading scenarios, such as the growth of sharing economy, novel and superfood and the impact of millennials on innovation with the conference “How millennials are changing the food industry”

Seeds&Chips is organized in collaboration with TUTTOFOOD 2017, a synergistic action that generates positive effects in many sectors of the entire Italian National system.