What Is A Container Farm?

30-04-2021 LettUs

Container farming, vertical farming, indoor farming… What do they all mean? Are they all the same thing? In this blog, we’re going to explain exactly what a container farm is and what the benefits of growing crops in this way are.

The controlled environment agriculture club

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) is a term for using different technologies to grow food indoors. In CEA, these technologies ensure the best growing conditions and protection for specific crops. This is slightly different to just indoor farming - by nature, indoor farms simply protect crops from external forces such as weather and pests. A container farm would be an example of CEA, as would other indoor farms such as vertical farms and high-tech commercial greenhouses.

A container farm is usually a vertical farming system built inside a shipping container. The benefits of placing a farm within a container, rather than a building, are that it is transportable and can be squeezed into existing spaces, such as in car parks or on farmland. 

Since it is classified as a temporary structure, you typically don’t need planning permission for a shipping container. This can be particularly useful for those who rent their farmland. However, there are always exceptions and the necessary checks should always be made before making arrangements. As long as there is level ground, access to electricity, water & wifi, a shipping container can fit into a range of different settings.

Serving communities, big or small 

Since they’re easy to transport, container farms can be easily deployed as and when they are needed. This means they could be used for research or social-impact projects, without needing to build a permanent facility. Shipping containers are also modular, which means multiple containers can be used to build a larger facility and businesses can scale their operations appropriately. They also have the potential to be bedded into existing container parks - these are dotted around the UK and are usually shipping containers made up of independent shops, cafes, and restaurants. One container farm could supply fresh produce to all of these.

In this way, container farms have the potential to be a positive disruptor within our food supply networks and strengthen our local food security by reducing our dependence on imported produce. Food waste and carbon caused by food transportation would also be reduced by strategically placing containers in key locations within communities.

The DROP & GROW container farm

LettUs Grow’s container farms are powered by aeroponic technology. This is a soil-less system that uses a nutrient-dense mist to irrigate crops - boosting oxygen levels and encouraging healthy root stock. Whilst hydroponic container farms are more common, DROP & GROW uses aeroponics to optimise crop health and increase growth rates.

Our container farms have also been designed with the grower in mind. DROP & GROW:24 includes a separate preparation area, providing ample space for the grower to do their job. Our farms have also been designed to be easy to maneuver within and check on your crops.

Celebrating vertical farming technology

DROP & GROW wasn’t designed to be inconspicuous. Quite the opposite! We think urban farming, new technologies and feeding local communities is something to shout about, so a DROP & GROW on your site is an opportunity to start a conversation and encourage your customers to learn more about the benefits of vertical farming.

If you want to take a positive step towards a more sustainable and resilient food supply chain in the UK, then talk to LettUs business development team about why a container farm might be in the right choice for you. Find out more...

Source and Photo Courtesy of LettUs Grow

When We Started Freight Farms In 2010, There Was No Such Thing As An “Ag Tech” industry

We weren’t even sure how to explain what we were trying to do to our own friends and family! But we knew that there was a need for urban agriculture to emerge as a competitive industry in the food landscape. That’s why Freight Farms was born—to build the infrastructure and technology that would allow local food to thrive around the globe.

Less than a decade later, we are proud to be on the forefront of the fast-growing Agriculture Technology industry. Freight Farms has grown into a platform that anyone can use to supply their communities with fresh produce year-round, regardless of background or geographic location. We’ve had the pleasure of launching our container farming system in over 44 states in the US and 24 countries around the globe, creating the largest network of connected farmers.

Freight Farms has a passionate customer base of small businesses, entrepreneurs, traditional farmers, hotels, restaurants, corporate campuses, universities, and non-profits. We’d love to welcome you into our community of Freight Farmers, and our team is ready to help you get started. 

Jon Friedman and Brad McNamara

Freight Farms Co-Founders

USA: BALTIMORE - Hydroponic Operation Supplies High-End Restaurants

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Art Petrosemolo, Southeastern Pennsylvania Correspondent

Apr 23, 2021

Growing vegetables in a shipping container have opened new marketing opportunities for a Baltimore County farm.

The hydroponic growing system has allowed Karma Farm to sell fresh produce regardless of the season to high-end restaurants in Baltimore and Washington.

“Today we are delivering leafy greens and herbs year-round to a growing customer base,” said Jon Shaw, founder of the family operation.

The farm, which makes multiple weekly deliveries to 27 customers, has picked up clients through word of mouth and sampling visits arranged with chefs who find the farm on social media.

“Well-known chefs talk and move from restaurant to restaurant ... and they have brought us with them,” Shaw said.

The farm got its start just over a decade ago when Shaw was growing produce on 5 acres, both outside and in hoop houses, for retail sale as well as a nearly 100-member CSA.

Karma Farm purchased a freight container vertical hydroponics Leafy Green Machine from Freight Farms in Boston in 2017. Photo by Art Petrosemolo

Jon’s 28-year old son, Nat, learned the business from his dad as a teenager, and in the past few years he has helped Karma Farm pivot to the new customer base, embracing the new ag technologies.

Nat, now the farm’s hydroponic production manager, researched vertical growing in insulated shipping containers while he was studying entrepreneurship at the University of Baltimore and thought the year-round production method would be a good fit.

“Hydroponic container farming is still relatively new and is being introduced to farmers in parts of the country where short growing seasons, weather, and soil conditions make profitable, small family farming difficult,” he said.

With a feasibility study completed and a new focus for the business, the Shaws purchased a Leafy Green Machine container in 2017 from Freight Farms in Boston. The container is 40 feet long by 8 feet wide.

“These are the insulated type of refrigerated containers used to ship fresh produce across the country,” Nat said.

With delivery and setup, the container cost about $100,000.

Lead photo: Nat Shaw, left, and his dad, Karma Farm owner Jon Shaw, stand in their freight container.

Inside Inuvik’s New Hydroponic Greenhouse

April 16, 2021

MEAGHAN BRACKENBURY

Inuvik’s first all-season growing facility will soon be operational, offering residents year-round access to locally produced greens.

Inuvik's hydroponic greenhouse is decorated with artwork by resident Adi Scott. Meaghan Brackenbury/Cabin Radio

The hydroponic greenhouse, in a trailer on land donated by Jesse and Keren Harder, is run by the Inuvik Community Greenhouse. Leafy veg like lettuce and herbs will grow using nutrient-rich water rather than soil.

“We have been working on this project for a long time, trying to get funding,” executive director Ray Solotki told Cabin Radio. “We want to be putting food in the community. We want to be hiring people in the community. We want to be doing things that are actually helpful to what our mandates are.

“This unit has been in the works with the hopes that we will produce enough food to see an actual tangible amount of difference in the communities, and also provide jobs here in Inuvik.”

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Ray Solotki inside Inuvik’s community greenhouse in the summer of 2019. Ollie Williams/Cabin Radio

The greenhouse received more than $400,000 for the hydroponic facility from economic development agency CanNor last November. ColdAcre, a company that runs hydroponic greenhouses in Yukon, was contracted to construct it.

Another $100,000 from the territorial government will pay for a small solar farm to power the facility, which Solotki says will mean cheaper energy and lower-cost produce.

Solotki hopes the facility can grow as much as ColdAcre’s Whitehorse facility – about 500 lb of produce a month.

“If you consider how much spinach weighs, it’s not very heavy,” Solotki added. “That’s quite a lot of food to be bringing into the community.

Inside Inuvik’s hydroponic greenhouse. Plants are grown on shelves using nutrient-rich water that runs through a closed circuit. Meaghan Brackenbury/Cabin Radio

Kale, bok choy, Swiss chard, mizuna, and basil will be included in the greenhouse’s veggie box program, where members pay $20 a week and receive their share of the harvest. Some will be available at local grocery stores.

“I want this to be a case of once a week you get something that’s so fresh it was picked this morning, even when it’s minus-56 outside,” Solotki said.

Finding firm financial footing

The hydroponic unit will require a year-round staff member to operate it – a position Solotki said has been filled by an Inuvik resident – and offer more training opportunities for students and summer staff.

“We want to train kids from the ground up, literally, and teach them that this is a potential job,” she said.

The organization has received funding from the University of Saskatchewan for programs like bringing residents from smaller Beaufort Delta communities to teach them about hydroponics.  

Shelving units inside the hydroponic greenhouse. Meaghan Brackenbury/Cabin Radio

“It doesn’t have to be in a shipping container,” Solotki explained. “You can take these out and put them in a school, you can put them in an office, you can do all sorts of things.

“But people need to understand how they work and see if it’s something they want to do.”

Meanwhile, produce sales from the hydroponic unit could help the greenhouse grow its commercial side.

Revenue that’s independently generated means less pressure to constantly fundraise, Solotki said, and could free up funding pots for other groups in the region.

“The amount of agricultural funding available per area is fixed, which means if I’m the one constantly tapping into it, other people can’t or might not have as many opportunities,” she said.

“If we could be utilizing it in better ways, and creating a better economy and creating more interesting things in the community, this is great for us.”

The greenhouse is currently seeking funding for an aeroponic facility – a system that suspends plants in the air and sprays them with nutrient-rich mist, which works well for heartier crops such as beans, potatoes, and peas.

Exploring what’s possible

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, agriculture and food security have become bigger discussions in the NWT.

Last June, a 50,000-pound donation of free potatoes to the NWT sparked debate about what northern food security should look like.

In February, three farmers in Hay River received funding for projects designed to help move the territory toward having an established agricultural sector. This month, the City of Yellowknife approved its latest food and agriculture plan after announcing a partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University to create a food hub in the city.  

In Inuvik, Solotki concedes that leafy greens “won’t solve the problems of caloric intake and what you actually require for food security” – but she argues the hydroponic facility will allow the community to re-evaluate what is possible in the realm of Arctic agriculture.

“This is an idea that starts to change people’s mindsets: that we don’t have to buy from out-of-territory,” she said. “We don’t have to ship it in, we could actually do it ourselves.

“While the hydroponics is not going to be the be-all and end-all, wouldn’t it be cool to see community greenhouse hydroponics, sitting next to community greenhouse aeroponics, sitting next to the greenhouse chicken coop, sitting next to the pig barn, sitting next to the cow barn… having an actual agricultural sector that is utilizing what we need to work in our climates?”

USA: This Colorado Company Is Building Farms In Shipping Containers To Help Feed People In Need

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Author: Jeremy Moore

April 19, 2021

FarmBox Foods Wants People To Be Able To Farm

Anywhere, Allowing Them To Access Fresh Food

They Otherwise Wouldn't Be Able To

SEDALIA, Colo. — A three-year-old Colorado company has an ambitious goal: to bring food security, safety, and sustainability to communities in need around the world.

FarmBox Foods aims to achieve that goal by connecting those communities to sustainably sourced food that's grown locally inside one of their container farms.

Their first product was a vertical hydroponic farm, or VHF, built inside a shipping container.

The company has since developed a second product: a gourmet mushroom farm, or GMF.

So far, customers in Colorado include Centura Health, Vitamin Cottage Natural Food Markets, and the C Lazy U Ranch in Granby.

FarmBox CEO Rusty Walker and COO Jake Savageau joined 9NEWS to talk about how they hope to change the way the world thinks about farming.

9NEWS also spoke with a prospective customer of FarmBox, Cori Hunt of the Denver restaurant group Edible Beats.

(Editor’s note: Responses have been edited for context and clarity.)

As a mission-driven company, what is the mission of FarmBox Foods?

Walker:  Our goal and our mission is to get our products out into the communities where we can help develop food security programs. We’re looking to get into food deserts, opportunities where folks in the world might not have access to good, clean nutritional food. And so we kind of strive as a company that’s driven to feed the world one container at a time. And we’re ready to go out and manufacture thousands of these if we can. 

We’re able to decentralize growing food by being mobile – being able to deploy these by just having a semi come in. We can then lift it up on a flatbed and take it to anywhere in the world. We’ve got two containers going to islands. We’ve got our first container that took off for the island of Jamaica. It’s going to Montego Bay where it’s going to be used behind mega marts on the island. And then we have another container which is our gourmet mushroom farm that’s going to be going to Tahiti where they’re going to be using that to feed the island population which does not have access to that type of food. 

One big area that we’re really focusing on is the urban areas throughout the U.S. where they don’t have a lot of land to grow. These farms can go right into the parking lots, behind a church for example. We’re working with a community church on the south side of Chicago that’s looking at placing two of these containers – a vertical hydroponic farm and a mushroom farm – right outside in the parking lot outside the church. 

And we think we could bring an educational spin to this where we can have the community grow their own food and supply the community themselves with highly nutritional food that ordinarily they just would not be able to get their hands on. So, we’re thinking that if this pilot program goes well this would be an application that would apply to every inner city throughout the U.S.

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Farmbox Foods grows vegetables in shipping containers. Credit: Jeremy Moore, KUSA

Savageau:  The mission’s always been to create products that are for the decentralized food insecurity industry. So, we want to create a product that can be deployed anywhere in the world, can run off-grid, and can feed communities. So, we have two different products – the VHF and the GMF. Every product that we develop gets us one step closer to being able to feed a community with everything they need, because you can’t feed communities forever just on leafy greens. 

So mushrooms, they’re more nutrient dense, that gets us one step closer. There’s other products that we’re going to develop to get us to that point. But, I think the mission for the company is to be able to deploy these farms into communities where they’re needed, whether that’s a rural area, a food desert in the U.S., an inner city, or somewhere in Africa like Ghana or the Sudan. 

We want to align with big ag and we want to help the industry get better. So we want to get food to where it’s needed. We’re looking at doing stuff with food insecurity and food inequality. That’s big with what we’re doing. So, that kind of aligns with our mission. If you look at our food system – just take for instance – you know if you look at a SNAP program or food subsidy program – you’re taking food and giving it to somebody or they’re purchasing it. 

But, a lot of that food that they’re purchasing is processed, sugar – I mean, it’s poison. And if you go on a military base anywhere in the U.S., there’s fast food on the base. It’s really what you see. So, there’s a lot of reasons why we’re doing this I think. We can help fix our food system. And we can help educate the youth on how they should eat. We’re doing some stuff with an Inuit community in Alaska. They don’t necessarily know how to fix this food or prepare it or use it. So, I think education is a big part of what we’re doing.

How do these container farms work?

Savageau:  When people think of farms, they don’t think of agriculture like this. Vertical hydroponics and indoor ag and controlled environments – it’s been around for a long time. I think that the way that this one works is pretty simple. The water gets fed into a tube system and the water trickles down and goes back into the tank. And where you’re standing – the seedling tray area – the water goes into a tank, into the seedling trays, gets flooded, and then back into the tank. 

There’s a software that we use called Agrotech that monitors the temperature, the humidity, the lights – basically, all automated. So, it’s fairly easy to run. You need about 15 to 20 hours a week to run one farm. The GMF farms takes about 25 hours a week. It’s a little bit more intensive. The VHF is the vertical hydroponic farm and that’s the farm that we’re standing in. The GMF is the gourmet mushroom farm, which is the one that you went through earlier. You want to just keep things as clean as possible. The cleaner that you keep it the better it’s going to run. 

So, we have a standard SOP, you know, that we implement with our training. Cleaning the floors. Cleaning the tubes. You don’t clean them every time. But, usually, every couple harvests you’ll take the tubes out, wash them out. You’re cleaning the tanks about every 60 days. 

But, on average it’s pretty easy to maintain if you’re doing the daily checklist. The seeds are going to be in the seedling tray for about two weeks. Then, they go into the wall. And then they get harvested about 60 days after they start in the seedling tray. So, on average you’re about 60 days from seedling to harvest depending on what you’re growing. 

And this farm is really setup for vertical hydroponics. So, it’s leafy greens. You can do hundreds of different types of lettuce. You can do cherry tomatoes, strawberries and peppers. There’s a lot of different things that you can grow in here. Most of our clients are only growing a couple things at one time. You don’t have to worry about weather. You don’t have to worry about if this is in a cold climate like the arctic. You know, they can’t grow food. If it’s in a desert, they can’t grow food. If it’s on an island, they can’t grow food. So, these can be deployed anywhere. And they grow 365, all day, every day. Also, the yield is very high for the square footage. So, you can put these on top of a building, inside of a building. It only takes up 320-square feet. You don’t have any pesticides. So, you don’t have to worry about pests, bugs, mildew, stuff like that’s going to effect the plant as it’s growing. It’s also decentralizing the food system.

 So, you’re not having to ship food hundreds of thousands of miles from point A to point B. So, the food is right there. And the nutrients that we use are organic plant-based nutrients. And there’s no pesticides. So, the nutrient density is extremely high compared to something that you would buy – even organic – in a store.

Walker:  We grow a variety of vegetables and lettuces. I believe that we’re somewhere in the area of 30 to 40 different types of vegetables and lettuces that we can grow in our farms. And, then of course we’ve got our gourmet mushroom farm which we’re currently growing anywhere from eight to nine different varieties of mushrooms. We’re in the startup phase of running that farm ourselves. So, we’re exploring the different types of mushrooms that we can grow. But, we’re very proud of the folks that are actually running these farms – our staff, very knowledgeable and they do a great job. We’re going upwards to 300 to 400 pounds a week now. We’re not competing with traditional farming. We’re actually a compliment.

Who are your customers? 

Walker:  One of our first customers is Centura Health. They purchased their first container – which is now sitting at St. Mary’s in Pueblo. They ordered two more containers after seeing how the first container behind their hospital worked. We actually started up a pilot program with Centura Health where we’re now running them as the FarmBox family. 

We’re working with Centura Health in identifying not only their hospitals and the patients who are going to be fed through our vertical farm – but then we’re also identifying where the food deserts are and Centura Health will then help us with what we’re going to be growing, and then the communities that we’re going to be serving from those, those particular crops. 

We do have a couple that’s looking at doing some farming right here in Sedalia. They’re going to use it to supplement their traditional farming, which will be an interesting pilot program for us to work with them on. We’re working with C Lazy U Ranch out of Granby, Colorado. They’ve ordered a hydroponic farm and we’re going to be manufacturing that. And they’re going to place that at the ranch. They don’t really have access to a lot of good food as far as having it grown right there on the property. So, this will be a nice compliment to the services and the customer experience that they provide their customers by having one of our farms right on site. 

Centura Health is one of FarmBox Foods' first customers. Credit: Jeremy Moore, KUSA

One big area that we’re really focusing on is the urban areas throughout the U.S. where they don’t have a lot of land to grow. These farms can go right into the parking lots, behind a church for example. We’re working with a community church in the south side of Chicago that’s looking at – we’re looking at placing two of these containers – a vertical hydroponic farm and a mushroom farm right outside in the parking lot outside the church. 

We can have the community grow their own food and supply the community themselves with highly nutritional food that ordinarily they just would not be able to get their hands on. So, we’re thinking that if this pilot program goes well this would be an application that would apply to every inner city throughout the United States.

Savageau:  We have a customer here in Lakewood that’s going to put one in their backyard. They run a small organic farm. We’re looking all the way up into federal government and military, and everything in between. 

So, Rusty was talking about FEMA, the UN, UNICEF, those are the big customers that take a long time to build a relationship with. And then we have customers that are all the way down to just an individual that wants one for their property or maybe a couple of people are going to run one for a restaurant or a developer wants one for a small development that he’s doing. 

We’re working with a group in New Mexico and they’re building a huge development of about 45,000 houses. So, we’re talking about 100 of these units that are going to be deployed in that area right outside Albuquerque to feed those communities within that area over the course of about two years. We work with a grocer that’s regional. And we work with some other customers that are kind of at a government, federal government level. 

I think we’ve done a lot in the last three years. I mean we haven’t gone out and raised any capitol. So, we’ve self-funded it. And I think from that point of view you know we’ve done a lot. We’re kind of at the point right now where we’re just starting to scale. So, we’ve just started our social media. You know SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing). We have a sales team. And orders are starting to come in. We’ve partnered with RK which is manufacturing our units. That’s giving us the ability to scale. Because before that we were building these one or two at a time in Sedalia and now we can build 100 of them. So, that’s really been a huge part of us being able to scale is the manufacturing side.

How much does it cost to purchase and operate the farms? 

Jake:  This VHF farm – vertical hydroponic farm – starts at $140,000. The GMF starts at $150,000. Then, you have training and deploy, getting it there. So, usually, you’re over $150,000 for a farm. So, your ROI (return on investment) in this product is going to be about 12 months to 24 months depending on what you’re growing and where it is in the world. 

The GMF is going to be closer to 12 months because mushrooms tend to be more expensive – again – depending on where it’s going. We have a unit that’s going to Tahiti for example. That ROI is going to be extremely fast because they ship everything in. If there’s a market for mushrooms there, which there is with a grocer, it’s going to be quick. So, the cost of running it with labor and everything you need to grow the plants, usually around $20,000 to $40,000 a year. We’re a mission-driven company. So, money isn’t the first thing that’s important. We want to build a certain amount of these and then every x amount that we build, we build one for free and we send it to a community that maybe our social media has engaged with or given us an idea that ‘hey, this would be a good community.’ And then, we send it there. We pay for it. We train people. And that’s something that we want to do. We can’t do it yet. But, I think that’s coming in the next year.

Why is Edible Beats interested in working with FarmBox?

Hunt:  We try to be as local and organic as possible and that’s what brought us here to FarmBox. We can put a box behind a restaurant and have lettuces cut and washed and put on the plate the next day. 

Just to have that connection with our food and know exactly where it’s coming from and how it was produced. It’s going to be better quality because it’s not traveling. It’s not ripening in a truck coming from Mexico. Economically, what we can do to not pay the mileage on the vehicles and the gas, the inputs, the emissions, the extra packaging, the plastics. 

That’s one of the best things about FarmBox – that what we can do is – if we produce food for our restaurant group – I’m not going to have to buy packaging that’s going to go into a landfill or even need to be recycled. It’ll go directly into the vessels that we’re going to store them in the cooler. We don’t have to worry about marketing and labeling and you know stickers and plastics and all this extra stuff – this hoopla that we don’t need – because FarmBox is a possibility now. 

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The Farmbox Foods containers allow leafy greens to grow vertically, maximizing space.

Credit: Jeremy Moore, KUSA

We are looking at lettuces and herbs, leafy greens. So yeah, like basils, sage, leaf lettuces, butter lettuces, arugula – these kinds of things that we use that could greatly help our impact. Essentially it’s a self-contained box that you can grow fruits and vegetables in – most likely leafy greens – and it’s a soilless or near soilless medium. 

So, essentially you plant your seed in a very small amount of coconut core or soil or peat moss – something to hold the root structure – and that, according to with FarmBox, they’re system is a vertical farming. 

So, they have vertical towers and then they put the lettuces in the towers in their small soil medium and then they drip water with enhanced nutrients mixed into the water specifically built for those vegetables. It doesn’t have a lot of soil waste. 

For the amount of the surface area you can get way more production out of it and the water that goes through is recycled. Per plant, it uses far less water than any other type of growing system.

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How Square Roots Is Meeting Unprecedented Post-Pandemic Demand For Fresh, Healthy, Locally-Grown Food

Square Roots Is Expanding Fast—Deploying Its Latest

Indoor Farm In Michigan In just Three Months.

To meet rapidly increasing demand for our locally-grown produce, today we’re announcing our newest indoor farm in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We broke ground in late December and planted the first seeds in March—just three months later. Now we're preparing for the first harvest, and our delicious, fresh produce will be available at grocery stores, eCommerce platforms, and restaurants across the Great Lakes region in the coming weeks.

Kimbal Musk, our Co-founder and Executive Chairman, says: “COVID-19 exposed major weaknesses in the industrial food supply chain, and accelerated the already fast-growing local farming movement. Square Roots can now deploy commercial-scale, controlled-climate farms, fast, in locations across America to meet the demand for local food, all year round. My wider mission is to bring responsibly-grown, local food to everyone in America. With Square Roots, we’re going to do it fast.” 

From shovels-in-the-ground to first-seeds-planted, we built our new farm in just three months.

Growing Reliable, Fresh Produce Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

While COVID-19 wreaked havoc across the industrial food system, consumers increasingly valued local food, which in turn accelerated the adoption of indoor-grown produce. Consumers, forced to stay at home and cook, were able to experience the consistent peak-season flavor of our locally-grown greens. Meanwhile, retailers appreciated the reliability, longer shelf life, and complete traceability of all Square Roots’ products. As a result, we’ve seen a big increase in retail demand this year, and we’re now available in more than 200 stores (including Fresh Thyme Market, D&W Fresh Market, Whole Foods Market, FreshDirect, and more!). 

In parallel, working hand-in-hand with our strategic partner Gordon Food Service—one of the largest food distributors in North America—we've been supporting and supplying restaurants throughout the pandemic. We’re as excited as anyone to see diners begin to venture out once more, and the restaurant industry bounce back strong. 

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Square Roots' new Michigan farm

This new farm in Michigan, our third commercial facility, is co-located with Gordon Food Service and represents another step towards a larger shared ambition to build indoor farms together across the continent—enabling local food at a national scale.

Our produce can be found at more than 200 stores across the Midwest and New York City area.

Square Roots’ Modular Farm-Tech Platform 

Central to our ability to move fast and meet demand is our modular farm-tech platform. Capital-efficient and pre-fabricated inside upcycled shipping containers, ready-to-go farms can be shipped and deployed just-in-time to any site in the world, immediately creating the perfect conditions for growing the highest quality food, regardless of local climate conditions or time of year. The overall growing capacity of any Square Roots farm can seamlessly scale up or down depending on demand in the local market.

Our new two-story farm in Michigan also includes all of the necessary infrastructures to run a state-of-the-art, food-safe, and people-safe commercial operation. This includes cold storage, biosecurity, climate-controlled packaging space, distributor loading docks, and more. Meanwhile, all of our farms are Harmonized Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certified, in line with the USDA’s standards, and operate to strict COVID-19 safety protocols to keep farmers and the local community safe. 

Our farms are also cloud-connected and managed by a combination of skilled Square Roots farmers and sophisticated in-house software. Known as The Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt, our proprietary OS provides day-to-day guidance to farmers while capturing millions of data points throughout growing cycles across our network. This data can then be analyzed to determine how changes in certain environmental parameters impact factors like yield, taste, and texture. Our system learns faster as we deploy more farms and our network gets larger, all while helping farmers determine how to grow more, better-tasting food with fewer resources. Training new farmers—and empowering the next generation of leaders in indoor agriculture—has always been core to our mission, and the Farmer Toolbelt is a key enabler in our ability to offer accessible pathways for young people to enter the high-tech farming industry. 

Farmers are guided through day-to-day operations by The Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt.   

Responsibly-Grown, Local Food, Available Everywhere

We’ve always designed our farms to provide responsibly-grown food in areas close to the end consumer. Our hydroponic system uses 95% less water than conventional agriculture, our farms require zero pesticides, and the location of our facilities cuts down dramatically on food miles and food waste by enabling delivery of fresh produce within 24 hours of harvest, all year round. Meanwhile, our latest farm design is easily configured for both vertical and horizontal-stacked growing formats—a new and unique capability that means we can grow a wide range of crops to meet a variety of local market needs. To date, we've grown over 200 different varieties of herbs, microgreens, leafy greens, fruits, and even root vegetables—and we’re just getting started!

Keep an eye on this blog for announcements about more new farms soon. For more information about Square Roots check out our website, squarerootsgrow.com. And for daily updates, follow us on social media @squarerootsgrow.

How Square Roots Is Training Next-Gen Farmers During A Pandemic

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Square Roots

10.08.20

The average age of the American farmer is 58 years old. If we're going to change the food system, we need to create more pathways for young people to launch successful careers in agriculture.

One of the many ways Square Roots invests in the future of farming is through our Next-Gen Farmer Training Program—aimed at new farmers or those at early stages in their careers. Farmers initially join Square Roots as Apprentice Growers. Through our proprietary training methodology—supported by our intuitive technology platform—Apprentice Growers rapidly learn the essential farm skills needed to move into permanent roles on the farm team and accelerate their careers.

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We continuously evolve our training program to zero in on the skills and experiences that help employees become the best indoor farmers they can be. Throughout COVID-19, we have been committed to prioritizing people safety and plant safety which has led to changes in our day-to-day farming operations, as well as rewiring our in-flight farmer training programs in May and adapting how we run the Square Roots Next-Gen Farmer Training Program going forward. Also, after several years of training farmers, we’ve listened and learned to what farmers value from their experience at Square Roots and have incorporated that into our program going forward. Read more about what it’s like to be a grower at Square Roots and how the program has evolved:

Individual Pathways

Based on the needs of our farm production teams, apprentices are hired and onboarded, either individually or in pairs, on a rolling basis. By spacing out onboarding and training, our team is able to provide more attention and support to apprentices, allowing them to move more quickly through the training program and into permanent positions on our team. We expect most apprentices will complete their training in three to six months, but each will advance at their own pace.

Foundational Remote Learning

We have moved our training materials onto a virtual learning platform, which houses videos, interactive presentations, animated diagrams, virtual tours, and other types of content that can be brought to life beyond a typical presentation. Since COVID-19 restricts our ability to hold classroom-style learning, online learning can be self-serve, supporting different types of learning styles. It also drives consistency in training and terminology, reducing the burden on managers responsible for administering it.

Intensive ‘Boot-Camp’ Style Farm Immersion

Training for Apprentice Growers is laser focused on the skills required for new farmers to quickly become the best indoor farmers they can be. After the initial foundational onboarding, apprentices will jump into production, and, in parallel, will be equipped with the necessary context and complementary training to support expanded learning and competency much sooner. Apprentices will be supported by our software operating system the Farmer Toolbelt, empowering them to get up to speed much faster, engaging with data, and ultimately helping them become better growers. Throughout the training process, farmers will receive direct supervision by one of our experienced farm team members who will act as their training guide and provide professional and moral support.

Pathway to Permanent Employment at Square Roots

Central to Square Roots is our mission to empower Next-Gen leaders in urban farming, and the Next-Gen Farmer Training Program is one of the most direct ways we do that. The program is designed to bring young people with little or no experience up to speed in our proprietary indoor farms as quickly as possible and on to their careers in indoor farming—acting as an internal training program for permanent full-time employees on the Square Roots farm team.

The Apprentice Grower role is the first step in a career path to indoor farming at Square Roots. To start, apprentices will earn an hourly rate indexed to the area’s living wage, and receive 100% covered health benefits and equity in Square Roots. Once they’ve successfully mastered indoor growing fundamentals (we expect this to take three to six months), apprentices will be eligible to move into Associate Grower positions.

For more information and to learn about new open positions on our farm teams, follow us on social media and sign up for our newsletter for updates.

Tags: Next-Gen Farm / Farmer Training / COVID-19 Response / Updates

AUSTRALIA: VIDEO - Shipping Container Farms: Check Out This Craze In Modified Containers

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Greenhouses, hydroponics, and mushroom farms – converted shipping containers can produce protein and vegetables for all your needs. Even if you’re not an environmentalist, there are business opportunities to be had in delivering extremely fresh food to people in urban environments like Brisbane. Given the changing climate and topsoil loss we are facing, shipping container farms could well be an answer to these issues.

Over the years in the Gateway Gazette, we have published a number of stories that look at producing food in converted shipping containers. Reflecting on what we have published and looking at the detail of what can be done, let’s consider the possibilities that come with shipping container farms.

Open Top Container Greenhouse

One of the most cost-effective ways of using a shipping container as a food-producing unit is by attaching a glass top to an open-top shipping container.

In this video, Urban Farm Units looked at the concept of a greenhouse-container. An open-top 20-foot container would have a greenhouse attached to the top with shelving units directly under the glass. This allows photosynthesis to take place in the normal way.

Seedlings can be started in the lower part of the unit, which is warmed by the light and heat from the outside.

One step down from slapping a greenhouse on top of an open-top container would be to use a flat rack container and to have the greenhouse on the base (Gateway Containers can supply both open-top and flat rack containers).

The concept is an improvement on the one in the video, as long as you keep the greenhouse within the dimensions of a 20ft standard or high-cube container, it would be possible to lift and move the container farm from place to place.

This might be useful where you have an agreement with property developers or a council to use vacant plots of land in a city for agriculture. When the site is ready to be developed you can stick it all on a truck and move it to the next plot.

The concept of a shipping container greenhouse is:

• Cheap to buy

• Mobile

• And often won’t need planning permission for a permanent site

Could this be something you’d consider? Contact us at Gateway Containers to discuss your needs!

Mushie Container Farm!

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Image source: King Oyster Mushrooms Facebook

In 2019 we reported how Belgrave, Vic-based John Ford has developed a shipping container mushroom farm. This could produce protein for people as an alternative to meat or for anyone who loves the taste of freshly cut shrooms.

Mushrooms of any kind don’t store well and are best eaten as soon as possible after cutting. This is why having a mushroom farm close to restaurants could be a money-spinner.

This requires no modification from a basic shipping container, you could even install the racking inside the container yourself.

In their lifecycle, mushroom mycelium live out of sight of the world until they are stressed and get the impression that they are facing death. When stressed they flower to produce spores – those flowers are the mushrooms that many of us love to eat.

A shipping container is perfect to take advantage of such a lifecycle. Logs or other media are infected with the mycelium and left to rot for a certain time. By altering the environmental conditions, so you deliberately stress the fungi and they flower.

In our article, we reported how John Ford is producing mushroom species that are famed for their delicate taste but don’t travel well at all – shiitake and oyster mushrooms. As a sideline to his main income as a marine biologist restoring seagrass habitats near Belgrave, he produces freshly cut shrooms for local people and restaurants.

For you as an entrepreneur, mushroom growing would require buying a used shipping container and setting it up as a mushroom farm. If you are planning an urban mushroom container farm, you can take advantage of the fact that you can treat the container as a mobile unit and not as a permanent base. Shipping containers are also pretty inexpensive to buy and convert.   

Hydroponics – The Rolls Royce of Shipping Container Farms

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Image source: ABC

The hydroponics concept is highly developed for the use of fresh food and can be set up for high density vegetable farming in shipping containers. This requires a fair bit more modification than the two systems we describe above.

Unlike the Urban Farm Units company, several companies have managed to survive over the years selling their hydroponic container farm businesses to entrepreneurs and restaurants around the world.

Modular Farms is a company we featured in our blog originally based in Canada, but who recently set up shop over here in Australia. According to their website, they “design and manufacture container farm systems that can be used to grow food in most locations on earth.”

These systems strive to get around some of the issues we face here. Cities like Brisbane get far too much water sometimes and then face droughts for years on end. The Australian Food Services News reported, “With a focus on sustainability, Modular Farms’s hydroponic, closed-loop system uses 95% less water than a typical outdoor farm.”

Topsoil erosion is a problem, especially in prolonged droughts when it gets blown away as dust. Hydroponics use media like rock wool and even used mattresses to house the plants’ root systems and feed them nutrients via a watering system.

With our ever more extreme climate, food often has to be imported into cities from hundreds or thousands of miles away. A hydroponic container farm can enable you to grow many vegs very close to markets and restaurants.

This has been observed by global homewares retail giant IKEA, which in 2019 announced it was piloting growing vegetables in its stores for use at its restaurants. We reported, “While selling hydroponic indoor growing equipment to customers, IKEA is feeding its staff with lettuce and other vegetables grown in a container outside its Malmö and Helsingborg stores.”

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Image source: ABC

There are a few downsides to hydroponics. Firstly, while some types of plants are happy enough growing in hydroponics – the simpler ones producing leaves and flowers (like broccoli!) – others aren’t so happy, such as cassava, wheat, and potatoes.

The next big issue is that for a high-intensity farm, not unlike factory farming chickens, you need to be ultra-clean in your production as the arrival of a destructive disease or fungus could wipe you out very quickly.

Container Fish Farm Too?

In theory, it is possible to run a fish farm connected to the hydroponics container farm, with you largely feeding the fish and collecting their feces and other waste to feed the plants. The plants would clean the fishes’ water and make it habitable for them as reed beds do in nature. This a concept that is in development but hasn’t caught on commercially yet.

How Can Gateway Containers Help?

We can provide and convert an insulated container for you to get started with and advise you how to best make further additions without compromising the overall structure.

If any or all of these ideas have caught your interest – or you just know about these concepts and need a shipping container to make it possible – then get in touch with us today to discuss your needs!

Posted on February 22, 2021
By Mark FinneganOtherShipping ContainerModified Shipping ContainersLeave a comment

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UAE: “Hydroponic Farming Is Not Yet Deployed At A Meaningful Scale”

“While hydroponic farming is extremely relevant to the water-poor Middle East, and incentives for agriculture such as energy and water subsidies have been put in place, the technology has not been deployed at a meaningful scale yet,” Alexander Kappes, founder of Greener Crop states.

Greener Crop was founded in September last year with the goal of enabling hydroponic farming in the Middle East and Africa. Alexander was working at an investment office prior to Greener Crop which brought his attention to the long-existing problem: the country is too dependent on food imports. “We wanted to enable local sustainable farming here as well.” Greener Crop offers farm management solutions, removing entry barriers.

The company offers four key solutions for existing or aspiring farmers: development of crop strategy, input management, physical farm management, and crop marketing. From Container farms to greenhouses and indoor vertical farms, Greener Crop supports their clients from finding the right supplier and setup, to selling the crops in the market. “It’s a great solution if you’re looking for an experienced partner to get your farm up and running, whether it’s short or long term,” says Alexander.

Alexander Kappes

There has been a strong push from local governments to develop alternative farming methods. The government in the UAE has invested over $200 million to support the development of growing facilities. This is a highly valuable approach, however, it is important to keep in mind that even a $40m indoor vertical farm can only contribute 0.03% of the local annual fruit & vegetable consumption. Farming is a highly democratized industry and requires not only a handful of a large farm but thousands of small and medium-sized farms that enable a country to be self-sufficient,” Alexander claims.

Removing barriers
Whether farmers want to expand or convert their farm into a hydroponic farm or an outsider investor, Greener Crop is here to help. The company connects farmers to suppliers and manufacturers, they can either run the farm, handle the supply chain and in some cases, handle the sales. “Clients no longer have to figure out everything on their own – we are here to support them with the operations and even sale of their crops. In many cases, clients are self-consumers such as hotels and restaurants,” Alexander explains.

The company sits together with their clients, comes up with a plan, ticks off the boxes, and starts setting things up, given the customer budget. Based on the expected yield, an approximate selling price per kg can be provided to clients. “We can always predict with a certain degree of accuracy. In this way, we can sketch revenue, utility costs, including labor, etc., which eventually leaves us to the expected profits. After the preliminary proposal is given, we reach out to potential suppliers as we understand what they offer in terms of yield, cycles, crop analyses, costs, and input.”

Green Crop has the ability to run a farm completely independently, however, the client can decide how hands-on they want the company to be. Clients can set foot on the farm at any time. “We can also operate certain parts of the operation such as maintenance for instance. Our benefit is that we come in, with trained staff, they do the work and go out. 

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Finding a suitable market
Alexander says, “The difficulty is not in selling all of the produce, but whether you are able to sell it at the right price. The smaller the farm, the higher the production costs. Being able to sell something at the price where it covers all costs is the main goal.” The challenge this therefore to gauge the available client-base for your produce, as well as the competition and their prices. Similarly, a thorough crop strategy must account for seasonal price fluctuations and ensure that we seed to harvest at the right time.

Often, the biggest challenge, according to Alexander, for smaller individual farmers is sourcing the right seeds and nutrients. Finding suppliers of quality products is often a challenge, and in most cases, they require you to buy large quantities that exceed the farms' annual consumption. “There are large differences in quality between suppliers and often when farmers choose the most affordable solution, this results in high costs for maintenance and replacements. For many new manufacturers, hydroponic farming looks like an easy enough industry to get into, but they underestimate the complexity of fine-tuning an indoor farm for efficient farming, and it’s often the farmers that pay the price for this,” Alexander notes.

Greener Crop started operations in the UAE and is now expanding into Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the rest of the Middle East and all of Africa in their sights. Alexander adds: “As the region in the world most under threat from water stress and shortages, conventional farming is often not a sustainable option. It is for that reason that we chose to focus on enabling hydroponic farming in this area.”

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For more information:
Alexander Kappes, Founder and CEO
Greener Crop
alexander@greenercrop.com   
www.greenercrop.com 

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Publication date: Mon 22 Mar 2021
Author: Rebekka Boekhout
© VerticalFarmDaily.com

FRANCE: How To Grow Food In A Concrete Jungle

22-03-2021 | BBC

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FRANCE - Building flourishing farms in the heart of cities used to be just a utopian fantasy. Now it's an important step towards developing a smart, diversified food system capable of feeding a growing world population. Guillaume Fourdinier has lived in Paris for six years, but he still misses the taste of the fresh cereal grains, beets, carrots, and more that grow on his family's farm in Verton. There, in northern France's countryside, eating locally is a way of life – not simply a trend or a sticker on an apple at the grocery store.

“Local food is everywhere when you are in the countryside. You get fruits and vegetables with better taste, more nutritional value,” he says. “When you are in Paris, what is local food? There is nothing coming from a local farm. I think for quality of life for people living in big cities this is a big problem.”

In 2015, Fourdinier co-founded Agricool, an urban farm that's now comprised of 11 recycled shipping containers on the north side of the city. Eight farmers plant, harvest, pack, and deliver the pesticide-free lettuces, herbs, and strawberries to 60 supermarkets (though Fourdinier expects that number to grow to at least 200 retailers by the end of 2021).

Urban farms like Agricool are part of a broad collection of metropolitan agricultural efforts including everything from vertical farms to greenhouses to aquaponics to community gardens. The idea of cultivating food in or near cities is not new (see the victory gardens of both world wars, for example), but these ventures have become increasingly popular in recent years as the local food movement strengthens. After the rise of the supermarkets led many people to feel disconnected from food production, consumers are again paying more attention to how and where their food is grown, along with how far ingredients must travel between field and plate.

From Brussels to Nigeria, entrepreneurs and farmers are reimagining what farms are and conceiving innovative technology to help grow food in smaller spaces and in more sustainable ways. They're attempting to fix existing food supply chain concerns, which we've all became intimately familiar with in the past year. Images of picked-over grocery shelves and farmers tossing out produce early in the Covid-19 pandemic broadcast the failures and fragility of our current systems.

 Click here to read the full article.

Photo Courtesy of BBC

PODCAST: Is This The Fastest-Growing Vertical Farming Business In The World?

March 11, 2021

Louisa Burwood-Taylor

Indoor agriculture is competitive. While there is so much whitespace for vertical farms and high-tech greenhouses to grow and sell produce regionally, those that are VC-backed seem to have been fighting for investor attention for years – with big announcements often lacking substance. So who is really leading the race?

When I returned from maternity leave in January, I reached out to my good friend Henry Gordon-Smith from urban ag consultancy Agritecture to find out what I’d missed and what sort of traction these highly-funded startups were really getting.

When thinking about which company was making the greatest strides, Henry highlighted Infarm – the Berlin-based vertical farming group with more than $300m in funding under its belt.

Infarm’s global footprint has expanded rapidly in recent months. Its in-store units have been cropping up across the globe – including in Japan, one of the longest established and most developed indoor agriculture markets. It’s also expanding into new crops, a welcome addition to the leafy green focus so many of its peers continue to have. And, since we recorded this podcast — yes that’s how fast they’re moving — they announced the roll-out of new modular ‘Growing Centers’ and added yet more funding.

So we decided to co-host an episode with Infarm’s two co-founders — and brothers — Guy and Erez Galonska, to dig into this growth.

Expect to hear about Infarm’s surprising commitment to sustainability; the focus on their core customer -the retailer; the expansion of their plant science team; and the evolution of their differentiated business model. Enjoy!

Lead photo: Image credit: Infarm

NIGERIA: Fresh Direct Makes Landless Farming Possible And Appealing For City Dwellers

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Adenike Adebowale

March 9, 2021

With about 200 million people to feed, Nigeria is battling with food security and is yet unable to produce all the food it needs. Coupled with that, farmers still lose a significant percentage of produce from post-harvest losses because of poor roads, lack of storage systems among others.

Most farms are located in rural areas because that is where the land is. The markets, however, are in the urban areas, and in taking the food from where it is harvested to where it is needed, a lot of damages happen to the produce. Studies carried out on post-harvest losses in some Nigerian communities show that as much as 20 – 30% of total grain production, 30 – 50% of root and tuber and a usually high percentage of fruits and vegetables are lost after harvest.

Nigeria produces about 1.5 million tons of tomatoes a year, but over 900,000 tons is lost to rot.

Nigeria’s Ministry of Agriculture

What if farms were located closer to the urban markets and farmers could cut down post-harvest losses by selling to the farm as soon as the produce is ready?

Agritech startup, Fresh Direct, is making this possible through its combination of hydroponics and vertical farming. The company was founded by Angel Adelaja in 2014.

Fresh Direct’s different approach to agriculture

Hydroponics is a soilless technique used to grow crops in nutrient solutions instead of in the soil. Fresh Direct grows different crops in vertical stackable containers and develops its own hydroponic system using technology and locally-sourced materials. This includes the use of metres and sensors to monitor the conditions of the plants in the stacked farm.

Farming with hydroponics

The container farms allow people in urban areas as well as people who have never farmed before to grow agricultural produce directly in places that are closer to the market. By using stackable shipping containers, the volume of crops that can be cultivated on a piece of land is increased exponentially. This allows the farmer to get as much as 10 times more yield using only 7 percent of the land that would be required if traditional farming methods are used.

“It has a lower barrier of entry because you do not need to go find land to start. You do not need a green house. You can start in your kitchen, closet, balcony or backyard.”

Angel Adelaja

Since the planting does not require soil, this system of farming is more appealing to youths because the back-breaking work that characterizes agriculture is absent. However, what this mode of farming removes in stress, it adds in creative thinking.

Suggested Read: From Farmcrowdy to Releaf, Here are the 5 Most Outstanding Agritech Startups of 2020

According to Adelaja, “What you avoid in back-breaking work you face in advanced thinking. It’s a higher level of thinking needed to calculate nutrients needed or design a system”.

The startup does not provide educational materials for city farmers, instead, it organizes periodic training to help farmers and intending-farmers get their footing.

Source: FoundersAfrica

Fresh Direct is gaining traction by involving more youths

Fresh Direct plans to get 10,000 youths interested in its Agritech model of farming. Already, the startup has urban farms in Abuja as well as mini-campuses in Osun State.

Also Read: Kenyan Insurtech Pula Closes $6M Series A to Boost Profits for Small-scale Farmers Across Africa

It teaches people who want to learn about urban farming as well as set up their own vertical farming containers. These teachings are provided in the form of periodic training that are organized by the startup. A training costs between N10,000 and N30,000 depending on how extensive the trainees want to go in urban farming.

After the training, Fresh Direct helps the trainees to get financing for the container farm with a collateral-free micro-loan that is obtained from banks. The problem of access to the market is also removed through the startup’s network of ready off-takers. After the produce is harvested, the city farmer can sell directly to Fresh Direct’s market.

Fresh Direct has raised N3 million in a pre-seed round

Since it started in 2014, Fresh Direct has raised funds from one disclosed round. It raised N1 million naira from Chivas Venture in 2016 in a pre-seed round. It raised an additional N2 million from She Leads Africa.

While players like Farmcrowdy are helping to make funds available for farmers in the country, more lucrative ways of farming like the vertical method and hydroponics can help farmers maximize their production and get more urban dwellers into the agriculture sector.

US: NEW YORK - Well-Known Investors Water Ellicottville Greens With $1M In Growth Funding

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By Dan Miner

Reporter, Buffalo Business First

March 8, 2021

Ellicottville Greens continues to push forward on its ambition with $1 million in new funding, led by well-known local investors.

The Series A round of funding will support construction of mobile vertical farming facilities, built inside reused shipping containers, along with the acquisition of Vertical Fresh Farms, an established indoor farming operation in Buffalo.

It is a natural progression for the company, which was founded in 2018 by Sal LaTorre and Gabe Bialkowski and seeks to take advantage of the national consumer drift toward locally grown, organic produce.

“We decided to go after a new round of funding because we have a lot more demand coming in than we have capacity to grow right now,” Bialkowski said. “We are focusing on growing the product and sales and that will help define everything else.”

The round was led by Scott Friedman, chairman of Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman law firm, and Andrea Vossler, a partner at that firm. The duo run Varia Ventures, an investment vehicle and management consultancy aimed at startups in Buffalo. A group of angel investors based in Buffalo participated as well.

Ellicottville Greens raised $250,000 in seed funding last year from Launch NY and other local investors.

Ellicottville Greens has thus far established four shipping containers: three at its Ellicottville home base and one on the Eastern Hills Mall property in Clarence. It sells its products to homes and restaurants through web-based marketplaces that include Produce Peddlers and Off the Muck.

Produce Peddlers is itself a local startup founded by Gary and Gina Wieczorek.

In the long-term, Bialkowski says Ellicottville Greens has a repeatable business model that could be attractive to supermarkets since the company could set up shop nearby and deliver produce at the peak of possible freshness.

He said the firm is set up at the intersection of nationwide consumer shifts in how people consume food.

“People want to buy healthy local products,” Bialkowski says. “They’re getting more health-conscious and they want to know where their food comes from.”

Ellicottville Greens is the third local startup to announce a growth-oriented round of private funding this year. The others include Torch Labs ($25 million) and Circuit Clinical ($7.5 million).

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Freight Farms

Lead photo: Ellicottville Greens' storage containers

IN THIS ARTICLE

• Andrea Vossler Food & Lifestyle Gabe Bialkowsk Sal LaTorre Scott Friedman Freight Farms

Advanced Container Technologies, Inc. Joins Clean Food Initiative

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March 03, 2021 | Source: Advanced Container Technologies Inc.

Company joins movement toward sustainable alternatives to traditional food production.

CORONA, Calif., March 03, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Advanced Container Technologies, Inc. (Ticker: OTC:ACTX) stated it is joining the Clean Food Initiative and intends to become a leading force in the drive toward sustainable agriculture.

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The Clean Food Initiative is focused on bringing clean, fresh, healthy food to children throughout the world, that is free from pesticides, herbicides, or harmful chemicals. Along with the practice of implementing Sustainable Agriculture Systems (SAS), the aim is to develop a global food system that uses half the water and half the soil as it does today – yet produces twice as much food.

Through the use of the company’s GrowPods, ACTX can provide farmers, community groups, investors, and non-profit agencies with a turnkey system to grow ultra-clean and nutritious food that can not only benefit the ecology of the planet and bolster community food security but can also provide new jobs and economic opportunities.

GrowPods are automated indoor micro-farms that can provide a sustainable supply of affordable safe, clean, nutritious food, while also providing jobs at a local level by promoting the growth of a skilled agricultural workforce in non-traditional settings.

Doug Heldoorn, CEO of Advanced Container Technologies, Inc., said the company’s objectives are to make agriculture sustainable, investable, manageable, scalable, and transparent.

“There is a substantial difference between meeting basic food requirements and meeting optimum nutrition requirements,” he said. “People need access to high quality foods that are rich in nutritional value. Future generations deserve access to a healthy and sustainable food supply, not a diet filled with preservatives, pesticides or chemicals.”

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SAS and the Clean Food Initiative represents one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, as well as a tangible investment opportunity with sound business growth prospects and consistent annual income generation.

“There are few problems facing mankind that are as massive as our need to change our methods of food production and distribution,” Mr. Heldoorn stated. “Fortunately, there are innovative solutions to these challenges, and we are extremely proud to be a vital participant in this agricultural and social evolution.”

For more information, call (951) 381-2555 or visit: www.advancedcontainertechnologies.com.

About Advanced Container Technologies, Inc.

Advanced Container Technologies, Inc. is in the businesses of selling and distributing hydroponic containers called GrowPods; and designing, branding, and selling proprietary medical-grade containers that can store pharmaceuticals, herbs, teas, and other solids or liquids, and can grind and shred herbs; as well as selling other products and accessories, such as humidity control inserts, odor-proof bags, lighters, and plastic lighter holders; and provides private labeling and branding for purchasers of the Company’s containers and the other products. For more information visit: www.advancedcontainertechnologies.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release includes predictions or information considered "forward-looking" within securities laws. These statements represent Company's current judgments but are subject to uncertainties that could cause results to differ. Readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on these statements, which reflect management's opinions only as of the date of this release. The Company is not obligated to revise any statements in light of new information or events.

Company Contact:

(951) 381-2555

info@advancedcontainertechnologies.com

Investor Relations:

Stuart Smith

SmallCapVoice.Com, Inc.

512-267-2430

ssmith@smallcapvoice.com

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AmplifiedAg Introduces Indoor Farm Platform And Disruptive Technologies, Positioning Company For Rapid Expansion

News Provided By AmplifiedAg

Mar 03, 2021

CHARLESTON, S.C., March 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- With a mission to provide global access to safe food, AmplifiedAg, Inc. introduces its indoor farming platform which includes vertical farms, hydroponic systems, and its proprietary operating system with disruptive seed-to-sale SaaS-based technologies. For the past five years, AmplifiedAg has demonstrated its unparalleled ability to sustainably grow produce to scale at the highest yield, quality and nutritional value, while operating directly at the point of consumption.

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AmplifiedAg, Inc. wholly-owns Vertical Roots, the largest hydroponic container farm in the world. Vertical Roots indoor farm production operates with AmplifiedAg's holistic indoor farming platform.

AmplifiedAg's compact farm design operates directly at the point of consumption, maximizes growing space, and is easily scalable in food deserts and space-limited areas. The company's proprietary OS gives farmers total transparency and control of horticulture, food safety, production and business management.

AmplifiedAg deploys indoor farms 70% faster than other CEA implementations, and directly at the point of consumption.

AmplifiedAg rapidly deploys fully functioning farms 70% faster than other CEA implementations, and at cost, that is 50% of the required capital per production pound. The company upcycles shipping containers into controlled agriculture environments with vertical hydroponic systems, LED lights, and electronics, and integrated with AmplifiedAg's proprietary operating system.

AmplifiedAg's indoor farm platform produces 86 times more crop yield per acre compared to traditional farmlands and provides reliable crop production with 365-day farming, regardless of climate and resources. The compact design maximizes the growing space and provides easy mobility and scalability in food deserts and space-limited areas.

But the heartbeat of the operation is AmplifiedAg's proprietary Operating System that features industry-exclusive traceability which tracks every detail of an individual plant's journey from its growth to distribution. This gives farmers total transparency and control of horticulture, food safety, and business management.

Farm containers' resilient architecture and segmentation minimizes the risk of crop loss due to pest and pathogen infestations. SaaS-based technologies provide real-time tracking analytics and 24/7 access for farmers to mitigate risk, control the farm environment and optimize plant growth.

AmplifiedAg's ability to quickly place farms directly in communities and distribution points drastically reduces emissions. Sustainably-focused, the farms don't use soil or pesticides and utilize up to 95% less water than traditional farming.

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Wholly-owned by AmplifiedAg, Vertical Roots is the company's proofpoint and has set industry-breaking records in less than five years. Vertical Roots is the largest hydroponic container farm in the U.S., growing nutritious leafy greens with products in over 1,200 grocery stores across the Southeast.

With a proven concept for leafy greens, AmplifiedAg's horticulture expansion plan includes varied nutrient and protein-rich foods to feed the world's growing population.

Increasing threats to the planet's food production fueled Taylor, a 30-year software industry veteran, to found AmplifiedAg in 2016.

"With a growing population, less arable land, water supply and food contamination issues, climate change and environmental disasters," said Taylor, "Our planet is on a path to grow less food for more people while continuing to accelerate the degradation of the earth's fragile ecosystem. Exasperating our already critical food access issues on the planet. The only way we're going to get ourselves out of this situation is with technology. We need to grow safer food in greater volumes closer to the point of consumption while conserving and restoring the environment."

"That is what is driving all of our development and innovation, and ultimately the demand we are seeing from indoor farmers and communities across the world," concluded Taylor.

AmplifiedAg, Inc. was founded in 2016 as the parent company of Vertical Roots, Boxcar Central, a SaaS platform supporting third-party logistics companies and breweries, and Tiger Corner Farms, a CEA farm manufacturing company. AmplifiedAg has absorbed Tiger Corner Farms and Boxcar Central operations as the company presents its mobile indoor farm platform to the market.

About AmplifiedAg, Inc.
AmplifiedAg, Inc. is an ag-tech industry visionary on a mission to provide global access to safe food. The company manufactures indoor vertical farms, hydroponic systems, and disruptive seed-to-sale SaaS-based technologies. Unlike other indoor ag operations, AmplifiedAg provides holistic indoor farm solutions to grow and distribute food anywhere in the world.

AmplifiedAg owns and operates Vertical Roots, the largest hydroponic container farm in the World. Learn more at www.amplifiedaginc.com. Growing Food for a Growing World.

SOURCE AmplifiedAg

Related Link

https://www.amplifiedaginc.com

Creating A Connected, Community Centered Urban Farm Environment

“NYC streets are ripe with potential to start producing their own food,"  says Julian Lwin with Street Farm. Full and built up through the city might be, lack of space is no excuse for anyone, as Street farms’ vertical farm can be fit also in small public spaces. “We now can claim street space for sustainably grown urban greens the same way we claimed the streets for outdoor dining during COVID.”

COVID forced many countries to rethink their food system, as logistics suddenly got complicated. Also Julian became acutely aware of the need for new retail environments, finding a safer way to interact with food, and purchasing fresh produce. Via an automated dispensing think vending machines & dedicated StreetFarm app.

In this period he saw people taking their activities outside, exercising or even eating out on the streets whereas they would normally do this indoors. With that in mind, he found (conceived) Street Farm, intending to find a solution for growing fresh produce right there in the streets of NYC. “We will fabricate the farms right here in New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard, to keep the transport emissions to an absolute minimum.” This model can be set up in any city metropolis around the globe where freshly grown produce is missing from the urban environment

Street Farm’s micro-vertical farm works with a hydroponic growth system and is designed to be reused again and again. The designs vary in size from 8’ wide x 8’ high x 12’ long to 16’ high to 32’ long. The smaller ones can be placed in gardens, allowing the larger-scale growing to be done in empty storefronts, city lots, etcetera. Julian dreams of the microfarms to be placed even in schools, libraries, and train stations to show people that food can be grown literally anywhere. 

Urban “element" vertical farm

Combining the latest technologies in the field of AI and robotics for monitoring the growth and yield, the New York streets will produce lots of fresh produce for the local population.  “With Street Farms we can transform New York from a food desert to a paradise of nutritious, healthy vegetables.” The plan is for the system to monitor the plant growth itself, but for the harvest to be done by employees, thus creating more jobs in the city. “We want these farms to create a connected, community-centered urban farm environment, connecting people to each other and to the food they eat.”

Julian finds it vitally important that people see tangible agriculture grown in public places, rather than hiding vertical farms in post-industrial spaces and rooftops. “Street Farms will connect the community with the products we eat. We aim for a paradigm shift in our relationship to the food we eat and our city landscape.”

Lead photo: The micro modular urban vertical farm satellite

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For more information:
Lwindesign
Julian Lwin, Founder 
julian@lwindesign.com 
www.lwindesign.com  

Publication date: Thu 25 Feb 2021
Author: Rebekka Boekhout
© VerticalFarmDaily.com

USA - MICHIGAN: Indoor Agriculture Receives $100,000 Grant From MDARD

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February 19, 2021

Ayanna Allen

NMU’s new indoor agriculture program recently received a $100,000 grant on Feb. 12 from Michigan’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to help offset the costs for a self-contained growing center.

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According to MDARD’s page, the grants are to help “promote the sustainability of land-based industries and support infrastructure that benefits rural communities”. 

MDARD received over 139 proposals, totaling over $11 million. The program only accepted 20 proposals, which totaled to roughly $1.7 million. This included NMU’s proposal for a self-contained growing center.

The indoor agriculture program is a new major brought to NMU which focuses on hands-on learning of indoor agriculture, sustainable farming practices, urban farming models, environmental infrastructure systems, helping solve the global food crisis, and more. 

Last fall was the first semester that the program took off.

“One of the biggest challenges of growing a program is finding space, and even though there is some available around campus, and in the Jacobetti Center in particular, it still costs a lot of money to retrofit that space and make it usable for the intended purpose.” Evan Lucas, assistant professor of technology and occupational sciences, said. “We targeted this grant specifically to help alleviate the cost impact of adding space for our labs.” 

Lucas went on by saying that the program submitted the idea of purchasing one to two shipping containers to enhance the curriculum. The shipping containers, depending on size and capability would be used to add growing space and diversity the type of growing space.

The program hopes that with the grant money they will be able to grow, and in turn create more space for students to work. Sarah Cormier, a junior in the indoor agriculture program, has exciting hopes for the grant money. 

“I’d hope it’d encourage others to look into the program and think about food production differently,” said Cormier. “We are limited in our labs with the number of seedlings we can tend to, but with more systems we would be able to monitor more plants simultaneously.” 

In turn, having more space means having room for more students. After quick shutdowns and pack-up times, last semester was hard for the program. However, Cormier felt that the experience this semester has been more straightforward. 

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the program had to cut back on the amount of students able to register. This left many students on waiting lists, unable to participate in the brand new program.

“We were unfortunately not able to open up more than we did without sacrificing the hands-on aspect of growing, which we weren’t really willing to do as that kind of defeats the main purpose,” Lucas stated.

However, Lucas was quick to say how integral Kim Smith Kolosa, another assistant professor of technology and occupational sciences, was to the program. 

“She has done an amazing job taking this program from literally non-existent to exceptional in no time, and we couldn’t ask for anything better at this time,” Lucas said.

TAGS: grant, indoor agriculture, news

Training Artificial Intelligence To Track Greenhouses in Antarctica and Mars

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FEBRUARY 17, 2021

by Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology

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Credit: Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology

Scientists from the Skoltech Center for Computational and Data-Intensive Science and Engineering (CDISE) and the Skoltech Digital Agriculture Laboratory and their collaborators from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that enables processing images from autonomous greenhouses, monitoring plant growth and automating the cultivation process. Their research was published in the journal IEEE Sensors.

Modern technology has long become a fixture in all spheres of human life on Earth. Reaching out to other planets is a new challenge for humankind. Since greenhouses are likely to be the only source of fresh food for Mars space crews and settlers, development of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer-vision-based technologies for plant growth automation is perceived as a priority research target. A test site is already in place for developing and testing advanced life support systems: An autonomous plant cultivation module is operating at the Antarctic Neumayer Station III near the South Pole. Right now, scientists are focusing on creating an AI system that could collect information about all the plant growth factors and seedling health and control greenhouses in autonomous mode without human involvement.

"One cannot maintain continuous communication with Neumayer III, and training computer vision models onboard requires too many resources, so we had to find a way to send a stream of plant photographs to external servers for data processing and analysis," Skoltech Ph.D. student Sergey Nesteruk explains.

As a conclusion to their research, the Skoltech team processed a collection of images from remote automated systems using their new approach based on convolutional neural networks and outperforming popular codecs by over seven times in reducing the image size without apparent quality degradation. The researchers used the information from the reconstructed images to train a computer vision algorithm which, once trained, is capable of classifying 18 plant varieties according to species at different stages of development with an accuracy of 92%. This approach makes it possible to both visually monitor the system operation and continuously gather new ML model training data in order to enhance the models' functionality.

There are plans to deploy and test the new systems right on Neumayer III, which will mark an important step towards automation of plant growing modules, thus removing yet another roadblock on the way to Mars.

Lead photo: Plant cultivation module in Antarctica. Credit: Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Learning Centre Gearing Up For “Village Greens”

Published on February 13, 2021

By Laura Keil

Fresh, local and green aren’t words you often hear about Robson Valley products in the wintertime, but the Valemount Learning Society hopes to change that.

The Learning Centre is branching out from its usual array of employment services and courses and digging into local food, thanks to a grant last summer from Northern Development Initiative Trust. The Society used the $166,328 grant to buy a Growcer “growing container” to supply the community with fresh greens year-round: they have made inquiries at IGA and local restaurants and plan to donate some to the food bank. They are also considering a box program if other options don’t work out.

The container is currently on order and will arrive sometime in March, said Riette Kenkel, manager of the Valemount Learning Centre, and she hopes they will have their first harvest in May.

Mike Johnson, who works for VLC as an employment advisor, will run the Growcer operation, which will be called “Village Greens.” Prior to arriving in Valemount, he worked in a commercial greenhouse for 20 years, Kenkel said.

The Growcer company provides training as the food is grown hydroponically.

The container will be set up in the Valemount Industrial Park next door to Robson Valley Mushrooms and near the Valemount Community Forest offices. Kenkel said the heating costs should be offset by the well-insulated container walls, which are good to -50 degrees.

She hopes to package most of the food in biodegradable packaging.

Kenkel previously told the Goat it’s no one’s fault the fresh food supply in Valemount isn’t always consistent.

“By the time the truck gets here the produce is old, and if stuff flies off the shelf we have to wait for the next (truck),” she said. “The Learning Centre has always responded to community needs. This was something we were hearing.”

She said it’s a social enterprise, so if it makes money, that cash will be cycled back into the programs that the Valemount Learning Centre delivers.

One of the more recent programs they’ve taken on is 4-H, which has a focus on agriculture and livestock and they’ve put a call-out for people to come up with program ideas.

Kenkel says it goes beyond just agriculture, however. Projects can relate to environmental issues, learning about aspects of farming, soil, and animals- not just farm animals.

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The Growcer container is self-contained and ready to go in any season using hydroponics. The Valemount Learning Centre hopes to fill the winter void, create a job or two and raise money for their other programs. //GROWCER

“It’s wide open right now for whatever the community wants it to be.”

Farmers Market management
The Society recently took over management of the Valemount Farmers’ Market from long-time organizer Christine Pelletier.

“We’re pretty excited about it,” Kenkel said. “We’re not really going to make any changes. We want to just run this next season as close to what it’s been in the past.”

She said the market will run from June 17th until September 30th this year and the rates for vendors will be the same: $10 per day plus a $10 annual membership.

Kenkel says they likely won’t sell their own fresh greens at the market, as they don’t want to compete with local growers.

“If Village Greens has something that’s marketable at the farmers market that isn’t competing with existing customers, then we might look at it. But yeah, we don’t want to compete with any of the smaller farmers that have been reliably selling lettuce, kale, basil, that kind of stuff.”

Related Posts:

• Non-profit to invest in local wintertime greens

Why I Moved From California To Kansas To Grow Leafy Greens In All Seasons

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By Brad Fourby

January 9, 2021

The Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Brad Fourby runs Leafy Green Farms LLC, a hydroponic shipping container farm in Pittsburg.

Google Maps says the distance between Sacramento, California, and Pittsburg, Kansas, is 1,842 miles.

This year has been tough, with COVID shutdowns, a heart attack, bypass surgery, and the loss of a loved one. All of this slowed me down but did not stop me from leaving California and starting a year-round container farm that will provide Pittsburg with fresh leafy vegetables like lettuces, basils, and arugula.

Good nutrition starts with what is on your plate. Knowing where your food comes from and how it was grown is becoming more important to everyone.

While living in downtown Sacramento, I started Innovative Farms. I would build and help consult with others interested in aquaponics, growing fish and plants together in small places. Small towns have to wait and pay higher prices for food that has been grown and transported from California, China, Argentina, and other countries. The produce is picked early so that it may ripen in transit on ships or trucks while being treated with chemicals along the way.

Through this work, I met longtime Pittsburg residents Rob and Sara Morris, owners of Energy Group Consultants. They told me that Pittsburg and Crawford County were considered a food desert — like much of the Midwest, grocers in Crawford County import their food, while producers export what they grow, such as corn and soybeans.

I would visit the city a few times a year and got to know some of the people and businesses. I loved the vibe of the place.

Rob and Sara and I discussed increasing the farm-to-table opportunities in Pittsburg. We talked about container farming, using repurposed shipping containers that have been outfitted with computer-controlled vertical hydroponics. This highly efficient method requires no pesticides or herbicides to grow vegetables that can be harvested weekly regardless of the climate.

My previous experience with aquaponics reminded me of Freight Farms, a Boston farm manufacturer with a great track record of successful farms worldwide. Their farm design was expandable, and vegetables could grow in any weather condition.

I came up with the outline of a business plan. With three farms, my goal was to begin year-round harvests this winter in Pittsburg and support the farm-to-table lifestyle.

I began making phone calls to the city. Compared to the regulation and tax heavy California, Kansas felt welcoming to new business. I heard the term “agri-tourism,” and the idea of new agricultural developments directly helping the area was exciting for many people I spoke with.

The city planners loved the idea of a new business that supported other existing businesses like restaurants, grocers, and the farmers market community, many of them hurt by the COVID shutdowns.

Working with Pittsburg State University’s Small Business Development Center, I created a final business plan. Equity Bank signed on to assist with the Small Business Administration loan process.

So far it has been a real team effort. We really picked up steam after a call with Mike Green, Equity Bank’s small business banker. Turns out he grew up on a farm and instantly recognized the value the business would be to the entire area. We talked about how freshly picked non-chemically treated vegetables actually taste. The difference is night and day.

After that call I knew for sure Pittsburg would be the home of Leafy Green Farms.

The Kansas Healthy Food Initiative then stepped in and awarded the business $15,000 to assist with operating and equipment expenses. This kind of support was a real boost for everyone. KHFI and our farm goals are very much aligned.

It turned out that everyone agreed: Every Kansan should have access to healthy, affordable food.

The idea of more fresh food being produced in Pittsburg was something Live Well Crawford County director Brad Stroud told me he has been very supportive of. Joining their network has been a very positive experience.

We hope that by adding farms that are unique to the area that grows specialty crops, more people will visit the city and frequent some of the supporting businesses. We will take input from chefs and the community palate, and restaurants in the area will be able to offer menu items that their counterparts in large cities have no chance of offering. Our list of available herbs, roots, and vegetables is long and our variety is huge, with Firecracker Leaf Lettuce, Sylvesta Butterhead, and even Wasabi Arugula.

Sacramento County has around 1.5 million people, Crawford County 38,000. Many of my California friends and family are watching my move with great anticipation. When someone asks “Why Kansas?” my answer has remained the same since the beginning: Kansas is open for business.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Lead photo: A Freight Farms container on its way to a destination. (Submitted by Leafy Green Farms to Kansas Reflector)