Brick Street Farms Unveils Plans For Urban Hubs, Parking Lot-Sized Farms Opening In Urban Communities
BY BOB CARSKADON
The newest farm in Florida could be coming to a city parking lot near you. St. Pete's favorite Brick Street Farms recently unveiled plans for an innovation it is calling Urban Hubs, a series of eco-friendly farm and retail destinations housed in urban locations.
Brick Street Farms is using its climate-controlled agriculture and hydroponic farming systems to turn repurposed shipping containers into urban farms that can fit in a space the size of a parking lot, with its first location coming to St. Pete’s Grand Central District in early 2022.
Multiple containers will be “assembled like Legos” on-site, with each container serving a unique purpose and creating a full farming and retail structure in a fraction of the usual space. Each Urban Hub will feature a retail store where customers can purchase the goods grown in that same building, a project in sustainability and innovation that will help bring fresh food directly to the communities that need it.
Perhaps the most impressive part of the operation is the production capability of these miniature farms. Operating out of lot-sized 1/3 of an acre, each Hub will be able to produce the equivalent of 16-20 acres of fresh produce, thanks to Brick Street Farms’ custom farming systems. (And all of that with room to spare for parking.)
The first Hub model will be located at the original Brick Street Farms location in Downtown St. Petersburg at 199 20th Street South, which the company expects to break ground on and open in early 2022. Brick Street Farms moved to its new location at 2333 3rd Avenue South after early success helped them outgrow the first location. Following this maiden opening in St. Pete, the company plans to open more Urban Hubs in Tampa and elsewhere in Florida.
Urban Hubs utilize eco-friendly farming systems to offer fresh produce with sustainability
So, how does it all work?
Each Urban Hub will consist of eight to 24 of the company’s THRIVE Containers, dependent on the needs of the individual communities that they are placed in. Thanks to its Lego-like design structure, each farm can be built and opened quickly after individual containers are customized and built off-site.
The base of the Hub is two containers dedicated to the centralized systems of Central Propagation, Central Fertilization, Central Filtration, and Fertigation Dosing Systems. Each site will also have a custom-designed and engineered container hosting a market retail space for the direct-to-consumer experience, along with a packaging container, dry storage container, and cold storage container.
The goal of these Hubs, Brick Street Farms says, is to offer direct access to healthy, nutritional food in urban communities. In doing so, the Hubs have a focus on sustainability by combatting water use, energy consumption, and more.
“To us, bringing food production to the point of consumption means creating the most environmentally sustainable urban farms that do not require the use of mass transportation, supply chain or distribution channels,” the company said. “We believe it’s time to eat like the planet depends on it.”
Learn more about Brick Street Farms and the Urban Hubs at brickstreetfarms.com.
Rendering courtesy Brick Street Farms