The Trendy, Spendy Future of Tech-Enabled Indoor Farming

Apps and sensor-laden gadgets are helping farmers shift from the fields to indoor food-growing operations. But these innovations still don’t make it easy.

SINCE THE ARRIVAL of the plow thousands of years ago, technology has made farming easier. Now, farmers large and small have access to advanced robots, automated facilities, self-driving tractors, and pollinator drones. Tech can enable regular folks to grow their own vegetables and herbs too, as app-enabled home systems like Click & Grow and Lettuce Grow Farmstand have blurred the line between farmer and hobbyist. It’s a phenomenon—and a market—that companies have become keen to capitalize on.

“Everyone's coming out of the gate trying something new, and some of it works, and some of it doesn't,” says Thomas Graham, an environmental sciences researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. “It's still a little bit of the Wild West, and creativity is running rampant. That’s a great thing.”

For years, proponents have hailed indoor growing techniques like hydroponics (growing plants in nutrient-rich water rather than soil) and vertical farming (packing rows of plants beneath grow lamps inside of a warehouse, basement, or retrofitted shipping container) as ways to “democratize farming” for anyone who wants to give growing a go, regardless of whether they own any fertile land. And the indoor farming business is booming. In January, the commercial farming company Square Roots opened its fourth facility of shipping container farms in Wisconsin. The company says the collection of containers are capable of producing a couple million packages of plants—leafy greens like lettuce and herbs—per year. Walmart got in the indoor farming game in January when it invested in Plenty, another commercial vertical farming company. Some companies have even positioned themselves as one-stop shops for farm production, all packed into a single unit.

The Boston company Freight Farms builds farms into shipping containers for clients who want to feed a small community or run a business. In 10 years it has gone from a Kickstarter campaign to growing food for Google’s office lunches. Freight’s newest offering, the Greenery S, is a system that packs rows of vertical growing shelves into an 8-foot by 40-foot shipping container. It’s controlled by a companion app called Farmhand that allows growers to monitor data collected by sensors inside the container. With it, growers can remotely tweak a garden’s temperature, humidity, lighting, and CO2 levels from their desktop or phone. Users can tap sliders to adjust light and water controls and monitor camera feeds to keep an eye on things inside the sealed and stable environment. If something goes awry with the conditions around the plants, the app will send a notification about what’s amiss.

“I could be sitting in the farm, I could be sitting in my office away from my farm, I could be sitting on the beach 500 miles away from my farm, and I can just see what's going on,” says Erich Ludwig, a product leader at Freight Farms.

That ease of access doesn’t come cheap. The Greenery S container costs $149,000, and a subscription to the Farmhand app is $2,400 per year. (There are also bound to be additional equipment and maintenance costs, depending on how growers run things.) That’s less than buying a plot of land to cultivate a farm in most places, sure, but not exactly pocket change. Still, Freight Farms wants to appeal to a broad range of customers, from aspiring business owners to educators and hobbyists. Freight Farms CEO Rick Vanzura estimates that 80 percent of the company’s customers have no previous agricultural experience.

Thing is, even after you load a garden up with sensors, remote controls, and automation, farming is hard.

“It’s definitely still farming,” says Alexa Kaminski, a Ph.D. student at the Rochester Institute of Technology who works on producing food in a Freight Farms container on campus. (It’s an earlier model, called the Leafy Green Machine.) “A lot of times these are advertised as turnkeys or just plug and play. It’s not always as simple as that. There’s still a lot to control. There’s still a lot that can go wrong.”

Growing indoors, especially in a tight space like a shipping container, can be tricky. Energy costs for powering lights and water pumps can outweigh the potential return on investment. The tight space also limits what crops you can grow. Leafy greens like lettuce take to such conditions well, which is why it’s the main crop you see nearly every container farm company advertise.

David Wees, the associate director of the Farm Management and Technology Program at McGill University, points out that greenhouses in Canada primarily grow tomatoes, then peppers, then cucumbers, with lettuce as a distant fourth. The nutritional value of lettuce is much lower than those other plants, but those other plants are bigger and require more resources. And even though lettuce prospers in a vertical hydroponic farm, it’s not something that’s going to satisfy all the needs of your community or your restaurant.

“Hydroponics is great for the DIY harvest-scale home grower,” says David Brault, director of the Tait Preserve, a farming initiative at RIT. “But if you're going to drop 100 grand or $120,000 into something and try to start a business on it, I don't think that's where you start.”

Freight Farms says it doesn’t intend to just leave green growers hanging. The company offers lessons within the Farmhand app—walkthroughs and guides to growing certain crops aimed at the beginning farmer. Growers can also appeal to the knowledge of their peers by connecting in the app’s user forums. For the ambitious entrepreneurs, Freight Farms offers guides to creating a business plan that incorporates production and marketing efforts for the aspiring grower.

PHOTOGRAPH: FREIGHT FARMS

Sowing the Seeds

For those who don’t have a spare six figures lying around, there are plenty of cheaper options to keep the hydroponics flowing. Spend a few hundred dollars on sensors, pumps, prefabricated grow kits—and a few mason jars and buckets—and you can assemble a small, personal home garden that still takes advantage of the latest tech innovations.

Amanda Ashley turned to indoor farming at her home in Savannah, Georgia, after she grew frustrated battling the pests who chowed down on her outdoor plants. Her setup includes home grow units from Gardyn, two Aerogardens, and a Black Magic Grow Pail. They’re all small enough to fit on a tabletop or stand up against a wall. Just like the shipping container farms, many of these smaller units utilize cameras to remotely monitor the plants, computer intelligence to automate lighting and feeding, and mobile apps to fiddle with all the settings. Still, Ashley prefers to rely less on the tech and more on the analog green thumb. “The more tech you have, the more opportunity you have for something to break,” she says.

Ashley says she eats food grown in her home setup every day. Some greenery goes into salads, some into ramen. For her, the reward comes less from actually eating the food and more from the puzzle of figuring out how to run the perfect indoor garden.

“Not everything's going to be easy. You are going to run into obstacles,” she says. “But it's so cool to learn all these things, and it's awesome to have something like this in your home and be able to grow your own food. It's very rewarding.”

Boone Ashworth is a staff writer on the WIRED Gear desk, where he also produces the weekly Gadget Lab podcast. He graduated from San Francisco State University and still lives in the city. Currently, he has opened too many browser tabs.

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Lead photo: FREIGHT FARMS