US (FL): Sustainable Self-Sustaining Farm Hubs To Empower Local Production
It started off as a dream to promote local, urban agriculture with a focus on environmental sustainability. Now, Shannon O’Malley and Brad Doyle, co-founders of Brick Street Farms have officially broken ground for their new BSF Retail Hub.
“We have a tentative opening for Summer 2022 of this year,” Shannon says. “We did experience some delays, as everyone did during these times, but at the end of the day, it was something we could work through with a little creativity. Everything is rolling along now, and we’re excited to bring our Brick Street Farms Hubs to the market.”
Remote and self-sustaining hubs
Brick Street Farms’ project is called BSF Hub and consists of modular farms within shipping containers, including the front-of-house retail location too. In this way, the community would have access to fresh, high-quality, local food, all in one place. Pulling this off is not easy, especially considering how energy-intensive controlled environment agriculture (CEA) operations are. Yet, sustainability has always been the foundation of Brick Street Farms. “We developed a smart energy management system,” explains Shannon.
“We do have solar panels, and we plan on eventually using fully renewable energy sources; yet, as of now, sometimes it’s not enough. So, we have set up a system that selects an energy source from solar panels with a battery backup system, natural gas or pulls directly from the grid. Thanks to our smart energy management system, the facility will pull energy based on what’s most convenient at that moment. This would look not only at the cost of a given source but also at the carbon footprint.”
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Photo: Shannon O’Malley