Why Container Farms?

Donald Taylor

CEO at AmplifiedAg

January 23, 2023

An analysis of the core business and planetary advantages of container farming as CEA infrastructure--from reduced carbon emissions in construction to capital and deployment efficiencies

In my last article, I discussed the agriculture industry’s negative impact on the environment, specifically accounting for 25% of global carbon emissions, as the main driver behind why Controlled Environmental Agriculture (CEA) is mission critical. 

Continuing on the theme of creating sustainable sources of food and minimizing the negative impact on the environment, in this article, I'm focusing on the architectural design of indoor farms and the construction decisions we have made for AmplifiedAg farms.

How We ‘Construct’ Farms With Less Construction

The need to rebuild and reinforce the agricultural ecosystem to provide sustainable food sources for global populations is nothing short of an absolute. And so is the need to reduce carbon emissions in an effort to stem the catastrophic effects of climate change. However, these critical objectives are somewhat and sometimes at cross purposes. 

The CEA category - in the quest to create new, localized, and technology-enabled agricultural capacity - is constructing indoor farms using various building types, namely large-scale warehouse and greenhouse farms. These buildings require huge amounts of carbon-intensive inputs such as cement and steel to create the foundations and structures of these farms, not to mention the recurring emissions created by the buildings themselves. It is noted that cement emissions have grown faster than most carbon sources, almost doubling in the last 20 years according to leaders from the Global Carbon Project, and account for 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions today. Steel production accounts for approximately 7% of the global total, contributing approximately 1.85 tonnes of CO2 per ton of steel produced, according to the World Steel Organization and International Energy Agency (IEA).

The earth's land, trees, and oceans absorb carbon emissions, much of which are created during the manufacturing of steel, fertilizers, pesticides, concrete, and glass. When land is disrupted, that carbon is released into the atmosphere. As more forests are replaced with urban development, less carbon is captured from the atmosphere. The net result is growing levels of carbon in our atmosphere, a core contributor to climate change.

Graphic sourced from AP, June 22, 2022: Cement carbon dioxide emissions quietly double in 20 years

Our decision to use refurbished [upcycled] decommissioned shipping containers as the primary structure and format for AmplifiedAg farms was multifold, not the least of which was environmental impact and sustainability. As you can imagine, there are millions of shipping containers floating around the world. Once they reach the end of their useful life as shipping containers, instead of dropping to the bottom of the ocean floor, we can, with minimal work and investment, give them a whole new life as indoor growing environments. I see no need to manufacture more steel to construct new farms while this supply exists. 

From a sustainability and foundational architecture perspective, we apply the following technical requirements when developing an AmplifiedAg farm project with our partners:

• Utilize the minimum amount of land; vertical farms produce the highest volume of product per square foot of land by as much as 4x and 10x depending on the crop. 

• Utilize the minimal amount of building materials; decommissioned shipping containers greatly limit the amount of emissions when constructing the grow chamber.  As an alternative, decommissioned buildings would be another viable option but do have other risks.

• Mitigate crop loss risk due to highly contagious pathogens; shipping containers provide the foundation for a distributed farming architecture which also minimize foodborne illness risks.

At AmplifiedAg, we have built, deployed, and analyzed hundreds of shipping container farms, and as a result we’ve been able to rapidly evolve the engineering and efficiencies of our system, developing a fully integrated, globally accessible, vertical farming food production platform enabled with:

• SaaS based farm operating system

• Seed to sale business management

• Environmental controls & monitoring

• Automated nutrient management

• Proprietary lighting system

• Issue management and alerting

AmplifiedAg upcycles shipping containers into modular, scalable, high-density vertical farms. This image features AmplifiedAg's propagation model (AmpVPS) on the left and growing model (AmpNFT) on the right.

Container farms operate with lower capital and increased efficiency

The shipping container model affords several business level advantages over the new construction of large scale greenhouses and vertical farms:

• Capx savings greater than 400% when compared to traditional structure implementations such as greenhouses & indoor farms

• Time to market is increased by 4-12x by deploying a phased, modular and scalable container infrastructure than a conventional indoor farm build

• Minimized crop loss from infestations or pathogens due to the redundancy created by the segmented container model 

• Modular format allows for farms to be implemented in direct proximity to the point of consumption or distribution (i.e. food distribution centers) eliminating transportation emissions and expense

• The mobile nature of the containers makes it easy to relocate farms in response to changing market conditions and emergency response

• Climate and geographically agnostic growing allows the solution to support population needs in all regions of the world - from arid to tropical, flatland to mountainous, and beyond

CEA companies can assist in the endeavor of renewable energy mobilization by disclosing factual and scientific sustainability reporting for effective benchmarking and solution-oriented collaboration.

Battling CEA’s power demand and mobilizing renewable energy

The core argument against CEA is power consumption, which leads to the global need for renewable green energy sources. I believe that over the next 10-15 years engineering and science will get us to a point where fossil fuels are not a necessity where large power requirements exist. Not just renewables, but also reducing energy demand. CEA companies, particularly vertical farming, need to become more energy efficient in addition to using renewable energy, and can assist in the endeavor of renewable energy mobilization by disclosing factual and scientific sustainability reporting, which is something we actively practice and promote at AmplifiedAg.

If we all use less, we develop less, and ultimately need fewer resources to build massive-scale infrastructure projects. While the utilization strategies for renewable energy sources are evolving, we, as a CEA industry, need to be perfecting the engineering and operations of agricultural systems that give back more to the planet than they take.

In summary, we all need to be focused on creating agricultural emission free methodologies.

AmplifiedAg is on a mission to modernize and localize agriculture by enabling farmers, communities and institutions with vertical farms and technology. Follow AmplifiedAg on LinkedIn and at www.amplifiedaginc.com to learn more about AmplifiedAg farms, technology, and our partners.