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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Modern Farmer

Zooey Deschanel Has a New Startup Selling Hydroponic Farms for the Home

Nowadays, there’s any number of ways to have a hydroponic farm at home: wall-mounted gardens, countertop farms, and pillars that grow fresh greens. The latter is possible thanks to actress Zooey Deschanel’s new startup Lettuce Grow, through which she and her husband Jacob Pechenik launched the Farmstand, their take on a hydroponic farm.

Farmstand, which debuted at SXSW in Austin, TX in March, is a self-watering, self-fertilizing farm that grows in a pillar-like fixture made from recycled plastics. As of right now, the farms are meant for outdoors. Clocking in at a little over one foot wide and between four and six feet tall, depending on the model, the farm takes much of the guesswork out of growing by automating the watering and nutrient delivery process inside the pillar.

Image via Lettuce Grow

To set up a farm, there is a one-time fee for the hardware, then a monthly subscription fee for a grow plan that includes regular seedling deliveries along with nutrients every two weeks. If that seems like a lot, it’s because Pechenik and Deschanel are hoping you’ll use the farms every day to harvest food for regular cooking. Monthly memberships range from $49 for four growing levels to $69 per month for six growing levels. Users can choose from a number of different plans to get seedlings that best suit their needs.

Pechenik and Deschanel told INC that the idea began as a way to provide their family with fresher greens, and that going forward, their mission is to “allow people to grow at least 20 percent of their food at home.” To that end, plant varieties a customer will receive with their subscription are based on geographic location: an algorithm selects plants best suited to grow in, say, Texas weather.  An accompanying app makes recommendations about when to harvest, add nutrients and water, and offers recipes and growing advice. And if you wind up needing more grow space, each farm is easily expanded by snapping another growing level onto the top of the farm.

Right now Farmstand is a little less sophisticated than other consumer-grade models out there in the sense that the plants still need natural sunlight to grow. According to the Lettuce Grow website, lighting kits for indoor growing are in the works, along with a wifi and cellular-enabled IoT device to better monitor water, pH, and power levels in the soil.

Farmstand won’t be the only ones pushing indoor hydroponic grow systems. In fact, there are already several options on the market or taking pre-orders that make the concept easy and easy to fit within even the smallest apartments, from the wall-mounted Herbert by Ponix Systems to CityCrop’s teeny-tiny countertop device.

Lettuce Grow is currently taking pre-orders for Farmstand.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the product as “the Farmstead.”

Agerris Raises $6.5M for its Ag Tech Robotics and AI Platform

Agerris, an Australia-based robotics and AI platform for agriculture, announced over the weekend that it has raised $6.5 million (AUSD) in seed funding from Uniseed, Carthona Capital and BridgeLane Group.

The startup was founded by Professor Salah Sukarrieh and began as research at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney (which is also a partner in Uniseed). From the looks of it, Agerris is building a modular robotics and AI platform that has broad applications for both plant and livestock farmers.

According to a University of Sydney news post, Agerris has two main products. The “Swagbot” can autonomously monitor and identify weed issues, detect food and crops through computer vision, as well as herd livestock. Agerris'”Digital Farmhand” is a lower cost robot platform to help row and tree crop farmers manage crop health and yields.

Tree Crop Demo - Farmhand and Swagbot

Agerris will begin trials in Australia before attempting to expand to Southeast Asia and countries in the South Pacific over the next year.

AgTech presents a big opportunity for robotics as the world’s farms will need to increase production to keep up with a growing global population, and robots can do much of the hard, manual labor that comes with farming. Adding to that pressure currently here in the U.S., farms are facing a labor shortage, creating even more need for automation in the fields.

Agerris seems similar to Pennsylvania-based Augean Robotics, which scored its own seed funding last week. Augean builds the Burro, a squat, rugged, wheeled robot meant to haul gear and crops around a farm. But the Burro is also a broader platform, upon which Augean will offer additional ag-specific capabilities such as weed detection, targeted spraying and more.

If you are interested in how robotics will change the meal journey, be sure to come to our ArticulATE food robot and automation summit next week in San Francisco. Tickets are almost gone, so get yours today!

Square Roots Partners With Gordon Foods to Expand Its Indoor Farmprint

Urban indoor farming company Square Roots announced today it has teamed up with Gordon Food Service, a food service provider and distributor in North America. According to a press release (sent via email), the partnership will give Square Roots the chance to expand its farming footprint significantly while making locally grown produce more widely available.

Gordon Foods will assist Square Roots with building farms on or near Gordon distribution centers. Food grown on these farms will be available to Gordon’s customers, which include corporate clients as well as individuals buying from the company’s e-commerce store. Gordon is, according to the press release, a $15 billion company, so its deep pockets can facilitate the expansion.

Square Roots was founded by food entrepreneur Kimball Musk along with engineer-turned-entrepreneur Tobias Peggs. Since its inception in 2016, the company has been steadily rising as a leader in the vertical farming space. It’s known both for its indoor farms, which it operates out of recycled shipping containers, as well as its Next Gen Farmer Training Program. The latter is an entrepreneurial-meets-agricultural program designed to teach young adults the nuances of farming (right now the average age of a farmer is about 58). It places heavy emphasis on the technological aspects of urban farming, so participants graduate with as much tech savvy as they do plant savvy.

One cool thing about the Square Roots-Gordon Foods partnership is that it means more of these Farmer Training Programs across the continent. The deal includes building new Square Roots “campuses” on or near Gordon distribution centers, and each of these campuses will need people to care for the farms. Square Roots told me its Brooklyn HQ has 10 farms total and accepts 6 to 10 next-gen farmers each year. For new farms, the number of farmers will vary based on the size of the campus, Square Roots said.

Gordon operates 175 different distribution centers in North America. For them, the partnership is also a way for an old food brand to put on a newer, more modern face. The company has been in operation since the late 1800s and currently serves restaurants, hospitals, schools, and other food-service facilities. But as we’ve seen recently, even big institutions are starting to look beyond historical staples (green Jello, anyone?) and provide healthier alternatives to patients, students, and other customers.

While not a complete parallel, the deal does remind me of Corelle’s recent move to merge with Instant Pot: a century-old company teaming up with a young startup, presumably in response to the way our perception of food, cooking, and eating is changing. More and more consumers are growing aware of the quality of their food, and eating local is a growing movement that’s starting to become more than just a trend for rich hipsters. Big Food knows it. Old institutions know it. Gordon Foods has actually gone and done something about it, and possibly set a standard for other major distributors along the way.

IBM to Use IoT, Watson and Data to Boost Sugar Cane Production in Thailand

If you’re around my age, when you think of IBM, an image of big mainframe computers with giant rotating tape loops come to mind (I’m old). But for you young’uns, you’d be forgiven if the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about IBM is food.

Today, Big Blue announced a two-year research collaboration with the Thailand government’s National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) that will use IBM’s Internet of Things (Iot), artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities to help improve sugarcane yields in Thailand. (Thailand is the world’s second largest exporter of sugar.) The pilot will run on three sugar cane farms covering 1 million square meters run by Mitr Phol, Asia’s largest sugar producer.

IBM’s Agronomic Insights Assistant will bring together elements of IBM Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, the IBM Pairs Geoscope and The Weather Company, which IBM purchased in 2015. The program will gather data from the fields (soil moisture, crop health, etc.) using a combination of IoT sensors and satellite imagery, which will be augmented with local data from the NSTDA and years of weather data from The Weather Company to better predict potential environmental issues like rainfall.

The IBM platform will then take all this data and run it through Watson to create a software and mobile dashboard to help Mitr Phol better assess and manage risks like pests, diseases, irrigation and pesticide/fertilizer application, with the goal of optimizing productivity and increasing crop yield.

The Agronomic Insights Assistant will start its pilot in the middle of this year, and because IBM is working with NSTDA, a government agency, the insights gained may be shared with other farmers in the region so they can apply the same tactics.

As noted earlier, IBM is a name that keeps popping up in the food tech space for us here at The Spoon. In September of last year the company created the Agropad, a cheap, paper sensor that could be used to measure acidity and chemical levels in soil. And earlier this year, Big Blue partnered with McCormick to apply its AI tech to developing new spices.

Right now, the Agronomic Insights Assistant is in the research phase, so things like pricing and availability weren’t discussed. IBM is facing a lot of competition in the data-driven-insights-for-agtech space. Arable and Teralytic both make field sensors to provide data on soil conditions, Taranis uses aerial imaging including from satellites to help farmers spot diseases early, and Hi Fidelity Genetics uses sensors, data and AI for improved crop breeding.

The advantage IBM has, of course, is that it’s IBM. It has existing sales channels, Watson is perhaps the premiere AI brand, and it can combine sensors, data, weather prediction and AI under one roof. And, of course, a younger generation of farmers unfamiliar with IBM’s roots may not have the preconceived notion of IBM’s mainframe roots.

Ÿnsect Raises €110M to Build the World’s Largest Insect Farm (to Help Feed Fish)

Ÿnsect, a Paris-based company that farms insects for protein used in fish and pet food as well as fertilizer, announced today that it has raised a €110 million (~$124M USD) Series C round led by Astanor Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Ÿnsect to $149.5 million.

The news comes via EU-Startups, which says that Ÿnsect will use the money to build the world’s biggest insect farm in Amiens Metropole, Northern France, which will eventually produce 20,000 tons of protein year.

When we talk about bug-based protein, we often talk about crickets, which are a source of easily renewable protein for baking flour or even workout supplements. Ÿnsect, however focuses on Molitor larvae, or mealworms.

One of the ways those mealworms will be put to use is as fish feed. Global demand for seafood has doubled in the past 50 years and continues to increase. Currently, roughly half of the seafood eaten worldwide comes from farmed fish, and that number is expected to hit 62 percent by 2030.

However, the food currently used to raise those farmed fish is… other fish in the form of fishmeal. A 2017 study from the University of British Columbia found that 90 percent of that fishmeal (roughly 18 million tons) is suitable for human consumption. Replacing fishmeal with insect feed like that made by Ÿnsect could help ease the stress on fish stocks, especially when combined with computer vision tech like Aquabyte’s to reduce overfeeding.

These efforts could in turn prolong our ability to savor salmon, at least until we’re able to make lab-grown fish.

As the Food Industry Wakes Up to Blockchain, Online Training Options are Now Available

It’s no secret that the food industry is rapidly awaking to the great promise of blockchain technology, and headlines abound about how it promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. That could revolutionize the food supply chain, which remains burdened by sketchy accountability. Part of the challenge in assuring that blockchain fulfills its promise is connecting the right people—everyone from farmers, to fishermen to warehouse managers to data scientists. Another part of the challenge, though, is educating people in the food industry so that they can implement blockchain-based food source tracing solutions, and more.

At major business schools ranging from Berkeley to Wharton, students are flocking to classes on blockchain and cryptocurrency. As CNBC recently reported: “According to a new survey of 675 U.S. undergraduate students by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Qriously, 9 percent of students have already taken a class related to blockchain or cryptocurrency and 26 percent want to take one.”

But you don’t have to be an MBA student to study blockchain basics. Recently, we’ve covered how blockchain could have mitigated the California Romaine lettuce crisis by providing more rigorous and easier-to-access sourcing information on where tainted lettuce as coming from. We’ve also covered blockchain’s growing role in tracing fishy seafood sourcing origins, which could give us confidence that the fish we think we are buying actually is what the label says it is.

That’s why it’s going to be essential for many people in the food industry to educate themselves on how blockchain works, how to implement a solution, who to partner with, and who is already running efficient blockchain deployments. The good news is that much of the underlying technology required is free and open source, with organizations such as hyperledger working hard to make sure they stay that way. Hyperledger is a multi-project open source collaborative effort hosted by The Linux Foundation, created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Brian Behlendorf, the Executive Director of the project, has been named one of the top 10 influential voices in the blockchain world by the New York Times.

With open source solutions, food industry players can often pay nothing to implement a blockchain deployment. These players need education, though, so where can they turn?

There is more good news on this front, in that many of the best educational options for blockchain are either free or available at a nominal cost. In addition, there are a number of good online, self-paced educational options. Let’s consider some of the best courses.

Udemy offers many online blockchain courses priced at under $10, including The Basics of Blockchain, Learn How to Build Your First Blockchain, and Pass the Certified Blockchain Developer Exam. All these courses are self-paced online and available for $9.99. In the Basics of Blockchain course, TED speaker Bettina Warburg “connects the dots between the business, economics, and technology of Blockchain.”

The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project has steadily produced the key open technologies favored by blockchain developers, most notably Hyperledger Fabric–a foundation for developing blockchain applications or solutions with modular architectures.

These are a couple of the key courses offered by The Linux Foundation, with the first course priced at $299 while the second course is free:

Hyperledger Fabric Fundamentals (LFD271) Teaches the fundamental concepts of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies (LFS171)A primer to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Learn how to start building blockchain applications with Hyperledger frameworks.

These are self-paced online courses and the Fabric Fundamentals course is taught by the folks who created Hyperledger Fabric. You can find even more blockchain training options from The Linux Foundation here.

The Linux Foundation and hyperledger have done quite a bit of outreach to various industries to raise awareness of low-cost blockchain training options, and make clear that learning about blockchain does not require advanced technical skills. Still, there will be challenges in getting some non-technical participants in the food industry to take advantage of available blockchain training options. There are non-profit organizations tackling these challenges, and a good place to start is to join The Global Blockchain Business Council.

By joining The Global Blockchain Business Council, you can gain access to a lot of content about how blockchain works. You can also connect with other people and organizations who are actually deploying blockchain solutions.

In the food industry and across many other industries ranging from healthcare to finance, blockchain development and management skills are going to become ever more valuable.  Careers website Glassdoor lists thousands of job posts related to blockchain, and the numbers are growing.

Interested in more? At a 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit panel, executives from ripe.io and Walmart discussed the promise of blockchain in the food industry, food safety, and which groups of people need to get connected for blockchain solutions to work. Watch the video to hear the whole conversation.

 

Why Vertical Farming Won’t Grow Without More Data

Vertical farming got a lot of attention at the very end of 2018, from Bowery’s $90 million funding round to news of major corporations starting their own farms.

But amid all those numbers and names, one vital piece of information was (and is) missing: We don’t actually know how well the vertical farming market as a whole is doing — if it’s on track to reach its projected $13 billion marketshare by 2024, and if the concept is even as promising a food source as the headlines would have you believe.

That’s where universities come in to play — Princeton University, to be exact. The Princeton Vertical Farming Project (PVFP) researches what the most optimal growing conditions are for indoor farming and how to produce the best crop yield while using the fewest amount of resources (e.g., water, electricity). Led by Paul P.G. Gauthier, an associate research scholar in plant physiology and environmental plant metabolism, PVFP also wants to provide a model for other initiatives and companies by releasing data on their experiments about what works in vertical farming, and what doesn’t.

“I just wanted to study and provide data,” Gauthier said in a phone interview. “Yes, we’re putting [farms] indoors. We never talk about where the waste water is going, how we get the water. Is it really worth it?”

If you’re a startup operating under the pressure of turning a profit, that’s a scary question. However, Gauthier and his PVFP team are free of that burden, so they can afford to ask questions and conduct more experiments: whether that’s trying to grow wheat or questioning the very value of, say, hydroponics, the current darling of the vertical farming startup scene. “It seems that hydroponic would be more efficient, but that’s never really been proven that that’s true,” says Gauthier. The industry as a whole tends to claim things that aren’t, he says, necessarily backed up by data.

The answer, as he sees it, is open-source vertical farming. That is, turning current data about vertical farming into a framework other projects and startups can use to guide their own efforts in the space. Gauthier would like to see PVFP provide an open-source model for vertical farming so the industry can start to answer some of those tough questions and gain a better understanding of the future.

Tied to that ideal is also the need for data to tell us about the not-so-successful stories. For every AeroFarms out there, there are others who go under for various reasons: operational costs, failure to break even, etc. We know very little, for example, about why Chicago-based startup FarmedHere shuttered in 2017. But the answer could help other vertical farming companies operate more successfully.

Gauthier agrees: “A lot of the small companies have something to tell, and we should hear their story.”

He’s quick to point out, though, that even with more robust data to learn from, vertical farming shouldn’t be treated as a savior come to end world hunger. “There’s really a lot of possibility and a lot of strategy, but it’s important to put everything into a context,” he says. Right now, leafy greens and cannabis are the most successful crops grown in vertical farms; neither make for a meal by themselves, particularly when you look at them in the context of food-insecure populations who need higher-calorie food as fuel.

That said, Gauthier does believe there’s a place in our agricultural future for vertical farming. “It will save us space,” he explains. “And eventually in the future, some of the space we’re using for [traditional] agriculture we can restore to forestry and improve biodiversity.” And initiatives like PVFP can also help train a new generation of labor to understand the science and process behind caring for plants, especially in this indoor context.

Right now, PVFP is working towards realizing that open-source model mentioned above, though no data is currently available publicly as of yet. Currently, the project fuels student theses at Princeton, and the greens produced by their experiments are making their way around campus eating establishments, most notably at the Terrance F. Club, one of Princeton’s dining clubs. PVFP would like to eventually supply all of the school’s dining outposts with vertically farmed greens.

There remains a lot of debate around the merits of vertical farming. I could write a 95-page opus on the complexities of the space, and how it’s neither a worrying distraction nor the robot-manned future of indoor agriculture, and instead lies somewhere in between those two extremes. But I don’t have to: research initiatives like PVFP — not to mention a growing number of others, including University of Arizona and Cornell University — are already delving deep into those complexities as they harness data that gets to the heart of vertical farming’s real value.

What Bowery’s Latest Funding Round Says About Indoor Farming

New Jersey-based indoor-farming startup Bowery announced yesterday that it has raised $90 million in fresh funding. The round was led by Alphabet Inc.’s GV with participation from Temasek and Almanac Ventures, General Catalyst and GGV Capital (Bowery’s Series A investors), and various seed investors.

Bowery produces what founder Irving Fain calls “post-organic produce.” Or to put it more plainly, Bowery produces leafy greens in an indoor environment it controls with proprietary software. The FarmOS system, as it’s called, helps farmers manage crops by collecting data about water flow, light levels, humidity, and other environmental factors that impact the taste of greens. And because the farm is indoors, Bowery can grow its crops without soil, pesticides, or chemicals.

This new investment round brings Bowery’s total funding to $117.5 million. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to Softbank’s $200 million investment in Bowery’s West Coast competitor Plenty, which took place in July of 2017.

Both companies’ raises illustrate the enormous amount of interest in indoor and vertical farming right now. The latter field is expected to have a market valuation of more than $13 billion by 2024, and there are dozens of other companies working on various iterations of indoor farming today.

AeroFarms grows leafy greens inside a 70,000-square-foot facility in New Jersey and has backing from IKEA and Momofuku’s David Chang. Crop One Holdings and Emirates Flight Catering are building what they call “the world’s largest vertical farm.” And Ford Motors operates a farm in Detroit that helps feed the homeless.

Okay, but will leafy greens really feed the homeless? Will butter lettuce and fresh basil help alleviate the global food shortage we’re expected to face as the population nears 9 billion people?

By itself, indoor farming can’t do either of those things, at least not adequately. But that doesn’t render indoor farming an overhyped segment. What it does mean, though, is that we need to start moving beyond the leafy greens and start producing foods with a little more substance. Plenty says cucumbers and strawberries are next on its list. Meanwhile, it’s possible to grow root vegetables like turnips, beets, and sweet potatoes using hydroponics. It’s just more expensive and more challenging than basil.

Bowery says its new capital will go towards “scale its operation in new cities across the country and open multiple farms by the end of 2019.” There’s no word yet on whether those new farms will stick to leafy greens or branch out, though Fain did say Bowery is working on “scalable solutions for an impending climate and food crisis.”

We’ll hopefully see Bowery put those words into action by figuring out how to widen the possibilities of what we can grow with indoor farming.

Ford Motors Is Using Vertical Farming to Feed and Educate Detroit

On Wednesday, Ford Motors and Detroit’s Cass Community Social Services announced a new hydroponic container farm that will grow produce year-round and help to feed Detroit’s food-insecure areas.

The 40-foot shipping container was donated by the Ford’s philanthropic arm, the Ford Motor Company Fund. It’s the second part of a larger $250,000 grant from Cass Community Social Services received from the Ford Motor Farm project. In March of 2018, Ford and Cass unveiled the first part, a F-150 Ford pickup with a garden bed and glass cover that visits local schools.

This latest initiative, dubbed the Ford Freight Farm, will reportedly be used to grow lettuce and greens that will be used in Cass’s non-profit community kitchen, which serves up over 700,000 meals per year. The meals themselves go towards feeding Detroit’s homeless population.

Like other container farms, this one uses LED lighting and has a capacity equivalent to two acres of traditional farmland. That gives Ford and Cass the ability to grow up to 52 harvests per year. “This is urban gardening at its best because we can grow in every season of the year,” Cass Executive Director, Faith Fowler, said in the press release. “And it delivers fresh produce, farm-to-table in half an hour!”

Ford Motor Farm is housed at the Cass Community Social Services’ World Building in Detroit and operates without soil, sunlight, or pesticides. And in addition to providing food, it will also offer some part-time employment to adults with development disabilities.

The entire project was conceived by a group of Ford employees who, in 2017, participated in the company’s philanthropic leadership program called Thirty under 30. The group was tasked with improving Ford’s mobile food pantries

It also underscores a question I keep hearing in conversations with people: urban farming sounds great in theory, but is it a realistic solution to helping feed food-insecure populations? Or as one writer put it, Is urban farming only for rich hipsters?

That’s not to depreciate the good work done by startups like Square Roots, Freight Farms, and the dozens of others looking at new ways to farm more locally. Realistically, though, container farms have high operational costs, high labor costs and require funds to educate those who do the actual care for the plants (because at the end of the day, farming is a skill). Little wonder, then, that the leafy greens coming from these farms cost anywhere from $5 to $15 per bag.

Even so, there’s a rising need to make the benefits of urban farming accessible to a wider population. Backing from a company like Ford will be one approach we’re likely to see more of in the future.

Robots Run Iron Ox’s Indoor Farming Facility

The agricultural worker shortage means that many farms are turning to automation to assist with tasks like hauling equipment, precision weeding and even driving tractors. But startup Iron Ox is looking to take this to the next level by creating farms completely run by robots.

As MIT Technology Review reports, Iron Ox debuted its autonomous farm facility in San Carlos, CA yesterday. It’s an 8,000 square foot hydroponic facility that can grow up to 26,000 heads of leafy greens per year.

What sets Iron Ox apart from other indoor grow facilities is the robots. Big robots (carefully) move 800 pound water and plant-filled trays around the building, while mechanical arms transfer plants as they grow into larger hydroponic bays. All of this automated action is coordinated by a centralized “Brain” that monitors growing conditions and coordinates the movements of the robots.

For now, Iron Ox isn’t totally human-free. People are still required to seed and process crops, but the company plans to automate those tasks as well.

Iron Ox’s mission is to bring farming closer to cities, thus reducing the need to transport long distances. It’s certainly not alone in this mission. Projects like Square Roots and Freight Farms aim to do that as well, while CropOne is looking to build the largest indoor vertical farm in the world.

The other thing all these companies have in common in their crop: leafy greens. City dwellers better love their roughage, as a lot of it will be produced in these up and coming grow facilities.

Iron Ox is bringing a level of industrial automation to indoor farming, developing robots that can work around the clock, constantly monitoring, tending and raising crops. Coverage of the company’s launch did not include pricing, but one has to imagine that those hulking robots don’t come cheap, at least in terms of upfront costs. The question now is whether Iron Ox can get its robot-run facilities to a price that makes sense.

Food-Insecure Schools Are the Next Major Frontier for Indoor Farming

Tech startups and pundits alike are considering the many places (anywhere, really) in which indoor agriculture can become a reality. But an organization in the Bronx, NYC provides the most obvious clue as to where this type of farming can make its biggest impact.

Teens for Food Justice (TFFJ) is a nonprofit dedicated to training youths on hydroponic farming techniques, health and nutrition education, and entrepreneurship skills. In real life, that translates to working with schools in NYC to build and maintain indoor hydroponic farms that provide fresh produce to school cafeterias on a daily basis.

By TFFJ’s estimates, their farms yield around 22,000 pounds of fresh produce annually at each location, including bok choy, herbs and lettuces, hot peppers, and cucumbers. At some locations, the yield is even greater. Thanks to a donation from Green Mountain Energy Sun Club, DeWitt Clinton high school produces over 25,000 pounds of produce per year. The 1,300 square-foot indoor farm lives in a former chemistry lab in the high school, and feeds not only the students but also the surrounding area — which happens to be one of the most food-insecure communities in NYC.

TFFJ grew out of Students for Service, a nonprofit created in 2009 to involve at-risk-area teens in community service projects. A focus on food justice and sustainability developed a few years later, in 2013, when the first TFFJ model raised over $90,000 to build its first hydroponic farm in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. A second farm launched in 2016, and TFFJ now operates in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn at Title 1 schools. These schools typically serve low-income areas, many of which are also food-insecure zones.

Roughly 42 million Americans, including 13 million children, are considered food insecure. Lucy Melcher, director of advocacy and government relations for Share Our Strength, last year described food insecurity as “a family that has enough money to buy groceries three out of four weeks; it’s a mom skipping dinner; it’s having to choose between buying groceries and paying rent.”

It’s also a vicious cycle. As anyone who’s ever skipped a meal knows, hunger throws both brain and body out of whack and can severely impact things like the ability to concentrate and even make sound decisions. In a school setting, that usually means lower academic performance, higher dropout rates, and lower-paying jobs as an adult — all of which can perpetuate the food insecurity cycle for any given individual.

TFFJ’s mission has the potential to halt that chain of events early on: in the classroom. You might say the organization is trying to build a new cycle, one that focuses heavily on getting hands-on with the food-growing process, education oneself, then taking those lessons to others in the communities:

It’s obviously quite a bit more complicated than an infographic can show, but getting indoor agriculture into more schools is definitely becoming a legitimate movement. Consider “Growing Brooklyn’s Future,” a $2 million initiative to create hydroponic classrooms in a dozen schools across Brooklyn neighborhoods Brownsville, Bushwick and East New York. Or Princeton University’s Vertical Farming Project, which this past May announced a partnership with Hopewell Elementary school in Hopewell, NJ, to develop a vertical farm-to-cafeteria program.

Right now, however, most of these programs rely on donations and grants, and literal and figurative growth will depend on much more funding in future. This is where indoor agriculture companies could really step in. There are plenty of high-tech farming startups out there, all hoping to play a role in the $27 billion indoor agriculture market. But as I wrote last week, these companies have an opportunity to expand their reach from the farmer’s market and the upscale grocery store to areas in greater need of both fresh food and better nutritional education.

One other advantage of schools: if indoor agriculture is going to be the force many hope it becomes, the world will need more people who actually know how to grow the food using hydroponics and other indoor farming techniques. Bringing these programs into schools is effectively training an entire generation on skills that will soon be critical for us all.

Freight Farms Unveils Onsite Vertical Farming Service

Your average institution, be it a schools, company, hospital, or university, typically doesn’t have the space or cash to consider an indoor farming initiative, even if it would mean putting fresher, more local greens into cafeterias and dining halls. That’s an issue Freight Farms looks to solve with the release of its new service Grown, which was just announced today.

The Boston, MA-based company is already known for its Leafy Green Machines, which are 40-square-foot shipping containers that hold vertical farms. These farms are climate controlled and use LEDs as well as a closed-loop hydroponic irrigation system to nurture crops throughout their entire lifecycle. Like most other vertical farming systems, the technology platform powering Freight Farms’ containers automates much of the work (and guesswork) of growing and harvesting greens.

Grown, unveiled today, is less product than service, as Freight Farms installs the Leafy Green Machine then manages the lifecycle of crops on an ongoing basis. Once the Machine, aka the shipping container with the farm inside, is installed, the customer doesn’t have to do much besides decide which crops to grow and what to do with the produce once its harvested (e.g., serve it in the company cafeteria). No additional staff (or land, for that matter) is needed, as Freight Farms monitors climate, water usage, and all other aspects of the indoor farming process. (This is different from, say, Freight Farms’ relationship with vertical farming startup Square Roots, who use the Leafy Green Machine but have their own farmers to care for the greens.)

The Grown package starts at $5,000/month, and includes replenishing supplies, maintenance, cleaning, 24/7 farm monitoring, and all farming operations, including seeding, transplanting, and harvesting. Customers can also add, for an extra fee, services like marketing and branding as well as on-campus educational programs.

Freight Farms already counts a few universities and several small-business farmers among its customers, and also has a presence in Europe. But they’re one of many in the indoor agriculture space, each with a slightly different focus. Agrylist raised $1.5 million earlier this year, though it’s focus is on larger farms (10,000 square feet up to five acres). Farmshelf brings smaller setups directly into restaurants and retail outlets. Crop One and Emirates Flight Catering are in the midst of building what they claim will be the world’s largest vertical farm.

The Grown service could really set Freight Farms apart, though, particularly if it manages to bring vertical farming and fresh greens into places it might not otherwise go, like schools or smaller companies. In fact, Freight Farms told The Spoon that a major focus right now is “the existing interest in on-site, year-round local sourcing methods especially in the school dining/university education sector.” So there’s also a real opportunity for a vertical farming company to align itself with a mission that’s about more than selling products at farmers markets to those with disposable income.

Consider the current initiatives to get more local, fresh produce into NYC public schools: Thanks to a non-profit called GrowNYC, over 50 percent of those public schools now have gardens. But accessing and using them depends in part on the weather, and as any New Yorker knows, the weather out here is horrible about half the time. By working with programs like GrowNYC, Freight Farms could theoretically expose an entirely new audience to vertical farming, not to mention provide them with year-round greens.

The company is already thinking in that direction. In the K–12 and higher education sectors, Freight Farms said they’ve seen a 63 percent increase “from those who strongly want to integrate the farms (to provide hyper-local produce for meals, as well as provide a great platform for education around nutrition and sustainability) – but haven’t had the capacity to do so.”

The launch of Grown has at least set on the discussion table the idea that we can expand our thinking around where and when everyone, not just tech employees, can get their hands on the kind of nutrition they need.