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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Vertical Farming

GoodLeaf Farms Raises $65M, Plans Vertical Farm Expansion Across Canada

GoodLeaf Farms announced this week it has raised more than $65 million from food manufacturer McCain Foods and is set to embark on “an aggressive growth and expansion plan” for its network of vertical farms, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Based in Ontario, Canada, GoodLeaf grows leafy greens inside a controlled-environment vertical farm via hydroponics and its own proprietary tech setup that controls light, temperature, and humidity levels, as well as other elements on the farm. The company opened its first farm in 2019 in Guelph, Ontario. According to this week’s press release, two more farms are slated to open in Canada 2021: one in the Eastern side of the country and one out west. Exact locations will be announced soon.

“It is our intention to build farms that support the Canadian grocery store network, food service industry and consumers,” GoodLeaf CEO Barry Murchie said in a statement sent to The Spoon. Currently, the company provides greens to a number of brick-and-mortar as well as grocery stores servicing Ontario, including Fortinos, Whole Foods, and Bondi Produce.

One of GoodLeaf’s goal with its farms is to produce greens closer to where Canadian consumers actually shop for food, rather than these consumers having to buy produce shipped from the U.S. and Mexico. It’s a goal echoed by other Canadian control ag companies, including Lufa Farms, which is growing greens on Montreal rooftops, and Elevate Farms, which is bringing vertical farming to food-insecure areas in the country. Bringing production closer to consumers also means fewer miles to transport the food, which is better for the environment.

With its forthcoming farms, GoodLeaf will serve more grocery outlets as well as foodservice businesses beyond Ontario and across Canada.

Kalera Acquires Vindara to Optimize Seed Breeding for Indoor Vertical Farming

Vertical farming company Kalera announced this week it has acquired Vindara, a company developing seeds specifically for the indoor vertical farming environment and other controlled environment agriculture methods. With this acquisition, Kalera says it can increase both crop yield and the speed of growth cycles in its current and future facilities.

Kalera currently has two commercial-scale vertical farms in operation, both in Orlando, Florida. The company is also expanding rapidly, with new locations across the U.S. in the works. Facilities in Atlanta, Denver, and Houston are slated to open in 2021.

Typically, seeds for outdoor farming are bred to resist things like disease and pests. The drawback of that method is that plant flavor, texture, and nutritional profile is often sacrificed in the process. But in a fully controlled indoor grow environment like a vertical farm, pests are nonexistent and growers and systems have better control over monitoring the danger of plant diseases. 

That gives companies like Vindara an opportunity to produce seeds bred for flavor, color, nutritional content, and better overall quality. The company combines genomics, machine learning and computational biology with traditional breeding techniques to get its seeds, which are non-GMO and which Vindara says take 12 to 18 months to develop, rather than the standard five to seven years.

With the acquisition, Vindara will become a “fully owned subsidiary” of Kalera and operate out of the latter’s headquarters in Orlando. For Kalera, the acquisition brings the potential to develop its own plant varieties and increase the output of existing ones. Right now those are just leafy greens, though Kalera hinted at spinach and strawberries for the future. 

InFarm to Launch a Network of Commercial-Scale ‘Modular’ Indoor Farms

InFarm, a company best known for bringing modular hydroponic farming units to grocery stores, today introduced its Growing Center facility, a combination high-capacity farm and distribution center. The company plans to build out 100 of these facilities by 2025 in major cities all over the world, with the total amounting to 1.5 million square meters of farmland, according to a company press release.

Berlin, Germany-based InFarm already operates a network of smaller, cloud-connected hydroponic farms across the world. These modular units are typically found in the produce section of major grocery retailers, from Marks & Spencer in the UK to Kroger in the U.S. to Aldi in Germany. The pod-like farms are modular, meaning they can vary in size depending on location. And because the leafy greens inside the farms are grown on-site, the buying public gets access to more freshly harvested produce that hasn’t traveled the length of a country to reach store shelves.

With its Growing Center initiative, InFarm is essentially scaling up the modular-farm concept. Dozens of InFarm’s modular units, each between 10 and 18 meters (about 33 to 59 feet) high, make up one Growing Center. InFarm says these facilities take six weeks to build and will be able to generate “the crop-equivalent of 10,000 m2 of farmland.”

InFarm’s existing units in grocery stores are all cloud controlled, so that environmental elements like CO2 levels, farm temperature, light and pH levels, and plant growth cycles can be set, monitored, and managed remotely across the entire network. In other words, if one combination of those elements works for, say, basil, that “recipe” can be replicated across the entire network.

Growing Centers will plug into this network, so that the entirety of InFarm’s units are connected to “a central farming brain,” according to the company’s Chief Technology Officer Guy Galonska. “We’ve collected more than 300 billion data points throughout our farming network to date. These data enable us to perfect our growing recipes and improve yield, quality and nutritional value, while reducing the production price constantly,” he said in today’s press release.

While plenty of smaller vertical farms exist nowadays, much of the attention of late has been on larger, commercial-scale facilities that produce pounds of leafy greens that number in the millions. Last year, AeroFarms, Kalera, Plenty, BrightFarms, Nordic Harvest, and many others saw both major funding and significant expansion. Driving a lot of this activity is that commercial-scale farms can produce more delicate types of produce (e.g., leafy greens) closer to consumers, eliminating the need for lengthy shipping times that can damage plants.

All of these companies promise produce grown more efficiently, with less water and energy required than would be with traditional farming. However, at this point, most data is siloed within each company, so it’s difficult to find a truly universal, objective point of view when it comes to efficiency and energy savings. That doesn’t however, mean the numbers are all a smokescreen. In fact, of all the things the controlled ag sector did in 2020, proving itself as an important and viable part of the future farming system was the most important. While the role of this method will constantly evolve, its presence will remain a given for the foreseeable future.

For its part, Infarm says its Growing Centers will be located “in major urban centers.” So far, 15 are either planned or under construction across, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Vancouver, Seattle, and Toronto. InFarm has not said which of these facilities will open first.

Bowery’s Founder, Irving Fain, on the Future of Vertical Farming

At one point in the not-so-distant past, vertical farming’s role in our future agricultural system was far from certain. Growing leafy greens in warehouse-like environments controlled by tech seemed like a compelling business, but one that had yet to prove itself either economically or as an important source of food for a growing world population.

That, at least, was a common sentiment Irving Fain, CEO and founder of Bowery, met with when he started his vertical farming company five years ago. “There was a bit of skepticism around it,” he told me over a call recently, suggesting that five years ago, there were a lot more “ifs” than “whens” in terms of vertical farming’s future.

Fain, Bowery, and the entire vertical farming industry get a much warmer reception nowadays. Investment dollars are pouring into the space. Around the world, companies, scientists, and food producers are using the method to not just supply upscale grocery stores with greens but experiment with breeds of produce, feed underserved populations, and grow food in non-arable regions. As Fain suggested when we spoke, the last 12 months seem to have turned those “ifs” into definite “whens.” 

Bowery’s last 12 months also illustrate this change. Fain said that Bowery went from under 100 retail locations about a year ago to nearly 700 right now, and will be in more than 1,000 “in the coming months.” Its produce is in a number of food retailers around the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including Whole Foods Market, Giant Food, Stop & Shop, Walmart, and Weis Markets. And in 2020, the company experienced “more than 4x growth” with e-commerce partners.

While the pandemic is responsible for some of this popularity, Fain insists it is not the only reason for the eventful year. “It’s definitely bigger than the pandemic,” he said. “What you’re seeing is a food system that’s evolving and [people have a desire] to see transparency and traceability in the food system.” These, he says, are issues the traditional food supply chain isn’t really able to address right now, hence the opportunity for companies like Bowery, which effectively cut multiple steps out of the supply chain.

Bowery grows its greens (lettuces, herbs, and some custom blends) inside industrial spaces where crops are stacked vertically in trays and fed nutrients and water via a hydroponic system. Technology controls all elements of the farm, from the temperature inside to how much light each plants get. The company currently operates two farms, one in New Jersey and the other in Maryland. A third is planned for Pennsylvania.

Technology, in particular, is something Bowery has big plans for. On top of a retail expansion, Bowery also added some notable personnel to its staff, including Injong Rhee, formerly the Internet of Things VP at Google as well a chief technologist at Samsung. Having such technology chops onboard will be vital in order for Bowery to realize many of its ambitions around advanced automation, which has the potential to optimize many parts of the seed-to-store process for vertically grown greens. 

For example, Bowery’s farms are equipped with sensors and cameras that are constantly collecting data — “billions” of points, according to the company — that can be used to not just observe the current state of plant health but also predict the most optimal growing conditions for each crop. Elements like temperature, humidity levels, nutrient levels, and light intensity can all be adjusted, via the BoweryOS software, to create those optimal conditions. The end result is more consistent crop production, better yields, more flavorful food, and, ideally, a better nutritional profile for the greens compared to what conventional produce offers.

The system can also, through automation and AI, detect problems with plants. In a recent interview with Venture Beat, Bowery Chief Science Officer Henry Sztul used the example of butterhead lettuce yellowing at the edges during growth. Bowery’s system is technologically advanced enough at this point that it is starting to understand the conditions that create those yellowing edges. That foreknowledge, in turn, will allow growers to adjust the crop “recipe” (see above mixture of lights, temperature, etc.) to avoid the problem.

It took Bowery years to get to this point in terms of what its technology is capable of doing. “The system [for] indoor farming that you choose has a direct impact on the crops you’ll be able to grow, on the margins you’ll be able to generate, and on the return profile of the business itself,” said Fain. “And so being incredibly intentional and thoughtful about what technology you use is something we spent a lot of time on because it has an extraordinarily important economic impact.”

On a less technically complex note, controlled ag from Bowery and others also goes some way towards reinventing the supply food chain. Rather than greens being harvested in, say, Mexico and shipped via a complex distribution process all the way to Baltimore, they are packaged up at the farm and distributed to nearby retailers, usually those within a day’s drive “It is much more sustainable. It is much more efficient, and it’s more reliable, and those things have been important to consumers long before COVID,” said Fain.

Bowery will continue to innovate on both the technology and supply side of its business, as well as with the food itself. The company just launched a new specialty product line that will experiment with different flavors of greens and change frequently.

In terms of tech, Bowery’s latest farm, currently being built in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, will incorporate even more automation than the company’s two existing farms. That location is slated to open later in 2021. When it does, Bowery will be capable of serving nearly 50 million people within a 200-mile radius.

The company hopes to expand its geographic reach much wider some day, building farms near most major U.S. cities and beyond. Given the increased confidence in the vertical farming sector as a whole, now looks to be the optimal time to move towards those ambitions. 

Gardyn Raises $10M for Its Consumer-Grade Indoor Farm System

Bethesda, Maryland-based indoor farming company Gardyn announced today it is raising a $10 million Series A round led by JAB Holding Company. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the non-controlling investment, when finalized, will bring Gardyn’s total funding to date to $15 million. 

The new funds will allow Gardyn to accelerate the North American expansion of its consumer-grade vertical farm to meet what the company calls “the incredible demand” it is currently seeing for its product.

Gardyn’s at-home vertical farming system is geared towards consumers interested in growing their own produce who have neither space nor green thumb to do it the traditional way. The farm itself is a compact vertical tower that can grow up to 30 plants at once and easily fits inside a small apartment. Its accompanying software platform, dubbed Kelby, automates the majority of the grow process, including circulating the water and nutrients, monitoring plant growth, and notifying users, via a smartphone app. when it’s time to add water to the console or harvest the plants.

Currently, the device can grow leafy greens, herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers have the option to also use their own seeds.

Gardyn is one of several companies developing indoor farms for the consumer home, a category that grew significantly in 2020. Gardyn itself said it experienced “double-digit month-over-month growth throughout 2020.” Others, including AeroGrow and Click & Grow, also reported surges in interest over the last year. Aspara, too, reported a spike in sales in Hong Kong, where the company is based. Aspara has since launched in the U.S. market.

“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” Gardyn’s founder and CEO FX Rouxel told me late last year. More than ever, there is greater demand from consumers for local foods with traceable origins and sans pesticides. The pandemic ushered in record levels of consumers buying produce directly from farmers; putting a farm in your house is the obvious next step.

For some, that is. Food sovereignty in the home is currently only possible for those that can afford it. In other words, farming systems for the home are still fairly expensive, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand depending on the company and model.

When we spoke, Rouxel was keenly aware of this point, and that the $799 price tag for Gardyn’s the base model is still too high for many. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”

The hope is that some of this new funding and expansion can go towards making the grow-at-home movement possible for a wider swath of the population.

Fifth Season Expands the Grocery Footprint for Its Vertically Grown Greens

Fifth Season, a company using vertical farming and robotics to grow greens indoors, just announced a sizable expansion for its leafy green products in Giant Eagle Retail stores. As of today, Fifth Season greens will be available in over 75 Giant Eagle and Market District stores across Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio metro areas. 

The expansion is a significant jump from the company’s previous distribution reach, which was just 10 stores in the Pittsburgh area. The company also launched a direct-to-consumer service for Pittsburgh-area residents in 2020.

Like other controlled ag companies, Fifth Season grows greens vertically indoors, aiding the process with hydroponics and technology (sensors, AI, etc.). Its main differentiator at the moment is the robotics element of its grow process. A proprietary robotics system handles tasks on the farm such as stacking and moving trays of plants, harvesting, and packaging. While the system is overseen by a human, actual bodies are less needed in the grow room of Fifth Season’s farm, which cuts down on labor costs and can execute tasks faster. Human-free grow rooms also mean there is less chance of pathogens getting into the growing space and impacting plants’ health.

The use of robotics isn’t yet widespread in vertical farming, although that is changing quickly, with companies like Nordic Harvest and iFarm introducing a range of robotics and automation technologies to their operations. Kalera, which is expanding rapidly across the U.S., is another notable example.

For Fifth Season, today’s news marks the company’s first expansion outside of its hometown of Pittsburgh. The company will sell four different varieties of its greens as well as ready-to-eat salads at the new retail locations.

The company said in today’s press release that it is the first of many expansions Fifth Season will announce in 2021. 

Vertical Field Signs Agreement to Bring Controlled Ag to the UAE

Israel-based ag tech company Vertical Field announced today that it has signed an agreement with Emirates Smart Solutions & Technologies (ESST), which develops high-tech agricultural projects around the Persian Gulf, to pilot vertical farms in the United Arab Emirates. The first farm will be installed as part of a research, development, and training center in Umm Al Quwain. 

Vertical Field grows leafy greens vertically inside shipping containers that are equipped with technology like sensors that can monitor climate control, lighting, and irrigation levels inside the farm. Data on those elements and others can be fed back to the growers via Vertical Field’s proprietary app, which allows for remote monitoring and management of crops.

Many companies nowadays take a similar approach to controlled-environment agriculture these days, with Freight Farms, Thrive, and Brick Street Farms being a few notable examples. Where Vertical Field differs from these companies is its choice to use geoponics — soil-based growing — rather than the more common hydroponic method. Instead of plants growing in towers through which water is circulated, Vertical Field farms are made up of what the company calls “living walls” (see image above). The company claims this geoponic method means lower initial and operating costs as well as more crop variety.

Whether with geoponics or hydroponics, controlled ag is an obvious concept to try out in the Persian Gulf region, which endures high temperatures, sparse rainfall, high winds, and other extreme weather conditions around the year. These conditions limit the amount of traditional agriculture production that can happen, which makes controlled-environment container farming an attractive alternative. Another notable development in this part of the world is the Abu Dhabi Investment Office’s recent multimillion-dollar investment in a few agtech companies to innovate on the concept farming in this particular climate.

The Vertical Fields pilot project with ESST will be the first step towards full-scale deployment of the farms across the UAE. Through the partnership, the Vertical Field farm will run as a pilot project that will provide produce to both commercial establishments and the private sector. One of the goals of the project is to determine which crops are most suitable for the local market. 

Eventually, the partnership is expected to expand and include farm deployments around the rest of the Gulf states. 

Abandoned Spaces and Automation: What to Expect for Indoor Farming in 2021

Controlled-environment agriculture — also simply known as indoor farming — had a big year both in terms of activity and investment dollars. While once we might have questioned the sector’s economic viability and ability to actually feed a growing global population, a lot of those doubts have diminished and indoor ag in its many forms now has an important role in our future food system.

What that role is, however, will continue to evolve over time. Here are a few thoughts on how that will happen over the next 12 months. 

More automation.

Automation isn’t new to controlled-environment agriculture, but its presence as a part of indoor farming operations has increased over the last several months and will continue to in the next year.

In the context of controlled-environment farming, automation can refer to any kind of technology that removes manual human labor from the growing process. In some cases that includes robots that plant and harvest greens or move trays of produce around the farm. More often, though, automation refers to software that can calculate the optimal environmental temperature for each plant, know when plants need to be fed and harvested, and handle many other calculations that would otherwise require a person to have horticultural and technological (hardware and software) expertise.

Moving into 2021, we’ll definitely see a few more robots buzzing around the indoor farm. But the bulk of automation will be about software. 

More grocery store partnerships. 

Many large-scale indoor farms started out selling their leafy green wares to restaurants and hotels. The pandemic, of course, put a hold on that in 2020, and controlled-environment agriculture operations had to look elsewhere for customers. 

Enter the grocery store. From container farms at local markets to Kalera’s partnership with Publix stores across the U.S., more indoor farming companies are growing their greens either onsite at grocery stores or within throwing distance of them. 

This could in turn help bring the cost of greens grown on high-tech farms down, since the shipping and distribution steps will be less resource intensive in many cases and nonexistent in others. 

More underutilized space.

One of my favorite stories from 2020 was this one, about a company called Wilder Fields that turned an abandoned Target store in south Chicago into a massive indoor farm.

Many companies are constructing their own facilities from the ground up, while others stick to smaller scale container farms that are a bit more mobile. Finding existing space, such as an abandoned big box retailer, seems a logical middle ground, and one we’ll likely see more of as companies work to lower costs and keep their environmental footprint down.

Predictions pieces, of course, are always a bit of a crapshoot, and even if the above forecasts turn out to be true, they’ll be but a smattering of the activity that will happen for controlled-environment ag in 2021.

Indoor Farming Got Big in 2020. Literally

One thing we can say about indoor farming in 2020: it grew, both in market size and investment.

At the start of the year, a big part of our attention focused on the potential of smaller vertical farms in grocery stores and consumer homes. Writing on the topic at the end of Dec. 2019, I figured we would see the most compelling developments in this area over the next 12 months when it came to controlled-environment agriculture.

There certainly were a lot of notable happenings. InFarm further expanded its concept of placing its pod-like mini farms in grocery stores. A number of companies, including Aerogarden, MyFood, Rise Gardens, Aspara, and Farmshelf offered vertical gardens built for the consumer home. And on that note, at CES 2020, both LG and GE unveiled concepts to turn indoor farming into the next big home appliance category. Manufacturers of at-home farms, in particular, reported spikes in demand resulting from the pandemic and our sudden collective interest in at-home food sovereignty.

There’s one drawback to at-home vertical farms and smart gardens: for now, at least, they come with a price tag that’s too high for many households. See Aspara’s $350 countertop farm on the low end and, on the high end, the $13,000 Natufia Kitchen Garden. When it comes to providing fresher, more local, and affordable greens to everyone, it was actually the large-scale commercial farms that made the most news.

A glance at some of the major announcements shows just how big controlled-environment agriculture got in 2020, both in terms of physical space and investment dollars:

There are plenty of differences in the way these companies approach controlled-environment agriculture. Some rely on vertical farming, while others stick to the greenhouse method aided by automation and AI. Many stick to growing leafy greens; others have expanded their wares to include tomatoes, the aforementioned strawberries, and other types of produce.

What all of these have in common is that they are trying to bring the concept of healthier, fresher food to more people at a price point the majority of households can manage. Many of them also provide much-needed jobs for local communities.

The world’s population is expected to hit nearly 10 billion people by 2050. At the same time, the limitations — and environmental dangers — of relying solely on traditional agriculture get more apparent each year. The past 12 months have shown us that these controlled-environment farms, which occupy millions of square feet and are now producing just as much produce, will be a major part of agricultural innovation going forward.

Stay tuned for more developments in 2021.

 

 

UbiQD’s Quantum Dot Tech Is an Electricity Free Lighting Option for Greenhouses

While costs are coming down for controlled environment agriculture, electricity remains one of the highest because it has to power the LEDs that provide the lighting formula for plant growth. But a materials science company called UbiQD wants to change that by replacing electricity with a more efficient means of lighting: quantum dots.

Quantum dots are semiconductor nanoparticles that can transport electrons. When exposed to UV lighting, these particles emit lights of various colors, and can be adjusted in size to emit a specific color. For example, larger particles emit redder wavelengths, while smaller ones shift to blue.

Via its UbiGro product, UbiQD uses a patented quantum dot technology to create a layer of lighting in greenhouses. Quantum dots are embedded into a film that is installed beneath a greenhouse cover. When illuminated by sunlight, the film converts shorter wavelengths (UV and blue) to longer ones (red/orange), the latter being the most photosynthetically efficient wavelengths.

Controlled environment farms require both red and blue lighting to enable plant growth, and standard LEDs installed in these farms emit one or the other in terms of color. Because UbiQD’s quantum dots can harness various wavelengths, growers can take better advantage of the full light spectrum, which recent studies suggest is advantageous for higher crop productivity and yield. For example, green light may also be necessary for better plant growth in the greenhouse, since it penetrates deeper into the plant canopy to promote photosynthesis.

In a recent interview with the company, AgFunder News noted that UbiQD’s tech “can achieve 10% to 20% higher yields than equivalent electrically powered systems with faster cycle times, reduced waste, and improved crop quality.”

Another big advantage to UbiQD’s product: it doesn’t require an external electricity source, which cuts down on the overall costs of running a controlled-environment greenhouse.

The company closed a $7 million Series A round earlier this month co-led by Scout Ventures and Keiretsu Forum. At the time of that announcement, UbiQD said it would use the new capital to continue scaling distribution of UbiGro, which is already used by “major international greenhouse operations” (company names were not disclosed). The funding will also go towards developing new products, including light recipes that could increase crop yield and productivity.

Since this technology requires actual sunlight, there are areas of controlled-environment agriculture, such as container farms, where it won’t be applicable. But for the greenhouse market, which is becoming increasingly essential to the indoor farming sector, the need for more energy efficient lighting sources offers a major opportunity for both UbiQD and quantum dot tech in the future of farming.

Bowery Announces Its ‘Most Technologically Advanced’ Indoor Farm

Controlled-environment agriculture company Bowery is set to open its largest indoor farm to date. The new facility will be located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, turning a non-arable industrial site into a farm that will grow leafy greens throughout the year.

A spokesperson for Bowery said that the company does not disclose actual square footage of its farms, but that it would be able to serve nearly 50 million people within a 200-mile radius. 

The Bethlehem facility joins Bowery’s roster of farms located in Kearny New Jersey and Nottingham, Maryland. All farms use the hydroponic method for growing. Plants are set in vertically stacked trays and fed a nutrient-enriched water solution that gets recirculated continuously. On the software side, Bowery has a proprietary system, BoweryOS, that monitors plant growth from seed.

Bowery says its Bethlehem facility will be its “most technologically advanced commercial farm yet.” Importantly, it will leverage billions of data points collected from Bowery farms over the last five years to boost this new farms “intelligence” when monitoring plant growth and health.

Other advances include energy-saving LED lighting, more automation of the growing process through BoweryOS, and some innovations in water circulation. The latter will come in the form of what Bowery calls “a comprehensive water transpiration system.” Transpiration is the release of water from plant leaves; Bowery’s system will capture and re-use this water, with the goal of reclaiming “nearly all” of the water used in the growing process.

For the new facility, Bowery is working with the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and the Governor’s Action Team, both through a Pennsylvania First grant. The farm is expected to create year-round jobs for the area’s farming community.

The news caps off what’s been a big year for Bowery in terms of company growth. Since January 2020, the company expanded its retail presence from 100 brick-and-mortar stores to 680, and said it has seen more than 600 percent growth in stores and doubled its e-commerce presence.

According to Bowery’s spokesperson, Covid was definitely “an accelerator” for some of this growth, though some of that growth is also due to demand for more local, traceable food grown without pesticides — a trend that predates the pandemic. The new farm will help the company further meet this demand, along with advancing the technology component of the vertical farming sector. 

Freight Farms Partners With Arcadia to Provide Growers With Clean Energy Options

Freight Farms announced today it has partnered with clean energy service Arcadia to offer growers a way to connect their farms to cleaner sources of energy. The new program, available to all Freight Farms customers in the U.S., will let growers synch their utility to one of Arcadia’s wind or solar farms, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Arcadia will then match 100 percent of the farm’s electrical consumption with solar and wind energy.

Freight Farms helped to popularize the concept of turning old shipping containers into vertical farms that grow produce like leafy greens, herbs, and tomatoes. The farms, of course, require electricity to function, since most controlled-environment farms rely on LEDs as their plants’ light source and need additional energy for temperature control and dehumidifying. There isn’t a lot of public data yet on how much power these farms use, which in turn has led to a lot of questions in the last couple years around how energy efficient they actually are. 

While they’re not giving away any hard numbers on energy consumption, Freight Farms and Arcadia claim their new partnership can connect growers to cleaner forms of energy, including wind and solar, and potentially reduce their energy costs. The program builds on Arcadia’s existing subscription model, where users pay a flat monthly fee to connect their utility to Arcadia’s clean energy sources.  

Once a Freight Farm is connected, Arcadia will match 100 percent of its electricity generated by purchasing the equivalent amount of wind and solar energy in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates. Growers may, based on their location in the U.S., also be able to cut down on energy costs.

There are two options for membership, based on a farm’s location. Growers located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, and Maine can sign up and access the community solar power market. Those in other states sign up for $5/month to access cleaner energy, according to today’s press release. 

Arcadia’s systems automate everything, so signing up for the program doesn’t require any extra steps on the part of the grower. 

Since the program is brand new, it’s difficult to say exactly how much energy is saved through it or what the actual cost savings for individual farmers are. Freight Farms said today only that the program “reduces Freight Farmers’ carbon footprint to one-quarter of industrial farming operations.”