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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CEA

Plenty’s New Vertical Farm To Produce 4.5M Pounds of Leafy Greens From a Single City Block

Today indoor ag startup Plenty announced what it claims is the world’s most advanced vertical farm. Located in Compton, California, the company says the farm is designed to yield up to 4.5 million pounds of leafy greens annually, occupying just a city block’s worth of space.

Unlike most other vertical farms that grow produce on flat planes, Plenty’s 3D system uses vertical towers nearly two stories high, which it claims allows them to yield up to 350 times that of a conventional farm.

The company also uses robotics in nearly every step of the process, from planting to harvest. You can see the system in action in the video below:

Plenty Farm Waltz Tour

“After investing nearly a decade into research and development, ​​Plenty has cracked the code on a scalable platform for indoor farming,” said Plenty CEO Arama Kukutai. “With Plenty’s first commercial farm, we’re proving that our uniquely vertical indoor farms can deliver a reliable, year-round supply of fresh produce with positive unit economics.”

The company’s emphasis on unit economics makes sense, particularly in light of the struggles of the vertical farming industry over the past year. High upfront capital expenditures have made it difficult for companies like App Harvest to stay afloat, which means investors are increasingly focused on high-volume production of margin-positive produce going forward.

The opening of a high-tech farm in Compton is a milestone for a city with historically high poverty and unemployment. The city’s mayor, Emma Sharif, emphasized over 30% of the farm’s employees hail from Compton during the announcement.

“Plenty’s farm can serve as a model for improving access to fresh, locally grown food for urban populations while fostering cities’ economic growth,” said Sharif.

According to Plenty, the Compton Farm grows four types of leafy greens: Baby Arugula, Baby Kale, Crispy Lettuce, and Curly Baby Spinach. Plenty says the Curly Baby Spinach is one of the world’s only vertically grown, pesticide-free spinach products.

Plenty’s leafy greens can be found in Northern and Southern California locations, including Bristol Farms, Northern California Whole Foods Market stores, and local grocers in Compton and Southern California Walmart stores. Plenty’s greens are also featured as a meal ingredient on Singapore Airlines flights from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

High Tech Farmer AppHarvest is Rapidly Running Out of Money

Kentucky-based controlled environmental agriculture company AppHarvest has warned in its latest financial report that it only has enough capital to continue operations into the first quarter of 2023.

According to its quarterly report filed on November 7th, the company says there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern unless it can raise additional outside capital.

As of September 30, 2022, we had $36.2 million of cash on hand, and an accumulated deficit of $270.6 million. In October 2022, we entered into a $30.0 million note and loan agreement with Mastronardi Produce-USA, Inc. (“Mastronardi USA”) and received $15.0 million upon execution. In November 2022, we initiated a third restructuring plan to further reduce operating costs and our losses. Despite these actions, management believes there is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern and absent additional sources of financing, we expect that our existing cash and cash equivalents will only allow us to continue our planned operations into the first quarter of 2023

According to a story in the Kentucky Herald-Leader, the company needs $85 to $95 million in cash to fund operations for the next 12 months. That’s a lot of new capital in a market where raising new money has become increasingly difficult.

AppHarvest is looking at a few strategic options, including selling Berea farm to its primary distribution partner  Mastronardi Produce Limited (the same company it borrowed funding from to launch the first 5 acres this past month). They are also talking with potential acquirers according to AppHarvest CEO Jonathan Webb.

“There are large conglomerates in auto manufacturing,” Webb told the Lexington Herald Leader. “I mean, look at GM, for example, and all the different auto brands inside of GM. So yeah, we’re actively having conversations with CEOs, with investors, with partners, with anyone who wants to partner with us here in Kentucky and to help make our mission succeed.”

The company’s current situation is a far cry from its early days when it was seen as one of the brightest lights of the CEA farming world. And while the company’s massive capital needs show a potential downside of building automated indoor farms – especially compared with more traditional farms that take significantly less capital to build and run – it’s worth pointing out other high-tech indoor farmers like AeroFarms and Bowery are continuing to thrive and find new partners.

As we wrote a couple weeks ago, the company’s new farm in Berea is impressive to watch in action and will no doubt produce a whole bunch of salad kits once the full 15 acres is operational. Let’s just hope the company can survive long enough to see it come to fruition.

Re-Nuble Aims to Use Food Waste To Make Indoor Agriculture More Sustainable

The role of indoor growing, ranging from small indoor vertical farms to large greenhouses, is vital to sustaining the world’s food supply. Controlled Environmental Agriculture is essential for growing crops in underused spaces, rooftops, and rows of vertical gardens. Seizing upon this vital resource, Tinia Pina, Founder & CEO of ReNuble, has taken up the challenge to help this idea scale. With a best-in-class nutrient and growing medium, Pina’s company has created organic compounds sourced from food waste for sterile, technology-driven hydroponic and soilless systems.

For the dynamic Pina, her vision for what became Re-Nuble started more than six years ago in the New York school system. “I also saw our outreach educational classes for this program were from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.,” she recalled in an interview with The Spoon. “I noticed what the kids were bringing for class for lunch, and those options were very processed. With that diet, you see a direct impact on their level of attention. And I felt, from a systemic perspective, that will immediately impact the type of productivity and retention of the information we’re teaching. So overall, I always felt that people with better access to nutrition are spending more time being able to be fully immersed and retaining the information. And they are calling less out of work with fewer sick days.”

The genesis of Re-Nuble’s solution, Pina goes on to explain, came from her observation of how food waste was disposed of. “At that time, New York was spending $77 million to export its food waste to China, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And that’s simply because we don’t have the composting infrastructure to handle it,” Pina said.” I wondered how we could make food waste a consistent alternative for conventional synthetic fertilizers by doing it for soils or hydroponic systems. So, we focused on using food waste as a viable alternative for chemical fertilizers in indoor grow environments.”

Specific to its product lines, Re-Nuble’s Head of Business Development & Strategy, Riyana Razalee, said in a company press release, “CEA is a large part of the future of farming, and so, we have to prioritize its role in decarbonization. Solutions need to address the gamut of the food supply chain, decarbonizing as many parts of it as possible. This vital issue is what our team is focused on”. The company states that for every acre of an indoor farm that uses Re-Nuble’s organic hydroponic nutrient, Away We Grow, the company can remove up to 5 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. That’s approximately one home’s energy use for a year.

In addition, its grow medium, ReNu Terra, supports the anti-peat movement. Companies, activists, and governments are demanding the reduction of drained peatlands. When farmed for agriculture needs, peat changes from a carbon sink to a greenhouse gas emitter, releasing approximately 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2e annually. This amounts to 0.4 billion gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for a year.

Pina said Re-Nuble has three customer segments now. First is the consumer market. Away We Grow could be part of a kit offered for an indoor growing system. “Consumers are eager to find more environmentally and people and animal-friendly solutions,” Re-Nuble’s CEO noted. The second segment is commercial farms such as Gotham Greens. The third, she said, is “disruptive farms.” For the last group, she stated, “There are severe supply shortages globally, and so there’s a lot of urgencies to find something that could be more sustainable, but even more importantly, something that they can afford.”

Watch as AppHarvest’s Automated Indoor Farm Takes Produce From Pre-Seed to Packaging

Even if you’re aware of controlled environment agriculture, a tech-forward approach to indoor farming that can include techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical farming, automation, and more, chances are you haven’t seen a CEA system take a plant from seed to packaging.

Well, today’s your lucky day because we have a video from AppHarvest showing the different stages, from seeding to harvesting to putting it all in a package. The new 4-minute-plus video is a simple b-roll that came to us from AppHarvest as part of the news announcement about their new indoor salad greens farm in Berea, Kentucky.

According to the announcement, the new farm features a touchless growing system that automates the entire lifecycle from pre-seeding to packaging and also includes onsite washing for produce that goes into washed-and-ready-to-eat salad packs. AppHarvest says the new farm can grow about 35 million lettuce plants at a time, going from seed to maturity in about three to four weeks, depending on the variety. That equates to about half a billion lettuce plants produced per year.

AppHarvest built the new facility in partnership with Mastronardi Produce, a company that sells produce such as tomatoes, berries, and salad kits at retail, who provided $30 million in debt financing to AppHarvest to build out the new facility.

You can watch the entire video below or skip to certain portions on Youtube, including harvesting, washing, or packaging.

Watch a completely automated precision farm from seeding to harvesting to packaging.

According to AppHarvest, 5 acres of the new farm is currently operational, and shipping produce. They plan for the new facility to be a total of 15 acres when completed. The company plans to open a 30-acre berry farm in Somerset Kentucky in the next few weeks, a farm which they built using $50 million in USDA-secured debt.

While the new facilities may pump out a whole bunch of produce compared to traditional outdoor acreage, the total number of CEA farms is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the 900 thousand traditional-ag acres there are in the US. According to AppHarvest, the US only has about 6 thousand CEA farm acres, compared with over half a million in Europe.

Impact Justice Launches Program to Train Incarcerated Populations to Become High-Tech Farmers

This week, Impact Justice announced the launch of Growing Justice, a new program that utilizes precision indoor agriculture to expand access to fresh food in prison communities and provide skills training to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations.

The program’s first containerized vertical farm and job training program will be at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, the first of what Impact Justice says will be multiple Growing Justice installations at corrections facilities across California. The second location will be Impact Justice’s Oakland headquarters. Both installations will be hydroponic farms built inside shipping containers outfitted with grow lights and irrigation systems.

The Growing Justice work training program is available to populations within 24 months of their scheduled release date. Those already released can apply to participate in the program. Growing Justice is also working with controlled environment agriculture advisory firm Agritecture to create a six-month training program tailored to give prison populations hands-on experience operating a vertical farm.

The organization is also working with a number of vertical farming startups to create pathways for employment post-training, including Square Roots, Bowery Farming, and Fork Farms.

“People in prison face substantial challenges, including poor and limited food choices. For those released, employment options are limited and healthy food remains difficult to obtain,” says Impact Justice President Alex Busansky. “Growing Justice demonstrates how government, the nonprofit sector, and businesses can work together to improve the quality of food, create pathways to jobs, and give people a real second chance.”

In addition to job training, Growing Justice also provides fresh food to prison populations. According to Impact Justice, a fully operational containerized farm will provide up to 60 pounds of leafy greens and herbs per week. Only 11% of prison populations have regular access to fresh vegetables, and this low access often leads to lingering health problems for prison populations that can often extend well-beyond incarceration.

Growing Justice is the latest program in the vertical farming space launched to help train a new generation of farmers. Kentucky-based Appharvest has been building training centers at schools in low-income areas of Appalachia to give high-school students skills training in vertical farming, while Freight Farms works with schools around the Northeast to launch containerized farms at high schools.

The program by Impact Justice is unique, however, in its focus on bringing rehabilitative programming to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations. Initially funded by the California State Legislature, the California Department of Corrections, and an anonymous donor, the program provides a potential pathway for people of color to start businesses and find employment post-incarceration.

The program is a tangible example of how newer approaches to food production can be made as on-ramps for marginalized populations to enter the job market. What makes Growing Justice pretty neat is it’s also a very tech-forward and sustainability-centered approach to farming, a part of the economy where people of color own a tiny percentage of businesses.

Construction of the containerized farm at the Central California Women’s Facility will begin in early 2023, and the organization expects to recruit its first cohort in June next year.

Equilibrium Capital Closes a $1.02B Fund for Indoor Ag

Equilibrium Capital has closed its second fund dedicated to indoor agriculture. The Controlled Environment Foods Fund II (CEFF II) raised a total of $1.02 billion, exceeding its original goal of $500 million. 

Speaking in a company blog post, Equilibrium CEO David Chen said that the fundraising for CEFF II reflects a broader shift where larger institutional investors are concerned. “Investors and retailers are increasingly looking for more sustainable and less volatile ways to invest in and scale agriculture. The fund is reflecting the magnitude of the opportunity and the growing importance of CEA in our food system,” he said. 

CEFF II will invest between $10 million and $125 million per deal, mostly in high-tech greenhouses and indoor farms as well as “other CEA segments of alternative proteins and aquaculture.” The fund is focused largely on North America: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. 

Equilibrium’s current assets are mostly in lettuce and tomatoes, which are two of the most popular produce types when it comes to indoor ag. However, Chang name-dropped berries in blog post, saying that Equilibrium will be “dramatically expanding” its presence in the berry family in the future. The statement reflects the larger development for indoor ag where more companies are either currently growing or planning to grow berries. Chang also mentioned peppers, cucumbers, mushrooms, and herbs.

The new fund follows the original CEFF, which closed at $336 million in April 2019 and includes well-known CEA companies like AppHarvest, Revol Greens, and Little Leaf Farms. All of those companies focus on raising crops in high-tech greenhouses, as opposed to the massive vertical farm setups a la AeroFarms or Plenty. Whether CEFF II will invest in more vertical farms remains to be seen. Chang said there were “niche applications” for the technology, though he was not specific about what those applications are. Currently, most vertical farming operations only grow leafy greens and herbs at the kinds of volumes that can supply grocery stores and restaurants. Debate persists as to whether this particular indoor ag format can produce more crops in an environmentally and economically sustainable way.