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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

farm to table

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.

Technology Brings Farm Fresh Goodness to Home Gardens

While “windowsill to table” hasn’t exactly caught on with the vast realm of food bloggers and foodies, one of the newest parts of the tech-inspired food revolution involves regular, everyday city folk becoming farmers. Elements of this movement include indoor gardening, vertical gardening and turning your small deck or rooftop into a lush patch of fertile land that yields everything from arugula to Green Zebra Tomatoes.

Urban farming has a place for everyone. Social entrepreneurs like Kimbal Musk, with urban farm-accelerator Square Roots, and Irving Fain, with his IoT-driven Bowery Farming, are jumping into this space. They are focused on testing aquaponics ecosystems which use LED grow lights and less water by using smaller spaces than conventional methods. These efforts produce top-quality veggies sold to restaurants and directly to consumers. For the home gardener, choices include all-in-one IoT-based indoor growing kits from companies such as Aerogarden and tower-garden setups from startup NutriTower.

On the more DIY side of things, consumers that want fresh herbs and greens can dust off an old aquarium. You can start with the purchase of an aquaponics kit like those from Aquasprouts or Grove, or by simply mail ordering some non-GMO seeds and taking an old cottage cheese container from the trash. From there you add dirt and water to your seeds and soon you can watch your microgreens take bloom. If you encounter a stumble along the way, there are countless YouTube videos to help you along. More sophisticated help is available with some smart gardening assistants such as Growerbot to keep track of your watering and soil conditions.

As the space matures, urban and indoor farming are likely to have different trajectories. It is unlikely consumers will move from growing herbs and microgreens indoors to buying a 100-acre farm in Iowa. It also is a longshot that hipster gardeners will buy vacant buildings and convert them the huge vertical farms with robotic water and harvesting devices. For this crowd, it’s more about crowing over those fresh sorrel greens placed on a salad for the next dinner party.

For social entrepreneurs, the endgame is different. Most visionaries in this space come from other areas (primarily technology) and bring science, fresh ideas and a sense of community to their projects. But these techfarmers also bring a keen sense of business and realize their sustainability will need to include some revenue-generating ideas. Some, such as the Square Roots collective, offer home or office delivery of greens, while Smallhold builds indoor farms onsite for restaurants to provide chefs with ultra-fresh mushrooms.

While some supermarkets may be content to hope IoT-indoor farming fizzles out, the German chain Metro refuses to bury its head in the sand. In Berlin, the company houses an Infarm installation at the end of one of its grocery aisles. And it’s not just for show; fresh greens and herbs from Infarm are for sale in the store.

The biggest threat urban and indoor farming poses is to the national meal kit business. One of the mantras for this new breed of growers is to focus on consumers and restaurant in a 10-mile radius. Serving a local community is part of the marketing message from entrepreneurs in urban farming. The vertical move, adding other local food artisans to their retail packages, could result in the sort of immediacy which the Blue Aprons and Hello Fresh cannot match—at least for now.

Maine’s Forager the Latest to Use Tech as a Farm-to-Table Solution

Much like the zeitgeist term “Internet of Things, the use of the popular slogan “farm to table” is confusing marketing speak widely subject to personal interpretation. The farm part is fairly easy to understand, but table conjures up the image of local tomato grower driving up to your home and placing a pound of heirlooms on your kitchen counter. If only that were the case. Yes, it’s a “Portlandia” skit come to life.

In broad brush strokes, the world of farm-to-table is two businesses—tech-driven B2B logistics platforms that connect farms to retailers and restaurants, and the far-more-challenging niche world of home delivery of farm-fresh produce.

Speaking of Portland—the one in the Northeast part of the U.S.—a new enterprise called Forager is an app-based ecosystem that offers a farm-to-table solution connecting local growers to retailers, restaurants and market vendors. Forager allows commercial buyers of fresh farm goods to see what local farmers are growing and have in stock, and then place orders accordingly. Forager CEO David Stone says the system eliminates what he calls a “manual, paper intensive, error-prone process.”

“More and more people are putting local food on their plates,” Stone told a local Portland TV station. “[The farm-to-table movement] is growing really fast, but the technology hasn’t really focused on it yet.”

Stone’s goal is to make Forager a nationwide platform, but in its early days the technology is being utilized by farmers in Maine and New Hampshire. His immediate goal is to get the technology in the hands of growers throughout New England and upstate New York.

B2B farm-to-table solutions abound focusing on the part of the value chain that put fresh goods into the hands of resellers. Pointing to the glut of innovators looking at this growing part of the food tech industry, the 2017 Food + City Challenge featured such F-2-T solutions providers as Bucketload, Farm Fare, and Origintrail. There also are plenty of tech newcomers to support this new-ish-IoT supply chain. Companies such as Fresh Surety provide technology that calibrates freshness of goods as they travel from grower to marketplace.

A few daring entrepreneurs have attempted to tackle the business of delivering those farm-fresh goodies to consumers—essentially a specialized grocery delivery service. Any of the countless supermarket-to-home services will deliver a bunch of celery or a pound of oranges, but those selections hinge on the untrained eye of your average Instacart employee. For field-to-home goodness, subscription-based startups such as New York’s Farm to People and Texas-based Farmhouse Delivery have heavily curated weekly services that bring seasonal produce to your door.

Cost is the significant issue for bringing that ear of corn picked that morning directly to your kitchen. With low margins and an elusive target market, companies such as Farmhouse Delivery charge a one-time membership fee and weekly or bi-weekly service of a medium bushel (five-seven items) for $27.00 or a large bushel (nine-11 items) for $39.99. For better margins and a higher per-customer order, Farmhouse also delivers prepared foods, meat, poultry and dairy items. The target for such services is the subset of families who want to eat healthy and have the resources to buy local and organic without a weekly trip to the farmers market.

At the other end of the farm-to-retail-to-table spectrum is a potentially large and socially responsible opportunity, but one that is far less sexy. Solutions for getting fresh food to underserved “food deserts” attracts neither visionaries nor startup capital, leaving such programs as the St. Louis Metro Market, a non-profit that converts city buses into mobile farmers markets, as a placeholder for future social entrepreneurs.