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.

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.