Tom Kimmerer, a plant physiologist who taught at the University of Kentucky, has tracked indoor farming alongside his research into the growth of plants both outdoors and inside. And they say paying for that light can make profitability impossible.
What 100-year-old menus reveal about global warming and how it's changing what we eatīut skeptics question the sustainability of operations that can require energy-intensive artificial light.
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The companies frequently tout their products as free of pesticides, though they’re not typically marketed as organic. It's also a way to protect crops from increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change. Other growers are trying industrial-scale greenhouses, indoor beds of soil in massive warehouses and special robots to mechanize parts of the farming process.Īdvocates say growing indoors uses less water and land and allows food to be grown closer to consumers, saving on transport. Indoor farming brings growing inside in what experts sometimes call “controlled environment agriculture.” There are different methods vertical farming involves stacking produce from floor to ceiling, often under artificial lights and with the plants growing in nutrient-enriched water.
“The fact that other people are failing and other people are succeeding, that’s going to happen in any industry you go to, but specifically for us, I think that especially as sustainable as we’re trying to be, the sustainable competitors I think are going to start winning,” he said. Sign up for NBC South Florida newsletters. Get South Florida local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. The industry churn doesn't bother Jacob Portillo, a grower with Eden Green who directs a plant health team and monitors irrigation, nutrients and other factors related to crop needs. And a five-year-old company in Detroit, Planted Detroit, shut its doors this summer, with the CEO citing financial problems just months after touting plans to open a second farm. Meanwhile, two indoor farming companies that attracted strong startup money - New Jersey's AeroFarms and Kentucky's AppHarvest - filed for bankruptcy reorganization. California-based Plenty Unlimited this summer broke ground on a $300 million facility, while Kroger announced that it will be expanding its availability of vertically farmed produce. And players in the industry are betting big even as rivals wobble and fail. The company operates two greenhouses and has broken ground on two more at its Cleburne campus, where the indoor facilities are meant to shelter their portion of the food supply from climate change while using less water and land.īut that's if the concept works. This is Eden Green Technology, one of the latest crop of indoor farming companies seeking their fortunes with green factories meant to pump out harvests of fresh produce all year long.
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A few weeks later, once the vegetables grow to full size, they’ll be picked, packaged and shipped out to local shelves within 48 hours. Inside a bright greenhouse about an hour outside Dallas, workers in hairnets and gloves place plugs of lettuce and other greens into small plastic containers - hundreds of thousands of them - that stack up to the ceiling.
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