AeroFarms reveals to California North Coast food producers its high-tech controlled environment agriculture
Imagine a farming method so efficient that you could grow a variety of leafy greens in half the time it traditionally takes - without any pesticides, herbicides or fungicides - and where the sun has no role.
It's all done indoors, and it's a growing trend known as controlled environment agriculture (CEA). The biggest player in the space is AeroFarms, a Newark, New Jersey-based operation that was among the businesses that participated at the Feb. 25 North Coast Specialty Food & Beverage Conference.
“We track everything that happens to the plants, from its genetics all the way to harvest. And by measuring along the way, we can use that data to learn more about what makes plants grow,” said AeroFarms Chief Financial Officer Guy Blanchard. “The ability to do this is transformative, it's brand new, if you think of the difference with field farming, where you can't control the temperature and you can't control the weather. You're really reacting and trying to respond to the things that Mother Nature is throwing at you.”
In addition to AeroFarms, which is privately held, there are a variety of CEA players in the marketplace, including Bright Farms, Little Leaf Farms, Bowery Farms, Revol Greens and Plenty, which is based in South San Francisco. The majority of these businesses are headquartered in the Midwest and further east, where bad weather makes it impossible to grow the greens outdoors.
There are a variety of growing methods within the CEA category, the two most common being hydroponics and aeroponics. With hydroponics, plants are grown with mineral nutrients in a water base rather than in soil. Aeroponics, which is AeroFarms' method, also uses no soil, instead planting seeds in fabric and misting them with mineral nutrients.
AeroFarms grows 800 varieties of edible greens, such as lettuce, arugula and spinach. The plants require 95% less water than on farms, and are completely grown in 12 to 14 days, rather than 30 to 45 days in the field. The company's retail brand, Dream Greens, is sold in grocery stores in New Jersey and New York.
Blanchard declined to disclose the company's financial metrics. According to ROI-NJ, a New Jersey business publication, AeroFarms raised $40 million in 2017.
The vertical farming market size was valued at $2.23 billion in 2018 and projected to hit $12.77 billion by 2026, according to Allied Marketing Research.
Pegi Ball and Janet Ciel, who each run farmers markets in the North Bay, said at the conference they wonder how the CEA industry might someday impact the region's farmers.
“There's going to be change, but I don't want to lose our small farmers,” said Ball, who manages the Santa Rosa Original Certified Farmers Market at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. “It's more than just lettuce and that sort of thing. It's the culture, it's the tradition, it's our community, so that's what concerns me.”
Ciel, who manages the Healdsburg Certified Farmers Market and also works with the Agricultural Institute of Marin's Stonestown Farmers Market in San Francisco, came away impressed by Blanchard's presentation, but also curious about how traditional farming and controlled environment agriculture could potentially coexist.
“I think the technology is brilliant,” Ciel said. “I just think the small farmer is … dealing with the weather and pests and (various other factors), and they don't have the funding or the education to pull something like this off. Is there something there that is for them?”
Blanchard views the growing CEA industry to be more comparable to - and therefore more competitive with - commercial food-processing operations than traditional farming because of the costs involved, from investing in capital equipment to staffing, of which AeroFarms employs about 160 people.
“If you're going to have a farm manager, a safety manager, a shipping manager and a maintenance manager (among the staff), you may be up to like $600,000 a year in wages and benefits before you've even gotten to anything really related to the farm,” Blanchard said. “In many ways, even though the processes are different, this isn't different than some other food-processing (businesses) necessarily, and you've got to manage it.”
Another reason CEA poses little to no threat to farmers, at least at this point in time, is because food grown in this vertical indoor environment is limited primarily to leafy greens. Greenhouses have more latitude.
