Virginia Welcomes the Future of Food with Controlled Environment Agriculture Farms
In partnership with: Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services
Not all fruits and vegetables stocked in the produce aisle were grown with soil and sunshine in long, tilled rows. Instead, some fresh foods – including arugula, kale, tomatoes, bell peppers, strawberries, watercress and other microgreens – grow indoors, where advanced technology provides the ideal lighting, water, temperature and humidity to guarantee year-round production of some of our favorite foods. It’s called Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), and it’s becoming a popular way to produce food.
Three pioneering companies – AeroFarms, Beanstalk Farms and, coming soon, Plenty Unlimited Inc. – recently announced or opened CEA farms in Virginia, furthering the Commonwealth’s position as a leader in this industry. CEA is also known as vertical farming because produce is grown in multiple tiers stacked from the floor to the ceiling.
“Vertical farming is transforming agriculture by contributing to a more resilient food system,” says Marc Oshima, co-founder and chief marketing officer at AeroFarms.
Cultivating Technology
Growing crops indoors requires a high-tech approach.
Mike and Jack Ross, brothers and co-founders of Herndon-based Beanstalk Farms, came from technology and engineering backgrounds and used those skills to develop the fully automated indoor farm.
For California-based Plenty Unlimited, a planned 120-acre vertical farming campus in Chesterfield County will use a high-tech approach to produce up to 20 million pounds of leafy greens, strawberries and tomatoes annually. Yields within an indoor farm are up to 350 times the yield per acre on traditional farms while using a fraction of the land and water.
“Our controlled indoor growing environment optimizes produce for flavor, texture and size by tailoring nutrients, water and light to the needs of each plant, growing produce with peak-season flavor year-round,” says Dana Worth, senior vice president of commercial for Plenty.
New Jersey-based AeroFarms developed a proprietary agriculture platform that uses machine learning and plant biology to grow award-winning leafy greens at its new vertical farming campus in Danville. The high-tech approach “improves the way fresh produce is grown and distributed locally and globally” and “delivers superior flavor, better quality and improved nutrition with the most sophisticated levels of traceability and food safety in our industry,” according to Oshima.
CEA isn’t just more efficient, it’s also good for the environment. It uses up to 99% less land, 95% less water and a fraction of the fertilizers used in field farming.
See more: Ovoka Farm in Virginia Raises Top-Quality Wagyu Cattle
Focus on Freshness
Vertical farming also brings food production to urban and suburban areas where there is a lack of available farmland for growing crops. Moving food production closer to consumers means crops travel fewer miles from farm to table and arrive at peak freshness.
Mike Ross points to recent university studies that found spinach lost up to half its nutritional value after eight days in refrigerated storage to highlight the value of providing fresh, local produce. Beanstalk Farms delivers produce to consumers just one day after it’s harvested.
“You want to be eating produce as close to harvest as possible to maximize the nutrition,” he says. “If you’re buying this food to be healthy, you need to be buying it from a local farm – and vertical farms can grow year-round, which adds a ton of convenience.”
Getting fresh produce from farm to consumer was among the reasons AeroFarms chose Danville for its newest – and the world’s largest – aeroponic smart farm. Oshima notes the Virginia location is near 1,000 food retailers, including partners like Whole Foods Market and The Fresh Market, plus more than 50 million consumers are within a one-day drive of the farm.
When it comes to the future of vertical farming, the sky is the limit.
“With increased challenges facing traditional agriculture as a result of climate change, pests, geopolitical concerns and more, how we supply a growing global population with fresh food has to evolve,” Worth says. “Indoor vertical farming has the potential to bring regionally grown produce to just about anywhere in the world.”
See more: Conservation Considerations Are a Priority for Virginia Farmers