Whether you’re a seasoned grower or just starting out, you won’t want to miss the Indoor Ag-Con panel discussion, “How To Kill Your Indoor Ag Business.”
From pitfalls to watch out for to critical vendor partnerships, their tips will help your business not just survive, but thrive in the coming year.
Q: What is one of the classic pre-operation mistakes – before you even start selling to anyone?
A: Andrew Blume
Thinking too big too quick, and thus failing to understand that agriculture moves at a different pace than other industries. To master indoor ag requires a grasp of several forms of engineering: software, mechanical, electrical, biological, financial and even social engineering. Farming is hard work and the path forward is full of potential pitfalls.
In my 5 years in this industry, I’ve seen and heard companies make huge statements like:
“Napa in a box”
“We grow 50,000-60,000 lbs per shipping container per year”
“We’re the Ferrari of indoor agriculture”
These statements are about what people want to do. My advice is to avoid talking a big game and first: validate your assumptions, prove your product via a pilot, and acquire customers. Once you’ve done that, it might just be time to tell the world and start adding all those zeros to your excel model.
A: Matt Liotta
Not planning for loss of crops. Spoilage, pests, and disease need to be planned for. This is especially true when designing the facility because an improperly designed facility could make it very difficult or even impossible to prevent and mitigate these issues.
A: Jim Pantaleo
In my humble opinion, it is not “proving the building and/or proving the crop” prior to placing your “Open for Business” sign.
The word “proving” means is the building functionally ready. Have all the issues with environmental controls, water, energy, air flow, etc. been addressed? Can the building, once proven, produce a quality, consistent crop in volume? If the answer is yes, then you are ready to start selling!
Q: What suppliers are essential to maintaining your business?
A: Andrew Blume
At inHouse Produce, we rely heavily on our vendor partners to ensure smooth operations. The two categories of suppliers that are essential include:
Inputs like seeds, substrates, nutrients, pest management items, and even software.
Hardware like trays, LEDs, fans, and PCBs.
We switched our LED vendor after meeting a supplier that better suited our needs at Indoor Ag-Con 2019. For 2020, I’m willing to be surprised, but I am specifically interested to see what’s new in small-batch manufacturing, indoor-ag specific software, and the latest in pest management.
A: Matt Liotta
A good understanding of consumables required, minimum order requirements, and storage for those minimums is certainly important. Testing labs are often overlooked, but critical to success. Depending on the specific crops grown, the local regulations, and any requirements your customers may have could have considerable 3rd part testing requirements. The turnaround time of some of these tests may even impact facility design for storage and quarantining of product.
A: Jim Pantaleo
I have always found that the essential suppliers provide that which is continually in use or need on an indoor farm. Think nitrile gloves, clam shells, other consumables like cleaning products and here’s a fun one: seeds. If you don’t have an adequate supply…maintaining your business is going to be tough.
Learn more during the full session on Monday, May 18 from 11:00 – 11:45 am.
Ahead of the session, we reached out to our participants to find out, from an LED perspective, what is the next hot thing in lighting? Here’s what they said:
The hot thing right now is dynamic lighting. This involves modifying LED light recipes during the plant’s life. This includes spectrum, time duration and intensity per crop stage. This interaction with control of the growth environment create unlimited opportunities for machines to learn and continuously improve.
LED lighting is poised to become the mainstream lighting technology for indoor horticulture. This is due to the much higher efficacy and potential for extended life made possible by LED technology and these factors will result in cost savings for growers. From my perspective, the next ‘hot thing’ in lighting is just figuring out the most effective product features, form factors, and layouts that maximize the productivity with LED lighting and provide consistency and confidence for growers. There is still considerable uncertainty around what is the most effective spectrum for plant growth, what are the optimum light levels and photoperiods, and will LED lighting products live up to their reliability claims, necessary to achieve a return on investment. The next ‘hot thing’ is to also understand and communicate realistic limits and expectations for the horticultural lighting system.
Horticultural LED lighting must operate in an extreme environment with consistent high temperatures, high humidity, and possible chemical exposure. This is a challenging environment for any lighting product. The reliability of LED products is defined by the depreciation life of the LEDs. While the LEDs in a fixture are expected to last a long time, there can be reliability issues with the fixture power supply, thermal management, or optical components. There can also be issues with color shift over time, particularly if multiple colors of LEDs are being used in a fixture. For example, red LEDs will likely degrade at a different rate than blue or white LEDs, shifting the color balance and fixture efficacy over time. Best practices need to be developed to anticipate these changes in the fixture, minimize down-time from failed lighting products, and maximize yield.
So the next ‘hot thing’ won’t be flashy tech like AI or advanced controls, but rather well designed lighting products with good reliability that provide growers with the consistency and confidence they need.
Look for more information coming from our other panelists, too! And, check out the full conference schedule to learn more about other speakers and sessions.
— Square Roots is building a distributed network of indoor, modular farms, farmed by a new generation of farmers, to grow local food for people in cities all over the world. Here’s why it’s working.
Square Roots’ scalable “farmer-first” platform brings fresh, healthy food to urban areas year-round, while simultaneously training future generations of farmers. With production farms in Brooklyn, New York, and Grand Rapids, Michigan (with more to come in 2020!), Square Roots has a mission to bring local, real food to people in cities across the world while empowering the next generation of leaders in urban farming.
Whether we’re in the farms tweaking CO2 levels, or in a board meeting plotting a pathway for what the company looks like in 2050, every decision we make is guided to help us achieve our mission faster, smarter, and with as much impact as possible.
Choices we’ve made around our technology platform are a good illustration of that. Our platform needs to bring fresh, healthy food to urban areas year-round, consistently, sustainability, and on any continent in the world. At the same time, it must also be a welcoming environment, conducive to training future generations of farmers to be productive, fast.
Central to our platform is the decision we made very early in the company’s life to build a distributed network of modular Climate Containers, as opposed to following the plant factory template.
Inside a Square Roots Climate Container, data-empowered farmers work with optimum growing conditions, all year round.
There are a lot of smart people in this industry, many with different visions for the optimum architecture and model for indoor farming (e.g. plant factories). But all working hard to bring better food to market — which, given our wider vision to bring real food to everyone, is wonderful to see. The more of us working on the real food revolution the better — and we want all of these systems to flourish. But here are 10 reasons why we think container farming rocks:
1. Speed to Market
Today we can enter a new market and open a Square Roots “Super Farm” — with 25 Climate Containers, cold storage, biosecurity infrastructure, and everything else you need to run a food-safe farm at scale — in less than three months, like we did in partnership with Gordon Food Service last Fall. That time period is only coming down. In comparison, building a plant factory can cost tens of millions of dollars, as well as take years to construct. We want to get real food to more people, and fast!
2. Easy to Scale
To meet increasing market demand, we simply add Climate Containers to any existing deployment. This means just-in-time capital deployment, and also just-in-time technology deployment. This is really important in an industry where the technology is improving fast. You don’t want to spend years and millions to open a big farm full of old tech that immediately needs a refresh.
3. Climate Control
I was an early investor in Chicago’s Farmed Here, one of the first and largest plant factories in the US. There, I saw first-hand how much the team struggled to control the climate in a building that size. Plants don’t like it when you get it wrong. And neither do landlords — the humidity can wreak havoc with the underlying infrastructure. In our programmable Climate Containers, each one built inside a 320 square foot shipping container, optimum conditions for a variety of crops can easily be maintained. The perfect climate for each variety can be seamlessly replicated — in any market — to ensure consistent quality every time, at every harvest.
Alyssa Patton, Square Roots Next-Gen Farmer, harvesting fresh, local basil inside a Climate Container in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
4. Diversity of Products
Multiple containers on our Super Farms allow for multiple climates, which lets us grow multiple crops at the same time to satisfy local market demands. For example, basil requires a completely different climate than chives to grow well, so it’s practically impossible to grow these two products together in a way that tastes good if you have a giant farm with one mono climate. The ability to grow multiple quality SKUs is particularly important in the retail market, where product variety is key to getting shelf real estate. Having multiple climates also means we can tackle many niches in any local market (e.g. using one container on a Super Farm to grow something exotic like Shiso or Mustard Greens), giving us a lot of business flexibility while keeping things interesting for our teams of farmers.
5. Sustainable Systems
As with most hydroponic growers, Square Roots uses zero pesticides, and 90% less water than outdoor farms. We can also be clever about energy usage. For example, we make it “daytime” in the farm by turning on our grow lights overnight when there is excess energy in the grid, and the cost per kilowatt hour is lower. However, if for some reason we need to be in the farms during “daytime,” we can put a Climate Container into “harvest mode” — which dims the lights, and configures the climate to be optimum conditions for people at work — before seamlessly switching back to plant growing mode once we’re done.
6. Location
Our modular architecture means we can be very creative in re-purposing existing city infrastructure when we look for locations to build a farm. We can pop up on an empty parking lot like we did in Brooklyn, New York, or build a campus on the headquarters of a major distribution company like we did with Gordon Food Service, or even build into a new development. This flexibility means we can build our Super Farms literally in the same zip code as the end consumer. This means fresher and tastier products for the customer, fewer food miles (most industrial food is shipped in from the other side of the world!), and less food waste. It also helps to get consumers more connected to their food and the people who grow it — they can simply jump on a subway or in their car, and come visit one of our farms!
7. Food Safety and System Resilience
All indoor farms need to be prepared for bad things to happen. While there is way less risk in a controlled environment versus an outdoor farm, it’s inevitable that you will get some sort of pest outbreak, powdery mildew, or some other issue at some point while you’re managing a complex ecosystem full of living, breathing plants. If that ever should happen in one of our Climate Containers, we can quickly shut it down and reboot that single node while the rest of the network keeps going strong. I’ve seen this happen in a plant factory, with one big mono climate, and you lose all your crops.
8. Faster Learning
Our farms are cloud connected, and we collect millions of data points that we analyze to determine how changes in certain environmental parameters can impact factors like yield, taste and texture of the final produce. More climates in more containers means more feedback loops, which means faster learning. To systematize this learning, we’ve built The Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt — a software which is now the OS for the whole company as we all learn faster together.
9. The Network Gets Smarter as it Scales
Square Roots’ cloud-connected farms and data-empowered farmers learn from each other, enabling us to replicate success from one location to another, seamlessly. Working with Gordon Food Service to build farms across their network of distribution centers and retail stores brings us closer to the vision of a distributed network of indoor farms, bringing local, real food to people in cities across the world—while empowering thousands of next-gen leaders in urban farming through our unique training program.
10. Sense of Responsibility
Perhaps this is unique to Square Roots and our Next-Gen Farmer Training Program, but because we grow in modular Climate Containers, we’re able to give all our young farmers a personalized understanding of their individual impact on the overall business. The Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt provides day-to-day instructions on a per-farmer and per-crop basis, as well as a means for data capture, and real time analysis of both plant health and business metrics. All this information is accessible from the tablets that everyone on our farm team carries everyday. This system also ensures that we track every aspect of production — who does what, when, and how, from seed to sales. This is a goldmine of data, that not only helps us improve operations, but also implicitly provides traceability. In December 2018, we started exposing this data to consumers in the form of our Transparency Timeline. On every package of Square Roots produce, you can simply scan a QR code and get a complete story of where your food comes from — seed to shelf.
Simply scan the QR code on every Square Roots package to see where your food comes from.
Our Super Farm platform is exciting in terms of scalability, resilience, and efficiency, and it’s a really wonderful environment for our farmers to farm in. For urban consumers it means local farmers growing your food with love — which is why it tastes absolutely delicious. And technology enables us to grow a ton of food in a very small area, in ways that make a lot of business sense too. It’s a classic example of “doing well by doing good”.
It has been an exciting journey to our Super Farm platform. When we launched Square Roots back in 2016, we were very focused on figuring out the Farmer Training Program model — as we knew that farmers bring love to the food, the program would create enormous impact over time, and it would also be a long term engine of growth. So we partnered with a number of 3rd parties who could provide parts of the growing system for us, while we got the training program right. (In many ways, that was like Tesla sourcing our chassis from Lotus for the first Roadster). After that initial phase, and finding out what the urban farming world needs — i.e. higher quality yields with much lower costs to drive scalable unit economics, and ultra-high standards of biosecurity to support operations that are first class in food safety—we have developed our own technology specifically tailored to our model. This enables us to grow local food at incredible scale in ways that make sense for people, planet and profits.
Our partnership with Gordon Food Service was announced at the end of March 2019, and our first co-located farm opened just six months later in Grand Rapids, Michigan — marking our next step of bringing local food to people in cities all across North America while training thousands of future farmers. Which, in a neat and circular way, brings us right back to the mission statement we started this post with.
Of course, we still have lots of work to do and we have a lot of exciting announcements coming this year as we grow! And, we’re always looking to talk with great people — from hardware and software engineers to farmers and plant scientists. So feel free to check our website and get in touch.
While the world’s space programs were instrumental in spinning off vertical farming, today’s vertical farming industry will likely, in turn, ultimately enable NASA and other space programs to realize their future food production systems on the Moon, Mars and beyond.
As the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s first Lunar landing and moonwalk on July 20, 1969 was observed last year, it is fitting to recall the myriad innovation spin-offs that NASA’s space program has gifted mankind. These range from the integrated circuit to computer microchips to satellite television to cordless tools to electric vehicles to freeze-dried food to memory foam, etc. — and yes, still unbeknownst to many, vertical farming.
Space Farming
While the Apollo program itself did not initiate or develop space farming, its unprecedented success directly led NASA to establish the Controlled Ecological Life Support System (CELSS) division within its Advanced Life Support program around 1978. The aim, in part, was developing the technologies and strategies necessary to grow food and regenerate resources on the Lunar surface or on Mars for future long-duration manned missions and habitation.
Nearly two decades before NASA, however, the then Soviet Space program commenced activities beginning in 1961 toward developing its own bio-regenerative space life support system. In 1968, the Soviets first realized growing crops in their completely sealed controlled-environment system Bios-2, located in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, wherein they successfully cultivated wheat, carrots, cucumber, dill and other vegetable crops. (Bios-2 should not be confused with Biosphere 2 in Arizona which was constructed much later between 1987 and 1991.) An improved underground test facility, Bios-3, was subsequently built by the Soviets in 1972.
Fast Forward
Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, NASA’s CELSS program made significant advances in the cultivation of a whole range of crops in closed controlled-environment systems under optimized environmental conditions of lighting, temperature, relative humidity, air flow, nutrient compositions, etc.
The foregoing advances by both NASA and the Soviet Space program paved the way for the emergence of the first commercial vertical farms (or plant factories) in the United States and Japan. General Electric’s Geniponics based in New York and Alaska, as well as General Mills’ Phytofarms of America in Illinois, were established in the 1970s and operated through the 1980s, though eventually closing down owing to economic challenges.
Vertical Farming Takes Root
It was in Japan in the 1980s, however, when the then fledgling vertical farming industry truly took root and flourished, in part, through their proactive adoption and incorporation of emerging technology innovations.
For instance, TS Farm (Q.P. Corporation) was first in employing aeroponic systems, while Cosmo Plant Co. Ltd. in 2000 became the world’s first commercial LED-based vertical farm and began producing up to 7,000 heads of lettuce per day, significantly exceeding the industry norm of 3,000 to 5,000 heads of lettuce per day in the 1990s.
Vertical farming today, of course, has gone global and, in parallel with advances in lighting technologies, climate control, data analytics, automation and other innovations, has correspondingly been setting new achievements in both yield and resource sustainability.
The Future
And just as the space program spun off the Vertical Farming industry, there is poetic symmetry in the very real prospects that it will be the vertical farming industry that will ultimately enable NASA, as well as other space programs, to develop and fully realize its bio-regenerative space life support systems for future Lunar and Martian human habitats.
In the future the vertical farming industry may indeed extend its prospects from the mere terrestrial to the extraterrestrial.
Photos Captions (top to bottom):NASA’s Apollo 11 Lunar landing and moonwalk on July 20, 1962. (Photos courtesy of NASA) ; The author’s NASA-sponsored project on design and demonstration of NASA’s first Hybrid Solar and Electric Lighting System for Bio-regenerative Space Life Support for application in future long-duration manned missions to the Moon and Mars.
Dr. Joel Cuello will be moderating the session , “Growing In Space With the Help of Government, Industry and Academia during the May 18-20, 2020 edition of Indoor Ag-Con at the Wynn Las Vegas
During the May 2020 edition of Indoor Ag-Con, we’ll be featuring a panel presentation, 
July 20, 1969 was observed last year, it is fitting to recall the myriad innovation spin-offs that 
Nearly two decades before NASA, however, the then Soviet Space program commenced activities beginning in 1961 toward developing its own bio-regenerative space life support system. In 1968, the Soviets first realized growing crops in their completely sealed controlled-environment system Bios-2, located in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, wherein they successfully cultivated wheat, carrots, cucumber, dill and other vegetable crops. (Bios-2 should not be confused with 
significant advances in the cultivation of a whole range of crops in closed controlled-environment systems under optimized environmental conditions of lighting, temperature, relative humidity, air flow, nutrient compositions, etc.
It was in Japan in the 1980s, however, when the then fledgling vertical farming industry truly took root and flourished, in part, through their proactive adoption and incorporation of emerging technology innovations.
advances in lighting technologies, climate control, data analytics, automation and other innovations, has correspondingly been setting new achievements in both yield and resource sustainability.