Tag: greenhouse

Navigating Cyclospora: How Greenhouse Growers Are Bringing Transparency to Salad Safety

Written by The Packer- Jill Dutton on July 27, 2026. Posted in Blog.

As the U.S. faces its largest foodborne illness outbreak in more than three decades, concerns surrounding produce safety have reached a critical high point.

Public health officials are currently investigating a cyclospora outbreak tied to contaminated iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC has confirmed more than 1,900 illnesses across nine states linked to this specific outbreak, while thousands of additional cases remain under investigation — including another 500 cases reported in Michigan alone in a single morning.

Amid growing consumer anxiety and broad media advisories warning shoppers away from packaged salads, indoor greenhouse growers and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) advocates are stepping forward to provide clarity. Their message is focused on transparency, structural safety advantages and open communication — all while maintaining respect for the rigorous safety efforts of traditional field growers.

Read full story from The Packer…

North American Greenhouse Growers Assure the Public Their Products Are Safe

Written by Hortidaily.com | Verticalfarmdaily.com on July 16, 2026. Posted in Blog.

From HortiDaily.com The cyclospora outbreak in the US holds the industry in its grip. More than 2,640 positive Cyclospora test results have been reported in northwest Ohio as a surge in illnesses linked to the microscopic parasite, and although the source is not confirmed yet, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services called out lettuce as ”a common product that regularly comes up during the investigation’ and advises consumers to purchase whole heads rather than pre-washed, bagged lettuce, or pre-mixed salad kits.

“Given the extent of the outbreak, the incubation period of up to two weeks for symptoms to develop after exposure and complex food distribution networks across the state and country, it will take some time for agencies to complete their investigation,” adds the MDHHS.

Authorities have not linked the outbreak to any specific grower, processor, shipper, production region, or brand, and other food sources have not been ruled out.

Greenhouse growers
Greenhouse growers currently do everything they can to assure the public their product is not the source of the outbreak.

Responses include comments from KingsOne, Gotham Greens, Little Leaf Farms, Adrina Farms, Planted Detroit and more.

Read full story from HortiDaily.com…

Built All at Once: What an 18-Month, 12-Hectare Desert Build Teaches About Scale Risk

Written by Kyle Barnett, Founder, KB CEA Consulting on July 11, 2026. Posted in Blog.

When Ryan Archer arrived on site in 2018, the project had been described to him as a greenhouse. What he found was a 12-hectare construction site in the desert outside Al Ain, about an hour and 45 minutes inland from Dubai, near the Omani border. Archer, now co-founder of Horizon Growers, had spent his career delivering large capital assets across Qatar and the UAE. He had never set foot inside a high-tech greenhouse.

“Much like probably a number of people involved in that project in the very early days, I massively underestimated what it was that was going to be undertaken”

The facility, backed by a Munich-based conglomerate in a joint venture with a UAE semi-government agricultural organization, would become the largest semi-closed greenhouse in the country, producing 6,000 tonnes of fresh tomatoes annually for the local market. How it got built is a case study in scale risk that applies well beyond the Gulf.

Read the full article here…

And, you can listen to the full episode (ep. 283) of CropTalk featuring Ryan Archer of Horizon Growers on CropTalkMedia.com, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

CEA Summit East 2026 Unveils Conference Program

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on June 19, 2026. Posted in Blog, Press Releases.

Four Deep-Dive Tracks, Greenhouse Sessions and More Set for Sept. 15-16, 2026 In Danville, Virginia

Indoor Ag-Con and the CEA Innovation Center announce the full conference program for the Fifth Annual CEA Summit East, taking place Sept. 15–16, 2026 at the Institute for Advanced Learning & Research (IALR) in Danville, Virginia. The program features four 90-minute deep-dive breakout tracks, keynote addresses, special panel presentations, and the popular CEA Industry & Research Showcase Sessions — with speakers being added to the roster daily.

In a format unique to the Summit, select breakout sessions will be held directly inside the greenhouse of the CEA Innovation Center — putting attendees face-to-face with working research rather than a slide deck. Guided Innovation Center tours cap off the two-day program and are included with every conference pass.

Four Tracks. Twelve Sessions. Real Depth.

Each of the Summit’s four breakout tracks runs across both days, with three 90-minute sessions per track — giving attendees the opportunity to go deep on the topic most relevant to their work. Tracks and sessions are as follows:

TRACK 1: Launching a CEA Operation

• Session 1: Market Research & Defining My Target Market

• Session 2: Building My High Tunnel or Greenhouse: Regulations, Siting and Funding

• Session 3: Starting an Indoor Vertical Farm: Exploring the Models, the Options and What It Really Takes

TRACK 2: Getting Back to Our Roots – Core Horticultural Skills

Held inside the Greenhouse of the CEA Innovation Center

• Session 1: Matching Substrates to Crop & Production System (Soilless & Hydroponic)

• Session 2: Tools For Fertility Management

• Session 3: Lighting Fundamentals: Measurements, Metrics and DLI

TRACK 3: Technology Selection & Data Management

• Session 1: Data Collection & Environmental Monitoring

• Session 2: Data Management & Cybersecurity in CEA

• Session 3: Practical Examples of AI and Automation Integration in CEA Production

TRACK 4: Food Safety & Pest Management

• Session 1: Cleaning & Sanitization Protocols for Food Safety and Plant Health

• Session 2: Insect & Disease Identification in CEA Systems

• Session 3: Building an IPM Plan: Beneficial Insects & Biocontrol Tools

Keynotes, Panels and Showcase Sessions

Keynote addresses on both mornings will set the stage for each day’s programming. Special panel presentations will round out the general session lineup, including a dedicated session on Strengthening the Workforce Ecosystem on Day 1 and a panel focused on What’s Next in CEA Crops – Breeding and Variety Development on Day 2. Keynote speakers will be announced shortly.

The popular CEA Industry & Research Showcase Sessions return across both days — fast-paced, idea-packed presentations from industry innovators and researchers delivering concentrated insight on everything from grower success stories to the latest findings from the field. These sessions are among the most attended and talked-about at the Summit year after year.

The Tour That Everyone Talks About

The guided CEA Innovation Center tour — included with every conference pass — closes out the Summit on the afternoon of Sept. 16. Attendees will explore the research greenhouse, automation systems, and ongoing trials driving the future of controlled environment agriculture. This is not a marketing showcase: it’s a firsthand look at how science and innovation are shaping real-world CEA solutions, led by the researchers and specialists doing the work. Additional tour stops will be announced in the weeks ahead.

Register and Learn More

The full schedule, speaker roster, tabletop exhibits and registration are available at www.ceasummit.com. Speakers are being added regularly; the complete line-up will be announced in the coming weeks. For exhibitor and sponsorship inquiries, contact Suzanne Pruitt at suzanne@indoor.ag or 404.452.1884.

ABOUT CEA SUMMIT EAST

The CEA Summit East is an annual conference bringing greenhouse growers, vertical farm operators, and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) professionals together with researchers, suppliers, and industry leaders. Produced by Indoor Ag-Con and the CEA Innovation Center — a joint project of IALR and the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences — the summit focuses on the intersection of protected cropping, production science, and emerging technology. Held at the IALR in Danville, Virginia, the event includes keynote presentations, panel discussions, breakout sessions, tabletop exhibits, and guided tours of the CEA Innovation Center’s working research facility. For more information, visit www.ceasummit.com.

ABOUT INDOOR AG-CON

Founded in 2013, Indoor Ag-Con is North America’s largest trade show and conference for greenhouse, controlled environment agriculture and vertical farming. The event covers all crop types and brings together growers, tech providers, researchers, and business leaders to explore trends and innovations shaping the future of food production. For more information, visit www.indoor.ag.

ABOUT THE CEA INNOVATION CENTER

The CEA Innovation Center is primarily housed in Danville, Virginia, on the IALR campus and in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the Virginia Tech main campus. It is a joint project between the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and IALR to serve the growing controlled environment agriculture industry. It addresses the needs of the industry with research, education, and extension programs. For more information, visit www.ceaic.org

Promised Yield, Delivered Yield: The Gap Between What Vendors Sell, What Finance Models, and What the Plant Delivers

Written by Kyle Barnett, Founder, KB CEA Consulting on June 14, 2026. Posted in Blog.

Yield is the number that quietly underwrites every CEA business case. It shows up in the vendor pitch, in the investor model, and in the daily pressure on the grower, and it is rarely the same number in all three places. I recently sat down with Pieter Slaman and Tim Van Hissenhoven, two operators who have spent their careers on the delivery side of that number, to work through where the figure comes from and where it falls apart.

Pieter spent more than a decade scaling Little Leaf Farms into one of North America’s leading greenhouse lettuce operations before founding GaaS Solutions and taking on an advisory role with Green Gardens in Slovenia. Tim was raised in a Belgian greenhouse and now runs Cultivators, guiding operations from first business concept through technology selection, startup, and grower training. Between them they have built, advised on, and repaired enough lettuce operations to know where yield numbers come from and where they go to die.

The claim on the way in

Every operator fields the same calls. A treatment that vibrates the plant. A device that conditions the seed. A spectrum tweak that promises a step change. The headline figures cover a wide spread. As I put it to them, the claimed yield increases can run anywhere from two and a half to 25 percent, depending on how much Kool-Aid the provider has been drinking.

Read full article by Kyle Barnett, KB CEA….

Great Lakes Growers plans $5 million expansion in Ohio

Written by Cleveland.com on June 1, 2026. Posted in Blog.

From Cleveland.com

Great Lakes Growers is planning a $5 million expansion at its Burton facility that county officials say will significantly increase the company’s hydroponic greenhouse production capacity.

Geauga County commissioners on Thursday approved an agreement intended to help the company secure financing for the project, which includes construction of a new greenhouse and infrastructure upgrades.

The expansion will add a 50,000-square-foot greenhouse, bringing the operation to about five acres under glass, according to county officials. The project also includes power and infrastructure improvements that would support an additional four acres of future growth.

Read full story from Cleveland.com

Energy is no longer a cost. It’s a crop strategy

Written by Timme Hovinga Product Director at Priva on May 15, 2026. Posted in Blog.

Why growers need to rethink how energy is used in the greenhouse

For years, energy in greenhouse production was something to manage and minimize. That approach worked when prices were stable and predictable. Today, it no longer does.

Energy now plays a direct role in crop performance, production consistency, and the ability to meet contracts. It is no longer just about what you spend. It is about what you grow. The conversation is no longer about how to reduce energy costs. The real question is how energy can be used to protect and enhance production. These themes were recently shared with more than 130 growers and industry professionals at the ACT Grower Summit in Leamington, Ontario.

Every energy decision impacts the crop

Modern greenhouses depend on energy for lighting, heating, irrigation, CO₂ dosing, and climate control. When energy use is reduced without a clear strategy, the effects show up quickly in the crop. Reducing lighting to cut costs may deliver short-term savings, but it often leads to slower growth, delayed harvests, and lower yields. Those impacts are difficult to recover from and can put contract commitments at risk.

In this environment, energy decisions must ﬁrst protect crop development. Cost optimization comes second.

Rising complexity in an electriﬁed greenhouse

Greenhouse operations are becoming more electriﬁed. LED lighting, electric boilers, and heat pumps are increasingly common. While these technologies improve efficiency, they also increase dependence on the electrical grid.

At the same time, electricity pricing has become more volatile. In many regions, growers must deal with variable pricing, demand charges, and limited grid capacity.

One of the most important factors is peak demand. In markets such as Ontario, a grower’s highest short-term electricity peak in a month can signiﬁcantly impact the total energy bill. A single spike in usage can set costs for weeks. This creates a new challenge. It is no longer just about how much energy you use, but when and how you use it.

Smarter use, not less use

When energy prices rise, the natural response is to cut back. In greenhouse production, that approach has limits. Crops require a certain amount of light. That requirement does not change. What can change is how that light is delivered.

By spreading lighting over a longer period and avoiding simultaneous peaks, growers can maintain required light levels while reducing exposure to high costs. The total energy input remains similar, but the cost structure improves. The key is shifting from reducing energy use to optimizing energy timing.

Too much to manage manually

Managing energy today involves multiple variables. Weather forecasts, natural radiation, electricity prices, crop targets, and contract obligations all inﬂuence daily decisions.

Handling all of these factors manually is no longer realistic. Even experienced growers cannot consistently optimize across so many moving parts. This is where a more data-driven approach becomes essential.

Moving toward intelligent energy management

A growing number of growers are adopting more predictive and automated ways of managing energy. By using available data and integrating systems, it becomes possible to plan ahead rather than react in the moment. Lighting can be scheduled based on both crop needs and energy pricing. Peaks can be avoided before they occur. Crop targets remain the priority, while costs are optimized around them.

To make this possible, the greenhouse must also be connected to the outside world. Access to day-ahead electricity pricing, weather forecasts, and utility signals allows growers to anticipate changes rather than respond too late. Open, connected platforms such as Priva One, combined with integration capabilities like Priva Integrations, enable growers to bring these data streams together and act on them in real time.

This approach allows growers to maintain consistency in production while reducing ﬁnancial risk.

Energy as part of the whole operation

Energy decisions do not stand alone. They inﬂuence climate control, irrigation, and even labor planning. For example, changes in lighting affect heat levels, which in turn impact climate strategies. Irrigation timing may shift based on plant activity. Production timing can inﬂuence labor requirements.

Treating energy separately from these processes leads to inefficiencies. Integrating energy into the broader production strategy creates better overall results.

Building resilience for the future

Energy markets are unlikely to become more predictable. Volatility, electriﬁcation, and increasing complexity are here to stay. For growers, this means energy management must evolve. The focus should move from short-term cost cutting to long-term production stability. The growers who succeed will be those who use energy as a tool to protect their crop, manage risk, and maintain consistent output.

At Priva, we see this shift already underway, with growers adopting more connected and data-driven approaches to align energy use with crop performance. Because in today’s greenhouse, energy is no longer just a cost. It is a core part of the crop strategy.

Written by Timme Hovinga, Product Director at Priva. Timme works closely with greenhouse growers to connect energy strategy with crop performance, helping turn energy from a challenge into a manageable and optimizable part of daily operations.

The Operator’s Edge: What Dirk Aleven Learned Running Greenhouses on Four Continents

Written by Kyle Barnett, Founder, KB CEA Consulting on May 15, 2026. Posted in Blog.

Dirk Aleven did not grow up in a greenhouse. He is Dutch, but he came to this industry as an outsider, a business advisor who got pulled into CEA when a Ukrainian client asked him to help raise capital. That distance from the conventional Dutch grower path turned out to be an advantage. Dirk spent the years since building FoodVentures , a company that takes full operational and financial responsibility for greenhouse assets on behalf of investors, deploying its own growers and running the P&L. The portfolio spans Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, China, Hawaii, and the United States.

When Equilibrium Capital called looking for someone to step into Revol Greens approximately two years ago, Dirk already had a working relationship with them through the AppHarvest bankruptcy. What he found at Revol was a company with the right assets in the right locations, running like a corporate bureaucracy instead of a produce operation.

What Was Actually Happening on the Farm

When Dirk walked the Texas facility for the first time, he noticed a sign on the wall directing the flow of new hires to walk to the left. People were standing idle throughout the operation. The company was adding headcount to solve a production problem that headcount was not going to fix.

Read full article from Kyle Barnett, KB CEA Consulting….

The Packer-- Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable

Inside Ontario’s Billion-Dollar Greenhouse Surge

Written by From The Packer - By Jennifer Strailey on April 14, 2026. Posted in Blog.

By Jennifer Strailey for The Packer

From a concentrated hub in southwestern Ontario, the majority of Canada’s greenhouse growers are strategically located within a 24-hour drive of more than half the U.S. population — positioning the province, not just as a local producer, but as a year-round vegetable garden of North America.

Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers represents a network of more than 170 of these growers, who specialize in tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and contribute some $2.5 billion to the province’s gross domestic product each year. Production is spread across 4,500 acres, about 80% of which is concentrated in Kingsville and Leamington.

“In recent years, the sector has enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 7%, and projections suggest expansion could continue at roughly 5% per year until 2033, provided ongoing support from government policies and strong partnerships with local municipalities,” says Richard Lee, executive director of OGVG. “The sector’s impressive expansion has been propelled by robust demand from the U.S., driving sustained growth over the past decade.”

Read full story from The Packer…

Salad Days greenhouse expansion brings locally grown lettuce to Mississippi grocery stores

Written by WLBT3 News Station Mississippi on April 13, 2026. Posted in Blog.

From WLBT — Mississippi is growing its own lettuce — and it’s a big deal.

Until recently, 95% of the lettuce eaten in Mississippi traveled more than 1,500 miles to get there. That changed this month when Salad Days Produce — a 65,000 sq. ft. greenhouse in Flora, MS — held its ribbon-cutting and officially put locally grown lettuce in grocery stores statewide for the first time.

Founded 14 years ago by Leigh Bailey and Jamie Redmond (former real estate professionals who took a leap), Salad Days started by supplying James Beard Award-winning chefs across the Southeast. Now, that same pesticide-free, root-on lettuce — with a 2-3 week fridge life — is available to Mississippi families at their local grocery store.

State leaders are calling it a blueprint for the future of food production in the region.

See full story from WLBT …