Inside the CEA Alliance: Advocating for Growth, Innovation, and Sustainability
Q&A With CEA Alliance Executive Director Tom Stenzel
In this edition of Indoor Ag-Content, we caught up with Tom Stenzel, Executive Director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Alliance (CEA Alliance), to discuss the organization’s pivotal role in shaping the future of indoor agriculture. From its early days as a food safety coalition to its expanded focus on sustainability, public policy, and industry collaboration, the CEA Alliance has become a driving force in the CEA sector. As the Alliance prepares to hold its 2025 annual meeting in conjunction with Indoor Ag-Con Las Vegas, Tom shares his insights on the challenges, opportunities, and trends that will define the future of controlled environment agriculture.
Let’s begin with an overview of the CEA Alliance. Can you describe your mission, goals and organization?
The CEA Alliance is a membership trade association representing and serving vertical farms and greenhouse producers growing fruits and vegetables in a highly controlled indoor production environment. The Alliance was formed in 2019 as the CEA Food Safety Coalition. At that time, a group of indoor leafy greens growers came together to develop food safety best practices for indoor production. In 2022, the group expanded to include all indoor produce production, not just leafy greens, and also expanded our portfolio to all issues affecting the sector. Our membership today is pretty equally divided between growers and their supplier business partners. Alliance member growers account for the vast majority of high-tech indoor-grown produce in North America.
We’re led today by a 10-person Board of Directors, with our primary work focused in four critical issue areas for the sector. Food safety continues to be a major focus, where we continue to develop best practices, define research needs for the sector, and represent our members working with regulatory authorities at the US Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture. Other issues areas with specific working groups include public policy, sustainability, and marketing communications.
You mentioned that public policy advocacy is a critical component of your work. What are some of the most pressing legislative or regulatory challenges facing the CEA sector today, and how is the CEA Alliance addressing them?
Our Public Policy committee is our largest working group, including more than 50 members. We’re working to make sure CEA production is supported in agricultural policy through the US Farm Bill, which is now under debate in Congress. Many current farm programs were developed long before anyone thought about growing food indoors. We need to make sure that indoor growers have access to the same programs and support as outdoor growers.
A really important new initiative is the Supporting Innovation in Agriculture Act, a bill we’ve been working on to create a new incentive tax credit to support capital investment in innovative agricultural technologies. Tax incentives have been used to support other sectors such as renewable energy, and can be an effective way for government to help drive private sector innovation that serves the greater good. This legislation would benefit both CEA growers and field growers investing in innovative technologies.
Can you tell us more about the recently released sustainability framework by the CEA Alliance? How do you envision this framework impacting the industry and supporting growers in their sustainability efforts?
The new Sustainability Framework for Controlled Environment Agriculture is the industry’s first sustainability framework developed by indoor growers, for indoor growers. The new framework features 60 metrics supporting 20 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across a variety of environmental and social aspects of indoor growing.
Because growers in indoor vertical farms and high-tech greenhouses have a greater ability to control their growing environment, producers are better able to measure key impact areas for sustainability, including carbon, water use, nutrient use efficiency and discharge, food loss and other attributes that are difficult to measure in field production.
We believe the framework will drive credibility, transparency and continuous improvement through standardized approaches for sustainability measurement, guiding indoor growers through both key impacts to measure and metrics for measuring them.
With the new partnership between the CEA Alliance and Indoor Ag-Con, what are your primary goals for the 2025 annual meeting and the educational program in Las Vegas?
The CEA Alliance is pleased to be holding our 2025 annual meeting in conjunction with Indoor Ag-Con. One of the core values of associations like ours is bringing together growers and their business partners, something that trade shows like Indoor Ag-Con do well. Our membership has grown over the past few years and now includes the majority of indoor produce production in North America, including leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, cukes and berries. We also are finding companies coming aboard from around the world to participate in our food safety and sustainability programs. With that base of experience, we’re pleased to present a “State of the Industry” report at the show, sharing our members’ analysis of the challenges and opportunities for indoor agriculture.
The CEA industry is continuously evolving. From your perspective, what are the most promising advancements or trends in CEA that you believe will shape the future of the sector?
I believe the industry is transforming from a “technology sector growing food” to a “food industry leveraging technology”. It sounds like a subtle difference, but we have to focus first on delivering the freshest, highest quality, most nutritious and best tasting food to consumers. There are many ways companies can use technology to achieve that goal – vertical farms with either horizontal stacks or vertical towers, high-tech greenhouses with hydroponics or soil systems, hybrid combinations of vertical, greenhouse and outdoor, etc.
The industry also now seems to have a much healthier focus on profitability. We should never have been compared to tech start-ups that could invest millions of dollars and cash out at extraordinary multiples without ever making a profit. Indoor production is a key to meeting future challenges by using less scarce resources to grow more food. I still believe growing food indoors in high-tech farms is a revolutionary step in agricultural history. But it’s not an overnight step. We’re here for the long haul.
