Oct 15, 2021
A robot moves between trays of baby greens at Fifth Season as they are bathed in fuchsia light. This “pinkhouse” is the result of an LED-powered mix of red and blue light, which helps the business reduce electricity costs for indoor growing. Courtesy of Fifth Season
Editor’s Note: Context matters with every farm. Growing leafy greens in California via a controlled environment makes sense given their severe drought and that CEA systems can reduce water usage by up to 95%. But, for states where the electrical grid continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels, this means that energy-intensive vertical farms are significantly contributing to carbon emissions. We must continue to think about and prioritize the sustainability component of farms, recognizing that context matters. Work with Agritecture to figure out how your farm can be more sustainable!
Written By: Eve Andrews
We made eating greens more convenient. Can we make it truly democratic?
Braddock, Pennsylvania is not what most people would call a farm town. White plumes of methanol, ammonia, zinc, and manganese billow throughout the day from its last remaining steel mill, while cars and pickups and freight trucks roar back and forth across the nearby Rankin Bridge. Despite its diminutive size, the town is well-known in the Pittsburgh region for its air quality, which ranks among the worst in the nation for year-round dust, soot, and smoke pollution.
And yet, inside a wide, windowless warehouse set just a block or two back from the banks of the Monongahela River, thousands of tender, young plants are thriving beneath a gleaming roof and complex HVAC system that shields them from both the azure sky and the effluence of the adjacent smokestacks.
The company Fifth Season is responsible for tending to this farm, though the startup’s use of “farm” certainly stretches traditional definitions. The greens here do not grow out of the comforting foundation of earth; they are produced “vertically,” cradled in plastic trays of soil about 16 square feet, stacked and slotted into a white tower as tall as several men, like cookies in a bakery for giants.
The indoor plots are bathed in fuchsia light and tickled by an artificial breeze, precisely calibrated by hundreds of intermittently humming fans. It is not the whim of clouds and air pressure that determines when these greens are watered; rather, it is a continuously refined algorithm that drives the robot dispersing carefully measured droplets over arrays of seedlings. Meanwhile, the human overseeing that algorithm sits in a room several states away in Michigan.
What plants does one grow in such a place? Young spinach, juvenile arugula, prepubescent brassicas — you may know them as “baby greens.” In just a few decades, they have become the standard base of any salad, commonplace in both families’ crisper drawers and the coolers of airport cafes. In order to maintain their omnipresence, more growers are looking into moving delicate crops like these indoors.
To actually incorporate these greens year-round into diets in places like western Pennsylvania, “some level of indoor production in those climates and locations will be necessary,” said Daniel Blaustein-Rejto, director of Food and Agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization in Oakland, California.
The indoor growing strategy has environmentalists split. On the one hand, anything that helps shift diets away from carbon-intensive animal products and toward plants is generally considered to be necessary to mitigate warming, including by the experts that make up the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But there are challenges to growing enough fresh produce to feed billions. Defying seasons — and, increasingly, extreme weather patterns — takes a lot of energy from an electrical grid that continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels.
But if the weather is too unpredictable and vertical farms are too energy-intensive, what’s the best way to grow greens so that anyone can eat them at any time? Or in other words: How can we democratize salad?
