In Big Sky Country, as elsewhere, students at a liberal arts university are growing curious about what they consume, and dining services is offering resources to show them, and to get them engaged in food production.
Food production is a driving force behind the economy of the state of Montana. In 2013, agriculture and forestry accounted for 1.6 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product, but in Montana it accounted for 6.4 percent of the state’s GDP, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The state also issues grants to growers — not just growers of commodity crops, but specialty crop growers, as well. On the higher education level, Montana’s stake in agriculture is showcased by the research and extension services of its land-grant university, Montana State University, which was founded in 1893 as the Agricultural College of the State of Montana.
Lesser known in the state’s agricultural realm is the liberal arts-focused University of Montana, which offers academic programs that are focused less on plant production methods and more on environmental issues, ecology and sustainability. In the 21st century, UM students have become increasingly interested in food system transparency, locally sourced food and sustainability, says Trevor Lowell, director of sustainability for University of Montana Dining. “I think it varies from student-to-student, but I think, overall, the trend is just a greater awareness of food system issues in the past decade or so, where students are coming in as freshmen and they know some of the problems associated with our food system,” he says. “An interest in local food and an interest in a transparent food system is something that we hear a lot and see a lot of support for.”
To accommodate students’ interests — as well as those of faculty, staff and community members — UM Dining manages two produce gardens, a greenhouse, an indoor microgreen operation and an aquaponics system, Lowell says. It also possesses design plans for a new greenhouse, and, in the basement of its main dining hall, has begun growing oyster mushrooms from inoculated spore bags.
In 2016, UM Dining sold 70 varieties of produce — including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, microgreens, salad mixes and raspberries — on campus, while collaborating with student groups and professors, employing interns for credit and other students for pay, and hosting learning events such as tours and workshops for children.
Operations overview
The amount of produce grown in the two gardens and indoor areas is minor compared to the amount UM Dining purchases, Lowell says, but there is value in getting people engaged in the production process and learning how it works. The aquaponics operation, which is a collaboration with UM graduate Jeff Pernell and his company, Galactic Farms, is used primarily for educational purposes.
The microgreens operation produces around 350 pounds of crops such as broccoli, radish, pea shoots, amaranth and wheat grass each year, Lowell says. Growers seed the plants in coco coir in an indoor shelving unit, put them through a dark cycle for about three days, pull the lids off and place them under fluorescent lights. “That’s just a great way for us to keep something green and fresh in the middle of the winter all year round, to be putting in on the salad bars and in different applications,” he says.
Most of the produce comes from the gardens, Lowell says. “In the two of them, we grew about 7,000 pounds of produce last year,” he says. “Both of them are organically managed, so we haven’t gone through the certification process, but we don’t use any herbicides or pesticides, and we compost with local compost from a farm up the road and plug all that produce back into the different operations on campus.”
Gardens and greenhouses
University of Montana Dining manages a 10-by-15-foot greenhouse, seen here during construction.
Photo courtesy of Trevor Lowell
Opened in 2003, Lommasson Garden features traditional row production, raised beds, a permaculture forest and a passive-solar greenhouse that members of the 2012 graduating class helped construct, Lowell says.
The ADA-accessible, 10-by-15-foot greenhouse is made from earthbags — which Lowell notes is a construction technique that has long been used for military applications — and timber-framed wood from a local arborist. With two soil, drip-irrigated raised beds and a thermal mass on its back wall, it is primarily used for starts and hot house production for tomatoes, peppers, basil and other traditional greenhouse crops. “It does give us probably an additional month on either end of the season,” Lowell says. “So, we can finish stuff in there, and we can switch to some faster-growing produce in the fall and harvest that. Then, using it as a place to start our production early in the spring has been really useful.”
In 2016, UM Dining unveiled South Avenue Garden, which is approximately three times larger than Lommassen Garden. At the time of this story’s publishing, construction is about to commence on a roughly 500-square-foot greenhouse near the South Avenue Garden. Scheduled to open by fall 2017, the greenhouse will utilize ground-to-air heat transfer, which Lowell says will presumably extend the growing season by four or five months. “One of the challenges, especially at schools, is that your harvest seasons don’t line up with the busiest times for your operations,” Lowell says. “So, we’re always looking for ways — ‘Can we value-add some of our garden produce? Can we pickle it or store it or can it?’ We worked with the State Department of Ag here in Montana on this grant project, and they gave us some grant money to build this greenhouse.”
UM Dining will work with the Missoula County Extension and Weed District and its horticultural expert Seth Swanson to track greenhouse performance metrics such as temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide, Lowell says. In the fall, UM Dining will focus its efforts on leafy greens and root crops that require less light than fruiting crops such as tomatoes and peppers. In the greenhouse’s second year, the growers might try their hand at sweet potatoes, too.
Consumer impact
In 2003, UM Dining began a farm-to-college program, through which it buys Montana-grown and raised products, Lowell says. When UM Dining started the program, those food products only represented a small fraction of its total budget. Now, they represent almost a third of it.
Students can walk into the university’s main dining hall and see a blackboard that changes every harvest day based on what is fresh from the garden, Lowell says. At multiple campus retail outlets, signs that read, “This week’s garden produce,” notify consumers of the kale, tomatoes and other produce that is available at the salad bar. UM Dining also sells its produce through catering services, concessions, a food truck and its weekly farmers market.
When retailers can tell consumers where their food comes from, it tends to excite the consumers, Lowell says. “Nobody thinks that we’re going to get to a point where we can grow all the produce that we would need to feed the thousands of people that we feed every day,” he says. “Just engaging in that [on a smaller scale] and having those conversations is a really powerful thing and a really exciting thing. For the customer to come in and say, ‘Oh, wow, I can buy this product from you, and you guys grew this out back,’ or, ‘I can get this in my salad,’ I think that has a huge impact.”
In our April issue, Metropolis Farms’ Jack Griffin walked us through his second-floor urban vertical farm, which was unique in part because it wasn’t on the ground floor. This month, we’re taking it a step further (or higher, shall we say) with our cover story.
Lufa Farms is a Montreal-based greenhouse produce grower for which the sky is the limit, as they’ve built their greenhouses on rooftops. Their efforts have been so well received that even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the operation recently (check out photos from the visit on Lufa’s flickr page: bit.ly/2qkn12u), and Mohamed Hage, one of the founders, gave a TEDx Talk about Lufa and its views on sustainability and food production (watch it here: bit.ly/1dSypWi).
And as of 2013, Lufa has been cultivating a strong connection with the local population, creating a successful CSA program that incorporates both their greenhouse produce as well as other local businesses’ prepared foods. One of the points that I found interesting about their CSA is that the produce for the 10,000 customized baskets is both harvested and picked up within a few hours. “Lufavores,” as the CSA members are called, commit to picking up the basket on the same day as delivery “to ensure food safety and maximum freshness,” according to Lufa Farms’ website. Harvesters are picking that day’s orders very late at night or early in the morning — sometimes while wearing headlamps because the sun isn’t up yet! You can see a photo of it at bit.ly/2qTrkVk
Lufa Farm’s CSA program also stands out with its comprehensive online ordering system, what they call the Marketplace. It’s easy to see what’s available and order it with a simple click, up until midnight on the day before delivery. Lufa Farms is a great example of the potential of collaborating with other local businesses for maximum success, and making the most of what most people wouldn’t think of as an ideal growing space. Read the full story, including details on the challenges and benefits of rooftop growing, starting on page 6.
Frustrated by the mystery surrounding supermarket produce, Canadian Mohamed Hage and his wife Lauren Rathmell reimagined food production. They realized farmland was disappearing rapidly, at the same time as the population grew exponentially — leaving lots of unanswered questions about the sustainability of the food supply.
“One of our big frustrations was going to the grocery store and having so many questions,” Rathmell says. “We know this tomato is coming from far away, but where’s it coming from? Who grew it? How was it produced? It’s just something on a shelf, so far removed from where it came from and so little we know about it.”
Hage presented a TEDx Talk on the topic, explaining that food travels 1,500 miles on average before landing on a plate — losing flavor and nutrients as it’s repacked, refrigerated and resold. “The process of industrial farming is far from optimal,” Hage says, describing commercial farms as massive consumers of land, energy and water.
He wondered: “What if you could grow food in a more responsible way … and go straight to the consumer?” With that vision to “grow food where people live and grow it more sustainably,” Hage and Rathmell, along with Yahya Badran and Kurt Lynn, founded Lufa Farms in 2009.
To Hage, more sustainable agriculture means:
Using no new land, instead growing on rooftops
Using less water, more efficiently
Not using any synthetic pesticides
Selling produce the day it’s harvested
Committed to these principles, Lufa Farms built the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse in Montreal in 2011. Since then, the company has built two more in Laval and Anjou, each one larger and more innovative than the last, as they’ve developed growing systems and technologies to make rooftop greenhouse production more sustainable — both ecologically and economically.
Finding sustainability
No new land. To produce food as close to as many consumers as possible, without using any more land, Lufa Farms looked to unused urban rooftops.
Hage and Rathmell used Google Maps to find a large enough building for their first site.
“One of the biggest challenges — starting up, and still now — is finding suitable buildings,” Rathmell says. “We found our first site by doing a Google Maps survey of Montreal, and going quadrant by quadrant to see, from the top down, which buildings looked big enough for a rooftop greenhouse. Out of that needle-in-a-haystack search, we found a couple buildings that had the structure to support a greenhouse, and one owner was willing to take the risk with us.”
After four years of developing growing technologies, it took less than three weeks to erect the first commercial rooftop greenhouse, a 32,000-square-foot steel-and-aluminum structure.
“It’s not built like a farm, so you have to follow building codes, which makes it harder, heavier and more expensive,” says Rathmell, Lufa Farms’ greenhouse director. “It had never been done before, so engineering a greenhouse that’s typically built on the ground in rural areas, for urban rooftop construction, was quite challenging. We’re getting better at it with each greenhouse.”
The second greenhouse opened in 2013 after a developer contacted Lufa Farms with the opportunity to incorporate a rooftop structure as a new building was being constructed. Lufa worked closely with KUBO, a Dutch greenhouse design and construction firm, to engineer the space.
“Building from the ground up was hugely beneficial,” Rathmell says of the 43,000-square-foot greenhouse in Laval, Montreal’s largest suburb. “It’s much more efficiently designed; it’s wall-to-wall.”
Lufa Farms' plants are grown in channels that a conveyor transports to the harvesting area.
Earlier this year, Lufa Farms opened its third rooftop greenhouse, a 63,000-square-foot operation in the Anjou borough of Montreal — the most technologically advanced yet.
Water conservation. Lufa Farms’ founders implemented hydroponic methods to minimize environmental impact. They developed proprietary systems to capture rainwater, snowmelt and condensation, using closed-loop drip irrigation to water plants growing in coconut fiber.
“The main difference with how we had to engineer things for the rooftop was making everything as light as possible,” Rathmell says. “We have no tanks, no heavy equipment up in the greenhouse. At our first site, (the water collection tanks) are in the basement of the two-story building below — which keeps it cooler, but it also means we have to pump it up to the top, which is not always easy.”
Still, Rathmell says she’d rather face the challenge of irrigation circulation than place additional demand on the city water supply. Because irrigation is recirculated, it uses up to 90 percent less water and nutrients than standard hydroponic methods.
“We recirculate everything, which is unique in greenhouses because the plants aren’t getting a perfect [nutrient] recipe all the time,” says Rathmell, a self-proclaimed “data science nerd” who uses software to measure and track everything — including water intake and nutrient levels. “It’s important for us to eliminate runoff and recirculate everything so nothing is wasted.” Lufa Farms uses biological pest controls, such as ladybugs and wasps.
Biological pest controls. Lufa Farms’ founders are determined to keep their produce free from synthetic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.
“We thought being in a city on a roof might help avoid a lot of the pest problems you see in the fields, but that’s not true,” Rathmell says. “We’re kind of an oasis in the city for all the aphids that want to invade. We have every [pest] you can imagine, so we had to learn how to manage those.”
Lufa Farms uses biological pest controls, releasing beneficial predatory insects — like ladybugs and wasps — to combat harmful pests like aphids. For mildew and leaf diseases, they also use biologically derived sprays, such as a beneficial fungus that fights bacteria.
“One of the bigger sustainable growing challenges is pest management,” Rathmell says. “We realized pretty quickly that the best way to control it is to scout and catch problems as early as possible.”
Lufa Farms fills 10,000 customized CSA boxes every week for its "Lufavores."
Most growers scout, but most don’t measure to the degree Lufa does. They even developed their own mobile app to track their scouting data. Every week, growers walk each row in the greenhouses and log metrics like pest population density.
“That data populates a hotspot map so we can visualize trends over time,” Rathmell says. “We’ve had two bad whitefly seasons, and it usually gets worse in tomatoes in the winter because the controls are less effective when it’s cooler and darker. We had a good whitefly control season this year, and we wouldn’t be able to do that without seeing the map of what’s going on.”
The biocontrol report is first and foremost on a long list of reports that Rathmell reviews in weekly one-on-one meetings with growers at each location. “I went a little data crazy,” she admits, but says the analytics make the greenhouses more effective.
"We're unique in how much we measure," Rathmell says of Lufa Farms' use of analytics.
“We’re unique in how much we measure,” she says. “Most people wouldn’t spend quite as much time as we do, but because of our unique situation — we’re never empty, we grow lots of different varieties, and we don’t use pesticides — that combination forces us to dedicate the time because we save time and costs later.”
Picked-to-order. Lufa Farms’ first greenhouse worked like any community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Subscribers — called “Lufavores” — got whatever produce was available each week from pick-up points around the city.
“It had the novelty aspect, like there’s a cooking challenge every week to use what’s in your basket,” Rathmell says, “but we knew that model was limited. People would say, ‘I love what you’re doing, but I don’t want cabbage every week until the end of time.’”
Based on that feedback, Lufa Farms launched an online marketplace in 2013, allowing Lufavores to customize their baskets (with a minimum order of $15) up until midnight before delivery day. Lufa has since partnered with other local farmers and food artisans that share its commitment to fresh, local, responsible food. Now, in addition to nearly 50 varieties of greens, herbs and vegetables from Lufa’s rooftop greenhouses, customers can also choose from a wide selection of other fruits and vegetables, meat, seafood, dairy, pasta, baked goods and pantry staples like peanut butter and jelly.
Lufa Farms' produce is harvested and delivered the same day.
“You can get almost everything you need for groceries through the marketplace,” Rathmell says.
Harvesters arrive in the wee hours of the morning to pick veggies for that day’s deliveries. Local bakers and food makers fill orders by mid-morning, so baskets are assembled before noon. Lufa Farms fills 10,000 customized baskets every week, which are delivered by a fleet of five electric cars to 350 pick-up points across Montreal and Quebec City. Home delivery is also available in select cities.
Because food is picked to order and delivered same-day, it eliminates waste and drastically reduces the energy that’s usually spent packaging, shipping and refrigerating produce.
Growth potential
“The food model we’re trying to create is a local food engine, direct-to-consumer, providing access to fresh produce and other goods year-round. This model works in any city, especially where local food is hard to come by in the wintertime, so we’re hoping to expand,” says Rathmell, who’s “actively planning a new location in New England.”
Now with 150 employees, Lufa Farms has maintained more than 50 percent growth year-over-year since 2013. Until last year, that growth was largely word-of-mouth — fueled by greenhouse tours every few months. Then, in 2016, Rathmell developed the company’s marketing and communications department, adding marketing director to her title.
She launched new social media channels to engage with Lufavores by taking them behind the scenes at the farm — for example, posting Instagram stories sharing site tours and new varieties, and blog posts introducing partners.
“It helps people connect and understand what we’re about,” she says. “Yes, you are shopping for groceries online, but every product, every supplier, has a story behind it. We want to make sure all the info is out there and the story is complete.”
Recently, I read a thought-provoking article called “The vegetable technology gap,” by Helena Bottemiller Evich. She makes the case that the American public consumes four times as much spinach now than 40 years ago because of technological advances in the form of a new and improved bag that allowed the product to be shipped, damage-free, across long distances. However, according to the author, most of the public and private funding for research like that which led to this new bag goes to commodity crops like corn and soy, instead of the fresh fruits and vegetables programs like MyPlate encourage people to eat.
On the USDA website, these healthy foods are grouped into the “specialty crops” category, which is defined as “fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops (including floriculture).” According to a March 7 USDA press release, there is currently $60 million in grants available to the specialty crop industry. The USDA press release states that the grants are to be used to “support projects including research, agricultural extension activities, and programs to address the needs of America’s specialty crop industry.” There’s not much funding available when you consider just how many of these produce and ornamental growers and institutions would be interested in receiving these resources, and how long of a process it is to come up with technological advances like the spinach bag for highly perishable fruits and vegetables. Bottemiller Evich states in her article that in the past 30 years, only 15 percent of the federal research budget went to specialty crops. You can read the article at politi.co/2n5YVr2
But there’s no doubt that there’s a need to continue to invest in technological advances in the produce industry, including those that will enable more efficient growing methods that yield an increased number of higher-quality fruits and vegetables. For that reason, we’re focusing on technology in this month’s issue.
For our cover story, I spoke with Jack Griffin, the founder of Metropolis Farms and a former Wall Street executive, about how he’s using technology to feed the residents of Philadelphia. He’s a passionate advocate for vertical farming and for “democratizing technology” — creating affordable, highly efficient indoor growing systems that can be adapted to any crop. Griffin is a strong believer in supporting the local economy with locally grown food and technical innovations, rather than shipping produce across the country. “I love California, but jobs in California and 3,000-mile truck rides? It doesn’t make sense [now]. The economic term for it is comparative advantage,” he says. “They had better sun and a comparative advantage growing outdoors [in the past]. But comparative advantage can be eclipsed by technological enhancement or technological innovation, which is essentially what’s happened.” Turn to page 6 for more on how Metropolis Farms is changing the way we see vertical farming.
How has technology shaped the way that you grow? Drop me a line at kvarga@gie.net and fill me in.
Written by Karen E. Varga • Photography by Jeff WojtaszekGriffin in his second-floor production area
Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jack Griffin didn’t start his professional career with farming on the mind. He studied economics and physics, not horticulture, and ended up working as a Wall Street executive. However, it’s the combination of his experience and skillset that led to him opening a revolutionary vertical farm in 2014 in his native Philadelphia, Penn. — Metropolis Farms, the first to be located on the second floor of a building. Griffin and his team, including business partner Lee Weingrad, are in the process of opening the first solar energy-powered vertical farm on the fourth floor of the same building and producing the equivalent amount of produce as a 700-acre outdoor farm. Produce Grower sat down with Griffin to find out how he made the successful transition from Wall Street to deep water culture, how his technology differs from other systems currently available, and what he’s doing to make vertical farms more accessible to potential growers.
Produce Grower: Describe your career path and how it led you into vertical farming.
Jack Griffin: My educational background is in physics and economics. … I [was] the president of Merchant Banking on Wall Street, [at] The Capital Resource Group, a company that focuses on small to mid-sized companies from their initial financing through the private placement market. Two extremely wealthy folks came to [me] and wanted to raise $25 million for [a vertical farming project] when the industry was three years old. I’m the guy that said no … because the math that I was given made no sense. There was no proof.
I’m looking at this and I go you know what? This is a phenomenal idea, but it doesn’t work on paper. It’s not economically sustainable. Obviously, the project failed.
It was something that always bothered me. I started messing with it as a hobby, and then one day it became an obsession and I quit my job. I bought the equipment they had and spent years refining it, correcting it, studying it, looking at the errors. Once I had an enormous list of everything that was wrong, that was my work product.
PG: When did Metropolis Farms officially launch?
JG: As my excellent science project it started before this, but as a corporation Metropolis Farms started in 2014. We started selling crops about six months after we started.
PG: How did you choose the name Metropolis Farms?
JG: I saw a really cool name — it was a company called Gotham Greens. So I said if you’re going to pick Batman, I’ll pick Superman.
PG: What is the company’s tagline, and how does it reflect your overall goal to expand vertical farming’s reach?
JG: It’s not one I think people are likely to expect from us — “Join the revolution.” Because we need to feed the revolution and find better ways of [growing food]. I’m not saying our way is the only way, but it’s one of them. We’re more than a vertical farm. We’re an indoor growing technology company. How do you grow it better? How do you make it more accessible? How many people want to be farmers that can’t? How many empty buildings are there in cities? How do we access that? How do we rebuild these places? If we’re all moving back to cities, which is what the demographics all show, what’s it look like in 20 years if we don’t have this infrastructure in place? You never get to [vertical farming advocate] Dickson Despommier’s dream [of large buildings with multilevel farms]. You never get to the glass tower because no one has the building blocks to build it because no one [can] access capital markets to afford it.
PG: What barriers do you see for growers to get into vertical farming?
JG: The first physical barrier is energy cost. The second physical barrier is BTU management cost. The more energy you put out, the more light you put out, the more energy you have to manage in terms of getting rid of that heat.
Growers can license the patented technology that Griffin developed, and he encourages users to suggest possible improvements.
Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek
The third barrier to entry is scalable modularity and [the fourth is] cleaning and maintenance. It’s really easy to build a vertical farm and watch it fall apart. The day you build it, it starts to degrade because of the bacteria that’s in the system. A lot of our patents relate to maintenance.
The fifth is the economic modalities. Where are you going to sell it? It’s not “if we build it they will come,” because they won’t. [We focus on] institutional purchase — universities, colleges, schools, prisons. We’re pre-selling our produce to those groups because they’re a virtual bottomless pit against our demand. [We also sell to supermarkets], but those relationships take a great deal of time to develop.
PG: There are many functional vertical farm systems already. Why did you “recreate the wheel” with your own technology?
JG: If I took whatever you're driving for a car right now and said, “I guarantee you if you give me enough money, I’ll make it go 200 miles an hour. It won’t be efficient. You’re not going to like your car when I’m done, and it’s probably going to break in a couple of hours, but it will go 200 miles an hour.” It’s the beginning of the learning curve [for vertical farming].
I pulled out my brick phone at a meeting and explained it. In 1984 [it] cost $4,000, which is the equivalent today of almost $10,000. It's the most expensive cell phone ever made and makes phone calls for half an hour and then it dies. That's it. But at the time it was the most advanced phone in the world. Because we spent the money on that, today we have iPhones. But you had to go through it.
Now you're into the commercial era where you've got a number of people like myself who are looking at [vertical farming] and saying, “If it’s not economically viable, then it’s not viable.”
PG: Tell me more about Revolution Vertical Farming Technology, the manufacturing division of Metropolis Farms that's responsible for building and licensing the proprietary vertical farm systems.
JG: “The Science of Indoor Growing” is the tagline. [If you think of Metropolis Farms like a triangle], you put food production at the top of the triangle, and at the base of the triangle are two other pieces: [Revolution Vertical Farming Technology] manufacturing, and food optimization, which is research and development. From a profitability perspective, [manufacturing brings in more capital because] you’ve got to sell a lot of lettuce to equate to a $20,000 tower. So clearly you can build towers and make money on them, but I’m really focused on building towers that other people can make money on, too.
I probably have close to $20 million in letters of intent right now. We have so much demand for the product and our current production [space] gets swallowed up by opportunities really fast.
[Our question is] do you have the most advanced technology in the world, or the optimum technology? Because we have the optimum technology. Our technology brings price, value and everything to one point. If it’s not optimum, it’s not advanced — it’s over-engineered. We’re not growing for NASA. We’re growing for people in north Philly that need food. And if we never build a system because it’s too expensive, nobody gets to eat. The reason we managed to get so many patents is because no one thought about these things from this perspective.
Also, because we control the hardware, we can control what goes on it. We have a couple of wacky ideas. One, no GMOs. Two, if you’re going to work with our equipment, you agree to equal pay for equal work. Three, you can’t discriminate against people for any reason. There is a social component to it.
PG: What makes your technology different from existing systems?
JG: Every component in our [vertical farming] system can be hot swapped in less than two minutes. That makes it so much easier to work with. Being able to build them [ourselves], our systems are modular. The typical time to build a vertical farm takes nine months to a year. We prebuild everything and they go up in a matter of days.
Metropolis Farms is the first vegan-certified vertical farm and has successfully grown a wide variety of crops, including microgreens, leafy greens, strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, small carrots and radishes, and is researching growing anything from “corn to calla lilies to tulips to stevia” and other root vegetables.
Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek
We created a factory where we could prebuild all of the parts and all of the components and bank them so that they go up like Legos, and they can all be disconnected and broken down the same way. If you lose a pump in a [traditional] vertically stacked farm, you’re pretty much out of business for a day by the time you remove all the water, get everything out, replace your pump and so on. We isolated every major component.
If all your components are prebuilt and all you’re doing is making the connections, the other difference is everybody else is building a farm, which is a construction project. What we’re doing is we’re providing a device because it’s a patent.
It’s built for production. It’s built for the ability to maximize the profitability and the ability for workers to do meaningful work versus drudge work. Part of our technology allows us to slow down or speed up growth by 15 percent either way. So I can create a supply chain.
My system works as deep water culture (DWC). It works as a shallow. It works as a nutrient film technique (NTF). It words as a flood-and-drain. It works as a trickle. You can do all of the various major systems of growing. It’s a matter of a few adjustments. We [also] have a system that has aeroponic elements as well as hydroponic elements that’s in it. I think it’s the best of both worlds.
We developed our own lighting using a common [ceramic metal halide] bulb and reconfigured it. We added robotics, too.
We built them for the real world. I’m trying to build an industry. I want to make sure we get the technology out there.
PG: You consider your technology to be open architecture and encourage users to share problems and suggestions for improvement. How do you think this approach will benefit the system’s development?
JG: Our goal is to create a [standardized] system that anybody can touch. Our model works, and the more people that touch our stuff, the easier it is to [develop it and] grow more. I can use a stable platform that can cost effectively do all this and then throw resources at optimizing that platform rather than everyone having a home-brewed, separate platform that only they know how to work.
You have to have a standard platform. That’s the most important thing. But you have to be brave about it as well. You have to be willing to accept that there’s always the guy that’s going to steal your stuff because of that. And you’re going to have to spend the time to protect it. I don’t even want to patent half this stuff, but if I don’t patent it, some SOB is going to do it and block everybody from using it.
This whole thing of “Leave it alone. It’s mine and I have the secret sauce, and you can’t have it unless you pay me mad money” — that’s not how you create an industry. You create an industry by creating a ubiquitous platform that everybody can use.
I’ve spent a career apologizing to people for the fact that when I talk I’m not actually angry, I’m from Philadelphia. This is how a Philadelphian talks. — Jack Griffin, Metropolis Farms
PG: How do you reduce pest and disease pressure in your vertical farm?
JG: You make your systems hostile to anaerobic bacteria and you don’t have to worry about [that]. Now if you’re referring to mold spores, that sort of stuff, my HEPA filter takes care of that. We have, in going on three years, never gotten a disease, and we don’t have bugs.
People do bring in bugs, but [we use a trap plant] we created, [called] the Terminator. It’s voracious. We also use pitcher plants and things like that. But the nice part about these ones is they’re ever blooming. They don’t die. We’ve never had a major bug problem.
The accelerated rate of growth takes care of most disease-based problems. The major disease-based problems you have in vertical farms relate to poor cleaning habits and poor maintenance habits associated with most vertical farms. Our entire array of patents revolves around a modular system that allows you to take it down and clean your entire tower in about a half an hour. If you’re not clean, you’re done because your farm is a time bomb. I generally like to see them done once every three months because it just takes minutes.
PG: You’re not the only new produce grower in the area. Is there enough demand to sustain the addition of new growers?
Metropolis Farms’ systems can be operated by workers after basic training.
Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek
JG: The food market is so large, respectfully, that it’s a bottomless pit. Are you familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? What’s your first need? Air. Second is water. Third is food. We’re not worried about energy, housing, status, anything else if you don’t have food, right?
It may not be the largest by dollar volume, [but] how many people buy diamonds and how many people eat food? Transactionally, [food] is larger than almost everything [unless] they start selling air and water.
PG: How do you see food and vertical farming as a vehicle for social change?
JG: Go to the Bible. Go to the Talmud. Go to the Koran. Go to any book or religion and I guarantee you you’re going to see a centric thread on food. Nothing touches us as much as that because nothing is more communal. Sunday dinners. Going out with mom. How much of our lives centers around food?
So to me if you want to create social awareness, social change, if you want to impact society, this is the space. There are people out there that aren’t going to [care about] the value of these strawberries we have. They just want a really good-tasting strawberry. But when they bought it [from our vertical farm], you know what they did? They supported the potential for solar [energy]. They supported local people working. They supported disadvantaged veterans and felons working.
PG: How exactly are you supporting veterans and felons?
The proprietary deep water culture systems used at Metropolis are designed to accommodate a wide variety of crops, including some that aren’t typically grown in hydroponic systems.
Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek
JG: Thirty percent of my staff [of about 10] are felons and 60 percent of my staff are veterans — and there's an overlap between those numbers.
[Also,] we’re creating a program to train [prisoners so] that when they get out of prison they’ll have a job. I’m already talking to the Department of Corrections. The guy that started me on the concept was a guy named Joe Sibilia, a social entrepreneur out of Massachusetts. How many people can we get involved that we can all at least try and row in the same direction and do something effective? If you’re going to make ubiquitous systems you’ve got to make something that somebody with a high school background could do. Make something that somebody that’s getting out of prison can do.
PG: What would you say the biggest failure of Metropolis Farms, if there has been any, has been so far?
JG: Everything. Our whole model is based on failing forward. We continue to try things that other people won’t try. For example, density. You’re not supposed to be able to grow plants as close as we do. They’re all supposed to die. We’ve actually had botanists come out and tell us we can’t do it. Here it is. It’s working.
How many times have you had something blow up in your face and have to deal with it? That’s what I said. Failing forward. Getting that experience. In my company failing is not a bad thing — failing and giving up is. That’s the truth of it. Just don’t quit. And that’s how we’re able to find the solutions we found.
We didn’t find them because we had super geniuses running around. We found them because if I have one characteristic that has value here it’s I’m stubborn. I’m going to get it done. I’m going to continue to focus on it until I get what I need to get done.
What it really comes down to is [you spending] those couple of years getting yuck under your fingernails, figuring out how you’re going to make it work and you screw up over and over … I learn far more from failure than I ever do from success.
Also, failure gives you a backbone. Talk to farmers who’ve got to get out every day. There is no Sunday. If anybody in the world has a work ethic it’s the farmers.
I’m going to make Philadelphia the vertical farming capital of the world. I know that’s a bold statement, but that’s what’s coming. — Jack Griffin, Metropolis Farms
PG: On the flip side, what do you consider Metropolis Farms’ biggest success?
JG: Our relationship with the city of Philadelphia. It’s remarkable. There’s two things Philadelphians never get to say: (1) The Eagles have won the Super Bowl. (2) City government is doing a good job. We had every resource laid at our feet. And that’s because we have a real symbiotic relationship with them. I didn’t go to the city government and say give me millions of dollars. We’ve never taken a single dime of government money. I funded a lot of it myself.
[I said] I’ll do the heavy lifting, but these are the doors I need you to kick in — and they kicked them in. Major food providers, the universities, the colleges. They have brought all of these people to our farm [to see what we’re doing and potentially develop a relationship].
The systems developed by Griffin and his team are modular, which means they’re simple to build and it’s easy to swap out parts without having to shut down the whole system.
Photo: Jeff Wojtaszek
Why are cities so willing to work with us? We’re pushing for a movement towards “green-collar” jobs. How much money did you spend for food at our local prison? It’s an awful lot of money. How many of those people you bought that [California] food from are spending money in Philadelphia?
If demand can choose where it gets its supply, it should always get it where it benefits society the most. And the benefit for us is local farmers. And not just us. They should also be focusing on the farms around us and buying as much food as possible from them.
Then you extend it year round with [Metropolis Farms]. Now if it costs the same why wouldn’t we want to create local jobs versus jobs in California? No offense to California. I love California, but jobs in California and 3,000-mile truck rides? It doesn’t make sense [now]. The economic term for it is comparative advantage. They had better sun and a comparative advantage growing outdoors. But comparative advantage can be eclipsed by technological enhancement or technological innovation, which is essentially what’s happened.
The technological innovation has moved us past the comparative advantage so we now need to, as a society, look at how we’re going to grow more and more of our food locally. I love the idea that Dickson Despommier puts out, which is we are going to have these enormous buildings and these buildings are going to themselves be farms growing on multiple floors. But what we’re doing now is how you get there. Somebody has to build this stuff in the first commercial, viable way so that we can get to the next level.
I have no illusions about what I’m doing. We’re going to be completely forgotten in the future. But there’s some kid that’s going to be able to use the infrastructure that we’re [creating] right now and do something amazing. And that kid will save the world.
Patrick Williams
