Based in Kingsville, Ontario, Canada, Great Northern Hydroponics is a leading greenhouse operation best known for its tomato crops. Led by president Guido van het Hof, the company turned to LEDs for 16.5 acres of its 70-acre facility to reduce operating costs and improve production.

According to Van het Hof, Great Northern previously used high pressure sodium (HPS) lights and was one of the first adopters of supplemental lighting in Ontario. When LEDs became an option, he was curious about how broad-spectrum LEDs might help his operation. As a result, they began plant trials and research studies. The result was clear.

“We’ve spent a lot of time and energy on this work,” Van het Hof explains. “But over time, we’ve discovered that tomato crops perform beautifully under white light LEDs and come with higher yields and fruit weights as well. We’ve recorded 10% increases in fruit production and yield under Fluence’s broad-spectrum LEDs in comparison to previous harvests under other solutions. It’s a much, much better option.”

For Great Northern, there is also the added benefit of cost savings as the result of using LEDs. By retrofitting LEDs into 10-acres of glasshouse space, Van het Hof estimates that his business will save $150,000 Canadian (roughly $123,402 in the U.S.) in annual operating costs as a result of the switch. As part of the transition to LEDs, Great Northern can use fewer engines to fuel its entire facility. Before, it took three engines to power the facility. Now, it only takes two.

“That’s a really, really big deal for us,” he says. “We are always trying to be more efficient in how we work and this was a clear way of getting to where we want to be.” By working with Fluence, Great Northern was also able to qualify for the Independent Electricity System Operator’s (IESO) Save on Energy Retrofit program that Van het Hof says “drastically” reduced the cost of upgrading to LEDs.

As the business continues to grow, Van het Hof says that he plans to explore using LEDs to grow cucumbers, various peppers and strawberries. He also hopes that by using LEDs, Great Northern can produce increased tomato yields and keep yields consistent year-round. If that can happen – and Van het Hof is optimistic it will – then he says he expects profits to rise. The company’s retail partners, he says, are intrigued by the idea of being able to get the same volume of tomatoes year-round, thus keeping supply consistent.

“If we can do that, it would be a big win for us,” he explains. “It’s also something that is not possible without us making the switch to LEDs.”

Kalera, based in Orlando, Florida, is taking the local indoor farming concept and stretching it from coast to coast during a nationwide pandemic. This all while turning out flavor and nutrient-packed and conventional crop price-competitive lettuce and leafy greens in a zero-pesticide, 95% less water-requiring closed loop automated production system.

The highly automated vertical grower (with the slogan The Science of Great Greens) operates three indoor vertical farms, two of which are situated near its corporate headquarters in Central Florida.

The operation’s third vertical farm, located in Forest Park, Georgia, recently completed its inaugural lettuce harvest. This farm is one of the largest indoor farms in the U.S. Southeast at 77,000 square feet and is reportedly capable of churning out 10 million heads of lettuce to local Atlantans and food service distributors annually. Heads of lettuce pulled out of the new Atlanta facility have already made their way to local operators like Publix, Sysco and Fresh Point.

With the first harvest in Atlanta now under its belt, the nationwide farm network rollout rolls on into the summer.

The latest scoop: Kalera is pursuing a whirlwind agenda for the home stretch of 2021 and into the next year, opening new, modular farms in places like St. Paul, Houston, Denver, Columbus, Seattle and Hawaii. There, the company says the farm will be the island’s first operable commercial indoor farm when launched.

The new farm building campaign is not the only big news with Kalera. The group recently made waves by acquiring Vindara, an up-and-coming disruptor in the plant breeding world. The operation says it leverages machine learning and AI alongside traditional breeding techniques to drastically shorten the development window of new seed varieties and traits bred specifically for indoor vertical farming.

Leading and innovating

While the Kalera name is fairly new, the group is not some fly-by-night operator that just sprang up in a retrofitted warehouse one day. CEO Daniel Malechuk says the group worked for 10 years “behind the scenes in stealth mode” to develop the coast-to-coast indoor farm network concept.

“For the first time ever, an indoor farming company can offer you something from Hawaii to Seattle to Florida, and everywhere in between — which is exactly what the food service companies want — and it’s a consistent, quality product,” he says. “We’re bringing scale and unit economics and high yields unseen to this point in the vertical farming world, a couple years ago people laughed at this concept, but clearly this is no longer a pipe dream.”

Malechuk has been with Kalera for just about a year now, having spent the bulk of his career in supply chain and retail purchasing across the food industry. The former VP of supply chain for Mastronardi Produce has a firm grasp on what consumers want from an indoor produce company, and how to make that a reality in today’s world of segmented supply chains and COVID-closed borders.

“I have a lot to learn [about vertical farming] and I still do, and honestly that is what is most exciting for me — solving some of these challenges of ‘this is how we do it now, but can we do it this way’,” he says. “Can this be done at scale and with profitability? Those are the burning questions in this industry right now, and at Kalera we are answering those questions in a big way.”

Answering those questions by staying focused on providing a phenomenal produce product at a reasonable price is what sets Kalera apart in a crowded segment, according to Malechuk. “[Growing] something people can afford and not have to splurge to purchase this premium product, that is really what drives. Of course, our robotics and advanced technology is part of that focus, too, but our customer and what they care about — quality grown and sustainably produced, and at what price — that’s what gets us out of bed every morning.”

Building out during a shutdown

Austin Martin is Kalera’s chief operating officer, based at the group’s first farm outside Orlando. The former big-box retail logistics professional oversees all of the far-reaching tentacles of the Kalera nationwide expansion strategy, managing the various farm buildouts as well as many aspects of the farm operations themselves.

“For those that were willing to work really hard and push the envelope to make things happen, [COVID] was actually a great opportunity for us to focus and get ahead,” Martin says when asked what it has been like managing such an ambitious rollout throughout the pandemic.

COVID did in fact alter Kalera’s go-to-market slightly. Initially, management was keenly focused on the food service retail segment as its primary customer. Then COVID hit and the bars, restaurants and local distribution networks that serve them practically grounded to a halt. Martin and his team had to quickly pivot to consumer-facing food retail to ensure a mixed-channel distribution strategy which the company will stick with once normalcy returns.

“These food retailers want to partner with a more sophisticated provider who can guarantee continuity in supply across a wide geography, yet still maintain that same level of focus on food safety,” Martin says. “They deal with a lot of regional growers and that’s really just because they don’t have another choice. They want the redundancy that a larger-scale operation can provide.”

Seed acquisition

While Kalera’s scale and approach to vertical farming are attention-worthy attributes, what put the operation over the top was the acquisition of indoor seed genetics provider Vindara. It’s not every day that a farm can buy the company and infrastructure that provides arguably the most crucial link in the production chain.

The collaboration was born out of both familiarity and need: both companies have close ties to North Carolina State University’s ag programs — Malechuck is an alumnus — and Kalera’s leadership had realized a glaring need for genetics tailored specifically to indoor production systems.

Add Vindara president and co-founder Jade Stinson to the list of Kalera-connected executives with an interesting background. Stinson has worked in agriculture for decades, having helped with uncovering the link between mad cow disease and humans in the United Kingdom before joining BASF after college.

Vindara was founded in 2018 on the back of Stinson’s vision of becoming the premier provider of elite genetics for the vertical farming space. The fact that they figured out how to accelerate the seed trait breeding cycle from a ten-year lead time down to 18 months, while maintaining and even offering customizable yield and flavor profiles, simply cannot be oversold.

We're bringing scale and unit economics and high yields unseen to this point in vertical farming ..."

“Say we develop a new indoor lettuce seed variety today with higher yield. Ok, that’s great, but that can’t be it,” Stinson says. “LED lighting technology will evolve, there’ll be more automation and more hands-off growing style, different plant architectures. This industry is moving too fast for traditional breeding to keep up, and when you can leverage deep machine learning and analytics, you can really dive into the genetics and really start leveraging genetic diversity.”

What today’s vertical farming space requires is what Stinson calls a “systems approach” to breeding. “It’s not a one seed fits all approach. The production systems from grower to grower are so disparate, one seed in one system won’t move the needle,” she adds.

The partners share a focus on democratizing their own corners of the ag universe. Vindara is wholly-owned by Kalera, yet operates autonomously and will continue serving genetics to the entire CEA industry. Kalera wants more access to fresh, nutritious and affordable food, and Vindara wants the same for the breeding innovations side of the coin, too.

“Let’s democratize and have growers be able to call us up and say ,‘Ok I want a lettuce with dark purple color, high yield and nutrition, and it has to stay crispy in transport,” she envisions. “The Kalera vision is why should just the top 5% of the world population have access to the most nutritious food? And that’s what we believe in, too.”

Automation and technology

Having launched its first facility located at Orlando, Florida’s Marriott World Center convention area (which has a a commercial irrigation and climate control system) Kalera’s chief technology officer and co-founder knew the operation required more precision and customization.

“Development and implementation of our automated HyCube growing system has been a tremendous advantage for our production cycles,” says Cris Toma, co-founder and chief science officer. “It’s something we started to develop a couple years ago because those off-the-shelf systems didn’t meet the requirements of our vertical farming operation and it was too difficult to extract the data.”

Today, the system is a cloud-based, mobile-optimized ecosystem of sensors and controllers and irrigation modules that are in constant interaction with the group’s closed-loop production systems.

By developing and launching its own system, the operation has cultivated a unique approach to technology via its experiences thus far.

“We like to say that we are farmers who use technology, rather than being a technology provider looking for an application in farming,” Toma says. “And that’s coming from somebody like myself with a machine learning and digital imaging processing background.

“We do not make these statements because we do not understand technology, or have trepidation in dealing with it, rather it’s been my entire professional life,” he continues. “Yet, at the same time we need to be very careful that we don’t destroy the ROI and economic performance of each project with how we integrate technology.”

Once Kalera’s farm network is built and fully operational, the built-in-advantage provided by all that aggregated production data will be a massive enablement piece for the head growers at each facility.

“We’ll create a digital data warehouse and implement big data analytics and algorithms, and those activities will drive our sensors with computer visions and AI for tracking plant health and development across all facilities,” Toma says.

While that data is important to what Kalera plans to do in 2021 and beyond, it will still rely on the tried-and-true head grower structure.

“The AI is not quite there yet for full automation, but the trend is there and will only continue to grow. And yet we still need a human in the loop for certain tasks, for the more complex tasks you still need the expert in there monitoring and making adjustments, and then you hope to build on the expert with data and analytics,” Toma says.

Bottom line

Kalera isn’t settling down anytime soon.

“I envision our expansion plans are going to continue, and we are also looking at international expansion in the years ahead,” Toma replies when asked what’s next for the operation. “We’ve got a deep pipeline of opportunities to capitalize on.”

For the CEO, it’s all about continuous improvement and never growing complacent.

“We never want to be flat organizationally, we are constantly striving to get better, learn, refine, and innovate within our business model,” Toma says. “And, if it adds value to our customers, then we’re going to do it.”

When you think of controlled environment agriculture, mushrooms might not be the first crop that comes to mind. But why not? Using controlled environments to produce mushrooms is a great use of technology to produce another important class of edible crops.

There are a wide variety of mushrooms commercially grown and popular with consumers. These include oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus), shiitake (Lentinula edodes), maitake (Grifola frondosa), and lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus), as well as several others. However, the most widely grown mushroom in North America is the common mushroom, Agaricus bisporus (Fig. 1). This article is going to focus on producing button mushrooms, since they are the most important from a commercial standpoint.

There are three primary varieties of Agaricus bisporus grown, including the white cap, off-white cap and brown varieties. The white cap variety is the highest-yielding of the varieties, and it is also the most commonly grown for processing. However, growing for fresh market sales allows producers to charge a more premium price compared to sales for processing. For fresh-market sales, the off-white and brown varieties are the most popular.

Mushroom production utilizes controlled environments just like nearly all other food crops grown in soilless culture; in fact, mushroom production was one of the first industries to utilize vertical farming techniques! To maximize mushroom growth and development, rooms with controllable air temperature and humidity are best (Fig. 2). While lighting is necessary in these growth rooms, the lighting is to aid people when they are working in these rooms and is not for mushroom growth, in contrast to the intensive and extensive lighting required for photosynthetic crops.

The growing substrate or compost used for producing mushrooms is comprised of carbohydrate and protein. Traditionally, mushroom compost has been comprised of straw-bedded horse manure and straw or hay. However, in order to produce a more consistent compost year-round, “synthetic” compost is made by combining straw (the carbohydrate) with poultry manure (the protein). These components are then composted, and after microorganisms reduce soluble sugars and ammonia they will die and serve as “food” for the mushrooms.

Using controlled environments to produce mushrooms is a great use of technology to produce another important class of edible crops.

Mushrooms must be forced to form the fruiting structures that are harvested and sold. To force the mushroom to move from a vegetative state to reproductive state, a “casing” layer is placed on top of the substrate ). This is most commonly done using peat moss, though other materials such as coconut coir or bovine or equine manure are also used. By carefully managing the moisture of the casing, the fruiting structures of the mushroom start to form ).

As the mushrooms develop, harvesting will depend on the final product. For baby mushrooms, obviously they will be harvested at an earlier stage when the fruiting body is smaller and gills less exposed. On the other end of the spectrum, the mushrooms can be allowed to develop and harvested when the cap is large and the gills are very exposed; this would be the strategy for producing portabella mushrooms, which are simply mature brown-strain Agaricus mushrooms. Mushrooms are harvested by hands with very sharp, curved blades which allow for harvesting without damaging stems.

While mushrooms may not be the first crop you think of when considering controlled-environment agriculture, they should definitely be on the list! Mushrooms can add diversity to any producer’s portfolio or serve as a primary crop.

Christopher (ccurrey@iastate.edu) is an associate professor of horticulture at Iowa State University.

PHOTO © owngarden | ADOBE STOCK

Produce packaging has been a hot topic the last few years, when it comes to both consumer concerns over sustainability and better brand marketing opportunities.

While food safety is always a top concern, it has taken on a new sense of urgency in the age of COVID. Online grocery shopping created a big demand for safely packaged produce over the last year, leaving many consumers conflicted about sustainability. Post pandemic, I suspect we are all going to want the best of both worlds.

Truth be told, I have always had a love/hate relationship when it comes to produce packaging.

I am intensely concerned about plastic use and waste. I separate and wash all my recycling and would personally prefer to buy all my produce bulk and loose. But as a horticulturist I know that shelf life of fresh produce can be significantly reduced with packaging (cutting down big time on food waste). And, as a marketer I know produce growers need to differentiate their products and engage with customers in ways that enrich their produce experience.

What is the answer? Produce packaging that is sustainable and safe but can withstand the supply and shipping needs of grocery delivery services and deliver meaningful brand communications. Not too much to ask, right?

Produce on demand

The reality is many of us now want our fresh produce dropped on our doorstep, but we expect it to be fresh, clean, and intact. Beyond traditional food safety concerns, now potential viral spread has put an even bigger spotlight on all sorts of food containers, be they from the grocery store or takeout from a local restaurant. We are talking about airtight covers and seals.

Additionally, many of us are no longer interacting with POP or signage inside the grocery store, so packaging will have to do all the marketing work including communicating your sustainability messaging.

2020 plastic pivot

Recyclable, biodegradable, and zero-waste packaging was where many manufacturers were heading in 2020. Edible packaging was also on the horizon, but I wonder with our new virus and safety concerns if that is no longer a viable option?

The entire sustainable package movement appeared to make a hard pivot back to plastic when packaging supply could not keep up with pandemic demand, not only at the fresh produce grocery level, but also with restaurants. It looked to me like most businesses simply put sustainability on the back burner just to keep up with demand and the pandemic pressures on the marketplace.

It was not just suppliers that abandoned sustainable practices; recycling overall at the consumer level also plummeted. According to Tetra Pak, only 9% of all plastics globally are recycled, and 32% of plastics are never collected for recycling at all. I wonder how much those percentages dropped during 2020? The mountain of plastic grocery and takeout containers we find ourselves surrounded by post-pandemic is undeniably unacceptable.

Back to safety

Ultimately, consumers do not want plastic containers for our produce. That said, the huge societal shift over the last year in how we purchase food and produce may spur just the kind of packaging changes we have needed for a long time.

While the CDC tried to assuage us all that our chances of catching COVID, or other viruses, from packaging surfaces is low, The Journal of Hospital Infection found the virus can survive between two hours and nine days depending on the surface material. While our chances of catching COVID from packaging are significantly lower than if we come into direct contact with someone who is infected, it is still a possibility and one that may continue to concern consumers.

Interestingly, porous packaging material such as cardboard is less conducive to virus survival than non-porous surfaces such as plastic. As such, some packaging manufacturers are combining sustainability with safety by using plant and paper-based containers and lids made of porous balsa wood and compostable leak proof cardboard. It looks like there may be some excellent crossover opportunities for the produce industry from the restaurant grab-and-go takeout packaging evolution away from plastic.

Package for home chefs

Another pandemic trend we cannot ignore is the rise in home cooking during lockdown. The National Restaurant Association reports that nearly 17% of U.S. restaurants have closed either long-term or permanently because of the pandemic. Americans are eating more meals at home and learning how to be better cooks. Consumers who are doing their own cooking – some for the first time in their lives - need to know how to use your produce.

Engaging and encouraging produce customers with recipe ideas and other helpful preparation and produce storage tips is key. This type of content marketing on your packaging is also a great way to get your end customer to engage with your brand online.

Whether you are a big or small grower, chances are packaging is one of your biggest challenges. I suspect 2021 is going to be “the year of packaging” across all food related industries, and consumers will expect new safe and sustainable options.