Urban farming 2.0: No soil, no sun

Co-founder of Big Box Farms co-founder Sam Miller-McDonald, inspecting a hydroponic lettuce crop, thinks indoor farming can be made more energy-efficient than traditional agriculture. Photo by Big Box Farms.

Urban agriculture is a growth industry

By Jennifer Alsever,
CNN Money
December 23, 2010

Excerpt:

Forget the conventional wisdom that says veggies must be grown on vast farms in the Midwest. What if commercial-scale crops took root inside cavernous city warehouses, without sunlight or soil?

Call it urban farming 2.0. Over the past decade, city agriculture has largely been the province of non-profit organizations, school groups, renegade gardeners and restaurants sowing seeds on rooftops. But the newest breed of city farmers are business folk. In their hands, urban agriculture is scaling up to meet a rising demand in city centers for safe, organic and locally grown food.

One such indoor farm opened in September in Vancouver, growing lettuce and spinach inside an 8,000-square-foot warehouse using a hydroponic system that replaces dirt and weather with peat moss plugs and circulated water. High-efficiency LED lighting hits plants grown on stacked shelves.

The Eco Spirit-branded lettuce operation — which is owned by the local Squamish Nation tribe — now supplies eight stores for Choices Markets, a natural foods chain in greater Vancouver. The tribe licensed the technology from TerraSphere Systems in Canada and plans to grow the Eco Spirit label into a larger brand of locally grown produce.

Read the complete article here.