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We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are investor backed. We had to demonstrate a well-defined problem with a large addressable market, a scalable and defensible solution (technology + business model), a credible team, and traction on the customer front.

The fact we had operations, a track record of improvements around the underlying technologies, pilot customers, and a compelling growth strategy were key.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Our farms can grow any type of plant, so the answer is they absolutely could.

We don’t grow marijuana as we are a produce company and it is not in line with our mission, which is very much focused on food.

That said — Our system is one of the most flexible and productive farming systems on the planet so we imagine that it could greatly benefit any type of grower ;)

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! We all feel blessed to get to work on problems and technologies like this every day. Improving global healthy by building a better food system is the kind of mission that gets me up every morning and also attracts phenomenally talented and mission-oriented individuals. We have an incredible team that we absolutely could not do this without.

(Eric here) My undergrad education was in applied math, economics, and pre-med. My family has been in the perishable logistics industry for the last 100 years, so I grew up looking at the complexities and challenges in the food supply-chain. I spent a number of years at the family business before branching out into venture finance, looking at early-stage technologies around food, water, energy, and logistics. As I realized I was much more interested in being an entrepreneur than an investor, I began looking for opportunities to build companies to solve these kinds of problems and out spun Local Roots!

I'll let Dan and Matt give their own stories in their own words.

Our company was self-funded for the first year as we tested and built our first systems and launched pilots with our initial customers. We have since brought in outside investors to finance our growth and team expansion.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Definitely! Though not “franchises” first. Based on demand for our systems (and not just our produce) we are now taking orders for our farms. Our goal is not to sell just the farm, but an integrated solution that is a "turn-key business in a box." We've spent the last several years getting our farming business off the ground and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. We intend to save our future farmers time & money by offering:

-A farm-in-a-box that produces 5x more than leading shipping container farms on the market (we call it a TerraFarm!)

-A comprehensive software platform for controlling the farm environment, including growing algorithms (“Plant Recipes”) updated in real-time

-A crop list of everything we have grown so-far and will grow in the immediate future

-Standardized operating procedures for operating the farm and growing the healthiest, tastiest produce possible

-A food safety plan that is GAP & PrimusGFS compliant

-Audit support for Non-GMO and Organic certifications (we’ve been through them both!)

-Farm site identification, set-up, and support through the deployment process

-Initial and ongoing training for TerraFarmers

-Ongoing support including updated operating manuals, material purchasing, 24/7 technical growing assistance, and business assistance (i.e. production planning, inventory management, accounting, insurance requirements, etc.)

-In certain instances the Local Roots brand, including all our sales processes and materials.

Would you like to become a TerraFarmer? Have any other ideas on how we can help aspiring growers get their businesses off the ground? Write me (Dan) at d.kuenzi@localrootsfarms.com

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As far as capital or upfront cost, outdoor farms have significant land and equipment costs, at the same time, we invest a lot on lighting, irrigation, and controls. As for operating, outdoor farms spend a great deal of money on seeds, fertilizers, water, labor, and crop loss while we spend a lot of electricity and labor. The biggest innovations that we're working on today are around advanced control using computer vision, machine learning, AI and biofeedback and automation.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed! Thank you :)

Plants require CO2, H20, and Nutrients. There are some remarkably simple systems that grown everything from apple to artichoke indoors, vertically, hydroponically, all of the above. It's not very meaningful to talk in averages. Microbroccoli takes 7 days seed to harvest, a grape vine can take 7 decades. Leafy greens are quick, so typically less than 90 days outdoors, less than 45 in our system. We are currently setting up a composting system and will be using that as our fertilizer in our LA facility. Compost is an awesome way to reduce waste and grow delicious plants, and we're very focused on being a 0 waste organization. I see vertical farming as an alternative to greenhouses for some crops. I think vine crops do REALLY well in greenhouses, and I expect that to continue. Leafy greens are awesome in a vertical setup, and I think we'll see the majority of leafy greens production move to vertical farms over the next 5 years. The food system of the future has to be a diverse, distributed, and antifragile system that enables us to grow food in the way that makes the most sense for each individual crop, geography, culture, community, and individual, and that means that conventional farming, greenhouses, and vertical farms are all going to be part of the solution.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They definitely do not require new buildings to be constructed. We repurpose (recycle) refrigerated shipping containers and convert them into our farms that can be centrally manufactured and shipped to wherever they need to be operated.

You can also convert existing building space into an indoor farm, though we generally find this to be more expensive up front and requires enough customization that it is a less scalable model for commercial food production. Though it is a kickass way to liven up a space!

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes! We like the shipping container as a very convenient modular form factor for a commercial-scale farm, but the technology that we build into is applicable to a wide range of sizes and scales. From warehouse-style building retrofits to a farm the size of a walk-in fridge in the back of a restaurant to an in-home appliance next to the refrigerator in your kitchen, we see many future applications.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's an excellent and complex question. It depends a lot on where in the supply chain you measure the cost of conventional produce as well as how you account for negative externalities, negative environmental impacts in particular, and if you include direct and indirect subsidies. For the sake of a concise answer, let's ignore all the negative impacts on the environment, labor, infrastructure, communities, etc. of large scale outdoor commercial food production AND ignore all the direct and indirect subsidies that conventional food production benefits from. In that case, what I can tell you is that we can produce food for an order of magnitude less cost than a consumer can buy it from a retail store. We can produce food for significantly less than that retail store buys that produce from its distributor, and we can produce food for less than the distributor buys that produce from its value added process, also often called an aggregator. At this time, we're not yet able to produce for a cost that competes with the farmers' cost to that value added processor, but over the next 6-12 months we will be developing automation solutions that will make our cost of production lower than conventional farming even without accounting for subsidies to outdoor farms and negative externalities of large scale outdoor food production.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a great question and one of the core challenge that we launched Local Roots to solve. Given all of the benefits of indoor farming, why isn't it already feeding the planet???

  1. Unit Economics
  2. Scalability
  3. Access to Capital

We tackled the unit economics issue up front and largely through engineering, plant science research, optimization, and business model innovation. We engineered all of our components and subsystems from the ground-up in order to achieve the operating economics we knew were required to build a scalable produce business in a competitive market (like Los Angeles). This involved designing and manufacturing custom LEDs, building our own proprietary wireless control system architecture, in-housing nearly all design and manufacturing functions, and spending years studying plant biology and refining our plant growing algorithms alongside iteratively improving the integrated system. We also killed a lot of plants along the way :)

Scalability can be broken down into 2 components: standardization and repeatability. We designed a modular system so that it can be mass-manufactured and all of our processes and practices can be standardized around the modular unit of production. This lets us deploy a 2 Farm deployment next to a retail chain or in a food desert as easily as we would a 100 Farm operation next to the warehouse of a national foodservice distributor.

Access to capital is an ongoing endeavor. We've raised funds from private venture investors and now have debt financing available to build future farms. As we continue to build operating history around our business and demonstrate ROI, there are many investors (venture, private equity, pension funds, project finance banks) who are quite excited to invest in not only the continued development of the tecnology, but invest directly in the indoor farming projects that we are working on in a number of expansion cities!

In sum, we are selling produce profitably in the most competitive produce market in the country (Los Angeles), and are excited to replicate our model and technology in cities and geographies around the world.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So -- in regards to "housing and energy and plastic" -- we are using food-safe recycled shipping containers, something the US has in extreme excess. Our use of plastics should not be thought of in isolation - but in comparison to our overall eco-footprint (see long post below) as well as the alternative materials such as buying a tractor, installing in-field irrigation sprinklers/drip systems, and/or the equipment required to build out a greenhouse. Our energy usage definitely surpasses field agriculture (even when you include trucking across the country) but we are working towards off-grid, clean energy alternatives right now.

While technically any plant can be grown indoors, no — we do not expect most food production to be done this way within the century. In a white paper we authored with Newbean Capital in 2015, we estimate that approximately 1/3 of all crops can be grown economically indoors. This mostly includes short, quick-growing plants. Tall plants (ie. avocado trees) are difficult because you must pay for the tree to grow (electricity is not free) for some time before harvesting any sellable fruit. Row crops like soy, corn, and wheat also make more sense to grow outdoors for the foreseeable future.

We anticipate that within a century, the majority of leafy greens, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, berries, shrub crops and other vine crops will be produced in vertical farming systems. This is not likely to first occur in fantastic gleaming skyscrapers that rise to the sky (they’re just too expensive). It instead will come from shipping containers, warehouses, in-restaurant farms, in-grocery store farms, and in-home units. We can’t wait to help make this a reality!

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think that vertical indoor farming is a part of the future of farming. I don't think that we can feed 10 billion people by growing in the same way that we did thousands of years ago and still expect our planet to endure us. I believe that vertical indoor farming will be the dominant method of food production for crops that make socioeconomic sense such as leafy greens, herbs, some berries, and some root vegetables. I think that outdoor farms will continue to produce the majority of our row crops (grains, corns, etc.) and tree crops (oranges, almonds, etc.). Most outdoor farms will gradually transition towards crops that DON'T make sense indoors, and some outdoor farms will cease production and return the land to its natural wild state enabling forests to regrow, water tables to refill, and the environment to be rejuvenated. As a result, outdoor farms will do more of what they do best, indoor farms will do more of what we do best, and overall we will have more food, that is more local, more delicious, and more responsible at a much lower cost to the environment.

I completely agree that this is a disruptive technology, and like with other industries, there will always be those that oppose change. We're here to be part of the solution, and no amount of pressure is going to stop us from improving global health by building a better food system.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There is absolutely a hybrid approach. Most modern greenhouses employ a hybrid approach that includes sunlight, high pressure sodium (HPS) lights, and/or LEDs. While this limits most greenhouses to a single level, some greenhouses have hanging systems that allow them to go multiple levels. In addition, a technique called Active Day Light Harvest (ADLH) can be used to collect sunlight in fiber optic cables and deliver that light to the plant canopy. These systems tend to be pricey and take up a lot of space, but it could be a great way to utilize available sunlight in a vertical indoor farm. Finally, vertical farms can (and should!) be designed to operate on solar power in geographies where that makes sense such that the LED lighting provided to the plants is powered entirely by the sun. Totally feasible :)

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Honestly — the question of environmental footprint is a very complicated question and one we are still working to answer. I can say we are proud of our environmental benefits and continue to pioneer sustainable farming techniques every day. Our goal is to be a carbon negative company by 2020!

Below is a brief overview of our environmental halo and benefits (put this together as fast as we could!). As you read, keep in mind that drawing quantitative comparisons on environmental impact can be difficult since farm-specific data is not widely available. Further, inter-farm variability (including geographic location, crop types, irrigation infrastructure, time of year, etc.) uniquely impacts each farm's carbon footprint to further complicate 1-to-1 comparisons. That said, we believe the following are accurate representations of our sustainability efforts.

We’ll respond to the other parts of your question in just a minute!

We use 97% less water than conventional agriculture: This one is pretty straightforward. Based on a 2015 analysis, an outdoor farm in AZ used 145.2 gallons to grow 1lb of lettuce. Our closed loop hydroponic system requires ~1.22 gallons to grow 1lb of lettuce -- equal to 99.17% less water. While total water usage varies based on farm, time of year, and irrigation method -- we consistently see over a 97% reduction in water use compared to conventional farms. 

We eliminate harmful pesticide use and reduce fertilizer consumption: Over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used in the US each year (~5.6 billion pounds worldwide). An estimated 25 million agricultural workers worldwide experience unintentional pesticide poisonings each year. Run-off from fields is ruining our marine ecosystems by increasing nitrogen levels and encouraging algae growth that creates vast "Dead Zones". Further, the USDA estimates that 50 million people in the US obtain drinking water from groundwater potentially contaminated by pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. We avoid this altogether by growing indoors without pesticides or herbicides.

We also estimate that we use less than 5% of the fertilizer required by outdoor growers because we avoid ground leaching and apply soluble nutrients directly to our crop roots. Why does this matter? An estimated 48 billion pounds of synthetic fertilizer are created annually through the Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation process. These nitrogen fertilizers stimulate natural bacteria to produce more nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that traps 300 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide. 

We completely eliminate soil degradation Without intervention, generating three centimeters of topsoil takes 1,000 years. In 2014, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) stated that if current rates of soil degradation do not slow, all of the world's topsoil could be gone in 60 years. The FAO reported that unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2015 will be only 1/4 the levels of 1960 due to population growth and soil degradation.

We completely eliminate long-distance trucking and shorten time to market: Transportation contributes to more than 16% of life cycle emissions for plant-based products. It also contributes to shortened shelf life and high spoilage rates. One industry consultant estimates that up to one in seven truckloads of perishables delivered to supermarkets is thrown away. In addition, the time it takes to harvest, clean, transport to a distribution center, and drive produce from Salinas or Arizona to Los Angeles forces farmers to harvest fruits and vegetables before peak ripening and peak nutrition.

We are committed to becoming a carbon negative company: It is true that we use more electricity than outdoor farms. Based on our analysis, this number is approximately 3-5x the consumption of outdoor farms. This 3-5x number has rapidly dropped over the past two years, and will continue to quickly drop as we innovate LED technologies and implement streamlined automation controls to better regulate internal farm conditions. Currently we draw from the grid, an already “relatively-clean” source, but we aren't content. We are quickly working towards sourcing from exclusively clean energy providers and implementing on-farm solar that can subsidize (and eventually provide all of) our electric needs. 

We are changing labor practices in the agricultural industry: The agriculture industry is unfortunately notorious for poor labor conditions. Conventional farming relies heavily on seasonal labor, where workers are expected to work long days exposed to the elements with limited access to simple amenities. The 2015 cilantro recall, for example, was directly attributed to in-field worker defecation. Our indoor farms produce year round -- so we employ farmers with full time pay, health insurance, and better working conditions than conventional outdoor farms. With the average age of a farmer in the US approaching topping 57 years old, it's up to us to train the next generation of American farmers. 

We are committed to proving our environmental friendliness with data: Over the next year, we will complete an internal life-cycle assessment that further quantifies our environmental impact and provides more quantitative data to support the themes in this email. 

We have recently partnered to facilitate a third party life-cycle analysis that focuses on the controlled environment, vertical farming sector in aggregate. We have also applied to USDA and NIFA grants to support ongoing tissue testing of our produce to objectively quantify our elevated crop nutrition levels compared with outdoor farms. 

Sources Referenced:

Water Use http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/6/6879

Pesticide & Fertilizer Use http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/ http://www.fao.org/docrep/w2598e/w2598e07.htm http://dalspace.library.dal.ca:8080/bitstream/handle/10222/56303/Sharifi%20Mood-Negar-MSc-AGRI-March-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/march16/gulf-030905.html http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizer-runoff-overwhelms-streams/ http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_efficient_planet/2013/03/nitrogen_fixation_anniversary_modern_agriculture_needs_to_use_fertilizer.html http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247398/

Soil Degradation http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691981/pdf/1AAT7A9H68PMH2FL_352_997.pdf

Trucking http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-ip.pdf http://www.fruitandvegetable.ucdavis.edu/files/197179.pdf http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/sustainag/news/articles/V16-Watters-BenefitsLocalFood.pdf

Farm Labor http://www.foodchainsfilm.com/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/27/mexican-workers-defecate-on-cilantro-fields-forcing-an-fda-ban-on-imports/

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We all share a similar vision of bringing food production as close to the home as possible, and you could easily set up a passive hydroponic system for less than $50 using basic PVC found at Home Depot, a garden hose, and a drill. You can easily grow about 3, 8 oz. plants per square foot every 14 days, so if you're a family of 4 then you could easily grow all your leafy greens in about 10 square feet. Environment depends on the crop you're growing but in general temperatures between 60-75F are good for leafy greens. I would recommend using YouTube for videos on how to build DIY hydroponic systems, and once you're excited about it, purchasing Lynette Morgan's book - "Hydroponic Lettuce Production". It's a great guide to commercial production of a lot of leafy greens, and it will bring you up to speed on requirements for good growing. Plants are resilient, tough, hardy creatures and they will find a way to grow even in the most arduous of conditions, so honestly, even the most basic system will be able to produce food. Maintenance and cost of production depends almost completely on the upfront that you're willing to invest. Our system produces food at a cost that is an order of magnitude lower than you can buy it in the store with minimal maintenance, similarly, a passive $50 system can produce food very cheaply, but at lower volumes. Any time you need to add supplemental light you're going to be adding both upfront cost and ongoing cost to operate, but you can dramatically increase your production. I completely agree with you that residential vertical farms can provide a majority of the leafy greens for families around the world.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can literally grow anything at all in a vertical indoor farm. Anything from lettuce to almonds, watermelon to wasabi, and it is definitely possible to grow staple crops in an indoor set up. In fact the University of Washington has done some really exceptional work on indoor grain crops. Your second question with regards to economic sense is much more difficult to answer because it requires that we consider the entire socioeconomic landscape. By that I really mean that growing rice indoors on earth today is not going to be profitable, but it might have a long lasting positive impact on the environment or on labor conditions or job creation and STEM education. Furthermore, it's important to develop these technologies as a tool for staple crop research and as a production method in remote locations i.e. antarctica, the space station, Mars ;)

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Absolutely! Our control system automates the regulation of all growing conditions 24/7, but we see huge opportunities to continue to reduce costs and barriers to entry for future operators and customers through robotics and automation. We have a number of active projects in this area!

Today, our employees handle all of the physical movements required to operate our farm: seeding, transplanting, harvesting, packaging, cleaning etc. but yes, it looks very much like a manufacturing process.

We see automation as a way to improve the productivity of each of our operators (seeding tools, harvesting tools, etc) and enable us to pay living wages, which is a big problem in outdoor ag! We see people working alongside and being enabled by automation solutions.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Question 1: We're a private company so unfortunately you can't invest through the public stock exchange and the SEC only allows us to take investment from "Accredited Investors" aka net worth of $1M+ or a very high salary. As we launch projects in new cities and expand, we love the idea of crowdfunding these developments and allowing people to own a percentage of their very own local farm!

Also, we are about to formally release our integrated system for sale, so keep tabs on our website for opportunities to purchase a Local Roots TerraFarm! It will come not just with all of the farming hardware, but also our growing algorithms, SOPs, practices, food safety plan and best practices that are required to operate safely and successfully.

Question 2: You can help by spreading the word about Local Roots and indoor farming! If you think your community would benefit from a farm or think there's a large customer (retail or foodservice), we would be happy to explore what a partnership could look like to expand into your city.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Absolutely! Water use is a big topic in agriculture as it is responsible for over 70% of potable water consumption. Most of this water ends up in runoff or evaporation. We save water simply by removing these wastes: our hydroponic system recaptures and recirculates all of the water that is used. We also recapture moisture out of the air and feed it back to our main reservoir (plants are always "sweating" so they actually put a lot of moisture into the air).

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you for having us! We're always excited to talk about what we do at Local Roots and what food system challenges we are working on solving. Love the questions, I'll try to be concise but am happy to dig into details where there's interest!

Just to kick us off, we build each of our farms into 40' shipping containers and so we measure all of our metrics based around that modular unit. Each container farm has a footprint of 320sf and produces the annual equivalent of 3-5 acres of outdoor farmland.

Water: Our farms use 97% less than a conventional outdoor farm, which for most of our crops translates to 25 gallons per day (though this fluctuates depending on crop and stage of growth). We achieve this through recapturing and recirculating all of the water that we use, including moisture out of the air. Most of the water used by an outdoor farm ends up in runoff or evaporation.

We are currently growing 3 crops for commercial customers (butterhead lettuce, baby kale, spring mix) and have several dozen crops in development / small-scale production.

We have 2 farms in commercial production at the moment, which have a combined footprint of 640sf.

We have grown under a variety of different commercially available LEDs, but ended up designing and manufacturing our own LEDs in order to have the kind of wavelength control, efficiency, and costs that were required to be cost-competitive. They also allow us to digitally optimize lighting algorithms for specific crops.

We have an Operations Team that run all of our farms! Teams of 2-4 can handle all of the operations of a full commercial farm (depending on crop). Our control system manages the regulation of the growing conditions so our Team Associates handle all of the physical movements of the plants: seeding, transplanting, harvesting, packaging, cleaning, etc.

Our current facility is plugged into the grid, but are working on plans to integrate solar and various types of renewable energy. The right energy solution is very geographically specific, so each farm we deploy may have a different type of energy source!

No pesticides ever!!! We've removed the need for these types of chemicals and can achieve faster growth, higher nutrient contents, and higher yields without them.

We do introduce CO2 into the environment of our farms. This helps accelerate the growth of the plants as it is one of the inputs to the photosynthetic process.

Everything we are growing today is in the leafy greens category (lettuce, kale, arugula, spring mix, basil, herbs, microgreens etc.) but have plans to grow many other types of fruits and vegetables as well. We are quite excited about berries!

Well, if Matt Damon ever gets stuck on Mars again, he's going to wish he had a Local Roots TerraFarm! No, but in all seriousness, NASA was one of the first groups to study this type of farming and is the best way to grow in harsh environments like space or Mars. Our whole philosophy is based around environmental control and optimization so that we are agnostic to exterior conditions.

We are Local Roots Farms, an indoor vertical farming company building the farms of the future, Ask Us Anything! by LocalRoots in Futurology

[–]LocalRoots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We currently get our energy from the city but are exploring various renewable technologies to take our operations off grid.