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Architecture

FarmedHere has high ambitions with new 60,000 sq ft vertical farm

January 29, 2016
FarmedHere has high ambitions with new 60,000 sq ft vertical farm
The Louisville farm will accommodate 10 rows of vertical grow beds
The Louisville farm will accommodate 10 rows of vertical grow beds
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Construction of the West Louisville FoodPort is expected to begin in August
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Construction of the West Louisville FoodPort is expected to begin in August
The facility will be part of the new 24-ac (9.7-ha) West Louisville FoodPort that will be home to a community of food-related businesses
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The facility will be part of the new 24-ac (9.7-ha) West Louisville FoodPort that will be home to a community of food-related businesses
FarmedHere's indoor facilities are controlled environments
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FarmedHere's indoor facilities are controlled environments
FarmedHere's facilities use energy-efficient LED lighting for the growing process
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FarmedHere's facilities use energy-efficient LED lighting for the growing process
FarmedHere's facilities are said to produce 15 times as many crop cycles as traditional farms every year and to use 97 percent less water
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FarmedHere's facilities are said to produce 15 times as many crop cycles as traditional farms every year and to use 97 percent less water
The Louisville farm will accommodate 10 rows of vertical grow beds
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The Louisville farm will accommodate 10 rows of vertical grow beds
The Louisville farm will provide 18.2 million people living within 200 miles access to freshly harvested, USDA-certified organic and pesticide-free produce all year round
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The Louisville farm will provide 18.2 million people living within 200 miles access to freshly harvested, USDA-certified organic and pesticide-free produce all year round
The Louisville farm will produce microgreens, herbs, salad dressings, baby food and other produce
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The Louisville farm will produce microgreens, herbs, salad dressings, baby food and other produce
View gallery - 8 images

The US city of Louisville, KY, is set to become home to a major new vertical farm. The FarmedHere facility will be part of the new 24-ac (9.7-ha) West Louisville FoodPort that will be home to a community of food-related businesses. It will grow microgreens, herbs and vegetables.

The new farm will cover an area of 60,000 sq ft (5,574 sq m). This will make it smaller than AeroFarms' 69,000-sq ft (6,410-sq m) facility in Newark, New Jersey, which, at one point, was claimed as the biggest in the world, and indeed FarmedHere's own 90,000-sq ft (8,361-sq m) facility in Chicago, which it says is currently the largest indoor vertical farm in North America.

Nonetheless, FarmedHere expects the new farm to help the Louisville FoodPort become "one of the most transformative urban reinvestment projects of the decade." It plans to hire 40 new employees from the local area, many whom it expects to be veterans and second-chance employees. In addition, the facility will contribute to fulfilling the company's own long-term ambitions.

"This new location will bring us one step closer to reaching our goal of building vertical farms in 18 cities across the country and feeding 75 percent of the United States' population," says FarmedHere CEO Matt Matros in a press release. "With a projected 9.6 billion people on earth by 2050, alternative forms of agriculture are becoming more important, especially in urban areas where adequate farmland is limited."

FarmedHere's facilities use energy-efficient LED lighting for the growing process
FarmedHere's facilities use energy-efficient LED lighting for the growing process

FarmedHere's indoor facilities are controlled environments that use energy-efficient LED lighting for the growing process. They are said to produce 15 times as many crop-cycles as traditional farms every year and to use 97 percent less water.

The Louisville farm will accommodate 10 rows of vertical grow-beds, as well as dedicated space for sorting and packaging microgreens, herbs, salad dressings and baby food, among other produce. FarmedHere says it will provide 18.2 million people living within 200 miles access to freshly harvested, USDA-certified organic and pesticide-free produce all year round.

Construction of the West Louisville FoodPort is expected to begin in August this year.

Sources: FarmedHere, Seed Capital KY

View gallery - 8 images

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ArchitectureFood technologyFoodVertical Farming
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7 comments
Racqia Dvorak
"15 times as many crop-cycles as traditional farms "
I want to hear more about this figure. How is it computed?
LordInsidious
Love seeing things like this.
Stephen N Russell
Expand farms worldwide, test for urban areas esp Mexico City, Kobe, Tokyo, Hong Kong Macao, Singapore, Mumbai India
Don Duncan
I started organic gardening 60 years ago when it was considered by all the scientific community to be lunatic fringe. I welcomed GMOs until I heard the details, now I avoid them like the plague. I am encouraged to see science contributing to the lay growing community in a constructive way.
Joel Detrow
@Racqia Dvorak: Normal farms plant 100% of their crops early in the year, tend the crops all at once as they grow, and harvest them late in the year. They have to do it this way because of the seasons. Indoor crops don't have this limitation, so you can plant a fraction of the farm's total capacity multiple times a year.
So, when FarmedHere says they have 15x as many crop-cycles as traditional farms, what they mean is their total growing capacity is divided up into 15 portions, each planted and harvested independently. Put another way, if they have a total of 9000 grow beds, they would plant a batch of 600 beds every 3½ weeks, and harvest each batch when it's fully grown. This has a number of advantages.
1. By spreading out the total work of the farm so it doesn't need to be done all at once, they can employ a few workers year-round instead of a large number of seasonal workers. 2. Harvests (each yielding 1/15th the total yearly capacity of the farm) are made about every 3½ weeks, so fresh produce is available to their buyers all year long, without having to be transported from South American growers. 3. No need for extensive storage facilities for a year's worth of produce. Every harvest can be packaged and sold immediately to local grocers or nearby manufacturers.
Those are on top of how fantastically environmentally friendly indoor vertical farming is; minimum water use, no toxic runoff, very little fertilizer, no pesticides
There's no computation needed, it's simply how the farming technique works.
CAVUMark
Perhaps we will have soylent green some day?
Daishi
This makes so much more sense than trying to plant vegetation on the outside of skyscrapers.