GreenForges digs deep to farm underground

Added on 20 October 2021

Tags

GreenForges digs deep to farm underground

Vertical farms usually look up. Aerofarms, Plenty, Gotham Greens these companies are trying to revolutionize agriculture by looking toward the sky, with tall warehouses full of growing equipment extending upward. But Philippe Labrie is looking down. Labrie is the CEO and founder of the pre-seed startup GreenForges, an underground farming company founded in 2019 looking to take vertical farming technology underneath buildings. Earlier in his career, Labrie thought he, too, would be looking to the sky for farming potential with rooftop greenhouses. But he found that the sky does, in fact, have a limit.

"I stumbled upon a paper that was analyzing how much food production capacity can we do in cities using rooftop greenhouses," he said. "It's a relatively low number; we're talking 2 to 5% range for the cities of 2050. No one was asking the question, 'Can we grow underground?'"

Agriculture has always been a business fueled and restricted by space. When agriculture first emerged around 12,000 years ago, farmers had to clear forests for cropland. That destructive process has continued to this very day. In order for farmers to grow more food and make more money, they need more land. Traditional vertical farming tried to solve this land conversion issue by moving farms to urban environments and stacking the crops on top of each other. But the warehouses still have to sit somewhere. GreenForges is trying to take advantage of space that would otherwise go unused, under our feet.

After two years of research and development, the company is planning its first pilot underground farm system north of Montreal in spring 2022 with Zone Agtech, an incubator for agricultural technologies. The company's farming system will use existing controlled indoor agriculture technology, including controlled LED lighting, hydroponic growing (growing without soil) and climate controls for humidity and temperature but with a novel approach.

Instead of taking over large warehouses, GreenForges will drill 40-inch-diameter holes into the ground underneath new buildings and lower the equipment into the hole. Maintenance and harvesting will be done by mechanically pulling the crops up to the surface where a human can fix or pick. The pilot program will place the farms 15 meters deep, but GreenForges has plans and models for farms up to 30 meters deep.