In southwest Ohio, tech is driving changes in food production

Now, there's another way to grow produce, and farming may be on the cusp of a major shift thanks to technology.

The evidence for that change can be found on the shelves of a local store — the Dorothy Lane Market in Kettering, where we find produce from 80 Acres Farms.

"We carry the firework cherry tomatoes, which are like — boom! They are delicious," says Michelle Mayhew, produce director for all four Dorothy Lane Market stores. She says they've carried the 80 Acres brand since it became available.

"We carry their basils, the little baby cucumbers that the farm grows, and Brooke can probably tell you exactly how they taste because her mom buys them all the time."

Brook Sears is the produce manager.

"We've been carrying it for about four years now and it's really grown over the years," she says. "I would say the last couple of years, especially through COVID, they were able to supply us with salads when nobody else could."

What makes these salad ingredients unusual is that is that they were grown in an indoor vertical growing facility.

"We believe that the vertical growing, indoor growing is definitely a part of the future of growing vegetables," says Mayhew.

The future of growing produce, like those firework cherry tomatoes (which are like, boom, delicious) is taking place some 40 miles south of this store, in Hamilton County.

It is an impressive operation.

Noah Zelkind is a manager at 80 Acres Farms, in charge of growing the company. He stands high on a mezzanine overlooking a good portion of the farm, which is inside a building that's about the size of a football field and a half.

He calls it the "bird's eye view."

It looks a bit like Willy Wonka's factory, but it's not chocolate they're making here.

Far below, workers dressed in coveralls, hair nets and gloves are tending to large trays of lettuce, kale, arugula and micro-greens, all in various stages of development.

Car-sized trays are loaded onto conveyor belts that move from station to station, in and out of a giant warehouse-sized cube called "the grow zone."

"So, we seed the product, then we germinate the product, then we transplant the product and then we grow it in the zone, and then we harvest. All the normal farming steps that you'd expect," he says.

Zelkind says because the produce is also packaged here and everything is done under one roof, "We're able to get our product to people in 24 hours, right. 24, maybe 48 hours. Which means that when you see our produce at your grocery store, when you see our food at your restaurant or wherever it may be, you're getting stuff that is a day or two old, not a week or two."

The USDA estimates that on average produce from typical farming loses about 43 percent of its nutritional value as it's transported from the typical farm to the packager, then to the grocery store.

So, 80 Acres is growing more crops using less land. The "80 Acres" name is inspired by the amount of food they can grow, not the amount of land they use to grow it.

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Photo created by wirestock - www.freepik.com

Source: 91.3WYSO