Salad will survive climate change. But at what cost?

Despite its diminutive size, the town is well-known in the Pittsburgh region for its air quality, which ranks among the worst in the nation for year-round dust, soot, and smoke pollution. 

And yet, inside a wide, windowless warehouse set just a block or two back from the banks of the Monongahela River, thousands of tender, young plants are thriving beneath a gleaming roof and complex HVAC system that shields them from both the azure sky and the effluence of the adjacent smokestacks.

The company Fifth Season is responsible for tending to this farm, though the startup's use of "farm" certainly stretches traditional definitions. The greens here do not grow out of the comforting foundation of earth; they are produced "vertically," cradled in plastic trays of soil about 16 square feet, stacked and slotted into a white tower as tall as several men, like cookies in a bakery for giants. 

The indoor plots are bathed in fuchsia light and tickled by an artificial breeze, precisely calibrated by hundreds of intermittently humming fans. It is not the whim of clouds and air pressure that determines when these greens are watered; rather, it is a continuously refined algorithm that drives the robot dispersing carefully measured droplets over arrays of seedlings. Meanwhile, the human overseeing that algorithm sits in a room several states away in Michigan.

What plants does one grow in such a place? Young spinach, juvenile arugula, prepubescent brassicas — you may know them as "baby greens." In just a few decades, they have become the standard base of any salad, commonplace in both families' crisper drawers and the coolers of airport cafes. In order to maintain their omnipresence, more growers are looking into moving delicate crops like these indoors.

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Source: Grist