Vertical farming and cost sustainability

Added on 21 December 2021

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Vertical farming and cost sustainability

Let's seewhere did the produce that is now in my house come from? The Lucy Glo apples are from Chelan in Washington state. BB #:170403 I bought the avocados fom Costco BB #:150902 in a mesh sack that I have long since thrown away, but the best guess is Mexico. The head of romaine in the refrigeratorSalinas, no doubt. It's starting to look old, and if my wife bought it, say, three weeks ago, it was probably before the Yuma crop was coming in. And the blueberries are from Peru (at least that's what I remember from the clamshell before we threw that out). In short, like most of the American produce supply, it is a medley from the Western Hemisphere. This will come as no surprise at all to this audience. It will also come as no surprise that there is increased concern about the costs, environmental and otherwise, of this international panoply.

Fast Company has just come out with an article with the headline "40 Percent of the Produce in the U.S. Is Wasted. This Vertical Farming Startup Is Trying to Change All That". It profiles 80 Acres in Cincinnati, a vertical farming company that sells only within a 50-100 mile radius of its facilities.

By the way, here's the source cited for that 40 percent figure.

The destination for 80 Acres crops is going to supply some 300 Kroger BB #:100073 stores in the vicinity. As you may remember, Cincinnati is the headquarters for Kroger, meaning that if the company has a good experience with 80 Acres, it's likely to look for similar opportunities in other metropolitan markets.

Eighty Acres was founded in 2015, with a single vertical farm that could supply about 80 acres' worth of produce (hence, I guess, the name). Today it has eight operations, all in the Cincinnati area except for one outlier in Springdale, AR.

Cofounders Tisha Livingston and Mike Zelkind have shown a deft hand for both marketing and social responsibility: at the start of the pandemic, they operated a pop-up vertical tomato farm outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, dovetailed with an exhibit called "Countryside: The Future."

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Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Source: Blue Book Services