The Trendy, Spendy Future of Tech-Enabled Indoor Farming

The arrival of the plow thousands of years ago made farming easier. Farmers have access to advanced robots, automated facilities, self-driving tractors, and pollinator drones. Tech can enable regular people to grow their own vegetables and herbs, as app-enabled home systems like Click and Lettuce Grow Farmstand have blurred the line between farmer and hobbyist. It's a phenomenon and a market that companies are eager to exploit.

Thomas Graham is an environmental sciences researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. That is a great thing.

Proponents of indoor growing techniques have hailed them as ways to democratize farming. The indoor farming business is doing well. Square Roots opened its fourth shipping container farm in Wisconsin in January. The containers are capable of producing a couple million packages of plants per year. Walmart invested in Plenty, a commercial vertical farming company, in January. Some companies have put together a one-stop shop for farm production.

The Boston company builds farms into shipping containers for clients who want to feed a small community or run a business. In 10 years, it has gone from raising money on a project to growing food for a company. The Greenery S is a system that packs rows of vertical growing shelves into an 8-foot by 40-foot shipping container. It is controlled by a companion app called Farmhand that allows growers to monitor data collected by sensors inside the container. Growers can remotely adjust a garden's temperature, humidity, lighting, and CO 2 levels from their phone or computer. Users can adjust light and water controls and monitor camera feeds to keep an eye on things inside the sealed and stable environment. The app will send a notification if something goes wrong with the plants.

I could be sitting on the beach 500 miles away from my farm, or I could be sitting in my office, away from my farm.

It doesn't come cheap. The Greenery S container costs 149,000 and a subscription to the Farmhand app costs 2,400 per year. Depending on how growers run things, there will be additional equipment and maintenance costs. That is less than buying a plot of land to cultivate a farm in most places. A broad range of customers is what Freight Farms wants to appeal to. 80% of the company's customers have no previous agricultural experience, according to Rick Vanzura.