Indoor Farming: How Can You Ensure Success?

Any business can fail for any number of reasons, but indoor farming is an incredibly delicate organism that depends on many disparate factors being perfectly aligned and in balance. This increases the risk of failure for those unaware of the number of plates that need to be kept spinning in perfect time. This list is not definitive but gives you a good idea of the most common mistakes to avoid.

Continue reading Indoor Farming: How Can You Ensure Success?

Growing microgreens with LED grow lights in Sonora, Mexico

(Español abajo.)

Urban grower Karla Garcia is proud to announce the creation of her new company, Microgreens FLN based in Sonora, Mexico. Karla is a recent graduate with honors and a master’s degree in plant science from the University of Arizona. She is proud of her company’s commitment specializing in microgreens production using an indoor vertical farming strategy. Microgreens are an emerging class of specialty leafy greens and herbs. The crops are harvested when the cotyledons are fully developed and in some cases when the young plants have one true leaf.

Continue reading Growing microgreens with LED grow lights in Sonora, Mexico

Local by Atta rebuilds vertical farm with GE LEDs after devastating fire

 

Case File Facts

COMPANY: Local by Atta

LOCATION: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

CROPS: Local by Atta produces a variety of lettuces, basil, kale, Swiss chard, bok choy, cilantro and microgreens. Products are sold at farmers markets, health food stores, grocery stores, restaurants and through a weekly basket  program. The basket program is expected to increase sales as the company looks to expand with pick up at local businesses, municipal buildings and its new production facility.

TECHNOLOGY: GE Arize Lynk LED Growing System

Continue reading Local by Atta rebuilds vertical farm with GE LEDs after devastating fire

Hort Americas and Bright Agro Tech partner for a free webinar on picking substrates for hydroponics

Choosing a Hydroponic Substrate: Tips From the Pros

Hort-Americas-Bright-Agro-tech-webinar

Hort Americas has partnered with Upstart Farmers – Bright Agrotech to offer a free webinar on choosing a hydroponic substrate!

Knowing what your hydroponic system needs can be hard. To help you out, Dr. Nate from Bright Agrotech, Chris Higgins, and Tyler Baras from HortAmericas lent their experience and knowledge in choosing a hydroponic substrate.

hortamericas-chris-nate-tyler

Hydroponic medium/substrate selection is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a grower. Substrate selection effects germination, growth rates, and operation costs. Each substrate option has unique benefits and limitations.

We’re joined by the experts at Hort Americas to dive deep into these considerations so that you can make an informed decision about your growing medium.

Some of the factors to consider when choosing a hydroponic substrate are cost, ease of use, compatibility with hydroponic system, accessibility, water retention, and sustainability.

In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
-Moisture Retention (particle size, shape, porosity)
-Adjusting Irrigation for Specific Substrates
-Cultural Practices (substrate preparation, germination conditions, crop size/staging)
-Cost
-Sustainability
-Comparison of Common Hydroponic Substrates

 

To register for the event, click here!

 

Click to read Bright Agrotech’s article of why substrate selection is important.

 

Indoor Harvest Corp Provides Update on CLARA Vertical Farm Project in Pasadena, Texas

Houston, Texas, June 25, 2015 — Indoor Harvest Corp (OTCQB:INQD), through its brand name Indoor Harvest™, is a design build contractor, developer, marketer and direct-seller of commercial grade aeroponic and hydroponic fixtures and supporting systems for use in urban Controlled Environment Agriculture and Building Integrated Agriculture. The Company is pleased to provide an update on the Pasadena, Texas Community Located Agricultural Research Area (“CLARA”) project.

On March 31, 2015 the Company announced the signing of a LOI with the City of Pasadena, Texas to fund the establishment and provisioning of an indoor agricultural facility (vertical farm) to be located in Pasadena, Texas. Under the LOI, the City was to provide Indoor Harvest, or a partner of their designation with City approval, with two facilities owned by the City for the sum of ten dollars ($10.00) per annum for a period not to exceed twenty (20) years as well as provide tax abatements on these properties for use in a CLARA project. In addition, the Pasadena Second Century Corp. (economic development entity for the City of Pasadena) has been asked by City officials to consider a budgetary proposal of $500,000 as seed money for the project’s economic development portion in north Pasadena.

Mr. Chad Sykes, Chief Executive Officer of Indoor Harvest, stated, “We’ve received a timeline for the project through the City. We’re currently in the final stages of drafting the MOU and expect to be in a position to begin work on the project as soon as August, based on the timeline provided by the City. All of the parties involved are working together to create an agriculture campus in Pasadena that we hope will become a model for the rest of the nation. By combining agricultural research, education and commercial operations in one campus, we’re working to build a foundation to turn North Pasadena into a leader in new, innovative agricultural trends. We’ve also begun discussions with several potential commercial partners and investors interested in locating operations at the CLARA campus. Although we don’t have any binding agreements, interest seems to be significant given the background and history of groups with whom we are discussing the project.”

The CLARA project, based on current negotiations, is expected to be divided into two phases. Phase One will focus on developing the non-profit aspects of the project and is envisioned to include the construction of a 6,000 sq. ft. vertical farm R&D facility and 6,000 sq. ft. of classroom and office space.  Phase Two is envisioned to support a commercial retail operation with greenhouses built on approximately two acres of land adjacent to the vertical farm and education centers.

The Phase One vertical farm facility is intended to serve dual roles, with Indoor Harvest using the facility as a demonstration farm and R&D facility and Harris County BUILD Partnership, a non-profit group, using the facility for educational and charitable purposes.  It is anticipated that the crops grown will be donated, or sold at cost, to provide fresh produce to low income families in the North Pasadena area.  The entire proposed campus area, almost two city blocks, will be designed and built to allow the flow of tourists without impacting operations. The City has been asked to develop a project overview to be presented in August to department heads at the Pasadena Independent School District’s Kirk Lewis Career & Technical High School and the Continuing and Professional Development Department of San Jacinto College regarding academic curriculum development to be located at the CLARA campus.

The Harris County BUILD Partnership was established in January 2015 to eliminate the conditions that cause food insecurity in north Pasadena by launching a new healthy, accessible, and community-supported local food system.  The conveners of the BUILD Partnership are the Houston Food Bank, the Harris County Public Health & Environmental Services (“HCPHES”) and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Additional members of the BUILD Partnership include CHI St. Luke’s Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Brighter Bites, CAN DO Houston, City of Pasadena, Neighborhood Centers Inc., Pasadena Health Center and the U.T. School of Public Health.

The BUILD Partnership is an extension of Healthy Living Matters (HLM), a county-wide collaborative of over 80 organizations chartered in 2011 to address childhood obesity in Harris County. There is also a Pasadena-specific version of HLM called the HLM-Pasadena Community Task Force that has 23 members local to the Pasadena community.

On June 9, 2015, the Harris County BUILD Health Partnership was selected as one of seven projects out of over 300 applicants nationwide, to receive a $250,000 grant from the inaugural BUILD Health Challenge class. The announcement was made live from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., featuring Karen DeSalvo, Acting Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was followed by a congratulatory letter from LaMar Hasbrouck, MD, MPH and executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials who remarked, “I look forward to tracking your progress and learning more about your projects’ best practices and challenges.” A portion of this grant funding will be used towards setting up the academic and non-profit portion of the CLARA project.

The Phase One initial project meeting has already been held. Caleb Harper, the Principal Investigator and Director of MITCityFarm, attended the meeting. As part of the non-profit academic portion of the CLARA project, all research would be made open source. The MIT Media Lab’s Open Agriculture (OpenAG) Initiative seeks to make agricultural research and data more available to researchers through an innovative cloud based system. Indoor Harvest is excited to continue its relationship with MITCityFarm by looking at ways to deploy the Open Ag platform at the CLARA research facility.

Chris Higgins from HortAmericas, a company involved in horticulture product distribution, consulting and services, also attended the meeting. Indoor Harvest has selected HortAmericas as a project consultant to the CLARA project. HortAmericas will assist the project by evaluating methods and process and providing feedback through the design phase as well as assisting in preparation of standard operating procedures.

It is expected that the project MOU will be finalized and property lease executed by August 2015 based on an existing timeline provided by the City. Construction on Phase One is planned for completion June 2016.

Phase Two of the project is anticipated to be developed on two acres of land currently available adjacent to the existing properties being provided by the City. Indoor Harvest, as the primary developer of the campus, expects to be able to provide commercial operators who build on the CLARA campus a unique group of incentives and key advantages in regards to distribution, manufacturing intelligence and access to resourcing and key agricultural production talent. Phase Two timeline will be dependent upon securing commercial partners who have adequate funding and approval by the City. The Company is currently in talks with several commercial parties interested in building on the CLARA campus.

In addition, the City of Pasadena is currently considering creating a tax increment reinvestment zone (TIRZ) in the immediate area surrounding the CLARA campus.  A TIRZ is a public financing structure that Texas law allows to target tax revenue helping to support redevelopment in underserved areas. Such a zone, if created, could provide an additional economic incentive for tangential services to locate on the project site.  As of now, the City is not obligated to create a TIRZ zone and no such zone may ever come to fruition.

Consistent with the SEC’s April 2013 guidance on using social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to make corporate disclosures and announce key information in compliance with Regulation FD, Indoor Harvest is alerting investors and other members of the general public that Indoor Harvest will provide weekly updates on operations and progress through its social media on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Investors, potential investors and individuals interested in our company are encouraged to keep informed by following us on Twitter, Youtube or Facebook.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/indoorharvest

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/indoorharvest

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/indoorharvest

ABOUT INDOOR HARVEST CORP

Indoor Harvest Corp, through its brand name Indoor Harvest™, is an emerging design build contractor and OEM manufacturer of commercial aeroponic and hydroponic system fixtures and framing systems for use in Controlled Environment Agriculture and Building Integrated Agriculture. Our patent pending aeroponic fixtures are based upon a modular concept in which primary components are interchangeable. We are developing our aeroponic and hydroponic systems for use by both horticulture enthusiasts and commercial operators who seek to utilize aeroponic and hydroponic vertical farming methods within a controlled indoor environment. Please visit our website at http://www.indoorharvest.com for more information about our Company.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

 

This release contains certain “forward-looking statements” relating to the business of Indoor Harvest and its subsidiary companies, which can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “estimates,” “believes,” “anticipates,” “intends,” expects”and similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those described herein as anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Certain of these risks and uncertainties are or will be described in greater detail in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements are based on Indoor Harvest’s current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects on Indoor Harvest. There can be no assurance that future developments affecting Indoor Harvest will be those anticipated by Indoor Harvest. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties (some of which are beyond the control of the Company) or other assumptions that may cause actual results or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Indoor Harvest undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Indoor Harvest Corp

CEO, Mr. Chad Sykes

713-410-7903

 

ccsykes@indoorharvest.com

Growers, investors discuss horticultural opportunities

Attendees at the first “Realities of Growing Plants
Indoors” Short Course learned what it takes culturally to produce controlled
environment crops as well as how to finance and market their businesses.

By David Kuack
Based on the phone calls Gene Giacomelli receives at the
University of Arizona he said growers and would-be growers aren’t talking
enough to the people who are interested in investing in the industry.
Giacomelli, who is director of the university’s Controlled Environment
Agriculture Center and a professor in Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering,
saw an opportunity to bring the two groups together at the first “Realities of Growing Plants Indoors” Short Course,
which was held in Tucson in July.
“I receive phone calls regularly from investors wanting
to know about the possibilities of putting their money into production in
controlled environment agriculture,” Giacomelli said. “They feel they don’t
know enough about the industry. I was trying to get them together with growers
so that they could have some discussion. They had the opportunity to share
their vocabulary, their activities and the things that need to be done if they
want to invest in a successful business.
“This also applies to the growers, who are looking for potential
investors. Growers need to know how to make presentations and be able to
provide the information investors need in order to satisfy their stakeholders
if they are going to lend money or invest in a business.”
For the first 1½ days of the Short Course participants
were provided with the basics applied “how-to-grow” controlled environment
agriculture.






Attendees at the first “Realities of Growing Plants Indoors”
Short Course had the opportunity to tour a small, commercial-
sized tomato greenhouse, a supplemental lighting research
facility and a small grow box for greens.
Photos courtesy of University of Arizona

“The grower-focused presentations had an emphasis on
indoor production, which included greenhouses and also closed environments such
as vertical farming,” Giacomelli said. “Topics included irrigation, climate
control and lighting. We gave them some applied horticultural information that
they should at least be aware of and then learn more about if they want to get
into this business and grow indoors.”

Getting down to
business

During the last half of the second day the Short Course
transitioned to the business side.

“A couple of business people spoke about their
entrepreneurial horticultural activities,” Giacomelli said. “This presentation
transitioned the discussion to the third day where we conducted an investor and
business forum.”
Prior to the start of the business forum attendees took a
2-hour tour of the university’s production and research facilities including a small,
commercial-sized tomato greenhouse, a supplemental lighting research facility
and a small grow box for greens from Japan.
“The growers and investors had an opportunity to see what
growing was like in a traditional greenhouse using the sun as the light source
as well as growing inside using only electrical lamps,” Giacomelli said.
The business forum included a panel of five participants
including a produce distributor, two entrepreneurs who started their own indoor
food production companies, a regional buyer for a national grocery store chain
and a philanthropist investor.
Members of a business forum panel who spoke to Short Course
attendees included a produce distributor, two entrepreneurs who
started their own indoor food production companies, a regional
buyer for a national grocery store chain and a philanthropist investor.

“By bringing the two groups together we tried to give
those growers and would-be-growers who are considering starting a horticultural
business a chance to hear from those people who could provide them with a
reality check,” Giacomelli said.

For more: Gene
Giacomelli, University of Arizona, Ag & Biosystems Engineering Department,
Controlled Environment Agriculture Center; (520) 626-9566;
giacomel@ag.arizona.edu; http://ag.arizona.edu/ceac.

David Kuack is a freelance technical writer in Fort
Worth, Texas; dkuack@gmail.com.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

Hort Americas new Supplemental and Artificial Lighting Education Video

Hort Americas just released its newest video designed to help people interested in using supplemental or artificial lighting in hydroponic, vertical farming, urban ag, tissue culture and greenhouse applications.

Whether you are looking to purchase high pressure sodium lamps, need photo-periodic lighting, learn more about LED Grow Lights or simply have any other lighting questions…this video series will help.


Understanding Light Quantity and Its Effect on Commercial Horticulture from C Higgins on Vimeo.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

Video of Vertical Farm Growing Hydroponic Lettuce

Philips Horti LED Division releases a new video of a commercial farm using vertical growing methods, hydroponics and led grow lights to produce hydroponic lettuce.

Enjoy and let us know if there are any questions.  You can contact Hort Americas at infohortamericas at gmail dot com to learn more.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

Hort Americas is offering a Vertical Growing System

Hort Americas is working to help those interested in Vertical Farming develop their ideas.

One thing needed is a “system” that allows new growers to test their theories.  Hort America’s feels they have come up with an option.

Hort Americas has developed a Vertical Growing cart that allows the grower to set up a germination area and a finished plant area.  The customer can customize the Horticulture LED Grow Lights (referring to light quality and quantity), the planting intensities, the crops and the nutrient selection.

The Vertical Growing Cart is heavy duty and portable, giving the grower the flexibility to try different locations and systems.

For more information on Vertical Farming using these customized carts, please email Hort Americas at infohortamericas@gmail.com.

Photos of the First Cart designed to be shipped from the farm to the market using nutrient film technique, LED grow lights and organic fertilizers.

Heavy Duty and Portable Vertical Growing Carts

This cart using Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) 

Stock Tank(s), Germination and Finished Production in one area.

Artificial Lighting Provided by Horticultural LED Grow Lights

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

An opposing view on Vertical Farming

Hort Americas believes that both sides should be heard and looked at when it comes to Hydroponics, Vertical Farming, Urban Agriculture and CEA.

And while we at Hort Americas may believe firmly in new “farming” opportunities, we completely understand the Macro view and their potential limitations.

Please take a minute to read this post from Graham Land at Greenfudge.org and the article by George Monbiot, before you make up your own mind.

In Monday’s Guardian George Monbiot slams the concept of ‘vertical farming’ in a piece, entitled ‘Greens living in ivory towers now want to farm them too’.

His main beef is that a Columbia University parasitologist named Dickson Despommier has been getting a lot of support in the green media for his idea to create skyscraper farms in densely populated urban areas like New York City, which might be a brilliant idea, but it’s a fanciful one as well.

This immediately reminded me of stories about an underground indoor rice farm in Tokyo’s financial district, which turned out to be an expensive publicity experiment.

Monbiot sees vertical farming as a distraction. Water and farmland shortages along with a growing world population bring agriculture and food towards the forefront of environmental issues. Scary stuff in terms of crop failures and resultant starvation for the poor have-nots, but the haves in places like Manhattan are interested in expensive high tech luxury solutions like skyscraper farming?

Despite the impracticality and massive expense the environmental media has been all over it. In a Time magazine article, there is a partial admission of the fault:

“[…] Despommier concedes that it would cost hundreds of millions to build a full-scale skyscraper farm. That’s the main drawback: construction and energy costs would probably make vertically raised food more costly than traditional crops. At least for now.”

Honestly, vertical farming sounds like a cool university project for a designer or architect, but the extent to which it is taken by Despommier seems far from realistic.

I prefer the other kind of urban farming that is happening in Detroit. People move out, abandon houses and land, the remaining folks utilize that land to grow food, which they eat and sell. Brilliant, efficient and not reliant on some expensive high-tech structure in an exorbitantly priced neighborhood. Maybe I’m just completely ignorant, but besides roof gardens, urban gardens or small plots, farming in Manhattan just doesn’t make much sense.

Read about that in this BBC News article:

Urban farming takes root in Detroit

We should be as efficient as we can, but that means behavior suited to the immediate surroundings, not forcing a square peg into a round hole. How about practical solutions like wasting less energy by importing less food? How about growing crops primarily for human consumption rather than wasteful, intensive livestock farming?

Still, if vertical farming happens to work, then fine, knock yourself out.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

Future Growings Tower Garden – Rooftop Garden Deluxe

Soon to be available at Hort Americas!

Rooftop farming with the Tower Garden is perfect for anyone interested in Hydroponics, Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

LED Research Modules Now Available

The below information was provided by Philips directly.

Research

“We require reliable products that can be used flexibly for various tests with different starting points. The GreenPower LED module is clear and reliable in its specifications and gives us a great deal of freedom when working with it.”

Dr Wim van IeperenWageningen University and Research Centre

In research it is about discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of plant science. The Philips GreenPower LED module enables you to study the influence of light on the growth and development of plants in conditioned environments. Light level and color spectrum are tunable and test results will not be impacted by heat radiation. Read more about Philips GreenPower LED module.

Tissue culture and storage

“ In our company we saw lots of opportunities for LEDs. By carrying out tests with the GreenPower LED string, we found solutions for both tissue culture and plant storage. As well as saving energy, LEDs help us to improve plant quality, mainly thanks to better heat control.”

Sjoukje Heimovaara, Royal van Zanten

In tissue culture it is about fast, uniform and reproducible production of high quality starting plant material often using low GrowthLight levels. The flexible GreenPower LED string is specially designed for tissue culture, storage and transport. It enables a uniform light distribution across the shelf, ensuring that every crop receives the same level and quality of light. Read more about Philips GreenPower LED string.

Young plants

“Over the past year we have achieved very good results with GreenPower LED modules, using a combination of red and blue light. The next step will be to optimize the yield and quality of our Anthurium production, while taking into account the overall cultivation recipe.” Martin van Noort, Rijnplant Breeding

When producing young plants, high uniformity, strong year-round quality and on-time delivery to the customer are of key importance. With GreenPower LED module it is now possible to tune the light intensity and light color to meet the specific needs at every stage of a crop’s growth. Its specially developed optics and optimized thermal design ensure a uniform light distribution while radiating very little heat toward the plants.

Production/ assimilation

For lighting in greenhouses high GrowthLight levels are required. In the next few years HID lighting continues to be the most efficient solution for growers.

For assimilation in greenhouses too, Philips continues to invest in R&D and field tests to develop horticultural lighting solutions that will create value for growers worldwide. For example, it is currently conducting a major field test – together with a leading tomato grower– with a hybrid of HID and LED lighting. In this way it is seeking to combine the best of both worlds: the GrowthLight power of HID with the flexibility of LEDs.

The knowledge of these tests will help us all to develop meaningful light solutions for greenhouse applications.

We will for sure keep you updated about this project.

For more information on LED lights currently available contact Hort Americas directly.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

The Future of Growing with Tim Blank

www.futuregrowing.comLast week Hort Americas had the pleasure of visiting with a visionary from with-in the commercial Hydroponic Industry.

Tim Blank of Future Growing

Tim Blank of Future Growing, LLC (formerly working with Hydroponics for Disney’s Epcot theme park in Orlando) is committed to further developing Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture.  His primary driver is to provide as many people as possible with access to healthy and locally grown food options.  If you are seriously interested in learning more about Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture, we recommend you visit Tim’s website at www.futuregrowing.com.  And, if you are interested in purchasing hydroponic towers for your backyard please send Doug Pennington and email at dpennington@hortamericas.com.

Visit our corporate website at https://hortamericas.com

Can Farming Save a City?

Fortune Magazine post an interesting question?

Can Farming save Detroit?

What do you think?  We think Agriculture will go thru many changes as it continues to cope with changing expectations regarding:  Sustainability, Climate, Natural Resources and Population.
But, we are not sure that it will save cities…unless that is that the expectations within those cities are greatly different than what they are today.
Please let us know what you think.
Below is what was posted at CNN on Dec 29, 2009.
By David Whitford, editor at largeDecember 29, 2009: 11:37 AM ET


DETROIT (Fortune) — John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management.
Twice divorced, Hantz, 48, lives alone in clubby, paneled splendor, surrounded by early-American landscapes on the walls, an autograph collection that veers from Detroit icons such as Ty Cobb and Henry Ford to Baron von Richthofen and Mussolini, and a set of Ayn Rand first editions.
With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit — one of the very few in his demographic who stayed put when others were fleeing to Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city.
Every weekday Hantz pulls his Volvo SUV out of the gated driveway of his compound and drives half an hour to his office in Southfield, a northern suburb on the far side of Eight Mile Road. His route takes him through a desolate, postindustrial cityscape — the kind of scene that is shockingly common in Detroit.
Along the way he passes vacant buildings, abandoned homes, and a whole lot of empty land. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “Every year I tell myself it’s going to get better,” says Hantz, bright-eyed, with smooth cheeks and a little boy’s carefully combed haircut, “and every year it doesn’t.”
Then one day about a year and a half ago, Hantz had a revelation. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” And that, he says one afternoon in his living room between puffs on an expensive cigar, “is how I got onto this idea of the farm.”
Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and — most important of all — stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.”
This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case. The city that was once the fourth largest in the country and served as a symbol of America’s industrial might has lately assumed a new role: North American poster child for the global phenomenon of shrinking postindustrial cities.
Nearly 2 million people used to live in Detroit. Fewer than 900,000 remain. Even if, unlikely as it seems, the auto industry were to rebound dramatically and the U.S. economy were to come roaring back tomorrow, no one — not even the proudest civic boosters — imagines that the worst is over. “Detroit will probably be a city of 700,000 people when it’s all said and done,” says Doug Rothwell, CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan. “The big challenge is, What do you do with a population of 700,000 in a geography that can accommodate three times that much?”
But still there’s the problem of what to do with the city’s enormous amount of abandoned land, conservatively estimated at 40 square miles in a sprawling metropolis whose 139-square-mile footprint is easily bigger than San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined. If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can’t afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has.
Faced with those facts, a growing number of policymakers and urban planners have begun to endorse farming as a solution. Former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, now chairman of CityView, a private equity firm that invests in urban development, is familiar with Detroit’s land problem. He says he’s in favor of “other uses that engage human beings in their maintenance, such as urban agriculture.” After studying the city’s options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: “Detroit is particularly well suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale.”
In that sense, Detroit might actually be ahead of the curve. When Alex Krieger, chairman of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard, imagines what the settled world might look like half a century from now, he sees “a checkerboard pattern” with “more densely urbanized areas, and areas preserved for various purposes such as farming.
The notion of a walled city, a contained city — that’s an 18th-century idea.” And where will the new ideas for the 21st century emerge? From older, decaying cities, Krieger believes, such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, and especially Detroit — cities that have become, at least in part, “kind of empty containers.”
This is a lot to hang on Hantz. Most of what he knows about agriculture he’s picked up over the past 18 months from the experts he’s consulting at Michigan State and the Kellogg Foundation. Then there’s the fact that many of his fellow citizens are openly rooting against him. Since word leaked of his scheme last spring, he has been criticized by community activists, who call the plan a land grab. Opponents have also raised questions about the run-ins he’s had with regulators at Hantz Financial.
But Detroit is nothing if not desperate for new ideas, and Hantz has had no trouble getting his heard. “It all sounds very exciting,” says the DEGC’s Jackson, whose agency is working on assembling a package of incentives for Hantz, including free city land. “We hope it works.”
Detroit’s civic history is notable for repeated failed attempts to revitalize its core. Over the past three decades leaders have embraced a series of downtown redevelopment plans that promised to save the city.
The massive Renaissance Center office and retail complex, built in the 1970s, mostly served to suck tenants out of other downtown buildings. (Today 48 of those buildings stand empty.) Three new casinos (one already bankrupt) and two new sports arenas (one for the NFL’s dreadful Lions, the other for MLB’s Tigers) have restored, on some nights, a little spark to downtown Detroit but have inspired little in the way of peripheral development. Downtown is still eerily underpopulated, the tax base is still crumbling, and people are still leaving. The jobless rate in the city is 27%.
Nothing yet tried in Detroit even begins to address the fundamental issue of emptiness — empty factories, empty office buildings, empty houses, and above all, empty lots. Rampant arson, culminating in the annual frenzy of Devil’s Night, is partly to blame. But there has also been a lot of officially sanctioned demolition in Detroit. As white residents fled to the suburbs over the decades, houses in the decaying neighborhoods they left behind were often bulldozed.
Abandonment is an infrastructure problem, when you consider the cost of maintaining far-flung roads and sewer systems; it’s a city services problem, when you think about the inefficiencies of collecting trash and fighting crime in sparsely populated neighborhoods; and it’s a real estate problem. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000.
That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. “In the target sites we have,” says Hantz, “we [reevaluate] every two weeks.”
As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction.
“I think you should make pods,” Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods — or lakes, as he came to think of them — each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. “What if we had seven lakes in the city?” he wondered. “Would people develop around those lakes?”
To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Where there are row crops, Hantz says, they’ll be neatly organized, planted in “dead-straight lines — they may even be in a design.” But the plan isn’t to make Detroit look like Iowa. “Don’t think a farm with tractors,” says Hantz. “That’s old.”
In fact, Hantz’s operation will bear little resemblance to a traditional farm. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings.
He’s really excited about apples. Hantz Farms will use a trellised system that’s compact, highly efficient, and tourist-friendly. It won’t be like apple picking in Massachusetts, and that’s the point. Score wants visitors to Hantz Farms to see that agriculture is not just something that takes place in the countryside. They will be able to “walk down the row pushing a baby stroller,” he promises.
Crop selection will depend on the soil conditions of the plots that Hantz acquires. Experts insist that most of the land is not irretrievably toxic. The majority of the lots now vacant in Detroit were residential, not industrial; the biggest problem is how compacted the soil is. For the most part the farms will focus on high-margin edibles: peaches, berries, plums, nectarines, and exotic greens. Score says that the first crops are likely to be lettuce and heirloom tomatoes.
Hantz says he’s willing to put up the entire $30 million investment himself — all cash, no debt — and immediately begin hiring locally for full-time positions. But he wants two things first from Jackson at the DEGC: free tax-delinquent land, which he’ll combine with his own purchases, he says (he’s aiming for an average cost of $3,000 per acre, in line with rural farmland in southern Michigan), and a zoning adjustment that would create a new, lower tax rate for agriculture. There’s no deal yet, but neither request strikes Jackson as unattainable. “If we have reasonable due diligence,” he says, “I think we’ll give it a shot.”
Detroit mayor Dave Bing is watching closely. The Pistons Hall of Fame guard turned entrepreneur has had what his spokesman describes as “productive discussions” with Hantz. In a statement to Fortune, Bing says he’s “encouraged by the proposals to bring commercial farming back to Detroit. As we look to diversify our economy, commercial farming has some real potential for job growth and rebuilding our tax base.”
Hantz, for his part, says he’s got three or four locations all picked out (“one of them will pop”) and is confident he’ll have seeds in the ground “in some sort of demonstration capacity” this spring. “Some things you’ve got to see in order to believe,” he says, waving his cigar. “This is a thing you’ve got to believe in order to see.”
Many have a hard time making that leap. When news of Hantz’s ambitious plan broke in the Detroit papers last spring, few people even knew who he was. A little digging turned up a less-than-spotless record at Hantz Financial Services. The firm has paid fines totaling more than $1 million in the past five years, including $675,000 in 2005, without admitting or denying guilt, “for fraud and misrepresentations relating to undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangements, as well as other violations,” according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (Hantz responds, “If we find something that isn’t in compliance, we take immediate steps to correct the problem.”)
Hantz Farms’ first hire, VP Matt Allen, did have an established reputation in Detroit, but it wasn’t a good one. Two years ago, while he was press secretary for former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Allen pleaded guilty to domestic violence and obstructing police after his wife called 911. He was sentenced to a year’s probation. Hantz says he has known Allen for many years and values his deep knowledge of the city. “He has earned a second chance, and I’m willing to give it to him,” he says.
Some of Hantz’s biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who’ve been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That’s a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation’s dependence on Big Ag.
None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don’t generate a lot of cash (most don’t even try), but otherwise they’re great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves.
That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn’t have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. “I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”
Hantz, meanwhile, has no patience for what he calls “fear-based” criticism. He has a hard time concealing his contempt for the nonprofit sector generally. (“Someone must pay taxes,” he sniffs.) He also flatly rejects the idea that he’s orchestrating some kind of underhanded land grab. In fact, Hantz says that he welcomes others who might want to start their own farms in the city. “Viability and sustainability to me are all that matters,” he says.
And yet Hantz is fully aware of the potentially historic scope of what he is proposing. After all, he’s talking about accumulating hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of acres inside a major American city. And it’s clear that he views Hantz Farms as his legacy. Already he’s told his 21-year-old daughter, Lauren, his only heir, that if she wants to own the land one day, she has to promise him she’ll never sell it. “This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940,” Hantz says. “No one should be able to afford to do this ever again.”
That might seem like an overly optimistic view of Detroit’s future. But allow Hantz to dream a little. Twenty years from now, when people come to the city and have a drink at the bar at the top of the Renaissance Center, what will they see? Maybe that’s not the right vantage point. Maybe they’ll actually be on the farm, picking apples, looking up at the RenCen. “That’s the beauty of being down and out,” says Hantz. “You can actually open your mind to ideas that you would never otherwise embrace.” At this point, Detroit doesn’t have much left to lose. To top of page

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Food security, safety and availability!

More Households Request Food Aid

The U.S. Agriculture Department said Monday the number of households that reported struggling to buy enough food in 2008 jumped 31% over the previous year.According to the USDA’s annual poll, 17 million U.S. households reported some degree of food insecurity in 2008, up from 13 million households in 2007.

Associated PressFood banks are seeing a jump in people needing help, a survey says.

“It is time for America to get very serious about food security and hunger,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who is pressing Congress to expand such programs as food stamps and free school lunches that consume roughly 70% of his department’s budget.Comparable numbers for 2009 aren’t available yet. Officials with organizations involved in feeding the hungry say the survey results square with growing demand at food pantries: the number of people seeking help this summer is up an average of 30% from the summer of 2008, according to a recent survey of food banks by Feeding America, a food-bank network.The 2008 survey results suggest that almost 15% of U.S. households had trouble putting enough food on their tables, up from 11% in 2007; the proportion is the highest detected by the survey since it began in 1995. Put another way, about 49 million people, including about 17 million children, worried last year about getting enough to eat.Maura Daly, vice president of government relations for Feeding America, said 90% of food banks in the recent survey reported that, according to anecdotal evidence, unemployment is the leading factor for the increased demand.

[Food Crisis chart]

U.S. consumers in 2008 also saw a sudden acceleration in the cost of food. While the food inflation rate has stalled this year, some economists are worried that the move by many recession-weary farmers to cut production might ignite grocery prices again next year.The global recession is helping swell the number of hungry people around the world to the highest levels since the early 1970s.But the way USDA economists measure food worries in the U.S. is far more liberal than their gauge for other nations, where people are labeled food insecure only if they consume fewer than 2,100 calories a day. Few of the U.S. households labeled as food insecure by the USDA have it that tough.Instead, the USDA’s domestic survey tries to quantify the number of households that have difficulty providing enough food at some time during the year. Many of these families are able to avoid hunger by participating in such federal nutrition programs as food stamps, or by having their children participate in a free school-lunch program.Still, the USDA survey indicates that someone in about one-third of food-insecure households experienced some hunger or came very close to it in 2008. In these households with very low food security, food consumption fell and normal eating patterns were disrupted.According to the survey, 6.7 million U.S. households had very low food security in 2008, up 43% from 4.7 million households in 2007.