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Fain says the ef ciency of LED lighting has more than doubled in the past ve years, making the model increasingly scalable.
Paul Sellew, founder of Little Leaf Farms in Devens, MA, works very closely with energy suppliers to improve the production process and its impact.
“We’re located next to a solar eld, so a major source of our electricity is photovol- taic electricity generated, and it’s a way to manage the carbon footprint,” says Sellew, who is now growing on ve acres and supplying 1,500 supermarkets and hundreds more restaurants and institutions.
Wylie Goodman is an urban planner and graduate of the Master of City and Regional Planning program at Cornell University, who with Jennifer Minner published a paper in the journal Land Use Policy on CEA in New York City. She applauds Gotham Greens’ sustainable greenhouse model on top of a Whole Foods.
“Capturing waste heat from that building, that’s terri c,” she says. “It’s a eld that’s still evolving, and I think that the innovation happening in the eld to lower the carbon footprint is research that needs to continue.”
Paul Lightfoot, the CEO of BrightFarms, says his produce is cost competitive with eld-grown organic salads, but says, “not all CEA produce is the same. Vertical farms have signi cantly higher costs of labor and utilities, and sometimes capital equipment.”
Goodman is optimistic about the poten- tial for improved technologies from the organization Greenhouse Lighting & Systems Engineering (GLASE), supported by Cornell, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the New York State Energy Research and Devel- opment Authority (NYSERDA) and most leading urban CEA companies.
Another example of industry collabora- tion is the CEA Food Safety Coalition, which created its board in early August comprising executives from BrightFarms, AeroFarms, Bowery, Little Leaf and San Francisco-based Plenty.
THE QUEST FOR COST COMPETITIVENESS
Little Leaf Farms, whose operation like BrightFarms is more peri-urban than urban, is likely to increase its production to 10 acres in early 2020.
“I’m a big believer in using controlled environment agriculture to grow fresh food on the doorstep of large urban markets,” says Sellew, who also emphasizes the reduced food waste associated with growing closer to the market. “But I am not really a proponent of urban agriculture.”
He says the high cost of real estate, energy and taxes makes growing food in cities less preferable to growing in areas a bit further out but still much closer than leafy greens grown in California.
“I am a proponent of peri-urban, where there are all kinds of land available,” he says. “And if you look at the cost of the land here
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