BRIGHTFARMS:AN INNOVATIVE New York company is designing, financing, building and operating hydroponic greenhouse farms on the roofs of supermarkets and schools, in a bid to produce locally grown food with low carbon and water footprints.
Brightfarms supplies its supermarket clients with fresh vegetables, such as lettuce and tomatoes, that have not had to endure a truck journey of up to six days from California, Mexico or Canada. Transporting produce is expensive, reduces the flavour and nutritional goodness, and is both fuel and CO2-intensive.
Brightfarms also has acted as an adviser to such projects as Gotham Greens, which was started by green entrepreneur Viraj Puri and investment banker Eric Haley. Gotham Greens recently built a 140 sq m greenhouse on a Brooklyn rooftop with the aim of growing 30 tonnes of organic fruit, vegetables and herbs each year for sale through local shops, farmers’ markets and to restaurants.
It uses a combination of energy management technology, solar panels and hydroponics technology to yield up to 30 times more produce than conventional field production, using 20 times less water during the growing process. Hydroponics involves growing plants in mineral-rich solutions without soil.
The company has signed up eight supermarket chains in the US, including three of the country’s largest, and has four farms under construction.
A one-acre farm costs about $2 million (€1.4 million) to build and would generate $1 million to $1.5 million in annual revenue, providing attractive profit margins given the reduction in shipping costs for the supermarkets, the company said.
“Our plan is to achieve $100 million in revenues by the end of 2015 and $1 billion by the end of 2020,” said chief executive Paul Lightfoot.
Among the investors in Brightfarms are the founders of US solar power giant SunEdison, Brian Robertson and Jigar Shah, and San Francisco-based tech investor and entrepreneur Ali Partovi.
Shah is also the chief executive of Carbon War Room, a green not-for-profit group set up by the Virgin founder Richard Branson.
“BrightFarms is an excellent example of aligning environmental goals with profit by eliminating waste, because photosynthesis is very efficient, whereas trucking a tomato 3,000 miles in a fuel-guzzling fridge is not,” said Partovi.