![]() For a plant, whether it be a tomato plant, or lettuce or strawberry, you’re not manipulating the plant itself. “At our indoor farms, we’re growing tomatoes, salad greens and strawberries, rotating English cucumbers seasonally. How difficult is that, compared to leafy greens? AppHarvest is now also growing strawberries and tomatoes. ![]() Indoor farming/vertical farming initially focused on leafy greens. Vertical farming tends to be on a smaller scale, with most vertical farms measuring in thousands of square feet versus acres and hyper-local with all artificial inputs for light and city water.” This is a key differentiator from vertical farming, which doesn’t use any passive solar. Although we do supplement the sunlight our plants receive with LED lighting, our plants require less energy than indoor warehouse farms because of our passive solar design. Our closed-loop irrigation system uses up to 90% less water than open-field farming and allows for precision dosing of nutrients, resulting in far less use of fertilizer than open-field agriculture while avoiding pollution from agricultural runoff. We grow at-scale leveraging sunshine and rainwater first then boosting with technology as needed. “AppHarvest’s controlled environment agriculture (CEA) approach is different than black box or vertical farming. Is there a difference between indoor farming and vertical farming? Indoor farming and vertical farming are terms that are often used to say the same thing. Text continues below image The Berea Farm measures 15 acres and is the smallest of AppHarvest's indoor farms. We believe that large-scale indoor farming is the key to feeding the world’s rapidly growing population.” AppHarvest is a sustainable foods company that leverages the best of AgTech – sunshine, rainwater and up to 90% less water than open-field growing while producing yields up to 30 times that of traditional agriculture on the same amount of land without agricultural runoff. That’s why I founded AppHarvest – where we’re building and operating some of the world’s largest high-tech indoor farms. We have to grow much more with far fewer resources. That means we would need a second Planet Earth to have enough land and water to feed everyone. The United Nations predicts that in about 30 years – by 2050 – we’ll need to produce about 70% more food to feed a world population of nearly 10 billion people. In the U.S., areas that normally grow much of our food – the Southwest and California – are experiencing extreme weather events that make our food supply unstable. Climate change is negatively impacting agriculture. But an even more pressing issue no one seemed to be talking about was food security. While in Washington D.C., all the talk was about energy security. “My background was in building large-scale solar development projects for the Unitd States Department of Defense, one of the country’s biggest energy consumers. ![]() When and how did you get personally involved in indoor farming? He firmly believes indoor farming is the key to a more robust, climate-resilient, sustainable food system, which also provides new jobs where they are most needed. ![]() Jonathan Webb is the founder and CEO of AppHarvest. Other farms AppHarvest operates are the 30-acre AppHarvest Somerset Farm, and the 60-acre flagship farm in Morehead, Kentucky. Recently the company announced it had completed calibration of a “touchless growing system” featuring autonomous harvesting for its new 15-acre Berea, Kentucky salad greens farm. AppHarvest operates some of the world’s largest high-tech indoor farms in the United States with robotics and artificial intelligence. ![]()
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