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Bright Farms Hydroponic Greenhouses Move From Urban Farming to Suburban Farming
After dealing with the high costs and logistical nightmares of developing in urban areas, Bright Farms realized that they could streamline their process by moving just a bit outside the city limits.
By Adele Peters
FastCoexist
Mar 2, 2017
Excerpt:
BrightFarms also has greenhouses in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Culpeper County, Virginia; and Rochelle, Illinois—all also near, but not in, large cities. The new strategy lets the company avoid the costs and challenges of working on urban sites, while still providing a local version of foods like salad greens that would normally travel thousands of miles.
“Like most good strategies, it was driven by some painful experiences,” Paul Lightfoot, CEO of BrightFarms, tells Co.Exist. “Basically, we had a couple of failures. We tried to develop a giant rooftop of a building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and we also tried to develop an environmentally soiled parcel of land in the city of Washington D.C., owned by the city.”
In both cases, the landowners were eager for BrightFarms to build, and they had strong support from the communities and city leaders. But both sites had challenges. In Brooklyn, the roof needed complex engineering work that couldn’t be completed on the startup’s timeline; in D.C., the city had to do environmental remediation that also took longer that was commercially viable.
Read the complete article here.
Source: http://www.cityfarmer.info/2017/03/08/bright-farms-hydroponic-greenhouses-move-from-urban-farming-to-suburban-farming/
