The white windowless box surrounded by heat-cracked asphalt gives nothing away. There's a discreet sign: Uriah's Urban Farms. It doesn't look like much. But Farmer Dave Smiles has invested a lot of sweat and brain power in this.
When it's running at full capacity, the 24,000-square-foot warehouse will grow about eight football fields of produce. It will accomplish this using 5 percent of the water of regular farms. It will do this with no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. And it will employ one of the world's most energy-efficient lighting systems.
If all goes as planned, it will become one of the three largest indoor farms in North America. But for Smiles, that's not all that's at stake at his farm, named for his son Uriah, 8.