In a nondescript former root beer plant, tucked behind the Curtain & Bath Outlet off Main Street in Millis, Massachusetts, FreshBox Farms is growing the future of food.
The FreshBox facility bears no resemblance to our cultural renderings of a farm; not only is there no soil, but every attempt is made to contain the risk that such outside organic matter could introduce. Visitors are asked to dip the soles of their shoes into a shallow plastic water bath, so as to limit contamination by pathogens and insects. Entry into one of the facility’s 15 growing units—8' x 40' metal boxes resembling shipping containers—necessitates a white cap and a lab coat. The units feature a double-door protocol that requires the exterior door to be closed before a second internal door can be opened. In the far corner of the building, a larger-scale model of the growing unit features an entry foyer with a ventilation system that cycles the air every few seconds and a secondary system designed to blow out any pathogens or insects that might have snuck past earlier garrisons.
Plant protection
All of this security is in place to protect the racks of Styrofoam-like growing beds inside the units, which are filled with leafy greens and fed by precisely tuned LED lights. An intricate digital system measures the room’s temperature and the CO2 levels inside the units every 30 seconds, adjusting as necessary; another delivers computer-calculated nutrients and water through the plant beds. These precision systems allow the facility to use about 1 percent of the water required by traditional farming counterparts, while producing the equivalent of a 400-acre farm in just 27,000 square feet of space. It’s as if nature has been stripped of its variability and cranked all the way up.
Feeding the world
Which is exactly the kind of tech upgrade the world food system needs given our increasingly insecure ecosystem, says Sonia Lo (MBA 1994), CEO of Crop One Holdings, which owns and operates the FreshBox brand. Sitting in FreshBox’s makeshift conference room—a long table, chairs, and a monitor, surrounded by four very high stacks of the white foam growing racks—she lays out the challenge. Climate change and its progenies, drought and flooding, are threatening traditional agricultural systems. And even when those systems work, they still rely on carbon-intensive shipping supply chains that move food thousands of miles from where it is grown to the tables where it is consumed. The global population is rising, with the United Nations projecting it to swell to 9.7 billion from its current 7.7 billion by 2050. “We also have to solve the calorie deficiency that we’re going to confront by 2050 on this planet,” she says. “We have to produce 70 percent more calories than we produce today to feed that population.”
Fast food: tons of lettuce needed
Addressing a problem with that kind of span requires scaling beyond the 8' x 40' units—and beyond Millis. “The modular unit that’s going into Dubai will be three times the size of this,” says Lo, motioning to the larger-scale model in the back left corner of the facility. In June 2018, Crop One won a bid to provide leafy greens to Emirates Airlines’ flight catering company, and it is in the midst of building a 130,000-square-foot facility in Dubai that they expect to produce three tons of greens a day. It’s an almost unfathomable amount of daily production, but Lo puts it in perspective. “A single fast-food restaurant chain uses 300 million pounds a year of leafy greens alone,” she says. “A one-ton-a-day farm produces 740,000 pounds a year. So even if we built a 50-ton-a-day farm, you’re still only producing 240 million pounds a year. You would serve one customer.”
Enhancing control
That 50-ton-a-day mark is a real goal, says Lo, and the Dubai farm will be a big proof of concept. And while any company’s world-saving ambitions can resemble Silicon Valley–like hype, Lo stresses that there’s a path, and the first step was figuring out how to most effectively grow lettuce in climate-controlled shipping containers in this former root beer plant. “We’re doing this in a very logical, road-mapping way. We’re not trying to bend the laws of physics. We are trying to enhance control. We’re trying to grow 365 days a year. We’ve been growing every day since February of 2015, which is pretty remarkable for any farmer to be able to say. We have not stopped growing even one day, you know?”