Bringing the Farm Indoors
By: Bill Brian Hudgins | Categories: Alumni Interest
That’s exactly what the Ross brothers decided to do after talking with farmers, food distributors, restaurateurs and consumers in the greater Washington, D.C., area. “To discover how much energy and resources are spent taking a seed from farm to table, we spoke with key members of the food system,” says Mike Ross, co-founder and CEO of Springfield, Va.–based Beanstalk Inc.
Like true engineers, Mike and his brother, Jack, had a solution in mind to reduce the time, effort and cost of growing and shipping fresh produce to wholesale customers: indoor vertical farms in close-by urban locations. And, of course, they did it with a robotic twist.
Most vertical farms—the new, high-tech offspring of traditional greenhouses—are challenged by space and systems engineering limitations, as well as a need for cutting-edge automation. But the Ross brothers used their engineering know-how and a ton of research to develop a custom, robotic, automated growing system to cultivate lettuce, spinach and the ubiquitous kale for a wide range of clients. In 2017, the brothers applied for and received seed funding from Y Combinator—a well-known accelerator for startup companies—to try out a variety of technologies and methodologies. Beanstalk completed the program in 2018, and leaped right in to apply what it learned to create its first vertical farm.
“We focused on building a true production-scale prototype and increasing the level of automation,” Ross says. “By the end of the program, we had successfully proven that we can grow profitably at wholesale pricing.”
Farm No. 1 took sprout in Springfield in a facility where growing towers soar 20 feet high to handle as many crops as possible in a relatively tight footprint. To be sure, it’s a far cry from the traditional homestead acreage we picture when we think of farming.
Between the glossy floors and high ceilings, racks and racks of plants—of numerous types and on numerous tiers—bask under bright simulated sunlight. Environmental control machinery and optimal levels of CO2 help spur on growth, as do automated irrigation systems that fill each level with nutrient-rich water—the bulk of which is captured and re-used—and balance it with just the right amount of fertilizer. If that weren’t enough, cloud computing enables Beanstalk to process, tune and implement control systems to maximize crop yields and consistency even from afar.
To optimize the company’s impact, the Ross brothers sell produce to large food service providers who cater to universities, corporate cafeterias and public institutions. Beanstalk’s efficiency can cut down shipping distances and costs for those customers.
“Don’t get me wrong, traditional outdoor farming is unbelievably productive,” Ross says. “What outdoor farmers are able to do with their land is astonishing. But they have to deal with volatility they don’t have much control over—weather, logistics issues, transportation and labor market shifts. We are purely augmenting that production. But we also see it as the future of farming.”
There is another industry-wide topic that brings competitors together in their pursuit of shared information: food safety. In recent years, it seems like there has been an uptick in scares such as listeria and e-coli contamination from produce that reaches grocery stores and restaurants. “Farming is a fairly competitive industry, so our peers might not share details about how their operations are run,” Ross says. “But they are very open at industry conferences when it comes to solving the big problems that need to be solved for the sake of our customers' health and well-being.”
Indoor farming, with its controlled environments, has built-in advantages when it comes to minimizing the risks of contamination, and the lessons learned are being widely shared. “We belong to an indoor farming coalition for food safety, and we share ideas for best practices, even though different farmers have their own approaches on running their operations,” Ross says.
Since indoor vertical farming is still in its infancy, Mike and his brother had little experience to draw upon when they dove into the industry from their original careers in software development. But Ross started his immersion into the industry with a lesson he learned at Tech: Start with a small experiment.
“When we came up with this idea and saw the promise of it a few years ago, we started off with small prototypes,” Ross says. “We talked to restaurateurs and looked specifically for software (control) problems that we could fix on our side. But we found most of the volatility came from the production and transport side.”
It’s no surprise that he drew upon the problem-solving skills he acquired at Tech while studying to be an aerospace engineer. He originally thought he might pursue a career in the Navy, but while he was working part-time at the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), his boss Gary Spinner told him to keep an open mind about business opportunities.
“Gary encouraged me to start a business,” Ross says. “That job fixing equipment and training people on how to use it made me think about a lot of the bigger challenges we face with energy and food—and how technology works into that picture,” he says.
Beanstalk has provided him an avenue to pursue those challenges. And it’s a promising field. The indoor farming industry has historically been composed largely of greenhouse crop production, but today vertical indoor farms make up a healthy 30 percent of the total field, according to a 2017 Agrilyst survey.
Today, Beanstalk has five employees but plans to expand and enter the Washington, D.C., market later this year.
“I haven’t really worked this hard since I was at Tech,” Ross says. “The engineer you become while you are there, the problem-solving methods and first principles of a ground-up approach have given us our vision to build better farms for urban environments
