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A vertical farming company set to put a $120 million facility in Covington outlined in an interview Tuesday how it sprouted through a synthesis of American market intelligence and Dutch knowhow.
As Gov. Brian Kemp’s office announced that startup 80 Acres would hire 150 people at a new facility in Newton County east of Atlanta, the company’s co-founders were speaking about efforts to fix the U.S. food supply chain at GreenTech Amsterdam, one of the world’s premier horticulture tech conferences.
It was a fitting coincidence for an Ohio-based company with a Dutch subsidiary, Infinite Acres, providing its technology and building out its farms globally.
The announcement also comes two months after Atlanta hosted a Dutch Greenhouse Delta delegation focused on feeding the world through agtech innovation. Atlanta’s own Andrew Young keynoted a reception with the group at the Consulate General of the Netherlands.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Infinite Acres CEO Tisha Livingston told Global Atlanta that the company got its start about seven years ago when she and Mike Zelkind began looking to rectify a core problem with food in the U.S.: namely that is optimized for shipping rather than taste and nutrition, since it’s typically grown so far from those who eat it.
The duo also had first hand experience with the environmental challenges of the traditional model while working to remediate the environmental impact of pesticide runoff from a vegetable canning plant in Arkansas. (80 Acres’ products are completely pesticide free.)
“We realized through that process that our food supply is very fragile,” Ms. Livingston said. In conversations aimed at rebuilding trust with local growers, they could see the world was headed a mismatch between growing capacity and demand.
“We knew there was going to be a gap. We knew that the way we were currently farming was not going to work long-term,” she added.
A search for the most advanced vertical farming technology led them to the Netherlands and Japan, which was experimenting after the Fukushima nuclear disaster led to food shortages and reports of contamination.
Perhaps stereotypically, they found that the Dutch kept an intense focus on the horticultural side, while the Japanese had stellar engineering and processes. But neither pieced the whole business together in such a way that it could be scaled for the world-changing impact they desired.
“We came back realizing neither had quite figured it out six or seven years ago, and we needed to do our own research,” Ms. Livingston told Global Atlanta.
Pretty soon, they landed in the Netherlands once again, meeting with Meiny Prins, the CEO of Priva, a Dutch provider of greenhouse technology. The partners established a joint venture that was later joined by Ocado Group, a British online grocer that also provides technology to help stores with e-commerce fulfillment.
The first farm together didn’t function as well as they wanted it to, but they pressed on.
“When you have those situations where things aren’t working well, you can walk away from one another or you can decide that you want to figure it out together. We decided to figure it out together,” Ms. Livingston said.
Vertical farming isn’t new, but Ms. Livingston said one has to look at the whole value chain than just the technology itself, which is why it made sense for the partners to pool their intellectual property and knowhow.
“It’s not only the technology of growing — for airflow, lighting, dehumidification and irrigation. It’s what you’re going to do before you put the plant in the grow room and what you’re going to do with it afterward,” she said.
Now Infinite Acres develops farms for 80 Acres, including its eight current U.S. farms, the largest of which is in Hamilton, Ohio. Others are in the works across the world.
The Georgia facility will produce four times as much food as the Hamilton location, from leafy greens to tomatoes and eventually, perhaps cucumbers and strawberries. The company says its farms use 95 percent less water than a traditional farm while putting out 300 times more produce per square foot.
Mr. Zelkind, the 80 Acres co-founder and CEO, said Georgia seemed to be underserved in a variety of produce items, and the company was pulled into the state through demand from retail partners, its growing local consumer base, logistical advantages and other factors including support from state and local leaders.
After 30 years working in the food sector, including stints in private-equity, Mr. Zelkind said 80 Acres is now looking to redress some of the structures he personally helped entrench earlier in his career.
He frames 80 Acres and vertical farming in general as a radical rethinking of the food map in the U.S., launched in earnest at a time of rising environmental challenges and as supply-chain resiliency has been brought into sharp focus by the pandemic.
“This was a tremendous opportunity to do something meaningful and apply all our successes and failures to a completely new industry that requires tremendous innovation,” Mr. Zeskind told Global Atlanta. “When you do something radically different, if you do it right, it becomes obvious, ubiquitous and everybody thinks, ‘Whoa, we should have been doing this all along.’”
By focusing on the “unit economics” of its produce, 80 Acres’ proven technology — an automated symphony of lighting, sensors, watering systems and robots that create various “micro-climates” and “grow zones” under one roof — will make produce affordable and accessible for Georgians, regardless of income or neighborhood, he said.
“Every day when we go home we feel like we did something really important,” Mr. Zelkind said.
Pat Wilson, commissioner at the Georgia Department of Economic Development, said in a statement that 80 Acres shows Georgia’s business advantages and the strength of its innovation ecosystem, exemplified by the Center of Innovation for Agricultural Technology, which is involved in the project.
“Vertical farming technology uses cutting-edge techniques to better manage land and resources, increase crop yields, and reliably produce a diverse selection of crops year-round. Georgia’s rich farming history, our innovative AgTech ecosystem, and our strategic geographic location ensures 80 Acres Farms will find all the support it needs to flourish in Georgia,” he said.
80 Acres has raised a total of $250 million in capital across four investment rounds, including a $160 million series B in August 2021, according to Crunchbase.
This isn’t the first vertical farming investment announced in Georgia: Bowery Farms, which counts 800 retailers among its leafy greens customers, said in January it would put a new facility in Henry County and hire 100 people.
Learn more about 80 Acres here and Infinite Acres here.
See a video with Mr. Zelkind below:
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