Greenhouse Farming Advantages

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

While traditional outdoor farming still produces the vast majority of our food, controlled environment methods of agriculture like greenhouses and vertical farming have expanded in the last decade. After working in vertical farming for years, Casey Call is focusing on strawberry production in greenhouses with his young company, Zordi.

Call... "Economically, I see greenhouses as a faster route to enabling some of this production near city centers. The CAPEX part of it is a whole different world, right? Like greenhouses have the advantage of using the sun, right? And in an indoor farm, you have to supply every bit of energy that goes into that plant. So that's, that's the huge difference, right. So, you know, there's advantages to growing completely indoors and we can debate those, but I think that there are also huge advantages economically. Time-wise, capex-wise, impact-wise. We can make decisions about variety selection, about timing of crop, about what expectation we're setting for the consumer at certain times of the year. And if you look at those factors and you pencil out a lot of that, you know the amount of money that you need to invest to build X amount of square feet for output of a vertical farm compared to a greenhouse or a hoop house, it's two different orders of magnitude."

That’s sixth-generation farmer turned strawberry startup entrepreneur, Casey Call.