LATIMES.COM/FOOD THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019F5
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO —
At a nondescript gray building
about 10 miles south of the Mission
District, a team of a couple hun-
dred people is trying to make vege-
tables taste better.
This is the headquarters for
Plenty, a company in the business
of vertical agriculture — using
hydroponics (growing plants with-
out soil) to farm in an enclosed
space. The practice is a long-in-de-
velopment new frontier of farming
that is starting to get to a place of
technological efficiency that will al-
low it to scale commercially. In a
space the size of a basketball court,
the farm is growing kale, arugula,
bok choy, beet leaves, fennel and
mizuna.
At Plenty, the mission is to
make plants that taste so good,
you’ll want to eat them over every-
thing else.
Chief executive and co-founder
Matt Barnard, 47, claims that
Plenty not only uses 1% to 5% of the
water used to grow comparable
crops on a traditional farm but also
uses a fraction of the land — and
he’s doing it all in a 100% renewable
facility powered by a combination
of wind and solar energy.
After launching the South San
Francisco farm this summer, the
company has inked a deal to open a
second vertical farm, this time in
Compton. It will take just a few
months to get the 95,000-square-
foot facility up and running, but the
farm is not expected to bring pro-
duce to market until late 2020.
Once completed, Plenty will
supply produce to dozens of
Southern California restaurants,
including Nancy Silverton’s Oste-
ria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza, as
well as hundreds of grocery stores.
The farm will be the largest of its
kind in the Greater Los Angeles
area and one of what Plenty hopes
is at least 500 farms around the
world in densely populated urban
areas with 1 million or more people.
“By doing that, we increase ac-
cess and availability through high-
quality produce, change behaviors
and get people to eat fruits and
vegetables in lieu of snack food,”
Plenty spokeswoman Christina Ra
said.
Besides restaurants and gro-
cery stores, the company also
hopes to make inroads in local
schools. Plenty is in talks with
Compton schools to create a part-
nership that will bring the farm’s
produce and technology to kids in
the area.
The company declined to say
how much it will cost to build and
operate the new facility, but
Barnard said he plans to create
dozens of jobs by hiring locally.
“Compton has rich agricultural
roots and Plenty Farms is continu-
ing that tradition,” Compton May-
or Aja Brown said in a statement.
In the center of the San Fran-
cisco warehouse, the Plenty farm is
wrapped in a foil-like material that
reaches from the concrete floor to
the ceiling like an alien fortress. Gi-
ant dehumidifiers hum loudly on
the outskirts of the rooms.
Once the farm is running at full
capacity next year, Plenty claims it
will be able to grow enough pro-
duce for more than 100 grocery
stores. The growing capacity in
Compton will be even greater.
Visiting the farm requires hair
nets, beard nets, full jumpsuits,
booties, gloves and special glasses;
the vibe is less “American Gothic”
and more like a movie about a
world-ending virus.
The crown jewel of Plenty is the
growing room, where plush greens
sprout from tall vertical towers
that blend into one another like
rows of continuous living walls. Op-
posite the plants are glowing strips
of LED lights. Once the plants
spend a few days in the growing
room, the towers move along a
track out into a processing room. A
robotic arm turns the towers on
their side, slices off the produce,
then sends the greens to a room for
packaging.
People manage and sterilize the
machines, but no human hands ac-
tually touch the produce at any
point in the farming process.
“There’s no need to wash our
product,” Barnard said. “You know
those bags of lettuce that say triple
washed? They are washed in
bleach. We don’t think people
should have to eat pesticides or
bleach.”
Barnard, who grew up on a farm
in Wisconsin, sees vertical agricul-
ture as a way to address obesity,
drought and food shortage prob-
lems — along with eliminating the
need for your salad spinner. Ac-
cording to a 2018 USDA report, the
Earth will need almost 70% more
food, 30% more water and more
than 50% more energy production
by 2050.
In a conference room at the
farm, Barnard and Olivia Nahoum,
who is the senior product devel-
opment and sensory manager for
the company, have set out a tasting
of sorts. Using tweezers, Nahoum
places borage flower, pea herb, wa-
sabi flower, wasabi leaves and
purslane on a plate and instructs
me to try them.
Tasting the pea herbs, fairy-
sized green leaves attached to tini-
er stalks, is like biting into a raw
snap pea with a freshness and
earthiness likely better than the
real thing. Purslane tastes of an
ice-cold glass of sweet and sour
lemonade on a hot summer’s
day. Borage flowers, gorgeous sky-
blue blooms with white centers,
evoke a mojito, with pure sugar and
notes of fresh cucumber. The wa-
sabi flowers look innocent enough
but the delicate petals pack a pep-
pery punch. The wasabi arugula
leaf is the strongest of the bunch,
offering up a nose-tingling slap of
wasabi.
But the bulk of what Plenty
grows is not fancy herbs. I also
sampled baby kale that was soft
and sweet, an unbelievably pep-
pery arugula and a mixture ofgreen and purple bok choy that
made me think of baked potatoes.
Those greens have impressed
Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton,
who is on the board of the company
as a culinary advisor and collabo-
rator.
“I was so blown away,” Silverton
said of her visit to the farm. “The
idea that this not only can be done,
but I was so surprised by how good
everything tasted.”
Chef Dominique Crenn, who is
also on the Plenty board, uses a
purple butterfly herb that Plenty
grows to add a bit of tartness to her
black cod dish at her San Fran-
cisco restaurant Atelier Crenn.Growing ‘algorithm’
In order to tweak flavor profiles,
scientists adjust what Barnard
refers to as the light recipe of a
plant. When you’re outside, every-
thing is up to Mother Nature;
Barnard said the climate, soil and
overall growing environment “al-
gorithm” determine a plant’s fla-
vor. Inside, he and his team are ad-
justing the lights, air temperature
and humidity to coax the maxi-
mum amount of flavor from the
produce.
“For our kale, we can take the
flavor spectrum and move it from
bitter to sweet so that it’s more bal-
anced and easier to eat healthy
food,” Barnard said. “Now that we
have brought the farm inside, we
can control the things that control
flavor and change the recipe in or-
der to make plants that people
like.”
Plenty has a plant and flavor
science team in Wyoming that
tests seeds and varieties to figure
out which have the most flavor po-
tential. In the last year, the facility
tested 700 kinds of produce. Al-
though most of what Plenty pro-
duces are leafy greens, Barnard
said they are working on straw-berries as well.
It may sound like something
out of “Blade Runner,” but Chris
Dardick, lead scientist and plant
molecular biologist with the US-
DA’s Agricultural Research Serv-
ice, says this type of flavor manipu-
lation is feasible.
“Scientifically, I don’t know
how much data or evidence there is
yet on that, but from our own expe-
rience, fruit crops that develop
sugars and flavors are influenced
by environmental conditions like
the amount of sunlight,” Dardick
said. “Those properties can be ma-
nipulated if you have control over
lighting conditions and tempera-
ture.”
He is doing his own work with
vertical farming and sees immense
potential.
“One of the ways we [USDA
Agricultural Research Service] got
interested in vertical agriculture
was the idea being we could take an
orchard and bring it indoors,”
Dardick said. “We work on fruit
crops, particularly temperate trees
like peaches, plums, apples and
pears.”
Most of those fruit are challeng-
ing to farm indoors because of their
size, shape and need for dormancy.
The research Dardick is doing may
make it possible to grow these fruit
year-round, without the need to
wait between planting a seed and
the fruit flowering.
Plenty is not the only company
to attempt vertical agriculture.
There’s Bowery Farming and Farm
One in New York, Buckeye Fresh in
Ohio and Canadian Grocer in New
Jersey. NASA started testing crop
systems with shelves of hydro-
ponic systems at the Kennedy
Space Center in the late 1980s. The
scientists grew wheat, soy beans,
potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes and a
couple of attempts at rice in a con-
trolled chamber as a way to test avolume-efficient approach to farm-
ing in space.
Raymond M. Wheeler, who was
on the team that tested the crop
system in the ’80s, said they grew
the plants under high-pressure so-
dium lamps similar to the orange-
colored street lights on many city
blocks. The lights, he said, were far
from efficient, so Wheeler was en-
couraged by Plenty’s LED light sys-
tem, the company’s focus on flavor
and what that could mean for
growing plants in space.
“If someone can come up with a
very flavorful, very nutritious leafy
green or a range of types, that
would be perfect,” Wheeler said.
“You have to get people to eat on
space missions, so any way you
could kind of help that out by en-
hancing flavor, the texture, the col-
ors, all these things and the nutri-
ents, are all a good thing.”
Although the benefits of verti-
cal farming are generally touted as
positive, some critics point out
that the energy it takes to fuel a
hydroponic facility can be exces-
sive. According to Paul Zankowski,
a senior advisor at the USDA, it all
depends on a farm’s location.
“It all depends on where it is
grown and the energy factors of
that city,” he said.
Plenty is still working out what
will be grown at the Compton farm
and where it will be available. The
company is currently selling salad
boxes of greens for $4.99 at small re-
tailers in the Bay Area like Good
Eggs and Bi-Rite, and some of the
produce is available at restaurants
such as San Francisco robot bur-
ger joint Creator.
“We’re looking to compete with
the whole middle section of the
grocery store — all that dead stuff
with highly processed sugars and
lots of calories,” Barnard said. “We
want to compete straight up on fla-
vor.”Lush greens sprout from growing towers at Plenty, a San Francisco-based business out to revolutionize vertical agriculture.PlentyPlenty of
potential
A vertical farm
aims to take on
the snack aisle
with its produce
By Jenn Harris