Strawberries in the sky: How AI is changing the way farmers grow food year-round
Plenty Richmond Farm in Chesterfield, Va., is getting a lot of attention these days, and for very good reason. It's doing something that's never been done in a place you might not expect — an industrial park warehouse.
Inside, you'll see row after row of strawberries hanging from 30-foot towers suspended from the ceiling. While most vertical farms are made up of stacked horizontal systems, Plenty Richmond Farm is growing the produce on movable, vertical towers nearly two stories high.
Not only does it look futuristic, this innovative approach uses 97 percent less land and up to 90 percent less water than conventional farming, according to the San Francisco-based company. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze more than 10 million data points throughout a dozen rooms each day. With a patent-pending method, Plenty has even engineered the pollination process by evenly distributing airflow across the strawberry flowers — no bees necessary.
'The Plenty Richmond Farm is the culmination of 200 research trials over the past six years to perfect growing strawberries with consistent peak-season flavor indoors year-round,' Arama Kukutai, Plenty's CEO, said in a press release.
The farm opened in September 2024 and is touted the first farm in the world to grow indoor, vertically farmed berries at scale. The goal: to produce more than 4 million pounds of strawberries annually — even in the middle of winter — on a piece of land that is a fraction of the size of Central Park.
The first batch of strawberries, grown exclusively for Driscoll's, was scheduled for delivery earlier this year.
Beyond Earth
Vertical farming even has applications in space. The USDA Agriculture Research Service (ARS) is working with NASA to develop growing systems suitable for spaceflight applications since food production in zero-gravity or low-gravity is key for long-term space exploration.
'Nutrients in prepackaged foods degrade over time, and thus only have an estimated shelflife of approximately 18 months,' says James Altland, a research leader for USDA ARS.
'Because there is very little room to grow crops on space stations or within future extraterrestrial ground-based installations, optimizing vertical farming systems will be critical to ensure astronaut health under long duration missions,' says USDA ARS molecular biologist Chris Dardick.
As part of a long-term cooperative agreement between USDA and The Walt Disney Company, biotechnology is being used to adapt crops such as plums and apples for production in NASA plant-growth systems. It's all being done at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center in The Land Pavilion.
Future of vertical farming
There's a lengthy list of benefits when it comes to vertical farming, including extended growing seasons, water conservation, and expanded local and regional food options. And vertical farms can be built in places with extreme weather, areas that do not have quality soil and urban settings.
Plenty, for example, has operated a research center in Laramie, Wyo., for nearly a decade. Last September, the company received $20 million — the largest economic development grant ever given by the state — to expand its research and development footprint and build the world's largest vertical farming research center.
Plenty also has plans to build five farms in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates — where 80 percent of the land is desert — over the next five years to grow peak-season-flavor strawberries.
Significant obstacles to the long-term profitability of vertical farming remain, however. 'Energy costs are the primary cost to vertical farms, so improvements in energy efficiency with lighting and dehumidification are needed for long-term success,' Dardick says. 'In addition, success of vertical farms will depend on maximizing crop yields and quality.'
And many crops are not suited to vertical farming, because they are too large, because of seasonality or because of cold dormancy before they flower.
'These crops can be bred to be smaller (and) produce continuously but this will take considerable research investments, similar to what has been done to maximize conventional farming systems,' Dardick says.
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