A Vacant Lot In Wyoming Will Become One Of The World's First Vertical Farms | Food Production and Preservation | Forums

Will be interesting to see how this works and if it takes off

Jackson, Wyoming, is an unlikely place for urban farming: At an altitude over a mile high, with snow that can last until May, the growing season is sometimes only a couple of months long. It's also an expensive place to plant a garden, since an average vacant lot can cost well over $1 million.

But the town is about to become home to one of the only vertical farms in the world. On a thin slice of vacant land next to a parking lot, a startup called Vertical Harvest recently broke ground on a new three-story stack of greenhouses that will be filled with crops like microgreens and tomatoes.

"We're replacing food that was being grown in Mexico or California and shipped in," explains Penny McBride, one of the co-founders. "We feel like the community's really ready for a project like this. Everybody's so much more aware of the need to reduce transportation, and people like to know their farmer and where food's coming from."

The small plot of land is owned by the town, and the building that houses the farm will be owned by the town as well, as part of a partnership. The founders spent five years working with the city to fully vet the idea—from how well the business model can support itself to how the efficient the new building will be.

"One of the things the town of Jackson was concerned with was if we using more energy than if a tomatoes was trucked in here," says Nona Yehia, the architect of the vertical farm and one of the company's co-founders. Greenhouses do typically use a lot of energy, especially in a cold climate, but the math worked out, in part because of the farm's design.

more here http://www.fastcoexi.....ical-farms