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Shipping containers provide climate-control farming year round

STARTUP Freight Farms is using repurposed freight containers and LED lights to grow acres worth of produce in a fraction of the space, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Companies like Green Line Growers in South Boston are farming year-round in refrigerated shipping containers developed by Freight Farms. Inside the cavernous interior of a former Boston-area taxi depot, three gleaming reefer containers sit side by side.

Bone-chilling rain is falling outside, but inside the 320-square-foot boxes, it's a relatively balmy 63 degrees, and the humid air is heavy with the earthy smell of greens. Filling each box are 256 neat vertical towers of plants, bathed in a noonday-intense pink light.

There are more than 60 Freight Farms containers installed in 22 states and two Canadian provinces, in climates ranging from the long winters of Ontario to the sweltering heat of Texas.

In a development that surprised even the company's founders, the containers are increasingly making their way onto traditional farms for supplemental income outside the growing season.

Freight Farms has received US$5 million in funding to date and projects to sell 150 farms this year, at $80,000 each. Selling produce to consumers has proved difficult for many ag startups, but Freight Farms operates no commercial farms itself; instead, the company supplies the technological infrastructure and tools to grow.

The crops being cultivated here條ettuce, herbs and other leafy greens梐re not what we've come to expect from this kind of operation. But the company behind this agricultural innovation owes a large debt to America's cannabis, or marijuana, growers.

Freight Farms was founded in 2010, its existence predicated on a bet that LEDs would soon become efficient enough for farming as if the sun had disappeared 梬ithout breaking the bank.

Co-founder Brad McNamara puts it this way: "Traditional research said, yeah, LEDs are good, but the more important research was that they were improving at a Moore's-Law rate".

Moore's Law, used to describe the exponential increase in computing power over the past 50 years, can be applied to LEDs thanks in part to the needs 梐nd considerable resources梠f marijuana growers.

In addition to 128 LED strips, each "farm" has a water circulation system, eight gallon-size tanks of liquid fertiliser and a propane tank for producing supplemental CO2梐ll running on as little as 10 gallons of water and 80 kWh of energy per day.

Under the right conditions, a grower can go from seeds to sellable produce within six weeks. According to data pooled by the company, an average Freight Farms box can produce 48,568 marketable mini-heads of lettuce a year梩he growing power of two acres of farmland.