The Future of Everything
Strawberry Jam: Urban-Farming Startups Tackle a Problem Crop
If shipping-container farms are going to feed the world, their backers will have to find an economical way to grow the popular fruit indoors
By Mike Cherney
SYDNEY—In a rush to turn old factories and shipping containers into high-tech urban farms, entrepreneurs likeFrancisco Caffarenaare in a jam: Strawberries are proving surprisingly troublesome.
Growing crops indoors in cities can help feed the world’s expanding population—and appeal to affluent locavores willing to spend more on produce grown nearby. Meanwhile, extreme weather associated with climate change means new challenges for conventional farmers.
“Fifteen years from now, will there be such a thing for a producer of crops as a traditional, normal season?” saidJason Wargent,an associate professor of horticulture at Massey University in New Zealand and chief science officer for BioLumic, a startup researching ultraviolet-light treatments for plants. “You’re going to need every tool in the box.”
Indoor farming has attracted some big-name investors. Last year, investors including Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and funds tied to Amazon’sJeff Bezosand Google’sEric Schmidt pumped $200 million into an indoor-farming startup called Plenty.
Some startups have already successfully grown leafy greens indoors. Strawberries, with short growing cycles and relatively small plants compared with fruit-bearing trees, are in theory good candidates for urban farms. Strawberries are also very popular: Retail sales in the U.S. reach roughly $3 billion annually, according to the California Strawberry Commission.
But strawberry plants require a lot of light, which means higher electricity costs. And unlike leafy greens, they have flowers that need to be pollinated. On a traditional farm, bees and other insects do this for free. In a shipping container, the most reliable—yet expensive—pollinator is a human worker.
Solving the strawberry conundrum could be the difference between shipping-container farms being a niche business supplying local supermarkets and restaurants, or a more significant production source for a wider variety of crops. New techniques and technologies developed to help pollinate the strawberry flowers could be used for other fruits.
Mr. Caffarena, whose company, Sprout Stack, is already growing lettuce and herbs in a shipping container in Sydney, sees several possible strawberry solutions, including racks that could be lightly vibrated, knocking loose pollen and fans to blow the particles around. Other companies say workers could be cost-effective in certain locations. Still others think robots might be able to help.
In Paris, a startup called Agricool is using bumblebees for pollination in four containers it has growing strawberries.
“I find it therapeutic to hand brush pollen on a strawberry, but some people might go, ‘That’s really painful,’” saidJames Pateras,director at Modular Farms Australia, another company that wants to retrofit shipping containers to grow crops.
Plenty, whose website until recently highlighted lettuce, mint and strawberries as crops, declined to discuss its farming methods.
Heather Szymura in Glendale, Ariz., bought a container farm from a company called Freight Farms and is now growing strawberries in it. Photo: Heather Szymura
Some agricultural scientists are skeptical about container farms. Most strawberries in the U.S. are grown in California, where the climate along the coast offers ideal conditions: cool but typically not freezing nights, and warm days that usually aren’t too hot, saidGerald Holmes,the director of the Cal Poly Strawberry Center, part of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
If a startup can “produce strawberries in the dead of winter on a roof somewhere in Chicago or Toronto, now there’s a niche,” Mr. Holmes said. “If you just put it head-to-head against field production in coastal California, that’s going to be very difficult to show that you can do that economically at anywhere near the same price.”
In North Carolina, a company called Vertical Crop Consultants recently designed a container-farming system that it says could grow 7,000 pounds of strawberries annually.Tripp Williamson,the chief executive, says he recommends hand pollination by workers. The first units were recently sold to clients in Trinidad and the Cayman Islands, where strawberries are expensive in supermarkets.
At home, however, Mr. Williamson said strawberries, depending on the season, could cost as little as $2 per pound at retail. He said the container system—called a CropBox—wouldn’t make economic sense for strawberries unless the grower could get $5 or $6 a pound wholesale.
“You can grow anything in a CropBox,” he said. “You could put one or two banana trees in there and grow some bananas, but it’s going to be so expensive that you wouldn’t get any payback from it.”
In Glendale, Ariz.,Heather Szymurabought a shipping container from a company called Freight Farms in 2015—and about six months ago, she began growing small batches of strawberries. Some have turned out “really sweet and really juicy,” she said.
Pollination hasn’t been a problem, she said, but she has been handling the plants a lot and that could have helped spread the pollen. Air flow within the container could also be playing a role, she said. She hasn’t set a market price for the strawberries yet, but has sold other crops to chefs willing to pay more for quality and novelty.
“I have been able to baby these plants and pick off the dead leaves and make sure everything is looking the way it should,” she said of growing strawberries. “If I had a container full, I think it would take a lot of time.”
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