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Shipping Container Farming and the Fait of Freight Farms · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hello, welcome back to Hydroponics Daily with me, Dr. Russell Sharp.
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  A couple of weeks ago, I talked about a number of high-profile vertical farm
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  companies that had gone bust, had gone bankrupt.
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  Well, in the lyrics of my son's latest favourite song, dun, dun,
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  dun, another one, bats the dust, yep, another vertical farm company has gone
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  bust, and this time it is Freight Farms in America.
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  So only in 2023 was Freight
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  Farms valued at 147 million dollars
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  and now it's gone bankrupt so what's gone wrong
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  so quickly for freight farms well as
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  the name suggested freight farms had one specialty and
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  that was cultivating crops in shipping
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  containers so freight farms and they were scaling aggressively from 2023 onwards
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  and rather than selling the produce they were selling the container farms as
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  like modules where you could put them next to a shop,
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  a restaurant, or a school, things like this.
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  Then they would have continued payments for the nutrients and seeds and things
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  like this going forward.
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  And they had at least 600 of these containers sold, and they were operating in over 40 countries.
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  So freight farms is a big name in hydroponics and controlled environment agriculture.
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  But crucially, they also supplied the software to run the grow rooms.
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  And with bankruptcy proceedings underway,
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  the software's gone down and lots of the orders have been unfulfilled and the
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  community of freight farm customers have had to come together and support each
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  other to actually keep their grow rooms running.
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  So there's not really much research journalism out there to say what actually
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  caused this company to go bust, but perhaps it's just running out of money,
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  running out of investment funds and not getting customers straight away.
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  So there are sector-wide challenges that have led to other customers going bankrupt as well.
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  Other companies such as high energy costs, however, they've come down recently as well.
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  The price of oil is really low. It's like $60 a barrel, isn't it, now at the moment?
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  I think it's really about difficulties of achieving the profitability at the scale.
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  Lettuce is ridiculously low. so profit
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  margin and leafy veg and so why would
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  somebody invest so much money in a highly complex shipping
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  container so shipping container growing is the
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  shipping container is the easy bit it's the it's the bits that go inside it
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  that it's difficult and also fitting everything in and maximizing production
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  so you can get these figures about how much you can produce per square meter
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  but they rely on everything working exactly as
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  it should be and all the process is going well and
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  obviously a sugar maintainer the what you
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  call it in america hvac we would call just call air conditioning units
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  and things like this if it's a very very hot positioning and
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  location then they're really going to struggle you can use tiered based trays
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  just like you do in in a large-scale warehouse vertical farm where it's like
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  either ebb and flood or nutrient film technique so large large trays either
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  side of the grow room or just one side of the ship a container.
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  However, Freight Farms was looking at sort of vertically aligned.
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  Grow them so the plants would you would harvest them very
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  easily rather than going into the tray almost like a wall like
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  a green wall of lettuce and then and the
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  lights coming in from the side it's a very interesting concept so
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  the figures on how much they said that the container farm
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  could actually grow so one container farm could harvest
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  nine more than 990 heads of lettuce every
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  week that's a strange figure you would think that you'd round
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  that up to a thousand but no two to six tons of production annually
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  so that's a lot of lettuce because you know it's a lot lot is a lot so it's
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  a lot of water going in as well but minimal water usage so they said they could
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  grow up to 13,000 plants using only five gallons of water per day 99.8 percent
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  less than traditional farming methods,
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  however there are a couple of issues with container farming and that's because
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  it's it's not small-scale hobby growing and it's not massive commercial production you sort of,
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  you're sort of trapped halfway in between the two and so if i was growing a
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  container farm i'd want a big area for sterilizing myself and my fellow workers
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  as we went in make sure there's no soil on our shoes making sure we're not bringing
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  in pest and disease an airlock in there so that any.
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  Flying insects or spider mites hanging around they can smell the
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  plants not trying to get in so they can be removed before
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  you go in and then it also you'd also need a
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  large fairly large area for post-harvest treatment so sterilizing the lettuce
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  if that's going to be you if you're going to be sterilizing it so a lot lot
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  of the time lettuce and leafy veg is chlorinated so you need a facility to do
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  that you're certainly going to need a facility for packing and removing any.
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  Unsightly leaves putting labels on the product and things
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  like this and that all takes space and time
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  if you were growing it for maybe if it was a school or
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  a restaurant you wouldn't really need to do that but if it was a supermarket or
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  for any other facility like a veg box type
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  scheme you would need to do something like
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  that so that would all need to be done
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  either in another group shipping container or somewhere else
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  because your shipping container is set up and optimized
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  for hydroponic growing as far as the
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  the nutrients and the technology it's all fairly similar to
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  vertical a standard vertical farming they're going
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  to use a computerized dosing system be circularity
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  system with pumps uv filters
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  maybe an ozone filter the LED lights will be standard they won't be as high
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  powered there'll just be more of them and and lower lower wattage and smaller
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  but lots of fans and just to get them in there and get the air moving still they're going
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  to need a lot of air circulation coming in so you're going to have to have inlet
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  and outlet filters on the.
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  Probably not an outlet filter. Yeah, you're probably still going to have an
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  outlet filter. I'd still stick an outlet filter on there just to stop any backflow
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  of any pests and disease coming in.
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  So if that filter went off, then to stop that.
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  The disadvantage of having it as a sort of restaurant-type shipping container
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  is that it doesn't look cool.
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  You see in London, there's a new restaurant that's just opened called The Orangery. Very expensive.
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  Like a bowl of porridge is nine quid or something like that, eight quid.
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  But it's got the hydroponic unit inside the restaurant which
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  looks flipping class whereas having a
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  shipping container outside your restaurant doesn't look great
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  does it you know what shipping containers look like it looks like you know
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  you're on a building site unless you can somehow have
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  like a webcam or or a window where customers can see into it and see the the
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  amazing sort of technology in there but it's that one of those things so you
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  know farming as a service hydroponics as a service they always say you know
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  that the lettuce you get from them is not,
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  necessarily value for money but people like the experience but
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  you know you could say that about an aquarium like my kids would
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  rather look at an aquarium than they would a hydroponic plant growth facility
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  even though their dad's a plant scientist so i'm always very skeptical of you
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  know you know companies saying that people will love the experience of seeing
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  the hydroponic systems there's lots of other things they'd like to see that
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  cost a lot less money than a full shipping container because these products are not cheap.
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  Plus, there's a lot of competition out there. There's a lot of plug-and-play
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  hydroponic companies that are looking to deliver ready-to-use,
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  off-the-back-of-a-lorry hydroponic systems.
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  Because there's a lot of engineers out there who like to develop systems like this.
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  It's a very cool thing to do, set up a shipping container hydroponic system.
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  Everyone thinks they can design the optimum 3D-printed widget and valve and things like this.
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  So there's no shortage of people who want to be hydroponic engineers.
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  So and you can see that you know it's very
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  the idea of setting up an engineering company to deliver this
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  it's probably quite cool so that's probably why there's
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  a lot of competition and there's no shortage of
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  people who want to invest in high-tech things and
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  this looks high-tech and you know growing in vertical vertical farms did attract
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  a lot of venture capital investment wall street city of london money because
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  of that and you know if you patent you can you can easily do a design patent
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  on a widget and a valve and then you've got a patent whereas if you.
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  Wanted to patent a plant or you wanted to patent a
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  fertilizer or a biostimulant it would take millions
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  of pounds and maybe 10 20 years to
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  do it but you know patents in
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  a widget a design patent is really easy and so
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  you can see why investors got attracted
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  to it because there was protection around it you know this was unique technology
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  despite the fact that it wasn't you know
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  it might not have been significantly better than what the opposition were.
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  The opponents the competition were developing but
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  yeah it's certainly bad news to have another hydroponic company go
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  bankrupt so i'm not reveling in it but it's all
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  part of you know businesses and companies come
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  out companies go bust and some of the people who were working for
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  freight farms i'm sure will set up other companies in
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  hydroponics a bit like when nokia went bust in finland and
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  about seven years later there's absolutely boom in
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  high-tech industry in finland with all these new companies
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  because all these people were were sat in nokia not
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  doing a great deal and then they all had big severance
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  pay and then they developed their own unique high-tech
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  company after that so hopefully it will just
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  mean we're through to the next cycle of hydroponic companies
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  be interesting to see what happens next and
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  hopefully with you know with less competition
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  the ones that survive will have more opportunity more market share and can make
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  a real go of it and have some real successes and profits so that's been hydroponics
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  daily for today shipping container growing and the the fate of freight farms
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  easier for me to say thank you very much for listening see you again tomorrow.