Among the more disturbing aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic involved food costs and supplies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported a 2.6% increase in food prices nationwide from March to April, marking the largest monthly increase in 46 years. These increases have been fueled by disruptions in the supply chain due to worker illnesses in processing plants.
For restaurants and food retailers, not being able to access materials or being charged higher-than-normal exacerbates an already acute problem of trying to maintain revenue streams during the pandemic.
However, a pair of regional businesses have begun using agricultural technology from the Israeli company Vertical Field that takes the farm-to-table concept and turns it into a container-to-table approach.
“The way it works is that we take a container, just the standard shipping container,” explained Sam Miner, Vertical Field”™s U.S. launch manager.
“And the main thing that we do is we put these modules on the wall that have irrigation lines behind it. We simply fill those modules with soil and we put in the right lighting equipment. And once you put plants in there, they just grow fairly simple.”
Vertical Field launched in Israel in 2006 as an agricultural supply solution for the nation”™s urban markets. Miner stated the firm began as a “green wall company” that took the horizontal aspect of rooftop gardens and switched it on its side.
The company now has 400 projects around the world, including a massive installation in Vietnam that Miner described as being “tremendous, like a football field.”
This spring, Vertical Field made its way into the U.S. market through a pair of Hudson Valley installations. John Lekic, chef and owner of Poughkeepsie”™s Farmers & Chefs restaurant, learned about the technology at a Culinary Institute of America symposium in late 2019 and was intrigued about operating his own food source.
“We were planning to bring in the container in March and we actually brought in a container days after the emergency thing was declared in New York,” he said. “It was a perfect timing. Ten days later, we planted our first crop, mostly salad greens, and in the middle of May we already had to harvest. We are going to have a third one this week.”
Lekic praised the technology for allowing several harvests per week, noting the ability to “harvest them the day of serving.” He also praised the user-friendly aspect of the 20-foot containers.
“It”™s super easy to maintain,” he said. “Once the container is set up and the mechanism is in place, you have an app that does the irrigation and controls the temperature and the humidity. It”™s not really complicated ”” after you do it once or twice, the planting and everything else becomes really easy to maintain. It does not require a lot of time.”
Lekic is now growing herbs and leafy vegetables in the containers, adding “it”™s still a playground for us.”
Another Hudson Valley business that has Vertical Field”™s technology in place is the Evergreen kosher supermarket in Monsey, which installed its containers at the end of May. Menachem Lubinsky, president of Brooklyn-based Lubicom Business Consulting and marketing director for Evergreen, praised the product for creating a speedy supply of produce.
“If something takes normally three months to grow, the technology can accelerate that to three weeks,” he said. “A restaurant or a supermarket can be in control of their supply.”
Lubinsky said he reached out to Vertical Field following news reports during the pandemic of truckers not being able to deliver goods and farms destroying crops because they suddenly had no outlets for selling. Besides selling the harvested crops, Evergreen is planning to make the containers a visitors”™ attraction.
“The customer will be able to see the process of how it grows, because one of the walls of the container is glass,” he said. “It”™s kind of like an educational experience just for a family to go over to see how this whole process grows. And there”™s a very large kosher constituency there who are concerned about consuming insects. This eliminates that concern because of the way it grows ”” it is insect-free.”
Lubinsky said that Vertical Field is planning to build on its technology to accommodate the growing of a wider variety of items, including strawberries and vegetables.
