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Pennsylvania Ag News Headlines |
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Firm Building Vertical Farm in Pennsylvania Shuts Down
Pennsylvania Ag Connection - 06/01/2023
A New York company that was building the world’s largest vertical farm in northeastern Pennsylvania has announced that it’s going out of business.
Brooklyn-based Upward Farms, which had started constructing a $160 million high-rise indoor “aquaponics” farm near Wilkes-Barre, PA, said in a March 30 post on their website that it was closing its 10-year-old business, including two operating vertical farms in New York where nearly 80 employees were laid off.
Upward Farms’ customers included Whole Foods in New York City and tony restaurants in the Hamptons.
“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex. As we tackled challenges, new ones emerged,” the statement said.
The new vertical farm, which was to be inside a building with a footprint of about 6 acres, was being built in a new industrial park on mine-scarred land in Luzerne County. It will not be finished, said co-founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matthew La Rosa. The soil-less operation would have grown organic microgreens, fertilized by fish waste from hybrid striped bass raised on site.
The vertical farm, since it was announced in early 2022, had been hailed in media and trade journals as the future path for organic foods and the world’s most ecologically minded such facility.
Waste from the bass would have been filtered to produce organic fertilizer and beneficial bacteria to aid in the quality, nutritional value and yield of floating rafts of microgreens — such as spinach, bok choy, arugula and radishes. Under a proprietary technology, the genetics of bacteria cultures from the plants would have been used to optimize growing conditions, the company said.
Source: bayjournal.com
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