Please tell us about the Bowery facility. How large an area
does it cover and what do you grow there?
While we don’t share information about size or output,
we’re expanding quickly. Our next farm, which opens
this summer, will produce 30 times more than our current
operation. Bowery operates large-scale, commercial indoor
farms that grow leafy greens and herbs, harvested and
delivered locally within a day.
How many people are currently needed to run
the farm in Kearny?
We currently have 38 people (and counting) working
at Bowery, ranging from modern farmers to engineers,
software developers, and sales representatives.
Do you clone or is your food grown purely from seed,
and what’s the turnaround time from seed to harvest?
Bowery produce is grown from non-GMO seeds that are
selected for flavor and quality. Not only do we grow more
than twice as fast as the field in many cases, but because
we grow indoors, year-round, we also grow more crop
cycles per year and are more than 100 times more produc-
tive per square foot of land than traditional agriculture.
How about water usage, is the water cleaned and reused?
Our indoor growing methods save 95-plus per cent of water
over traditional farming because we use an automated
irrigation system that can measure and maintain optimal
levels of water to support plant growth. This ensures that we
give our plants what they need and nothing more, and we
can recycle the water that’s left over.
Do you intend to expand the menu there to include melons,
tomatoes, potatoes, and other crops?
Right now, we’re focused on delivering the highest quality
and best tasting leafy greens possible, but we’ve already
started experimenting with other types of produce and
plan to expand our offerings in the near future. Because
we grow indoors and are unaffected by seasonality, we’re
able to test many different types of crops that are normally
tricky to grow in the northeast.
As the produce is continuously monitored by an array
of watchdog sensors, would you say your farm is an
amalgamation of an Internet of Things platform, machine
to machine, and vertical farming?
BoweryOS, our proprietary technology system, functions as
the brain of the farm, monitoring plants and the variables
that drive their growth 24/7, in addition to serving as a
workflow management system. BoweryOS can automatically
adjust environmental conditions to optimize plant growth,
quality, yield, and flavor, while utilizing an extensive
network of sensors and cameras to collect millions of data
points in real-time. By capturing large amounts of data at
each step, BoweryOS can constantly iterate on each environ-
mental input in order to provide all crops with exactly what
they need to thrive. For example, if BoweryOS detects signs
of stress in a crop based on images from its vision system, it
can automatically reduce the light that the crop receives in
order to return the plant to optimal growth and quality.
60
Maximum Yield
“
Bowery produce
is grown from
non-GMO
seeds that are
selected for
FLAVOR AND
QUALITY.