Lettuce grows on walls at this Long Island vertical farming operation

Ryan McGann’s quest for the perfect salad green starts at the end of his family’s yard in East Setauket, past the basketball hoop and dry-docked fishing boat, where he’s parked giant shipping containers that are sealed off from the sun and wind.

Inside, sweet crisp lettuce and romaine sprout sideways from floating walls, their heads stacked floor to ceiling like shaggy rows of library books. A constellation of LED lights shimmers across the new leaves, casting everything in a magenta glow while a network of hoses delivers a mixture of water and nutrients to every plant.

This is “vertical” farming, a radical departure from centuries of traditional agriculture that recently has gained a heap of attention — and investment — as communities look for new ways to feed an ever-growing population. While some experts see it as a fad that will flame out over time, McGann sees a way to grow vegetables all year, with little water, right next to the consumer.

His three-year-old operation, which is already profitable, is set to expand next year to an 11,000-square-foot facility in Calverton that can produce 1 million heads of lettuce annually.

“This is an industry that’s ripe for innovation, ripe for change,” McGann, 39, said.

The new high-tech farm, called CubicAcres, will update a previous owner’s vegetable patch with a series of 30-foot-tall “growth towers." Like McGann’s test site in East Setauket, its lettuce will sprout in a sealed environment without pesticides. The plants will be fed with an irrigation system that cuts water usage by recycling and collecting moisture in the air. They’ll grow under energy efficient red and blue LED lights, which have been calibrated to trigger photosynthesis. 

The entire operation can be monitored by cameras and sensors, minimizing the contact between farmer and crop.

Financing to expand

CubicAcres expects to break ground before the end of this year and bring its first yields to market before the end of June. McGann plans to hire about eight to 10 people as he ramps up production, expanding his workforce to as many as 40 employees as the Calverton site grows.  

The expansion will be funded with $3.7 million in low-interest loans from Intelligent Growth Solutions, a 10-year-old Scottish agriculture technology firm that also provided the specifications for the new facility.

North America has become a major global player in vertical farming, said Steve Gereb, who leads IGS’s operation in the United States. and Canada. Gereb noted that most of the salad greens in the United States are currently grown in California’s Salinas Valley, an area that has struggled to meet demand in recent years because of such challenges as viruses and flooding. 

“We don’t think that was an anomaly,” Gereb said of the recent natural disasters that ruined lettuce supplies and boosted prices. “We’re going to need other mechanisms to stave off food insecurity.”

He's not alone. The global market for vertical farming is expected to triple over the next five years to $15.3 billion in 2028 from $5.1 billion this year, according to the analysis firm Research and Markets.  

That said, the rush to rethink American farming hasn’t come without growing pains. Planted Detroit, a Michigan-based vertical farmer, shut down in August, citing financial struggles due to high costs of electricity and labor. Three others — Kalera  in Florida, AeroFarms in New Jersey and AppHarvest in Kentucky — recently filed for bankruptcy protection.

Managing costs, challenges

Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist and pesticide expert based in Port Orchard, Washington, said he’s skeptical about vertical farming’s ability to be successful long term.

“There’s a place for all of these alternatives,” Benbrook said in a telephone interview. “Unfortunately, once investment capital sees an opportunity, so much money flows in so fast, that what could be a positive idea could become a real negative because there’s so much eagerness to accelerate the development of a new industry before some of the problems have been honestly defined.”

Vertical farms must figure out how to manage the enormous energy requirements that come from powering so many LEDs, Benbrook said. Their facilities also need to be built to withstand the extra weight of water filtration and delivery systems, which can be expensive. And pathogens inevitably find their way into many of these production sites, gobbling up entire harvests that haven’t been treated with pesticides.

So far, Benbrook said, the only places where vertical farms really pencil out to make financial sense are those located near major metropolitan areas, where there’s a high demand for consistent, high-quality produce and consumers who are willing to pay for it.

Luckily for CubicAcres, Long Island is just one of those places.

'How hard could this be?'

McGann, a mechanical engineer by training, grew up in Shoreham with only a consumer’s interest in the vegetable fields and orchards that stitch together the eastern half of Long Island.

“I never thought I’d be a farmer,” he said. “I could barely grow grass in my yard.”

He purchased his 1.2-acre property in East Setauket as a real estate investment in 2017, thinking he would generate some passive income by renting houses to students at nearby Stony Brook University. McGann didn’t think about adding a farm until a few years later, after chatting with a friend who had started one in Washington.

“At first, I thought, how hard could this be?” McGann said. “It’s actually pretty complex.”

For about a year, McGann picked his way through dozens of lettuce varieties.

“I experimented with them: which yielded the best flavor, the best shape, which grew the best,” he said. “And then there’s other variables, like what grew best under what temperatures, nutrient profiles, (carbon dioxide) levels — each of those can change the flavor of the lettuce.”

He settled on a variety of romaine with hearty, dark-green leaves that are infused with so much sap they almost snap when you bite into them.

McGann now sells lettuce to more than a dozen restaurants in the area, charging chefs about 15% to 22% more on average than the price of traditional lettuce. His new facility will allow him to expand his customer base farther into the Hamptons and Manhattan.  

Besides the taste, McGann said, restaurants buy from him because when it comes to salads, they know there’s no beating the local stuff.

“You give them a head of lettuce that was harvested two-and-a-half weeks earlier and transported across the U.S., compared with lettuce that’s grown 15 minutes away, you can immediately taste the difference,” McGann said.