Same day, hydroponic harvest in Yardley to market
Paul
Lightfoot, marathon runner and local food zealot, is determined to
change the way highly perishable, expensive-to-ship produce is grown and
distributed to supermarkets in the Northeast and other parts of the
nation.
Starting in Yardley.As CEO of BrightFarms Inc., a big-picture company with a hyper-local focus, Lightfoot wants to "create beautiful local produce, near grocery retailers, that's thousands of miles fresher, and do it with the same food safety and year-round commercial volume as a large, centralized supplier might have been doing from a huge facility in California.
"Supermarkets have big appetites for local foods right now. They just don't know how to do it," says Lightfoot, 43, who formerly worked as a Wall Street lawyer and CEO of companies that improved productivity at retail distribution centers and provided information technology to restaurants.
But as an elite athlete who does most of his family's food-shopping and cooking, Lightfoot says he's come "to really care about where my food comes from."
On a leased, 1.2-acre sliver of the 234-acre Patterson Farm along Yardley-Newtown Road, BrightFarms has opened a $2 million, 56,000-square-foot greenhouse. Inside, Chris Williams, a 27-year-old farmer from Vermont, is teaming up with seven workers to hydroponically grow greens, salad lettuces, and tomatoes for all four McCaffrey Markets in the Yardley area and two of A&P's SuperFresh supermarkets in Philadelphia's Bella Vista and Northern Liberties neighborhoods.
BrightFarms has contracts with family-owned markets and supermarket chains that will gross $70 million over the next 10 years. New greenhouses are under construction or will soon be built in Brooklyn (SuperFresh), Oklahoma City (Homeland Stores), St. Paul (Cub Foods), and St. Louis (Schnucks). Lightfoot is negotiating with prospective market partners in Kansas City; Washington, D.C.; and Indianapolis.
In the coming months, A&P says it will start selling BrightFarms produce in its Food Emporium, Pathmark, and A&P stores in the Philadelphia area. And once the Brooklyn greenhouse opens, more A&P stores in the New York area will be included.
"Why wouldn't you want to get something that's grown today and delivered in your stores tomorrow, knowing that it's grown locally and maybe your neighbor works in the greenhouse? It's brilliant," says Elaine McGrath, who buys packaged salads for A&P-owned stores.
As for Williams, the on-site farmer, he's tending "a couple hundred thousand" seedlings of lettuce, kale, mustard, pac choi, and other greens in the Yardley greenhouse. He's also got 3,000 hybrid tomato plants - small grape-size (Sweet Telle), midsize (Endeavor), and beefsteak (Torero).
Williams spent seven years managing a large hydroponic operation in Vermont before joining BrightFarms. "This is what the market is asking for," he says.
The high-yield hybrid tomato tops have been grafted onto Maxifort rootstock, known for vigor and disease resistance, to produce plants that could easily top out at 30 feet. They're wired for support, making it possible to lower them to ladder height for hand-harvesting.
The lettuces and greens - competitively priced, to start, at $2.99 for a 5-ounce clamshell, eventually to go to $3.99 - are already in the McCaffrey and SuperFresh markets. So are the grape tomatoes, at $3.99 a pint.
The goal is to deliver the vegetables the day they're picked.
Because the growing is done indoors, without soil, temperature, water and nutrients can be tightly controlled. About 500,000 pounds of produce can be grown over a full year.
Being soilless, the operation cannot technically be called organic. But Williams says he follows Integrated Pest Management guidelines, which are similar to organic - except that IMP permits synthetic pesticides to be used as a last resort.
"But I'd rather pull the crop out than spray," he says.
Compared with field agriculture, Williams estimates the greenhouse uses 4 percent of the water for tomatoes, 14 percent of the water for greens, and about 10 percent of the space. There is no agricultural runoff.
Still, not everyone is happy about BrightFarms.
Donna Doan, president of the Patterson Farm Preservation Group, believes the farm property, which is owned by Lower Makefield Township, should be maintained as traditional agricultural land and that because BrightFarms is growing hydroponically, the greenhouse could - and should - have been built on a paved surface or at another location.
"We're not opposed to what they're doing. We're just opposed to taking farmland," says Doan, whose grandfather's farm was one of two that became the Patterson tract.
Lightfoot insists BrightFarms treads lightly on a "very, very tiny percentage" of the land. "We're essentially a more productive piece of a farm on a larger farm. We love the legacy of Patterson Farm," he says.
But like field agriculture, the greenhouse method is not bulletproof.
"Just because it's in a greenhouse doesn't mean it isn't subject to exterior factors. You can get a fungus or mold or some kind of infection that goes through a greenhouse like wildfire," says John Vena, president of John Vena Inc., in Southwest Philadelphia, a fourth-generation wholesale supplier of high-end produce to restaurants, caterers, hospitals and other food-service clients.
Vena buys hydroponic greenhouse peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, and tomatoes from other vendors, but he, too, has contracted with BrightFarms - for unusual varieties that Williams is still testing. Vena says it is these long-term contracts that distinguish BrightFarms from other distributors.
BrightFarms offers a local greenhouse growing fresh produce for local markets on a predictable schedule, versus "somebody who's just growing their business but not necessarily knowing who their customers are going to be," Vena says.
And what about taste? Can these greenhouse products compete with summer's bounty?
Lettuces, most definitely - but what about tomatoes?
Vena argues that consumers fuss more about tomatoes than any other crop.
"We've just raised the bar to such a point that people say, 'I want tomatoes in winter that look great, taste amazing, and are grown by a farmer down the street,' " he says.
Will BrightFarms tomatoes cut it? In Yardley, consumers now get to decide.
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