Plenty Richmond Farm in Chesterfield, Va., is getting a lot of attention these days, and for very good reason. It’s doing something that’s never been done in a place you might not expect — an industrial park warehouse.
Inside, you’ll see row after row of strawberries hanging from 30-foot towers suspended from the ceiling. While most vertical farms are made up of stacked horizontal systems, Plenty Richmond Farm is growing the produce on movable, vertical towers nearly two stories high.
Not only does it look futuristic, this innovative approach uses 97 percent less land and up to 90 percent less water than conventional farming, according to the San Francisco-based company. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze more than 10 million data points throughout a dozen rooms each day. With a patent-pending method, Plenty has even engineered the pollination process by evenly distributing airflow across the strawberry flowers — no bees necessary.
source: plenty.ag
