Weed, makeup new growth areas for vertical farms
Supercharged by the need to secure local supplies of fresh vegetables during the pandemic, some vertical farms are now branching out into other high-margin areas such as medical cannabis, health supplements and cosmetics.
South Korean startup Farm 8 is among a proliferation of indoor urban growers that saw sales jump during COVID-19. It’s looking to increase sales by almost 50% to 90 billion won ($79 million) this year, partly by boosting production of medical and cosmetic-based plants such as ginseng, centella asiatica and artemisia campestris, CEO Kang Dae Hyun said. In August, the company joined the country’s first regulation-free zone for medical cannabis, growing and processing hemp for cannabidiol (CBD).
“There’s massive demand for medical cannabis and the market’s growing rapidly,” Kang said in an interview. “Most of our production is dedicated to salad greens at the moment, but ultimately we’ll be ramping up production of cosmetic and medical-based plants to maximize profit.”
Other vertical farms are also using the technology to meet rising demand for stringent quality control in medical and cosmetic applications, such as Denmark’s International Cosmetics Science Centre, Poland’s Vertigo Farms and Californiabased MedMen Enterprises.
Farm 8 currently grows about 1.2 tons of salad greens per day on less than an acre (0.5 hectare) of land, spread across locations in three cities in South Korea, including in a busy subway station in South Korea’s capital. It’s one of the top local lettuce producers for fast-food chains including Subway, Burger King and KFC. Sales rose 30% last year.
That’s the traditional market for vertical farms — guaranteed delivery of quality controlled fresh produce that needs to reach the consumer quickly regardless of weather or season. Those advantages were underlined as pandemic supply disruptions and unreliable harvests pushed global food prices to a six-year high in February.
“You need the right amount of everything from water to light, and the weather has to be perfect, which is increasingly hard to predict,” said Kang. “We started as a traditional farming company 16 years ago, but we’ve learned to incorporate technology because we needed to protect ourselves from the changing climate.”
Vertical farming uses as much as 90% less water and reduces emissions caused by plowing fields, weeding, harvesting and transportation, but uses much more energy than traditional methods.