Wander through the labyrinthine tunnels twenty feet beneath downtown Houston, and the past practically oozes from the walls. Office workers walk over pink-and-green speckled tiles. Steve Winwood’s eighties banger “Valerie” plays over a sound system. But next to the Smoothie King and across from a restaurant called Pastabilities that reeks of marinara, a door to a well-lit space displays a potential glimpse of the future.
Bart Womack, a former nightclub owner and music event entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of Eden Grow Systems. Inside his showroom, a gardener tends to three carts, each about the size of an office desk, from which a couple of dozen golden and purple flowers grow out of trays connected to the sides of the cart. Rather than extend into soil, the plants’ roots dangle over nozzles sitting directly below the tray, which spray a nutrient-rich mist for about two minutes every hour. Overhead, LED lights take the place of the sun, flicking on and off via a timer.
This growing technique is known as vertical farming because trays of plants can be stacked on top of each other, maximizing limited space. The flowers in Womack’s showroom, intended for use in salads or craft cocktails, would require a few months to grow in a field. Here they’re ready for harvest after four to five weeks.
Eden Grow aims to sell carts like these—which it calls grow towers—to businesses that want to cultivate their own fruit and vegetable supplies. The carts, which cost about $5,000 each, could be placed just about anywhere, which is the point that Eden Grow is trying to make with its underground showroom. It also grows crops above the tunnels, on a floor in the historic Niels Esperson Building.
The company’s grander ambition is to decentralize agriculture, bringing the ability to grow lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, raspberries, strawberries, and more to a family’s basement, a restaurant’s kitchen, or the concrete-paved center of America’s fourth-largest city. “Our goal is to leverage these next-generation farming technologies and make them completely ubiquitous,” Womack said.
Vertical farming is taking an increasingly larger role in American agriculture, from outfits like Eden Grow to companies growing produce with this method on a massive scale. Texans who buy romaine lettuce from the brand Robinson Fresh at Walmart, for instance, are often getting greens harvested from a vertical farming facility in Cleburne operated by Eden Green Technology (not affiliated with Eden Grow). And Revol Greens, a Minnesota-based company with a vertical farm in Temple, sells lettuce at H-E-B and Sprouts.
The benefits of vertical farming include year-round harvests, faster growing, more productive yields, and pesticide-free crops that require about 90 percent less water than those grown in the field. Such facilities can also be located near or within cities, reducing the waste and carbon emissions from shipping crops long distances. But vertical farming also requires an immense amount of energy to power its LED lights, negating some of the environmental benefits.
Still, as climate change makes the state hotter and drier and global supply chains appear far less reliable following the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the future sustainability of Texas may require much more of this sort of controlled-environment agriculture.
Wide-scale commercial vertical farming has only come to Texas in the last few years, but much of the technology underpinning the industry was tested in the state decades ago by NASA. Starting in the late seventies at Johnson Space Center outside Houston, as well as the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency researched self-sustaining ecosystems. Plants could provide sustenance to astronauts on long voyages while also absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. “There was a real look at if we’re going to become an interplanetary species and begin to live and work in space or on the moon or Mars, we’re gonna have to feed ourselves and stay alive,” said Gary Stutte, a former NASA plant scientist.
Johnson Space Center housed two plant growth chambers in a facility sealed off from the surrounding atmosphere. NASA harvested crops there including lettuce, potatoes, soybeans, and wheat by soaking the roots in a nutrient-rich liquid—what’s known as hydroponic farming—or spraying them with a nutrient-rich mist—aeroponic farming. Stutte says the research helped demonstrate the viability of growing crops under LED lights in inhospitable locations.
In 2017, Womack, who doesn’t have a scientific background, got concerned about a potential global food crisis and wanted to leave a legacy “more impactful” than the entertainment business that he was working in. He launched Eden Grow after studying NASA’s research on vertical farming, and he eventually hired Stutte and Marshall Porterfield, another former NASA plant scientist, in advisory roles to help develop the company’s technology. “I’ve always felt like these are technologies that we need for environmental sustainability of civilization on the earth,” said Porterfield, who’s also an agricultural and biological engineering professor at Purdue University, in Indiana.
Texas agriculture has suffered because of drier weather and supply chain disruptions in recent years. The infamous 2011 Texas drought caused about $3.5 billion in losses to producers of cotton, corn, sorghum, and wheat. The 2022 drought wiped out 74 percent of the Texas cotton crop. During the COVID-19 pandemic, farmers throughout the U.S. faced labor shortages, leading to a decline in crops and produce on grocery store shelves. The COVID problems coincided with a pronounced increase in indoor farming. According to Pitchbook, a website that compiles venture capital data, indoor farming start-ups received about $2 billion in funding in 2022, up from $929 million in 2020 and less than $500 million in 2019.
Indoor farming has been a major industry in European countries, such as the Netherlands, for decades. But most of those efforts on the continent have involved crops grown in greenhouses, which offer climate-controlled conditions while still benefiting from sunlight. Greenhouses also require sizable acreage, making them difficult to build within big cities.
The industry’s initial growth in the U.S. has largely occurred in the cooler climates of the Midwest and Northeast, with start-ups building both greenhouses and vertical farms. Between 60 to 70 percent of the country’s indoor farms specialize in tomatoes, potatoes, or lettuce, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, though most big-time vertical farm start-ups have focused on lettuce because it’s easy and quick to grow, making it more financially feasible than fruiting plants.
Many vertical farms rely almost entirely on artificial lighting. According to one 2021 industry report, the median vertical farm uses about 38.8 kilowatt hours of electricity per kilogram of harvested lettuce (or about 17.6 kilowatt hours per pound). That’s roughly the amount of electricity needed to power a refrigerator for a month and, in terms of emissions, about the same amount of greenhouse gas as a forty-mile trip in a car. The same report found that greenhouses use 86 percent less energy for the same amount of lettuce, while farming in a field uses 99 percent less.
As a result, vertical farms typically contribute to the release of more carbon than traditional outdoor farms, even after factoring in the longer distances involved in shipping large amounts of produce from sparsely populated agricultural areas to cities and suburbs. Gene Giacomelli, a University of Arizona biosystems engineering professor who has researched controlled environment agriculture for more than forty years, said variables such as facility design, geographic location, and the experience of the farmers can lower the carbon output, but a desire to reduce greenhouse gases shouldn’t be the driving force in deciding to pursue vertical farming.
Their considerable demand for electricity also makes vertical farms difficult to operate at a profit. Many start-ups have struggled. New Jersey’s AeroFarms, Florida’s Kalera (which has a vertical farm in Houston), and New York’s Upward Farms have faced staggering losses, sagging stocks, bankruptcies, and outright closures during the last several years.
“People with a lot of money thought the vertical farms were just so sexy, and the technologists really, really inflated the balloon and said, ‘This is going to take over the world and look, they’re even doing it at NASA,’ ” Giacomelli said. “If anybody asked me, I’d say do a greenhouse. It’s much less risky. It’s still very risky if you don’t have experience or don’t get good consultants, but you’ll have a much better chance of returning your investment.”
Given the utility and infrastructure costs necessary to compensate for the weather conditions, Texas’s heat and humidity have been drawbacks for greenhouses and vertical farmers. Gotham Greens, a New York-based indoor farming operation that uses greenhouses, opened a facility last year in Seagoville, just outside Dallas. It was designed with dehumidifying and cooling equipment that the company hasn’t needed in its facilities in Colorado, the mid-Atlantic, and New England.
Still, Gotham Greens, which launched in 2009, is profitable, according to its cofounder and CEO, Viraj Puri. He compared indoor farms’ problems to those of electric vehicles. “A lot of [the failures were] just inexperienced operators. But that’s not necessarily an indictment on the sector,” he said, though he admitted that Texas has proven a “challenging climate for what we do.”
In 2022, Eden Green opened its two-acre farm in Cleburne, about thirty miles south of Fort Worth. The company has been around since 2017 but focused on research and development before opening the facility. Its growing space is a hybrid between a greenhouse and typical vertical farms, combining the ability to take advantage of sunlight with the density of stacked crops. Lettuce and herb plants there sprout in cup holder-sized pods on towers that extend eighteen feet high. Eden Green has successfully cultivated more than two hundred varieties of crops but has no plans to grow anything besides lettuce and herbs commercially. A clear plastic roof overhead lets in direct sunlight for each of the facility’s 320,000 plants. The company estimates using 4.59 kilowatt hours per pound of lettuce, bringing its energy use closer to the average greenhouse than to other vertical farms.
While many of its competitors sell branded microgreens at premium prices, Eden Green produces romaine lettuce for Walmart. CEO Eddy Badrina said the Cleburne farm breaks even, and the company hopes to achieve profitability by growing multiple plants in each pod, a concept it’s currently testing. Eden Green plans to open twenty more facilities nationwide by 2028, including two more in Cleburne.
Eden Green workers harvest lettuce in Cleburne, and then it’s mechanically packaged onsite and loaded into boxes. A Walmart employee hauls it to one of the retailer’s distribution centers, which sits across the street. Within about 48 hours, each head of lettuce is on a shelf at one of four hundred Walmarts across Oklahoma and Texas. There’s little waste from the facility—about 3 percent of the crop, Badrina says—and consumers, thanks to the relatively short trip to the store, have up to two weeks before their lettuce spoils. Nationwide, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates some $162 billion of food— having contributed as much to greenhouse gas emissions as 42 coal-fired power plants—is wasted every year. About one-third of food waste occurs in the field, and roughly 27 percent happens during packaging and distribution and at retailers. “That’s what we’re trying to solve,” Badrina said.
The proximity of vertical farms to cities also could grant Texans greater “food sovereignty,” said Texas A&M controlled-environment agriculture engineering professor Azlan Zahid, by providing a hedge against climate risks and political issues. In June, for instance, a standoff between Mexico and the U.S. Department of Agriculture affected the avocado supply. “You have to go local,” Zahid said.
Harris County commissioner Adrian Garcia said residents of his precinct, which consists of most of southeastern Harris County and north-central Houston, know they need to eat more vegetables, but “it’s an incredible challenge” to buy them in many of the neighborhoods he serves. So the precinct used grant money to buy two Eden Grow carts for a community center at Challenger Seven Memorial Park, in Webster.
In the spring, the precinct grew and distributed 44 pounds of tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, chives, and cucumbers to older residents. Garcia would like carts in every community center—or even in constituents’ homes to allow families to grow their own fresh produce.
Womack, the Eden Grow CEO, would like that too. The company envisions a customer base of communities that lack fresh food options or want to grow flowers or shrubbery for landscaping, as well as commercial clients such as restaurants and hotels that would use Eden Grow technology to cultivate fresh greens and vegetables. It’s a different model than Eden Green and most others in the industry—a bet that businesses and communities will see the benefits of being self-sufficient with their fruit and vegetable needs.
Because the company has hewed closely to NASA’s research and has former NASA plant scientists Stutte and Porterfield as advisers, Womack believes Eden Grow could even supply carts for astronauts on potential missions to Mars or the moon. But Womack also paints a far bleaker vision of the future, one in which technology such as Eden Grow’s will become a necessity after cyberattacks, pandemics, war, or other economic disruptions cripple global food supply chains. “Everything that made globalization work is ending,” he said, describing a bifurcation of society into those who adjust and grow their own food supplies and those who subsist on “bug paste” delivered by Amazon.
The reality, for now, is that consumers can shop at Walmart, and financial success has eluded Eden Grow, just as it has many other indoor farming start-ups. Womack said the company has attracted $2.3 million in funding, but last year its revenue totaled about $500,000—the equivalent of a hundred of its carts. The weak sales and realization it’d need a huge marketing expenditure to entice average consumers to buy led the company to pivot from selling to individuals to its current focus on commercial and governmental clients.
It just reached a deal to install a cart in the JW Marriott in downtown Houston, where Eden Grow will help the staff cultivate plants. But aside from that hotel, Precinct 2 in Harris County, and the small city of Nassau Bay (about 27 miles southeast of Houston), Eden Grow has found few willing customers. Cheaper indoor growing products, which Womack says are not as reliable as Eden Grow’s, cost less than $500 on Amazon.
Still, A&M professor Zahid, who’s used one of Eden Grow carts and been satisfied with the crops it produced, said he believes there’s a “huge potential market” for them, noting the value they’d provide to smaller towns and families living far from grocery stores. But, he added, most people would require “a lot of convincing” to consider growing their own produce. Puri, the cofounder and CEO of Gotham Greens, said the fact that indoor agriculture conserves water and stabilizes food supply doesn’t resonate for the most part. “But we believe it will in the future,” he said.
Eden Grow, like many of the struggling indoor farming start-ups, may not be able to wait that long. The company laid off seven of its thirteen employees this year. It closed a workspace and manufacturing facility in Washington State. Womack declined to say how much financial runway it had to continue operating, but acknowledged that Eden Grow might be ahead of its time, “like a solar company in the eighties.”
His challenge of educating Americans on the necessity of a decentralized food supply was apparent down in the Houston tunnel system. As the lunchtime rush began and retro hits played overhead, dozens of people ambled toward restaurants that sold pizza, dumplings, and banh mi sandwiches with ingredients sourced from who knows where. None of them stopped by Eden Grow’s display for a closer look.
