Freight Farms founder Jon Friedman talks about their Greenery S, a shipping container-based farming solution
Freight Farms lets you farm whatever you want inside a shipping container
Video Transcript
JON FRIEDMAN: So we see a lot of communities all around the world who don't have access to fresh local food. And what that means is they don't have a range of crops in their diet. They don't have, really, things that are green on places that are an island or really cold weather or hot weather because it doesn't transport that well. So you see a lot of meat heavy diets in those cultures and those regions, and that's not necessarily what the people in those markets want.
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My name's Jon Friedman. I'm the founder of Freight Farms. So at Freight Farms, we're a platform company. We're really finding ways that we can build infrastructure for people to get into farming a lot easier than they would if they were going with conventional means or any other opportunity market. Most notably, we use a shipping container to create a turnkey growing facility that can ship anywhere in the world and grow exactly the same in any climate. And we also provide all the tools, resources, education that goes along with becoming a farmer, or expanding their farming operation.
Well, the Greenery S is the most high performing turnkey solution that you'll find on the market. It is a 40 foot shipping container completely customized to growing precision levels of hydroponic vegetables. So you can put one of these in any environment in the world and it will grow 365 days a year, over 1,000 heads of lettuce a week-- actually does over 500 different crops. So you can grow a wide range of things in a Greenery S.
We've grown all sorts of fine crops-- pumpkins, watermelons, tomatoes, a lot of different flowers, a lot of different peppers, things like that. So things that you wouldn't expect. And that's really where we shine is we really have a wide range that we can grow in the Greenery S. We don't need access to arable land, and you don't need access to water because we're wicking water from the air and bringing that and filtering it back into the tank. So really, Greenery S is really a way to democratize access to farming.
The container farming method offers a lot of value compared to anything like greenhouse or indoor roads, specifically on entry point. So if you're somebody who is interested in getting into on-site production or farming in general, the capital expense of a greenhouse or a warehouse nowadays is very, very large and requires a long time to build the building and the land. And there's a lot of work that goes into just getting that structure started. What we realized is that people really didn't want to become structural engineers. They didn't want to become plant scientists. They wanted to farm. They wanted to own a farm. They wanted to scale a farm.
And some of the places that needed access to farming, they don't have the right amount of sunlight. They don't have the right weather to be conducive to greenhouse. And so we're really looking at, how do we standardize the farming process in a scalable way. The need for alternative farming solutions is really driven by arable land depletion, water resource scarcity, the risk in our supply chain. Growing the way we're growing in a centralized manner, that centralized production and distribution doesn't really support all the people in the world and all the places that need access to food.
It doesn't really fit the global markets right now. But with the Greenery S, we tie that into renewable power distribution. So this is really the most sustainable way you can grow. And we really need to make that change, just as a global population.
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