BOONE COUNTY, Ky. – In more ways than one, conditions in northern Kentucky are about to get a whole lot greener.

Vertical farming company 80 Acres Farms last week announced the construction of farms in Boone County, Ky., and Covington, Ga., to meet the growing consumer demand for local, fresh, pesticide-free food. In addition, the two locations combined will create 300 new jobs.

80 Acres Farms, based in Hamilton, Ohio, is a hydroponic farming company that operates super-efficient indoor farms that can produce up to 300 times as much food per square foot as traditional farms. They use 95 percent less water per pound of produce and minimize food miles and waste. The Boone County farm is a $74 million project and will be completed in August. It will create 125 jobs. The $120 million farm in suburban Atlanta will start sending organic produce to consumers in early 2023 and will create 175 jobs.

80 Acres Farms currently has eight farms in the United States, most of them in Ohio. The farms are built by the company’s technology group, Infinite Acres.

“Our Ohio farms have been operating at capacity for more than a year,” said 80 Acres Farms CEO Mike Zelkind. “The only way to reach more people is to keep building. After proving our model at home (in Ohio), we have the experience and technology to scale up, starting in Kentucky and Georgia.”

Tisha Livingston, co-founder of 80 Acres and CEO of Infinite Acres, said, “These next-generation farms will be our most efficient and most productive yet. Using our proprietary technology, driven by continuous innovation and improvement, we can grow at a new scale.”

80 Acres Farms opened its first such project in Hamilton on Jan. 13, 2021, though the inception for the farm was in 2015. The $30 million, 62,000-square-foot vertical farming building now grows more than 10 million healthy servings of fresh food every year. This particular farm currently serves more than 400 retail outlets, mostly in the Midwest, including Kroger, Whole Foods, The Fresh Market and other regional retailers, as well as food service distributors.

Inside each facility is a “growing box” that contains 64,000 square feet of cultivating space. There, plants are surrounded by purple light, where a self-contained water system recycles 97 percent of the water, if not more.

Pests are not a problem because cameras inside the complex detect tiny spots on plants before human eyes can. When the spots appear, those plants are removed.

For comparison, a football field is 57,600 square feet. But in these complexes, that space is broken into 10 growing levels, stacked atop each other.

The company’s Kentucky and Georgia farms will be among the largest vertical farms in the world, at more than 200,000 square feet each, and will increase total production by more than 700 percent when fully operational. Each farm will be able to grow leafy greens, herbs, microgreens, tomatoes, and fruits such as strawberries and blackberries – all under one roof, year-round.

“We produce about 10 million servings of food here per year, and we are really trying to change the way the world eats,” said Noah Zelkind, director of business development with 80 Acres Farms. “We believe this is the next generation of farming and the next stop of control and evolution in our idea of how to grow food, but we also see ourselves as part of an evolving food system.”

While 80 Acres Farms grows salad blends, microgreens, tomatoes and herbs, Zoe Plakias, an assistant professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at The Ohio State University, said “none of these products are grown at scale in Ohio, where food policy is more focused on commodity crops like corn and soybeans.

“If you’re a consumer in Ohio going to Kroger, you’re getting your fresh produce from elsewhere, not Ohio,” Plakias said. “There’s economic evidence that consumers will pay a higher price for foods they know are produced locally. This creates incentives for growers to produce for local markets and for retailers to sell locally produced goods.”

The growers at 80 Acres Farms use algorithms they have created to control variations in light they provide the plants. There are factory-sized things like 35,000-gallon water-supply tanks to tend the plants. The farms can produce plants that can be more fragile and tasty than the ones shipped many days from places like California.

At 80 Acres Farms there are three stages of growth, beginning with seeding.

“When you plant a seed, it really doesn’t need much, just water, temperature and humidity,” Noah Zelkind said. “Once the seeds crack open and display cotyledons, it’s ready to start photosynthesizing so we have to get them under the lights.”

The second growing state is the “grow zone,” a tightly controlled environment to get the precise amount of light and water for development. At the right time they are then transplanted to larger trays to continue their growth.

Finally, the plants are removed from the “grow zone” and harvested by one of the employees, who eventually send them off to be packaged. The entire process, from harvesting to the moment it hits the shelves, takes about 48 hours.

“Our new farm in Covington will grow four times as much food as our largest farm,” Zelkind said. 

Employment is also a plus for the northern Kentucky area. Zelkind said workers would be paid varying amounts depending on their roles. He said much of the company’s growing process is automated, eliminating some of the “backbreaking jobs” sometimes associated with farming. The company, Zelkind said, will seek to buy electricity produced form renewable sources from Covington’s municipal electric utility.

Only 60 percent of the food grown in the United States makes it onto the dinner plate. Some of it rots in the field, some perishable produce ends up going bad in transit, and some expires on the shelves. The nutritional value takes a hit as well.

80 Acres Farms only ships their produce within 50 to 100 miles of its farms. The company’s greens and produce are now available in more than 300 Kroger supermarkets in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky.

“We’re selling a highly perishable product, and the faster we can get it to consumers, the fresher and nutritious it is, and the longer it lasts in consumers’ homes,” Zelkind said.

Asked to predict how many facilities there may be a few years from now, Zelkind said: “In five years? Twenty, 30, 50…a lot.

“What you have here is a new standard being set for food quality, way beyond the organic. A farm that smartly removes much of the back-breaking labor, creates jobs, a farm that is designed for food safety and quality, a farm that is built to keep workers safe and customers healthy.”