Farming Grows Up

A group of startups raises lettuce, tomatoes, and berries in high-rise plant factories. The founders aren’t farmers; they’re technologists who have shown that even the most grounded industry can be radically reinvented.

- By Bill Saporito

A lot of things have been made in South Kearny, New Jersey, over the past 125 years. At the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, along the Hacken sack River, workers cranked out 440-foot Liberty ships during World War II. Before and after that conflict, Ma Bell’s Western Electric Company made telephone cable and transmission equipment that was built to last forever.

Too bad Federal and Western Electric didn’t last. Neither did a lot of businesses in this swampy New York City borderland, including chemical plants, metal benders, tank farms, warehouses, and manufacturers that spewed who-knows-what into the world before they began to close in the late 1960s.

Which is why it’s so hard to fathom that a company called Bowery Farming is growing lettuce, microgreens, herbs, and even strawberries in a century-old building here. That anything edible grows in this wasteland is astonishing.

Bowery is among a rapidly growing crop of high-rise urban farming companies that are changing the very concept of agriculture, as well as the way fresh produce gets to us. The pristinewhite interior and stacked greens of Bowery’s South Kearny Farm X building are a jarring contrast to the bleak landscape outside. Tray after plastic tray of greens—a 40-foot-high erector set of stacked plants—are seeded and racked in a tightly controlled, continuously monitored grid that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. “It turns farming on its head,” says Bowery founder Irving Fain, a software entrepreneur from Providence, Rhode Island, who had zero prior experience in agriculture before starting the company.