FAQ
1. What are the economics of an AeroFarms™ machine?
A typical AeroFarms machine will earn a 20-33% ROI. This depends on the price you get for leafy greens, on the size of system installed, and your particular input costs such as electricity, labor, and rent. We can work with you to produce a financial analysis specific to your needs. Leasing is also an option, if you have good credit and collateral that can reduce your capital outlay.
2. What do I need before really digging into aeroponics?
You should have created a business plan – let’s face it if you haven’t committed your ideas to paper, then you aren’t yet ready to buy. If you are working through your business plan, we have business planning information that can assist you. We often recommend getting some leafy greens from us and testing your market – see our survey instrument. You should put in your own costs into our cost sheet.3. What makes you different?
Three things make us different: using cloth as a growing medium, being able to fill all three dimensions of space, and using science to back up our work. Cloth provides many advantages to the grower: reusable, easily plant, grow and harvest baby greens, and making labor efficient. With artificial lighting, we can stack to the ceiling and extend to fit any size space – reaching up to 60 times the foot print in annual production. Nearly all artificial lighting claims are incorrect because the promoters have no scientific basis for the claims they make or even an understanding of how plants see light. We have made it our business to understand how plants see light.4. How will you protect your technology?
We have patents pending or in process to cover the key elements. However, two things are your best protection, satisfying customers and investing in research. We will not scrimp on shared knowledge and support. We continue to collaborate with leading institutions for expanding our knowledge:- Cornell University Department of Horticulture for light and nutrient application
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for LED testing equipment
- North Carolina State University for textile research
Market
5. What about my customers?
We have extensive experience with restaurants and grocers. However, there are a number of options for how and whom you’ll market to. We are happy to work with you in attracting customers, and offer marketing consulting and product sampling services. We can supply you with leafy greens for market assessment.6. What about a Farmer’s Market?
In most areas the profit from the farmer’s market will not compare to that of selling to a restaurant or grocer, but as the attendance grows, it could change.Production
7. What can I grow with your system?
We have experience growing over one hundred varieties of baby leafy greens and several herb varieties as well. These are high value crops, and not commoditized head lettuce, which significantly improves your economic returns. We also have experience growing some edible flowers, warm season greens, and grasses, but these are not as easily and economically grown as the cool season leafy greens. Other crops like vinous, tuberous, and pepper type vegetables are not well suited to our system. We will be researching other crops with an eye to modifying our system where a valued crop can be grown. Some seeds do not germinate without treatment of some kind, presoak, scarification, chemicals, or take a long time. Be sure to learn about what you plan to grow. Most seed companies will be able to advise you and some even rate seeds for hydroponic use. We like Snow Seed Company (http://www.snowseedco.com/organic.html) and Kitizawa Seed Company (http://www.kitazawaseed.com) for larger volumes and better seeds.8. Why do you use artificial light?
We realized early on that sunlight is not free – see article: Sunlight is free? We also like the idea of growing anywhere, anytime, and stimulating better quality from plants in a structure that is not specialized. You can use sun but then the LEDs get in the way and you are unable to stack the system.9. LEDs work, right?
An experience with a large LED manufacturer who claimed 100,000 hours of life, satisfactory growing with about 1/100th of the energy consumption lit an angry fire that fueled an investigation into how plants see light. We also have learned after purchase of supposed grow lights that knowledge is sparse on what plants need for light. This has led to exploration of artificial light. We are pursuing it with a one of a kind LED array from RPIs Lighting Research Center and the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University. This device will answer the question, “What quality photon delivered just in time will optimize the yield and quality of a particular plant?” LEDs are not quite as efficient in energy to light conversion as fluorescent lights and a good deal less efficient than HPS lamps. LEDs are totally dependent on temperature for light intensity and life. Most of the manufacturers are unaware of this or choose to ignore it. LEDs offer an opportunity to maximize the efficiency of watts to lbs of product, and we will be doing this scientifically. The next time you are seeking an LED “grow lamp” ask about the daily light integral in moles. If they don’t know about moles, then they don’t know much about plants.10. Do you have a small system?
Depends on what you mean by small. We are not competing with counter top units. Our expertise is in a commercial size system and one needs to have more than a garage to house a machine that will profit you. We do lease for short periods small setups for you to test out the equipment, show it to investors, and do market analysis.11. What does the process of growing look like?
It is best described with pictures – see our video. It was taken in 2004 when the company had its own production facility. There is a lot learned with the machines used then that is now embodied in the new units. We learned that the shiny material on the inside of the machines is unnecessary, white walls are better than 98% as effective in reflecting light – a big cost savings. We also learned that turbulence can come from a single fan that creates at about 50 fpm – another cost savings over the lots of little ones you see in the picture. And LEDs let us half the distance from light to plant.Facility
12. What will I need to do to a facility to grow in it?
Make sure that you can keep the humidity under 70% RH, maintain the temperature appropriate for your crops, and supply sufficient fresh air to keep carbon dioxide levels high. Note: stacking will, without remediation, create warmer conditions higher in a room.13. Isn’t growing indoors bad for the building?
Because plants desire a relative humidity that is low to allow transpiration, the best building humidity is less than 70%. This is also good for preventing mold growth and human discomfort.14. Won’t all that carbon dioxide (CO2) make my workers sick?
Experiments with human subjects indicate that 5500 ppm of CO2 has no consequence. It is unlikely that most AeroFarms installations will suffer more than 400 ppm (ambient outdoor level in most locations) or economically wish to exceed 1500 ppm in the growing of plants.15. What do you recommend for building alterations?
- Ability to bring in and exhaust a lot of air - this is your CO2 source and is critical to yields. It will need to be screened to keep the bugs out. Be sure that your air is not going to be fouled by large amounts of vehicle exhaust or another industry's exhaust that may taint your plants. Ethylene and NOx gasses have the most impact on yields.
- Place to create a walk-in cooler preferably near the shipping and harvesting locations
- Sometimes the posts or supports for the building get in the way. In one case the sprinkler system decreased ceiling height by at least two feet. Be sure you have the CLEAR ceiling height before specifying a system to us.
- Make sure power, water, and sewer are available in sufficient capacity.
- Sufficient HVAC to ensure that the incoming air is appropriate throughout the growing season – see HVAC guidelines.
- Evaluate what would happen if a nutrient spill occurs.
- Consider an automatic power generator for the chance loss of electricity. It only needs to power the pumps. Generally the plants can go without nutrients for a half hour before damage begins – that is with the fan and lights off.
16. Is anything especially dangerous in the inputs or operation?
Fertilizers can be used for illicit purposes. The acid used to control pH requires learning and safety equipment. Using a hedge trimmer for harvesting can expose workers to injury – follow the manufacturer’s recommendations.17. Don’t you need to purge the system of nutrients?
The system is a closed loop for the nutrients. There are three reasons in our experience that would indicate the need to purge and start over:- You mess up badly and get pH and/or EC way out of normal parameters or something is spilled into the reservoir that damages the plants.
- You allow algae to get out of control – keeping the pH under 5.5 will ensure that this does not happen.
- You become concerned that allelopathic chemicals build up. We can’t advise how to know this so we recommend once a year that the system is purged. Allelopathy occurs when plants exude chemicals (natural pesticides) to help them compete.
