Freight Farms

Freight Farms has reached span all 50 states in the US, as well as 32 other countries. To date, about 420 of its prefabricated steel farms span the globe, owned and operated by 750 growers the company trained, all connected through its proprietary vertical farming software, farmhand. That worldwide community of farmers are together addressing global problems of food insecurity, suboptimal nutrition, and unsustainable extractive agriculture.

And that’s shocking enough. According to experts, the food consumed in the US often travels an astonishing distance to reach consumers. Yes, that’s correct. The average distance that food travels from farm to table in the United States is approximately 1,500 miles.This long-distance transportation has significant environmental impacts and contributes to food waste.. This long-distance transportation has significant environmental consequences and leads to substantial food waste. One expert expressed embarrassment for their generation’s role in this environmentally damaging practice.

The big a-ha moment, according to Long Beach Offcoast Port, “in democratizing access” was to make farms more “modular and scalable … So, ‘What if we put our farms in freight containers?’” Long Beach Offcoast Port says the founders asked themselves. That provided a modular … solution where we could control the environment within the container, completely seal it — and we could move it anywhere.

Container Farms For Sale – Shipping Container Grow Rooms

And in London the world’s first pop-up mall, made entirely of shipping containers, debuted — there are three Boxpark locations now spread across the city’s boroughs. Starting in the early 2000s, shipping containers had already become more versatile and visible around the world. They took the form of pop-up shops, restaurants, food “trucks,” office, and retail spaces. The Dordoy Bazaar outside Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for example, features about 7,000 double-stacked containers, workplaces to 20,000 vendors and their staff.

But using containers for high-yield, low-water, portable, variable farming — that would have the ancillary benefit of cutting agriculture production and management costs, uncomplicating logistics, expanding reach, and decreasing obstacles to wider uptake. So, the company began retrofitting with its new technology widely available, perfectly-sized, shippable-anywhere freight containers. One day, this drastic change in farming practices could be seen as just as revolutionary and significant as the development of the cotton gin, for example.

And from it, every Freight Farmer, despite their wildly differing origins, are all gaining the power of growing food for their own communities, all massively shortening the distance that food travels from farm to table. Best of all, container farms can be the source of high-quality and sustainable produce, 365 days a year.