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[bright instrumental music]
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- We can take away a lot of the pressures
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that exist right now
in traditional farming.
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We can create the perfect environment
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that the crop needs to grow.
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These are the most pampered
plants you'll ever meet.
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And we can get this food
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at the peak of its
nutritional and taste value
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to people from farm-to-fork
within 24 hours.
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[upbeat electronic music]
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The way we farm today
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will not sustain human
civilization as we know it.
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- [Voiceover 1] There's
not gonna be enough water,
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and there's not gonna be enough land.
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- [Nona] We are never going to replace
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traditional agriculture
but we sure can innovate.
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- [Voiceover 2] We can
learn how to at least pivot
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and to work with this changing world.
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[music continues]
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[lively guitar music]
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- The way a head of lettuce
gets to your and my plates,
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is it travels, on average, 2,000 miles.
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So by the time it, you
know, gets to our forks,
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it's depleted of its nutritional value
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and it really doesn't taste like anything.
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[music continues]
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Caroline, she was looking for
consistent, meaningful work,
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you know, for her clients.
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And she said, "Hey, if we
get this off the ground,
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"would you employ my clients?"
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And obviously that resonated
for me in a big way.
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[gentle guitar music]
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My brother defined our lives
in so many different ways.
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He was always going to need us,
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and we were always going to need him.
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I was an advocate before I
even knew what the word meant.
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[music continues]
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When we looked at that sliver of land,
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we really did scratch our heads.
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We said, "What could happen here?"
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And that's really where the
idea to go up came from.
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We packed as much as
we can into this space.
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So there's 5,000 square
feet of growing area
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within this one room.
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Here we were, three women,
not from Wyoming,
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who wanted to be farmers,
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and none of us were farmers. [laughs]
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So yeah, I think there
was a healthy skepticism
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that was in the community.
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[indistinct chatter]
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[indistinct chatter]
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It is a good conference room.
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- Yeah, I can kind of
remember somewhat saying,
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"That sounds like, cool, pardon me,
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"but how the [beep] are
you going to do that?"
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- [Nona] Yeah, exactly, like many people--
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- "Where are you going to do that?"
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or "How is that going to
happen?" or "How do we do that?"
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And you're like, "Let me come back to you
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"in a little bit of time."
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- We needed the town in order to access
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the public money that we were targeting.
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The first meeting didn't go so well,
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but I said, "Let's have
another one," and we continued.
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We worked on it.
They listened to me,
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I listened to them,
and we won by one vote.
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[upbeat instrumental music]
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- [Johnny] I've been here since it opened.
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- Yeah. What are you
seeding right now, Johnny?
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- [Johnny] I'm seeding Toscano.
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- We are able to feed the plants
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through an irrigation system.
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So you can see on the end here,
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that's where our water comes through.
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And these, all of these
trays are slightly canted
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so that the water just
comes through using gravity,
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and it feeds all of these pampered plants
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exactly what they need to grow.
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[upbeat electronic music]
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So you're creating the right temperature,
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the right humidity, the right nutrients,
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and really allowing for a crop
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to just concentrate on growing.
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Their only job is to be as nutrient-dense
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and as tasty as they can be.
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We grow lettuce heads, we grow
baby greens and microgreens.
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Microgreens are greens that
have just sprouted their leaves.
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Micro basil, micro arugula, micro wasabi--
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really, the sky is the limit.
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Nobody had really heard about micro greens
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except for the chefs, right?
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- One of my favorite products
was the popcorn shoots.
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- Yeah.
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- I really liked, like,
the sweetness and crunchy.
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[bright guitar music]
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- So how many, how many sheets
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are you able to process an hour now?
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- That's a great question.
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I mean, we are doing
a few hundred per day,
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and getting done by 1 o'clock.
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So it's not quite 100 per hour,
but it's approaching that.
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[music continues]
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- We learned how to grow together.
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Our biggest challenge
has been the pandemic,
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I mean, understanding how to grow
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while protecting our employees,
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who are very vulnerable.
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People with disabilities have been shown
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to be more vulnerable to Covid.
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So over there you can see our little robot
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that measures the humidity
and the temperature
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within the growing
environment, and that interacts
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with the whole computer
system of the farm.
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So the misting will go off
every two to five minutes
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to keep the humidity level correct
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for the plants that we're growing here.
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Energy issue is really
one of the main criticisms
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of vertical farming,
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and we've addressed that in multiple ways.
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As the grid gets greener, so are we.
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As we expand, we're
looking at partnerships
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with renewable solar farms, wind farms,
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but we're offsetting
so many other things--
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the food miles, the runoff, the
damage to our water systems.
[00:07:06.03]
The fact that in the drought
that we're in right now,
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90% of the lettuce that we all consume
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is vulnerable right now,
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and might not even be able
to make it to shelves.
[00:07:18.04]
[upbeat electronic music]
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Our farm here in Jackson
Hole is really like our lab.
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People want to know
who's growing their food.
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Our farms are beautiful
buildings that you can see in
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and understand how we're farming,
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why we're farming, and who is farming.
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- [Sue] It's the end of family farm?
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- [chuckles] I think it's
the new kind of family farm!
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[bright instrumental music]
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[music continues]
