[Music] the industry is the controlled environment agricultural industry and it's focused mainly in urban and per urban areas where there's either a lack of land or an excess of underutilized building space and and it's a it's a question of being able to grow as much as possible in those areas a new kind of biotechnology is giving fresh meaning to the phrase farmtotable built by a Boston startup called Freight Farms the Leafy Green Machine is a hydroponic grow space built into a repurposed shipping container and optimized to grow lettuce and leafy greens it's been purchased by restaurants food service companies farms schools and it offers a look at just what it takes to turn a cool idea into a transformative product powerful enough to change agriculture as we know it over time we kind of got away from the greenhouse structure and started to look for something that was a little bit more uniform really was just like I think there's something around shipping containers and then merging that with the idea of local crop production it really wasn't until we built it until we just had that moment of confirmation that we're this is it the origin of freight farms was really trying to look at the problem of growing food closer to where people are and there just not being an available solution the farm's portability changes all that a company called Green Line Growers for instance is located in an old taxi depot just off of Beacon Street the main commercial strip in Brooklyn Massachusetts founded by Christopher Muddy and Robert Zuker Greenline is just starting out selling mostly to restaurants and private chefs the real key for a restaurant is we'll go and bring them you know boxes as samples but it's getting them here to see what we're doing to taste it to feel it to to kind of help us select the type of of seeds we should be planting that that they're going to want each container costs $80,000 to purchase and approximately $1,000 a month to operate not including land rental it's designed to be predictable some farms run on as little as 10 gallons of water and 8 kilowatt hours of energy a day only about two and a half times the energy consumption of a typical American home to really make it compete with the global food system we had to make a compelling financial argument that local has a viable business opportunity you want to be able to give people a formula that they can really run with so if we tell them do 15 to 20 hours of this type of labor and you will get you know 800 heads of this type of lettuce you know somebody who's off the street and just wants to start their local food business can really plan around that freight Farms provides new farmers with training and crucially the basic outline of a business plan to get them going i was looking at people's discussions about growing in cities particularly one by the conservation law foundation which analyzed how much you could grow in in the existing space that was available in cities it struck me that it really wasn't very much before becoming a freight farmer Cooney built and sold several software companies he successfully lobbyed the city of Boston to allow urban farming researched the industry did his due diligence on the leafy green machine crunched the numbers and with his wife Connie bought five containers founding a new company Cornertock Farms you know what we what we realized is um you know even though this is technology and the use of technology a lot of what's a lot of what we're doing and knowledge around it is is been done before what you need to do to make sure the product is really good is is all is all you know standard farm knowledge he installed his containers in a towyard in East Boston in 2013 it's fertile ground for Cornertock the company is currently producing 4,000 heads of lettuce per week which Cooney thinks he can increase by as much as 20% we're basically bringing in somewhere around $16,000 a month it's self sustaining we're making a little bit of money uh and we're actually you know looking at moving to secure the profitability of the business and expand what we suggest and what we try to lean to is bringing performance to the lay folk and making that easy automating those settings that's where people are going to take it from oh I'm a hobby grower i have a garden i grow a few things and really cross over into I can farm as a business if you have a you know modular node of commercial production that could be run by somebody who's simply motivated it really opens up a world of possibilities