Today, Square Roots, an indoor seed-to-sales urban farm headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, will open its newest indoor farm at the Gordon Food Service headquarters in Wyoming, Michigan. This is the beginning of a strategic partnership that will see Square Roots’ high-tech farms built on or near Gordon Food Service locations across the continent, helping to bring hyper-local produce to customers year round.
The fact that so much has happened in just six months is credited to Square Roots’ modular, scalable farm-tech platform. The company can bring this model to any city in the world, and it can be done fast.
“As the network of farms gets larger, it gets smarter,” the company said. “Cloud-connected farms and data-empowered farmers learn from each other, enabling Square Roots to replicate success from one location to another, seamlessly. Opening the Michigan farm brings us closer to the vision of a distributed network of indoor farms, built across the world, to bring real food to people in cities while empowering thousands of next-gen leaders in urban farming.”
The opening of the new facility in Michigan has also opened up a new pool of applications for Square Roots’ Next-Gen Farmer Training Program — half of the newest applicants are from the Michigan area.
Staff for the Michigan site is already in place: Brian Mitchell, the new Farm Manager, is coming from a 87,000 square-foot indoor aquaponic facility, and the Assistant Farm Managers are Lauren Niergarth, a horticulture major from Michigan State University, and Eli Zimmer, a former Next-Gen Farmer from Brooklyn.
