Greenhouses inside shipping containers supply stores and restaurants

There’s a pair of shipping containers sitting in a Minneapolis parking lot, but the contents inside aren’t getting ready to travel the country; instead they’re filled with basil that will be grown and sold to local food vendors at a healthy profit margin.

Ryan Sweeney is the “farmer” utilizing the shipping container to grow basil, relying on LED lights instead of sunlight, forgoing soil and pesticides and monitoring everything on his smartphone.

Then there’s Shawn and Connie Cooney, who run four “farms” out of shipping containers from a Boston towing company’s parking lot, growing approximately 30,000 plants (including kale, cilantro, mustard greens, wild mint and lettuce) a month, mostly sold to local restaurants.

Meanwhile, Mitch Hagney and Pat Condon operate Local Sprout out of San Antonio, selling fresh greens they grow in their storage container to two local juice bars.

These are just a few of the examples of people becoming urban farmers thanks to Freight Farms, a Boston-based startup that utilizes shipping containers to help others produce fresh, local produce year round.

Founded by Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, the company initially looked into rooftop farming and greenhouses before concluding that refurbishing refrigerated shipping containers was a better way to go.

“The idea came as a result of the frustration we experienced working on greenhouse rooftop projects that were inefficient and expensive,” McNamara said. “I always felt strongly that using a glass-walled structure when you need to climate control the space is not the best way to go about it. The container was a known structure, built to last, that offered a perfect sealed insulated envelope to start from. Not to mention there is existing infrastructure to move them quickly and easily around the world. Beyond that, they fit into almost any space.”

While traditional farmers plant one or two plants per square foot, a Freight Farm can allow for 240 plants per square foot. Plus, growing in a shipping container, where the light and water can be controlled exactly, allows farmers to deliver a consistent product no matter the season or city.

The method allows us Freight Farms to empower anyone to grow fresh local produce in the spaces that have been forgotten about.

“This allows us to create a uniform platform for plant production that is focused on the customer interaction and ease of use,” McNamara said. “By eliminating the need for complex custom installations that are all dramatically different, we can focus on excelling at growing and pass that knowledge on to each new farmer so that you don’t have to be a Ph.D. in horticulture or have years of experience to be a successful grower.”

Learning From Ryan

Sweeney first learned of Freight Farms from a Kickstarter video about hydroponic farming that the company had produced. Even though he had no background in horticulture, he decided to learn more.

“I was intrigued, so I spoke to them in January of 2013 and flew out to Boston and saw the early prototypes and pulled the trigger,” he said. “I was their first customer, and I worked closely with them on design changes.”

As of June 2015, Sweeney had two basil freight farms running. The first one used to harvest about 65 pounds of basil a week to a wholesale distributor, but he has changed over to only selling packaged clamshell containers, so it’s producing more like 30 packages of 1-pound basil a week, commanding $40 a pound from co-op groceries.

Freight Farms learned a lot from Sweeney and his experience with the crates—from workflows in his farm to the best ways to structure a business using the product.

“He is the ideal customer in many ways, because he really wants to change the food system and make a business while doing so,” McNamara said. “He’s got an incredible vision for the future, and I think we’ve been lucky because all of our early customers shared a much larger vision, not only for each of their farm businesses but for the food system as a whole. Ryan and our other freight farmers want to see more people like themselves being successful at farming while joining this dynamic and inspiring community.”

Getting Started

Currently, Freight Farms has more than two dozen containers being utilized for growing food, and over 35 farms sold. Getting started is as easy as heading to its website (freightfarms.com).

Customers get the Leafy Green Machine, a 40-foot insulated container with more than 4,000 plant sites for growing anything from lettuce to chard, which arrives fully assembled and only requires a simple electric and garden-hose hookup to get growing.

“The system is a fully assembled turnkey solution, so our customers know exactly what they are getting and how much time they need to dedicate to it,” McNamara said. “We train every farmer at a two-day ‘farm camp’ in Boston with a mix of classroom and in-farm lessons, so that you leave confident and ready to get started.

The company also sends a farm tech to make sure the setup goes without a hitch. The farm tech will refresh the customer on anything from the training that’s not clear, so customers are 100 percent confident when they plant the first seeds.

“The macro trends are very clear that we need to look at food in new ways to keep up and continue to thrive. Consistency, quality and transparency have become the most important aspects of our food system, and it’s important for us to make sure that more people, institutions and groups are able to take an active role in being part of the solution,” McNamara said. “Ultimately, we need farming to be a local and viable option for the future.”

Freight Farms recently released its third-generation product, the Leafy Green Machine, for around $76,000. The container costs an estimated $13,000 a year to operate before labor and insurance, includes room for 4,500 plants and uses 10 gallons of water a day and 20,000 to 30,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year.

— By Keith Loria, contributing writer