Cultiva, Taylor joint venture completes $10M expansion

According to local news, Cultiva Farms USA has announced the completion of its new cold storage facility, part of a $10 million project to build a salad crop farm on a 460-acre ranch in north Florida.

Cultiva Farms USA is a partnership between an Italian family company, Cultiva, and Taylor Farms. The Suwanee Democrat reported the goal of the partnership is to bring specialized Italian growing techniques to the U.S. market to encourage significant production of salad crops in the eastern United States, close to big metropolitan areas where most of the consumption takes place.

The newspaper also reports that Cultiva is the first company producing baby leaf in high tunnels (not hydroponic or vertical farming) and, at the moment, it is also the largest one. The farm includes 800 hoop houses, providing 125 acres of covered area to produce conventional spinach and arugula year-round and provide a buffer for adverse climate conditions.

In addition, later this month, Cultiva plans to have in production an additional 80 greenhouses to test organic production; the aim is to have approximately 600 more tunnels which are 100 percent organic, wrote the newspaper. This would create a true production and logistics hub in the center of the American Southeast. In Florida, Cultiva can produce non-stop from October to June, when the already too-high temperatures would not allow any other type of production.