Growing fresh produce under LED lights 365 days a year, Greenspace’s urban farms have created a blueprint – or greenprint – for the future of food.

For city folk, farm to table is a long and wasteful journey. Traditionally grown regionally, then transported over long distances, packaged up and distributed through our supermarkets and grocers, fresh greens lose crucial nutrients and leave a carbon footprint in their wake.

Not anymore with Greenspace. Since 2017, Greenspace has pioneered a data-driven vertical farming solution that grows fresh greens in centrally located urban farms (‘macrofarms’) and delivers them by foot to microfarms in corporate offices, hotels, schools, hospitality venues and shops.

“It’s for the future of the world,” Greenspace founder and tech entrepreneur Peter Fox, tells Business Builders. “This idea of having farms around the corner that service distribution points via our microfarms, with nutrient-dense living produce, you know that there’s zero food waste.”

Disrupting food supply chains

Being Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) farming, the urban farms can operate every day of the year with everything from LED lights to room temperature controlled.

“We use grow lights instead of sunlight. And because it’s vertically farmed, it’s multiple tiers, meaning in the same surface area we can quadruple the amount of produce,” explains Peter’s son Nicholas Fox, the business’ head of marketing and sales.

“We’re able to create this perfect environment for the produce to grow, a lot quicker than traditional farming. And we’re using a lot less water, so there’s a lot more food security around the produce that we’re growing. We don’t have a big storm that sweeps through and destroys all our crop. It’s always guaranteed to have the produce there year round.”

Stacked with the green stuff: Greenspace’s Darling Park urban farm in Sydney. Image: Supplied.

From these facilities, a couple of farmers manage the hydroponic systems and one person makes the deliveries to subscribers’ microfarms. Businesses subscribe to the community vertical farming service like they would for, say, Netflix.

“It’s pretty revolutionary,” Peter says of the farm-greens-on-demand business model. When a subscribing business receives their batch green goodies, they don’t have to do any growing themselves – the produce is ready to consume or be put proudly on display.

For businesses with ESG (environmental, social and governance) and wellness initiatives, it’s a powerful way to walk the talk on greenhouse gas emissions and food waste. For hospitality venues, it’s a way to source ready-to-eat, flavoursome and nutritional produce that reduces their CO2 footprint in the process. And of course, it transforms a grey city space to something lush and green.

“In a traditional farm, they’re wasting around 40 to 60 percent of their produce. They’re tossing it away before it even leaves the farm. We’re 10 to 15 percent,” Peter adds.

“That already is a really wonderful transformation. And then, the electricity used to power Darling Farm is backed by certified renewable energy with AGL’s GreenPower product  – that’s super important for us. A big part of our future is supporting and using renewable energy, whether it’s solar power or wind.”

Sydney, Melbourne leading the ‘farmhood’ revolution

So far, Greenspace has a handful of urban farms sprouting up in Sydney and Melbourne, from a converted bank building in Sydney’s Edgecliff to a new indoor farm at the city’s recently revamped Paddy’s Markets food precinct.

“We build farms in a local community centred around the CBDs of cities,” explains Nicholas. “And then that produce is walked on foot to distribution points scattered around the farm within walking distance.”

“It’s that hyperlocal production and then hyperlocal distribution, because the traditional agriculture system is all about shipping produce hundreds of kilometres. We’re all about walking produce hundreds of metres instead.”

The new Paddy’s Markets Greenspace urban farm provides educational tours on vertical farming and hydroponics. Image: Supplied.

Peter and Nicholas call it the concept of creating ‘farmhoods’ in city spaces that would otherwise be disconnected from the agricultural process.

“The farmhood is all about building the kind of farming neighbourhood where people know, ‘I’m buying this pot from my local farmer just around the corner’, instead of ‘This is from Queensland and I’m in New South Wales’,” explains Nicholas.

On the path to net zero

Like many small businesses, Greenspace has a goal to operate as sustainably as possible. One specific goal – becoming carbon neutral by 2027 – is core to their future operations.

The biggest challenge, as they look to launch macrofarms across both locally and globally, is deployment.

“If we can convince building owners to use their roof space to power our farms, it really means that, via solar, we are in that completely beautiful almost off-grid type scenario of growing food,” Peter explains.

Part of that journey is about making smart energy use a priority.

“Our main use of energy is the LED lights. They have a wide spectrum of light that the plants need,” says Nicholas. “Then the other things are our HVAC system for climate control, and the pumps for the watering system.

“We don’t have things like tractors. We don’t have giant trucks shipping stuff all the way from one state to the other. It’s really just those small systems that keep the farms growing.”

Nicholas says that AGL has helped optimise their business energy usage to their advantage.

“AGL has been helping us with scheduling when we use power, trying to aim around those off-peak parts of the day where we can really reduce our energy costs,” Nicholas shares.

“The big one has been helping us realign when we have our lighting system on. Now we have it on when it really suits that off-peak time.”

Pushing the vertical limits

As they grow their impact, Greenspace’s team is looking to bring investors on board to take the solution across the world.

“We’ve democratised vertical farming,” says Peter. “We’ve taken away the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to set up a farm, to being able to build a macrofarm and have connected microfarms very quickly in our cities.”

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This article is brought to you by Business Builders in partnership with AGL.

Feature image: Left to right, Greenspace’s Nicholas Fox and Peter Fox.