CONTENT SOURCED FROM OZY

Temperatures dropped to single digits this winter in New York City, but inside the mobile indoor farm demoed by innovative tech company Local Roots on the East Side of Manhattan, it was summertime. Rows of bright-green lettuce sprouting in trays basked under LEDs that mimic natural sunlight, while the circulating water delivered nutrients to their roots. A Los Angeles–based company, Local Roots crossed the country on a hunch. “New York may be a good market for this, so we brought our product here for a demo,” says the company’s CEO and co-founder Eric Ellestad, explaining that the firm transforms shipping containers into vertical hydroponic farms called TerraFarms.

They were right. Indoor farms are germinating in New York’s concrete jungle like never before, spanning most of its boroughs and increasingly trying to serve a diverse audience: rich individuals and poor communities, posh restaurants and local supermarkets.

Indoor agriculture, also known as vertical farming, hydroponics or controlled environment farming, is impervious to floods, frosts and droughts. It doesn’t require pesticides, because there are no pests, although some farms use insects that are beneficial to crops. Hydroponic growing recycles the water that delivers nutrients to plants, so it uses 90 to 97 percent less water than traditional farming — critical in areas with a freshwater shortage. Plants can be stacked in bookshelf-like containers on multiple floors of a building, which lets indoor growers produce a lot more food per acre than a field would.

It also allows harvesting locally year-round, without having to fly or truck the produce, increasing its freshness and reducing its environmental footprint. In his book The Vertical Farm, Dickson Despommier, a former Columbia University ecology professor and a hydroponics pioneer, argues that when the Earth’s population reaches 9 billion in 2050, with 70 percent of people living in cities, arable land will be scarce or too far away. Produce will have to be grown in the very buildings people live in.