Freight Farms: Hot Boston Start-Up Expands To Worcester
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Brad McNamara (left) and Jon Friedman (right), co-founders of Freight Farms, are setting the commercial standard for local farming.
Because plants are highly efficient, they drink exactly as much nutritious water as they need. In a Freight Farms container, what one plant doesn’t consume, flows to the next vegetation in line.
Last November, Boston-based Freight Farms held the grand opening of its first Worcester facility, at 501 Park Ave. The start-up business hydroponically grows leafy greens, vine crops and mushrooms in insulated, climate-controlled containers, which operate from a standard electrical outlet.
Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, founders of Freight Farms, seek to decrease the production costs and environmental impact of fresh produce by locating production much closer to the end consumer. Their modified, stackable containers use less water and energy than traditional agriculture. Just as importantly, they eliminate the need for pesticides and herbicides.
How brilliant is that? So much so, that Entrepreneur magazine, in its latest issue, celebrates Freight Farms as one of the Top 100 Most Brilliant Companies in America.
A container in every lot
These two Green Reapers have a simple, elegant and seemingly realistic vision: Reap greenbacks by enabling customers to grow green produce.
Freight Farms optimizes the harvest cycle for any grower and puts food supply within everyone’s reach. The human-centered design benefits a wide variety of users, including but not limited to; institutional food-service providers, schools, restaurants, farmers, grocery stores, disaster-relief efforts, wholesale produce distributors and developing communities.
Freight Farms can be operated with minimal training and equipped with technology to optimize workflow. Users can monitor the unit remotely and control every element of the system from their mobile devices. Harvest-support services are available for customers looking to maximize their growing potential.
Four months ago, Freight Farms’ Worcester container produced its first commercial crop, generating $500,000 in booked sales, with customers in Central and Southeastern Mass. as well as on the North Shore. McNamara and Friedman plan to deploy a total of 15 to 20 additional containers this summer in Massachusetts and Minnesota, including two on the roof of a new Tasty Burger restaurant in Boston.
These Green Reapers have also won the approval of the US Department of Agriculture’s Farm Loan program. This enable enables their customers to buy produce at an annual charge of 1.25 percent.
The 'aha' moment
Take a visionary marketing guru and team him up with a talented tech geek. Add a key “aha” moment. The result: a vision and mission that could radically and sustainably alter the way we feed people in healthy, affordable and sustainable ways.
McNamara has used his marketing experience to generate a virtual buzz around environmental issues. As the creator of Carfreebrad.com, he has been a voice for cyclists across the globe. He has an MBA and masters in environmental science from Clark University.
Friedman is a designer who has been shaping the next generation of sustainable consumer products for top consumer brands such as Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Merck, United Healthcare. He has a BFA in industrial design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Following are edited highlights of a recent interview with Brad McNamara, during which he recounts Freight Farms’ “aha” moment.
When did you and Jon come up with the idea of doing hydroponic farming in stackable storage containers?
As with anything, there were a few different iterations of what eventually became the final Freight Farms. Mid 2011, is when we started to pull all of the pieces together and start to really hone in on our design.
Did you know each other prior to this?
We did. Jon and I have a long, great working relationship. We first met in the mid 2000s. I was running a marketing company that I started in Boston shortly after I graduated from Northeastern [University], and he came on as a district manager while he was finishing school [at the Mass. College of Art & Design], handling Cape Code, the Islands and Connecticut, where we did business. … He [then] got into industrial design, working for all of these amazing companies and doing some great work. We just kept in touch and, around 2009, we kind of came back together around some excitement that he and his brother had. His brother was working in green-roof development down in [Washington,] DC.
“Green roof” is growing vegetation on roofs in order to keep the building cool and create a new supply of oxygen for the building as well.
Yes. [Jon and his brother] were so excited about the potential of rooftop development, hydroponics and food production in cities, using unused roof space. We just sort of caught up [with each other], started brainstorming and one thing led to another. Long story, short: We got to Freight Farms.
At first, you were thinking, “How do we do this in a scalable, money-making way in square feet of space?” Then, somewhere along the line, one of you had the brainstorm, “Let’s go to cubic feet.”
Yes. We started off as a three-man consulting group and hustled up a few clients in Boston and Minnesota, working with a few major distributors on [green-]rooftop development. It was a progression over time of evaluating the designs and possibilities for their structures and realizing that the solution was in the cubic foot, in growing in every possible inch, floor to ceiling, in whatever structure you’re in. So that came over a period of time. From a business standpoint, we were dealing in New England and Minnesota, where we were using greenhouses, originally, and we needed to bring in something with [an artificial] light [source] because it’s not a great growing season year-around [in those two regions]. It all sort of came together that we were using an inefficient structure in greenhousing. We were already bringing in supplemental lights [to the greenhouses] because we had to [do so], to get those commercial yields, and we weren’t using that space most efficiently.
Why didn’t you just stack a bunch of shelves upward in the storage containers, with plants in pots of soil?
Great question, and one that a lot of people want to know about. For us, it was all about the efficiency of growth and the efficiency of the system. So by stacking soil-based plants, you end up having to bring in soil constantly in order to replant those plants and keep them growing.
And shelves take up a lot of space, too.
Yes, they take up a lot of space. And then there’s the whole shading issue, where one plant on top is getting all the light. With traditional growing, you’ve got sunlight and it’s free. Whereas, with us, [the container] is a fully enclosed, controlled environment, where we’re using powered lights.
There’s a weird red-violet aura to the inside of the storage container. It looks like a scene out of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Yes, it’s very futuristic. We realized that if we’re going to compete with the free resource that is the sun, we needed to use that lighting as efficiently and as sparingly as possible. [We needed to] keep the cost down, keep the energy down, but, most importantly, grow high-quality food.
…What’s the energy cost to grow hydroponically?
…t’s [only] about $2,600 a year to power [each] Freight Farms [container] because we are running LED lights, which are really [energy-]efficient, and we use minimal electricity outside of that.
Listen now to Steven Jones-D'Agostino's 29-minute interview with Brad McNamara, which aired recently on The Business Beat on 90.5 WICN.
Steven Jones-D'Agostino is chief pilot of Best Rate of Climb: Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media and Radio Production.
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