![]() “Essentially, we have to feed the plants the same amount of light every day, 24-hour period day, and we want to get as much as we possibly can from the sun, and anything that we don’t get from the sun, we have this lighting system to provide whatever is in deficit.” Says Bob LaDue Lēf needs to mimic June weather-a warm and humid, 75 degrees-365 days a year. Lēf sells those 5 ounce clam shells you see lined up at the grocery stores for somewhere between $3.99 and $4.99, a package.īaby Greens are the Prada of produce, the Lamborghini of lettuce, the Stradivarius of salad.īut just to be clear, this isn’t exactly an easy thing to pull off: lettuce usually does not want to grow in the middle of the New England winter. Which is a LOT of money for a greenhouse, but think about how much baby greens cost. Henry invested $10 million dollars to get this greenhouse up and running. Robotic arm number two then swings the gutter out onto the greenhouse floor. Next, a robotic arms swings that gutter over to a different machine which sprinkles a precise number of tiny seeds into the soil. First, a machine fills each of these gutters with a really thin layer of nutrients. It’s basically an assembly line for growing lettuce. About 19 feet long, just under 2 inches wide.” Says Bob LaDue, Vice President and COO of Lēf Farms. ![]() “ looks like a miniature rain gutter, specially designed to hold our growing medium, and also work with automation. Instead of pots, the plants are grown in long trays they call “gutters” and they take up the entire greenhouse floor. But instead of Mustangs, it’s cranking out baby greens. This Ford factory style greenhouse is almost completely automated. They currently have one crop that takes 13 days from germination to harvest, and another that’s 17 days.Īnd this greenhouse, at full capacity, will be able to grow 1.3 million pounds of baby greens each year, with growth happening year round, even in the middle of a harsh New England winter. They’ve invested in a way to grow baby greens incredibly fast. ![]() The inside of the Lēf Farm’s 50,000 square foot greenhouse sort of looks like a cross between a computer chip factory clean room, a Ford automotive factory and an Ikea.
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