Brad McNamara, CEO and Founder of Freight Farms is on Growing Business radio.  

Freight Farms is a critically acclaimed startup that reuses shipping containers, to offer a sustainable alternative to agriculture, as we know it.  Freight Farms takes up-cycled shipping containers and retrofits them into fully automated hydroponic farms. Their goals are to provide you with farming infrastructure to empower you to enter the local food system and offer a new platform to grow your business. Each container can provide about an acre worth of vegetation, and because it’s a soil-less system there are no herbicides or pesticides involved in the growth process.  

There are a number of benefits to operating a freight farms. For one, because of it’s fully automated system and human-centered design, labor requirements are significantly reduced and it only requires about 15-20 hours of work per week. Also, it’s possible to grow leafy greens year round because everything is operating inside a fully-insulated shipping container with extensive climate controls. This allows people to grow anywhere regardless of the outside environment.