"It started as a hobby in my backyard, but a couple of my friends wanted to know how the produce I was growing was so good. One thing led to another, and a few weeks later I decided to give it a shot full-time."
"It" is Stacked Farm, an indoor vertical farm, that began with a pilot 400-square metre facility in Burleigh Heads, Queensland. That facility shut down in 2021, and the company has now hit full production on its 6,588-square-meter Arundel facility (2,144 square meters of which is the operating farm footprint), which completed its first full harvest in January this year. The new facility is engineered to output more than 400 tonnes of herbs and leafy greens per year, along with soft fruits like berries and tomatoes.
Its big draw-card is that the farm requires just six employees for operation and maintenance, and can enable full growth of a crop in just 16 to 31 days depending on the crop variety (compared to 45 to 80 days at a traditional farm). "We were late to entry in the market," Tzvetkoff says. "We got to see what all the US operators were doing first, and that was a huge advantage because we were able to see what they were doing wrong and test their processes."
Tzvetkoff and the team made two fast realizations. First: Australia's fair work policies make running a farm expensive. And second: they'd need cheap energy to grow indoors, which Australia didn't have. "We kind of had to rethink the entire business to build an indoor farm that was profitable," he says. "We focused our energy on automation, firstly. Figuring out where the bottlenecks were and how we could solve those issues."
Read the entire article at Forbes