This indoor farming company is trying to win workers over to agriculture — through desk-job benefits

• Eden Green uses high-tech systems to grow greens indoors and reduce the unpredictability of farming.
• The company also aims to draw workers by offering health insurance, paid leave, and a 401(k).

"It was just like I'm walking into Willy Wonka's factory or something," Lewis told Business Insider. "It looked like everything I had ever wanted."

That was three years ago at Eden Green Technology, and Lewis got the job. They'd never considered a career in agriculture even after having grown up wandering through the hoop houses that dot their aunt's homestead. But Eden Green, which uses a high-tech system for growing staples like arugula lettuce and cooking greens like kale and chard in Cleburne, Texas, where Lewis was raised, won them over.

One of Eden Green's aims is to remove some of the unpredictability of farming by doing it indoors in soaring greenhouses stacked with rows of greens. The company is also trying to take on another challenge many farms face: finding enough workers. To do that, Eden Green wants to make agriculture feel like other careers. It offers health insurance, paid leave, and it recently introduced a 401(k) — benefits not always available to traditional farm workers.

Part of the idea is to pull in workers like Lewis. Finding employees who might not have thought of ag is important because it's an industry that, like healthcare or retail, often faces trouble drawing enough workers.

Eden Green's playbook involves going where the people are. Cleburne, with a population of about 34,000, sits on the edge of the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth region. That means Eden Green can truck produce to nearby grocery distribution centers and operate in an area with a large enough population to attract job candidates. It's a far cry from traditional US farms, which on average span hundreds of acres in rural areas where fewer than one in four Americans live.

"By solving the distribution problem, we've actually solved the labor problem, too," Eddy Badrina, the company's CEO, told BI. It's a location that's already a draw for workers. There's a Walmart distribution facility less than half a mile down the road — that Eden Green also supplies its produce to — and an Amazon warehouse about 10 miles away, he said.

"If you could work with plants and work in something that is, you know, environmentally and economically sustainable, and it's feeding your local community, or you could work at an Amazon warehouse, what would you do?" he said, adding that one isn't necessarily better than the other.

When Lewis, 24, came across the job listing for an entry-level role on Eden Green's production team, they were managing a Starbucks. "I just really wanted something more. I wanted to feel like I was doing something good," they said.

At its facility of nearly 83,000 square feet, Eden Green does its growing without soil, a process called hydroponics. Eden Green said it uses 98% less water and 99% less land than traditional farming. The company is adding greenhouses in Cleburne that will triple its growing capacity. In the next five years, it plans to build 20 greenhouses across the US.

The idea of producing basics like lettuce in a different way appealed to Lewis, who'd long been interested in environmental sustainability but wasn't sure how to make that fit with their job. Lewis, who's also a writer, tried college for a while, but they said it didn't feel right.

Now, Lewis has moved up and currently holds the job of grower. They spend about half their time at a computer placing orders, monitoring some of the systems used to run the greenhouses, and communicating with vendors. The predictability of the work is part of the appeal for Lewis.

"You can still have that agriculture job and have a full-time, steady position," they said.

Eden Green has 13 harvests a year, so there aren't the ups and downs for demand in labor as is often the case with traditional growing methods, Badrina said. That changes the foundational assumptions of agriculture.

Their workers have to "be in there every single day to plant, to tend, to harvest, to pack," Badrina said.

Eden Green pays $14 to $25 to its hourly workers, who do things like seeding, tending to plants, harvesting, and putting goods into clamshell packaging, he said. There are more than half a dozen roles within a greenhouse that someone can specialize in. "Someone with a high school degree can start at the base and then work their way up," Badrina said. And often, in his experience, younger workers like the idea of doing something meaningful to society.

That, he said, helps Eden Green hang onto workers. And it's not just young workers with high school diplomas. The company employs people with advanced degrees in controlled-environment agriculture, horticulture, and plant biology. Eden Green's retention rate has been above 80% for the past nine months, the company said.

Room to advance — and the work itself — has kept Lewis at the company, they said. "I do love working with people, but plants have always been a passion of mine. So to be able to join a passion with a career has just been a dream for me," Lewis said.