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Kimbal Musk - Elon's brother - just opened a shipping container farm compound in New York City

Kimbal Musk - Elon's brother - just opened a shipping container farm compound in New York City

The Square Roots farms sit between an old Pfizer factory and the apartment building where Jay-Z grew up in Brooklyn.

They are vertical farms — everything grows inside 320-square-foot steel shipping containers. Each container can produce about 50,000 mini-heads of lettuce per year.

The USDA gave the Square Roots entrepreneurs small loans to cover preliminary operating expenses. Other investors include Powerplant Ventures, GroundUp, Lightbank, and FoodTech Angels.

On four parallel walls, leafy greens and herbs sprout from soil-free growing beds filled with nutrient-rich water. Instead of sunlight, they rely on hanging blue and pink LED rope lights.

About the size of the standard one-car garage, each shipping container can produce the same amount of crops as two acres of outdoor farmland.

Musk and Peggs chose Square Roots’ first class of 10 young entrepreneurs from over 500 applications. Peggs says they represent the next generation of farmers — though not all came to NYC with farming experience.

Before Josh Aliber, 24, moved from Boston to Brooklyn to join Square Roots, he had never farmed. Now he’s starting up his own specialty herb business and running a vertical farm.

Earlier this year, while Aliber was recovering from a concussion, he learned about urban farming from a podcast. He started researching it from his bed, and found out about the Square Roots program.

His shipping container farm runs on 10 gallons of recycled water a day, which is less than the average shower’s worth.

Aliber can monitor everything from the oxygen level to the humidity — which affects the plants’ taste and texture — using “the computer panel” near the door and sensors in the growing beds. If he wants a tropical or northeastern climate, he can control that too.

Aliber is selling his specialty herbs and basil primarily to upscale Italian and pizza restaurants in NYC.

All of the Square Roots farmers sold their first harvests at a recent local farmer’s market.

Though the program, he has had the opportunity to work with numerous mentors, including Tom Colicchio, a restaurateur and judge from “Top Chef."

“Yes, I have the ability to make money, but yes, I also have the ability to change the world,” he says.

Another 27-year-old farmer, Electra Jarvis, comes to Square Roots three days per week. On Wednesdays, she spends four hours meticulously placing 800 seeds inside small troughs.

Two weeks later, she transplants them to the walls. “We should be growing closer to us in cities,” she says.

Aliber, Jarvis, and the other eight entrepreneurs are not just learning how to grow plants, but also how to grow their businesses. A large part of the program is learning about branding and “how to tell our stories,” Jarvis says.

The larger goal of Square Roots, Musk tells Business Insider, is to create “a real food revolution.”

In the late ‘90s, following the tech boom, the Musk brothers moved from South Africa to Silicon Valley. They invested in X.com, which later merged with PayPal and was acquired by eBay.

Kimbal Musk has known Peggs, who previously worked on tech startups sold to Walmart and Adobe, for a decade. Before Square Roots, they worked together at The Kitchen, where Peggs served as the "President of Impact" and helped expand the chain to new cities.

When asked how his experience in tech translates to running a vertical farming accelerator, Peggs says the two fields share the same motivation.

“You learn how to execute impossible dreams. This was all just a Powerpoint presentation six months ago,” says Peggs, pointing to the farms behind him.

“Today’s consumer wants to know they are supporting companies that are doing something good for the world,” Peggs says. “This not just a Brooklyn foodie trend.”

The world’s largest vertical farm, Aerofarms, launched this year in Newark, New Jersey. In late 2015, urban farming company Gotham Greens opened the world’s largest rooftop farm in Chicago.

Square Roots hopes to expand to 20 cities by 2020.

Vertical farms can grow all year, using significantly less water and space than outdoor farms.

Critics of vertical farms point out that the LEDs drain a lot of electricity. Peggs says Square Roots is exploring how the farmers can switch to solar power in the future, since electricity is the biggest cost for the farms.

Square Roots’ lights are only on in the evening and night, so they don’t run 24-7 like some other vertical farms.

Square Roots will build offices inside the Pfizer factory in the coming months. In its past life, the building produced ammonia, a chemical that’s sprayed on plants and became vital to the industrial food system after WWI.

In 2017 and beyond, sustainable food startups will do business there. “It’s an act of poetic justice,” Peggs says.

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