Is Vertical Farming the Future of Texas Agriculture?
Eden Green Technology in Cleburne, Tx.
Indoor crop production saves water and reduces supply chain risks, but its carbon footprint and expense still make it a gamble for start-ups.
In 2022, Eden Green opened its two-acre farm in Cleburne, about thirty miles south of Fort Worth. The company has been around since 2017 but focused on research and development before opening the facility. Its growing space is a hybrid between a greenhouse and typical vertical farms, combining the ability to take advantage of sunlight with the density of stacked crops. Lettuce and herb plants there sprout in cup holder-sized pods on towers that extend eighteen feet high. Eden Green has successfully cultivated more than two hundred varieties of crops but has no plans to grow anything besides lettuce and herbs commercially. A clear plastic roof overhead lets in direct sunlight for each of the facility’s 320,000 plants. The company estimates using 4.59 kilowatt hours per pound of lettuce, bringing its energy use closer to the average greenhouse than to other vertical farms.
While many of its competitors sell branded microgreens at premium prices, Eden Green produces romaine lettuce for Walmart. CEO Eddy Badrina said the Cleburne farm breaks even, and the company hopes to achieve profitability by growing multiple plants in each pod, a concept it’s currently testing. Eden Green plans to open twenty more facilities nationwide by 2028, including two more in Cleburne.
Eden Green workers harvest lettuce in Cleburne, and then it’s mechanically packaged onsite and loaded into boxes. A Walmart employee hauls it to one of the retailer’s distribution centers, which sits across the street. Within about 48 hours, each head of lettuce is on a shelf at one of four hundred Walmarts across Oklahoma and Texas. There’s little waste from the facility—about 3 percent of the crop, Badrina says—and consumers, thanks to the relatively short trip to the store, have up to two weeks before their lettuce spoils. Nationwide, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates some $162 billion of food— having contributed as much to greenhouse gas emissions as 42 coal-fired power plants—is wasted every year. About one-third of food waste occurs in the field, and roughly 27 percent happens during packaging and distribution and at retailers. “That’s what we’re trying to solve,” Badrina said.