April 8, 2020

A case study in how one vertical farming startup is helping to ensure food security for this U.S. territory

By Thea Beckman, Fusion Farms

When Kendell Lang and Lisa Jander, founders of Fusion Farms, travelled to Puerto Rico in 2018, they were shocked to find the once lush, tropical paradise looking like it had been tossed through a cosmic blender – chewed up and spit out. 

Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on September 20, 2017, was the worst natural disaster in recorded history to affect Puerto Rico and was also the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Jeanne in 2004. Add to the tragedy a long history of government corruption, failing infrastructure, and lack of aid, even though Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and you’ve got an island on its knees, barely capable of feeding its own residents, all American citizens.

Puerto Rico imports upwards of 90 percent of its fresh food

Puerto Rico is an island with plentiful, naturally occurring food sources, abundant fresh water, and a population of seasoned farmers ready and willing to work, and yet agriculture suffers here. Consequently, residents are forced to pay for imported food products, which are expensive and on the verge of expiry by the time they reach grocery store shelves. This is not to mention the toll the associated carbon footprint of importing has on the environment.

“There are times when out shopping that we found ourselves trying to decide which lettuce was the least wilted, which vegetables were the least browned, and which fruits were the least bruised and molded over,” said Kendell Lang, co-founder and CEO of Fusion Farms. “To add insult to injury, we were spending more money than we were in San Diego for fresh produce that was a day away from belonging in the compost heap.”

Relying almost entirely on food imports from the U.S. mainland and neighboring countries is a vulnerable position to be in for the Caribbean island nation, particularly at the present time when an unprecedented outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 is threatening to bring global logistics and trade to a standstill.

Puerto Rico pays 151 percent more to transport goods from American ports than from foreign ports

Compounding the problem is an archaic shipping law, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, which was intended to encourage American prosperity after World War I. Unfortunately, however, the law has had a profound and opposite effect on Puerto Rico. The Jones Act, as it is also known, states that all goods transported by water between ports in the United States and its territories (of which Puerto Rico is one), have to be carried on American-flagged, American-built, American-owned, and American-crewed boats. The unintended consequences of this act have done measurable harm to Puerto Rico’s economy, not only because of the steeper consumer prices incurred by the more expensive Jones Act vessels, but also because there aren’t always ships available to transport the volume of goods Puerto Rico requires. A third point of considerable harm has been done to the environment because Puerto Rican businesses have been forced to turn to cheaper land freight, which travels from further afield to transport their goods.

A study by Advantage Business Consulting (ABC) titled The Impact of the Jones Act on Puerto Rico was commissioned by a coalition of Puerto Rican government, hospitality, legal, and other institutions. After surveying a wide array of importing companies in Puerto Rico, it was found that transporting containers from the United States costs, on average, 2.5 times, or 151 percent more than transporting from foreign ports. 

For example: shipping a container on Jones Act vessels from the U.S. East Coast to Puerto Rico costs $3,063, but shipping the same container (on non-Jones Act vessels) to nearby Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic costs only $1,504; and to Kingston, Jamaica, $1,607. Using this data, ABC then calculated an impact equivalent to a Jones Act tax of 7.2 percent on food and beverages alone, which translates into an increase of $367 million in additional annual costs to the local economy.

After surveying the hurricane damage and learning of the island’s innumerable challenges, from expensive imported produce to rolling blackouts, you’d think that Lang and Jander would have been repelled from ever visiting Puerto Rico again. But they weren’t: they fell in love with the island and its people, and decided to relocate.

Fusion Farms is born

Lang’s background in biology and the couple’s life-long interest in sustainable agriculture and aquaponics, and passion for helping people, seeded the idea for Fusion Farms. The concept? A hurricane-protected, climate controlled, indoor vertical aquaponics facility powered by renewable energy. Leveraging the natural relationship between plants and fish, Fusion Farms can produce a regular, reliable cornucopia of fresh leafy greens, herbs, vegetables, fruits, and fish for local Puerto Rican communities. Moreover, an indoor vertical rack system, it can grow 9 to 12 times the annual yield of traditional farming with 10 percent of the water.

But how do you protect a farm, even an indoor one, from a category five hurricane with wind speeds of 175 mph?

The answer lies in the abandoned concrete warehouses that scatter the island of Puerto Rico. Belonging to the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO), these buildings were once thriving places of industry, predominantly pharmaceutical, but were steadily abandoned as debt, an unstable power grid, the rapid consolidation of manufacturing facilities, and a changing tax structure drove business to the ground.

“We immediately saw the potential in these unused buildings,” said Lang. “Built in the 1970’s, they have withstood fifty hurricane seasons and are still standing. We understood that if we were to establish a farm that could cater to the island’s need for fresh food, it would have to be protected from hurricane damage. These PRDICO buildings provided the answer.”

Soon after relocating, Lang and Jander arranged a lease deal with PRIDCO for an 11,500-square-foot concrete building in Mayagüez, in western Puerto Rico. With crowd-sourced funding provided by a Start Engine campaign, a hefty bank loan, and a government grant for a solar panel installation, the couple rolled up their sleeves and set to work building the first ever aquaponics farm in Puerto Rico.

In the ensuing year, the two brought their building up to code; painted the walls; fixed the wiring and plumbing; mowed the lawns on the property; installed dozens of grow lights and vertical rack systems to support their seedlings; networked with agriculture, aquaculture, and hydroponics experts around the world; purchased a power generator and rainwater tanks so that they could keep powering their operation independently of the municipal grid; and fought past hundreds of milestones, both humble and herculean in size, on the journey to getting Fusion Farms up and running.

How do aquaponics work?

Today, the 11,500-square-foot hurricane protected pilot facility in Mayagüez, when fully operational has the capacity to grow over 80,000 planted pots at a time, which are stacked on great vertical racks to optimize productivity per square footage of facility space. The farm’s spectrum of leafy greens, herbs, and vegetables are grown in deep-water rafts without soil under LED lights in a closed, climate controlled environment that is protected from bad weather, molds, pests, disease, and harmful pathogens, without the need for chemical interference, like pesticides.

In the aquaculture portion of the farm, Fusion Farms will rear healthy tilapia in enormous, subterranean circular ponds with a high margin to insure against flooding. The fish water, packed with nutrients from their wastes, is piped through the complex network of deep-water rafts and racks in Fusion Farms’ grow facility, providing its plants with the nutrition they need to grow quickly and prolifically. Once the water is filtered clean, it is channeled back into the fish tanks, ready for its next load of nutrients.

“We have set up a perfectly natural cycle, one that fuels plant growth and delivers seed-to-harvest produce in as little as 21 days,” explained Jander, who is in charge of the farm’s operations. “Additionally, our carousel grow cycle means that we can grow 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with consistent output.”

And so, through the fusion of aquaculture, hydroponics, renewable energy, and vertical agriculture, Fusion Farms aims to produce a year-round, reliable, and varied harvest of fresh leafy greens, herbs, micro-herbs, vegetables, fruits, and fish. Moreover, being the product of a closed, carefully controlled environment, this fresh, nutritious, 100 percent organic food is completely free of pesticides, additives, and hormones.

Food security during the COVID-19 pandemic 

With COVID-19 sweeping the planet, the need for food sovereignty and security in Puerto Rico is an imperative, now more than ever.

Puerto Rico is now on lockdown. Government offices and private businesses are closed, and no one is allowed to leave their homes except to buy food, attend medical appointments, etc.  This Easter weekend, even grocery stores will be closed and there is a whole new level of social distancing being implemented as we hopefully reach the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the next two weeks.

A lot of people are still in a deep fog right now. Reality still hasn’t quite hit. There is a line from the first Matrix movie when Morpheus tells Neo, “You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he’s expecting to wake up.”

A tsunami of consumers are waking up to the reality that they will need to figure out how to get food and drink delivered to their front door as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The CEO of Fusion Farms says that the company had “existing capacity” to deal with the strong growth when they initially launched in November of 2019.

Then, in March, demand jumped after the island-wide lockdown adopted by Puerto Rico caused an unprecedented surge in demand for Fusion Farms produce, which now needs to be delivered or made available for pickup.

A world in lockdown means this change has happened fast; so fast that some fresh produce growers like Fusion Farms are having difficulty keeping up with demand, and as a result of this unprecedented global event, they have been sold out every week and have more demand than they can currently supply.

“Fusion Farms was built to demonstrate how to achieve food security after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Little did we expect that our Food Sovereignty model would be proven out exactly for a situation like the one we’re currently facing,” said Lang. “The fact that Puerto Rico is a ‘food desert’ in the middle of a tropical Caribbean island has only been accentuated by Maria in 2017, the earthquakes in 2019, and now the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The risk of our food supply being interrupted is a very real possibility and people are experiencing first-hand what it means to have grocery store shelves emptied and waiting in lines for hours just to get basic food supplies.”

The scalability of Fusion Farms enables a necessary solution to be quickly expanded during the current coronavirus global crisis, providing a strong and valid foundation for continued effective operations for hyper-local controlled environment agriculture.

Only the most optimistic analysts see ‘brick and mortar’ retailers and in-person shopping going back to normal operations any time soon.

A pandemic so fast and so global has only occurred a handful of times in all of human history. And in our modern age, it’s unprecedented.

There are clearly a number of reasons why this pandemic could last much longer than most people probably think. So, it’s prudent to be physically, mentally, and financially prepared for that reality.

If this virus has taught us anything, it’s that tomorrow can be radically different from today.

This goes against some of our most basic human tendencies, what psychologists call ‘cognitive bias’ or what is also referred to as ‘normalcy bias’. Whether you call it the ‘cognitive’ or ‘normalcy’ bias, the bottom line is that our brains cling to the idea that tomorrow is going to be just like today. And we have a very difficult time accepting rapid change.

And even when radical changes do take place and we eventually become accustomed to our new realities, we still cling to the belief that things can’t get any worse.

They can. Again, anything is possible now. All scenarios are on the table. So it would be dangerous to assume that it can’t get any worse, or that the pandemic won’t drag on for a longer period of time.

It would be foolish to think that everything will go back exactly to the way things were before. What no one thought possible just a few short weeks ago has now become a world-altering reality, and it should open up your thought process about “what if?”

What if…airlines go bankrupt, global logistics and supply chain companies go bankrupt, international shipping companies go bankrupt, so…for a time, maybe months, all international airfreight and ships with containers stop coming to Puerto Rico [insert your city or country name here].  How long can Puerto Rico [insert your city or country name here] survive without shipments coming in? What is the Emergency Plan for PR [insert your city or country name here] if there are no physical transportation companies in operation to move goods or products in the air or on the sea?

Our normalcy bias used to prevent us from considering the “what if’s?”, but the reality of what is now on our front doorstep forces us to consider possibilities which were unimaginable just a short time ago. In order to prevent those “what if” scenarios, we have to take action TODAY in order to survive and then ultimately thrive. The challenge for Puerto Rico [insert your city or country name here] is that investment needs to be made IMMEDIATELY to help prevent a catastrophic disaster of no shipping or no food supplies!

It is entirely possible that we could see supply chain disruptions. It’s not a certainty—nothing is certain right now. But there are pretty obvious risks.

Chances are high that whatever you ate for breakfast this morning probably originated in some far-off place. The food on your plate can easily travel hundreds if not thousands of miles before it arrives to your table, starting off in a farmer’s field, to an inspection center, and then to the port where it is shipped/trucked/railed/flown to a regional distribution center, and ultimately to your grocery store.

The global food supply chain is incredibly complex and not especially resilient; however, it’s unlikely that the global supply chain would shut down completely. But there’s definitely a risk for hiccups, i.e. slowdowns that cause delays and sporadic shortages. This kind of scarcity could create some high stress situations in the grocery store; just take a look at Black Friday videos on YouTube to get a sense of what we’re talking about.

The pilot farm in Mayagüez is just the beginning. It is the goal of Fusion Farms to craft a repeatable, scalable model for aquaponics facilities, which can be built into PRIDCO’s abandoned warehouses across the island. In addition to catering to the fresh food needs of its surrounding community, each farm can provide a dozen or more jobs to Puerto Ricans, particularly disenfranchised farmers.

Food security now and for a food sovereign future 

Puerto Rico’s floundering economy, infrastructure, power grid, and agriculture make it clear, now more than ever, after Hurricane Maria and the exploding COVID-19 pandemic, that the island needs to establish its food sovereignty. Fusion Farms is one such venture that seeks to empower the island to feed itself but it should by no means be the only one.

“Each and every household and community should grow at least some of its fruits and vegetables,” urged Jander. “If you plant smartly, in places that are more protected from inclement weather than others, and preserve or can your excess produce, you can improve your family or community’s resilience in times of need. We also encourage Puerto Rico – its banks, businesses, and government, to renew its focus on supporting and encouraging sustainable agriculture. It’s the only way onward. It’s the only way upward.”

Come rain or shine, hurricane, earthquake, or virus pandemic, Puerto Rico should be able to grow its own food and feed its own people.

For more information about Fusion Farms and the fight for Puerto Rico’s food sovereignty, go to www.fusionfarmspr.com or email CEO@FusionFarmsPR.com.

All views, data, opinions and declarations expressed are solely those of the author(s) and not of Global AgInvesting, GAI News, GAI Gazette, or parent company HighQuest Group