Experience Magazine, November 2022
It’s 1 p.m. on a Monday in the Cincinnati suburb of Hamilton, Ohio. But inside a windowless 70,000-square-foot structure in an industrial park on the outskirts of town, the “sun” is only just rising.
In a sealed room within the factory, dozens of LED grow lights awaken, dispelling the darkness of a simulated night. The light-emitting diodes fill the space with a glowing pink dawn that illuminates rows upon rows of leafy greens, packed together on trays and stacked on racks up to the 55-foot-high ceiling. This is the grow zone at 80 Acres Farms, one of the country’s largest vertical farms. On any given day there, 13,000 plants per row, or 800,000 plants in all — from lettuce and kale to basil to microgreens — are somewhere on their 30-day journey from seed to harvest.
