Seedlings grow in the germination room at Bowery Farming’s facility in Bethlehem on Thursday, May 26, 2022, during the official opening of the company’s third commercial farm. According to a press release, the facility is Bowery Farming's most technologically advanced vertical farm, and is "a critical next chapter in Bowery’s growth as it reimagines how farming can be more sustainable and impactful for our future." (Joseph Scheller / The Morning Call)

The “farmers” wore white coats; the gray floor was spotless. Eat off it? You could.

The aroma of fresh greens, basil and more filled the air. Farmers packed the produce in clamshell containers at a room temperature around 38 degrees for shipping.

At Bowery Farming’s new south Bethlehem facility, workers grow, harvest, package and ship lettuce and other produce. Combining the benefits of local farms with technological advances, Bowery precisely grows crops in a controlled indoor environment without any pesticides and while using 95% less water than traditional agriculture.

Bowery officials say they are shortening the time from harvest to table. About 90% of lettuce sold in this country comes from California, according to one farmers organization there and Katie Seawell, Bowery’s chief commercial officer. Seawell said those greens can’t be fresher for the 50 million people along the East Coast that Bowery intends to serve from its Bethlehem site.

“You can’t walk that supply chain,” she said.

Federal, state and local officials gathered May 26 to celebrate Bowery Farming’s grand opening. The 156-000-square-foot plant, on about 9 acres in Lehigh Valley Industrial Park VII off Route 412 and Interstate 78, has been ramping up since the beginning of April and is now fully operational and shipping its products. Plans were announced in December 2020, shortly after work began on the farm.

Visitors saw fully grown produce getting ready to be shipped to salad-lovers locally and elsewhere.

Bowery is the first farm of its kind in the Lehigh Valley, but it’s one of many players in a fast-growing field. At least 74 indoor farming companies were founded in 2020 worldwide, according to an Associated Press story this year, and more could be coming.

The company said its indoor farms bring higher yields while using less land and water. Bowery officials say they also make it possible to grow produce year-round and closer to where people live, increasing the reliability of supply and reducing fuel consumption related to transportation.

Francesco Di Gioia of Penn State University agreed generally with those claims. Di Gioia said that while, generally speaking, such farms come with higher production costs (including lighting and technology), the amount of production and greater efficiency that comes with indoor farming can offset those costs.

“The fact that this technology is improving over time, and there is good investment from many companies, it seems it is making things more competitive,” said Di Gioia, an assistant professor of vegetable crop science who studies vertical farming and has heard of Bowery. “But everything is dependent on the availability of electricity, and it’s going to cost a lot of money for that.”

Another advantage, Di Gioia said, comes from the nutritional aspect — that having fresh produce reaching consumers in a shorter time makes a difference. “The shelf life [of leafy greens] is not too long,” he said.

And price per container of those leafy greens might affect consumers’ buying interest, he also said. A spot check of Bowery’s prices for a 4-ounce container of salad greens was $2.98 at Walmart; Weis supermarkets listed a 5-ounce salad mix at $2.99.

Produce from indoor farms “is not cheap, so it might not be affordable to everyone,” he said. “But I believe in the future, it may be more affordable.”

Various agencies, including NASA, and companies have been farming indoors since at least the 1980s. A November 2021 article by the space agency said its interest in farming grew from a need to feed astronauts during long-term space exploration. It claims it built the country’s first vertical farm in a hypobaric chamber left over from testing the Mercury space capsule.

The cost of lighting for the crops made it hard to commercialize the process — indoor farmers couldn’t grow enough produce to make a profit — but a drop in costs of LEDs in the past few years has made it possible for more businesses to begin indoor agriculture.

Irving Fain, Bowery’s 42-year-old founder and CEO, launched the company in 2015. To do that required more than just cheaper LEDs, Fain said: It needed to leverage innovation with robotics, computers and artificial intelligence storing, and process large amounts of data.

Those were impediments to making the business grow, Fain said. The impediment now, he said, is to keep “driving opportunity” and greater efficiency to broaden its range of crops.

Here is how Bowery’s indoor, vertical farm works:

A farmer pours seeds into a drum and starts the automated system that determines how many flats to prepare and how many seeds to include based on a specific crop’s growing preferences.

Next comes germination, in which the seeded flats are moved into a chamber for several days, with each flat on a varied schedule. Farmers receive notifications from the system when it’s time to move the plants into the grow room. During the growing stage, the farm recaptures water from plants with a goal to reclaim nearly all the water used in growing.

Next, an automated conveyor belt retrieves the flats from the germination chamber. When crops are harvest-ready, the Bowery system signals they can be picked. This initiates the movement of trays from the grow room to the harvesting station, where they’re code-scanned. From there, crops are auto-harvested and packed for retailers.

Throughout the process, Bowery’s operating system uses various sensors to monitor lighting, air flow and water supply for the plants. LEDs mimic the spectrum of sunlight, timed to give plants some time in the dark, as if they were growing outside. Bowery’s software knows where each type of crop is growing, and can time the lights differently for each crop. It can also detect problems, such as if a light is off longer than usual or if a crop appears to be falling behind, in which case it gets transplanted.

Bowery’s sophisticated system can let farmers know which crops are off to which stores.

The whole process takes approximately one month, meaning Bowery’s Bethlehem farm can conceivably harvest crops 12 times a year, according to Seawell.

Bowery officials have searched the country to gauge public sentiment about its farming concept, Fain said, but “Pennsylvania and in Bethlehem specifically just came in with open arms and said, ‘We really want to make this happen.’”

Seawell said the location of retailers’ distribution sites, the potential customer base and the region’s workforce made Bethlehem a perfect spot for the facility.

“There was a vision of how Pennsylvania can help move agriculture forward,” she said, a perspective shared by both company and state.

Gov. Tom Wolf, one of the speakers at the grand opening, said the state provided Bowery with about $460,000 in a grant and tax credit, while the company’s investment totals about $32 million. He called that a worthwhile deal.

Bowery also has farms in Kearny, New Jersey, two of which are for research and development. A third is a commercial operation serving grocers and e-commerce companies in the Northeast. Another facility, in Nottingham, Maryland, runs on hydroelectric energy. And the company has announced plans to expand near Atlanta and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Morning Call journalist Anthony Salamone can be reached at 610-820-6694 or asalamone@mcall.com.

Background: Bowery Farming’s south Bethlehem facility can grow pesticide-freer produce indoors 365 days a year, with a growing cycle about one month long compared with two to three months for conventional farms. It was built to eventually provide enough produce to 50 million people in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

Jobs and more: Privately owned Bowery is creating approximately 70 local jobs, though officials declined to discuss wages or how many positions it intends to fill with Valley residents. The company is partnering with Second Harvest Food Bank of the Lehigh Valley and Northeast Pennsylvania to donate fresh produce.

Key Stats: The farm is powered by 100% renewable energy, and features LED lighting and a custom water recapture system. Bowery says it is the largest vertical farming company nationwide and sells to more than 1,000 grocery stores, from large grocery chains to Gerrity’s Valley Farm Market in Bethlehem.

Why Bowery? Based in New York, the company’s name stems from the origins of a historic lower Manhattan neighborhood, CEO Irving Fain said during the company’s May 26 event. Settled by the Dutch in 1654, the Bowery (originally spelled bouwerij, an old Dutch word for farm) served as a great connector of farmlands to the heart of the city through the 17th century.