What’s in this story:

What is controlled environment agriculture?

Weekend boot camps, skill-building, workforce prep for a growing industry

This building used to nourish growing minds. Now it will nourish lettuce

Why Southwest Virginia is just right for indoor agriculture

Watch your step! Pathogens and plants in the lab

Harvesting edibles — and vital information on how to grow

ONE BY ONE the frizzle sizzles, brush strokes and violas make their way from plastic tubs to greenhouse beds.

The tiny flowers rise just an inch or two out of rockwool, peat and oasis foam. They had germinated in a vertical grow room at the Controlled Environment Agriculture Innovation Center in Danville. Now that they’ve sprouted, plant science student Jacob Haymore carefully places each one in the greenhouse slots where they will grow for the next several weeks. 

Soon they’ll stand about 8 inches tall, ready to add color to a summer salad.

“Use them to decorate your plate, to make it look fancy,” Haymore said. “They add a little bit of flavor, but … they’re kind of just there.” 

It’s less about flavor than about growing methods and other testing at the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA for short) Innovation Center. The research facility and agriculture technology training center is a partnership between the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research and Virginia Tech.

The CEA Innovation Center conducts experiments and research for the industry while training students for indoor agriculture jobs. That work centers it within Virginia’s upstart CEA scene, according to a recent Virginia Tech study. Southwest and Southside Virginia, along with the rest of the state, are “well-positioned for CEA industry attraction and sector growth,” according to the study.

While Haymore transplanted edible flowers on a recent morning in Danville, larger-scale microgreens production was happening five miles away at vertical farming company AeroFarms. 

About 120 miles northwest, in Pulaski County, Red Sun Farms was growing tomatoes in its high-tech, 18-acre, glass-covered greenhouse. Seven miles from that industrial park site, renovations were happening at Pulaski’s historic but previously abandoned Jefferson Elementary School, which companies including Veg and Pod Farms are working to turn into a CEA rental facility — a pilot project that could lead to similar facilities in multiple old schoolhouses in the region and beyond.

Thirty miles south, in Carroll County, a U.K. company called Oasthouse Ventures Ltd. was working to build a 65-acre greenhouse to raise tomatoes year-round.

Those and other companies in Southwest and Southside Virginia are part of a move in the commonwealth to grow the industry. How it will ultimately shape up remains unclear, said Michael Evans, a Virginia Tech agriculture researcher and co-director of the CEA Innovation Center.

“I’m not that smart, but I’m smart enough that I don’t really ever try to truly predict the future,” Evans said. “What I’ll tell you is I think CEA in all of its forms offers us additional tools to raise food.”

North America still has the resources to grow many crops outdoors, and the economics and technology don’t necessarily work for growing all food in CEA operations, he said.

“I don’t think anybody right now believes we’re ever going to grow wheat and corn and soybeans [indoors],” Evans said. 

But watercress? Wasabi? Those could all be on the grow menu in Virginia facilities, Evans said. Lettuce, herbs, strawberries, peppers and tomatoes are among the vegetables already growing in the region’s greenhouses and vertical grow buildings.

This article will look at CEA from perspectives including education, innovation, established companies and up-and-coming developments.

What is CEA?

Greenhouses date back to the early 1700s in Europe, with some in North America later that century, Evans said. Such sunlight-only operations are still popular, with Red Sun Farms and the coming Oasthouse project serving as regional examples.

With advanced technology came enhanced indoor agriculture. A 2023 Virginia Tech Center for Economic and Community Engagement report gave an overview. 

LED lighting has replaced the sun in some facilities, allowing for controlled environments. Vertical farming features plants stacked in towers, or horizontally in layers — effective in smaller spaces. All of them, greenhouses included, may include computer-managed technologies to improve light and nutrition distribution, plant quality and production.

The “systems allow for year-round growing and prioritize locating close to the consumer to decrease the transportation time of the products, which also decreases pesticide use,” according to the report, titled Controlled Environment Agriculture Strategy and Roadmap in GO Virginia Region 3 (this economic region covers most of Southside).

Growing methods include hydroponics, which includes no soil and significantly less water — tomatoes, peppers, herbs, cannabis and the CEA Center’s edible flowers sprout in that system. 

Aeroponics farmers also forego soil, suspending plants in the air and spraying them with a water solution.

Fish and plants are raised via aquaponics. Blue Ridge Aquaculture, in Ridgeway, was Virginia’s first CEA facility of any sort.

“As the impacts of climate change continue, disruptions to traditional agricultural production and supply chain systems are at an increased risk,” the report reads. “CEA has potential to provide high-quality food year-round close to the consumer, using advanced technology and a highly skilled workforce.”

Getting to work

Haymore, 21, of Chatham, talked about his farming experience while he transplanted the flowers in the greenhouse.

“Actually, really didn’t have any interest in it until I started working here almost two years ago,” said Haymore, a Danville Community College student. “Since then, I’ve really started to enjoy it and enjoy the process of, like, planning an experiment, and then the hands-on work of putting the plants out and watching them grow over time.”

He learned about the job, called undergraduate research technician, through a friend of his mother’s and applied for it simply to have a job while he was in school. He’s headed for Virginia Tech in the fall to complete his degree.

“I like having a goal to work towards, and … feel like there’s like a purpose in what you’re doing at work, instead of just doing random tasks or something like that.”

The Virginia Tech study cited, among other workforce issues, a need to make K-12 students aware of CEA careers before they get as far along as Haymore did. The state needs to develop workforce preparation, job connections, internships and network opportunities.

“Closing any existing talent gaps and meeting future workforce needs for the CEA sector (including allied support companies) is critical,” the report states.

The jobs might wind up paying great. But there might not be that many of them available, Evans said. Robotics will come into play.

“They still have to harvest tomatoes by hand, but if we perfect the robotics right, that’s going to be able to reduce that load number,” Evans said. “So some [companies] can employ some decent numbers. 

“But I’m just saying when you look at some of them that are very automated … you’re only employing 20 people. That’s not a huge economic lift, right. But one thing you’ve got to remember is some of these are … high-quality jobs, from the work environment to the skills to the pay, etc.

“We may end up having fewer jobs in the future, but they’re going to probably be better jobs … They’re gonna have to get really well-trained.”

Evans’ CEA connections are hiring people based on the so-called soft skills — such as the ability to communicate, solve problems and learn quickly. Those folks might not be able to go back for a four-year, agriculture-centric degree, but online training, weekend boot camps and other skill-building programs are in the offing, he said.

“That’s good for the employee,” he said. “It’s good for the employer. Companies looking at Virginia … they really look at, am I going to be able to find a workforce? So knowing that the training is in place is valuable also for Virginia to recruit companies. So we hope to do more of that in the future.”

Evans, during a greenhouse tour at Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus, said that community college students and high school interns are involved in the work there, along with graduate students who are already on campus and helping run the research projects.

“They help do the research, and you’re also developing talent,” he said. “They’re learning it by doing it.”

‘It all looks right on paper’: Lettuce in an abandoned classroom

The Jefferson school project in Pulaski is a few different things. It is a real estate venture, taking advantage of historic tax credits but renovating to suit those tax requirements about preservation. 

To preserve the structural integrity, the developers are renovating it to suit vertical farming. The completed building will feature a carbon capture system that would provide supplemental CO₂ to grow and produce indoors, the project developers say. They used a state Department of Energy grant to show that it can work.

If it all works, it would launch the purchase of multiple dilapidated buildings to retrofit in similar ways. 

Given the money savings from the building tax credits, the project is an opportunity for multiple indoor farming aspirants to begin their own businesses with low overhead, via lease.

“We are able to charge less for rent compared to if they built a brand new facility” that required heavier loan allocations, said Luke Allison, founder and chief development officer for ag tech company Vegg Inc. “If [a tenant] had to pay for construction, like a mortgage on a construction loan, they have to worry about every aspect from managing the property to paying a mortgage.

“Whereas with us, we’re creating these facilities and the software and a lot of the technology to go into the facilities, and renovating them. And then the tenants are paying a rent that is much less than what they would traditionally have to pay, because of the historic tax credits. The growers can just grow, that’s it.”

Allison and Vegg co-founder and board president Cody Journell have teamed with a Richmond-based company, Pod Farms, and another Pulaski company, Mova Technologies, on the school building project.

Pod Farms’ president and founder, Toni Sperry, said that the team has done experimental projects over the last year or more to determine the operation’s climate footprint and integrate related technologies into the building.

“We’re keeping sustainability in mind, climate tech in mind,” said Sperry, who is also Vegg’s chief science officer. “And then also it being a controlled environment agriculture facility, we will be utilizing vertical hydroponic equipment to [grow] locally demanded produce.

“We are on a very small scale at the moment. We have intentions of getting the larger auditorium space, and that will be a farm.”

Classroom spaces in the school can accommodate smaller setups for trials and crops. Pod Farms has tested growing lettuce there already and has other crops on deck. She declined to go into detail other than to say they are focusing on produce that is hard to grow in Virginia’s farming climate.

Pod Farms’ portfolio includes energy-efficient vertical hydroponic systems that will help reduce costs, Sperry said.

The full project is about two years from completion. Vegg is starting to get lease commitments for multiple spaces in the building, Sperry said. When it’s all built out, the operations should benefit from Mova’s carbon capture device, which moves CO₂ into a tank for use in growing crops, said Steve Critchfield, Mova’s president and board chairman.

Historically, CEA industries get carbon dioxide delivered, extracted from burning natural gas. Those are additional costs to the operation, Critchfield said.

“Regular air from the atmosphere that you and I are breathing is sucked into MOVA’s precision agriculture technology,” said Critchfield, who is on Vegg’s advisory board. “Our idea is just grab it out of the atmosphere, use it, and that way the need of the industry is met, but there’s less cost, and … you’re not making more carbon dioxide, so it’s really as much economic incentive and lowering costs as it is environmental.” 

Having shown that it works, Mova is seeking grants and other funding to complete a scaled-up carbon capture unit for the school building.

The more critical proof of concept is yet to come — the school idea itself. Allison said that it all looks right on paper.

“We just need to actually have it physically done to show that it is in practice … a feasible adaptive reuse of these historic buildings,” Allison said. “But once that’s done … we’ll be looking for schools, and we’ll be looking to expand.

“But I think this is something that communities will be reaching out to us for — communities with vacant buildings, looking for developers to come in.”

Southwest Virginia’s the ‘right climate’ for big players in a growth industry

What brings a Brighton, U.K., CEA developer to Carroll County, Virginia? Climate and state leadership, apparently.

Oasthouse Ventures Ltd. announced in February that it would invest more than $100 million in a multi-phase project that will start with a 65-acre greenhouse. The tomato-focused, glass-covered greenhouse, with a packaging facility and a day care center for employees’ children, will employ 120 and bring about $1.1 billion to the region, the company says.

The greenhouse should be growing tomatoes next year, at an operation that the company says will eventually create 265 full- and part-time positions.

Oasthouse’s senior development manager, Ben Alexander, credited Gov. Glenn Youngkin for providing “favorable headwinds.” Youngkin approved $800,000 in grants for the project — $550,000 from the Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund and $250,000 from the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development Fund.

Money is one thing, but sunshine is better.

“So when you’re building a greenhouse, it’s a bit different to, say, a tire factory or a glove factory or something like that,” Alexander said in a phone call from his base in Charlotte, North Carolina. “You have to make sure you find the right climate.

“And so to do that, we put [together] all the weather station data east of the Mississippi, billions of data points, and reverse-engineered the site selection process, based on finding the optimum climate. And that’s how we landed on Southwest Virginia.”

Oasthouse has two other greenhouses in England that it calls “low carbon” and said in February that it will contract with Virginia sawmills for wood fuel to heat the greenhouses. It’s part of a corporate portfolio that includes EV charging and solar and wind energy projects, according to its website. 

The company will employ back-up gas boilers for the depths of winter cold, but only expects to use them less than 4% of the time, Alexander said. The grid will provide other power needs onsite, he said.

“It’s trying to produce whatever it may be, food or electricity, at a cheaper rate than the prevailing market, but really … equivalent to a sustainable way,” he said. “We’d have made a lot more money if we’d just gone about things without doing that, frankly, but it’s kind of who we are and what we want to achieve. But really, this is more about, yes it’s sustainable, but also it’s about bringing good quality products that’s not traveled thousands of miles to the consumer.”

Oasthouse will join already established indoor growing operations Red Sun Farms and AeroFarms.

Less than three miles from Danville, at Ringgold-based AeroFarms, sunshine isn’t necessary. The 145,000-square-foot building houses a vertical aeroponic operation, growing under LED lights. No one touches the plants, despite 180 employees working shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, said Molly Montgomery, the company’s CEO.

As with Oasthouse, action from Youngkin and Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry Matt Lohr was key, along with favorable utility costs, Montgomery said. The company focuses on microgreens only, raising kale, bok choy, broccoli, wasabi and more. It’s five and a half days from seed to harvest for these flavorful plants, densely packed with vitamins, minerals and nutrients, she said.

Montgomery took over Aerofarms as it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has led the company as it streamlined its operations to focus strictly on the Ringgold location.

“We have found, to our surprise, that there is a very large national demand for microgreens,” she said.

The company’s automated process, which involved neither pesticides nor soils, means the microgreens don’t require washing, and that significantly increases their shelf time from the days when farmers grew them in the ground, she said. That means AeroFarms can deliver nationwide.

Montgomery said its products are in every Whole Foods store in the nation, along with more than 250 Costco stores and at least 10 more grocery chains. Aerofarms will soon be found in Harris Teeter stores, she said.

The new ownership took over in September 2023, and in October 2024, the farm’s operations were profitable before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, “a huge milestone for us,” Montgomery said. Focusing on the Danville-area operation and leaving behind research and development facilities, including one in Abu Dhabi, was key.

“There’s been a lot of scrutiny around vertical farming,” she said. “I feel that we’ve now proven that vertical farming can indeed be sustainable, but it also can be profitable and deliver product at scale. So we’re very proud of that with our Danville farm.”

The company is exploring the possibility of a facility out West, in order to better reach more customers, but Danville will remain a priority, she said.

“We continue to recruit talent into the area, and we just look forward to continue partnering with the region and building a successful business,” Montgomery said.

In the Pulaski County town of Dublin, Red Sun Farms grows its tomatoes inside an 18-acre, glass-topped facility, with room for expansion if demand warrants, according to information the company provided. The Ontario, Canada-based company distributes its Dublin produce in the United States and Canada but allocates the majority of it for local buyers, Red Sun’s marketing and packaging manager said in an email.

The tomatoes, cultivated in growing mediums that include coco peat, sprout from seeds selected for flavor, yield, quality and disease resistance. The plants receive recirculated water and nutrients through thin plastic tubes connected to the growing medium.

Cultivation is timed to deliver food year-round, with heat vented from the top of the greenhouse to regulate greenhouse temperature. Boiler-heated water is pumped through metal rails along the greenhouse rows to keep the facility warm in colder months, the company’s marketing and packaging director wrote.

The company would accept further questions, but added that Red Sun’s policy is to review and approve all media before it is released to print. Cardinal News declined prior approval.

Evans, the CEA Innovation Center co-director, said that Red Sun is among the commonwealth’s “marquee facilities.” The greenhouse uses high-wire systems to produce “super tall” tomato plants that grow for 50 weeks, he said. The company employs more than 100 people, Evans said.

Watch your step, and other lessons learned

Oasthouse’s arrival sounds like good news for ag science students. The lessons they learn include what not to do. 

Workers and visitors at the Virginia Tech greenhouse cover their footwear and use disinfectant on their hands. Bugs and pathogens have been known to get in and mess with crops, Evans said.

“So they’re just sitting in that slow flowing nutrient,” Evans said of a watercress crop. “And that’s why we’re so paranoid about things like diseases. Yeah, you get it in there, and now it’s got a free highway through the whole system … because it’s just circulating through, and it’ll spread all through it.”

Graduate students, or Evans himself if school is on a break, use peroxide to sterilize, spray down the floor and scrub.

Pythium and powdery mildew are among the pathogens that can make their way into a grow room, said Kaylee South, a CEA professor and extension specialist for Virginia Tech’s School of Plant and Environmental Sciences.

“Greenhouses and indoor, vertical farms a lot of times are really great environments for plants, but they’re also really great environments for a pathogen to grow,” South said. “And so plant pathogens are one thing that we do have to pay really close attention to and battle.”

During one long spring weekend at the CEA lab in Danville, electricity went out and the greenhouse temperature rose to 150 degrees, South said. No one was around to check it, and when they returned, the plants had died and the plastic rows that held them were melted.

That malfunction was “the biggest disaster we’ve had,” said South, who works at the Danville location.

“There’s a lot of things like that that can go wrong,” she said. “So it’s not only insects and pathogens.”

While students are learning those details, they’re helping their professors do the thing that industry counts on — trials and testing. The information gathered goes to commercial indoor growing concerns that are affiliated with the university and the CEA Innovation Center. 

Businesses plug what Evans called controlled yield data from the experiments into their economic models and come away with a good idea on whether they could make money off a particular crop.

If a greenhouse comes calling about the frizzle sizzles, brush strokes and violas, South will have lots to share. What’s the best fertilizer? How much of it is most effective? Is peat or oasis a better growing material? What cultivar do you select?

“And so those are all the types of questions that we’re looking at answering and then putting that out there as educational material and to add to, like, the scientific body of literature,” she said.

In other trials, it’s all about killing. Those pathogens can play a role there.

“For most of our crops, we end up doing some sort of destructive harvest where we will take the plant and dry it down and take its dry weight,” South said. Dry weight shows a crop management system’s effect on the plant’s performance more accurately than its fresh weight, which includes water, South said. 

Other research centers on how growers can use beneficial bacteria to improve a plant’s immune system, giving it more of a fight against pathogens, she said.

“For these we’re trying to not kill them, we’re trying to see what we can do to make them thrive,” South said. “But [with] some experiments … we do try and kill the plant.”

Reaping the harvest, with information to share

On a muggy mid-June day, under greenhouse glass, most of Haymore’s sprouts have grown up and produced a burst of flowers. The plant sciences student cuts flowers from them, placing them on a scale to weigh them.

He has been taking measurements throughout the experiment, tracking their growth and making sure there are no clogs or leaks in the system that feeds and fertilizes them. Haymore has seen no major problems, just noting that some of the seeds were poor quality.

It’s mostly a big and colorful crop filling the CEA center’s greenhouse, and he has cut flowers from the stalks three times. He expected a couple more weeks of flowering.

“They do a lot better out here in the greenhouse than in the vertical farm, because it seems almost every day, they’re making a lot more flowers,” Haymore said. “Just the other day I came here, there was not this many. So almost every day seems like every plant is getting at least two more or so. I think they definitely like it better out here.”

He’s been carrying flowers out for other staff members to take home and eat and will continue that until the plants have given out. That’s how it goes when he, South and other staff members grow crops they’re not killing, or that haven’t been treated with something noxious to humans.

A recent strawberry crop lent itself to sharing, South said.

“We had too many, and we hadn’t put anything on them, so we’ve been eating a ton of strawberries,” she said.

Haymore likes working with his hands and figures that he’ll focus on that end of the research spectrum, as opposed to literature reviews and other desk work. That’s been valuable at the CEA Innovation Center, which shares so much information with the industry.

One batch of the center’s research focuses on smaller indoor ag clients’ informational needs and growing challenges — from low-tech to high. The other batch is collaborative projects with industrial growers who want to test products or production methods, South said. The center works with the industry’s suppliers and vendors, as well.

AeroFarms is among the center’s industrial partners.

“We’ve partnered with them on doing different sample work and different R&D projects,” Montgomery, the AeroFarms CEO, said. “So it’s been very advantageous for us to be so close by them.”

Other research comes in partnership with universities aside from Virginia Tech, said Scott Lowman, the CEA center’s co-director and vice president for applied research at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research. University of Georgia, Brigham Young University, University of Virginia and Cornell University are among its partners on United States Department of Agriculture grants, he said.

“We’re subcontractors, which is fine,” Lowman said. “So that’s sort of the model now.”

It all feeds into a future that will see more plants growing indoors.

“People are really interested in it expanding beyond our current top crops … lettuce, tomato, microgreens and mushrooms,” South said. “There’s lots of opportunity for expansion into other crops, to more high value crops, crops that provide more nutritional content.

“I’m interested in how we can use technology and our growing methods to be able to produce edible crops to meet some of the emerging needs of people, for nutritious and easily accessible food.”

* Read the Controlled Environment Agriculture Strategy and Roadmap in GO Virginia Region 3 report below.