Freight Farms – Leafy Green Machine

Freight Farms, which was founded in 2010 by Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, has stuffed one acre of farm into an up-cycled freight container. How you ask? They call it the Leafy Green Machine (LGM). Each LGM contains a fully-operational hydroponic farm with crops that grow vertically to maximize space. These farms are able to grow a variety of leafy greens at commercial-scale in any climate and any season.

Once you're up and running, the LGM could literally be managed by one person (about 15-20 hours per week) but spreading the work between multiple hands never hurts. Each container (because they recycle the irrigation water) only takes 10 gallons of water a day.

I'm definitely a fan of the freight container trend and putting a farm in one? That's just an ingenious idea! On average an acre of farm land only has one harvest a year but a Leafy Green Machine can have up to 12! Let's take the mini-head lettuce; annually, one acre grown conventionally on farmland produces 23,760 marketable heads while Freight Farms boasts a whopping 48,568 marketable heads of lettuce. Love data like this? Click here.