You could, if you tried, imagine a less likely place for the farm of the future to take shape. The Gobi Desert, maybe. The bottom of Lake Erie.
But it's here, in an unremarkable building on River Street in Bridgeport, on a stretch of road with empty buildings and barbed-wire fences, where an idea will be put to the test. This is where MetroCrops will see if it can make a go of things.
The space the company will use appears to have been caught in a time warp. Row after row of manufacturing equipment to make wire products sits unused, looking as though it's all just waiting for the next shift that will never arrive. In a few weeks, if all goes as planned, it will be swept clean, climate-controlled and ready to grow lettuce.
Farming in a city seems like a contradiction, but it's become something of a trend. Depressed cities like Detroit have toyed with the idea of taking vast swaths of land that's fallen into disuse and turning it back to nature or, alternatively, growing food there. In richer areas, a tomato or an ear of corn from a tiny backyard plot is viewed as a minor rebellion against the lifelessness of surrounding concrete.
As it turns out, though, you're taking a real chance with food you grow in an older city because of contaminated dirt. Leaded gasoline has been barred for decades, but lead still sits in the soil, along with all sorts of other toxins from industrial days. No one wants arsenic in their carrots, so true urban farming has some limitations.
There are other variations on the urban farm, even in Bridgeport. On the property once known as Mount Trashmore, plans are underway for an 80,000-square-foot greenhouse that would grow produce for local distribution. The goal is to employ veterans and help fill what's known as a food desert, a designation for a neighborhood with a dearth of fresh food offerings. It's a worthy goal and one everyone can hope sees great success.
MetroCrops, it bears emphasizing, is different.
It's not some microplot in the backyard, and it's not a greenhouse. This company is taking sunlight and soil out of the equation, along with as many other variables as possible, replacing them with hydroponics and LEDs.
A six-month trial run at a UConn facility was a big success. Market testing has shown plenty of interest, and the units are designed to be replicable and usable in any large indoor space.
The potential benefits are hard to overstate. This means local jobs, year-round. It's locally grown produce, for which people have proven they will pay. And it's a use, at long last, for the empty buildings that do more to limit growth in places like Bridgeport than almost any other factor. These buildings are impossible to ignore, a chore to build around and difficult to repurpose. There's a reason they sit there, mostly untouched, year after year.
MetroCrops has a purpose for which these buildings are ideally suited, maybe for the first time since they were the center of the local economy, decades ago.
People are taking notice. A few weeks ago, the company was awarded Phase II of a Small Business Innovation Research grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support the expansion of its business in Bridgeport. This goes along with grants and loans from the state.
The USDA, not shy about hyperbolizing, is aiming high. "Should this project succeed in proving the concept of growing in such conditions," a member of the grant review committee said, "the food system near metro areas in the Northeast could change the landscape of food security forever."
This is real. It works. Whether it will fulfill its loftiest expectations remains to be seen. But there's something on River Street worth watching.
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