How St. Pete’s Brick Street Farms Grows Produce In Shipping Containers
Source: American Inno, Dyllan Furness
Photo: Brick Street Farms
Where does your food come from? Most Americans would struggle to answer that question. For Shannon O’Malley, co-founder of St. Petersburg’s Brick Street Farms, that’s a problem.
“Our food system is broken,” she said. “People are so disconnected from where their food comes from.”
Along with her husband, Bradley Doyle, O’Malley launched the agricultural-technology company Brick Street Farms in 2016 as a way to bring produce closer to consumers. The company converts 320-square-foot recycled shipping containers into high-tech facilities equipped with suites of sensors that help take the guesswork out of growing crops.
“We aren’t just growing plants the old-fashioned way,” she said. “We grow a whole lot of produce in a small amount of space. People may not realize how advanced this technology is.”
Brick Street grows leafy green such as lettuce, kale, rainbow shard and herbs. It sells its produce wholesale to hotels and restaurants around Tampa Bay, including The Vinoy, Don CeSar and Oxford Exchange. The company also sells retail from a small on-site market in St. Pete. Beyond fresh produce, Brick Street sells products such as house made extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette.
O’Malley and Doyle first got interested in indoor urban farming after struggling to establish a garden in Florida’s sandy, nutrient-poor soil. They converted their garage into a hydroponic grow facility and, after some success, decided to upgrade. Retrofitting a warehouse proved too costly, so the couple turned to old shipping containers, which they converted into makeshift grow houses using traditional greenhouse technology. Since then they’ve developed their own software platform (both O’Malley and Doyle have experience in computer engineering and IT), which allows the Brick Street grow houses to be completely controlled via an app or web browser.
“We’re as much a tech company as we are a grower,” O’Malley said. “We gather 120 different data points every 60 seconds. Our operation is all sensor based and data driven, which provides backend analytics that allow us to produce the highest quality greens in the shortest amount of time with the fewest amount of resources.”
To highlight the efficiency of Brick Street’s operation, O’Malley laid out the following comparison: each of Brick Street’s four shipping container uses about 15 gallons of water per day to grow produce equivalent to between two and two-and-a-half acres of traditional farmland. Meanwhile, farms in Southern California and Western Arizona, where much of the country’s leafy greens are produced, use some 1,000 gallons per day per acre.
Efficiency is great from a sustainability perspective, but it means Brick Street’s produce comes at a premium price, which may deter consumers. Although O’Malley said the St. Pete community has been supportive of the venture, one of the company’s biggest challenges is “educating people to understand, not why our produce is more expensive, but why the grocery store produce is so cheap.”
Brick Street, which currently employs four full-time employees, has plans to expand over the next year, adding eight shipping containers to its current site and renovating a large warehouse into a new market. The company recently signed an agreement for a pilot program with Publix, which begins in December, and plans to retrofit and sell grow containers to clients aiming to start their own urban farms.