A Day In The Life Of A Vertical Farmer: A Conversation With Kyle Willhite, Senior Grower At OnePointOne

By: The OPO Team

Vertical farming has emerged as a game-changing solution to address pressing global challenges such as rapid urbanization, climate change, and food security. Controlled-environment agricultural techniques not only conserve space but also dramatically reduce water usage, lower carbon emissions, and minimize the need for harmful pesticides. In this fascinating conversation with OnePointOne’s Senior Grower, Kyle Willhite, he takes us through his career, from a recent college graduate with little knowledge of vertical agriculture to becoming an expert in the field.

Discover his passion for indoor farming and enjoy this insider’s look into a day in the life of a vertical farmer. Explore the future of agriculture, both vertical and traditional, and how innovative technology could change the world as we know it.

Get ready to be inspired by the young man leading the way toward a brighter, more sustainable future.

The Future of Vertical Farming and Traditional Agriculture

Kyle, tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got into vertical farming.

I was a senior in college, not really knowing what I wanted to do. I was in basic environmental studies and science coursework. I hadn’t heard much about vertical agriculture or futuristic types of agriculture. There was a blurb in one of my professor's books that mentioned a new industry that was trying to accelerate the environmental friendliness of farming. And that was all I knew about hydroponics.

And then just a few days after I graduated college, I started looking for jobs and saw an opening for an internship at a hydroponic farm in Berkeley.

And you’re from California, right? 

Yeah, I'm originally from Pleasant Hill, California, in the Bay Area. There was a local vertical farm in my town where I could get in to see what that whole industry was about. And the second I walked through the doors, I was pretty taken with the blue and red lights that I quickly found out I wasn't supposed to be looking at.

It just looked like a very unique industry to be in. Not having any experience in it, I really wanted to see what it was all about. That internship quickly turned into a job, and out of that came my whole love of indoor agriculture. 

I wanted to keep going with vertical farming, and that’s when I got a call from OnePointOne.
They said they needed growers and I jumped on that opportunity right away and ended up here.

So before that, you'd never picked up a pitchfork or driven a tractor… or maybe you have? Have you ever been into traditional agriculture?

I never picked up a pitchfork, and I didn't wear boots and flannel shirts out in the sun. But I did have some experience in a soil-based farm.

It was mainly on a small farm, a few acres, but we grew a wide variety of crops: squash, strawberries, tomatoes, and leafy greens as well. And on that soil farm, I was able to build a greenhouse and implement some growing systems. What was very eye-opening was crop rotation – growing crops together, the relationships between the crops that are growing next to each other, and just the greater science of how the Earth grows food. 

There's a lot of sustainability talk out there, and vertical farming is a very disruptive technology. Do you see it taking over traditional agriculture?

So that's a very interesting question. Definitely, I think in the near term, at least 100 years out, this is a huge solution to help save water, to help save the square footage of growing land, and creating this enclosure around plants. Because as we get more severe storm weather, that's disastrous to crops that are growing out in the field, as well as the increasing destruction of crops from pests. Having this “envelope” indoors definitely shows a lot of benefits.

But I do have a soft place in my heart for soil, for working and growing in the soil because regenerative agriculture is keeping the Earth healthy. Working with the Earth rather than on the Earth to grow plants. So I almost see in the future there's a kind of relationship where indoor farms help the world regenerate, if you will, and be able to recreate these fertile lands that we used to grow on for millennia.

We're going to save water, and we're going to regenerate the Earth, but there still is definitely an application for soil farming.

A Day in the Life of a Vertical Farmer

So, Kyle, let’s talk about the juicy stuff that everybody wants to know. What's a day in your life as a vertical farmer like? Do you wake up at 4:00 a.m., go out and feed the cows and get on a tractor? 

So, for one, there's no way a tractor would fit in this [vertical] farm, and if I woke up that early, I'd be a pretty cranky guy, and I wouldn't be fun to work with.

All the automation that we have here and all the telemetry we get from our sensors constantly reading the environmental setpoints really takes the pressure off me.

Before, when we were building the system and we didn't have all that set up, I would be waking up in the middle of the night and looking at what I could do to make sure things were running correctly.

But once we got all that [automation] implemented, there were alarms. If the temperature is out of range for an amount of time that we believe will be harmful to the consistency of the crop, it'll alert me. I can go onto the software, check out all of those environmental setpoints and make adjustments where I see fit.

Are you telling me you were home and checking alarms? That’s like remote control farming.

Yeah, it is. It's definitely interesting. In past places where I’ve worked and we didn't have any of this telemetry, I was constantly worried that something's flooding, something's not getting enough water… so all of that anxiety is gone now.

Tell me some of the crops that you grow, and what are some of your favorites?

Currently, we're doing an array of crops. We've got herbs, microgreens, and leafy greens. This is savanna spinach – one reason why I like it is that it grows so fast. When you're doing system validation and testing new cultivars, and you see one that grows really well in your system, it makes you feel good that you're doing something right.

This crop is also really delicious. If you haven't heard of it, savanna is a mustard green-spinach hybrid that's got a nice little peppery flavor. It's a hybrid crop, so that's another reason it grows pretty well. It's bred to grow well in our system or other indoor cultivation systems.

I would say that one of my absolute favorite crops is broccoli microgreens. They have a very unique flavor. They're really easy to grow, and there's a widespread amount of health benefits with the sulforaphane, a cancer-fighting agent, and stuff like that. So that's another reason to feel good about that crop.

The Future of Vertical Farming

So vertical farming is getting a bad rep for ROI (return on investment). People want to invest, people want to buy vertical farms, and everything is based on how quickly they can recoup their capital. How do people see a return on their money? Are the yields higher? 

It has been proved that in indoor agriculture you can increase the yields and grow plants more quickly than traditionally in the field. And a big reason for that is our being able to control the environment.

In nature, you can't control the wind, you can't control cloud coverage, you can't control when it rains and when it doesn't. And the rain has stuff in it. The water quality of rain may be different from irrigation waters. There are all these different factors that you're constantly battling with. Whereas inside our farm, we're growing the same amount of volume, or we're growing a lot more volume in the same square footage just because of our ability to grow vertically.

Advice for Aspiring Vertical Farmers

So the taste of produce is incredible. I've had some straight out of OnePointOne’s farm. Tell me about pesticides that you may or may not use.

We don't use any pesticides. As you can see behind us, there are these big walls, we call them the envelope. So all of the plants that are grown are all contained inside the envelope. Not only is there this envelope, but we also have a warehouse we're standing in, which serves as another barrier for pests.

Obviously out in nature, there's really no protection from pests. And even in most greenhouses I've worked in before here, there's always some event of pest infiltration. And then once you get pests into your system, they're either really hard to take out and you may end up having to throw away that whole harvest just to prevent any infected crop from making it out to consumers.

Here, because of all of our barriers, we hardly see anything. I mean, crickets are prevalent in Arizona. So here and there, if a door gets left open for a little bit too long and it's a moist day, we might see a couple of them hop in. But those don't have too much of an implication on crop health, although we do our best to find them and instantly get them out.

Ever since working here, there have not been any other pests inside this farm. So that takes away the need to spray any kind of pesticides or herbicides on the crops.

The yields are greater than traditional farming, there are no pesticides… it seems to me that all of these factors, including the envelope, would create great reliability. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that is accurate. Along with the telemetry and our imagery of the plants, because we have cameras in there, we can go look at the plants and any event that happens in the farm that could propagate pest activity like leaks on the floor or stagnant water (a lot of these pests do like high moisture environments) – any of these things that could result in a pest infiltration, we can see the issue and mitigate it very quickly to prevent any damage.

If I buy a farm and decide that I want to scale it, can we add on to that?

Yes, the farms are modular. They’re designed with a central fluidic station, where all of our water is conditioned. So that's the main part of the farm. The most important part is where we have our water, and how the water is treated, and that isn't centralized in each system we build. This means we could build the same structure in the same way we built the first one, and then just run lines from that room to hook up the water.

Electricity, of course, that's another thing that's easy to solve. It's a little expensive, but it's easy to solve. So in our warehouse and space, we could build a whole other farm.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Kyle!

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Be part of the movement to feed the world in a healthier, more sustainable way. Connect with an OPO advisor today and discover how you can become a vertical farmer. Join the revolution of modern agriculture and take your passion for farming to new heights with OPO Farms.

9 MIN READ