WW presents "Distant Voices," a daily video interview for the era of social distancing. Our reporters are asking Portlanders what they're doing during quarantine.
When Ken Kaneko worked at Apple Inc. as a global supply chain manager, the company sent him on a business trip to Japan that changed his life. He visited an indoor farm, where lettuce and other crops grow under LED lights, often in vast, abandoned factory buildings.
Indoor agriculture has caught on during the past decade in Japan because labor and land are both scarce there. The concept dazzled Kaneko, an engineer by training. "I thought I could iterate and make it better," he says. So he came home, quit his job and, in 2017, started his own indoor farm in Vancouver, Wash. Now, he grows lettuce, arugula, baby broccoli, mustard greens and other leafy things in trays stacked all the way to the high ceilings of a former Hewlett-Packard printer plant. He recently renamed his company Forward Greens.
Read more at WWeek (Anthony Effinger)