Amid a light January snowfall in Whitefish, Dustin Lang dragged open the metal door of a nondescript shipping container sitting in the driveway of The Farm at River’s Bend. Inside, a blinding array of red and blue LED lights cast a violet glow on rows of hanging panels covered with a variety of salad greens.
The futuristic-looking garden is Vertical Greens, a fully contained hydroponic vertical farm that is the latest venture of recent Flathead transplant Tim Moyer.
“This is the perfect place for this kind of farm,” Moyer said, gesturing to the snowy landscape in Whitefish. “We could grow 10 acres’ worth of food right here on this little spot, and do it all year long.” Moyer and his wife Harline moved to their property east of Whitefish a year ago after spending a decade running a 69-acre sustainable farm in Hawaii.
Their Hawaii operation, Laihana Family Farms, utilizes a large volunteer workforce, and several years ago a volunteer from New York City told Moyer about a increasingly popular farming technology — hydroponic container farms.
Since Hawaii has a year-round temperate climate, the idea of moving growing operations into a freight container didn’t seem necessary, but Moyer kept the idea in his head. A few months after moving to Whitefish, Moyer put the idea into action, and the first shipping container arrived in October.
Once the growing systems were fully assembled, Lang planted the first lettuce seedlings and plunged into the world of hydroponic farming.
“We just hit the ground running,” Lang said.
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