Know Your Indoor Farmer: Square Roots,Techno-Local Food,and Transparency as Publicity

Introduction

The year 2018 was a rough one for the romaine lettuce industry in the United States. In early April, several reports of consumers falling ill due to E. coli O157:H7—a particularly virulent strain of the E. coli bacteria that can cause foodborne illness—began to surface. Within a few days, investigations by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) linked the outbreak to contaminated romaine lettuce from the Yuma, Arizona growing region. By the time a targeted recall was complete and the outbreak contained, it had resulted in 210 illnesses, 96 hospitalizations, and 5 deaths across the nation (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2018). By early October, another outbreak was already taking shape, with contaminated romaine once again identified as the culprit. In this instance, however, the FDA struggled to obtain sufficient traceback information that would allow it to initiate a targeted recall. Instead, on November 20, the agency took the drastic step of issuing a wide-ranging national public health advisory, as it called for the voluntary withdrawal of all romaine from the entire food service market and advised consumers to discard or avoid any romaine products until further notice. By mid-December, the FDA investigation finally identified the source in the sediment of an agricultural water reservoir at a ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. The outbreak was officially declared over on January 9, 2019, having caused a reported 62 illnesses and 25 hospitalizations, as well as millions of dollars of economic damage and considerable stress among a concerned eating public (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2019).

Considered a crisis by many large-scale producers and retailers, for others, the E. coli outbreaks were an opportunity. That was the perspective of Kimbal Musk, the younger brother of billionaire Elon, who in recent decades had shifted his focus from technology entrepreneurship to food and farming projects. On December 19, 2018, the younger Musk took to the digital pages of Medium with a bold claim: “After the Romaine recall nightmare,” the headline read, “here’s how Square Roots is going to get Americans to trust their food again.” Insisting that a “total lack of transparency makes Industrial Food impossible to trust,” he outlined a new initiative by his Brooklyn-based indoor urban farming company that specializes in hydroponically grown herbs and leads a “Next-Gen Farmer” training program. By scanning the QR code on a Square Roots package, Musk explained, consumers would be connected to a “Transparency Timeline.” Using a mix of photos and a data-driven, personalized narrative of the product’s life-cycle, the Transparency Timeline aimed to tell “the complete story of where and how your food was grown and who grew it—tracing the entire path from seed-to-store.” The initiative aligned with Musk’s stated vision of a world in which there is “real food for everyone” (Musk, 2018).

Various forms of indoor farming and other methods of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) have been put into practice for centuries; greenhouses that use natural sunlight serve as a prominent example. However, recent innovations in engineering, lighting, architecture, digital technology, and soil-free growing methods have led to increased interest in higher tech methods of CEA, as well as significant investment from the venture capital community (Burwood-Taylor, 2019; Jensen, 1999). Square Roots illustrates this new form of CEA, as it constructs converted shipping containers to grow vertically stacked plants, using hydroponic fertilization practices in a fully controlled environment equipped with LED lights, an internal irrigation system, and a suite of digital “urban agtech” tools that program, adjust, and monitor indoor growing conditions. Advocates of indoor vertical farming have pitched it as key to the future of food and agriculture, an opportunity to increase local food production in urban areas through the development of highly efficient and environmentally sustainable “plant factories” (Despommier, 2010; Kozai et al., 2020).

At the same time, Square Roots is one of a number of urban agtech projects that situate themselves as part of the “good food movement” (GFM). A diffuse constellation of food-related initiatives, the GFM envisions alternatives to the conventional industrial food system, which it sees as economically, socially, and environmentally unsustainable. Notably, city-focused GFM proponents have advanced urban agriculture, community gardens, and farmers’ markets as powerful tools to reclaim vacant land, build community capacity, and de-alienate residents from their food (McClintock, 2010). GFM organizations also decry the rise of ultra-processed convenience foods and scientifically enhanced functional food products—what Nestle (2007) deems “techno-foods”—as dangerous tools of big food corporations that put profits over people. Instead, GFM advocates generally call for a focus on local, slow, natural, seasonal, organic, non-GMO, low-tech, and culturally appropriate “real food” as key to improving public health, the environment, and society at large (Broad, 2016; Center for Good Food Purchasing, n.d.).

Blending core values of the GFM with technical and financial practices from the urban agtech community, Square Roots promotes its products as simultaneously “real” and technologically optimized. Attempting to create a market for what I refer to as “techno-local food,” Square Roots knows that this novel combination might prove uninteresting, confusing, or even alienating to consumers from varied perspectives. Indeed, those actively aligned with the GFM may be skeptical of high-tech indoor farming’s merits, while more conventional consumers may be unsure why the “real food” values of a company like Square Roots matter at all. As a way to build interest and forge trust in its techno-local food, Square Roots relies on transparency—which has long been used to promote good governance in food systems, among other arenas—as a publicity tool.

With a focus on Square Roots, this article provides a clear case study of an organization employing what Edwards (2020) terms “transparency–publicity as market strategy,” illustrating the positive possibilities that such an approach can bring to consumer engagement with the food system, while also demonstrating how the tactic can be used to distract from a company’s purported social responsibility goals. The Square Roots Transparency Timeline, specifically, operates as what Harvey et al. (2013) have called a “transparency device,” a technological apparatus that visualizes social data to “enact transparency and provide a space of moral certainty about what constitutes good governance or harmonious social relations” (p. 299). However, the boundary-setting and selective framing of transparency devices also serve to downplay or hide other relevant dynamics, with the potential to perpetuate anxieties (Christensen & Cornelissen, 2015). Ultimately, the transparency efforts of Square Roots tell a highly curated and at times extraneous tale of its products’ “entire path from seed-to-store,” instilling a measure of opacity when it comes to a variety of other economic, social, and environmental metrics that might allow an informed consumer to make a clear determination regarding the merits of indoor vertical farming.

The analysis that follows in this article is part of a broader research project that explores urban agtech and the CEA consumer market. In documenting Square Roots and its use of transparency as publicity, I draw heavily on three site visits to the Square Roots Brooklyn headquarters between 2017 and 2019, where I took part in public tours and engaged in question-and-answer sessions with Tobias Peggs, the company’s CEO. My research also incorporates insights from other interactions with Square Roots staff at public events in the New York City area, critical analysis of Square Roots’ online promotional materials and journalistic coverage, and close readings of the Square Roots Transparency Timeline. The article follows from here by providing some background on the rise of the contemporary GFM in the United States, emphasizing how a lack of trust in the industrial food system has led to calls for food system reform and greater transparency. From there, I describe urban agtech and CEA in greater detail, examining the tensions inherent to techno-local food. I then offer a full examination of the role of transparency in Square Roots’ public communication, building from Edwards (this issue) in assessing the merits and limits of transparency–publicity as market strategy, situating that analysis in the context of the food system.

Food Systems, Trust, and Transparency

By certain metrics, the contemporary food system works better today than it has throughout documented human history. Recent decades have seen dramatic declines in the number of famine victims worldwide, while undernourishment as a share of global population has reached record lows. In the United States and other developed nations, severe food insecurity affects a relatively small percentage of the population, while public and private emergency food programs help fill the gap for those in dire need (Roser & Ritchie, 2019). This success is attributed to a host of factors, including trends related to industrialization, transportation, trade, poverty alleviation, and peacekeeping. Other factors more specific to food systems include developments in plant breeding, fertilizers, pesticides, refrigeration, and food processing. For those in wealthy nations like the United States, the result is fully stocked grocery stores and restaurants serving up tasty, convenient, and affordable options at all times (Laudan, 2001; Lusk, 2016).

At the same time, the contemporary industrialized food system has created a novel set of complex problems that have garnered public and policy attention. Over time, concerns related to food safety, public health, the environment, and the economy have emerged. Notably, reductions in hunger or severe food insecurity have occurred in concert with a rise in diet-related chronic disease, accelerated by the food industry’s creation of environments that surround people with cheap, hyperpalatable, and convenient unhealthy foods (Mokdad et al., 2018; Monteiro et al., 2013). From an ecological perspective, agriculture emits greenhouse gases that catalyze climate change; contributes to air pollution, water pollution, and soil depletion; and exacerbates biodiversity crises through its land use practices (Searchinger et al., 2018). Industrial-scale food production, processing, and distribution have also been critiqued for violations against the well-being of workers and nonhuman animals, while heavily consolidated food and agricultural corporations have been accused of hollowing out rural farm economies and marginalizing small-scale players across the food chain (Holt-Gimenez et al., 2009).

Public policies aim to address some of these concerns, with a commitment to transparency often operationalized as a key tool for change. In the early days of food system industrialization, concerns generally focused on food purity and safety. In part as a response to Upton Sinclair’s fictionalized meat industry exposé, The Jungle, the U.S. government worked to build consumer trust through basic industry regulation and supply-chain transparency, as seen in the 1906 Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, the latter of which created the FDA. The next major overhaul came with the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, in response to a mass poisoning due to the unregulated elixir of sulfanilamide. Public outcry pushed the FDA to expand its scope by testing new drugs, inspecting factories, creating identity and quality standards, and requiring manufacturers to label food ingredients (Burkett, 2011). A patchwork of initiatives were added to this infrastructure over time, including the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, which required food producers to label products with standardized nutritional information. Despite hopes that this transparency would improve public health, however, political compromises created a system that was limited in scope and overly complex (Fung et al., 2007). Subsequently, the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act attempted another major overhaul of federal food safety law, as it granted the FDA new powers to regulate food production, harvesting, processing, and distribution, with transparency again cited as key to maintaining trust in the system (Armstrong, 2018).

Alongside and intersecting with these public sector initiatives, in recent decades a diffuse network of food-related enterprises and social change initiatives have taken shape to address the varied risks of industrial food. The aforementioned “GFM” has aimed to influence public policy as well as create community-based and market-oriented alternatives. Hardly a cohesive movement, the GFM is composed of players who operate at multiple scales and are motivated by various political and philosophical concerns. Common values articulated by GFM players include a focus on supporting local economies, healthy nutrition, fair labor practices, environmental sustainability, and animal welfare (Center for Good Food Purchasing, n.d.). The GFM urges consumers to make food choices that put these values into action by “voting with your fork” and “growing your own.” Other popular sayings include the call to “know your farmer” and, as influential journalist and food advocate Michael Pollan (2008) puts it: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” GFM advocates also push back against highly processed convenience foods, as well as scientifically formulated “techno-foods” that use food science to fortify products with additional nutrients (Nestle, 2007). Collectively, these concerns emerge from anxiety about the disconnect between consumers and the foods they eat, with critics decrying a lack of transparency on the part of the food industry and a lack of understanding on the part of the public. They ask: where does our food come from, what is in it, and what impacts does it have on our bodies and the environment?

Encouraged by these and other questions, there has been an explosion of consumer interest in products promoted as ethically, sustainably, and transparently produced “real” food. Organic food sales in the United States rose from $21.3 billion in 2009 to $47.9 billion in 2018, while the local food market in the United States—characterized by direct-to-consumer sales, farmers’ markets, farm-to-table restaurants, and farm-to-school programs—grew from about $5 billion in 2008 to an estimated $20 billion by 2020 (Organic Trade Association, 2019; Stone, 2018). Key reasons for purchasing include environmental and health concerns, food quality and food safety, and an interest in supporting local farmers and economies (Onozaka et al., 2010; Schoolman, 2017, Zepeda & Deal, 2009).

So-called “locavorism” has also caught the attention of the nation’s largest supermarket chains, nearly all of which have begun to increase their local food procurement; retailers like Wal-Mart, Costco, and Kroger account for the largest volume of organic food sales (Beck & Reich, 2018; Chait, 2019). Here again, the industry depends on a familiar tactic—transparency—to build greater trust between food producers and potentially disconnected consumers. A report by the Food Marketing Institute and Center for Food Integrity (2018) argued that “transparency is the key to building trust and overcoming the ‘big-is-bad’ bias” (p. 3). The best way to do so, they insist, is not to focus primarily on the science and facts of nutritional information, but rather to communicate shared values, adding: “(T)rust-building transparency is no longer optional . . . Being more open about an organization’s practices, for example, shows values in action” (p. 3).

This ethical consumer movement is not without its critics. Concerns have been raised about the amorphous definition of “local” in local food, whether organic food production actually produces better outcomes, and the propensity for industry “greenwashing” (Garibaldi et al., 2017; Northen, 2011; Onozaka et al., 2010). Many have argued that the movement is dominated by the interests and strategies of affluent, mostly white “foodies” at the expense of addressing racial and economic inequities across the food system (Broad, 2016; Glennie & Alkon, 2018). Elsewhere, supporters of modern food science and agricultural technology lament that the GFM’s techno-skeptical orientation, its valorization of small-scale farms and urban community gardens, its advocacy against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and its promotion of so-called “natural” foods is irrational at best, and dangerous at worst, with the potential to increase food insecurity, constrain innovation, and prevent long-term sustainability (Laudan, 2001; Lusk, 2016).

For those familiar with critical scholarship on transparency, food industry claims about the tactic’s unambiguous merit call for cautious consideration. As Christensen and Cornelissen (2015) have argued, across many organizational contexts, the “transparency myth” has become naturalized as, “purified information, devoid of bias, selection, framing, ambiguity, inconsistency, and other signs of organizational interference” (p. 140). The reality, however, as Muller (2018) put it, is that measurement and transparency, used properly, can be good things, “But they can also distort, divert, displace, distract, and discourage” (p. 4). Harvey et al. (2013) add that “transparency devices” that make internal data available to the public may be explicitly built on promise to eliminate obfuscation, uncertainty, and corruption, but note that they are implicitly built on a provisional technical settlement that establishes what is to be included and excluded. From there, transparency devices can ultimately amplify anxiety by encouraging hypervigilant subjects rather than resolve anxiety through the offering of useful information.

As a way to understand the tensions inherent to the communication of transparency, Edwards (this issue) created a matrix that outlined “four modes of transparency–publicity.” The matrix documents how transparency–publicity can be used within a (1) civic logic for the purposes of (A) representative democracy or (B) participatory democracy, or within a (2) market logic for the purposes of (A) reputation management or (B) market strategy. The Square Roots case study featured in this article is illustrative of an organization using transparency–publicity in “market-strategy mode,” wherein the primary purpose is to increase market share. In this context, Edwards notes, organizational self-interest takes precedence, with the strategy characterized by asymmetric communication, often “driven by a specific need at a point in time (e.g., to launch a new product) rather than as an ongoing principle of interaction.” This is not to say that such communication is without value, as organizations in market-strategy mode are not always being duplicitous: “rather, critique should be based on the degree to which their transparency–publicity acts actually deliver on the organization’s stated motivation.” The use of transparency–publicity to promote the “techno-local” foods of indoor vertical farming offers an opportunity to provide such an assessment.

Controlled Environment Agriculture and Transparency in the Indoor Vertical Farm

For thousands of years, humans have practiced various forms of “protected agriculture” that aim to extend the growing season and insulate crops from external pressures. CEA takes protected agriculture to the next level, defined as food production in a totally enclosed structure that provides control of the aerial environment, including temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, and oxygen (Rorabaugh, 2015). Greenhouse agriculture, which uses natural sunlight, represents a type of CEA with deep roots, an approach that saw significant innovation starting in the 17th century in Europe. It was not until the mid-20th century, when glass covers were substituted with the plastic polyethylene, that greenhouse-based agriculture became fully established as an industry. Traditionally, soils in greenhouses had to be replaced frequently or otherwise supplemented with large quantities of commercial fertilizers. The practice of hydroponics—growing plants in nutrient solutions (water and fertilizers), often with the use of an artificial medium such as gravel or vermiculite to provide mechanical support—was developed as a response, touted as a highly efficient and controllable crop production system that can be put into practice regardless of local environmental conditions or soil quality (Jensen, 1999).

For a variety of political, technological, and economic reasons, interest in CEA and hydroponics waxed and waned throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. By 2012, the global market for greenhouse vegetable production was estimated at nearly $350 billion, and CEA operations using hydroponic technology accounted for almost two thirds of the $797 million of U.S. sales of food crops grown via protected agriculture in 2014 (Kopf, 2017; Lensing, 2018). In recent years, amid growing concerns related to urban sustainability and food security, significant efforts have focused on expanding CEA outside of traditional agricultural regions and into major global cities. Indeed, futurist visions of highly productive, controlled, automated, hydroponic, and vertically stacked urban agtech “plant factories” have proliferated, with Dr. Dickson Despommier’s (2010) The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, a particularly influential example:

Repairing the environment and still having enough to eat may seem like mutually exclusive goals. In theory, the solution is straightforward: Grow most of our food crops within specially constructed buildings located inside the city limits using methods that do not require soil. (p. 22)

At the time of initial publication, Despommier’s book relied on artists’ renderings of the soil-free, indoor, vertical farms of the future. Within a few years, thanks to increased attention as well as capital investment and technological innovation (particularly in the development of targeted spectrum LED lights), actual vertical farming projects appeared around the world.

The basic concept is an indoor farm that uses a stackable, multilevel factory design, with typical features that include automatic air temperature and humidity control, programmable LED illumination, and recycled water systems that connect to hydroponically or aeroponically (using mist) fed plants. Long-term visions include solar panel lighting and heating, to take the system entirely off the grid. Indoor farming aims to deliver on a promise of highly efficient, digitally optimized, fresh, locally grown foods, harvested year-round without the need for pesticides, herbicides, or synthetic fertilizers (Benke & Tomkins, 2017). For advocates, the transparency of the enterprise—in terms of its physical design and its digital traceability—represents one of its transformative possibilities. “The vertical-farm building, being as transparent as air and housing green plants from floor to ceiling, irrespective of its final shape, will be a radical departure from the standard architectural model of glass-and-steel construction,” Despommier (2010) prophesied (p. 228). In their comprehensive guidebook, the “Plant Factory with Artificial Lighting (PFAL),” Kozai et al. (2020) insisted that

the quality and economic value of the vegetables are influenced not only by the taste and nutrition, but also by their safety, which needs to be guaranteed through traceability. The traceability of PFAL-grown vegetables is almost 100% and can mostly be done automatically. (p. 26)

Investments in CEA technologies and urban-based CEA companies have exploded over the past few years. In 2017, indoor vertical farming startup Plenty raised $200 million from backers including the Softbank Vision Fund and Jeff Bezos, while the Newark-based aeroponics indoor plant factory AeroFarms raised a total of $238 million between 2010 and 2019 (Burwood-Taylor, 2019). Meanwhile, a mix of young food professionals, technologists, and entrepreneurs—most without previous agricultural experience—have rushed to get involved in the burgeoning urban CEA industry (Autogrow and Agritecture Consulting, 2019).

Critiques of CEA and vertical farming have raised questions about whether the industry’s promises can meet the type of goals—notably, the support of local economies, healthy nutrition, fair labor practices, and environmental sustainability—that characterize GFM discourse. Concerns encompass the high levels of energy required for lighting and cooling, as well as startup costs, misconceptions about the labor market, high prices for consumers, unforeseen food safety and pest control challenges, and overly optimistic projections regarding continued technological advancement (Foley, 2018; Mattson et al., 2015). Thus far, the produce grown in commercial CEA—mostly leafy greens and herbs—tends to be of moderate nutritional value and is priced outside of the reach of low-income consumers. Few local CEA jobs have been created in cities, and some of those are also at risk of being automated out of existence. Claims about CEA’s environmental benefits—notably, lower use of water, pesticides, and fertilizer than soil-based farms, as well as the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from long-distance transport—have some merit, but are also highly contingent and context-dependent (Goodman & Minner, 2019). Further, the November 2017 decision by the National Organic Standards Board to allow hydroponically grown food to be certified as USDA Organic rankled those who believe organic agriculture should necessarily entail the active building of healthy soil (Kagan & Riemenschneider, 2018). Taken together, critics wonder whether the excitement around and investment in this techno-local food distracts from more low-tech and community-based solutions to promote healthy, sustainable, and economically viable local food systems. It is within this context that Square Roots has emerged as one of several prominent voices for the merits of urban CEA and the indoor vertical farm, promising that transparent communication about its technologically optimized local food will turn skeptics into supporters.

Square Roots and Transparency–Publicity as Market Strategy

Kimbal Musk began his rise to prominence in 1999, when he and his brother Elon sold a digital mapping platform called Zip2 to Compaq Computer for $307 million. He was an early investor in Elon’s subsequent ventures, PayPal and Tesla, before relocating from Silicon Valley to New York to enroll in the French Culinary Institute. As he tells it, he lived near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and spent weeks volunteering as a cook for firefighters and first responders. After that experience, he decided to relocate to Colorado and open a farm-to-table restaurant called The Kitchen. He then spent several years back in the technology industry before returning to food with the development of a nonprofit called Big Green, which focused on school learning gardens, as well as the creation of another chain of restaurants, called Next Door American Eatery (Brown, 2013; Severson, 2017).

In 2016, Musk partnered with Tobias Peggs—a technology entrepreneur with whom he had worked on several previous ventures—to launch Square Roots. They set up shop on the grounds of an old Pfizer factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, building indoor vertical CEA farms inside converted shipping containers. Supported by $5.4 million of seed funding, the stated mission and activities of the company are multifold:

At the time of this writing, several dozen participants had gone through the multiple rounds of Next-Gen Farmer Training at the Square Roots Brooklyn site, while the company’s packaged basil, chives, and mint were available at over 80 retail sites in the New York City area. In 2019 Square Roots announced a strategic partnership with Gordon Food Service that would help the company and its training program expand across the country, starting in Michigan. At the New York City Food Tank Summit in November 2019, I heard Musk describe his vision to bring technology to the GFM. “To be honest, I left technology as an industry 20 years ago. I don’t consider myself a technologist,” he explained,

But Square Roots was, now, wow, I can apply technology to food and it’s in a good way. So the food is tastier, it’s more nutritious, it’s local, it’s not shipped, it empowers young farmers. Ok, time to employ some technology.

When the moderator raised some skeptical points about the viability and necessity of the indoor vertical farm, Musk pivoted to the value of transparency:

I think that indoor farmers really need to own that, and really need to deliver on trust, which we work very hard on at Square Roots. . . . We have a Transparency Timeline where you can literally just see when the seed was planted, who planted it, when was it harvested, what time of day was it harvested, which day was it, with pictures of the farmers. It’s really about building trust with the consumer, because people have lost trust in the food system.

These intersecting themes—on the merits of “real” food and the GFM, on the possibilities of technologically optimized food systems, and on the promise that transparency will deliver trust by building connections between local producers and consumers—were at the heart of the Square Roots campus tours I attended. On each occasion, I was joined by forty to fifty other attendees, all of us beginning the trek by making our way upstairs in the cavernous, converted factory to the open office space of Square Roots. Dressed in branded t-shirts, some of the Next-Gen Farmers-in-training were stationed at the back of the room, offering samples of freshly harvested herbs and greens in front of a small marquee board that boasted its provenance in all capital letters: “LOCAL. NO GMOS OR PESTICIDES. HAND HARVESTED. BKLYN GROWN.” Closer to the front of the room, another marquee listed a set of organizational values: “AUTHENTICITY. EMPOWERMENT. TRANSPARENCY. CLARITY. DEDICATION. RESILIENCE. RESPECT. COLLABORATION. UNDERSTANDING. CONNECTION. OPTIMISM.”

After waiting patiently for a few moments, CEO Simon Peggs took his spot in front of a projector screen, again emphasizing the value of transparency: “Anything you see here tonight is on record. So feel free to take photos, share it on social media. Quite frankly, the more of that you do is helpful.” Despite the time span between my visits, the remainder of the 90-minute sessions were mostly consistent. Peggs began with a PowerPoint treatise against the negatives of the status quo, echoing many of common mantras of the GFM:

In the industrial food system there are all these layers between the farmer and the consumer. There’s agents and wholesalers and retailers, and all these guys take a cut, and it leaves the farmer with super poor margins and it leaves the consumer just completely disconnected from that food.

By contrast, he explained,

Local food is the food industry’s fastest growing sector right now. . . . And the reason for that is people are saying, ‘If I know my farmer, if I can connect with my local farmer, I can really trust that food.’ And of course local food is just that much more tasty, right?

The challenge, he continued: “How do you do that when everybody lives in the middle of a city, right? It’s not like we can put a 20 acre farm in the middle of New York. Well, maybe you can, right? And trying to figure out how you can do that is what led us to set up Square Roots.”

Whereas the GFM’s response to the perils of industrial food has generally focused on the revitalization of traditional, low-tech agricultural solutions, Peggs outlined how Square Roots planned to use new technology to make local, “real” food the norm. He led the tour group outside to take a look inside one of the Square Roots container farms, visible through a transparent window that covered the front side, and to outline the basics of how the Square Roots indoor farms operate. He explained that the rows of crops were vertically stacked, that they grew mostly herbs and greens (although they were experimenting with some other crops, stay tuned), that the plants were fed by a hydroponic nutrient solution, the climate control process was made possible using targeted spectrum LED lights, the farms were powered by the traditional energy grid (although they hoped, one day, to move to solar power when it became economically feasible), that each unit was equipped with a host of sensors and digital monitoring devices that helped guide the work of the Next-Gen Farmers, and that the water came straight from a New York City fire hydrant and was recycled for 3 months before being flushed into a nearby trench that they turned into a (flourishing) garden. The end result was fresh, pesticide-free, great tasting, non-GMO, “hyperlocal” produce grown right in the city, bolstered by big data insights.

“You’re standing in the middle of a 20-acre farm right now,” Peggs explained, gesturing to the 10 containers lined up in an orderly row.

We’re like literally right next to the Marcy Houses. For those of you who know your hip-hop history, that’s where Jay-Z grew up and spent his formative years, and then, you know, the farm is on a parking lot of an old Pfizer pharmaceutical factory. And how many people took the subway to get here? Right, it’s like we’re right in the middle of New York, we couldn’t get more urban than this.

With his focus on reclaiming urban land for the purposes of growing food, forging closer connections between producers and consumers, and eschewing petrochemical pesticides and GMOs in agriculture, Peggs’ rhetoric aligned with key tenets of the GFM. Yet the definition of “local” and “real” food was fundamentally redefined when, standing in front of a basil container farm, Peggs explained how Square Roots applies its urban agtech platform to its production process.

We study the environment in the north of Italy during prime basil growing season, and we’ll look at things like when does the sun come up in the north of Italy, when does the sun go down, what’s the temperature growth in the day, what’s the CO2 level, what are the nutrients in the soil? All of these factors then combine to grow this amazing tasting basil.

Even as Square Roots highlighted the technological optimization of its techno-local food, in other instances, Peggs emphasized continuity between the company’s approach and the longstanding attachments of the GFM. During one visit, I asked about the source of the hydroponic nutrient solution that feeds the vertically farmed plants. “We’re growing the same plants that you grow outdoors. So it’s NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) outdoors, and it’s NPK indoors,” he explained, insisting that the nutrients are the same as any organic farmer would use.

Whether you’re growing food in a shipping container in a parking lot in Brooklyn, or you know, upstate, organic, no-till soil farm, if you’re growing local food and it’s promoting local consumer connection to the farmer, we’re all on the same side and the more of that the better,

On another occasion, Peggs positioned the company’s climate-controlled indoor farms as an effective antidote against GMO foods.

Instead of having a GMO seed that is capable of growing in a very unpredictable climate, we have a very predictable climate, right, so we can use any variety of seeds and just manipulate the climate around it to grow that beautiful product.

Square Roots leaned heavily on transparency as a way to promote its approach, arguing that the connections built via transparency led to greater trust in its products and could assuage any concerns that might arise as a result of the novelty of its urban agtech platforms. With this in mind, I asked Peggs whether all of the containers were equipped with a see-through window, or whether that was only the case with the container on display. “So, the glass window, you know, people want transparency in their food, so we’re like, great, let’s just show everyone what’s going on, so we put a window in every single farm.” During another Q&A session, he explained the marketing philosophy of the company in greater depth: “The grand prize is that the urban consumer can get connected to their local farmer. Anyone can jump on the subway, come to the farm, hang out with a farmer, take a selfie in front of the farm,” he explained. Peggs added that the Next-Gen Farmers were also trained to conduct in-store demonstrations where they “tell our brand story and engage customers and listen.”

The other key strategy in the retail environment, Peggs emphasized, was the Transparency Timeline, accessible to consumers by scanning the QR code on the back of the Square Roots package. Peggs estimated that about 5% of its packages were scanned, a proportion that exceeded his expectations and represented a large number in total volume.

We have all of that data anyway, because we’re tracking everything from seed to harvest so that we can understand what’s happening in our operations. . . . So exposing that data to the consumer in the timeline was just something like, oh, we might as well do it.

To see the Transparency Timeline in action, I picked up some Square Roots chives from an independent grocer in Manhattan on a late-July day in 2019. Packaged in transparent plastic, the front side advertised that it was hand-harvested in Brooklyn, precision-grown, hyperlocal, and pesticide free. The backside encouraged me to scan the product’s QR code—item number 42310367—which immediately connected me to my “Nelly Chives Timeline.” Stock photos of the indoor farming process and thumbnail photos of the Next-Gen Farmers were interspersed with a narrative account of the product’s trajectory. It explained that the “non-GMO seeds” were sourced from Enza Zaden, a Dutch vegetable breeding company, and were seeded by Sarah Ann on May 14 in Brooklyn. On May 21, Sarah Ann placed the seedling “in the nursery inside our pesticide-free, climate-controlled farm #6.” On June 11, Colin transplanted the seedlings from the nursery to the hydroponic grow towers in farm #6. Then, after being “precision-grown for optimal health and flavor,” Elias hand-harvested, quality-checked, and hand-packed the herbs on July 22. As the final step, the herbs were delivered to my retailer “via low-impact transport” (with a bicycle delivery pictured) by July 24 at the latest. Scrolling down, the Transparency Timeline included links to connect with Square Roots on its various social media platforms, as well as to sign up for its newsletter, which promised, “No spam. Just real food.”

The Promises of Techno-Local Food and the Limits of Transparency–Publicity

Grounded in a prevailing myth of transparency as purified information, free from bias and selection, transparency devices promote a selective vision of organizational practice, a vision that both highlights and downplays aspects of reality (Muller, 2018). Presented as a tool to provide closure, transparency devices can also create hypervigilant suspicion and anxiety (Christensen & Cornelissen, 2015; Harvey et al., 2013). This is particularly true when transparency–publicity is deployed as market strategy, wherein an organization’s fundamental communicative goal is to compete for persuasive power, even if in the pursuit of legitimate corporate social responsibility aims (see Edwards, this issue). The emerging field of indoor vertical farming and CEA, in general, and the transparency–publicity of Square Roots, in particular, offers a case in point. At the intersection of the “GFM” and the urban agtech community, CEA projects like Square Roots attempt to create a market for a new category of “techno-local food” products that are simultaneously “real” and technologically optimized. In addressing its potential consumers, the company depends on transparency as a tool to forge connections with consumers and claim superiority over “industrial food.” Yet, while its Transparency Timeline may allow a consumer to know their farmer, it limits knowledge sharing about the actual operational aspects that would help one determine whether that farming was living up to its promise.

Indeed, as Edwards (this issue) notes, organizations should be evaluated not based on their adherence to any pure version of transparency or publicity, but “based on the degree to which their transparency–publicity actually delivers on the organization’s stated motivation.” Square Roots insists that its techno-local food advances the goals of the “GFM,” which supports local economies, healthy nutrition, fair labor practices, and environmental sustainability as key priorities (Center for Good Food Purchasing, n.d.). Relative to these aspirations, the public tours and Transparency Timeline, which purport to show the complete story of their products “from seed to shelf,” leave open a number of key questions about the company’s—and the indoor farming industry’s—ability to deliver.

Notably, even as organizations like Square Roots tout their efforts as key to an environmentally sustainable future—thanks to the benefits of water conservation, the reduction in food miles, and increased yield efficiency—they deflect when confronted with the enormous energy costs that still characterize the approach, and include no metrics on the topic in the Transparency Timeline. To his credit, during the Square Roots tours, Peggs did not deny that the current state of indoor vertical farming required too much energy. Instead, he countered with a techno-optimistic promise that innovations in lighting and solar power would eventually turn the tide: “As the efficiency of solar increases and the efficiency of lighting increases,” he explained, “there’s a point on the horizon, I don’t know if it’s 5 years, 7 years, 10 years maybe. But these farms are coming off the grid and that’ll be a much more sustainable solution.”

Details of the source of the indoor plants’ hydroponic nutrient solution were left out as well, and my efforts to obtain more information directly from the supplier—specifically, whether those nutrients are derived from synthetic sources (such as refined mineral or salts) or organic sources (such as guano, plant extracts, or worm castings) were unsuccessful. Organic certification of hydroponics is hotly contested in the GFM, but it is an issue that Square Roots downplays or omits in its public communications. Instead, the company emphasizes that its local, pesticide-free, and non-GMO approach is clearly aligned with the GFM, despite what any detractors might say.

Of course, the overall merits of any agricultural practice—including organics, the use of GMOs, and pesticide applications—are worthy of debate. The key point here is that the transparency–publicity of Square Roots offers little insight into these questions. Instead, its marketing relies heavily on amorphous buzzwords—better tasting, hyperlocal, and precision-grown, among them—while its Transparency timeline offers information about its Next-Gen Farmers with little utility for a hypothetical consumer who might be interested in making an informed decision based on actual performance metrics, emphasizing emotional connection instead. Peggs himself made this clear when he described the nature of Square Roots’ competitive advantage:

I always talk about love being the magic ingredient in growing food. You’ve got to have a farmer in there that’s tending this plant. And you can taste it . . . I have spent twenty years in Silicon Valley building tech companies. I never thought I would stand up here saying, “Hey, the biggest ingredient is love,” but it like totally is and I cannot describe it any other way.

Through its corporate communications, Square Roots calls on the public to be deeply concerned about the ecological, social, nutritional, and culinary implications of the industrial food system. In so doing, the company’s deployment of transparency devices can create additional anxiety among consumers (Harvey et al., 2013), anxiety that may not be alleviated by the purchase of its techno-local products. Furthermore, the company’s business model—selling relatively pricy fresh herbs and leafy greens—is out of step with the stated priorities of the GFM, which advocates for access to affordable, nutritious food. “The question isn’t really one of capability, it’s more of economics,” Peggs explained during one of the tours.

So if you’re growing herbs and leafy greens, not too much biomass, it doesn’t need that much energy. You can get that product on the market for a very competitive price. If I’m growing a turnip, much more biomass means much more energy, and today it probably wouldn’t make economic sense to do that. The good news though, of course, is that the technology is getting better literally every day, right?

The bad news is that the products grown by Square Roots are largely inaccessible and do little to promote local nutritional health in the very neighborhood where Square Roots operates, across the street from the Marcy Houses, a public housing project in Brooklyn (Goodman & Minner, 2019). At this stage, Square Roots deems the price premium necessary to offset the major costs of this speculative and future-thinking endeavor as well as to account for the value that comes from the so-called transparent connection with indoor farmers. As Peggs put it: “If I know my farmer, if I can shake hands with that person, talk with that person, see where my food is coming from, then I really trust that food.”

In September 2019, I had the chance to do just that when I moderated a panel on safety and transparency in CEA as part of the New York City Agtech Week. One of the panelists was Sarah Ann Horton, the very same Square Roots farmer who, according to the Transparency Timeline, had seeded and transplanted the chives I purchased back in July. I asked the panel about the criticisms of CEA and the limits of its current approach to transparency. As Square Roots was oft to do, she emphasized the promise of the technology, then suggested that transparency offered a way to strengthen the connections between the public and their food system:

When we receive criticism, more than anything we want to take that as feedback. . . . .This technology is moving incredibly rapidly within the industry and that’s going to continue to happen. We want to motivate people, we want to engage people, we want to be paying attention so people can look at this type of food production and then also really analyze our problems. We need different types of people in agriculture from all different directions.

At this stage, it remains unclear whether indoor vertical farming will be able to overcome the economic and technological challenges that remain to make it a viable and sustainable urban enterprise. It is also unclear whether there will be sufficient demand for the type of techno-local food that companies such as Square Roots supply to keep the enterprise afloat, or whether there will be sufficient interest among urban residents to more fully engage in the agricultural process. If it fulfills its many promises, it could indeed offer a valuable solution within the broader movement to promote a healthy and sustainable food future. As this analysis has shown, what is clearly apparent is that transparency–publicity will be central to the industry’s approach. At a time when many eaters are indeed detached from how their food gets to their plate, the tactic offers a measure of connection between producers and consumers that has the potential to build higher levels of trust. That connection, however, should not be conflated with offering clarity about food production practices and impacts, and it is only through that clarity that trust should be legitimately gained. Moving forward, scholars and practitioners interested in healthy, ecologically sound, and economically equitable food systems should be mindful of these dynamics, pushing indoor vertical farming to offer further transparency such that the actual implications of their operations can be evaluated and trust can be earned. From there, the public can better understand the strengths and limits of the approach, while also envisioning its potential promise or creating more effective alternatives.