This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
10 min read
This story was originally published by Civil Eats.
The town of Skagway, in southeast Alaska, is home to approximately 1,000 year-round residents and hosts more than 1.3 million summer cruise ship passengers. Isolated in the winter, and reliant on a barge system to bring food up from the Lower 48 to its one market, the town known as the Garden City of Alaska has long struggled to access fresh, healthy produce year-round.
But on the top floor of one of the town’s microbreweries, an indoor aeroponics farm produces 250 pounds of artisanal lettuce each week. That’s enough to meet the brewery restaurant’s entire demand in a region where fresh produce is often costly, inconsistent and hard to source.
Skagway Brewing Company’s aeroponic system is one of the few of its kind in the U.S., especially in a food-service setting. The closed-loop system uses nutrient-rich mist sprayed directly onto roots and CO2 captured from the brewing process to accelerate growth while minimizing water use, all without soil or pesticides. Skagway Brewing’s owner, Mike Healy, built this system to secure a steady, fresh food source for Skagway while aiming to be “the most sustainable brewpub on the planet.”
In Skagway, with food supplies cut off by weather, trade wars and other supply-chain issues, having fresh, locally grown lettuce in the middle of the winter is both physically and mentally beneficial. Healy feels his garden can be replicated throughout Alaska and in other areas that contend with food insecurity.
But shortly after Healy paid $150,000 for his aeroponics farm in 2018, the company that sold it to him vanished.
The current home of the Skagway Brewing Company (Brew Co. to locals), which the company moved into in 2019, was designed with the farm in mind. The brewery occupies the first floor, the restaurant the second, and the aeroponic farm — which supplies greens for the restaurant — on the third.
Dubbed the Raven’s Nest, the farm grows red oak, butter crisp, sweet crisp and a romaine-sweet crisp hybrid, plus basil. The varietals were selected for their short crop cycle and ability to thrive in a vertical garden. There’s little surplus in the busy summer months, but in the winter, excess greens are donated or sold at cost to the school, senior center, or the local market. Yeast from the brewing process is used for compost in the town’s gardens.
“Lettuce is the hardest to get up here, because of how delicate it is, to harvest it, ship it,” farm manager John Michael Mead said. “It shows up bad or partially bad and we spend hours picking through it.”
The idea for Skagway Brewing to grow its own lettuce began at the brewery’s previous location, Healy said. Frustrated with the quality of the lettuce that was being barged in, he originally researched outdoor growing options but quickly dismissed them as impractical for meeting the needs of a tourist season that can stretch from early April until October.
“Mainly because if we wanted those leafy greens and herbs early on when the cruise ship season started, we would have to put so much energy between heat and lights to get those happening,” he said. “So, it just became very cost prohibitive.”
After attending an indoor agriculture conference in Las Vegas in 2018 and exploring the various options for the new farm, Healy settled on an aeroponics vendor for Skagway Brewing’s new system. But getting the system to Skagway and installed was its own challenge.
“What I didn’t know — basically when I was writing the check, which was a large check — [was that] the company was going out of business,” Healy recalls.
Healy said the company cashed his check and then went silent. He finally was able to connect with the salesman he had met at the conference, who personally brought the system up in a container and helped the team install it.
“You could tell he had limited knowledge, but he did his best with our maintenance team and our head grower at the time. We got it all up and going,” Healy said. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very good system.”
The elements of the farm were basic items that could be purchased at any big-box hardware store. The only proprietary elements were the misting panels, but there weren’t enough of them, and the piping couldn’t handle the necessary pressure for a proper nozzle spray.
Because the aeroponics company couldn’t be reached, Healy and his team rebuilt the system twice through trial and error, without the benefit of tech support, replacement parts, or other guidance.
Vertical farms haven’t always risen smoothly. The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (aka the “farm bill”) expanded support for urban agriculture, including indoor and rooftop farming, and $4.7 billion in venture capital fueled the 2019 ag tech boom.
A series of high-profile indoor agriculture and vertical farming bankruptcies would all but erase those farms.
Bowery Farming was once the largest vertical farming company in the U.S., valued at $2.3 billion before abruptly shuttering last year. In November, its facility in Georgia was liquidated in one of the “largest vertical farming asset disposals in industry history,” according to a report in Fertilizer Daily. AppHarvest, backed by Martha Stewart and JD Vance, filed for bankruptcy in 2023, citing high costs and low yields.
Plenty Unlimited, which once raised $1 billion from Bezos Expeditions, Walmart and others, declared bankruptcy in 2025 before entering into a partnership with Driscoll’s to grow their strawberries. Just last week, indoor farming pioneer 80 Acres Farm shuttered after 13 years in business when they failed to raise capital to continue operating.
High startup costs, misaligned business models, intense price competition and a prioritization of tech over market demand have all been cited as contributing to the ag-tech bubble burst.
Dr. Laura Cammarisano, an assistant professor of plant sciences at the University of California – Davis, and a specialist in controlled environment agriculture (CEA), has a theory about why so many once-hyped ag tech businesses are gone.
“Some of these companies started without having a plant person within their team. They have engineers, economists, entrepreneurs — and they start without having a grower,” Cammarisano said. “How do you even start a farm without a grower? I understand this looks all technical, but the main piece in this is a plant.”
It‘s why Healy, who grew up on a farm in South Dakota, knew to hire an experienced indoor farm manager. For Mead, technology serves its purpose in the Raven’s Nest, but nothing beats a traditional approach.
“A lot of times, these systems rely too much on automation,” Mead said. “It’s important to have human contact. You have to be able to walk your system, understand what’s going on, and know if your plants are healthy.”
Between the initial setup costs and the various ongoing maintenance, Mead estimates growing the restaurant’s own lettuce costs about 10 percent more than buying and shipping lettuce to Skagway. But that estimate doesn’t take into account the multiple benefits of locally grown.
“In the long term, when you think about greens being grown in the desert in Arizona, then driven all the way to Seattle and then shipped up to Alaska on a boat — that’s a lot of diesel, a lot more fuel, and a much bigger sustainability impact,” Mead said. “And then on top of that, if the lettuce shows up and it’s bad, even though we’d get refunded by our vendor, we still lose that business.”
There are other benefits that are not as easily quantified. Large breweries have the option of purchasing expensive CO2 recapture systems to keep the greenhouse gas, a byproduct of beer fermentation, from escaping, but there’s nothing on the market for smaller breweries like Brew Co. For years, Brew Co. had simply exhausted their CO2 out onto the street — something that made Healy uncomfortable.
With the farm, a tube connected to the fermenter carries the CO2 byproduct directly up to the garden. The original system’s manual had encouraged adding CO2 to the farm to boost its productivity, something that’s been backed up by academic research. Healy estimates that current CO2 capture will increase this year’s overall harvest by more than 20 percent. Lastly, the heat generated by the LEDs on the third floor helps heat staff offices in the winter, which reduces energy consumption and the restaurant’s utilities bills.
Still, the economics aren’t always in their favor. Healy’s original vision for the farm — that it would feed the community in the winter — hasn’t yet been realized.
“Part of the original plan was to be able to fully supply our community in the winter. And unfortunately, the cost of electricity just keeps going up. And as a result of that, it’s become uneconomical,” Healy said. “It is my hope that after this season, when we start looking at all the numbers again, we’re going to say, ‘OK, we’re back in it.’”
Despite the challenges and limitations, Mead remains a true believer in the power of aeroponics.
“In places that have a lot of sun and easy access to roads and freeways, it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “But in Alaska, it’s dumb not to. The costs of not having what we need are too high.”
The high costs of vertical farming, particularly in remote locations like Skagway, mean that it won’t replace conventional soil-based agriculture anytime soon.
“I do think this has a great potential for certain locations and for certain scales like Skagway, where it’s serving the community,” Cammarisano said. “Elsewhere, the point is that this type of production system or farming is too expensive to even compete with high-quality organic.”
The closure of companies catering to smaller businesses, the proprietary nature of the systems, and the lack of industry support for small-scale customers all leave small businesses like Brew Co. to figure it out for themselves. The time, resources, labor, supply-chain management, and ongoing maintenance all add to the overall costs in both tangible and intangible ways.
However, small-scale closed farming systems are thriving as teaching tools. In New York, California, Maryland, and elsewhere, indoor farms are reconnecting students with their food and offering valuable life skills. And in Santa Barbara, California, an aeroponic tower farm pairs with a microgreens greenhouse and an apiary to feed families, seniors and students.
Like the computers that used to fill entire rooms but now fit into a pocket, it’s possible that over time, these systems will scale so that more restaurants, breweries, rural communities, schools and senior centers will be able to install, maintain and benefit from fresh, year-round produce.
Until then, the realities of growing lettuce in Skagway will remain surprisingly complicated, and offer a cautionary tale of the limits and realities of growing food in partnership with machines. Healy and Mead never planned to disrupt global agriculture. Their goal was simply to feed their neighbors during long winters and their guests during the busy summers. In communities like Skagway, that may be where indoor farming finds its true north.
The post In Remote Alaska, the Promise and Limits of Vertical Farming appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
