SAN ANTONIO – Matthew Ryan, CEO of Soli Organic, says his grandparents couldn’t have ever imagined how far farming would come along.
The elevated organic farm in Brooks opened over the summer. Ryan gave reporter Patty Santos and photojournalist Alex Gamez a personal tour of the company’s latest farm in San Antonio.
“We grow herbs and leafy greens. Leafy greens are things like spinach and rubella and lettuces of all sorts, as well as just about all the major herbs,” Ryan said. “We are in the world’s largest indoor organic farm right here in San Antonio and the Brooks City Base.”
Success has taken a lot of trial and error and years of investment in technology.
“By growing in soil, we’re able to grow organically using precision in more organic fertilizer. We can’t spread manure in here, so we have to make our own great organic fertilizer. And that’s exactly what we did,” Ryan said.
Ryan said it’s getting harder to grow food with climate change, even in places like California. Having a controlled facility where they can control the climate and water of the food can ensure that the fresh product will get to grocery stores any time of the year.
“While it’s high tech, it’s still growing in soil the way that nature always intended. We are just doing it in a controlled fashion,” Ryan said. “They call our business-controlled environment agriculture. It’s not doing something different from how farming on the outdoors is being done. It’s just doing it the best way consistently and day out all year long.”
There are some challenges to indoor elevated farming.
“So it’s not the electricity that costs as much as the people — that’s the number one thing. With regard to water, so much less water is used,” Ryan said.
“We, like anybody else dependent upon electricity, we’re dependent upon the grid becoming greener. And we would welcome any efforts to make the grid more green because when we can source green electricity, we actually have half the carbon footprint of traditional agriculture. That’s because we’re not shipping stuff around,” he added.
The company employs about 100 people, and the farm is tended to 24/7.