The last thing you expect to find midway down a shadowy alley in downtown Newark, N.J., is a farm. But that’s exactly what’s inside the former Distinct 89 nightclub and lounge, which closed last year. Past cluttered tables and industrial rolls of fabric, the dance floor has been cleared to make room for a 15-foot-high stack of planters, each one 10 feet long, 3 feet wide, and a foot or two deep. Stranger still, there isn’t any soil beneath the leafy green vegetation bursting from the flower boxes. There’s only air.
This is a test site for AeroFarms, a Delaware-registered startup focused on aeroponics, a kind of soil-free vertical farming. Essentially, an aeroponic farmer sprays a mist of a high-nutrient solution on plants to make them grow. The process takes far less space and water than nature would require, and zero pesticides. The idea has been around for decades, mostly among scientists studying how root systems operate outside soil. Until recently, technological limits kept true aeroponics largely beyond the reach of commercial growers.
