Most of the workplace buildings emptied by the pandemic are nonetheless sitting vacant. A latest report from Moody’s Analytics discovered that within the second quarter of 2025 workplace emptiness charges had been nonetheless above 20% nationwide, and cities throughout the nation are nonetheless attempting to determine what, if something, to do about it. One startup has an unconventional resolution. It desires to fill that vacant house with crops.
Area 2 Farms is a three-year-old firm primarily based in Arlington, Virginia, that’s taking the concept of indoor farming to uncommon areas. Its first farm, in Arlington, grows dozens of sorts of crops in a low-slung brick constructing tucked between a canine day care and a automobile restore store. With a brand new infusion of enterprise capital, the corporate is planning to increase, and it’s trying to empty workplace buildings as potential future farms. “A part of our imaginative and prescient is {that a} farm can go anyplace,” says the corporate’s founder, Oren Falkowitz.
Backed by $9 million in new funding from Seven Seven Six, Sluggish Ventures, 468 Capital, and Animo, Space 2 Farms is planning to construct 10 new farms throughout the U.S. in 2026. Falkowitz says the corporate is at present pursuing alternatives in Philadelphia, Charlotte, Nashville, South Florida, Orlando, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham, and Atlanta. His purpose is to construct indoor farms inside 10 miles of 90% of the U.S. inhabitants.
Proximity is the driving thought behind the corporate. Falkowitz grew up in south Florida and remembers a time when oranges had been sometimes purchased not at a grocery retailer however from the precise orange grove, instantly from the farmers who grew them. As we speak research estimate that most produce travels hundreds of miles earlier than it reaches the top client.
“The manufacturing of our meals simply will get pushed additional and additional away,” Falkowitz says. “Because of this distance the shops are asking growers to provide issues which might be extra shelf-stable, not essentially extra numerous or extra dietary.”
Falkowitz, who beforehand labored for the Nationwide Safety Company and later based two cybersecurity corporations, proposes a hyperlocal various. “We transfer the farm, not the meals,” he says.
The corporate’s pilot farm in Arlington produced its first crop in fall 2022. The corporate estimates it has produced greater than 20,000 harvests since then, utilizing a modular rack-based system that routinely strikes crops via a cycle of mimicked daylight and darkness.
Planted in field containers crammed with soil, the farm is ready to develop kitchen staples like lettuce, spinach, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and mushrooms, in addition to extra area of interest gadgets like amaranth microgreens and purple shamrock. Rising 18 ft tall, the racks cram 200 acres-worth of annual crop rising into 3,000 sq. ft of actual property.
Indoor farming is just not new. Greenhouses are an important a part of the worldwide meals system, and Falkowitz notes that hydroponic farming has existed for the reason that days of Babylon. “I’d say it’s solely partially attention-grabbing to be rising vertical, and it’s completely uninteresting or uninnovative to ship your merchandise to Complete Meals, or Safeway, or Publix,” he says.
Space 2 Farms works extra like these orange groves Falkowitz remembers as a baby, however with the excessive tech twist of its automated rising racks. Native farmers run the house and its buyer base comes primarily from inside a two-mile radius for weekly farm share pickups. “After we construct a farm or we transfer the farm again to individuals, we would like them to work together with it. We don’t need anybody in between the farmer and the buyer,” he says.
The thought has caught on. “We’ve been offered out for the final hundred weeks,” Falkowitz says.
That’s why he’s eager to increase Space 2 Farms’ modular farming know-how to new areas. “What we wished the know-how to have the ability to do is to suit wherever it may,” he says. “In an effort to construct a greenhouse in a metropolis you would want a quarter-acre to an acre of simply land, and that doesn’t exist.”
What does exist in cities is underutilized buildings and oddly formed tons. Space 2 Farms is at present within the means of constructing its second farm on a trapezoid-shaped lot in Fairfax, Virginia, that’s been vacant for 20 years.
Falkowitz sees much more potential within the empty workplaces that litter cities throughout the nation, and he says cities and actual property house owners have been open to the thought of taking this farming know-how inside former workplaces. “They’re identical to, ‘have the house. We don’t know what to do with it,’” Falkowitz says.
Space 2 Farms is one various, and maybe a second likelihood for buildings that may have in any other case gone out of date. “On the core, we’re actually targeted on revitalizing underutilized or present areas,” Falkowitz says. “And that may be a wide selection of shapes.”
