A new high-tech factory that recently opened at Brooks is a feast for the senses.
In a building as large as a city block, long rows of fresh, virescent herb plants grow happily in richly fertilized soil under lights as bright as the noonday sun.
The Soli Organic facility looks and smells like a produce farm — because it is. But the farm is behind closed doors where high-tech machines and proprietary systems do all the seeding, feeding, conveying and harvesting, the climate is controlled and water use minimized.
The Virginia-based grower and marketer of fresh produce recently showed off its new indoor farming facility following a ribbon-cutting to mark the completion of the plant, which was started in November 2022.
“As far as we know, it’s the world’s largest indoor organic farm,” Matt Ryan, CEO of Soli Organic, said.
The Soli plant was designed for extreme efficiency, he said. “The beauty of everything we do with efficient use is [that] it’s cost-effective at the same time. So our goal is to grow at a substantially lower cost than field farmers.”
Constructed by Joeris General Contractors, the facility is one of Soli’s three facilities in Texas and 10 throughout the U.S. It has four indoor farms, but its largest is located at Brooks.
The company chose San Antonio to expand to be closer to its customers, including grocers such as H-E-B, Walmart, Tom Thumb and Whole Foods, Ryan said.
Proximity cuts the amount of time and damage that occurs in shipping produce, said Steve Wright, head of sales for Soli Organic, which results in a better product for consumers and improved profits for the company.
“Texas is already a primary sourcing point for the national chains for nearly 300 different fresh produce commodities,” said Dante Galeazzi, president and CEO of Texas International Produce Association.
“Adding the mix of salad mixes, herbs, leafy greens and now berries from these Texas [controlled environment agriculture] producers makes all the sense in the world,” he said. “The Walmarts and H-E-Bs don’t want to send their trucks to multiple to states to fill their grocery stores.”
‘Secret sauce’
Soli’s Brooks facility nurtures 200,000 thyme, parsley, cilantro and basil plants a week, packing and shipping it to store shelves across the country.
“We are growing incredibly high-quality organic herbs and leafy greens using state-of-the-art technology,” he added. “At the same time we’re still just farmers here.”
A tour of Soli Organic’s fully automated assembly line starts with the soil. Soli is derived from the Latin word for “soil.”
After a machine drops dirt into the cells of a plat, another machine sows the seeds and adds fertilizer.
Soli does not use artificial fertilizers like many indoor farming operations, but instead collects waste from chicken farms to create a precise fertilizer mix. “It’s our secret sauce,” Ryan said.
The inventor of that sauce and much of Soli’s complex system of machines is Ulf Jönsson, chief technologist at Soli.
After a conveyor system fills plats, or trays, with soil and the seeds are planted and fertilized, workers moves them via carts into the LED nursery where the temperature is a steady 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity stays at 100% — conditions just right for germination.
After about 10 days, the trays of new plants are rolled into the “grow room” where the light is managed and nutrient-infused water flows and the growing herbs begin to give off the first hints of a sweet aroma.
90% less water
While the facility is not yet at full capacity, tiny leaves of herb seedlings sprawl into a blanket of green across an immense room. But it’s small by traditional farming standards — and that, too, is by design.
“We’re growing in this facility here on about an acre what would normally grow on 100 acres of land,” Ryan said.
The system also uses 90% less water, crop for crop, than traditional outdoor farming. The plants are watered from underneath, versus dripped or sprayed on the plant, and the water that drains off the plants is cycled back into pipes, then treated and reused.
The “sunlight” is also managed, with the lighting system turned off during the daytime to mimic night and save energy during peak use hours, and turned on again at nighttime.
“The key to this evolution is LED lamp [light],” Jönsson said. “We couldn’t grow indoors with the old lamp technology which was basically a street lamp. That is far too much energy and far too much cost.”
From the grow room, the plants are moved to another space where the trays are mechanically stretched to give the herbs more space to grow.
Then they’re whisked to a brightly-lit warehouse and stacked to the ceiling with other plants in various stages of growth, so that walking through the room is like watching the plants grow before your very eyes.
The system uses about 1/100th of the total land that an outdoor farming operation of the same size, Ryan said. “So we’re growing in this facility here at about an acre what would normally grow in 100 acres of land.”
When fully grown, a roughly 17-day cycle depending on the crop, the trays of plants are conveyed again to a space where the sweet-smelling herbs are mechanically cut from the soil. The company’s best-selling crop is its especially fragrant basil.
About 100 employees work at the Soli Organic facility. Some wear white lab coats while gently placing verdant bouquets of herbs into chilled boxes for transport or packaging. Others are engineers and scientists running the innovative farming operation.
The industry is growing right along with the state’s population, Galeazzi said. “This means more, high-paying jobs in the agriculture industry – which is a big win for a state like Texas that produces so many highly skilled, agriculture-orientated college graduates,” Galeazzi said.
