By Brian D. Sparks, Senior Editor, Greenhouse Grower
When the USDA launched a new initiative in early 2022 to fund the production of climate-smart commodities, it defined climate-smart crops as “an agricultural commodity that is produced using farming, ranching, or forestry practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or sequester carbon.”
“I think that in the next two years, we're going to see more effort put towards quantifying what climate-smart farming means.”
What this definition doesn’t include, and what might give the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) industry an advantage, is how these practices are quantified.
“Anyone can say they are climate smart, but how and by how much is important,” says Gretchen Schimelpfenig, a Senior Energy Engineer at Energy Resources Integration, LLC. “I think that in the next two years, we're going to see more effort put towards quantifying what climate-smart farming means.”
Derek Smith, Executive Director of the Resource Innovation Institute (RII), says growing operations need to understand how to create their own baseline so they can establish a roadmap for improvement.
“When you can establish your own baseline and compare yourself year over year and understand how you're trending and which practices you've deployed, you’re able to generate the outcomes you want,” Smith says. “Taking it a step further, what’s even better is if you can compare how you're doing to industry benchmarks.”
This is where groups like RII are taking the lead role. As part of its USDA Conservation Innovation Grant Project, RII will be bringing a report to the USDA this summer that it will also use to educate Congress about some of the findings that it’s come up with through benchmarking leading greenhouse operations and indoor farms.
“We're finding that farm operations that benchmark their performance can save 5% to 50%-plus on energy costs,” Smith says. “Just by starting that process, they will become more informed and begin to manage their energy use better.”
How Growers Can Implement These Practices
Schimelpfenig says once growers quantify and benchmark their processes, they can begin to make higher-level decisions — even if these decisions aren’t initially in their hands.
“If you’re looking to expand into a new state, you need to know about the local energy grid,” she says. “Am I going to be able to get natural gas, or am I going to have to get something that has a higher greenhouse gas content like propane?”
A second choice might be where you buy your energy from.
“Maybe you've got choices and can source your energy from a green power provider, or maybe you can produce renewable energy on site,” Schimelpfenig says. “That can be a way for CEA businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at an operational strategy level, and at a behavioral level, that's when the grower can be more involved in choosing the systems that are installed in the greenhouse and how they are operated.”
Examples of this, Schimelpfenig says, might be tied to equipment for climate control.
“Maybe you've got an old boiler and you have the opportunity to electrify the greenhouse, or you have the opportunity to install a heat curtain that's going to save more energy and allow you to continue using the same system, but just not use as much energy,” she says.
Smith emphasizes that while it’s easy to claim savings, you have to combine your own internal knowledge with best practices from external sources.
Schimelpfenig notes that with electricity costs rising in many areas, it’s critical to know which electrification systems might work better for some aspects of your plant production than others.
“It behooves producers to contribute to best practices dialogues like the working groups we convene, and there are always opportunities to engage in these discussions,” Smith says. “One thing that we do at RII is make sure these are multi-disciplinary discussions. We engage not just producers with producers, but producers with vendors, producers with engineers, architects, leading academics, and utilities. These utilities want to put incentives into the market to drive energy savings, but they need data and engagement by the industry to be able to justify those investments.”
“In some cases, the best way to reduce greenhouse gas content and save on energy costs might be to consider a new build instead of smaller upgrades to retrofit an aging facility,” Schimelpfenig says.
Schimelpfenig notes that with electricity costs rising in many areas, it’s critical to know which electrification systems might work better for some aspects of your plant production than others. For example, she says it may be more feasible or cost-effective to change to electric on-farm or fleet vehicles than to switch heating systems.
The increased availability of incentives, combined with CEA growers perhaps being more willing to make major changes (see “The Potential of Grower Expansion”), might even mean knocking down one greenhouse and building a new one.
The Potential of Grower Expansion
Greenhouse Grower’s 2023 Top 100 Growers survey asked ornamental growers with 500,000-plus square feet of controlled-environment production whether they were investing in new or retrofitted structures in the coming year. With many looking to do so, now may be the time to incorporate energy efficiency in those plans.
Resources for More Information
Energy Resources Integration, LLC (ERI) provides engineering services including energy efficiency engineering and high-level energy management support with a specialty in industrial and agricultural businesses. ERI’s staff of professional engineers identifies, models, and analyzes projects that reduce electricity and fossil fuel consumption with the goals of saving money and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Resource Innovation Institute is a government-, utility-, vendor- and producer-supported non-profit organization driving the adoption and celebration of resource efficiency and sustainability in the CEA and cannabis sectors.
Since 2011, the ERI team has helped hundreds of growers across the country identify energy efficiency opportunities and access rebates and incentives for high-performance equipment. More articles by ERI are available here.
Resource Innovation Institute is a government-, utility-, vendor- and producer-supported non-profit organization driving the adoption and celebration of resource efficiency and sustainability in the CEA and cannabis sectors. Founded in 2016, RII initially focused its efforts on one of the most under-studied and often resource-intensive crop categories: cannabis. From establishing the first benchmarking platform to empower producers and objectively inform the broader market to bringing together stakeholders to address proposed regulations in key jurisdictions, RII’s work has made a critical imprint on the most rapidly evolving sectors of agriculture. Since then, RII has expanded its scope of work to include a range of crops grown in controlled environments. In 2020, in partnership with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), RII was awarded a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). The three-year project titled Data-Driven Market Transformation for Efficient, Sustainable Controlled Environment Agriculture, commenced in April 2021, and aims to develop and execute a market transformation strategy rooted in collaboration.
Learn more about RII and its activities here.
Photos courtesy of Gretchen Schimelpfenig
