Design standards

CEADS Inc. (Controlled Environment Agriculture Design Standards) aims to set industry benchmarks and guide CEA enterprises in improving the design and performance of their operations, considering economic, environmental and social dimensions. These standards and benchmarks “are important to the industry because they’re designed to ensure that CEA is efficient, profitable, socially responsible and lives up to its potential for resource use efficiency,” says Charles Parrish, CEADS president.

These criteria are not tradeoffs. They can be accomplished simultaneously through good design, operation and management strategies, he adds.

CEADS was founded five years ago and was born out of a USDA NIFA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture) conference hosted by the University of Arizona Controlled Environment Agriculture Center. Parrish says representatives from industry, academia and government convened to formulate the biggest needs and opportunities for the CEA industry. It also helped NIFA set their funding priorities, he adds.

“During all those sessions, there was a resounding ask for standardization in the CEA space due to pretty rampant greenwashing that we’re still seeing today,” Parrish recalls. “We’ve seen a lot of fallout from that in the last couple of years. We’re trying to determine benchmarks and best practices and figure out how can we standardize and communicate those benchmarks and best practices in a holistic way to help raise the tide for all CEA growers.”

The CEADS framework encompasses the management of energy, water, materials, byproducts, pests, safety and finances. Growers can obtain recommendations in the seven CEADS domains: utilities, materials and waste, crop quality, integrated pest management, automation and labor, equity and localness, and profitability.

Here’s a rundown of the domains.

• Automation and labor: The balance of the effective use of automated technologies with human labor in CEA facilities to increase crop productivity sustainably and ensure worker safety and wellbeing.
• Materials and waste: The reduction, reusage and recycling of resources used in CEA facilities to maximize output per input and minimize the negative environmental impacts of CEA.
• Utilities: The effective and efficient use of electrical, water and energy resources to achieve energy and cost savings in a sustainable manner.
• Crop quality: The knowledge and management of crop health and safety in the growing environment to produce CEA products that exceed consumer and retailer expectations on a consistent basis with traceability.
• Integrated pest management: The incorporation of prevention and mitigation measures to control the presence of plant and human pests in CEA facilities while fostering environmental stewardship and sustainability.
• Profitability: The development of holistic business models for CEA enterprises that can serve both the short-term and long-term financial goals of the company.
• Equity and localness: The mutualistic relationships between CEA enterprises and their employees, other businesses and the communities in which the facilities operate.

Within the design standards is a set of 150 criteria across those domains, which is connected to a scorecard, similar to the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for green building rating systems.

The criteria are scored on a good/better/best option, similar to the LEED program.

“Take community relationships, for example. That’s not something that’s typically looked at in the sustainability of an operation. It’s usually centered around energy efficiency or something similar,” Parrish explains. “But for our equity and localness, community relationships and community involvement would be reviewed, such as how they participate in the local food system. The rationale there is they want to strive to be involved in developing policies that support local food systems. And then the goal would be to promote participation through coalitions or other forms of community involvement. A ‘good’ rating could be the company regularly consults with local food stakeholders. A ‘better’ rating might be participating in local food advocacy coalitions.”

The program was designed to be facility and crop agnostic.

“If you’re a greenhouse or a vertical farm, this can apply to you in the same scorecard. You just turn on or off certain criteria that don’t apply and you won’t be penalized for things that don’t apply to your operation,” Parrish says. “It also applies if you’re growing a medicinal crop, a food crop or an ornamental crop.”

Once CEADS developed the scorecard, it underwent a peer-reviewed process by external experts in industry and academia.

“We had different domain experts critically evaluate the domains relevant to their expertise. We then reviewed and assembled that feedback into what we call the ‘public scorecard.’ That’s the scorecard version we’re using now, which is based on industry expertise and benchmarks.”

CEADS is in its pilot phase and looking for growers to participate.

“We’re seeking growers to test these criteria at their facilities and see how it works in a real-world example. We want to understand how it works, the pain points and the challenges for growers to get data they might not be collecting,” Parrish says. “We want to understand how this does and doesn’t work well for them in their particular operation. And as we learn from that experience through the pilot program, we will be further developing it and updating it based on not only new information from benchmarks and best practices that are becoming more widely shared in the industry, but also our learning outcomes from the pilot program participants.”

CEADS is looking for a diverse group of growers in terms of location, facility type, operation size and crops grown.

“We’re focusing on the U.S. at this time but looking to expand internationally. We would like to see not only some participants in the early stage of operation, but also some mature-stage growers because, as the name implies, these are design standards and there’s the greatest opportunity for impacting the sustainability of an operation in the design process,” Parrish adds. “Of course, it’s hard to evaluate a complete facility if you’re still in the design process. But we want to make sure this is applicable at the onset, before a business ever starts construction. At this time we’re seeking pilots that have the current [finished] facility to test against that model.”

CEADS is also designing a certification as part of the program to help growers differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Currently, there are three levels of certification: seeded, rooted and cultivated.

“The industry has a huge potential to help be a strong component of agriculture in the future. While CEA will never replace field-based agriculture or conventional agriculture, CEA is becoming a more critical component of our agri-food system,” Parrish says. “In order for us to ensure that CEA is economical as well as living up to its potential for the resource use efficiency that it’s predicated upon, we really want to help enable growers to learn from benchmarks and best practices from established operators and from academic support and empower them with that information.

“We are seeing so many operations today going bankrupt or closing their doors because they’ve done a great job of selling to the investors of the potential and importance for CEA. But what they haven’t done is successfully set themselves apart in the marketplace and really drill down on their unit economics to sustain themselves, their operation and their communities. This fallout affects not just the investors, the bankers and the owners, but also the communities. We’re trying to enable the industry to avoid that fallout by designing a business from the ground up with sustainability in mind.”

CEADS is still determining the cost structure for certification. But participation in the pilot program will provide growers an early opportunity to be the first to become certified, Parris says. And CEADS will waive the initial certification fee for growers who successfully complete the pilot program.