The dream team: Meet Eden Green's growing team

Besides leafy greens, Eden Green Technology also nurtures bright and eager minds. Their next-generation grower team comes from varied backgrounds and disciplines. And their zeal for growing food and bringing innovation to the CEA market is contagious. Let’s meet the team.

Kelly Mardones, head production grower

Mardones grew up in a big farming family and followed the family tradition with an agriculture degree. As she started her career, she realized the flaws in current farming practices. Mardones became interested in sustainable ag and discovered CEA.

“I decided right then that I wanted to be involved in that part of the industry,” she says.

In a flurry of searches for CEA companies, she found Eden Green and VP of ag Aaron Fields on LinkedIn. She asked for a tour, applied for a job and found her calling. She jokes that she “bugged Aaron until he gave me a job,” but the truth is she’s been in the trenches collecting data and helping the greenhouse launch its product. She started in the propagation department and worked her way up to head grower where she oversees a team of plant specialists and manages all aspects of plant health within the greenhouse.

Cameron Grant, assistant production grower

Grant’s interest in horticulture piqued after a visit to the grocery store with one of his two young daughters. As they perused the produce section, he asked her where vegetables come from. Grant says she pointed to the back of store, thinking they just came from a warehouse. That summer, he built a raised bed and planted around 10 types of vegetables.

“And that’s when I rediscovered my love for plants and realized plant production is an important part of society,” he says. “I realized that with our traditional system of growing things, we were running out of resources. So I wanted to get into controlled environment agriculture because of its sustainable approach.”

Grant returned to school and graduated from Texas A&M with a horticulture degree. As assistant grower, he is charged with water management, including managing pH and EC, as well as moving plants from propagation to production and taking climate and growth data.

Jacob (Jake) Portillo, head R&D grower

Portillo studied environmental science at Texas Christian University where he explored sustainable options for several disciplines. He says he “stumbled into agriculture” when looking for jobs that offered sustainable options.

“I found Eden Green and read about their mission and thought, ‘This place seems a little too good to be true.’ I thought a place like this would only exist in Europe.”

Portillo started with the company as they were tweaking the technology that’s now used in the greenhouse, including collecting data and dialing part of the mobile light system Eden Green now uses.

“I’ve been able to use everything I learned growing up on a farm and everything I learned in school to treat a greenhouse like an ecosystem,” he says.

In the greenhouse

This dream green team helps manage the more than 328,000 leafy greens currently produced in the Eden Green’s production greenhouse. The company has broken ground on a second production greenhouse. Plants are grown vertically and hydroponically in 16-foot-high “vines” that consist of 36 plant spots, 18 on each side of the vine. Each side consists of separate channels. Air, water and nutrients are delivered to each plant spot, which is equipped with a removable cup. In that cup, the plants experience their own microclimate with optimal humidity, temperature and CO2. Besides using the natural light of the greenhouse, Eden Green also employs a patented mobile LED light bar that travels up and down lighting the vines as needed.

Prior to being transplanted in the vines, seeds are hand sown in a peat-based media in a 72-cell tray where they remain for about 14 days on ebb and flood benches.

“The propagation team seeds a couple of hundred flats every day and waters them in,” Portillo explains.

In his R&D role, Portillo helped dial in the science of propagating seeds in peat then transplanting them into a hydroponic system.

“That transition is a shock to the plants, but the growing vines are providing the exact ecosystem needed for each plant,” he adds.

At transplant, the target weight for each plant is about 1.5 grams, Mardones says. The leaves are about 2 inches tall when they’re placed in the vines. And at harvest, the target weight is about 5 ounces.

Depending on the variety, most plants are ready for harvest in 28 days and plants are harvested by hand. Eden Green currently grows Monte Carlo romaine, Rex butterhead, Danstar multileaf lettuce and Red Oak lettuce.

“If we do notice anything like chlorosis or an unusual growth rate, we can go back to our climate and nutrient data and figure out why this is happening,” Portillo says. “Do we have enough airflow or are we deficient in nitrogen?”

EC and pH are checked multiple times per day. And for individual nutrients, the team sends water samples to the lab every week which allows them to know the specific parts per million of each nutrient that occurs in the water.

For climate, there are sensors throughout the greenhouse that monitor temperature, humidity and CO2 levels, for example.

The team agreed that seeing the plants thrive, even sometimes tasting the plants as they’re ready for harvest, and knowing they’re helping provide clean, healthy food to communities motivates them daily.

Lessons learned

Grant says he’s still amazed by how quickly plants grow in this system. He’s also still in awe of the precision of it all.

“We’re providing plants with all the nutrients they need, we’re growing more plants inside one greenhouse without using as much water as traditional ag and we’re feeding people,” Grant says. It’s not a simple process. There’s constant data collection and constant management, he adds.

“But it’s a challenge I enjoy each day,” he says.

Portillo likes the cleanliness of the process.

“One of the largest benefits we have is how clean we can grow plants,” Portillo says. “We don’t have to spray to keep pests away like a conventional grower. We don’t have birds flying over open fields. Our facility is completely subject to how clean the people are who work in it. And we take that very seriously. One of our highest priorities is our clean culture our emphasis on sanitation.”

One of Mardones' biggest lessons so far is how specific they get with every aspect of growing.

“We control everything from the climate, to the nutrients, to the water temperatures — everything. When you’re growing outside, you’re at the mercy of whatever’s going on outdoors. But here we’re able to get so specific and really hone in on ways to optimize plant growth,” she says. “I think it would surprise anyone just how much goes into perfecting a head of lettuce here.”

For Portillo, his original perspective was from traditional agriculture, so dialing in on the ecosystem was the biggest shock.

“Rather than working against the ecosystem, you’re working with it. With our growing technology, the cups in the vines act like a small biome, like a microbiome for each plant,” Portillo says. “But then the greenhouse itself is one big ecosystem. It blew my mind in perspective to traditional agriculture which is basically land and resource management. Traditional ag is not as sustainable as it needs to be. So we’re stepping in at a very crucial time with Eden Green and our technology.”