By STAN MADDUX

Indiana Correspondent

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A Michigan man once producing steel for a living is trying his hand for the first time at farming – inside an old shipping container he outfitted to grow leafy hydroponic vegetables.

Brian Harris now has a second ocean freight car coming, to add variety to what he provides local consumers from his Green Collar Farms. Being a food producer was never on his radar until he sold the steel-making firm he owned for 20 years and, out of curiosity and boredom, started growing produce in the basement of his home.

Excited with the response of friends sampling his homegrown vegetables, Harris learned about an old refrigerated double-steel-walled shipping container retired in 2014 on the East Coast, and had it moved to the outskirts of downtown Grand Rapids on a lot he’s leasing from a friend for $1 a year.

He then outfitted the container with the latest in indoor growing technology and with up to 4,000 plant sites, churns out more than what a one-acre outdoor parcel would, in a far smaller 40-by-8-foot indoor farm.

“You can begin to appreciate sort of the density of the grow, and how you can get to an acre-and-a-half or two in terms of crop,” said Harris.

He said the shipping container is not heated but the warmth from energy-efficient LED grow lights is strong enough to help grow cold-weather crops even in subzero temperatures. A carbon dioxide burner – for enriching the CO2 plants photosynthesize, to promote faster growth – has motors and pumps that also generate some heat.

The container being insulated also contributes to year-round growing. “It’ll be 15 below (Fahrenheit) and not be an issue,” Harris said.

He’s already made several deliveries to three farm-to-fork restaurants within a 20-mile radius since planting his first seeds in June, and hopes to add a few more restaurants and small local grocery stores to his customer base.

Harris is raising several varieties of kale, chard, lettuce and other vegetables including mustard greens. They’re grown in different stages in four sectioned-off areas, so when one area is harvested another section is ready for picking just one week later.

Eventually, he is looking to expand into an underused warehouse type facility somewhere in the inner city but if that’s not economically feasible in the next couple of years, he might hang up his indoor farming hat.

“If I haven’t made traction to get certainty on a 10,000 to 15,000 square-foot facility, then I’m probably just going to go back to retirement,” said Harris.

Growing produce in shipping containers is being tried in other states to meet a growing desire for locally raised produce and make food production possible in difficult-to-grow areas such as the desert. Despite optimism sweeping the budding industry, there are no guarantees, cautioned Chris Moorman, founder of Rubicon Agriculture in Greenfield, Ind.

The Purdue University graduate is now in the process of closing after two years of producing food in shipping containers and setting up boxed hydroponic operations for schools wanting a firsthand experience for students. Among the biggest issues are finding enough customers preferring bulk orders from larger suppliers, and achieving enough sales to offset the cost of electricity, he explained.

Moorman advised crunching the numbers first to make sure there’s a profit to be made, before rushing into starting up such an operation.

“A lot of people don’t want to deal with anything smaller than a certain amount. It’s easy to get into one restaurant, but it’s hard to get into the chain restaurants,” he cautioned.