Hydroponic farm thrives in shipping containers in Ketchikan

Every Monday morning, Jenn Tucker harvests 3,600 living plants from one of the shipping containers that serves as a hydroponic farm and fills piles of crates for delivery across Ketchikan.

Tucker is the farm manager for Outpost Agriculture, a nonprofit that set up its first hydroponic farm in Ketchikan last year and is eyeing development of similar, controlled environment agriculture operations across Alaska.

The Outpost farm building on North Tongass Highway in Ketchikan is an assemblage of eight white shipping containers connected by a breezeway. Three of the containers are outfitted with precise light, heat, water, nutrient and carbon dioxide delivery systems meant for growing plants into marketable produce.

The plants grow on a three-week cycle, so Tucker harvests a full pod of 3,600 plants each week. On a recent harvest day, she picked a leaf from a mature basil plant and marveled at its crunch. Hints of clove pop from the herb's full-bodied flavor.

"I've never had crispy basil," Tucker said. "It's strong, so I've started cooking with less."

From the sealed breezeway, Tucker opened the door to one growth chamber, and then another.

Katherine Tatsuda seeds thousands of new plants for propagation each week. There's no dirt in Outpost planters, rather, Tatsuda sets seeds inside coconut fiber plugs that fill plastic trays in a neat grid.

After two and a half weeks in the propagation pod, 3,600 of the new, sprouting plants are transplanted into one of the three growth chambers, where nutrient-rich water flows over the plants' roots through plastic trays. The containers are slanted so that water flows through the trays and drains at the far end of each container.

Other containers host cold storage, dry storage and office space. From a computer screen in the office, or an identical dashboard on her cell phone, Tucker can monitor and control environmental factors such as CO2, airflow, humidity, strength and frequency of lighting cycles and pH levels in the water.

Tucker set up most of the equipment, plumbing and electrical wiring that runs the farm. She landed the role of lead farmer for Outpost after years of work in tour operations, and said that the new job allows her to engineer, experiment, create and spend more time with family.

"I know that I'm giving my family the highest-nutrient food that I can give them right now, which is why we also hunt and fish and do all of those things," she said. "My son is eating lettuce for the first time, he's 15, because this stuff tastes good."

Colin McIntosh, of Washington, D.C., launched the Alaska-based nonprofit Outpost Agriculture in 2020, and then began to fundraise for the company's first farm in Ketchikan.

McIntosh said he received starter capital for the nonprofit Outpost Agriculture from the McIntosh Foundation that was founded in 1949 by his relative Josephine H. McIntosh who was involved in Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., which at the time was thought to be the largest retailer in the U.S.

He said Ketchikan community members in 2020 were receptive to his plan to launch Outpost Agriculture because COVID-19 had interrupted cruise tourism and challenged Ketchikan's "mainstay, how everyone earns a living."

Now, Outpost is more than six months into selling its plants as food for grocery stores and restaurant kitchens across Ketchikan, including Alaskan & Proud Market, Salmon Falls Resort, The Barn Door Eatery, Bush Pilot's Lounge, AJ's Gourmet Burgers and The Ketch Inn. Outpost will soon begin shipping 25% of its plant harvest to Sea Mart Quality Foods grocery in Sitka, according to McIntosh.

McIntosh said Outpost will establish similar container farms in communities throughout Alaska. The plan is to set roots in Sitka next spring with a farm near Sea Mart grocery and eventually grow fresh produce in more remote places.

He said the project is "a way to get the technology up to Alaska" so that controlled-environment agriculture projects can take off statewide.

Outpost will first set up farms in larger "communities like Sitka, Juneau, Kodiak, up in Kenai hopefully, the communities that have the benefit of having relatively inexpensive electricity because they're predominantly hydro-generated," according to McIntosh.

Electricity is a critical input for the container farm in Ketchikan, as tens of thousands of LED lights must run around the clock for the plants to sprout and grow.

He said that without revenue from more urban farms, or support from donors, operating farms in remote, diesel-powered communities would be "prohibitively expensive."

While Outpost purchased property and established its own location in Ketchikan, future projects will likely be collaborations with local grocers, according to McIntosh. "We can partner with local grocers, which are natural partners, to hopefully build farms right on-site in grocery parking lots to provide their leafy greens and other produce."

McIntosh said he got his start in controlled environment agriculture almost five years ago by taking a job as a hydroponic farm hand in South Carolina in 2019.

"In 2018, I moved down to South Carolina without much of a plan in terms of what I was going to do next and I ended up starting with a really small start-up that was just launching out of Charleston, South Carolina, called Vertical Roots, which was the operating arm of a parent company called AmplifiedAg, which is the maker and manufacturer of the farming systems that we use at Outpost," he said.

"I joined them as a part-time agricultural laborer since that was the only thing they were hiring for at the time," McIntosh said. "It was a little bit of a humble thing to start back at the bottom of the ladder, but I was happy to. I learned quickly and after about six months I ended up running that facility and learning how to run a very substantial and complex system like that."

McIntosh in 2020 decided to bring the same AmplifiedAg farming systems to Alaska.

"In the summer of 2020 I decided to step back from a lot of my responsibilities as a manager of Vertical Roots and launch Outpost Ag," McIntosh said.

"It took about two years to raise the money to build the first farm here in Ketchikan. Once we did, we purchased the old Karlson Motors inventory parking lot right by the Walmart which has turned out to be a great place to build a container farm, just a parking lot. We got everything assembled last summer."