New direction for indoor growers — vertical
By Ginger Hervey, High Country News
Nate Storey looked out his window in China at agricultural workers laboriously threshing grain by hand.
“There has to be a better way to do this,” he thought.
It was 2001, and the Cheyenne, Wyo., native was working in a Chinese orphanage, trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. At that moment, his vision crystallized: He would make food production more efficient.
Back in the U.S., he enrolled in the agronomy program at the University of Wyoming. For his doctorate in 2012, he designed a structure that turned indoor farming on its head — literally — by growing plants vertically in towers.