The grow room at Second Chances Farm in Wilmington, Delaware, feels like the future.

Tucked away inside a low-rise industrial building on the city’s economically disadvantaged East Side, across from a charter school and in the shadow of a Pepsi bottling plant, the room is bright and clean, the air permeated with the scent of basil and rosemary. Among the brightly lit racks of hydroponically grown herbs, fruits and vegetables, workers seed trays of growing medium and monitor the progress of the crops.

For these employees, each one formerly imprisoned by the state or federal government, that future feeling isn’t abstract. By making its mission to employ only what company literature refers to as "returning citizens," Second Chances Farm has allowed these workers to envision lives not dictated by their past crimes, but instead characterized by steady jobs, living wages and training in an industry that its proponents say represents the next wave of sustainable urban farming.

Second Chances Farm is preparing to expand its operation to Philadelphia’s North Broad Street neighborhood, which faces similar challenges as Wilmington's East Side. But after the near death blow of the coronavirus pandemic, and facing several financial and legal challenges emerging from both its operations and the earlier business dealings of founder Ajit Matthew George, multiple factors are working against the company's success.

Meanwhile, while vertical farming’s supporters tout its many benefits — among them, saving arable land and preventing deforestation, cutting agricultural water use, locating food sources in urban centers and making up for a decline in the number of farmers — some question the viability of the model on which Second Chances Farm is based.

Read the full article about vertical farming by Scott Pruden at Smart Cities Dive.