NOURISH
Down on the Farm
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any Peachtree Corners residents may not know that there is a farm downtown, right off Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. Joan and Rob Flanders started Corner Greens Farm right before the pandemic. The Flanders have lived in Peachtree Corners for over 27 years. Their kids went to the local schools and are fully grown now. Since starting their farm, the family has quickly become a staple of the Peachtree Corners community. Whatever you’re currently picturing when you hear the word
By Kris Bird
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“farm,” this is not it. At Corner Greens Farm, instead of weathered red barns and silos, you will find industrial shipping containers, LED grow lights and a hightech irrigation system. Joan and Rob purchased the shipping container for their vertical farm in January of 2020, thinking they would sell to highend restaurants. As the story goes, they pivoted and ended up transitioning to online farmer’s markets, a niche that desperately needed to be filled in the wake of the pandemic. In March of 2020, they purchased the property on 6579 Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, which was zoned for commercial. After successfully opening the location in May of 2020, they subsequently bought a second
Photos by George Hunter
Peachtree Corners Magazine ■ December/January 2022 ■ LivingInPeachtreeCorners.com
container farm system in September of 2020 — and then a third container farm system in October of 2021. Each farm holds a 40foot shipping container, where the vertical farm grows inside under ideal, controlled growing conditions. Each shipping container farm yields about the same amount of produce as a four-acre farm.
Local, fresh produce The Flanders are both vegans, and after retirement they were looking for a project to keep the community healthier by providing local produce to an area where it isn’t always readily available. “It’s also a great way to get to know the people in the community,” Joan said. In Georgia, you can only typically grow lettuce for a few months out of the year, in fact, 90% of the peachtreecornerslife
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lettuce you see in stores is grown in California. But with climate-controlled, vertical farming, Corner Greens Farm is growing lettuce for the residents of Peachtree Corners, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. The problem with lettuce from California, is that by the time it reaches the stores here, it’s already been about 10 days since it was pulled from the ground, and it will be about weeks until it’s consumed. Every day the lettuce is out of the ground, it is quickly losing nutrients, so by the time you eat it, there has been a significant nutrient loss. At Corner Greens Farm, the lettuce is seeded, planted and harvested every single week. They first plant the seeds in the pods and move them to the seedling area. Then, after the seedlings sprout,
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