Urban expansion is a threat to agricultural land. As cities increase in size and residential areas are being built on arable land, a new solution to growing food in urban area needs to be considered. Shipping container farms are designed to grow a high number of plants in a small area. These farms are programmable to fit the environmental parameters that are optimal for each type of crop. In this experiment, ‘Toscano’ kale was grown inside the farm and harvested weekly for one year to simulate farm production. The average day/night temperature in the farm was 22.8C and 15.6C with a photoperiod of 20 hours. Sole sourced lighting was supplied by light emitting diodes with an 80:20 red:blue ratio and an intensity of 100 mol . m -2. s -1 for a daily light integral of 7.2 mol . d -1 . Electrical energy use of the farm was collected on three categories of energy usage: Lighting, HVAC, and all Other Energy usage. Seeds were sown four weeks prior to transplant. Plants were transplanted weekly into vertical channels and harvested 12 weeks after sowing. This experiment was a complete block design with block nested in time. Yield data was collected at time of harvest, including plant number, fresh mass, dry mass, plant height, canopy area, and leaf number. The mean number of plants per replication was 320. The mean fresh mass per plant by block was 43.34g, 48.84g, 53.17g, 59.15g, 57.88g, and 53.29g, respectively, while mean dry mass was 3.31g, 3.66g, 3.94g, 4.42g, 4.3g, and 4.08g, respectively. Daily mean lighting and other energy consumption exhibited no variation across all 48 harvests. Daily mean HVAC energy consumption varied based on outdoor environmental conditions, with increased usage during summer months and a maximum of 33.53 kWh/day. Overall, fluctuations across mean fresh mass needs to be investigated further as the optimal harvest date for this farm may occur prior to 12 weeks, for both plant yield and energy consumption levels.
