How it works
Roots in open air. Nutrients as mist. A loop that never spills.
Aeroponics is not hydroponics with better branding. Hydroponics sits roots in water. We hang them in air and mist them. That single difference is where the speed, the water saving and the cleanliness all come from.
Book a Grower ConsultThe cycle
Six steps, repeated every 4–6 weeks, forever.
Plant into a collar
A seedling goes into a collar or net and drops into one of the 108 pockets on the tower. No bed to prepare, no soil to till, no rows to lay out. It takes seconds, and it takes no expertise — the original site put it best: a seven-year-old can do it.
Mist the roots, do not soak them
The pod’s pumps push nutrient solution up the tower’s central column. Nozzles atomise it onto bare roots hanging in open air. Because the roots are in air rather than soil or standing water, they get maximum oxygen — and oxygen at the root is what drives the growth rate.
Catch every drop and send it back
Whatever the roots do not absorb drains down the column, into the return manifold, and back to the pod’s tank to go round again. It is a closed loop, not a running tap. That is where the water saving comes from, and it is why nutrient cost tracks what the plants actually eat.
Dose the pod, not the tower
A tower has no tank of its own. One central tank and its dedicated pumps serve the whole pod — sixteen towers at minimum, ninety-six at most. You adjust a recipe once and every tower in that pod follows it. A four-hundred-tower facility is managed as a handful of control points, not four hundred.
Watch it, do not babysit it
Sensors track nutrient levels, humidity, temperature and root health in real time and feed a single dashboard. You are alerted to a fluctuation before it becomes a lost cycle. Nobody is walking the rows with a clipboard.
Harvest standing up, then replant
Crops sit between knee and head height. Picking is done by hand, standing, with no tractor, no bending and no kneeling. Then the pocket gets replanted — no tilling, no crop rotation, no fallow ground.
The pod
The unit of scale is not the tower. It is the pod.
A pod is one central tank, its own dedicated pumps, a feed manifold out and a return line back — serving between 16 and 96 towers. 96 is the ceiling we recommend on a single tank. Nutrients are managed there, centrally, for every tower on the manifold.
Fewer things to get wrong
You are not mixing nutrients at four hundred towers. You are mixing them at a handful of tanks. Adjust the recipe once and the whole pod follows.
Pods are how you grow
Adding capacity means adding a pod, not re-plumbing the farm. Start with one, prove the economics, and add the next when the buyers are there.
Each pod is a different crop
The recipe in one pod has nothing to do with the pod beside it. That is what lets a single facility run strawberries, lettuce and kale at the same time.
The one real decision
Ninety-six towers can be one pod, or six. That choice is the whole strategy.
Because 96 is the ceiling on a tank — not the requirement — the same tower count can be plumbed very differently. This is the decision we spend the consult on, and there is no universally right answer. There is only the one that fits your buyers.
Fewer, bigger pods
Ninety-six towers on one tank. The simplest possible infrastructure: one recipe, one set of pumps, one thing to monitor, the shortest plumbing run and the lowest cost per tower.
The cost: that whole block grows one crop, so your revenue is exposed to one price. Right if you have a single large contract to fill and you want to fill it as cheaply as possible.
More, smaller pods
The same ninety-six towers split across six pods of sixteen. Six tanks, six sets of pumps — and six independent nutrient recipes. More hardware, more plumbing, more cost per tower.
What you buy with it: six crops from one footprint. You are hedged across six markets instead of exposed to one, and you can trial a variety in a single pod without risking the block.
Recipe zones
One facility. Several crops. At the same time.
This is the part most people do not expect. Because every pod is dosed on its own recipe, a single site is not committed to a single crop. One section of the field runs strawberries; the next runs leafy greens; a third trials a variety you are not sure about yet.
A single-crop farm lives and dies on one price. A facility running several recipes is hedged across several markets — and can move toward whichever one is paying, cycle by cycle, without disturbing the rest of the field.
Why the numbers move
Two charts that explain the entire business case.
Density is the whole game
Revenue per square foot is the only metric that matters when land is your most expensive input. Stack the plants and the denominator collapses.
Water stops being a running cost
In a drought-priced region this single chart is the business case. Closed-loop recirculation means you pay for what the plants drink, not for what soaks into the ground.
What you are buying
Four things, and the fourth one is a phone number.
Density
Nutrient-balanced mist reaches every one of the 108 sites in a tower. Faster growth, higher yield, consistent quality — with nothing wasted on the ground.
Central Control
Nutrients are dosed per pod, not per tower. One tank and its pumps serve up to ninety-six towers, so you manage a handful of control points instead of hundreds. No tilling, no rotation, no machinery.
Monitoring
Nutrient levels, humidity, temperature and root health tracked in real time. A constant feedback loop that catches a fluctuation before it becomes a lost cycle.
Support
System training, proactive maintenance insight and expert guidance from a team that manufactures the hardware it supports.
Questions we get asked
The honest answers.
Nothing hidden behind a click. If you have read this far, you have earned them.
What is the capacity of one tower?
Each ProduceFactory tower carries 108 growing sites. That density is the whole point: it is what turns revenue-per-square-foot from a losing number into a winning one, and it is what lets a small footprint carry a commercial harvest.
How big is a pod?
Sixteen towers is the floor and ninety-six is the ceiling — that is the most we recommend running off a single tank. So a pod is between 1,728 and 10,368 growing sites. Where you land inside that range is a real decision, and it is a tradeoff: fewer, larger pods mean simpler plumbing but fewer nutrient recipes. More, smaller pods mean more crops. We would rather walk you through that on a call than pretend there is one right answer.
Can I grow more than one crop at a site?
Yes, and this is the part most people do not expect. Nutrients are dosed per pod, so every pod carries its own recipe. One pod grows strawberries while the pod beside it grows lettuce. A single facility can run a genuine product range instead of a monoculture — which means you are hedged across several markets rather than exposed to one price.
How sustainable is it, really?
The water system is zero-waste by design. Nutrient-rich mist that is not immediately absorbed is recaptured and recirculated back into the tank, so nearly every drop is used. Against soil farming, that is up to 95% less water — as little as one gallon to grow a pound of lettuce, where soil farming takes twenty to thirty.
Do I need to spray?
Aphids, slugs, beetles, root rot, fusarium wilt, downy mildew — these live in soil. Take the soil away and you take away the vector. There is no need for pesticides, herbicides or synthetic growth enhancers, which means clean-label produce without the cost or labour of chemical treatment.
How hard is it to run?
Deliberately, boringly easy. Automated nutrient delivery, real-time monitoring and custom software built so that experience is not a prerequisite. There is no heavy machinery to harvest with, no soil to till, and no crop rotation to plan around.
What is the maintenance like?
The system is engineered so that downtime is rare and repair is fast: clog-resistant nozzles, smooth-surface construction, easy-access panels, and a modular design that lets you swap or upgrade a component without shutting the whole system down. Fewer moving parts, fewer things to go wrong.
Indoors or outdoors?
Both. Indoors gives you complete climate control and true year-round production. Outdoors, the towers still substantially out-yield soil in the same footprint and extend the season well past a conventional farm. Greenhouses, warehouses, rooftops, urban lots and open fields all work.
Find out what your square footage is actually worth.
A 30-minute grower consult. Bring your site, your crop and your buyers — we will tell you what it becomes as a Produce Factory, and whether the numbers work.