A new way to grow strawberries with less land, less water, and more berries.
Strawberry farm harvests aren't something most of us calculate on a regular basis (or ever at all), but the numbers from a strawberry farm in Richmond, Virginia, are staggering enough to make it worth an old-school word problem. If the average American eats 8 pounds of strawberries a year, and an average strawberry farm yields approximately 20,000 pounds of berries per acre, how many people could a 200-acre strawberry field feed?
I won't make you do the math. The answer is 500,000 people. But what if a crop that size, providing enough strawberries for half a million people, could be grown on just one acre instead of 200? It's possible. You just have to go—or rather grow—up, up, up.
Indoor vertical farm company Plenty Unlimited knows a lot about growing up. In fact, it's their entire business model. Instead of the sprawling fields that traditional farming methods require, vertical farms have a much smaller land footprint, utilizing proprietary towers for growing. Plenty has used vertical farming methods to grow greens such as lettuce, kale, spinach and more for years, but now it boasts a vertical berry farm that can yield a whopping 4 million pounds of strawberries on a little less than an acre.
Growing indoors means not being at the mercy of weather or climate inpredictability (barring a storm taking out your building), which is wise in the era of climate change. Unlike a traditional greenhouse which still uses the sun for light, Plenty's indoor vertical farms make use of the latest technology and research on light, pinpointing the wavelengths plants need from the sun to thrive and recreating them with LED lights. Plenty farms also don't use soil, as what plants really need is water and nutrients, which can be provided without soil (and with a lot less water than soil requires). Being able to carefully control water and nutrients means you can more easily control the size, taste and uniformity of the berries you’re growing.
If that sounds like a lot of control, it is. And that idea might freak people out. But when a highly controlled environment means not having to use pesticides and using up to 90% less water than traditional farming, it starts to sound like a solid, sustainable farming innovation.
Plenty even uses AI in its strawberry farm, according to its website:
“Every element of the Plenty Richmond Farm–including temperature, light and humidity–is precisely controlled through proprietary software to create the perfect environment for the strawberry plants to thrive. The farm uses AI to analyze more than 10 million data points each day across its 12 grow rooms, adapting each grow room’s environment to the evolving needs of the plants – creating the perfect environment for Driscoll’s proprietary plants to thrive and optimizing the strawberries’ flavor, texture and size.”
Plenty even has its own patent-pending method of pollinating the strawberry flowers that doesn’t require bees. Even just the fact that this enormous crop of strawberries will be coming from Virginia is notable, since the vast majority of strawberries in the U.S. are grown in California.
Traditional strawberry farming takes up a lot of land.Photo credit: Canva
Plenty's Richmond farm is currently growing strawberries exclusively for Driscoll’s.
“Partnering with Plenty for the launch of the Richmond Farm allows us to bring our premium strawberries closer to consumers in the Northeast, the largest berry consumption region in the U.S.,” Driscoll’s CEO Soren Bjorn said in a press release. “By combining our 100 years of farming expertise and proprietary varieties along with Plenty’s cutting-edge technology, we can deliver the same consistent flavor and quality our customers love — now grown locally. This new innovative farm is a powerful step forward in continuing to drive category growth in new ways for our customers and consumers.”
Is Plenty’s model the farm of the future? Perhaps it’s one option, at least. The more we grapple with the impact of climate change and outdated, unsustainable farming practices, the more innovative ideas we’ll need to feed the masses. If they can get 4 million pounds of strawberries out of an acre of land, what else is possible?
A mother and teen daughter just aren't on the same page.
When a friend or coworker comes to us with a problem, it’s not hard to lend an ear and listen to them without judgment. Sometimes, adults just need to vent or talk about their problems to understand them better. However, as a parent, it can be challenging to sit and listen without trying to fix the problem or share some advice.
Jenny Hwang of Project Parent Coach says that when parents are dealing with an upset teenager, one of the best things you can do is sit and listen without judgment or sharing any unnecessary advice. Jenny Hwang, PhD, is a clinical psychologist licensed in New York State who coaches the parents of teens and young adults who are popular on social media with parents who need help raising teenagers.
Hwang starts her video by explaining that it's normal and healthy for your teen to feel stressed out. “Because your teen is doing what teens are supposed to be doing, which is wrestling with the fact that they're moving into a world that, while is full of lots of gratifying, also comes with tremendous responsibility and lots of uncertainty,” she says.
@projectparent 🤫 What’s not said is as important as what’s said when it comes to connecting with our teens. ‼️Parents often make the mistake of assuming that parenting means doing, improving, speaking, saying something - the ultimate “if you see something, say something” situation. 💥This backfires for many parents in the form of the teen behaving in a way that feels dismissive, disrespectful, and even more withdrawn. 💡Parents can regulate their emotions- that urgency to do or say because otherwise you feel like you’d be failing - and remember that your choice to not say something says a lot to our teens. ✅Silence isn’t just you not saying something. ✅It’s you choosing to hold your comments for the moment in the name of making space for your teen. ✅It’s deliberate. ✅And no, parents don’t get much credit for it. ✅What you’ll find over time is that if you make room for a little silence - ask one less question and just be - your teen will be more inclined to stay present with you. ✅It’s not about extremes - it’s not about never saying anything. It’s also not about saying everything. ✅Just remember our choice to not speak especially when we could is often experienced by our teens as grace. ✅It builds trust. 💡💡So, don’t forget to incorporate it into your other approaches with your teen! SHARE if you found this helpful!! #ParentingTeens #TeenBoundaries #ParentingTips #ConsciousParenting #ParentingWisdom #fyp #foryoupage #GentleParenting
Hwang’s prescription for parents who want to help their distressed teens is to fight their instinct to solve the problem. Hwang says we need to find the power to be silent. “Your most surefire way of creating space for your teen is to stop talking if your teen is dissatisfied,” Hwang says. "Don't take their dissatisfaction personally. Give yourself at least one time where, in the face of your teen's dissatisfaction, when you normally would be scrambling to try to make something better or to try to talk them out of how miserable they are, just let it be. Just let it be and watch how uncomfortable it's gonna feel.”
The parent coach says the teen years are a time to reevaluate how we react to things as parents. “Because this is how conditioned we are to feel like parenting equals doing. Parenting equals talking, parenting equals guiding,” Hwang says. “All of these things. But there is important parenting that happens in silence.”
A mother listening to her teenage daughter.via Canva
"How do you always know what’s happening in my house? I struggle with this so much, but I’ve been trying more, and it’s actually been good. So uncomfortable, but good," Jane wrote in the comments. "I always tell my husband that sometimes we just need to listen to our son and validate his feelings. It's not our job to solve all of his problems," KG added.
The key to truly listening to your teen without lecturing, giving advice, or passing judgment is to understand the power you give them by listening. Barbara and John Frazier at The Successful Parent blog describes it perfectly. “When you can hear your child’s pain or suffering and hold it for her while she talks about it, you are lending her your strength. The message you send is ‘I can stand these feelings, and they won’t destroy me,’ which tells her, ‘You can stand them too, and they won’t destroy you either.’”
Sometimes, all a teen needs to get through a situation is the strength to do what they think is right or to make it through a trying, exhausting situation. By listening, you can reassure your teenager that they are worth being heard and that their experiences and feelings are valid. Now, after you have listened and empathized and are on the same page, you may ask, “Would you like me to help you figure this out?” And if the answer is no, that’s fine; it means you’ve already done your job.
You're trying to spice things up in the bedroom because, why not, right? You read in one of those "ten ways to have more fun in bed" articles that role-playing with your partner could really take things up a notch. But sometimes, what seems like a saucy idea at the time goes completely off the rails. Canadian TikTok star Josh Richards created a hilarious clip where he exemplifies all the ways a night of role-playing could fail. In the clip, entitled "When Role Play Goes Wrong," a woman clad in lingerie nervously proposes, "Do you wanna try, like, role play tonight?"
Josh agrees but admits he's not sure where to begin. She takes the reins, and things immediately get complicated. "It's 1910, New York," she suggests. "I'm a little orphan girl, and you're the shopkeeper." (He then confirms she's at least of legal age.) "I've been stealing some thumbtacks from you, only this time, oops, I've been caught." It gets worse from there and devolves into a plan involving the evasion of the orphanage's "madam."
Unfortunately, Josh's character then gets a bit too literal. "Why would you have so many thumbtacks?"
She tries again. "How 'bout this? You're a chef in France, and I'm a rat with dreams of becoming a culinary master." Josh, rightfully, points out that this is the plot of the Pixar movie Ratatouille. After she tries to convince him, he says, "I'm not sure the whole rat sex thing is really doing it for me."
Totally fair.
Many on Reddit also seem eager to share their hilariously "unique" role-playing misfires. In what seems to be an earnest question on a subreddit thread, someone asks for examples of odd and outrageous role-play ideas. But for the most part, the comment section does not take this request seriously.
File:Mountrushmore.jpg - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
One suggests trying different presidents to get your partner in the mood. "Four nights in a row. Each night you dress up as a different president from Mt. Rushmore."
Hungry Pizza GIF by Pudgy PenguinsGiphy
Another gets extremely detailed and really hates glitter. "I’m a pizza delivery man, she’s VERY hungry. I deliver a pizza to her house, but it turns out she doesn’t have any cash to tip. No worries, she’s got something else for me. She invites me in, and I watch her slowly and methodically use some popsicle sticks and glue to make a snowflake.
I’m really bored, but she tells me I can’t leave. Not yet. She then proceeds to sprinkle glitter all over the snowflake. I hate glitter. She doesn’t care. She wants me to be upset. This is all a game to her. Finally, after two hours of watching her craft, I’ve had enough. I can’t take it anymore, so I leave. But unfortunately, I find out I’m fired because I took so long on this delivery, and my boss said I was already on secret probation.
Live Tv Radar GIF by The Weather ChannelGiphy
This one gets complicated and eventually is ruined by the misplacement of an important item. "Portly meteorologist Doug borrows money from his widowed neighbor Tammy to pay for a broken fence caused by his estranged son's fiancée Margie, who has a penchant for drinking while operating a child's motorized big wheel. Doug falls on hard times and realizes he cannot pay back his debt and must make things right with more untraditional means of restitution. Tammy, while on the older side of Doug, still maintains a feisty demeanor despite being legally blind. To pay back her errors, Margie is called upon to film the encounter with a vintage JVC home movie recorder purchased from Goodwill. But first, she must locate the missing charging cable."
And of course, comedian Gary Gulman’s bit on the matter speaks for itself.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
