On a 30-degree day in January, heads of butterhead, red oak, and tropicana green-leaf lettuce are soaking up the sun in a balmy 75-degree greenhouse so close to 695, it’s visible to drivers approaching the Francis Scott Key Bridge. “It’s pretty dreamy in here,” says Nicole Baum, director of partnerships at Gotham Greens, as a blue divider lifts and the aroma of fresh pesto welcomes us into the “basil room.”

Unlike companies like Amazon and FedEx that have recently brought industry back to the grounds of the old Bethlehem Steel Plant with their distribution warehouses in Sparrows Point, Gotham Greens arrived and built a farm. An indoor, soil-free, tech-forward, 100,000-square-foot one.

Started on a Brooklyn rooftop in 2011, the New York City-based company is one of a hearty group of businesses now growing vegetables indoors in Baltimore year-round, turning the city into what could be, given its proximity to so many markets, a Mid-Atlantic hydroponic produce hub.

From small-scale, DIY endeavors to massive, state-of-the-art operations like Gotham Greens, these businesses say they’re increasing access to healthy, local produce while eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient losses, and food safety concerns inherent in shipping, say, California romaine across the country to the East Coast. They also see their controlled-environment agriculture as important to food security in the era of climate change.

How they will affect the region’s food system, however, is still uncertain.

“I used to be a hacker for the Feds,” says Larry Hountz from inside his brick rowhouse off Patterson Park, where he sits on a leopard-print stool, offers guests velvet slippers, and talks about the farm he operates in his spare bedroom upstairs.

Those computer skills helped him build City-Hydro in 2013, where he now grows dozens of varieties of microgreens out of his own home. A traumatic brain injury suffered in a car accident had made focusing at a computer difficult, and urban farming seemed like it could provide opportunities for both healing and business. When he looked into indoor hydroponic systems fit for city living, though, he didn’t like what he found. “It was a lot of non-food-safe plastics and fertilizers and just things that didn’t make sense to me,” he says.

Hydroponic farming is generally done indoors. It involves placing plants in trays or towers, with the roots dropping directly into water instead of soil. Liquid nutrients are added to the water, LEDs are used for lighting, and the environment is climate-controlled for ideal growing conditions.

Hountz and his wife, Zhanna, bought their own materials, including grow lights, green plastic trays, and wire racks. Then they researched and tested designs until they landed on an efficient way to produce their seedlings, which require little space and grow to maturity quickly. He decided to sell directly to local chefs, who love microgreens for their concentrated flavor and delicate appearance. In their 10-by-15-foot room, the trays are stacked vertically, with water the only input, no pesticides, and energy-efficient lights above each.

In January, micro leeks for Cinghiale were sprouting out of coconut husk pads below micro peas headed to The Pendry and Foraged. But the farm has been significantly scaled back since its most productive days. After news coverage thrust their surprisingly simple, yet effective, system into the spotlight, the couple shifted the bulk of their business to selling the system they invented to other eager growers. “This week alone, I think we sold 60,” Hountz says, showing off a tower of boxes behind the kitchen filled with supplies that needed to be unpacked and assembled for customers. “We import a million coconut pads a year.”

They also offer free trainings and post YouTube videos for individuals who want to build their own farms instead of buying them, and as people from across the country visit the house to learn and report back with success stories, Hountz sees little need for what he considers big, corporate growers. “The only way we’re going to feed people [around the world] is with small, individually owned farms,” he says. “This works, and we have the people out there to prove it.”

While some hail hydroponics as an exciting new farming frontier, others are worried about the implications of growing without soil, like on the nutritional value of the vegetables produced. In the hydroponic production of full-size produce, however, growers feed their plants tailored fertilizers, which can lead to higher levels of some nutrients compared to soil-based farming.

Research also shows nutrient levels in all vegetables degrade over time, and produce sold in East Coast grocery stores is typically shipped long distances, especially during winter. Because hydroponic growers can harvest year-round in any locale, they are technically able to get fresher greens to consumers more quickly.

But skeptics like farmer Dave Chapman, executive director of the Real Organic Project, say soil is a complex ecosystem, home to fungi and microorganisms that interact with plant roots in ways not yet fully understood. “We are not smart enough to get the nutrient balance exactly correct,” he says. “The more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know.”

How these farms will affect the local food system is still uncertain.

Then there’s the environmental impact. Hydroponic systems vary considerably, so it can be hard to make comparisons. Local distribution, no matter the farming method, can reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation. Hydroponic farms generally use significantly less water and require less space, and therefore land, to produce more food. They do, however, require some energy use for systems such as lighting and climate control. Traditional outdoor farms, of course, work off natural light, but they often pollute the environment via man-made fertilizers and pesticides used to control variables and inefficiencies inherent in nature.

Organic outdoor farmers, however, have long confronted these challenges without chemicals, in ways that benefit the environment. “Organic farming is based on healthy soil,” Chapman says, back to its earliest roots, which in turn, farmers and experts say, leads to healthy plants. “The slogan is ‘feed the soil, not the plant.’”

Recently, he and other farmers have been at odds with corporate hydroponic growers who lobbied for their crops to be eligible for USDA organic certification simply based on the absence of added chemicals. Operations like Gotham Greens avoid that debate altogether: Instead of calling their produce organic, they simply state that they do not use pesticides.

In the end, some see ultra-automated, large hydroponic farms as threatening to those that are small and family-run. Others view them as an exciting way to replace the sprayed greens from far-flung places that sit on supermarket shelves.

Somewhere in the middle is Jon Shaw, a local farmer whose name comes up in most conversations surrounding hydroponic produce in Baltimore, which may be surprising to those who know him as the organic guru behind Karma Farm in Monkton.

While Shaw and his son, Nat, fully believe that soil’s magic leads to the incredible sweetness of their winter carrots, they also see hydroponic growing as complementary to their outdoor organic production. “It became clear to us that the winter was our weakness,” says Nat, who runs the farm’s hydroponic operations. “It seemed like this perfect marriage to combine hydroponics with the outdoor farm to have local, seasonal food all year.”

Like Hountz, Nat is a tech-savvy tinkerer who built proprietary systems for Karma Farm after discovering the made-to-order versions didn’t quite work as advertised. In his basement farm, where he was growing multiple basil varieties in January, he’s like a scientist showing off the gadgets in his lab, complete with timers, pumps, fans, dehumidifiers, and beneficial insects released to deal with harmful pests.

He also tends to two hydroponic farms inside shipping containers. One sits next to a Karma barn and is filled with specialty herbs like borage and cilantro, growing in vertical towers. The other is on the grounds of Sandlot, chef Spike Gjerde’s outdoor beach bar at Harbor Point, and it’s equipped to produce trays of leafy greens, which can be eaten at many restaurants, including Woodberry Kitchen.

For the Shaws, perfecting the shipping containers was a long process. Many growers find these systems difficult to master due to design flaws and the sensitive calibration of technology. So far, greens, herbs, and microgreens are the only vegetables that hydroponic farmers see as efficient enough to grow to make a profit. “It took us about two and a half years to figure out what we could grow and what will sell consistently,” Jon says.

In West Baltimore, a new, 3,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse that’s under construction is all about training farmers. Public charter school Green Street Academy specializes in workforce development for “green careers” and is already home to an orchard, chicken coop, fish farm, pollinator meadow, and hoop house for vegetables.

But one challenge to educating young people in agriculture has long been the school year, which is out of sync with the growing season, says JJ Reidy, CEO and co-founder of Urban Pastoral, a local sustainable development company that’s helping Green Street build agricultural infrastructure. A greenhouse that continues to operate through the winter will give students the chance to participate in every part of the growing process.

“We should be able to do 25,000 pounds of leafy greens a year,” says Reidy, who plans to purchase them for Molina and Stem, his restaurants inside R. House in Remington. He also points out that the recent growth of hydroponic farming in Baltimore means that there will likely be more internship and job opportunities available for kids. “Indoor agriculture is a burgeoning field,” he says.

“We should be able to do 25,000 pounds of leafy greens a year.”

Across from T.J. Maxx and Petco in Nottingham, a looming gray building looks like a warehouse for storing boxes, but a worker wearing a hard hat and orange vest opens an unmarked metal door and points inside. “It’s the future of farming,” he says with a grin.

One thing is for sure: it’s futuristic farming. Started in New York City in 2015 with a mission to reduce some of the environmental impacts of agriculture, Bowery, another indoor farm setting up shop in Baltimore, now grows greens and herbs—purple bok choy, baby kale, wasabi arugula—at two farms in New Jersey.

During a winter visit, the Baltimore operation was barely up and running, but it was already clear that when founder-CEO Irving Fain says, “We stack our crops vertically from the floor to the ceiling,” he is not speaking metaphorically. The design, kept tightly under wraps, involves a dizzying grid of levels, stairways, and robotic parts moving around on their own. Fain declined to share the size of the farm or how much it cost to build, but Bowery has raised about $175 million total to date. He, too, chose the Baltimore County location for its access to markets and transportation.

“In this surrounding area, there are about 25 million people that we could serve with this farm,” he says, noting that Nottingham used to be an agricultural area. “This fulfills the mission we talk about—getting fresh food efficiently and sustainably to our population.”

Fain envisions a scalable model that would allow him to build Bowery farms that distribute locally in cities all over the world, and he emphasizes the importance of the sophisticated operating system that involves sensors, cameras, and algorithms that are constantly tracking and adjusting the plants and their environment.

“It’s like our central nervous system,” he says. “We’re collecting millions of data points in real time, and that data impacts how our crops are growing.” The company also digitally tracks each plant from seed to shelf, which reduces the possibility of an untraceable food safety scare.

While the scale and sophistication may inspire awe, the light human touch needed to operate the whole thing is apparent as well. When it’s fully up and running this spring, Bowery’s farm will create about 80 local jobs.

Gotham Greens’ farm will also employ about 60 people locally. But inside, it has less of a space-age feel, primarily because the company uses the sun instead of LEDs as its main source of light, and thus, plant energy. The space is vast, with leafy greens snuggled up to each other in rows as far as the eye can see, but it looks more like a turned-up version of a typical greenhouse. The technology used to irrigate, deliver nutrients, and move rows from seed to harvest is barely visible.

Since its launch in 2009, Gotham expanded within New York and also built farms in Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island. The Baltimore farm is the seventh, coming in around $11 million to build, and an eighth will be up and running soon in Denver. With each new location, the scale has grown, from the original 15,000 square feet to this newest iteration, which is six times the size with more advanced systems in terms of sensors, data, climate control, and automation.

CEO and co-founder Viraj Puri says the company was especially interested in Sparrows Point because urban revitalization is a part of the company’s larger goals. “We’re not single-handedly changing neighborhoods and cities,” he says. “But we are helping to raise the profile of some of these areas, to attract other businesses, and be a catalyst for additional urban renewal.”

Produce from Bowery and Gotham Greens will be sold throughout Maryland and surrounding states at various grocery stores, such as Whole Foods for the latter, and both will also court chefs throughout the region. As for small, local farms, Jon Shaw isn’t worried. “We have a relationship with restaurants. . . they want to be catered to, they want specialized [products],” he says. “And I think there’s a really strong inclination from chefs that buy locally to buy from soil-based farms.”

Plus, Fain says, “When you look at the demand for local food right now, it far, far outpaces the supply.”

CH-CH CHANGES

STEM: It’s going to be a big year for Urban Pastoral—the local development firm that specializes in high-tech urban farming. In the coming months, founders J.J. Reidy and Christian De Paco are planning to unveil 3,000 square feet of hydroponic greenhouse space inside a new learning center at Green Street Academy in West Baltimore. Once it’s up and running, the project will not only serve as an educational tool for students, but it will also provide an estimated 25,000 pounds of leafy greens per year to local restaurants. The produce will certainly come in handy for STEM, the newly rebranded iteration of Reidy and De Paco’s Stall 11 inside R. House in Remington.

Beginning this Sunday, January 12, the plant-based eatery will feature a redesigned counter experience, DIY bowls and salads, and a rotating roster of seasonal items. Although there will be many new options, Stall 11 regulars will be happy to hear that favorites including the Korean barbecue cauliflower, vegan mac and cheese, and avocado BLT will remain on the menu. “R. House was created as a launchpad for food entrepreneurs, and this is the evolution of our business and vision,” Reidy said in a statement. “After three amazing years with Stall 11 at R. House, it was time for a change in concept. . .We can’t wait for Baltimore to meet STEM and to share more of the delicious plant-based dishes that we know will become new favorites.”

Friends and Family: Speaking of rebrands—and vegan and vegetarian options—Fells Point mainstay Sticky Rice is closing its doors on Tuesday, January 21 with plans to reopen as Friends and Family in March. Known for its sushi, tater tots, and wide array of plant-based options, the restaurant will soon transition into a breakfast-all-day concept that maintains its emphasis on vegan and vegetarian dishes. “As we settled into our tenth year of business, we have determined it is time to retire the current concept and expand on our core principles,” managing partner Ginny Lawhorn, who will remain at the helm of the bar program, said in a statement.

Slated construction plans include renovated bathrooms, the removal of the large sushi bar to make way for more communal seating, and Lawhorn’s curated installation of artwork by—you guessed it—friends and family of the business. The new name was also inspired by the building’s former inhabitant, Friends—which Lawhorn and her husband, owner Ronnie Pasztor, describe as a cozy neighborhood dive bar. “Friends was a local favorite driven by comradery,” Lawhorn says. “Sticky Rice built on that comradery with an inclusive menu and welcoming team. We are looking forward to expanding on these pillars and cultivating our place in the community.”

Cunningham’s: Yet another dining destination starting the decade with a refresh is this Towson hotspot, which closed its doors earlier this week. The farm-to-table restaurant will reopen this spring after a major redesign by Patrick Sutton and the expansion of its downstairs cafe. Executive chef Jay Rohlfing tells us that the decision was influenced, in part, by all of the retail and residential development happening in Towson. “We figured it was time to be part of that renaissance,” he says. Though details about the new concept are still in the works, Rohlfing confirms that the locally sourced menu will emphasize American classics and the dining space will be downsized to include more bar seating. Read more here.

OPEN

Rooster & Hen: Just when we thought Cross Street Market had everything we could ever want (from pizza and beer to pho and Haitian cuisine), the newly renovated Federal Hill staple now boasts its own mini grocery store. Located just off of the Light Street entrance, the new “market within the market” offers a selection of produce, flowers, dairy, snacks, baked goods, and prepared foods for diners to grab on the go. Husband-and-wife owners Joe McRedmond and Allison Smith, who started Rooster & Hen in Catonsville in 2016, will also use their new space to continue Lucky Pantry—the store’s home meal kit program that now offers pick-up at the market every Monday. The new space also features a full kitchen for the owners to host food pop-ups, cooking classes, and other programs that contribute to their community-focused mantra.

The Veranda at The Milton Inn: Executive chef Brian Boston has launched an extension of this fine-dining den in Sparks. What was previously the outdoor patio is now The Veranda, an enclosed lounge highlighting a stone fireplace and retractable roof for the warmer months. It will also be a venue for live jazz and feature its own menu of drinks and small plates including crabmeat cocktail, charcuterie samples, and deconstructed s’mores that diners can roast at their tables.

Although Christian De Paco is a native of Costa Rica and J. J. Reidy hails from Buffalo, New York, the business partners behind local development firm Urban Pastoral both have strong ties to Italy. 

Aside from their own respective travels throughout Boot Country (Reidy spent six months in Perugia and De Paco frequently visits his girlfriend’s family outside of Florence), the duo lived in Milan for one month while attending a food-themed innovation program at the World Expo in 2015.

“Food is such a core facet of culture,” Reidy says. “We’ve both been blessed to experience that in different ways around the world, but especially in Italy and other parts of Europe—it’s just a way of life.”

Drawing inspiration from their experiences abroad, De Paco and Reidy have opened Molina Pizze and Polpette inside R. House in Remington. Taking over the last vacant stall in the year-old communal marketplace, Molina specializes in wood-fired pies, charcuterie, and classic Italian meatballs.

While making pizza is new for the partners, this isn’t their first project inside R. House. They teamed up with chef Melanie Molinaro to open vegan and vegetarian-focused Stall 11 inside the space when it first opened. Just like with Stall 11, De Paco and Reidy plan to use Molina’s menu as a way to further the sustainable mantra that they have established with Urban Pastoral—which works to activate green spaces throughout the city.

“Our overarching company exists to foster connectivity through food,” Reidy explains. “We’re doing that all across the supply chain from growing in our hydroponic facilities, to offering approachable vegan and vegetarian food at Stall 11. And now with Molina, we can connect people with our roots and family traditions.”

Molina’s menu features pies that are baked in a 1,000-degree hearth oven (traditionally called a pavesi) and topped with locally sourced herbs and vegetables from places like One Straw Farm in Baltimore County. The stall also makes use of naturally fermented mozzarella from Caputo Brothers Creamery in Pennsylvania.

Among the signature slices include the “Terra,” flavored with lemon-basil pesto and cauliflower, the “Parma” topped with arugula and prosciutto, and the “Raz,” a classic margherita named after Reidy’s grandfather who immigrated from Naples. The duo credits the pies’ unique texture with a special flour blend and specific fermentation process.

“The dough comes out light and crispy” De Paco says. “It’s the type of pizza that you can eat a lot of and not feel like you’re in a food coma.”

A native New Yorker, Reidy says that Molina fills a certain void in the local pizza scene.

“There are very few places in Baltimore where you can grab a good slice,” he says. “In New York, that’s a part of the culture. When you’re walking home from work, you get a slice of pizza. It’s like an appetizer.”

The lighter approach makes the offerings more conducive to R. House’s mission, which encourages diners to sample bites from each of its 10 stalls. The duo has enjoyed taking advantage of the communal environment, and has even partnered with R. Bar to create cocktail pairings (think a Negroni or an Aperol spritz) inspired by the Italian tradition of aperitivo.

“Cooking and sharing meals is an act of love,” Reidy says. “It’s people going on their first date, or launching their own company here at R. House. Those types of  interactions are so special to us.”

Field Notes is a monthly roundup of environmental news from around the area. If you have a story you’d like considered for a future Field Notes, email mamy@baltimoremagazine.net. Put “Field Notes Suggestion” in the subject line.

Bay Watch

When is a C- a cause for celebration? When we’re talking about the Chesapeake Bay’s health grade. Late last week, the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation released its report on the bay’s overall health in 2016, granting the estuary its highest grade since the foundation began issuing reports in 1998.

The report divides data into three main categories—pollution, habitat, and fisheries—then grades various indicators within each category to calculate an overall score out of a possible 100 points. This year’s overall score was a 34, which equates, in this specially weighted grading system, to a C-.

Except for a slight decrease in the amount of forested buffers, the bay showed improvement or remained steady across all sectors. Especially notable is the 10-point jump in the health of the blue crab population and the continued hardiness of the rockfish population, which garnered an A-, the scorecard’s highest individual grade.

But while things have improved, there is still a long way to go to reach that 100-point A+ (which would be like restoring the bay to how it was in the 1600s). Particularly troubling are the pollution scores, with nitrogen and phosphorus levels still earning F and D grades, respectively. (Excess nitrogen and phosphorus contribute to algae blooms that block sunlight and create dead zones in the bay. Certain algal blooms can be toxic to humans and pets, as well.)

The largest sources of nitrogen and phosphorus are agriculture runoff (particularly chicken manure and fertilizers), car and power plant emissions, sewage plant discharges, and suburban and urban stormwater runoff. Attempts to curtail the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff have resulted in controversial measures such as the Bay Restoration Fee (the so-called “flush tax”) and the much-maligned Stormwater Utility Fee (aka the “rain tax”).

But along with a suite of other actions that have been folded into a federally coordinated multi-state initiative called the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, there is a view that the oft-maligned fees are having a positive effect.

“We believe the Bay is reaching a tipping point,” the report’s introduction states. “As this report shows, the evidence is there. We are seeing the clearest water in decades, regrowth of acres of lush underwater grass beds, and the comeback of the Chesapeake’s native oysters, which were nearly eradicated by disease, pollution, and overfishing. . . . The bottom line is our report provides hope and promise for the future.”

Full report here.

So, That Was Christmas

And what have you done? Left your tree in the corner, dropping needles by the ton.

Don’t worry, Baltimore City Department of Public Works will be collecting Christmas trees with your regularly scheduled trash pickup throughout the rest of January (excluding Monday, January 16, because of Martin Luther King holiday). All tinsel and ornaments must be removed before pickup. Or, if you want to divert your tree from the landfill and turn it into free mulch for future garden projects, bring it to the the Southwest Citizens’ Convenience Center at 701 Reedbird Ave. in South Baltimore, Monday through Saturday (excluding the MLK holiday), from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Residents should bring their own containers for the mulch. DPW also would like to remind everyone that wrapping paper and many packaging materials are eligible for standard curbside recycling. An extensive list of recycleable items can be found here.

Baltimore County is also collecting old Christmas trees, beginning this week. Detailed instructions can be found here.

Anne Arundel County regulations can be found here.

Howard County runs a free mulch program similar to Baltimore City’s, as well as curbside pickup and recycling drop-off. Details are here.

Legislative Briefing

Last week, Gov. Larry Hogan announced his environmental priorities for the 2017 session of the Maryland General Assembly, which starts Wednesday at noon and lasts for 90 days.

Hogan wants to spend $65 million over three years on a variety of programs that focus on “targeted investments and market-based solutions to protect and preserve Maryland’s environment and natural resources.”

Forty-one million of the $65 million he has earmarked comes from a 2012 settlement with Exelon Corp. and must be invested in Tier 1 renewable energy projects. (Tier 1 renewables include solar, wind, and certain biomass and waste-to-energy methods.)

The rest of the $65 million would be distributed among four initiatives: increased tax credits and rebates for electric cars and charging stations, a $3 million investment in the state’s green jobs-training program, $7.5 million for a new clean-energy startup incubator at the University of Maryland, and up to $10 million in funding for a pollution credit-trading program.

But as The Sun pointed out in a recent editorial, those pet projects might not get much traction in the Democratic-controlled legislature. Instead, the General Assembly might focus on its own green agenda, which includes possibly overriding Gov. Hogan’s veto of a measure that would have boosted the state’s required quota of Tier 1 renewable energy from 20 percent to 25 percent by 2020. The legislature and the governor are also due for a reckoning about hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking. The controversial practice, in which a solution of water and chemicals is blasted into bedrock to release deposits of natural gas, is under a moratorium in the state while officials investigated its potential environmental impact. (It has been implicated in water and air pollution, as well as drilling-induced earthquakes.) But the ban expires this year and Hogan and the legislature will need to decide whether or not to allow it and, if so, how strictly it should be regulated.

Energy Star

Kudos to Columbia’s Wilde Lake Middle School. When the newly constructed school opened last week, it did so as the state’s first “net-zero energy” school. This means that, over the course of a year, the $33 million building will generate as much energy as it uses. The energy efficiency is achieved through both low-tech and high-tech means. There’s the school’s 2,000 solar panels, geothermal heating system, and lights that automatically dim when conditions are sunny.

But, as Scott Washington, the Director of School Construction for the Howard County Public School System, said in a video update on the project this fall, “Number one is the building orientation and envelope. That means how the building is situated on the site, as well as the envelope that the building is made out of—the roof structure, the wall structure, how insulated they are.”

The school also boasts an “energy kiosk” in the main hallway, which allows students to see, in real time, how much energy the building is using and generating. The school replaces the 48-year-old Wilde Lake school, which will be razed to make room for new playing fields and a bus loop.

Great Vertical

Time to add another entry into the city’s ever-growing register of urban farms.

Last month, a trio of organizations led by a Canadian agriculture technology companysigned a letter of intent to start a vertical farming operation in East Baltimore. The triumvirate is led by a Canadian agriculture technology company Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc., which procured financial backing from the Columbia-based venture capital firm CBO Financial to lease 25,000 square feet of indoor space from the local nonprofit Volunteers of America Chesapeake. The farm will grow greens like lettuce, basil, oregano, and cilantro in a climate-controlled environment and will offer agriculture job training to ex-offenders participating in Volunteers of America Chesapeake’s workforce re-entry program.

The $6 million project joins other agriculture and food system-related ventures popping up throughout East Baltimore. In the parking lot of the American Brewery building, another vertical farm, Urban Pastoral, grows greens in a LED-light-laden shipping container. Down the road, Walker Marsh raises cut flowers for market at Tha Flower Factory, a half-acre parcel where vacant rowhomes once stood. And in late September, the long-awaited Baltimore Food Hub broke ground at its 3.5-acre site at the corner of East Oliver and North Wolfe streets. The $23.5 million project, spearheaded by American Communities Trust and local workforce nonprofit Humanin, will eventually host job-training facilities, communal incubator space, and an excess of land to be dedicated to urban farming.