ALACHUA — On a cold, gray morning, Patrick Gruninger heads to his farm to tend his crops. Unlike many farmers, the weather doesn’t concern him a bit. His farm is not a wide, tilled field, but a narrow cargo crate.
Gruninger’s farm, Alachua Greens, sits nestled in the back of San Felasco Tech City, a sprawling corporate park about a 20-minute drive north from Gainesville. The cargo crate is marked with an “F” on its side. An air conditioner and antenna poke out from one end.
Gruninger’s farm is hydroponic. Instead of soil, he grows his plants exclusively with water-nutrient solutions, alongside various substrates or cultures. The cargo crate-farm is a bustling workspace, clean yet alive.
Inside it’s always temperate, with a consistently moderate temperature and neutral white lighting flowing from the edges of the ceiling. It’s a pleasant climate, cool but not cold, and the ambient lighting never gets too bright.
The floor is a series of ridged metal strips covered with a dry layer of algae that must be occasionally washed away; it accumulates in the ideal growing conditions.
While the shipping container doesn’t have a lot of space, what’s there gets used efficiently. Just inside the container a metal shelf holds various tools to the right, opposite a work counter on the left. Underneath, saplings sprout from shelves – what Gruninger calls the nursery.
Most of the rest of the container braces four “grow walls,” panels holding strips of metal that sprout with leafy greens. Some of the plants are inserted into black foam with cut-in folds. Others grow from newer, 3D-printed plates with notches for thumb-sized soil plugs. That’s all the room Gruninger’s produce needs to grow.
To free up more space, each of the grow walls slides on a ceiling track, allowing them to be pushed aside and folded into each other. The plants need little horizontal space to grow.
Regardless of any gloomy day outside the crate, the space makes ideal conditions for Gruninger’s leafy crops— lettuce, chard, kale, and others — to thrive.
Gruninger has one overarching concern: control. A CO2 tank in the corner helps stabilize the climate. Nozzles at the top of the grow walls drip only five gallons of water per day, just enough to keep his crops flourishing. Using an app called Farmhand, Gruninger can monitor how his farm is doing wherever he is, down to the temperature, amount of water his crops receive, and even a live camera feed.
Alachua Greens grows and delivers leafy produce to local establishments as far as St. Augustine. Though he owns the business with his wife, Lisa Sanders, a doctor at the University of Florida, the farm is, for the most part, a one-man operation. Gruninger does everything from planting the peat moss plugs to cleaning out the algae.
Gruninger and Sanders purchased the farm in 2023. By the start of 2025, Gruninger was able to make it his full-time work.
Ever since his childhood in Switzerland, he says, he was fascinated with farming.
“My parents told me that one day I came home from kindergarten and I told them I’m going to be a farmer,” he says. “I had no idea where it came from because we had no farmers in our family until then.”
Gruninger went to college to study agriculture, but when he found Switzerland’s agriculture industry difficult to enter, he moved to Canada and worked on a dairy farm.
He later moved to Florida where he trained horses, raised cattle, and grew watermelons in Punta Gorda before moving to Ocala to help raise thoroughbreds.
His choice to run a hydroponics farm instead of a more traditional land-based farm was a matter of logistics and cost.
“I’ve been checking out these farms because I really didn't have the finances to buy, you know, a lot of acreage, and when you have a lot of acreage you need a lot of staff, you need a lot of equipment, I mean it's incredibly expensive, so I looked into these farms.”
Farm to market
Shielded from the cold, Gruninger sets up shop at the San Felasco Market on a Wednesday afternoon. The air is chilly and the setting sun just bright enough not to intrude. Most farmers truck their produce in from the fields, but Gruninger’s farm sits just several hundred feet away.
His booth stands out with its distinctive green canopy, branded with the Alachua Greens logo. Under its shade he places pictures of the various vegetables he grows. To the side are two coolers full of crops harvested that morning.
Aside from supplying local restaurants with produce, Gruninger also sells to individuals at the San Felasco and Grove Street farmers markets.
Before crowds of customers, ranging from lone students to whole families, Gruninger presents his product, readily showing his fresh produce to possible buyers.
“As long as you keep this in your fridge, it will last for three weeks,” he says. “So in three weeks, it looks just like that.”
These sales reflect only a small part of his overall profit. He makes only about 15 sales a day, most repeat customers. His appearance at the markets is more to advertise his business, he says.
Alachua Greens advertises produce as longer lasting, more nutrient dense, and overall, higher quality than conventional land-grown produce.
He is part of a budding hydroponics industry in Florida, where, according to UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, local markets demand high-quality produce year-round. A bigger-picture benefit is sustainability. The United Nations promotes hydroponics as one way to help stop groundwater depletion and soil degradation; the UN estimates that some 40 percent of the world’s land is degraded.
Alachua Greens makes a point to advertise their farm as eco-friendly. Vertical farming is space efficient, and the hydroponic setup means crops don’t pull nutrients from the ground. They also only use a fraction of the water conventional farms do.
Every day on his way to work, Gruninger says, he passes a soil farm. He recounts having sometimes seen the land sprayed with pesticides and being confounded. The only anti-pest measures at his farm are the sheets of fly paper hanging from the ceiling.
Despite steady growth, the hydroponics industry remains in the domain of hobbyists and small-time farms like Alachua Greens. For all the passion Gruninger puts into his work, he doesn’t see it as particularly lucrative. Farming isn’t the industry to enter to get rich, he says.
At a public lecture at the University of Florida this past fall, Michael Grunwald, author of “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate” spoke on the uphill battle of adopting more eco-friendly farming practices.
“It is really, really hard to change the world in a hurry,” he said.
“Especially the world of food and agriculture, because this stuff is personal, it’s cultural, we vote on these issues three times a day,” Grunwald said. “We’re going to need political change, technological change, and behavioral change.”
Back in his cargo crate, Gruninger has an optimistic view on the future of his farm. He’s currently planning to buy a second crate to further diversify the crops he grows and double the output.