Winemaker turned farmer goes green, sustainable – and vertical

“It’s small,” Noël Schaff said when asked about her vertical farming operation.

It certainly is. The entire farm – situated in the bucolic hills northwest of Petaluma – fits inside a 40-foot-long shipping container.

Schaff owns and runs Cardona Farms, an automated hydroponic container farm that has no dirt, no pesticides and uses only 85 gallons of water per month. Yet it packs a punch, producing the equivalent of 2.5 acres of planting space, she said.

In vertical farms like this one, plants grow out of a wall-like array of moving panels while water and nutrients drip down via a fully automated system. Schaff, a winemaking professional for the last 13 years, said she discovered the system while investigating new ways to grow food.

“I kind of stumbled upon this concept of hydroponic farming just in my search for how to make progress toward more sustainable agriculture,” she said.

She said she hopes to soon supply local restaurants with her produce – mustard greens, purple romaine lettuce, edible flowers, purple onions and confetti cilantro, among other foods.

“When we hit the drought years, it was really tough to kind of be a part of that and be using so much water and understanding how much water gets applied to the land for agriculture,” Schaff said. “So I just started thinking about how can I sort of make an impact on … saving water in California.”

Though she doesn’t have a background in farming, Schaff has a degree in environmental geosciences. Originally from Burbank, she moved to the Bay Area to work in the wine industry, working her way up to eventually become a winemaker. Many of the skills she learned along the way have transferred to her new venture, she said.

“My background in the wine business has helped me know how to operate things like pumps and water movement, nutrients and things like that,” she said. But, she adds, the new operation is “totally different.”

“Farming is not for the faint of heart. It’s a lot of hard work.”

Schaff only started growing produce about two months ago, but Cardona Farms has been more than a year in the making, she said. She’s currently testing the bounds of this farming method, and says her experiments are showing promise.

“I’m aiming to be fully custom for chefs. So when a chef wants a certain variety, then I'll grow it for them versus the other way around, which is what most farmers are doing now, saying, ‘This is what I've got growing. Do you want it?’ I'm going to ask them, ‘What do you want me to grow?’”

In this way she hopes to provide local chefs with “more colorful and more flavorful varieties than what they’re already getting. Instead of a normal standard romaine, they can have this beautiful purple kind of baby romaine,” she said. “Giving them things that they are used to working with, but in a more vibrant, colorful, flavorful way.”

And by supplying local restaurants, she aims to reduce the miles that food travels, enhancing Petaluma’s already vibrant farm-to-table restaurant culture.

Vertical and colorful

Inside the narrow metal container, bright blue and red solar-powered lights shine upon the green produce for up to 18 hours a day. Most of the produce grows within a seven-week cycle, Schaff said, with the exception of the microgreens, which go from seed to harvest in only about 10 days.

“Every week it's on a rotating schedule of harvesting, transplanting and seeding,” she said.

The seeds are first planted in thumb-sized compostable plugs made of hemp and coconut fibers – no soil involved. Once the seedlings have grown large enough they get transplanted to the vertical panels in a space called the “cultivation area,” she said.

During the transplanting, Schaff inserts the seeded plugs into foam channels within the panels. At the top of each channel are drip emitters which drip water and nutrients via foam strips that evenly distribute the contents from top to bottom, she said.

“It's a really efficient way of giving plants water. There's virtually no waste,” she said. After plants reach peak growth, she harvests them and the process starts all over again.

The whole system is fully automated and can be controlled through a laptop, which gathers daily readings on nutrients, water levels and other factors that impact the plants’ well-being. But Schaff still checks on the plants every day, doing a lot of hands-on care.

“It's really about listening to the plants. And farming is something that you just have to learn by experience,” she said.

Schaff doesn’t come from a family of farmers. The farm’s namesake comes from her grandfather, Louie Cardona, who immigrated to Southern California from Colombia when he was 15, eventually starting a manufacturing business that has supported her family for “multiple generations,” she said.

“I wanted to honor him with that and start another business that I intend to be a family business in the future.”

She can’t say her grandfather taught her how to run a business, exactly, but she credits him with showing her some of the concepts behind owning one. More than that, he inspired her to consider how far an open mind and hands-on learning can take her.

“I didn't study plant science. I'm learning it as I go, which is a little bit scary, but I think for me it's the best way to learn because again, you're just learning from your environment.”

Schaff believes her past accomplishments are just preludes to her future. One day, she said, she may own several vertical farms and expand into a direct-to-consumer market.

“I got wine, wine is down. Now let me try something else that I can apply those same skills in a way that's totally new and exciting, in a way that gives back to people through edible produce, and also the environment with the water.”

Argus-Courier staff photographer Crissy Pascual contributed to this report.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Sawhney at 707-521-5346 or jennifer.sawhney@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @sawhney_media.