Up on the Rooftop

It's a blustery day in January, and icicles are hanging precariously from the rooftop of Gotham Greens, a commercial-scale greenhouse perched atop a Whole Foods in the once industrial Gowanus section of Brooklyn. To the northwest stretches the gray winterscape of downtown Manhattan; one story below in the parking lot, a sea of wind turbines and solar panels reinforce the notion of standing in a city proper — urban, industrial, mechanical, busy.

Inside the greenhouse, however, is an entirely different world. It's a balmy 75 degrees. The air is moist and heavy, scented with spicy arugula, sweet Genovese basil and hearty butterhead lettuce, which grow in propagation trays that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Folk music blares from the speakers and a team of urban farmers wearing gloves quietly move around the 20,000-square-foot space picking greens, all of which will

soon be packaged and delivered to Whole Foods and other supermarkets and restaurants scattered throughout the city's five boroughs. Often, they will hit the shelves by the end of the day.

"New York has really harsh winters and a very refined palate," said Eric Haley (MBA '07), the co-founder of Gotham Greens and the chief financial officer, giving a tour of the expansive greenhouse on a Wednesday morning in the middle of January. "It just became very apparent to us that the need for fresh produce far exceeds the supply. And the testament to that is that we've basically been sold out since day one."

Haley, a former football player who stands at 6-foot-4, towers above the greens and tomato vines in the greenhouse on the roof of Whole Foods, where the company's corporate office is headquartered. It's the only commercial rooftop farm in the world integrated into a supermarket, and Haley has been involved in nearly every aspect of building and running it since it opened in 2013.

The Gowanus greenhouse, which recently celebrated its first anniversary along with the supermarket, is one of two rooftop greenhouses operated by Gotham Greens, and both are a model for how rooftop space in cities can be used to feed the growing appetite of urban consumers for local and farm-to-table produce, Haley said.

Like most of the team's small corporate staff, Haley is dressed casually in a red plaid button-down shirt and jeans. A self-described foodie, he is passionate about food, and spends his spare time reading cookbooks, roaming the aisles of Whole Foods to look at new products and visiting farmers markets, he said. He has a laid-back and comfortable demeanor, but speaks passionately about the company's quick rise from a pioneer in city farming to an industry leader that is now producing 300 tons of produce annually for New York City.

It's a journey that in many ways has surprised Haley, who until early 2012 was working full time for Corporate Fuel Partners, a boutique investment bank and private equity firm in New York City. He always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but never in his wildest dreams imagined he'd become an urban farmer, he said.

"I always thought if I did something with entrepreneurship, it would be on the real estate side or on a different level," he said. "My mom and dad never thought I'd be slinging greens."

The two years he spent at Mendoza in the Notre Dame MBA program helped solidify his long-term goal of becoming an entrepreneur, giving him the tools to jump in when the opportunity arose to get involved with a startup from the ground up, he said.

He sharpened his financial skills in the upper-level signature course Applied Investment Management (AIM), where he mastered how to do financial modeling and analyze a company's balance sheets, statements and cash flows. Those skills have proved invaluable in his role at Gotham Greens, where he needs to prepare monthly and annual reports, analyze the company's cash flow, create budgets and raise capital.

"That course was my first introduction to that, and it has been a crucial skill that I developed," he said. "I couldn't be doing what I'm doing now if I hadn't taken that class."

Another influential course he took was an entrepreneurship class, which exposed him to writing a business plan and the world of startups, he said. As part of that class, he developed a business plan that outlined how to build a community in Vail, Colorado, that would lower its carbon footprint via solar panels and a large rain catchment pond, he said. The idea won third place in Mendoza's McCloskey Business Plan Competition.

Gerard Pannekoek, who taught entrepreneurship at Notre Dame at the time and advised Haley on his business plan for the sustainable community, remembers him as a passionate and eager student interested in the environment and sustainability.

"He was a very focused and persistent individual, which is a characteristic of a successful entrepreneur," Pannekoek said.

It wasn't until 2008, a year after he graduated from business school, that Haley decided to dip his toe into the startup world, this time for real. His good friend, Viraj Puri, whom he'd met while studying abroad in college, had built a 1,000-square-foot greenhouse educational facility on a barge on the west side of Manhattan.

The experimental greenhouse was a model for hydroponic farming, a technique in which plants receive all their nutrients from their water supply and don't require soil in order to grow. The technique is ideal for urban environments where nutritious, high-quality soil and viable land are scarce, Haley said.

Chefs who visited Puri's greenhouse were so interested in the produce grown there that Puri realized he might be onto something, and enlisted Haley's help. The pair spent nights and weekends the following year interviewing chefs, visiting large- scale produce and farmers markets and talking with greenhouse experts to see if it was possible to do hydroponic greenhouse farming on a commercial scale.

Turns out it was, and in 2008, they founded Gotham Greens, with the goal of building their first greenhouse on a roof in an industrial section in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They raised money from family and friends, and shortly thereafter brought on Jennifer Nelkin Frymark as the company's chief agricultural officer, renowned in the agricultural community for her expertise in operating greenhouses in harsh environments like the South Pole and the desert.

Haley kept his day job at the boutique investment bank until early 2012, working for Gotham Greens on nights and weekends as the company built its first greenhouse.

From the get-go, the company's mission has been to turn the traditional method that supermarkets use to source greens on its head, Haley said. Most of the lettuce that consumers in New York City buy today is procured by a company that obtains it from hundreds of farms across the country or world, then packages and ships it to a distributor in New York, who finally sells it to retailers, Haley said. Gotham Greens' vision was to grow its own lettuce, pack it on site and then directly sell it to the supermarkets.

"We wanted to cut out all the middlemen involved," Haley said. "Our idea was to vertically integrate the entire supply chain."

Clever design has helped them achieve that goal. The green- house atop Whole Foods takes up only half an acre, but produces what a 10-acre soil-based farm would in a typical growing cycle, using just one-tenth of the water, Haley said. The farmers at the greenhouse can turn 26 crops in a year, all of which is made possible by a sophisticated computer climate control system, which regulates everything from light levels to humidity and dew point.

The company does not use pesticides, but rather combats pests by creating its own ecosystem, releasing 10,000 beneficial insects into the greenhouse every week. Each of the greenhouse's nine lettuce varieties receives a proprietary nutrient solution, which optimizes the growth and flavor of the greens, Haley said.

The company is in the midst of building two more greenhouses, one in Jamaica, Queens, and the other in Chicago. It will be adding at least another 70 to 80 employees to the existing 45 in the next several months.

The Chicago greenhouse, which will be atop an industrial building in the Pullman Park neighborhood, will be 75,000 square feet, the largest greenhouse the company has built, and Notre Dame staff, students and alumni will be able to see it from the road on the drive from Chicago to South Bend.

As the company enters a rapid expansion period over the next several months, Haley said he frequently finds himself returning to the lessons he learned at Mendoza, particularly those around ethics.

"Ethics has ended up becoming a big part of the business, from who I hire to how we deal with vendors," he said. "The school really taught me how to treat people ethically, be responsible and kind and walk a straight line."