Empty East Bay Office Building May Convert to Vertical Farming

Jamestown is exploring the possibility of converting a 300K SF East Bay office building into a vertical farming facility.

The property at 2000 Clayton Road in Concord, CA currently is occupied by a six-story office building that previously was home to Bank of America, which built a four-building campus at the location it in the 1980s. BOA vacated the building earlier this year and plans to let its lease expire this summer.

Jamestown bought two buildings at the Clayton Road campus for $117M in 2018. Office vacancy rates in the Concord area currently are more than 17%.

City officials have disclosed that Atlanta-based Jamestown has had discussions with them about a potential conversion of the building for a vertical farming operation, an adaptive reuse that would require a zoning change.

The indoor vertical farming industry already has a foothold in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, Realty Income Corp. formed a strategic partnership with South San Francisco-based vertical farming startup Plenty Unlimited to develop up to $1B of properties in the rapidly expanding indoor farming sector.

Vertical farming facilities are usually two- to three-story buildings that feature floor-to-ceiling racks holding leafy vegetables or fruits grown in climate-controlled settings with intense lighting in 24/7 operations (think data centers with radicchio instead of servers).

The emerging indoor agriculture industry is positioning itself as a direct-to-market produce supplier—facilities will be developed to service consumers within a 50-mile radius—that can deliver fresh produce from “farm” to table within a day of harvesting, while generating far greater yields per acre than traditional outdoor agriculture.

Realty, a publicly traded REIT will acquire sites and develop them to be leased back to Plenty. Realty is acquiring the land and funding the development of the venture’s first project, Plenty’s Richmond, VA facility, which is expected to be the world’s largest vertical farming complex to date.

The $300M, 120-acre facility in Richmond will grow crops including strawberries, tomatoes and leafy greens, with a capacity to grow up to 20M pounds of produce annually—an output the company says can generate up to 350 times the yield per acre of traditional outdoor farming.

The crops at the Richmond complex will grow on 30-foot climate-controlled towers, “irrigated” by the municipal water supply and tended by robotic arms. The towers are designed for maximized light exposure in an indoor facility that eliminates any need to use pesticides.

More than 2000 vertical farms currently are operating in the US. While vertical farms use much less land and water than conventional outdoor farms they are large consumers of electricity.

At is pilot plant in San Francisco, which produces kale, mizuna and arugula for Whole Foods and Instacart, Plenty uses 100% renewable energy.