Ground breaks on microgreen facility in Mankato

MANKATO, Minn. (KEYC) - Another addition to the area’s industrial agriculture sector, ground broke Tuesday on a 63-thousand square-foot indoor growing facility that will make Mankato the Midwest hub for microgreens.

Microgreens are small veggies harvested just a few weeks after planting, and have become increasingly popular in higher-end restaurants and other food providers.

Verdant Organics hopes the $13.6-million facility will be up and running within a year with sixty growing rooms and a workforce of fifty staff members, cementing another pillar in southern Minnesota’s ag industry.

“The community’s vision is to really become an agricultural hub, an agricultural innovation hub, and we like to think of Verdant as the future of food production. So the marriage just seemed to be really really strong there between those two,” said Verdant’s CEo Mike Borman.

To showcase the potential of microgreens the group partnered with South Central College’s Culinary Arts program, giving student chefs the opportunity to explore the possibilities of foods many of the students have never had the opportunity to work with before.

Each student made their own dish to highlight the flavors of the veggies, presenting them to industry leaders at the project’s kickoff ceremony.

“We don’t have a lot of access to a lot of the really nice produce coming fresh off the line, so it was really cool to be able to work with Verdant and they were very generous with just giving us a ton of product to mess around with and that was always the moral of the story,” said Kevin Peterson, a Culinary Arts Instructor at SCC.

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