The World Bank estimates that agriculture accounts for 70 percent of the world’s freshwater usage. Conservation of this finite resource is essential for our global community. Through the Environmental Solutions Fund, Mercy Investment Services is investing in greenhouses and operators that use less water and few if any chemicals to deliver quality, fresh produce.
- Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms operates more than nine acres of advanced lettuce greenhouses and is expanding down the East Coast. Little Leaf’s greenhouse facilities use 90 percent less water than traditional field-grown greens. It captures, recycles and stores rainwater for irrigation and uses predatory insects such as ladybugs for pest control in the greenhouse instead of pesticides or chemicals.
- Revol Greens will operate a 64-acre greenhouse in California that will become North America’s largest producing lettuce greenhouse; the company uses less water in its growing operations, capturing and reusing as much as possible while also growing without pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.
- Perfection Fresh, one of Australia’s largest privately owned fresh produce businesses, grows a variety of tomatoes in its state-of-the art sustainable glasshouse. The facility has a completely self-sufficient water system that collects and stores 4 million liters of water for every 10 millimeters of rain.
Sustainable agriculture and water are two of the strategies that drive Mercy’s Environmental Solutions Fund investments. Learn more about these investments.