From Hobby to Commercial Scale: Surna's 15+ Year History Assisting Indoor Growers

Editor’s Note: Agritecture recently spoke with Brandy Keen, Co-Founder & Senior Technical Advisor of Surna Cultivation Technologies, to learn more about the history and direction of the company. This blog post captures that conversation and is sponsored by Surna.

With 16 years of industry experience, Surna is one of the leading facility design firms in indoor agriculture, with particular expertise in climate management. Before the legalization of cannabis production within certain regions and the development of the commercial indoor farming industry, Surna began small with humble ambitions.

“We didn't have some grand master plan when we started our company. It was: we saw a need, and we thought we could fill that need,” shares Co-Founder and Senior Technical Advisor Brandy Keen.

Prior to co-founding Surna with her husband, Keen worked as a technical sales manager for a circuit board manufacturer, and her husband owned and operated a construction company. In between construction projects, her husband, a hobbyist gardener, tinkered with various hydroponic solutions for small-scale farms.

“What we saw was a lot being done on a small scale - and it was really, really inefficient. Climate management, in particular, was not done intelligently or wisely because people were just trying to use whatever they had available to them, and just throwing dehumidifiers at it. So, we developed a couple of smaller products that were really effective and affordable on a small scale for home cultivators. And our focus was crop-agnostic indoor cultivation.” 

The Burgeoning Cannabis Industry

Surna’s focus on the cannabis industry really began with Arizona’s legalization of medical marijuana in 2010. On the heels of the legislation passing, Surna contracted with a large medical facility in the state. As that project wrapped up, both Colorado and Washington passed legislation legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, and the passing of similar legislation across the United States ensued, quickly opening up even more opportunities for Surna.

“You know, it happened really quickly,” shares Keen. “[When we got started], there was no real large-scale, indoor cultivation of food. And with cannabis, at that time, the legal landscape was a little bit murky. So, we certainly weren't thinking of [cannabis] as a market. It wasn't until a few years later that this shifted. With the medical and recreational laws passing, and then Canada legalizing, it went from zero to 1000, kind of overnight.”

To keep pace with this rapidly expanding market, Keen left the security of her full-time job to focus all of her attention on Surna. Soon after, they secured a warehouse space and hired their first employees. Surna was now ready to capitalize on all of the new opportunities the cannabis market brought them.

Surna’s Growth Stage

The growth of the industry also led to an increase in professionalization. Surna’s leadership team knew that in order for Surna to keep up, they needed to expand their business model from just products to products and services, specifically design and engineering services.

“The biggest shift that we made during that evolution was to become an engineering company and to become a full-scale provider [with] mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering. And that's when we started on the design side of things.” 

This strategic decision allowed Surna to move into an unclaimed space and become an industry leader in indoor cultivation facility design.

“With building an indoor cultivation facility and the complexity of the integration - there's not really anything like it. You can point to a hospital or an airport and those are certainly very complex. But there are firms that specialize in that type of application, and there are standards to fall back on. One of the challenges in indoor cultivation is that there haven't historically been standards. The engineers don't have a reference book… but bringing in the architectural and the MEP [services] under one roof and directing traffic for all that coordination has been enormously helpful.”

To date, Surna has now completed over 200 large, commercial projects throughout North America. 

Keen gets personal enjoyment from projects that are innovating on the recycling or upcycling of resources.

”Right now we're working on a project in California and we're integrating the waste heat from the CHP plant into the climate control system. Anytime we can reuse energy, I'm all about it,” shares Keen.

She also believes that solving the energy problem for controlled environment agriculture is the industry’s next big step. 

“[The CEA industry is] going to have to improve its cost of operation. Our cost of production is going to have to decline, and a huge piece of that is driving down those energy costs. And I like where [Surna is] sitting to help people do that,” states Keen.

Adding Food to the Mix

As Keen tells the story of Surna, she emphasizes that they were always crop agnostic, and since the very beginning she has had a passion for indoor food facilities.

“Talk to anybody in our office and they'll tell you how long I’ve been on my soapbox about how food in indoor facilities is going to be a huge deal,” says Keen.

Recent geopolitical events, the supply chain disruption caused by the coronavirus, and the increasing effects of climate change have reaffirmed Keen’s belief that CEA is a crucial part of our future and our ability to ensure food security.

“It just seems so strange that the one thing that we absolutely can't do without is so, so vulnerable to world events and supply chains and the cost of oil. Indoor cultivation is not going to solve world hunger, but it will certainly contribute to the solution. As it relates to climate change, the biggest thing for me was the ability to drastically minimize water consumption and eliminate waste when you're cultivating food in a controlled environment. So it's always been on our radar. And I would say our shift to food isn't really a shift – we've really just been waiting for the market to exist.”

Now that the market does exist, Surna is perfectly positioned to serve indoor farmers.

“A lot of what we do for food has very specific parallels to cannabis. They're not that different from each other. Maybe the amount of water that we’re irrigating or the method of irrigation is a little bit different. The target temperature and humidity that we’re trying to achieve is a little different, and we do more vertical and tiered growing in food than we do in cannabis. So it's not really a specific product shift on a large scale so much as a shift in the engineering calculations that define how you're going to apply a product. 

[Beyond that], the most significant difference is maintaining homogeneity within each of the racks. And I think most cultivators who grow in tiered racks will tell you that hotspots are something that they're really concerned about. So looking at that as an engineering puzzle to solve during the initial mechanical design, as opposed to [reacting to it] after the fact, is the way that we think about it.”

Visit surna.com to learn more about Surna’s solutions for vertical farming.