Fresh Faces in CEA Spaces: Sam Humphrey

In our 2024 “Fresh Faces in CEA Spaces” series, we’re talking to young professionals in CEA about their work and where they see the industry going in the future. CEAg World recently chatted with Sam Humphrey, a graduate student who is finishing his Master’s in strawberry propagation at North Carolina State University.

CEAg World: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you developed an interest in horticulture, and later, CEA?

Sam Humphrey: I started getting into agriculture in high school because of the Future Farmers of America (FFA). They have a bunch of competitions that they call Career and Leadership Development Events (CCDES), and they have a forestry one and a vegetable one. All the animal ones were not fun for me, but the plant ones I really fell in love with.

So, I knew I wanted to study plants, but there are so many interesting things about plants you could study. You could learn about the physiology of the plant, how it functions or how different seasons affect plants. And for a long time, I was going through undergrad falling in love with these different areas, but not really seeing how they all fit together. But then I found controlled environment agriculture, and it really marries all those different topics in a way that is future-centric and optimistic. And I really fell in love with it that way.

CEAg World: Would you say your high school experience made you want to study CEA in college full time?

Sam Humphrey: I was first introduced to CEA in a weird way. I was in undergrad studying plants [and] interested in everything about them. But one day I was reading an article from the University of Florida, and it mentioned “Astrobotany.” That was the first time I read that word and it really stuck with me.

I went home after work that day and started Googling about it, and I became really, really interested in it. And it just so happens there was this competition that was about to start called the “Growing Beyond Earth Maker Contest,” which is a partnership with NASA at the Kennedy Space Center.

For the contest, you had to design and build a space plant growth chamber… and I hadn’t worked much with growth chambers before. I didn’t know much about them or what it took to make one. But that contest really grabbed my interest, so I started a team and recruited a bunch of engineering students. We had weekly meetings where we designed and built this beautiful chamber and we ended up winning the competition. So, I guess I got into CEA through that.

CEAg World: A lot of your research at NC State has been centered around strawberry propagation. Can you tell us more about that?

Sam Humphrey: For strawberry plants, if you grow them from seed, they don’t breed true. Like if you have a very high-yielding strawberry plant and you plant seeds and are excited for more high-yielding strawberry plants, you’ll probably be disappointed. Every one of those plants will be different just because of the chromosomes and how genetics work.

But farmers need or very much want to know how many strawberries they’re going to expect when they grow strawberries. They want to be able to predict their yields and improve their yields over time, you know? So, they can’t grow their plants from seed.

But nurseries grow in conventional ways, growing plants in the fields. They have to use a lot of different chemicals and fumigants because strawberries are so susceptible to disease. And then it also takes so much input in terms of labor, as they’re producing millions of plants. 

Then, hundreds of acres of these strawberry plants need constant care by humans. So, nurseries spend a lot of money on fumigation and labor. There are other issues like if they get a hurricane, will there be strawberry plants for anyone this year? There’s no way of knowing. So, it’s hard for them to break even, and they’re looking for ways to improve their conventional methods to make things more efficient and sustainable. Many scientists believe CEA is the solution for this.

CEAg World: Would you say your CEA focus changed since you first got into the industry?

Sam Humphrey: I entered controlled environment agriculture through Astrobotany and this excitement to uncover how plants respond in microgravity environments when there’s no gravity vector.

I think that over the years and by becoming involved in this strawberry project, I have pivoted a little bit from the basic or fundamental approach to an applied approach trying to solve the real-world problems that these strawberry nurseries are facing. [I want to] keep the strawberry industry afloat and use controlled environments as an applied science to solve these problems.

CEAg World: Where do you see CEA going in the future?

Sam Humphrey: There are lots of problems in horticulture and crop science that are very specific, like my strawberry project is very crop specific. I guess it’s a niche problem, but there are millions and millions of dollars to be made.

I think that herbs are another one. I think that medicinal plants are another one.
I think that we might see the CEA industry go in a more crop-specific or problem-specific direction in the future. I just think there are a lot of opportunities to solve problems and to improve the world in ways that are more specific than just producing a lot of lettuce at once.