Speaker: Sam Norton, Owner of Heron Farms

Date/Time: Tuesday, November 15th at 6:30 pm

Location: Online (Zoom and Facebook Live)

Description:Heron Farms is the world’s first indoor vertical saltwater farm, producing food without any natural sunlight or freshwater.  Sam Norton will explain why and how he founded Heron Farms, discuss its intensive cultivation of “sea beans” (aka samphire), and also talk about Heron Farms’ efforts to restore plant communities on dredged material in and around Charleston Harbor.

Sam Norton is a serial entrepreneur from Charleston, South Carolina. During graduate school he founded the world’s first commercial vertical saltwater farm which now has operations in South Carolina and Texas. Sam has worked on projects, accelerators, and licensing opportunities with NASA, Google, NOAA, World Food Programme, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. In 2021 he was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for his work on seawater agriculture. Sam spends his free time building an off grid homestead with his family on 17 acres in the ACE Basin of South Carolina.