Turning Waste Heat into Microgreens and Shrimp

Seven dollars and eighty cents a pound. That is the revenue Jolie Kahn puts on microgreens grown indoors, against about fifty cents a pound for leafy greens grown outdoors. Kahn is the CEO of AgriFORCE, and she brought that comparison to Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, held March 25 to 27, 2025. Bitcoin traded at $87,393 then. On October 19, 2026 it traded at $82,691.

AgriFORCE has its roots in agtech, and it moved into Bitcoin mining because, as Kahn said, that is her background. The company runs miners in shipping containers on stranded natural gas, off the grid, at two sites, one in Alberta and one in Ohio. Kahn put the total at about 1,200 miners and said the company was profitable on a site-by-site basis. The fleet is S19 J Pro machines, with an upgrade under way.

The heat from those miners is the point. It is piped into nearby containers fitted with rack growing systems. In some places the mining containers sit only 20 or 30 feet from the farm. Kahn said the farms use little electricity beyond a few computers and fans; the rest of their heat comes from the mining. The excess carbon dioxide can be used too, to raise production.

Microgreens come first because they turn around in about a week. Red algae is next, and white-tailed shrimp after that. Kahn said the company's chief operating officer, an engineer with two PhDs in agricultural engineering, could explain the shrimp in detail.

Both halves of the business are built to move. In her words, "If we have another site that is better suited for the miners that we have, we just unplug, we move it, and we plug it back in." She said a move can be done in a day. The container farms are plug-and-play as well.

Kahn did not claim the farms are cheap to build. Indoor vertical farming is the most expensive way to grow food, she said, and conventional outdoor farming is the cheapest. Her case is that the higher yield and the price per pound cover the gap, with almost no water used.

The company also sells air sanitizing devices that release hydroxyl radicals to neutralize mold, the kind of problem damp indoor growing rooms can have. She said they are already in use in hotel rooms and buildings in the Caribbean.

From the floor, she was asked about hydroponics. Kahn said it is harder to heat in a cold place like Alberta because it covers more surface area than vertical farming, so it fits warmer climates better. Asked about circulating water from a fish farm through the system, she said it is possible and under discussion, likely for the following year.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.