Case Study: Freight Farms achieves scalable, secure app-powered IoT farming with Heroku

Freight Farms Runs App-Powered IoT Farming on Heroku

Freight Farms builds the Leafy Green Machine — a hydroponic farm inside an upcycled shipping container — to bring local, year‑round produce to cities. As the company evolved from hardware maker to a connected‑software business, it needed a scalable, secure way to collect and act on real‑time sensor data, remotely manage dozens of farms, integrate with partners, and do all of this with a small engineering team.

They implemented an IoT stack using Xively gateways (MQTT/Node.js) feeding a Parse server on Heroku with MongoDB and Postgres, plus Heroku add‑ons (SSL, CloudMQTT, Papertrail) and Heroku Connect to sync Salesforce. The platform enabled rapid development and secure remote control, powering Farmhand apps (Shop and Track) that support 100+ farms, automate alerts, streamline e‑commerce and CRM workflows, and use aggregated data to optimize crop yields.

Freight Farms

Kyle Seaman

Director of Farm Technology