Case Study: A Strategy for Adding CEA Crops to an Outdoor Farm
April 28, 2025 Cornett Enterprises in London, Ky., is a seventh-generation farm owned by Brent and Rhonda Cornett. Like many open-field farmers, the Cornetts have adapted and diversified to meet market needs: Having grown tobacco, hemp, grain, cattle, and hogs since 2001, in 2017 they left the tobacco and hemp business and added produce. And that includes greenhouse-grown crops.
“We started because we were looking to grab the early market,” says Rhonda. “In Kentucky, the quickest you can typically get to market is July. But there’s definitely demand in May and June, and it’s daylight and dark in terms of pricing. We decided to try greenhouse growing and get those higher prices.”
The Cornetts have been methodical as they’ve expanded their protected crops offerings. Rhonda shares a few insights into how they’ve done it and where they go from here.
The Cornett family. Rhonda in the center; Brent and their daughter, Miranda, on the right; and their son, Jarrod, and his fiancée, Katie, on the left. | Photo: Rhonda Cornett
Taking the First Step
The Cornetts raise approximately 250 acres’ worth of outdoor produce, mostly peppers. The vast majority, Rhonda says, is marketed through Farmers Alliance (Immokalee, Fla.) and goes to Walmart and Kroger.
They also own and run Cornett Farm Fresh, a store that sells produce and meat from their own farm as well as nearly 60 other Kentucky vendors. Launched originally from their barn during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to provide fresh produce to the community, Cornett Farm Fresh now encompasses 15,000 square feet in its own building right off the highway and includes a bakery, deli, and farm-to-table café.
The produce sold and served at Cornett Farm Fresh and other farm market businesses across the state is a small but not insignificant percentage of the Cornetts’ business. Targeting the early market with greenhouse tomatoes made sense strategically, and the Cornetts were well situated to give it a try.
Both Rhonda and her husband had grown up on tobacco farms. “We’d raised float tobacco plants as kids, so we had a general idea of how greenhouses work,” she says. “Hydroponic plants vs. a medium-based plant [like tomatoes] were a little different, but Brent, as a lifelong farmer, knew the media side of things, too. And he is a researcher through and through.”
What they didn’t know, they learned, and with support from the Kentucky Horticulture Council and the University of Kentucky Extension program, they added a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse to their operations and planted determinate tomatoes.
Adding More Every Year
Today, the Cornetts have 14 greenhouses (75,000 square feet) in which they grow tomatoes to completion, raise pepper plants for the open field (which they seed for other farmers, as well), and cultivate ferns and hanging baskets.
“We’ve added to the operation every year,” Rhonda says. “Right now, we always start in the smaller greenhouse with some tomatoes, and then as the weather gets a little warmer, we’ll add more in the big half-acre one.”
The greenhouses are mid-tech operations with traditional heaters, fans, and louvers coupled with automated watering and fertilizing, output monitoring, and other controls. Many of the greenhouses are repurposed tobacco structures that were donated from local farmers who didn’t need them anymore. “They told us, ‘If you’ll come and take them down, you can have them,’” Rhonda says.
The Benefits of Starting Their Own Field Plants
Starting their own field plants in greenhouses has proved to be a tremendous benefit, Rhonda says. “I don’t know how many million pepper plants we seeded last year, but before that we were purchasing those plants. And we were at the mercy of the plant grower.”
Once the grower said the plants were ready, she explains, “we took them whether our field conditions were ready or not, because they wanted them out of their greenhouses. Then you have to hand water, and watering by hand outside of the greenhouse is never as good as the automated ones inside it.”
In taking over their own plant production, the Cornetts found that their field yields went up in the very first year, because they were starting with a stronger, healthier plant. “We’ve saved quite a bit of money over buying the plants from someone else and having them shipped to us,” she says.
From Tomatoes to Lettuces
The greenhouse tomatoes have fulfilled the promise of attracting early-season shoppers willing to pay higher prices, with an added benefit of creating customer loyalty. “These customers get in the habit of coming to us for the whole summer,” Rhonda says. “They start coming to us early [when there’s less produce to choose from], but it creates a habit when the time comes that they’re getting the same thing everywhere.”
One of the Cornetts’ newest ventures is hydroponic lettuce, which they just started this year.
“The lettuce is looking beautiful,” Rhonda says. “We’re just dipping our toe in now to make sure we’ve got down what we need to know.”
Once that’s accomplished, they’ll enter the realm of aquaponics. “We’ll be adding some fish tanks in those greenhouses,” she explains. “We’re doing a project with Kentucky State with tilapia—and then we’ll market that fish through our café, along with the lettuce.”
If it all works out, she adds, they’d love to explore other crops, such as microgreens.
“Again, anytime you can hit that market earlier, it’s great,” she says. “We always grow field lettuce, but when you get a bright, sunny day in March or April, and you can give somebody a really fresh salad—it brings people in.”
Worth the Challenges
Greenhouse farming adds challenges, Rhonda says, such as fuel costs for heating (“if we could mitigate that, it would be a phenomenal profit margin”), managing fungal diseases, and occasional cold-weather damage. Insurance can be tricky, too: “Greenhouses are hard to insure in Kentucky. It’s different for every agency; sometimes you can cover the frame, but not any of the contents. And obviously, insurance is super important for farmers.”
But the Cornetts believe the payoffs are worth it, and Rhonda appreciates the sense of control.
“When you’re coming from a traditional outside-ag background, you have to deal with the weather you get from Mother Nature,” she says. “[CEA means] changing your mindset. You realize, hey, I can fix this. I can change it.
“That’s a little different,” she adds. “It’s a good different.”