Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes back to the show CEO of Intelligent Growth Solutions, David Farquhar. In this episode, Harry and David talk all about the resounding economic and societal impact that Covid-19 has had on the AgTech industry and our daily lives. David shares the amount of science and scale that goes into every aspect of what IGS does as well as some of the latest projects they’re working on, including developing technologies to replicate the weather.

Special thanks to our Season 1 Sponsor

IGS – https://intelligentgrowthsolutions.com/

Vertical Farming Congress

Key Takeaways

02:50 – Harry welcomes David Farquhar back to the show to discuss how Covid-19 has altered the AgTech industry and his business strategy specifically

10:26 – David speaks to the initiatives and innovations that his organization, Intelligent Growth Solutions, has been working on lately

15:42 – David breaks down the amount of science, development, processing power and scale that goes into AgTech

20:42 – What Intelligent Growth Solutions is doing to give back to the community amidst Covid-19

24:54 – David talks about promoting awareness among the next generation about the opportunities that vertical farming provides

32:53 – New models in AgTech that are likely to manifest over the next few years

38:46 – David speculates on the future of technology development at IGS and shares the work IGS is doing with weather and climate technologies

47:56 – A tough question David has had to ask himself lately

Tweetables:

“I am not a fan of the phrase, ‘a new normal.’ I do think that we need to be flexible though. And I think that we’ve probably learned to do several things in a different way, and that’s good. But I am keen to see people actually socially get back together as soon as it’s safe.” (08:16)

“I think if people put their hand on their hearts and were honest with you in this sector, they would probably admit that once you’ve cracked the lighting, the power, the automation and handling, and the irrigation, the thing that is left on the table that is the toughest nut to crack is around the area of ventilation.” (11:14)

“And I have to say we also borrowed a couple of people’s garages. A couple of guys did some amazing work from home. I’d love to think of this as the AgriTech Garage Band.” (13:47)

“You know from our last conversation that we’ve made this promise to the market that we will never grow crops for commercial sale. Our covenant is that we’re a tech vendor, you guys are the farmers, you’re the growers, you know how to do this stuff. We’ll just give you a better set of tools.” (19:52)

“I think that governments have to make a choice between a societal focus or an economic focus and one or the other is going to suffer…I just hope that humanity comes to the fore because, at the end of the day, it’s people that make things happen. We need to look after people.” (24:17)

“Everybody loves everything as a service, whether it’s software, or razor blades or ink cartridges. How about farming as a service?” (34:57

“If there’s something that just works, then why not use it?” (40:06)

“The ability to manage that – the ability to replicate a certain type of weather because that’s the weather that this crop needs – that is the thing that we’ve been working incredibly hard on.” (43:23)

Links Mentioned:

David’s Website

David’s LinkedIn

Intelligent Growth Solutions

Website | Twitter | YouTube

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mentioned in this episode:

2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews

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For more information, visit intelligentgrowthsolutions.com.

I am not a fan of the phrase a new normal. I

do think that we need to be flexible though, and I

think that we've probably learned to do several things in a

different way, and that's good. But I am keen to see

people actually, you know, socially get back together again

as soon as it's safe.

Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast, weekly conversations with

fascinating CEOs, founders, and agtech visionaries.

Join us every week as we dive deep into the world of vertical

farming with your host, Harry Duran.

Vertical Farming Podcast, welcome back. Episode 12, we are

in the home stretch as we wrap up season 1. Thank you for everyone that's

been listening to the show since episode 1 and the feedback that

we've received. It's been so positive and so supportive

and it really lights a fire under me to keep

continuing it and to keep up with season 2, which is

already in the works. So excited to bring you a whole new round of

episodes from some fantastic founders in the vertical farming and indoor

agtech industry. If you're new to the show and this is your first episode,

it's the one where we interview fascinating CEOs and founders of the leading

vertical farming farming companies from around the world. In case you missed it last week,

we had a great conversation with Alex Tink of Fork Farms, learning

a lot about how he started the company and the inspiration that kept him

going through COVID, and it's really a compelling

episode. I highly recommend you check it out, episode 11.

This episode is also brought to you by the Vertical Farming World Congress.

This inaugural event will bring together vertical farming operators, investors,

retailers, technology suppliers, advisors, and

experts to debate and advance the sector's future.

The dates for the conference are September 22nd through the

24th, and it's going to be a virtual event. We're really excited to

partner with the conference, and the lineup is a who's who in the

vertical farming industry. There'll be speakers there from 80 Acres Farms,

AeroFarms, Bowery Farming, Growing Underground, Intelligent Growth

Solutions, Jones Food Company, Lettuce Grow, Root AI, Square Roots,

The Circle, OnsFarms, Vertical Future, YES Health,

association heads and academics and nutrition experts from Germany, Japan,

the Netherlands, and Turkey. It is indeed going to be a global

event. Investment experts from AgFunder and Ashfords and Innovate

UK and S2G Ventures. It's clear that the team

has pulled out all the stops to make this a landmark event for the

vertical farming industry, and we're excited to participate as a

partner. Attendees will have access to extensive networking

opportunities, interactive discussions, instant chat, one-on-one

video calls, and you'll also be able to log into the platform days ahead of

the event to build your profile, plan your agenda, and begin networking.

For more information, head on over to zenithglobal.com/events/vfwc2020.

We'll also have a link to that in the show notes. This week we

have David Farquhar back for a return engagement. David was kind enough to kick off

season 1 on our first

episode of the podcast. He is the CEO of

Intelligent Growth Solutions, IGS. In this episode, we

dive a little deeper into what IGS has been up to since we last

spoke. We talk about the amount of science development, processing power,

and scale that goes into agtech and what IGS is currently doing to

give back to the community amidst COVID. We touch on the importance of

promoting awareness among the next generation and educating them about the

opportunities that vertical farming provides. We talk about some new models in

agtech that are likely to manifest over the next few years, and David

speculates on the future of Technology Development IGS and shares some of the work

they're doing on the weather and climate management front. It's

really fascinating stuff. Remember that if you enjoyed this episode or

past episodes, I'd love it if you leave a rating and a review at

ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

Okay, let's jump into this conversation with David. So David,

welcome back to round 2 of the Vertical Farming Podcast. It's

really great to be here, and I enjoyed it last time. The folks in our

company enjoyed the style of it. A lot of our customers commented

on it as well, so it's obviously something you're very good at, Harry.

Thank you, I appreciate that. Do you think it was something about the

nature of the timing of the interview? Because we were

just checking on the dates, it was March 26th when we

had that first conversation, and as a as

a global phenomenon, we were going through just

understanding what was happening with COVID and people were trying to figure

out what the world was going to look like. So I think people were looking

for connected

conversations and connecting with our fellow human beings at a

time when it felt like we were going to be disconnected from people for an

extended period of time. I'm wondering if that might have been part of what people

were resonating with. I think it could well be. And I think

that certainly in this country, a lot of people are fretting about

Brexit. There doesn't seem to be a

really clear path, and that is going to have a big impact on

our food supply chain. But I

think the effect of the lockdown probably

really made people reflect on how are we going to feed

ourselves? And I think it's also oddly focused

people's minds on the whole climate change debate as well.

With a lot less pollution because of a lot less transport, there's been some

amazing imagery. The one that sticks in my mind are

photos of the Himalayas from Indian cities where you've not been

able to see the Himalayas for like 50 years.

Yeah. And it's not just India, of course, but lots of parts of the world

because of the much less transport. People, I also think,

valuing the ability to get out, get some exercise, get into a

green space, and sort of maybe reflecting on the fact that,

gee, didn't we take this for granted before? I really think there could be

a number of factors at play here. Yeah, I agree. I think, and people are

reevaluating even things like the need

to be in the same location for work to get done,

for what was possible when we're in the same room with

people and thinking maybe that that wasn't possible in a remote

environment. And it's almost like the grand experiment, whether you

wanted to or not as an organization, everyone was forced

to test out this theory of what can be done

remotely, how much progress we can do as

companies and as business leaders. And so I'm wondering in the time that since we've

had our last conversation, which was March, and now as of this recording, we're in

August. How have you thought about running an organization

differently than you may have thought was possible pre-March?

Yeah, that's an interesting question, and it does come up a fair bit

externally and internally. You know, we live in an

industry which employs

lots of very different kinds of folk, people who

really do need to get face-to-face, like

salespeople, trying to close a deal with someone,

even on a video call, is just somehow not the same.

Maybe there are new techniques that will have to be developed, but it really isn't

the same. And I think, but then there are other jobs

like software engineering where a lot of the

time you don't really have to be face-to-face. But

my opinion is even there, there are just some things that

happen better when you can look someone in the eye or

you can look around a room. And that sort of group thing

is certainly something people have not cracked. I am looking

forward to going to my first face-to-face meeting in which someone just does this.

So, we had an interesting thing. We raised our Series

A money between June and September last year. So, by the time we got

to our Christmas end-of-year all-hands event

and then Christmas party, we'd been building the team up

for about 3 or 4 months. And we'd gone from 8 people to

about, you know, 35, 40. And we then

built more into March, and we're just starting to recruit again now. But at

that Christmas all-hands, one of the most positive bits of

feedback we got was that people really loved the fact

that they could work when they wanted and where they wanted. So,

as a business, we were already trying to

be as flexible as we could to accommodate people's circumstances.

Some people had a more difficult commute to the office than others.

Some people just feel more productive at home. And to be honest with you,

these days, we should worry more about the outputs than the inputs.

We're not standing there with a damn stopwatch checking folk in.

There's really no need for that. The feedback I'm getting is that we're in

different teams, we're maybe between 85% and 95%

productive. I suspect that nobody would really put their hand

up and say that they are 100% productive compared

to where they were. Although, I would have to say the

output from most of our team has been spectacular anyway. Yeah.

So, they may well be more productive than a lot of other

businesses. But I think everyone would put their hand on their heart and

say, yeah, you know what? It's been harder. Everyone's

done their best, but it has just been harder. So, I am not a

fan of the phrase a new normal. I do think that we

need to be flexible, though. And I think that

we've probably learned to do several things in a different way. And that's

good, but I am keen to see people actually, you know,

socially get back together again as soon as it's safe. Yeah, I

think we're all trying to figure out when that's going to happen. And I think

there's not going to be a hard set date when everything is

magically switched back to the way it was before. And I think

companies that can acclimate to a sort of hybrid

way of doing business between now and then, I think, are the companies that are

going to have the most success. What have you seen or what's been the feedback

from your peers in the space? On how they're handling it? I would say that

indoor ag, agritech in general, has

benefited more than it has lost from this pandemic,

because I think everywhere in the world is

really reevaluating how it sources its

food. We have this additional burden of Brexit here in the UK.

Every part of the world that we've been speaking to, people are

thinking about deglobalization, relocalization. and how that's

going to just make things a bit more secure, a bit less dependent on other

areas. And in most climates, that really does mean

having to move stuff that you can move economically

and environmentally indoors. And that's tougher in some places than

others. But I think it's causing everyone to look

much more seriously at the viability of indoor

ag in general, whether that's aquaculture or— livestock.

I've even seen a report on the potential to grow cereal indoors,

which is something we've been looking at. So there's all kinds of stuff.

And certainly from our point of view, if you think about urban spaces, which is

obviously where the concentration of population is, space is at a premium.

And therefore having a technology which is delivering

super high levels of yield and quality per square meter

is enormously important because, you know, Space is going to

run out if we keep building more and more single-story structures.

Yeah. And I think what's important is prior to

COVID, IGS had a whole slate of

initiatives that were planned. And can you talk a little bit about how,

for lack of a better term, the show must go on. And so you must

continue to innovate and you must continue to bring some of these new innovations

to the market, maybe at a different pace and different in the way that you

had thought of prior to COVID. So can you talk about some of the new

innovations that you've had to keep working on and bring to market

since then? Certainly. I would say from a

technological point of view, the single

biggest area that we've managed to make progress on

is with the sort of air-based

elements, the ventilation-based elements of climate control.

I think if people put their hand on their hearts and were honest with you

in this sector, they would probably admit that once you've

cracked the lighting, the power, the automation and

handling, and the irrigation, the thing that is

left on the table that is the toughest nut to crack is around

the area of ventilation. And whether that is

near-field stuff, I mean, obviously there are very, very different physical structures

to indoor horticulture, but for us,

we think about, as you know, we think about things at a tray level, so

a 6-meter-square tray. And these trays are

stacked up inside our 9-meter-high towers,

so 50 in each tower. And you're putting a living,

breathing organism or thousands of them

inside a metal box. Yeah. And so eventually something that is

organic in behavior is going to hit something that is mineral,

and they're not the happiest of bedfellows. So dealing with the heat, the humidity,

the mix of gases, That's an incredibly tough area. And

one of the things that coronavirus did right at the start, when

everybody went into mega lockdown, was, well, we just had to stop

work. We had to send people home. And as we said

earlier, if you are a salesperson, that's tough. If you're a

software engineer, it can be easier to deal with.

But if you're a hardware engineer and you can't get your hands on

your kit, that's really, really tough to have

any kind of an impact at all. Yeah. So we kind of worked

within the rules. We worked with governments and we looked at, so

how important is this that we keep moving this forward? What can we do

that we can do safely within the regulations? And we figured out a

way of dividing our team into 2 halves. So part of

our development team, hardware team, R&D team had

relatives or very young kids

or some circumstance that made it probably

too risky for them to come to work. So, we did put a small number

of folk, just about 4 or 5, on furlough. And they

actually, I think, were okay about that because they recognized the

challenges that would potentially create for their families.

Yeah. And then, what we did with everyone else was we put really stringent

cleansing and distance mechanisms in place and

had them work in shifts. So it was always the same 2 people

who would be at the site developing the kit as

we went along. And I have to say, we also borrowed a couple of people's

garages. So a couple of the guys did some amazing work from home. I'd love

to think of us as the Agritech garage band.

Together, they made some amazing developments and we gradually got more

and more back to work. The James Hutton Institute where we

are co-located kind of went back at the beginning of this month. And so

we've been able to have actually visitors coming as well, which is great because

that's helped us to sort of close some business. We've now got to a

stage where we've got full-stack growing towers

with like 50 trays full of crops,

literally thousands and thousands of plants. And we've managed

to get the humidity levels and the temperature levels

within the trays and in the whole tower to tolerances

of around about 1.5%, 1.6%. So

that degree of accuracy and precision in saying,

this is what it needs to feel like for these plants, this is the ideal

climate for them, that's well within the tolerance

that a plant will cope with. And it probably doesn't need to be

that accurate, but the fact that we can do it means that we can

then turn the dial up when we need to, turn it down when we need

to, and kind of take a plant through the whole cycle

from germination where we want it to be warm,

humid, dark, right through to hardening

off at the end of the crop's sort of growing cycle when we want to

make it cooler, we want to make it much brighter. And,

the way chemically that the plant and biologically, the way it will act to

that means that it's going to have a much longer shelf life. Or it's going

to be much better hardened off for planting out if that's what you're doing with

the crop next. And so just having the ability to do that

and for the guys to have perfected that during this time, I think is an

absolutely amazing feat. Do you think a lot of

people watching from the outside take it for granted

the amount of science and development that gets required

to get things to this level of precision and also the processing

power that probably needs to be available, this sort of like perfect

storm of all these things that need to happen at the same time for you

to be able to do things at this scale? Yeah, well, you just used the

right word, scale, because doing this, you know, on your dinner table

is absolutely fine, or doing it in, you know, your garden shed or

a container is fine, but that's not the business that we're in. And

you're absolutely right. I think that it's just beginning to dawn on

the industry that if you are going to do this and do it at this

scale and do it with this degree of precision, It's big

mathematics, but it's also heavy, heavy lifting on a number of

different systems. So one of the changes we've noticed

in the last 6 months, but really

exaggerated since the lockdown, is the number of

high-profile, very experienced, very

talented growers who have been operating

perhaps in a greenhouse or at a certain level who were

trying to build their own at industrial scale and who've now turned

around and said, you know what? We just keep hitting cul-de-sacs. We

keep hitting brick walls. When you're getting to tens of thousands of

LEDs, when you're getting to that mass of air that we have

to deal with, when you have that many irrigation events and you've got to

manage the whole thing, it is really tough. And it's not just—

I'll come to the data in a second, but it's not just that. It's about

the electronics. It's about the physical handling. It

is about the ventilation and the humidity and so on. So it's

stuff that people are almost kind of taking for granted. I

was standing in a field with a guy with 100 acres of beetroot in the

north of Scotland just a week ago. And we were talking

about if you could take this field indoors, could you

specify the perfect climate for each period

of this crop's life cycle? He was telling me that he

needs to get mid-teens per acre to make his

business really work. He's occasionally got up towards 20,

but he's had a couple of years where he's been down below 10, and that's

incredibly tough. And trying to get a farmer like

that to think, well, if I'm not at the behest of the

climate, of the weather anymore, and if I'm in control of

it, what could I really do? Where could I take this thing? And then having

them think about how tough that is. So That is a journey I think a

lot of people are on. We are seeing a lot of business now

coming out of these more experienced growers. And that is, I find,

incredibly encouraging. And then you talked about data, and I

think you're absolutely right, because in order to make the right

decisions— so yes, of course, we have artificial intelligence that's proposing

recipes of weather climates to develop. But there's

also the intuition of someone with green fingers, someone

that has grown and is an experienced horticulturalist. And you

have to enable that experience to overlay what the

artificial intelligence is proposing because it's just intuition. They will just

know that that's not quite right. Yeah. And

also you're bringing the automation and the

industrial side together with this horticultural knowledge and crop

science, because crop science can bring to the table the fact that, well,

we know that we can impact the nutrition of this thing, the flavor of this

thing, the taste of this thing. if we can experiment with the way we apply

spectrum to it or brightness to it and at different

times in the life cycle. So having the ability to have that degree

of precision and control and to be able to vary

it is enormously important. So the data's great, but it's

only useful if you can respond to it and act

on it. Okay? So that's why the controls are so massively

important. important. So during lockdown, all of these things have

really developed for us incredibly well. But the one

that almost makes me the happiest of all was, so you

know from our last conversation that we've made this promise to the market that we

will never grow crops for commercial sale. Our

covenant is that we are a tech vendor. You guys are the farmers, you

are the growers, you know how to do this stuff. We'll just give you a

better set of tools. And so what we do with the

produce that comes out of our demo farm, it's grown for crop science, it's

grown for R&D purposes, and we always either compost it or

we take it home and we use it at home.

My wife has developed the most amazing pesto recipe

you have ever tasted in the world. When is the IGS

recipe book? Yeah, there you go. She's not even Italian, but this stuff is

incredible. And we've been sharing it with customers and partners and things, and they're all

going, What the hell is in that thing? So we're figuring out

what we actually do with this recipe. But the thing we

decided to do was there's a lot of people struggling in

cities. Maybe they're homeless, maybe they've been furloughed, maybe they've

got young families. It's been harder and harder for them to

access food and have a healthy diet and so on. And it

suddenly dawned on me one day that there was a notice came out from

the Scottish government saying, if business can do anything to help people,

in the current lockdown situation, please let us know. And I

thought, gee, you know what, we've got all this produce, why don't we

share it with the community? And so we got in contact with the

city council in Dundee, and they put us in touch with some people that

operate multi-ethnic kitchens and do food banks and

stuff like that. And so we offered them the produce. And for me, what was

so interesting, and I hadn't thought of this before we did the experiment, was

I wonder if the average person in the street is actually

going to like the stuff that our farm can grow because

some of the stuff we grow could be considered high-end produce.

Well, do you know what? It's been absolutely amazing. We're doing 2 to 3 deliveries

a week. Wow. We're harvesting it, we're bagging it in

compostable bags, and they're coming to collect it.

It's all done incredibly safely. We've had some fantastic

responses and they're just saying, can we get Can we get more? Can you

keep this going after lockdown? And so on. So what we're hoping to do

is to work with a local grower to actually put a vertical farm into the

city of Dundee to make this happen, because we need to get back to

our day jobs, as it were. But it's been a real

privilege to be able to supply that food to those folks because

it does seem to have made a difference. Yeah. And I think that's what's been

happening across the globe is

the impact. And here in the States, you know, if you look at things like

unemployment numbers and, you know, if certain stimulus

packages are not passed in time, the moratorium on evictions is

gonna come and go. And I think what we're seeing here, and I'm wondering

what you're seeing on your side as well, is I don't know that we've

grasped the impact of COVID and people losing jobs,

people losing homes, people not having access to food. And it feels

like there's a wave coming that we may or may not be prepared

for. And I think to your point, what you're doing

is a great start. And I'm wondering if we're starting to figure out a way

as a collective society, as business owners, what we can do

to help prepare for this and help, to put it as

simply as possible, help our fellow man out. Yeah, I mean,

societies vary a great deal in terms of their humanity,

don't they? And I guess countries also vary

from time to time depending upon who's running them.

Yeah. It's been interesting. I don't

believe that in a situation like this you

can look after the economy and society

fully at the same time. I think tough choices have to be

made. The Scottish government has opted more for a societal

approach, and as a business person, as an entrepreneur,

I will admit that that has been frustrating at times. I

don't understand why people can go to a pub,

but my guys can't go to the office. Because I guarantee you that

after a couple of pints, the level of social distancing in a pub is going

to be a lot less than us placing desks 2 meters apart.

Oh yeah. So some of the decisions I find

head-scratching, but overall, I think that

governments have to make a choice between a societal focus or

an economic focus, and one or the other is going to suffer. And

yeah, clearly there are opportunities for business to play its part.

And I just hope that humanity comes to the fore

because at the end of the day, it's people that make things happen,

right? We need to look after people. I'm a firm believer in

that. I do think that as a business, you can find

a balance between those 2 things. I don't think we'll always get it right,

but it behooves us to at least have a goal. Yeah. One

of the things that I wanted to talk about is your thoughts on

introducing new skills and encouraging greater awareness among

younger generations of people coming into vertical farming and how there might be

more awareness of that with everything that's happening now. You've got a crystal ball,

haven't you? So one of the things we did early in the year,

a friend of mine, Sandy Kennedy, runs a thing called Entrepreneur

Scotland. And it's a fantastic not-for-profit

organization which takes undergraduate students and it

sends them over to Babson College, which I think is in

Boston, isn't it? Yes. Right. So they go over

there for, I believe they do almost an additional year in

their degree course. And they go over there for an extended period of time and

they go through entrepreneurial training. And the idea is that

they then come back or maybe it's a semester, I'm not sure, but they then

come back to Scotland. And the idea is that they get a placement for

10 weeks or so during the summer. So they give up their

summer holiday to develop their understanding of entrepreneurship.

Sandy reached out to us to say, look, we are really struggling. We

normally manage to place, I think he said about 250

students. It's an amazing program. And we are really struggling to get up

to about 100 Is there anything you can do to help? And

actually, just so happened that we've gone

from 8 people to like 55 people. We should actually be at

like 85 people, but we had to sort of slow things down on the recruitment

front during the lockdown. Yeah. And so we've got a bunch of

projects. You know what it's like when you're developing a new business? I need to

do this, I need to do that. You need to research this or find out

about that. All kinds of different things from pricing

structures to how do we create a digital twin to

how should we prioritize markets for the intelligent grid

product and so on. So loads and loads of different, really

interesting things. And with not enough hands to do it, we went back. So

I just said to the team, look, does anyone have a project that could use

a super bright, very enthusiastic, very intelligent

person for 10 months? And it was kind of, where do we get them?

So between Entrepreneurial Scotland and

some other connections to universities and to a

bunch of interns that were available locally in the Dundee area,

we've actually taken on 15 folk, which is in

addition to our main staff. So they're all here for the

summer. The feedback I'm getting is they're doing an absolutely amazing

job. So in terms of developing entrepreneurial

skills and developing enthusiasm for this sector amongst at

least a part of the next generation. And for us to get benefit from it

as well, that program has been absolutely terrific. But

another aspect is that we are now in

conversation with a couple of agricultural colleges

and universities and things who are interested in putting up a

vertical farm to teach. So,

you know, that's a development that I think that we will see in the

industry in the course of the next 12 months or so. And I think

that's a really exciting thing because it's kind of part of

making this thing mainstream. And, you know, I've talked quite

passionately in the past about the fact that it's not yet mainstream and let's not

kid ourselves on that it is. Yeah. Yeah. And so the third

part of this is that our engagement with the

real farming community has 3 threads to it. The first one is

helping them to diversify what they grow. The

second one is about helping them to grow a much better

supply of starter plants, seedlings and things that they

don't have to import. Yeah. But the third one is an agenda to keep

more of the next generation on the land because I don't know what it's like

in the States, but the tradition in Scotland, and I think quite a

lot of UK and maybe Europe, is that the farm always

passes to the oldest male child. Yeah. If

you think about it, if you're a dairy farmer and you're producing a lot of

stuff out of the back end of cows that is not great, but you can

do an ADHD plant and generate your own electricity, then

maybe you could get a vertical farm,

diversify your operations away from dairy into maybe growing

you know, salads and other leafy greens for, or fruit and things

for your local market. And maybe another person within the

family could run that part of the business. So maybe the daughter or the younger

son or whatever. So the agenda of keeping more of the next

generation in agriculture on the land is another one we're keen

to support. Yeah. And I imagine there's a different set of

skills that are going to be required because typically growing

up on a farm, you could learn what you needed to learn from your

father or the generations passing the wisdom of tilling the land.

But now there's a different set of skills that are required, especially when it comes

to vertical farms. And then I'm sure that's part of the education process as well.

Yeah. I mean, as we said earlier, you're doing this thing inside a metal

box. You're using a completely different substrate from the soil.

You are not having to react to the climate. You're creating the climate.

So I think first principles are probably the same,

but there are significant differences that have to be

learned. And again, if we are going to grow up as an

industry, we have to be honest about that and we have to make provision for

it. So the sooner we're teaching this stuff in an open way,

the better in my view. Yeah. So speaking of breaking new

ground, can you talk a little bit about the partnership with VertiGrow and

building Scotland's first commercial vertical farm? Yeah, it's

really exciting. So as it said in the

press release and so on, founder of Vertigo, the co-founder of

Vertigo, Martin Dickey, is one of the co-founders of BrewDog, which

is an absolutely amazing drinks brand. They started in

microbrewed beer, as you know, they have American investors. I think

they've got a whole bunch of locations around the States as well as over here

and in other parts of the world. They're very innovative people. You know, Martin and

his partner in VertiGrow are looking to do the same thing with

agriculture. In fact, BrewDog just earlier this week announced, on the

weekend, announced the BrewDog Forest. So they're going to go

carbon positive, you know, beyond carbon neutral, or maybe it's

carbon negative. I can never remember which way around it is. Anyway, they're going to

consume more carbon than they're going to generate. And doing vertical

farming is part of that. You know, the thing is a heat sink, it's a

carbon sink. But growing a forest is an even better

way of doing it. And so they've got lots of really

interesting ideas as to what they might do with produce that comes

out of a vertical farm. So they've got a site.

We've done the design with them on the layout for the harvesting

and packaging area and all that kind of stuff. And in fact, I had

lunch with them last weekend at the BrewDog HQ. I had an absolutely

amazing Beyond Meat burger. and a pint of Black and Tan,

which is not something you see every day, but it was excellent. A mixed

stout and IPA drink. Fantastic. So no, we're really pleased to

be working with those guys because they're innovators. They really care about

the environment, and not just with what they say, but everything that they've been doing

with BrewDog and so on. And I think we're going to see a lot of

really creative stuff come out of them. So that's an

exciting one. And we have some Equally exciting

ones in the pipeline, which I'd love to tell you

about, but the team would absolutely kill me. May have

to set you up for the 3rd interview now. Well, please. Yeah. I mean, watch

this space, but I'll tell you, we are really seeing Agriculture

4.0. People are starting to think about how this

enables totally new business models. What are some of those models

people may not be thinking of now, but that could be created as a

result of the work that's being done? Well, if you think about the fact that

all the supply chains, all the relationships between

buyers of raw food, whether it's

meat, whether it's milk, whether it's cereal, whether it's

lettuce, you have a farmer who works his

or her backside off, deals with the climate and

everything else that is thrown at them. And over production

sometimes, underproduction sometimes, seasonality.

And if you're supplying to a food manufacturer who's

trying to stock the shelves of a retailer, they need to be able to stock

those shelves 12 months of the year, but you can only

grow stuff seasonally. It is just so hard. I

mean, you really almost need to be nuts to go into it. I

really admire people who do. And so, and the

behavior of those growing and selling produce, the

behavior of the wholesale people, the sort of

middlemen, the behavior of the buyers and the

negotiators with big retailers and so on, has all been

governed by this lack of certainty and this

seasonality and this over and underproduction.

So everything is a negotiation. If that can be

taken away, If you can guarantee a yield,

a quality, a delivery, well,

that negotiation, you know, day to day, week to week, month to month,

season to season, that can go away. And you can get to a point where

you can say, you know what, I can stock

these shelves in these stores with these

SKUs. I can guarantee the yield. I can

guarantee the quality. So let's not haggle

on price for every head of lettuce. Why don't you pay me a subscription

and I'll fill your shelves for you? And so everybody loves everything as

a service, whether it's software or razor blades or

ink cartridges. How about farming as a service?

Interesting. And that's the kind of thing that we've been thinking

about ever since I kind of joined this business and we

put together our business plan for our Series

A investment. These are the kind of new models, new paradigms that

we've imagined one day might be possible. And I think that

the quality of people that we're dealing

with now, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I mean in a

sense of their experience, their knowledge,

their expertise as growers, their relationship with the

off-takers, the major buyers in the market, puts them in a position where they can

take this certainty, this guarantee of quality and delivery and

yield, and they can develop new business models and

become more assertive in the way that they deal with buyers and so

on. And I think, I don't think that's going to disadvantage the buyers. I think

the exact opposite. I think it's going to elevate the whole thing.

I think it's going to even it up and it's going to lift the

industry to a much better place. So Yeah, and I think

this speaks to some of the articles I've seen on AgFunder

recently about the continuous interest from an investment

perspective, because I think there are new business models that are being

formed and created as we speak. And so what are you seeing on your

end? Obviously, IGS was the beneficiary of

the funding necessary to get where you're at right now, but it doesn't seem to

show any signs of slowing down in terms of interest from the investment community?

No. And indeed, we have had a great deal of interest from the investment

community. People really want to give you money when you've got money.

Being cynical, but we have had a tremendous amount of interest and there's

different kinds of money, right? So there's very high risk money and we were

really privileged to be able to raise that last year. We'll be moving

from a risk phase into a growth phase, which then becomes

all about execution. You know, it's a different type of risk, but it's an

easier risk to manage, your degree of control over it is

greater. There you go. I've totally jinxed it now, haven't I? But it's so,

it's a different kind of money. And we've been seeing a lot of those folks

express an interest in supporting the next stage of our growth,

which is terrific. We're really grateful for it. Very interesting question

the other day. We've been put up for the finals of the British Farmer

Awards, which is really exciting to be

recognized by the industry as a a supplier. One of the guys

asked me, well, you know, aren't you in danger of building so many vertical farms

you're going to saturate the world market? I hadn't even thought about that, but

it was an interesting question. But I think there's plenty of space. So I

think there's plenty of room for capital to come in and support the growth of

this industry. And I hope, you know, things like

aquaculture and better management of livestock and, you know, better

management of staple foods and things like that. So I think

there's Plenty of investment opportunity. And yeah, I'd say we're definitely

seeing it. Do you see IGS at some point also

having a hand in developing some of these new technologies or sort of

supporting some of these new entrepreneurs with something along the lines of an

incubator or something that can help because of, you know, all the work

and development you've, you have, I imagine you might have an interest in

technologies where you could have a hand in supporting them that in

the long run could actually benefit some of the things you're working on at IGS?

Yeah. So if you look at how we build a vertical farm today,

or indeed how we build the intelligent grids today, and

as we come to a lot of announcements around that

product, which will be end of this year, that might be

a good time for a catch-up. But a

lot of the— we design components ourselves. And we take

them out to manufacturing partners. But we also encourage, you

know, young companies— well, what are we? But smaller

companies that have got really interesting technologies to come and talk to

us. But then we've also got some serious corporate partners in Asia,

in Europe, in North America, some real household names who

supply components to us. And we're always totally open-minded.

I mean, I think we know where the problems lie that we have to solve

because no one else has. But if there's something

that just works, then why not use it? And I'd

say we get 2 or 3 approaches a week from people that have

got interesting new stuff, whether it's a new growing substrate, a

growing medium, whether it's a clever widget, whether it's a

new piece of electronics, whether it's a better way to

mix nutrients. There's all kinds of stuff. I mean, it's such a

complex machine this thing. So yeah, we're seeing that all the

time. And AgFunder, one of our investors, has

set up an incubator in Singapore. Okay. That's got

some interesting stuff coming out of it. We certainly are thinking

quite hard about the package that we supply

to our customers because they need more than just

our vertical farm. You know, they need seeding automation, they need

harvest automation, they need packaging automation. And

You know, we're very keen to look at those aspects and more

and more people are looking to say, well, can we do an entire

operation cradle to grave with a kind of turnkey

solution? And so that's something we'll certainly be turning our minds to. I've

got no doubt about that. Can you talk a little bit about the work you're

doing on the climate front with regards to the new

technologies you're developing as well? Sure. So the way we're

now thinking about things is the weather is a 3-dimensional

object. So the 3 dimensions really are the sun, the wind, and the

rain. And however you choose to look at it,

different combinations of those are what make up our daily

weather, our weather from hour to hour. But it's more

complicated than that. So each one of those dimensions

has multiple factors. So, you

know, and it could be 6, 8, 10 different factors

that go to make up the light that we receive, the way we get our

water in, into our ground, whether it's through rain or groundwater,

the wind and the impact that has on our ability to grow crop. So

it then becomes more complicated from a mathematical point of view.

And then you have to think that each one of these 8 to 10

major factors of the sun, of the wind, of the rain,

each one of them has an almost infinite number of possible

values. And the one that brings it out for me the most is spectrum.

Think about when you go into a paint shop, you're going to go and buy

paint for your bedroom or something, and you go into a DIY store,

a hardware store as you'd call it, and you get the color chart and

it's just, oh my God, how am I going to choose? You never realized there

were so many shades of green available. Exactly.

And you then think about the RGB, the red, the green,

and the blue. And you think about every sunset you've ever

seen. Think about every sunrise you've ever seen. Think about the

colors in a beautiful garden. So, you know, there's an almost

infinite number of possible varieties of just

spectrum. And then you've got brightness on top of

that. Then you've got dimming and pulsing.

And, you know, you've got multiple different factors

just of light. So you're layering complexity on

complexity on complexity. And the ability to manage that, the

ability to replicate a

certain type of weather because that's the weather that

this crop needs. That is the thing that we've been working

incredibly hard on. The crop scientists and the

horticulturalists and the growers are the people who will

figure out what is required, but our job is to make their

job possible. That's been the biggest sort of breakthrough,

I would say, this year. And then you think about ventilation.

So you're thinking about temperature, you're thinking about

wind speed, you're thinking about a mass of air, you're thinking

about what gases are in the mix, you're

thinking about humidity, and then you think about

evenness as well. And then you think about the delivery of water. Well,

there's volume of water because you can drown things. Yeah. There is

pH value, there is a nutritional value, There is the temperature of

the water, there's the salinity of the water, there's how

it's delivered. And so there's sort of even the speed of

flow, the heaviness of the rain, all of these things have an

impact on crops outdoors. So you've got 3

dimensions multiplied by 9 to 10 factors

multiplied by infinite possible number of values.

Yeah. That is huge, huge mathematics. And the

thing we've then been thinking about is, do you know what? That's not enough.

Because when you put a seed in the ground, you want

it to germinate. And to get it to germinate, in most

cases, you probably have to put it in a dark, warm,

damp climate. Yeah. And therefore, that

is what it needs in the first few days of its life. When

you are finishing the crop, whether you're going to plant it out into

polytunnels for harvesting, whether you're just going to take it and harvest it and

package it or put it on shelves, whether you're going to plant it out in

an open field, you've got to harden this plant off. And

so what you want to do is you actually want to cool the temperature down

and you want to intensify the light, and it's got to be a particular type

of light. So my point there is that throughout the crop's life

cycle, it doesn't need the same thing. It needs very, very different things. Yeah. And

you have to be able to deliver that. And then you have to think about

a diurnal range. So you start with the night and the night is not

black. The night has ambient light. Then you have a sunrise, then you

have 18 hours of perfect weather, then you have a sunset. If you can't make

that, then you cannot make the ideal weather morphing into a

climate. And then you have to think about seasons.

Most things grow between April, May and September,

October, depending upon where you are in the world. Of

course, the Southern Hemisphere has the exact opposite, but you've got to

think about that seasonality and what that then does to the crop.

And that 4th dimension of time is still not enough because you've got to think

about space. Yeah. So when you have a climate,

it's not just about what the weather is and

what the crop needs at a given point in time, it's about where it is.

Is this on the top of a cliff right next to the ocean? Is it

inland? Is it within a forest? Is it up in a mountain? And

you've got to think about, in our case, the space on a growth tray,

which is a microclimate, the space inside a tower,

which is an independent farm with a background climate,

the space in terms of the size of the pot that you put

the seed into to get the effect you want. And then the space in

terms of a latitude. So if you're growing the legendary

basil and baby vine tomatoes, you probably want to mimic

Tuscany between May and August. And so you've got to be able to

do that stuff. So we're seeing the

controls in a 5-dimensional way, the 3

dimensions of weather, the dimension of time, and then the dimension of

space turning into a climate. Yeah, fascinating. I think

people underestimate all the different variables because it's not just

the 4 or the 5, it's the way those 5 interact with each other,

which then gets you into exponential numbers and exponential

outcomes. Absolutely. Well, that's really exciting. I'm glad that you got

to share some of what's happening. And just as we wrap up, I'm

excited at a lot of the initiatives that are, that are going on within IGS.

And I think the fact that the industry continues to innovate at breakneck

speed is exciting to watch. I appreciate you coming on and

sharing some of the insights about what's happened since we last talked. So one

last question I have is, what's a tough question you've had to ask

yourself recently? As we go from

being an R&D company to where we are now,

you know, a real commercial business, to completing

our first deals, I want to make sure that we

live up to the promises that we're making our customers as

they come on board. You know, more than that, the promises that we're making

society and the world that yes, we can use this sort

of technology to improve our food supply chains, to de-risk

things, to help the climate. And the

next part of our journey is all about scaling and

making sure that we can deliver on the potential. So

That is really where I'm focusing my energy and the

team is focusing their energy for the next stage of our journey. And

it's super exciting. That's exciting. And thank you for sharing.

Thank you for once again coming back on and being, you and your

family are staying safe and continue to share with us anything that's happening

and that you're innovating at IGS. So thanks again for your time, David.

No, thank you, Hari. Pleasure to reconnect. So thanks

again to David for making a return visit to the Vertical Farming Podcast,

sharing a lot of the innovations that are happening at IGS,

and giving us a nice state of affairs for what's happening in

the 6 months since we last spoke. I can't believe how much time has flown

by. As I mentioned at the top of the show, if you are enjoying this

podcast, please leave us a rating and a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

We'll be sure to read those out on future episodes. As a reminder, special

thanks to our episode sponsor this week, the Vertical

Farming World Congress. Check out the registration link in the show

notes to sign up, September 22nd through the 24th.

Until we meet again next week, here's to your health. Thanks for listening.

To read the full show notes for this episode, which includes any links

mentioned in the episode as well as a full show transcription, Visit

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