Episode Summary

Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show Founder of Heron Farms, Sam Norton. It is the mission of Heron Farms to create a sustainable agricultural system and restore the marsh using earth’s most abundant resource: seawater. In this episode, Harry and Sam talk all about sea beans, Sam’s fact-finding mission to Bangladesh to learn more about how seawater crops are grown, and the work Heron Farms is doing with other brands to help rebuild salt marshes across the globe.

Episode Sponsor

Ceres Greenhouse Solutions

Key Takeaways

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• 03:22 – Harry welcomes to the show Sam Norton, founder of Heron Farms, who speaks to his passion for environmental studies and what inspired him to get involved in AgTech
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• 10:07 – Sam discusses why he chose to focus on seawater agriculture, the startup competition he entered and won and the mission of Heron Farms
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• 15:17 – Mentors who have motivated and inspired Sam 
• 20:30 – Sam speaks to the various challenges that he faced when moving to indoor farming
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• 23:47 – The most eye-opening part of Sam’s trip to Bangladesh
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• 26:35 – Sam shares some of the tech stack he’s utilizing with Heron Farms and the skillset necessary to succeed in AgTech
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• 30:18 – Sam discusses some of the benefits and nutritional value of sea beans
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• 34:35 – Marketing challenges with sea beans
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• 38:28 – What Sam would do differently in building his team if given the chance
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• 41:52 – Sam talks about the work he’s doing with Dalai Sofia
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• 45:13 – How Sam has grown as a first-time CEO, what excites Sam most about the future and a tough question Sam has had to ask himself recently
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• 49:19 – Harry thanks Sam for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can connect with him 
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Tweetable Quotes

“The mission of Heron Farms is to tap into the largest resource on the planet, which is seawater. And if we can do that while rebuilding the planet, that’s really a win-win.” (12:44)

“We’re fixing the car as we drive it down the road. We have the good kinds of problems. We have more demand than we can grow for so we’re fixing it as we go and trying to get ready to scale.” (14:55)

“Monocultures are scary at scale, but diverse agriculture at a smaller scale is very interesting and seems to be working over in Bangladesh although it has caused great loss in the natural environment.” (26:19)

“We’re basically copying the model that the avocado did. If you boil it down, all we’re really doing is asking, ‘why have you ever eaten an avocado?’ All those plants went through similar cycles. People didn’t know how to eat an avocado, when it was ripe, what a fair price was. And all of those are true of sea beans.” (35:10)

“These systems, they’re not like a fine wine. Indoor AgTech and your grow room do not get better with time.” (41:15)

“We pitched this idea with Dalai Sofia where we asked them to put our logo on their can and, in exchange, we’ll replant one square foot every time they sell one of these cans. And within three weeks it was their best-selling SKU.” (43:10)

“If we can team capitalism up with restoration then this planet is going to overflow with biodiversity.” (44:42)

Links Mentioned

Heron Farms Website

Sam’s LinkedIn

Dalai Sofia

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Mentioned in this episode:

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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 Season 2, welcome back. If this is your first time listening,

you're in the right place. This is the show where we interview fascinating CEOs and

founders of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world. I'm

your host, Harry Duran. In case you missed last week's show, I had a

great conversation with the co-founders of Babylon Microforms,

Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith. This week I speak to

Sam Norton, founder of Heron Farms. Heron Farms has a mission

to create a sustainable agricultural system and restore the marsh

using Earth's most abundant resource, seawater. We talk all about sea

beans, Sam's fact-finding mission to Bangladesh to learn more about how

seawater crops are grown, and the work Heron Farms is doing with other brands to

help rebuild salt marshes across the globe. We learn about Sam's

passion for environmental studies and what inspired him to get involved in agtech, why

he chose to focus on seawater agriculture, the startup competition he entered and

won, We learn about mentors that have motivated and inspired Sam, and he shares

with us the various challenges that he faced when moving to indoor farming. We learn

about what was the most interesting part of his trip to Bangladesh, and he shares

the tech stack he's utilizing with Heron Farms. A special thanks to our episode

sponsor, Ceres Greenhouse Solutions. If you're looking for a greenhouse

solution that will suit your specific climate and growing goals, then talk to an expert

from Ceres Greenhouse Solutions. Ceres combines passive

solar concepts, innovative climate control technologies, and customized

grow systems to ensure that their growers are yielding the highest highest quality product

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Naturally, I'm curious to learn about the benefits and nutritional value of sea beans as

well as marketing challenges with that crop. All in all, a very

fascinating conversation and I learned a lot. If you

enjoyed this episode or past episodes, I'd love it if you leave a rating and

a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

I'd love to read yours out next. This episode is also brought to you by

the Vertical Farming Weekly newsletter. Each week, our team member Daniel Dreys

scours the ends of the earth, climbs mountains, and fords rivers to bring you the

latest and greatest in the world of vertical farming. Sign up today at

verticalfarmingweekly.com. Okay, let's jump into this conversation

with Sam. So Sam Norton, founder of Heron

Farms, thank you for joining me on the Vertical Farming Podcast.

Thanks for having me. So I like to

start off on a high note. What's something good that happened to you this

week? We broke another sales record and my niece turned

1. So those are both awesome. Can you share the record?

It's probably pretty low for most of your audience. Yeah, that's okay. But it's good

for us. We're on our— that's our 11th sales cycle, our 11th week of sales

out of this new facility. Yeah, we're on the right path. And for

the benefit of the listener, where's home for you now? Charleston, South Carolina.

I grew up outside of it, and that's where this first farm was

located. What was life like growing up for you?

It seemed okay. It gets pretty warm down here, but

it's a pretty beautiful part of the world. I grew up

on one of the barrier islands, so a lot of surfing and

mostly sports, mostly basketball and football. That was kind of all I

knew until I tried— I took a stab at academia.

What were you thinking, if you can remember going that far back,

but like when you were in high school getting ready to decide where you wanted

to go for college and what you wanted to study, what was on your mind

back then? Oh gosh. Well, I did the— I did exactly— my mom

told me what I should do, which was to leave the state and to go

off and do what she did. And my brother went to University of Hawaii, so

he went about as far from Charleston as you could go. Yeah, I decided that

wasn't— that I was smarter than her and I would just go to College of

Charleston. And, uh, no, CofC has been great. I'm a grad

student there now about to finish. And, uh, but I was thinking

out of leaving high school like, oh, I'm having so much fun, I'll just stay

in this town. And I ended up failing out of school and

becoming kind of a carpenter vagabond for a while until I got back into

school and turned things around. That's funny, my partner went to University of

Hawaii as well, so I heard a lot of good things

and that's actually one of the options for a future place to go

temporarily. You never know with what's happening nowadays. My business is remote. So,

it seems like all options are on the table. Oh, sure. I just bought

17 acres in what's technically middle of nowhere, South Carolina. It's not even

incorporated. It's called Green Pond, but it's because this

work-from-home lifestyle that we might move towards that we're

kind of forced into recently but might move towards. It'd be nice to do it

from a beautiful part of the world, and it's certainly nice down there. So Hawaii

would be a good choice, although my brother told me that it was pretty expensive

for a gallon of milk and some of the necessities. For people that

are either unaware of Charleston,

how would you describe it and what's the draw to it? Because it is a

beautiful part of the country, and I think for people who know the

big cities and know the popular touristy places, I don't know how many

times Charleston comes up in conversations of great places to

live, but how would you describe it to folks? Well, gosh,

it has just a troubled history. It was the largest slave

port in the 19th and 18th century in

America. Because of that, the city of

Charleston had great, great wealth, but it was built on,

of course, nonsense. Today,

it's still a very undiverse place, but it is

beautiful in the sense that it's scaled properly.

We were one of the first cities to have a historic district and to

have a board of architectural review that would not allow

the development of the historic district. And so that has

remained intact, and it's one of the main reasons people come down here to do

weddings and things like that. But more importantly, it's couched between

the Francis Marion National Forest just to our north and

then the Ace Basin just to our south. And so both of these protected areas

give this place just an incredible greenness to it. And of course, it's sitting

out in between these 2 rivers and marshland all around. And that's

been under a bit of pressure since the mid-2000s-ish.

We've seen quite a bit of development, and people like my old man that build

houses, it's just great news for them. But For the marsh, it's not good

news. When did this interest in environmental studies

click for you? When was it something that you started to realize you were being

drawn to? Well, I was studying political science as an undergrad, and so

when the last administration came into office, it kind of felt like an

oxymoron. And I was sort of drifting at the time towards natural

sciences because I had been reading folks like Wendell Berry and

E.O. Wilson and people that my professors had turned me on to.

And so I just got more and more into— I bought a

microscope at one point during undergrad and it turned out just

like looking at your compost under the microscope and things like that had its

own entertainment value to it because I didn't have social media or

TV or anything. So it had a lot of— I could just— that was fun.

So anyways, kind of drifted that direction and ended up studying

these salt-tolerant plants and getting into grad school for that

field and just kind of running with it. Did you know anyone who was

in the industry? Were you starting to make connections or follow people that were doing

something similar at the time? Well, sort of in a

strange way. I just met this woman at Boeing and she was

on the biofuel strategy team. And she was like,

I was studying Middle East politics and she's like, you need to check out what

we're doing in the Middle East. You know, we're growing this plant called

Salicornia with nothing but salt water. And I

just thought that was so fascinating that I wanted to learn more. And anyways, ended

up writing my capstone on what they were doing out there and seawater

agriculture in general. And the takeaway is that the plant that they were

growing for biofuels that they were saying would kind of lead

the way or be the corn of seawater agriculture was the same plant that we

had eaten growing up around Charleston. It was the annual

species, was native. And so I had been eating it growing up and

realized like, We should grow this for food and not

fuel. And that's kind of what started it. I do want to set some context

for the listener because I just love the sort of

like the real-worldness of podcasting sometimes. So can you just let the listener know where

you are? Because if they do hear background noise, I actually want to leave it

in there because I think this is what's awesome about talking

to a variety of people in this industry. And then sometimes you're

actually calling from the place or dialing in from the place where work is. So

maybe set some context for where you're at now. Yeah. Sorry. Harry, and for the

listeners, the grow room is right behind me. There's, and

there's about a half dozen people still on site right now who are

feeding and kind of cleaning up after our biggest week

so far. And so you might hear a door or two open and I apologize.

That's okay. So yeah, so, so that when you had that

realization that this plant that you were very familiar

with, having grown up with it yourself, could be grown in those

environments, was it that immediate? Was that like that light switch went off and you're

like, this might be something to look into? It was pretty immediate, and it's because

we have in Charleston and in Savannah and in these port

cities in the Southeast, inside the port, we have these things called

confined disposal facilities, and these are basically large areas of

marsh that the Army Corps has turned into confined areas to put

dredge material when they deepen the harbor. Telling us that, telling you all that because

we deepen the harbor in Charleston every 10 years to keep up with Savannah and

these places. And it, when you dump a bunch of saltwater and mud into

a confined area, the water evaporates and it leaves behind very

salty, desiccated mud. And so

we have a very famous one under our big bridge in Charleston called Drum Island.

And I was going over the bridge after meeting these folks at Boeing and realized,

oh my God, the plant that they're talking about starting the seawater

agricultural industry is growing right there naturally.

And so that kind of sparked this whole, let's rebuild the confined disposal

facilities and grow useful products with seawater. And it turned out you

had to decouple those. And then if you wanted to rebuild confined disposal facilities, you

could do it, but you couldn't do it and have any

useful, very many useful products. You could do it and let Habitat scale on

its own, but it needed to bring the food system elsewhere. And

can you talk a little bit about the competition you entered also as well? And

how that played a part in learning more about this? Oh, gosh. Well, that was

just a lot of luck timing, because the South Carolina

Department of Agriculture, we are not the most forward-thinking

bunch up until the commissioner went to

Netherlands and saw some, some advances in the industry

and really wanted to come back and say, listen, guys, we—

corn and soybean and cotton is, is just fine. But peaches

are just fine too. But let's, let's let's get more interesting. And so he

tasked a woman named Kyle Player with starting the Acre

Startup Competition. So I entered that with this idea. I was kind of the

youngest person there. For some reason, thought it was willing to take a

chance on it. So it really gave me the runway necessary to just fail

over and over again with these plants indoors and outdoors and get the path

cleared out for me, at least for a little ways. What I thought was interesting

was the fact that you make it a point to have your mission

prominently displayed on your website. So can you

let the listener know what that is? Because I think it's very audacious and I

think it's very inspiring as well. Yeah, it's to tap into the

largest resource on the planet, which is seawater. And

if we can do that while we rebuild the planet, then that's really

a win-win. But it comes from living in a

place like a lot of towns on the coast that are looking at

seawater and looking at the next 50 years or few centuries and saying,

oh gosh, better move to Asheville or somewhere

closer to you. And so what we're saying as a company is

let's not just treat the seawater that's incoming as a problem,

let's treat it as a resource. And so that's where we got our mission from,

is trying to communicate that in as few words as possible. What's interesting is

the fact that you're still in school and then you've been— you founded Heron in

2018. Is that right? Yeah. And so

when did you realize that this was something that in order to be successful,

in order to take it to the next level, you'd have to create a

company and you'd have to figure out a way to scale this up? And that's

not something that most people, unless they have the entrepreneurial spirit,

think of. I've got the spirit, but I don't, you know, I don't have much

else. What happened was The Acre sent me an email in July

of 2018 and said, hey, you won the competition. we're going to wire you this

money to your Heron Farms bank account. Didn't exist. Heron

Farms was just an idea. It didn't— it was not a real thing

besides something I had made a PowerPoint and done a little bit of research on.

So anyways, the business was formed prematurely in order to process the grant,

which we ended up— yeah, they allowed me to use it for academic purposes at

the time. So the business started in 2018,

but that was really the beginning of mostly research until

last, basically this time last year when an established hydroponics company,

we had just won another startup competition in the area and a

more established hydroponics company said, okay man, you can

use one of our shipping container farms and just go crazy with it and

see what happens. And we ended up selling out of our product despite the

pandemic, and so that's when we got enough funding to kind of go off and

do our own thing. So the being ready for scale, and

with the second part of your question, you know, we're, we're like the— we're fixing

the car as we drive it down the road type of thing. We have the

good kinds of problems, you know, we have more demand than we can grow

for, so we're, we're fixing it as we go and trying to get ready to

scale. But at the time it was that they gave the grant, it was just,

hey, go figure this out. And thanks to a lot of help in the area

and folks in the industry, we're starting to get there. So where do you

look to for inspiration? Because you've got a pretty decent team that you're

starting to build up. Who do you look to for guidance when you try to

figure out, like, who's the next hire? Like, where do I ask for help? Like,

how do I grow this? How do I scale this? What is it that I

don't know that I should be asking? I imagine at that point, like, you

have a lot of unanswered questions. Sure. I've got—

so in the most recent startup competition, I had a mentor. This

gentleman has started 2 publicly traded companies. He's in his 70s.

old-school American capitalist, doesn't curse, doesn't— he's

a great mentor. Anyways, he, after we won, became

an investor. And so he wears the investor hat and the mentor hat. We

also have another investor I met through him that is a

new-school Stanford finance guy that is also a great

mentor. But they both don't come from ag. And so

that sort of inspiration comes— I've, up until

recently, had a member on the team named Brian Evans who had worked at Plenty,

and we would just brainstorm all the time. And he was a big inspiration. But,

you know, conversations like this and conversations with the local

team, but mostly just sort of random interactions with folks.

One person on my team got me to get LinkedIn a few months ago, and

that's just led to some just fascinating conversations. I hadn't had social media up

until then, so it's really been— that's been interesting. So

for inspiration, I would say the internet's full of it, and so

are people outside the industry who whose businesses are going

through similar things right now and they can always help even though they have no

clue about how fights physiologically work.

Would you want to mention any of those mentors or any of the folks that

helped you there? Sure. Stuart Bascom, who I was talking about, he was the

mentor in the startup competition. And Scott Fisher, who is

the other mentor and investor I was talking about. Also, one of our

early investors was the judge of this startup competition. His name is

Patrick Bryant. He's a software-focused investor and

entrepreneur. who are in the South. But because of

LinkedIn and podcasts like these, the mentor list is definitely

growing. And that's a lot of fun because people like what we're doing enough

to speak honestly when we're just— I'm just messing it up. And

so they— a lot of good honest feedback has been coming in. Is anyone

doing anything similar with saltwater, like similar to

what Haron is doing? There are, you know, a few dozen folks doing

it outdoors in Europe and Asia. There's about to be

someone doing it indoors in Europe. I don't recall

the name. We have some random

restaurant customers that we ship to, and so it looks like

we're getting a few boxes ready to go out the door. Very cool.

Yeah, I was just asking if there's any folks doing something similar in this space.

Well, I want to back it up, Harry, because there's many people that have

been doing it outdoors. And what I realized in grad school, and

I'm This is part of the reason for bringing food production

indoors with seawater ag is that we saw

4 or 5 major big funder

projects outdoors grow Salicornia and fail after a couple years. So I was

trying to figure out why do they keep failing, and it looks like, it seems

like it's been the same 3 reasons, and those are land constraints.

If you want to pump seawater in, you must be near the coast. If you're

near the coast, you're very high likelihood that people live there. And they do

not want to have a guy from

America come in and say, hey, look at all this marginal land, we're going to

grow Salicornia. It doesn't go over well. This happened in Sonora, it

happened in Eritrea, it happened in UAE to some extent.

It's kind of the not-in-my-backyard type of thing. So that's one land constraint.

So then if you find a place that is near the coast and desert— deserted

enough to work, You run into the second constraint, which is that

if the annual precipitation is less than the annual evaporation,

if it just doesn't rain much, you build up sodium chloride in the soil,

and even these plants, which are the most salt-tolerant terrestrial, can't handle it

after a little while. And the third one is

just seasonality. These plants flower as the

photoperiod changes in the end of the summer, and there goes your

that ability. And so we tried to fix those 3 issues by

bringing it indoors and going vertically. But so

the outdoor farms are going to work if their

main product is outside the food space. They can make food products

seasonally, but what we're seeing now is more of a push

towards raw materials. So there's a— so for

using the seed oil for pharmaceuticals or for biofuels or

for tech, we're seeing the lignin being

processed for biofuels and we're seeing folks trying to

make use of the basically dead plant matter. Or an

interesting company in Asia who is only interested in the

plant salts because when sodium chloride is processed through a halophyte,

it decreases— it changes the sodium chloride ratio and makes it healthier for

humans than— healthier than table salt. And so they've won

some interesting startup competitions in Asia Based on that platform.

That's really interesting. And I think the idea that you decided to go

indoors, did that present its own set of challenges as well? I mean,

your listeners know all of them, I'm sure, and more,

because when you look at a company's Instagram, it

looks very beautiful inside their indoor farm. But, but of course,

behind the scenes, there's just all sorts of issues when you

try to put nature in a headlock inside of this room and then make it

all work. But no, it's the same issues as most people. I mean,

pumps need to turn on at the appropriate time, lights need to do their job,

and the electric bill needs to stay in a good space, and the room needs

to stay cool, and your planting cycles need to be really

dialed in so that there's no gap weeks because you just promised a customer that

you deliver 52 weeks a year and then you— 47 doesn't

count. And so it's presented all of its— plenty

of challenges, but— We did find one example

in the outdoor space where 2 of the 3 challenges were solved,

and that was in rice paddies that had become salinized due to sea level rise.

And so I went to Bangladesh last year on the whim that with a guy

from Europe that, yeah, that would work, and it kind of

does because the land use constraint isn't there. It—

because it's already— the land is already dedicated to agriculture for rice production,

but during the non-monsoon season, there's no rains and

the incoming The irrigation water is too saline for rice. And so

we had this thought, well, why don't they just switch crops and grow halophytes

like Salicornia and a few others? And that turned out to work.

It also solved number 2 because it would rain in the

monsoon seasons and knock out the sodium chloride and you would not ruin the

soil. And so we're going back in March to Bangladesh to try that on

a larger scale with different partners. And so that's pretty interesting and we'll see how

that does. Well, that would seem to open up a whole new possibility of

partnerships if you get that right and probably get a lot of

attention to you and the work that you're doing, which in my

mind, I start to think about juggling different priorities as well and

all the challenges that come with that. But was that your first time out to

Bangladesh? First time. Yeah. The partner, he owns a company called

Seawater Solutions in Europe and they do strictly outdoor

climate resilience marsh replanting. for food and other.

He basically called me about a week before and said, hey, do you want to

go to Bangladesh? And I had never met him, but ended up, you know,

we just had knew each other, our companies followed each other on Instagram,

that was about it. But anyways, I went with him and it was a great

time. And we traveled around with the Ministry of Agriculture and tried 4

pilot sites, which represented the 4 kind of versions of

rice paddy, which had been inundated by saltwater and were no longer we're

laying fallow, and 3 of them worked. And so we're going back this year with

a Dutch partner called ICO and the World Food Programme, and of course

the ministry again. And you're right, it'd be really interesting if it scales.

It will have likely one of the same problems, which is what is

the end market if we do grow all these halophytes? Let's say every

10 million acres of rice paddy that will be laying

fallow next non-monsoon season, what, what are we going to do

with all those halophytes? And that's, that's really what needs to be

established before this scales. What was the most

eye-opening or interesting thing about your time in Bangladesh?

It was pretty awesome. I would say, yeah, in Charleston,

a lot of land— we do not have very many people in South

Carolina compared to how much on— in Bangladesh,

every inch of the place, places I went through at

least, had been turned into food production. It was incredible. I

mean, every inch of someone— you had a rice paddy, on the edge of the

rice paddy they were producing tamarind or some tree. In the

backyard they were growing shrimp, and in the front yard there were livestock. And it

was just seeing— but so there was— Wow. The

really interesting part where they had learned to grow enough food for so many people.

I mean, half the population of the US fits into Bangladesh. And

that thing is— the country's the size of South Carolina. The other

part of that is, oh gosh, this is supposed to be mangroves. Where are the

mangroves? So there's some of that as well. But there is, of course, the Sundarbans

in southern Bangladesh, which are untouched. People kind of

get in and out and it's very— you can get a lot of money if

you can find a tiger to bring back to the market. So

it's quite beautiful. But so all I'm saying is It was fascinating,

the food production in that amount of space for that amount of people, but also

the destruction of the natural environment was also a bit eye-opening.

Was there anything that changed your perception from a

production standpoint in terms of, you know, obviously they've

demonstrated what is possible, you know, and anything that you were

able to bring back in terms of how you think about what you're trying to

do here stateside? I came back with a sense And you can

fly over the Midwest where you are and get the same sense. And there's parts

of South Carolina will give you this sense. But I came back with a sense

that monocultures really just are a

noggin scratcher. They just, they are great on paper.

And when you actually implement them, they are just

not good at scale across a landscape. It is to

see an entire landscape of only rice and to know what was there

before. So I'm not, you know, so that's what I came back with, was

that sense. The other one is, if I can say the second

part, it would be that— Yeah. You can grow your own

food. That whole country is learning, you know, besides the folks in Dhaka,

in the big city. I mean, most of the folks are growing their own food,

and what's left over is given to or sold at the local market. So you

really can have a robust town where everyone grows their own

food and supports They're growing different things. And so

monocultures are scary at scale, but

diverse agriculture at a smaller scale is very

interesting and seems to be working over there, although it has caused a great

loss in the natural environment. That's a nice perspective.

Thank you for sharing that. So back with Heron, can you talk a little bit

about the technology stack to the extent that you can, that you're using and what's

working for you right now? We have not gone the route of

robotics, so we are trying to learn our takt times through

manual labor. And as those takt times reveal themselves and things

become unscalable, or we see things that can scale better with

automation, that's where that comes in. But the grow room technology

is fairly standard, I would say. I mean, there's not many in

the industry now who are not monitoring and manipulating the environment

with auto-dosing and with logical controls in

the environment. So CO2 and humidity and

etc. are manually controlled during the commissioning phase, and then

they— you automate one at a time. That's our route.

In terms of— well, we're using

software that allows us to also have our inventory and sales built

into that. So there's traceability throughout the system.

So we log into a dashboard and see the environmental parameters of the farm and

anything that may have happened, but then put in a sales

order, move inventory through the software into

cold storage, and basically be able to, like most

farms that want to have Harmonized GAP Plus or one of these certifications, be

able to trace back in case there was ever an issue. And so in terms

of technology that we're working on, so the folks listening to

this are dosing their nutrients with

conductivity probes, but a conductivity probe doesn't allow

you to distinguish between sodium chloride salts and nutrient

salts. It all looks like— I mean, if

you drop a conductivity probe into saltwater, you basically break the thing.

And so what we're working on, just a little teaser, is

being able to distinguish those and to be able to dose properly when you add

seawater to the equation. You bring up an interesting point because

some of this is brand— a lot of this may be brand new in terms

of technologies used, but also what that

brings to mind for me is the skillset required for people to

operate in these environments. And I don't know to what extent

there are people who are being taught or learning the combination of

skills you need to operate in these new

types of vertical farms and even some of the things that you're doing that are

cutting edge and specifically related to the challenges you have with

saltwater. So I'm wondering how you think about those as you start to grow your

team. Well, myself and the rest of— I try to

do some academic research, but a lot of us are just

YouTube University. I mean, that's— you look at— you had Nate Storey on

recently. I mean, if you've got an hour a day to watch Nate

or Bruce Bugbee or Dr. Kubota at University of Arizona, I

mean, you're doing just fine. Brian

Evans used to joke that Plenty was Hydroponics University and you could

spend 2 years at Plenty and then graduate and you would you would have learned

everything you need to know. But so in terms of the skill set, what

Brian and I used to joke about, he came up with this term, someone else

may have come up with it, called plumbtrician. And so if you wanted to be

a useful person on a hydroponic farm, you needed to be part plumber, part

electrician, and then part, you know, plant scientist, blah

blah blah. Oh yeah. So no, I think the industry isn't old

enough yet to really have— we have the converts, you know, we have the

old-school people that came from greenhouses and are now in CEA, but A

lot of what we're seeing is at least

people my age, you know, they kind of learn from YouTube and then you learn

from just trying and they work. They grow one plant in the basement, kill it

5 times, and by the 6th they've eaten it and they

are starting to learn. Can you talk a little bit about the

benefits and some of the nutritional value and just maybe just a

101 on sea beans? 'Cause there may be a lot of people that don't understand

'em, don't know them. And obviously you growing up with 'em are very Well-versed in

them, so I think that'd be helpful. Sure. The first thing is

they have salt water in them. They're 98% water and the water they grow in

is salty, so they're like biting in. It's kind of like a

plant, it's kind of like an oyster but in the

plant world. So it's like jumping in the ocean

a little bit, not quite that salty, but it's delicious. It's the only

produce that's already seasoned with salt and us and the other mammals really like

salt. Not too much or we'll be totally offended, but, you know, you can shoot

a deer down here just by putting out a block of salt. And where you

live, elk will get run over because they will come lick the road

salt off. Yeah. And there's no species on the planet that doesn't need

sodium chloride. And so we have this sort of primal attraction to it

in a sense, and I think that just comes from us liking salt and needing

it. But nutritionally, it's interesting because

In order for a halophyte to live in the marsh, they

have to, you know, you remember in Bio 101 you learned about water

and how water is kind of weak, it just kind of follows

ions around, and so halophytes have to change the

osmotic gradient, and what that means is they have to hold on

to more salts and minerals inside their cells

in order to bring the water in from the soil, which in this

case is very salty and full of minerals. And so to change, they have to

create a gradient where there's— where water wants to enter the cells. And

that's why you cannot plant corn in a salty field, because the

water won't enter the cells of the corn. And so for

that reason, halophytes store more minerals per gram

than typical plants. However, they can store a lot of

sodium in the vacuole, and so it can become unhealthy. And so what our game

here is to make them salty enough to taste

delicious and salty enough to use as much seawater as possible, but

also not too salty to make them unhealthy and make them

unpalatable. And so we're trying to match that up, but it's like most plants,

vitamin A, calcium, iron, it has a profile similar to, it's in the

same family as spinach and beets. So if you had to pick a profile that

was most similar, you'd pick spinach. What are some other common

halophytes that people may not not be aware of that fall in that family?

This is the goosefoot family, it's called Chenopods.

There are, I know, if people, you know,

if someone grew up on the coast, they might be familiar with Batiste maritima,

it's called saltwort. Most of the halophytes are a little bit obscure, I

mean, sea purslane, maybe, it's in a different family, but

there's about 1,500 halophytes we know of,

and only a couple dozen really are being

looked at seriously for ag, and only about a dozen of those are

pretty serious for food. Salicornia has the longest history of

edibility, and that's why— and it's also the most salt tolerant, and it's annual— and

so that's why it gets the most attention, because it's been eaten on multiple

continents for a very long time and typically just foraged. And that's how

all of our chef customers, you know, occasionally there's one that doesn't know what it

is, but typically a chef has used it at some point

during its wild harvest season and they're already familiar with the plant, even

though it has all sorts of strange monikers in the US. Sea beans is what

Whole Foods calls it, which is why we went with that name. But there's a

bunch of names for it. Where does seaweed fall in the range of

plants that flourish in seawater? Well, they're a

macroalgae. They're not— they don't have a vascular system. They don't have a

root system. Okay. And so what we're growing are terrestrial

angiosperms. And so you would— we get

asked this all the time, like, why don't you guys— why are you guys trying

to go after this niche market? I mean, just grow a bunch of algae. And

it's just, we're set up to grow basically like lettuce, or,

you know, we're growing a rooted vascular plant. Mm-hmm. And so,

but algaes, for good reason, are getting a ton of funding and attention

because, oh my God, you can grow protein and healthy things in seawater,

we should be all over that. But no, it just doesn't fit what we're doing

here. Having switched your hats now to marketing, now

that you have the product out and you're growing this crop now,

how do you start to think about who the buyer is

and how do you start to have those conversations? And is there any education involved

in getting the word out? When we built this new farm, I

lumped— if you had a teeter-totter, I weighed the team down on the sales side.

thinking that what we would really need to do was inform the customer and go

out and sell. And we got— I got the teeter-totter thing wrong. We actually needed

to grow more. But what we've connected with customers on is that

if they've never heard of it— so we basically— this—

we're copying the model that the avocado did. I mean, that's if you boil

it down. I'm trying to make it sound sophisticated, but all we're really doing is

saying, why have you ever eaten a banana? Why have you ever eaten avocado? You

know, all those plants went through similar cycles. And what happened

in the avocado's case was— I'm going to botch this, but to

paraphrase, the California Growers Association was like, hey,

look, we can grow this tree fruit. At the time, you know, ahuacate is the

Aztec word. It means tree testicle. So you would think it has the worst

marketing of all time. But what they realized was, you know, people

didn't know how to eat this thing. They didn't know when it was ripe. They

didn't know what would be a fair price. And all those are true with sea

beans, but what they did realize with that was that

interesting chefs in San Francisco and LA would love to use the product.

They would pair it with luxury items, and they would teach people when it was

ripe, how to eat it, what to pay. So there was

immigration to the US from Central America, and folks from Central America had eaten

avocados, so there was that influence. But the avocado

built on the backs of chefs, and chefs taught people how to

eat them. And chef taught them that they were luxury food in the

beginning. And that if you do price, if you adjust for inflation,

it would cost you $27 for one avocado back in the 1950s. Wow.

And last year, it was the first fruit to have its own Super Bowl commercial.

It's a $10 billion market. I mean, it's just a fascinating story. The thing that

used to be called crazy names, and they actually tried calling it the

alligator pear for a while, and that turned out not to work either. So then

they went back to avocado. But anyways, We're not doing anything different.

We're saying, chefs, we don't want to make a

big margin on you. We just want you to do interesting things with this product

and teach people how to eat it and when it— and what to pair it

with. And we let the chefs run with it. And so if you look at

a certain market, introduce to chefs, and then you kind of build out from there.

I've been fascinated with all things chef-related. I think at some

point in a previous life, I wanted to be a chef. I remember baking

and cooking when I was younger. But, uh, so I love Chef's Table, the Netflix

show, and, and they always have these episodes where they focus on local,

you know, chefs doing local things, interesting things, and

reintroducing the restaurant owners and the local chefs

to native, you know, plants and native, you know, things

that are found in their own backyard, and reacquainting not only, you know,

themselves, like the chefs, but also their clientele. And it sounds like that's something that

you're doing, like, hey, if you want to like support local and

let, you know, folks in South Carolina know, like, hey, this is, this is

something from your own backyard, and which with a rich history. I think

that's really what I find fascinating. There's an American guy named David

Fairchild, and he's kind of the reason any of us have ever tried a kiwi

or a watermelon. He was tasked by the USDA to

go out and find interesting things. I mean, he was walking through the jungles of

Chile and saw the first water— first Westerner to see a watermelon.

Wow. So, but I have a friend at MUSC named George Hanna,

and he thinks that, like you just said, we're in this era where we're going

from David Fairchild's model, which is let's eat everything we can from other countries,

back to let's see what grows around us and let's eat

that. And over the next century, maybe we'll be eating a lot more native plants.

I wanted to circle back about your conversation about, or your comment

about building the team. So if you had to do it all over again, how

would you, you know, rethink the scale and

the skill set that you would bring on for your needs?

That's a good question. You know, it depends on if money is, is accounted,

you know, is that in like an infinite money situation or?

Yeah, let's say you do get the funding you need and you want to build

out a dream team. Now knowing what you know, you know, what you learned the

hard way, how would you rethink how you you would want to grow the team?

You know, I'd do what probably Nate Storey and those guys did

better, which is one of the guys that helped build the farm, his name's Josh

Ochsner. He, uh, is one of the hardest working people I've

ever seen. And he came in one day and was like, what the hell are

you doing? Excuse me. He was like, you know, why do you

have 3 people on marketing and sales? And at the time I thought,

duh, you need to. But now I realize if we had rebuilt the team from

the beginning, it would be Plant scientist, engineer, computer

scientist, plumptician, plumptician, plumptician.

Yeah, that's going to be helpful for folks that are just getting started. So thanks

for sharing that. And pest management. Oh, can you

explain more or talk more about that? Yeah, I mean, we have an

ozone machine, so we are— I can't say

anything. If you don't have an ozone machine, go get one. That's what I

would say to any listener who doesn't have one. They really help out a lot.

But anyways, pest management is an area that can just

absolutely crush you. You know, if you've scaled up a farm and you're just

rocking and rolling and then Pythium comes through and you don't really know, or

one of these root-borne pathogens, they can wipe out a whole farm

and you don't even know it. You don't even see it happening. So that hasn't

happened to us at this farm yet, but it's happened to me in the laboratory.

It's happened to me at the last farm. So it's worth your

investment to have someone on the team with a little bit of IPM, with a

little bit of pest management. It's interesting because one of the things, or one of

the selling points, if you will, or people describe as the

advantages of indoor indirect agriculture farming is

no need for pesticides because there's no pests coming in

from that aspect. But I think what you're talking about is just,

is that just a function of what you're growing and how you're growing it? Or

do you think that's applicable across all crops

indoor? Yeah. Oh gosh, no, it's industry-wide. I mean, every

head grower at the companies you've interviewed

will know, will probably shudder if you say the words Pythium or

Phytophthora or fungus gnat. I mean, it

is a function of the water.

It's a function of, you know, these systems, they're not like a

fine wine. Like, they don't— indoor ag doesn't get Your grow room

doesn't get better across time. You know, you might get better results by fixing the

parameters, but I'm saying the actual inner workings of it,

entropy takes over immediately from the day you can finish building it.

And it starts to, you know, maintenance is key. If you haven't checked every

box every week or every day in cleanliness, something's gonna pop

up. And so they're right, you don't need pesticides in the

same way. You may, you might not have aphids, but you have maybe something

in the root zone that's microscopic. That's helpful. Thanks for sharing

that. I noticed some work that you're doing to sort of get the word

out and the visibility for the brand. Can you talk a little bit about the

work you're doing with Dalai Sofia, if I pronounce that correctly,

and what that initiative is about? Well, they, they have a delicious

product, and they took a chance on us, you know,

before we had— like, right as we launched this new facility, and, and the

owner's an acquaintance and And what they're getting the

word out for and what we've been working on a little bit is to

help the marsh restoration efforts. And so if you, even on the

back of a napkin without a calculator, you can determine that

our indoor facility emits more carbon dioxide than it

sequesters. And that's just— I know plenty use it, and

a lot of these folks use options from the grid, which are solar

or wind-based, but that's not an option in the South. So

we emit more carbon dioxide than we sequester. So anyways, we replant

marsh every spring to offset those emissions and

let nature go out and scale. And so what we're thinking is, well, gosh,

if we can get halfway decent at replanting marsh

and if it's helping our bottom line because people are more willing to

become regular customers knowing that they're benefiting the marsh, what if it

benefits somebody else's bottom line? And so we pitched this idea

with with Ollie Sophia, like, hey, put our logo on your can and we'll replant

a square foot every time you sell one of these cans. And within 3 weeks,

it was his best-selling SKU. And so that set us up

now for a few other collaborations, one with a sunglass

company, one with a sea salt company. And so basically

what they're doing is putting the logo on there and we'll replant marsh

for them and have a very small margin on it. And so it's a

win-win for the planet and both companies if and helps their

sales. I'm writing a— this is called a—

I'm writing a paper on it right now. It's called a willingness

to pay or conjoint analysis. You basically, you give a bunch of

people a survey and you— in my case, I'm writing about sunglasses.

So these people will be surveying about sunglasses and they will say—

we will measure their willingness to pay with if they want their sunglasses

polarized, floating, biodegradable, And if you replant the

environment for each sunglass you purchase. All those other

variables are dummy variables and they won't change, but we will be able to

record or measure their willingness to pay a premium on sunglasses

that rebuild the environment. And so we see that Coors Light, for

example, just came out with a beer that restores 500 gallons for every beer or

every case. Patagonia came out with a beer recently that

replants a tree for every 6-pack. Ecosia replants a

tree every time you search through their search engine. So I

think we're going to see that absolutely blow up in this

century, and rightfully so. If we can team capitalism up

with restoration, then this planet's going to

overflow with biodiversity. That's fascinating.

And Deli Sophia, we'll make sure to include a link to them as well. They're

a kombucha company, right? Yeah. So a couple

questions as we wrap up. This has been fascinating, by the way, because it's, you

know, when I think, you know, when you think vertical farming, you first start down

this road, you know, you start with your leafy greens. And I've had, you know,

people growing mushrooms and insects for

feed and a whole range of different topics. How have you

grown as a first-time CEO since starting and from

what you've learned now? Oh boy. When we

built this farm and when the first idea was on paper,

it was all about— here's the original logo.

This is a textbook I had. Can you hold that up? I'm going to take

a screenshot if you don't mind. This is a textbook I really love about

from the 1950s on petroleum geography. But

anyways, when I first had the idea and we were first building out this

farm, it was like sales, plant science, and manufacturing. Let's put all

these 3 together and I'll be a great— I'll try and learn everything I can.

It turned out what really I need to work on the most is HR

and just being able to communicate with the team effectively

and be there for them and also not put too much pressure on

myself. You know, I want this to work. It's my baby.

And so I'm learning as I go.

I'm trying to figure it out. Luckily, what we talked about in

the beginning about good mentors help a lot and good employees because they'll just

be like, Sam, what in the world? You know, so they'll,

they'll hold me accountable. And so, yeah, I'd say HR has been the

biggest challenge, but it's— this has been

so cool. I mean, this morning our biggest customer called and the whole room

kind of went silent because they're like, they're a very large percentage of

our business and they called and And we were watching—

Andre's our lead sales guy, so we're, you know, we're waiting to see what his

expression is. And he comes and he just like lights

up and comes into the next room. He's like, they're selling out every week. And

so, you know, that makes it all worth it, even though we've had a crazy

week otherwise. So it's, it's been cool. I'm trying to learn

and making most— a lot of rookie mistakes as I go.

But— What do you look most looking forward to as things start

to open up, hopefully, you know, towards the latter half of this year?

Well, in my personal life, I can't wait for pickup basketball to start back up

again. I just, I can't play one-on-one with my quarantine

buddy anymore. I love him, but can't do it. So

I'm looking forward to that. And just like shaking a stranger's hand,

you know, like to meet somebody. That's always, I miss that. It's very strange

to meet someone face to face. And by the way, half

the South doesn't care or realize there's a pandemic going on. So if you were

to go down King Street, which is our main party street, uh, you will

be like, you wouldn't realize there's a pandemic, but I'm excited for the

restaurants to be booming again. That's so much of the Charleston economy. And there are

so many of my friends who are out of work because their restaurants

aren't at capacity or even open. And it is a damn

shame, really. And it's for good reason. But I really

cannot wait to see this bustling again. Yeah, that's been the

impacts on multiple fronts, obviously. And

then just a single one out, the restaurant industry, obviously

decimated by what's been happening recently. So I think everyone in that

industry is looking forward to the time when, you know, we can get some semblance

of normalcy in terms of like just hanging out and

having a bite with friends and And just some of the things, it's funny, it's

like some of the things you used to take for granted, you know, just being

able to like hug a stranger and just, you know,

like share a meal with someone in public or go to the bar and have

a drink, you know, just like all those little things I think I was probably

missing. What's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently?

Probably, am I being a good leader? Am I, you know, that's probably, I

am trying to be the best leader I can.

Be, but I don't think I'm always— right now

I'm asking myself, and I've been asking myself that a lot recently. And so

I think there's a little bit of fluctuation to it, you

know. I, but hopefully I'm able each week to kind of

look back and figure out. But no, I think that's what I've been asking

myself recently is, am I being a good enough manager with the,

with the experience that I've got so far? And I'm trying to work on it.

Well, Sam, this has been a very interesting conversation,

wide-ranging as well. So I know we had some technical

difficulties in the beginning, but I'm glad we were able to make it happen. And

I'm just glad I got to learn more about what you're working on. And

congratulations on everything you've done so far with Aron, progress you're making, and

the awareness you're bringing to just a niche aspect of a

niche industry that a lot of people may not know about. And I

appreciate you sharing your story today. Yeah, of course, Harry. Thank you. It means a

lot to be— your podcast has a lot of people that I've been

watching on YouTube for 5 years, so that it means a lot to just be

talking to you. And, uh, that was a lot of fun. Thank you. Where's the

best place for folks to learn more about Heron and to connect with you? The

website's fine, or our Instagram is fine. Just— I have access

to the Instagram, although I'm not very savvy. They can just message it and Kate

or I will see it and Yeah, that's the best. Those are the

best channels. And I have LinkedIn now. I have that now. Okay,

we'll make sure we have— yeah, that's it. It was fascinating about

LinkedIn specifically for the vertical farming industries.

I've connected with so many people. I had a couple of conversations of new people

coming in connecting with me today. And I always ask people like, oh, why are

we connecting? How'd you find me? And they mentioned the podcast and they've— a couple

of people who are looking for jobs in the industry have been using the

episodes as a way to learn more about the business. So it's been really

exciting to see the community that's on LinkedIn around

this topic. It's been really fun to have those conversations. Yeah, LinkedIn

has showed me how big but also tight-knit the

community is. I had no idea so many of these CEA companies existed. And it's

just fascinating to learn about what each of them are working on. Yeah, so we'll

be sure to, yeah, stay connected. Excited to share your story with our audience.

Thanks, Eric. So thanks again to Sam for that fascinating

conversation about the world of indoor agriculture,

specifically sea beans, something I didn't know much

about. There was so many paths I was excited to go

down. The fact that he had traveled to Bangladesh and

seen how saltwater crops are raised there,

bringing those findings back here to the States, challenges

working with seawater, fresh perspective on the importance

of managing pests related to indoor

agriculture and vertical farming, which was enlightening for me. So

love his interest in sharing all the growing pains that have

been happening with Heron Farms, the, the work they're doing

with some of these brands to help rebuild salt marshes. So many

good things. I'd love to hear what one of your highlights was from this conversation,

so please let us know. We're active on all the socials. Full show

notes available at verticalfarmingpodcast.com. Special

thanks to our episode sponsor, Ceres Greenhouse Solutions. Ceres creates

sustainable growing environments by combining smart design, innovative

technology, and dynamic partnerships. Learn more at

ceresgs.com. That's C-E-R-E-S-G-S

dot com. Podcast production and marketing provided by Fullcast. Sign

up for a free podcast brainstorm at fullcast.co/chat15.

Tune in next week for my conversation with with Sefer

Moussavi, co-founder of Sweetgreen. And as always, if

you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

We'll be sure to read these out on future episodes. 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

verticalfarmingpodcast.com. There, you can

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