Episode Summary:

Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show Scot Bryson, founder of Orbital Farm, a global agri tech company supplying fresh vegetables, fish, and vegan protein to local markets around the world. Scot has spent his life and career as a problem solver, from picking stones and baling hay in farm fields, to becoming an entrepreneur at 22 and building a multi-million dollar advertising agency over a decade.

Today, Harry and Scot dive deep into the fascinating and honorable work Scot is doing to address existential threats such as climate change and other massive issues like world hunger. Scot gets technical and talks about the process by which he builds a team and how he and his team are integrating advanced technologies in vertical farming. Finally, Scot shares his vision for the future of Orbital Farm, which will include building 200 circular mega projects around the planet to support and feed billions of people here on earth today, and spend the next 20 years prototyping and developing the technology to feed people in space in the future.

Episodes Sponsor:

Freight Farms – https://www.freightfarms.com/ 

Global Vertical Farming Show – https://verticalfarmingshow.com/ 

Cultivatd – https://cultivatd.com/

What We Covered:

03:42 – Harry welcomes to the show space farmer and founder of Orbital Farm, Scot Bryson, who joins the show to discuss his passion for problem solving everything from Climate Change to World Hunger

19:32 – Orbital Farm’s origin story

24:04 – Scot breaks down ‘daily protein’ in layman’s terms

28:02 – How Scot approaches the team building process

38:09 – The complexities of solving issues like hunger and homelessness

46:27 – Scot’s vision for the future of Orbital Farm and let’s listeners know where they can learn more about Orbital Farm and how to help

50:44 – Another critical piece of the vertical farming story

54:18 – Harry thanks Scot for joining the show and reiterates where listeners can go to learn more about Orbital Farms and connect with Scot

Tweetable Quotes:

“We have the same capacity and capability to get through these challenges and struggles. And that was really what I wanted to address and what kept me down this entrepreneurial pathway.” (06:49) (Scot)

“The way that we get through climate change is to look at wastestream sources as revenue streams. And if we can make that leap, if we can identify technologies, if we can enable capabilities to where wastestreams look like valuable resources, we can mobilize global capital to invest in the solutions that are needed to address the challenge at the pace and the scale required.” (08:39) (Scot)

“Really at the heart of what Orbital Farm is is we are a project development firm. We are integrating proven, existing technologies, and developing these business models and developing these project opportunities in different places that will come in a whole bunch of different forms. We have a very clear architecture, and that architecture is driven so that, in twenty years’ time, we want to have the ability to support hundreds of people living and working in space.” (15:42) (Scot)

“The attraction of people to a big vision - when I say two hundred facilities is enough to provide a billion people with food and end World Hunger - that’s an achievable goal in a short enough time frame to adjust the problem. That’s enough motivation for people to volunteer.” (29:13) (Scot)

“It’s gonna take a brilliant financial mind who has done significant work and raised significant capital for other purposes. And this [Orbital Farm] is a great opportunity to now come in and help lead that investment vehicle decision.” (49:01) (Scot)

Links Mentioned:

Scot’s LinkedIn  – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotbryson/?originalSubdomain=ca 

Orbital Farm Website - https://orbital.farm/

Orbital Farm Email - [email protected] 

Sponsor Info:

Cultivatd Website – https://cultivatd.com/

Cultivatd Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/cultivatdco/

Cultivatd’s Twitter – https://twitter.com/cultivatd 

Cultivatd’s Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/cultivatd/

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Mentioned in this episode:

2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews

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you need the full picture before your competitors get it. The 2025

Precision Agriculture Intelligence Report From iGrow News is now

available. Get your copy today at

igrownews.com/precision. If you are starting a vertical

farm and don't know where to begin or which technology would suit your needs,

then reach out to the experts at Cultivated. As indoor farm brokers, they

help connect you to the right technology and ensure your project is successful.

Best of all, their service is free because they work on behalf of their

partners. Visit cultivated.com to learn more. And

that's spelled C-U-L-T-I-V-A-T-D.com,

or click the link in the show notes. Really at the heart of what Orbital

Farm is, is we are a project development firm. We are

integrating proven existing technologies and

developing these business models and developing these project opportunities in

different places that will come in a whole bunch of different forms. We have a

very clear architecture, and that architecture is driven by

this In 20 years' time, we want to have the ability to

support hundreds of people living and working in space. The only way

that you're going to be able to do that is to take a look at

the waste streams and the resource streams that you're going to have available in that

domain in the future and design an ecosystem that can be

derived from that. That's your supply chain.

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 4.

Welcome back. If this is your first time listening, you're in the right place. It's

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.

And as we wrap up 2021, this is the

last episode of the year and not of the

season. So stay tuned for that coming right at your

podcast player early January.

I want to take a moment to thank all the listeners and all the

supporters, all my sponsors, all the

guests that I've had on the show. I would not

have a podcast without all of you, and I am eternally

grateful for your trust in me and your

trust in the show and the value that you get and letting me know

and sharing the story with other colleagues in the industry,

other people that you come across in the industry. And I

have to say, it's been really heartwarming, and I'm looking

forward to kicking off 2022 in the same

fashion. So make sure if you are enjoying the show to leave a rating

or review at ratethispodcast.com/vmp

so I can get to know the community a little bit more. If you missed

last week's episode, Simon Deacon is the founder and CEO of Light

Science Technologies. If you hadn't heard of him or heard of his

company, they're passionate about delivering lighting science and research-proving

plant monitoring solutions that help growers grow more with less.

Simon's got a lot of experience in the LED space,

and we talked in depth about his products and the research his company is doing

and the future of LED technology and how

Light Science differentiates themselves from the competition. We talk

about the impact of supply chain issues— it's on everyone's mind nowadays—

and how they're approaching customer relations through the lens of win-win partnerships. So make sure

you check out that last episode. This week I get to speak to some Scott

Bryson, space farmer and founder of Orbital Farm. Thank you for joining

me on Vertical Farming Podcast. Thanks for having me. Great to

be here. So, uh, we were chatting a bit in the

green room and you said home is Toronto now? Yeah,

I live up in Toronto and grew up in the country around here and

moved to the city for university, started companies, haven't left. How long have

you been either an entrepreneur or

a founder, or how long has that gene been active in you?

It's an interesting way to put it. The gene, I think, has been active since

my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather wasn't an entrepreneur, but he

was an inventor. He worked for a company called Hotpoint in the

UK and contributed a lot of work into

the heating element. So, you know, we've got the wax-sealed patents at

home with the black spiral heating element on the top of

everyone's stove. And so a lot of heating elements that are still in

a lot of irons. GE bought the company, so it's, you know, own it.

But certainly, that gene has definitely been— I feel like

I'm part— that's somehow part of me. And I always just, even

growing up, was figuring out how to put things together. I took

apart and bought a couple different Arc 7s because I wanted to learn and

understand how rotary engines functioned. And I just loved the concept of

them. And never really thought I was going to be an entrepreneur, but

started off while I was still in university, actually. Okay.

you know, a whole opportunity in the how to tell stories in

online space that no one really understood what to do. And so I

created my first company in 2005, which is

the same year YouTube was founded, to give a digital timestamp. I wish

I'd created YouTube. You know, I ran that company for

10 years and sold the company off to a holding group in the US.

And I joined the holding group and their M&A team. And we

helped them roll up another 19 different companies across North America.

I got to work with a number of different investors and their portfolios of different

customers and clients. I got to build another couple different companies

within that holding group and also outside of that with other partners

and really started down this journey about 5 and a half, 6

years ago in 2015, 2016,

when I really started to get a handle on what was going

on with climate change, what was going on with the global hunger

situation, And just the understanding of how

investment functions and how globally we're just not

making the progress that we need to meet the challenges that are in front of

us. And, you know, just understanding that challenges

that we're facing are really business model challenges.

We have the capability of producing as much food as

we want. We can do it anywhere we want. We can capture

all the carbon dioxide that we want. We just need the right business model

to make that function and the willpower to make that happen. I mean,

we collectively as a society decided to end slavery and,

well, for the most part, overt slavery maybe was a better way of

putting it, but we have the same capacity and capability to

get through these challenges and struggles. And that was really what I wanted to address.

And I think, you know, kept me down this entrepreneurial pathway.

I saw that you had some earlier experience with aquaponics as well.

And so was this something where these

technologies, for lack of a better term, were something that you were becoming aware

of? Because I mean, some of the stuff like hydroponics, I mean, it's been around

for a long time, you know, probably maybe even thousands of years,

you know, if you— depending how far back you want to go. And this idea

of ancient civilizations fascinates me as well. So if you look at

some of the stuff that was done in places like Egypt and you're like, well,

to try to recreate that now would be extremely challenging. And so

that opens up another wormhole. But But I think it's in our consciousness, and I

think we just forget sometimes. And it feels like we're going through another cycle of

awakening and realization of what is happening on this planet

and what our responsibilities are as stewards of this planet.

And so can you talk a little bit about what was happening or what was

bubbling up inside of you to make this more alive for you?

Yeah, so, you know, aquaponics is a great example. You know, it's—

I think from my understanding, it's 4,000 years old, and it was taking

place in Central America, it was taking place in Asia, and it

is a replication of what happens in nature. It is

biological ecosystems and the reproduction of that. And it wasn't

until the '70s that it really became scientifically formalized.

And, you know, where we see aquaponics and aquaculture systems today

really sort of was born out of a lot of that understanding.

But the pathway for me was actually a stage

even earlier than that, was in creating food products

from waste streams. I figured that sort of my

genesis moment really came from the

way that we get through climate change is to look at waste stream sources

as revenue streams. And if we can make that leap, if we can

identify technologies, if we can enable the capabilities where

waste streams look like valuable resources, we can mobilize

global capital to invest in the solutions that are needed to

address the challenge at the pace and the scale that's required. That's the general thesis.

And so I started with CO2, you know, how can we look at

CO2 as this component? And I came across this technology that

NASA had created and worked on in the late '60s.

Late '60s is when this work was really taking off. And they were looking

at the situation where, well, we've got this, you know, if we want to do

a mission longer than a year and, you know, we can't bring cows and

chickens and pigs with us, how are we going to have a protein source for

us? And what does Earth's ecosystem function and do? How—

where are protein sources derived from? How is this created? And

they looked into soil microbes,

and these organisms are single-cell organisms that consume sort of

the base level of materials that are available. And, you know,

that's CO2, that's oxygen, that's hydrogen, it's ammonia.

They live in water. And these are some of the earliest organisms that

thrived on this planet. And these organisms

consume CO2. And so when I came across this, this was just

completely eye-opening. Wow, here's a solution that is

utilization of a waste stream source that is causing climate change

challenges and solving a protein challenge problem

with a natural process that already exists. And NASA

has already done a lot of the heavy lifting into this so long ago.

Now, you know, there's so many reasons that that now hasn't been proliferated,

but it's largely been a funding problem. The funding— NASA's

funding changed from supporting human habitation in space in

the early '70s, where that made up more than 50% of their

budget, and all that money was then funneled into building shuttle

program. And all of the work and progress and

huge amounts of progress that was made into these organisms really was lost.

People retired, the companies that did the work and developed the

prototypes all completely pivoted in different directions. I

talked to them and they have no knowledge and no corporate

capabilities within those sectors any longer. So that was really

a big eye-opening moment for me. And I joined and started

helping one of the companies that was commercializing it. They started off in the

biofuel sector. They developed the organisms to be able to

produce polymers and biostimulants and

proteins and oils. To replace palm oil, to replace

other oils for other purposes within the fuel sector or

ingredient sector. And it was just mind-blowing to

have this powerful tool that has a flexibility of

inputs, that has a flexibility of outputs, that is a natural process.

Like, its waste product ends up being water. And so, you know,

it's really what you look for when you're trying to do systems thinking,

when you're trying to do large-scale change, is you look for elegant

solutions. And elegant solutions is a nice way of saying

things just fit in a serendipitous way. But

nature finds elegant solutions because of millions

of optimizations and billions and trillions of optimizations over time.

And that's how elegant solutions develop. And those are the things that as

a species, as a society, that's what we really need to

begin to embrace. And so that's, yeah, that's what we started

doing and taking a look at aquaponic systems, It's a very long departure from

the question of aquaponics, but it's all related because it's

about thinking about cycles and it's about thinking about waste

as resources. And that's what aquaponics really is. It is the waste

from fish becomes the input components for

the fertilizer components for your plants and plant growth systems.

And when you look at an aquaponics system, what drives the economic of

that, economics of those systems? Well, it's energy, it's an

availability of water to start, but, you know, you can get to points where that

water can be recycled. It's the energy and the water and the feed to be

able to feed the fish, and that enables your plants to

thrive. And so that's a really big gap today

in how you're going to develop sustainable food systems for

aquaculture systems. And that really, you know, these single-cell organisms

are perfectly adapted for that. They are the basic building blocks.

and amino acids that are exactly tailored for fish

because that's the basis of the ecosystem in the aquatic sector. What was

interesting is this concept of the waste stream as

not as an energy source, which it can be, but I think the slight

distinction of it as a revenue stream is interesting because I

feel what it does, and you might be able to speak to this a little

bit, is I think when people realize they can build a business out of it,

you sort of get a lot of the brightest minds and investment dollars come in.

And, you know, it would be nice to think that everyone would just do things

altruistically in this world, but sometimes

the driver of making a business out of it can lead

to positive results, especially when you have a lot of

investment dollars. Because some of this is investment and money intensive because

you need— you sort of need to catch up to nature, to your point, because

it's had the millions of years of iterations and

We don't have the luxury of that cycle of time. So I think it's interesting

to see how that's becoming awake for folks

who, like yourself, who have the experience, who have the

passion, and who see this as one of the most pressing needs of our

time. Yeah, I mean, I think you've raised a lot of really important points.

Philanthropy, altruistic things

should be able to solve these challenges, but we have

almost a billion people that don't have enough food to eat tonight. And that number

has increased from last year by like 120 million

people. I mean, Canada's 37 million people

alone. I mean, the scale at which the

problems are proliferating today is vast. And

vertical farming technologies offer capability to be able to address some of

this, but it doesn't address those 120 million

people we just talked about right now. It's

completely focused into leafy greens and high-value

products and extremely luxury type of food products.

And it doesn't really address the bigger challenges and deeper problems.

It certainly has a major impact from a climate perspective, from a logistics perspective, from

helping to produce local jobs and resource streams. It's

not focused on addressing how do you solve these bigger challenges. So it

takes a focused effort to make that happen. It takes business models that are

specifically geared at that. It takes investors that can

get around return on the capital that they're investing in,

so that the projects have to be designed from the core to address some of

those challenges and problems. And so really at the heart of what

Orbital Farm is, is we are a project development firm. We are

integrating proven existing technologies and developing

these business models and developing these project opportunities in different places

that will come in a whole bunch of different forms. We have a very clear

architecture, and that architecture is driven by this, you know, in 20

years' time, We want to have the ability to support hundreds of

people living and working in space. The only way that you're going to be able

to do that is to take a look at the waste streams and the resource

streams that you're going to have available in that domain in the future and

design an ecosystem that can be derived from that. That's your supply chain. How do

you build up the biomass? How do you build up your nitrogen? How do you

build up your water supply systems? How do you build up your proteins and your

carbohydrates and all of the different components that you need nutritionally? to

support human habitation and life. And so you take those design

constraints and you bring that today, and we've got to

figure out how to integrate these systems. We've got to figure out how they operate

at scale. We've got to figure out where they fail and they break and where,

you know, 3 stages down, how the water

filtration system out of an aquaponics system is affected by the

bioreactor that has— that's capturing carbon dioxide from the

astronauts. What if the acidification changes in some

component and that has a downstream or accumulation effect, you know,

3 or 4 stages down that takes 4 years to emerge

before that actually happens? We see examples when you look into the

International Space Station and their life support system. We see examples

exactly like that. The higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere,

the condenser for extracting the water out of the air had more

acidity than they had planned, ended up causing a leak behind the walls

years after. That was the determination, was because of the high

CO2 levels that there were in the atmosphere, and that was what

caused it. Didn't emerge till I think like 5 or 6 years after it had

been built and were operating perfectly fine. But that

situation happening on Mars would mean

likely you've just now lost your entire colony. Mm-hmm. If your life

support system collapses, they're all going to die. And so

that's not an acceptable risk. And so what we need to do is we need

to have the capability of building these large-scale systems, and we need to

test everything. Who knows if algae systems, if a

specific vertical farming system is good for these types of crops, if this aquaponics

system growing these types of fishes is really good. What we need to do is

we need to build a consistent, reliable dataset. We need to have many

different iterations of these different systems, and we need that to be

tested and operated for a 15 to 20 year timeframe.

So not there. That was— Coverdi is one of the

companies that can take CO2 and turn this into proteins and

turn this into polymers and feeds. So that was really, you know, working

alongside that team was incredibly eye-opening. You know, it was a

brilliant team of 16 PhDs that, you know, I jumped in and was like,

I don't know how I can help, but this is the technology that the world

needs, not other technologies. So, you know, let me help you. And—

Sure. I did. And so I, you know, I worked with them on this. And

that was really the germination of this idea was that

core technology is fantastic, but it can't

operate in isolation. It needs renewable energy. It needs

green hydrogen. It needs carbon capture systems. It needs feed mills,

it needs centrifuges, it needs all of this upstream and downstream

processes. And you need to be able to, when you're trying to deploy large

industrial-scale projects like this, you need to have an understanding of that whole

ecosystem. And there are very few people in the world that understand

that. And that's really where the architecture of what we're

trying to develop and deploy really came from and stemmed from.

So can you talk a little bit or take a trip back a couple of

years Talk to me about where you're at personally,

what you're looking at, what you're consuming, or what you're working on.

How does the idea for Orbital Farm start to

germinate in someone like you with all this experience, with all this

passion, with all these opportunities that you've had to work with some of these

brilliant minds? And I'm just— I'm always curious about origin stories, just kind of like

how it all starts to come together. Yeah, so it takes time.

I've been— I was fortunate to be my own investor and have

the patience and have the focused effort to be able to

really learn at a very deep level each of these different

components, from the energy, from the biotechnology, from the vertical farming

systems, from automation systems, from water treatment, from aquaculture,

from aquaponics. It's a PhD in itself.

And so that has afforded me the capability to have this

clear perspective on what to— how to— where to start. And the beginning

phases of the company, what we focused on were to try to

validate, could we develop commercially viable investable

assets at industrial scales, you know, hundreds of millions

of dollar assets? Could we develop these projects in different

locations easily and, you know, with relative

speed? And so we spent our time, you know, going

to the northern part of the Netherlands, going and discussing with

people in the Middle East and visiting Dubai and Abu Dhabi, visiting

Bahrain, speaking to people in Egypt, speaking to

customers in Japan and visiting Japan. We almost built a project for

the Olympics right downtown Tokyo.

And to mining companies alongside operations down

in Namibia and Sub-Saharan Africa and alongside these

other commercial industrial partners. And came up with

truly hundreds of potential opportunities where these could be

deployed if all the right mix was there. If the investor— if you had

investor capital, if you had the right project flow, if you had the right engineering

and feasibility studies completed, these are viable project locations.

And that sort of said to us, okay, well, look, where we're going to execute

first is really going to be important. And so another thing

that's important to understand within, you know, the overall context of Orbital Farm and

what we're trying to achieve is the scale And so

biotechnology is an enabler for aquaculture

systems. Aquaculture systems are enablers for

controlled environment agriculture systems and vertical farming systems. And the

ability to recycle nutrients, the ability to recycle water within

these types of setups and systems are really enabling from an agriculture

production standpoint. And so it's important to understand the

scale of when you learn and understand about fermentation

technologies. These normal businesses will produce

somewhere in the 10,000 tonnes a year, upwards

of 100,000 tonnes a year of a biomass product.

100,000 tonnes of a product at, you know, 80%

protein content, that's enough for 4.5 million people

daily protein every day. And, you know, you're going to do a pro forma

on a project for 30 years. So you build one

asset, you can now support a country like Namibia

of 2 million people. You can support double their population,

which means they could— not that people are going to be consuming this stuff directly

every single day for every meal, but the scale is important

to understand. You now are looked at like a mining

operation, as an extractive resource. You're extracting sunlight, you're

extracting carbon dioxide. and you're producing

significant portions of food products and enabling

assets to be able to enable the controlled environment agriculture systems

to proliferate in these places. So with this, back to the

global hunger situation, 200 of these facilities

is enough daily protein to support the billion people that don't have

enough food to eat today. So that really aligned to our goal.

So when, I think just for the benefit of listeners, sometimes when they hear like

a term like a daily protein, like can you put it in like real world

terms? Like what does that mean? What does that look like? Are we talking like

basically tofu squares or does it, is it

become something a bit more palatable? And I, I think as people think about this,

is it Soylent Green? So people

have these ideas and people have, you know, thanks to movies of these visions of

what these can and probably shouldn't be. So I'm just curious

how you do explain that sometimes for the layperson. Yeah, so

what this actually physically looks like is a powder. They're single-cell

organisms. You grow them in a— it looks like the facility looks like you walk

into a brewery and the large stainless steel cylinders.

And instead of having yeast produce alcohol, we have

these single-cell organisms that are consuming these gases and they

they themselves grow. And you can select those little single

organisms to produce a bunch of oil if you grow them

in the right way. You can have them just grow up a whole bunch of

body mass, and that's the proteins. You can have them

produce a bunch of polymers, so you could make a bio-based

plastic. And so any of these combinations is really just about how

you're growing them and the specific strain that you're going to select, just like a

seed that you would normally select between, you know, different optimized for different

environments. And so you, what you get out of this is

sort of a flavorless,

colorless-ish, lighter color type of powder. And

that powder can then be made into whatever you want. That's really an ideal

platform. You can blend this into flours and make a protein-enriched flour.

Like I'm just doing some experiments at home in my bread maker and I'm

putting 3.5, 4 scoops of whey protein into my bread.

And I'm getting a sourdough-like texture in my bread.

And that slice of bread, 2 slices of bread now,

has almost 20 grams of protein in that. And

so, daily, a person needs, an average adult needs 50 to

60 grams per person per day. If you're working out and really trying to

build up, that could be significantly more, but really, that's what the base

requirements are. Get to a point where you can have a

bread product, which is one of the most universal products on the planet,

and you can provide the daily protein requirement for somebody for

cents. And there's no animals. These organisms are

vegan. You know, you can produce them anywhere on the planet. They're completely climate

independent in terms of fluctuating and volatile climates. And so

you can make them into burgers and sausages and just like the Beyond Beef burger

and just like the Impossible Burger. they could use this protein

source instead of pea protein, instead of soy proteins, and/or in

aquaculture feeds, you know, instead of using soy or instead of using

ground-up fish, which is completely unsustainable and collapses

ecosystems in the ocean. This is really what those little fish

are bioaccumulating anyways and what they're, you know, so you're

sidestepping bioaccumulation of heavy metals and

microplastics and all the crap that's in the ocean that

we're we've put there and exist there. This is a great

way. This is why you want to limit how much red tuna you're going to

consume because it's not healthy for you, what's been bioaccumulated in

that ecosystem. This is completely sidestepping that.

Several different threads I'm looking to pull there. First of all, when's the

cookbook coming out of recipes? That's probably

got to be in the future somewhere. Because I think it's a practical

application, right? Sometimes because people, they hear these concepts and, you know,

they— thankfully for companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible are

paving the way. My partner and I are pescatarian

for the most part. She's better at it than I am. But having grown up

eating meat, it's just there's something about the craving for protein. And I'm

wondering if, you know, this solution like this addresses that, because I've tried

Gardein, I've tried Impossible, I've tried All of them. And if you've grown up eating

meat, the challenge is the texture, but there's other ways to cook it. I

think that's to your point. Just stepping back a bit, I'm always curious,

being an entrepreneur myself and having spoken to tons of

CEOs and founders on the show, how do you think about

compile— like pulling together, you know, the best and

brightest minds? Because I imagine as you're thinking about Orbital

and what this is gonna look like and how to get this started and off

the ground, talk to me a little bit about How you think about building a

team to build something like this? Yeah, the team part's really

exciting. It's frankly been some of the best part of this work.

When setting out on this, it was also thoughtful in the

constructing of this architecture. And space is an important

component to that as well. You know, when you think about how do

you enable this vision, how do you enable this capability, if this is a

business model challenge and this is a financing challenge, how do you enable

solving this problem. And it needs to come from patient capital. It needs

to come from some of the smartest and brightest engineering minds on the planet. Where

do those exist? Where— if you are the smartest person in your high school,

where do people go? Well, you say, you know, maybe they're going to go to

be a brain surgeon, or maybe they're going to go be a rocket scientist.

So— Or it used to be Google and Facebook before

people have realized that they may not want to work for companies like that.

But the aerospace sector has done an fantastic job of attracting some of

the brightest minds on our planet. And the investors that are investing

into the aerospace sector are also patient capital investors. You have to have long-term

vision into these components and capabilities. And so the

attraction of people to a big vision with,

frankly, a realistic— I mean, when I say 200 facilities is

enough to provide a billion people end hunger,

that's an achievable goal in a short enough timeframe to address the

problem. That's enough motivation for people to volunteer.

I can't tell you the number of people that over the years of our business

have volunteered their time, their resources, their connections and

contacts to help further this. And it takes that level to

execute this properly. These are incredibly different

technologies that never typically touch or talk to each other. And so

it has taken a team of 70

different consultants and investors and advisors

to be able to pull all of this stuff together and to really, you know,

double-click deep into, okay, is this possible? This

seems to look accurate. What are some of the limitations?

What are the questions we need to ask? And teasing that all out. Now, we're

not 70 full-time people at all right now, but we're

working towards executing on our first project. And that's really where you start pulling

people together. But The creating an inspirational

message and mission is fundamental to

enabling this future that we want to have. Like, I've got a

2-year-old daughter. No, she's not even quite 2, but she's acting like she's 3. But,

you know, the future I want her to live in, this is what I'm

trying to create. And this is realistic. And this is possible. And this is

investable. And this is— we just need to execute.

And that's the setup, that capability

attracts the right type of people that you want to work with. It attracts other

entrepreneurs. And this is enabling to them as well in different

countries and nations. When you want to build

$200 to $500

million projects, you can't do it alone. You can't build this

from a central architecture. Yeah. You need to be an enabler. And

as an early entrepreneur, I learned really early on that

different management styles. And we first started out in our business and we hired a

bunch of juniors and they would work under us and they would delegate tasks to

them and train them. And it was great. And it was really motivating to be

able to train people like that. But it wasn't until later that I

came to realize that actually, if we hire the people that are way better

than me, and so to do this task, I was able to delegate things

so much faster and easier because I knew the faster I could get this out

of my hands and into their hands, going to come back to me with something

that was 10 times better than I could have done and 10 times better than

I could have educated someone else to do. And so when you can build a

team around some of the brightest and the best minds and be

picky about, look, this is the type of person that we want, this is who

we need, and ask for that to your network, you get some

incredible people back from all over the planet. Yeah, I would

imagine it's an opportunity that would be attractive

to people who are are self-starters who

constantly like to be challenged, who are problem

solvers, who can work independently, don't

need a lot of direction, but also can, you know, just some guidance on

what the outcome needs to look like, but have some flexibility in terms of how

they get there because it allows them to, you know, show their

creativity or their problem-solving skills. I imagine it's a unique mix of

folks that thrive in environments like that. And, you know, a lot of the people

that come to us are, they're in their last stage of their career

and they have worked for 20, 30 years in these

areas and are specialists. And, you know, one of our advisors

has spent his entire career in barley and has done some

amazing experiments and done a whole bunch of fantastic

things and, you know, is completely inspired by what we're trying to

do. And same thing goes from an engineer who was an entrepreneur

himself and had a business and sold it. And a robotics person, again, one

of the top robotics arm companies, sold the company,

finished his earnout, you know, really now wants to give

back and do something meaningful and can bring this huge

body of knowledge from their experience to the table. And then when

you think about the other people that we're going to need to be the

entrepreneurs to kick off these projects, it's going to

need to be people that have already done these type of businesses, As well,

what we're trying to do, to the question of how do you execute 200

projects in a short timeframe, another model, and when we were

designing the model, our business model that we wanted to

replicate was the renewable energy sector and the

what has enabled that scale-up. And what has enabled that scale-up has been

advanced purchase agreements. These, you know, power purchase agreements

were done and you go to a large corporation and they'll say, great,

we want 100 megawatts of power. And then you can take that letter like, okay,

great, GE wants 100 megawatts of power. I'm going to go to the bank and

the bank's going to be like, great, I trust GE is going to fulfill on

this. So here's a loan, Scott, you know, go build a 100-megawatt solar facility

and boom. And now the project developer moves on to the next solar

project and goes and gets a power purchase agreement from Samsung. And

that model is repeated over and over and over. And that's not

typically what we find in the food production industry. And

what we're trying to be is that catalyst. And so what it's going to take

is it's going to take entrepreneurs in every country to be able to

pull together these advanced purchase agreements. And

we're going to try to take that model and apply this into the food sector

so that we can still deliver returns to investors, but

the returns that the investors are going to make are on actually building the projects.

And you're going to be able to deliver a high rate of return for an

investor and they're going to get rewarded for actual construction and

building of the project. And then you've got these assets that are

predictable income, predictable outputs,

predictable food production. And this is perfect for the bond market.

And we're going to build and develop green bonds to be able to

roll up these assets. And now this is applicable to sovereign wealth

funds, the insurance companies, pension funds, where trillions of

dollars are sitting waiting to be invested into

projects that can tackle climate change, projects that can tackle the Sustainable Development

Goals. There is so much money out there looking for a place to

be. The problem is that there are not bankable, investable projects to be

there. And that's at the core of what Orbital Farm is

doing. We're designing and developing and building those investable

assets that can be applicable to those biggest investors on the planet.

Yeah, it sounds like you've given a lot of thought to pulling in sort of

best-in-breed practices for all these different industries. You

mentioned the bonds and the power purchase agreements. I guess the

equivalent would be like a food purchase, a protein purchase agreement. Absolutely.

As well. I mean, think of if you're a company, if you're a

manufacturing company, let's just use oats for example, because it's

what I can think of. This year, we had a heat dome over

North America and the western side of North America

experienced incredible drought, incredible amounts of heat.

We saw a reduction in yields. Canada, by the

way, is the largest oat producer on the planet. We're second only to the

European Union, which is a whole bunch of countries. And we had

a decline of almost 40% of yield,

like 33%, I think, in Canada alone. Wow. But combined between North

America, between Canada and the United States, I think it's like 43% or something along

those lines decline. It's significant. And this has

caused a huge price increase just since the summer in

oats. And so what you're seeing is

climate events and climate volatility is

driving huge fluctuations in the

agriculture sector. And we're just at the beginning of it. we're going to experience.

And so, you know, even when you just start looking at the pricing

volatility in leafy greens and tomatoes and many

different crops, these are over 400% volatility. That's

crazy. If you had 400% volatility in the stock market, you know how many

people would be all over that, making billions of dollars off of

that? Now, that's how stock market can make money, but the reality is

that for the companies that are operating businesses that have these huge price

fluctuations, That's really difficult to manage a business long-term.

So what we offer to large manufacturers are an ability

to lock in a price now before it gets really bad

and lock in a price now for a very consistent timeframe.

Our volatility is based on really the energy. And so we

can lock in these long-term purchase agreements and this can offer that

capability to clients and customers to be able to secure a

supply chain for a long period of time. and move on to start building the

next set of projects. That's at the core of what we're trying to enable.

When we talk about this idea of feeding a starving

population, this is not something that's new for

folks to wrap their heads around. You know, I grew up in the '80s,

and you would have organizations like Live Aid, you know, rice being delivered to

Ethiopia. But then, like, it's this idea of the last mile supply

chain, challenges. And, you know, it feels like the creation of

the food wasn't the problem at that time. It wasn't one of the problems, but

it was just the delivery of getting it in the hands of the people who

actually need it. And I'm wondering, since you do have so many of these

beautiful minds working on this project, if they're thinking about all these different phases of

like, you know, getting the country on board is one aspect, but then getting the

infrastructure with it— does— can it support like a distribution of this food?

Can it support, you know, maybe even education of the population to

like this as another source. And it feels like there's so many

moving parts when it comes to problems like these. When you talk about, you know,

hunger and homelessness, and it's just, you know, sometimes they're so big that

people have a hard time wrapping their head around all the different moving parts. So,

you know, it's an area of focus. You know, we haven't cracked the nut totally

yet, but I feel really confident in the direction that we're going. The

hunger has a number of different layers. Hunger generally,

there's food insecurity, just generally in North America, in

the developed world, where you're just not close enough to a retail store, that

largely can be served by a lot of smaller-scale vertical farm

systems. That has a great opportunity to address some

of the regional distribution challenges and issues. In the developing

world, a lot of hunger really at the end of the day is driven

by because they don't have enough money. That's a big, big component of the

reality of the situation. And They get into hunger

situations not 24/7, not

every day of the year. It's really between a 2 and a 4-month

timeframe during dry seasons or wet seasons when they have an inability

to be able to produce income and to be able to then afford some of

that food, or their crops or their fields or their

farm just isn't being able to be productive. And that really is a

huge stress and drain. And so that gives really

interesting opportunities because if you can think about a facility that, you know,

2 to 4 months of the year that it needs to be focused in helping

a local population, but then, you know, the rest of the year this could actually

be used to export product to an international market, to

one of these long-term offtake agreements. Now you can start to build

really interesting business models that are designed where you're baking in,

you know, covering those costs, providing maybe even food purchase

agreements through or World Food Programme. The other layer of hunger

here that you mentioned is also logistics and transportation and what we're feeling

right now. It is a real and significant problem.

We need to get off of this ability or this concept of aid

being, you know, we're just going to produce this and ship over some bags of

rice and soybeans. This is— these people aren't getting zero

vegetables in their diet. These people are not really— I mean,

they're kind of surviving, but not really. What we need to do

is we need to have their ability to be able to produce food in their

own home, in their own country. Like, that's what we need to enable.

And in order to do that, you can't just provide a finished product. You need

to provide a product that entrepreneurs there on the ground can add

value to. And this is why centering a system and

centering an Orbital Farm project around these biotechnology hubs that can

produce hundreds of thousands of product in a market can get you to

that to enable an entire industry to emerge of

aquaponic systems and the training that can come from that, the ability

to be able to then finance controlled or covered agriculture

and greenhouses and hoop houses, and the ability to even start thinking in

these ways that right now, just, it's not even a possibility

to do that. So that's sort of how I think about these

challenges and how we're pulling this all together. One

other point that I guess I want to say just before the end is practically,

where do we start? I've been talking about all these wonderful utopian

perspectives. And the reality was that when we

started looking at developing projects in all the places that I mentioned

earlier, they're really remote. And if you want to

build 200 projects, you're going to have to show that to

at least 1,000 investors because you're not going to get yes on every single

time. Definitely. And 1,000 is definitely on the absolutely

lowest scale of what you're going to need to do to make that happen.

And so if the first facility is 3 or 4 hours drive from an international

airport, how many investors are you going to be able to convince to get on

an airplane, go fly to this remote place, drive to that place, see the

facility? How am I going to get 1,000, 2,000 investors through there?

The place that emerged was New Mexico.

And at Spaceport America. And Spaceport

America is in the middle of a desert-ish. It's not,

it's not, it's not a bunch of sand desert, but it's in the middle of

nowhere. It gets well over 300 days of sunshine every

year. It is incredibly water stressed.

It's in a what's called an opportunity zone in the United States. It's the

communities came together, self-taxed themselves to

build a spaceport in their community because they wanted to attract

business and industry there because they were suffering and their

ability to be able to produce and develop really

the very first spaceport on this planet is completely inspirational.

27% of people in this county are currently living in poverty.

Wow. This is a county of 10,000, not even 11,000 people.

This is crazy. And so This is a location where—

and New Mexico is the most food insecure state in the United States. This is

a location where we can build and develop a project that we

can provide food to a local community who frankly deserves it. It

also is the place where 700, 800 people, I think now, have

paid for their deposits to fly in Virgin Galactic. And if you've got

$200,000 to $450,000 to drop on a 1.5-hour

adventure to go into space, You likely have a few other

hundred thousands or millions of dollars in your pocket. And you're going through a life-changing

moment. You're there for 2 or 3 days. We're going to be able to provide

you salads and smoothies and sushi. And we're going to give you a

Disney-like experience for adults that is going to blow your

mind. And your family and friends are there. And we can give

you this luxury experience and demonstrate to you, this is how we change the

world in a positive, reinforcing way. And you have an

opportunity to Provide that purchase advance purchase agreement to be the

catalyst. Choose where you want it located. Do you want to? You're from the Middle

East. Great. You know there's a huge food security problem there. You're from

India. Awesome. You know there's so many opportunities in there. You're

just you're from California. Great. Look, these are all possibilities. Your

corporations, your investments that you currently probably have, they probably have a

carbon dioxide problem that we could turn into a usable

product, a valuable product. You probably have a renewable energy opportunity or problem.

and we can develop renewable energy project alongside our project and

reduce our overall cost of energy for both of us. Co-developing these

type of assets are perfect. You probably have a waste stream challenge that you're dealing

with. We can gasify waste streams, we can reuse wastewater,

we can extract nutrients from wastewater streams. So there's so many

great opportunities for us to sit down and have that conversation with them. And

this really becomes that catalyst project. And so we're focused right now on

building a project there at Spaceport America. where we're going to build a

microgrid to be able to power and support the whole facility. We're going to have

electrolyzers to be able to produce hydrogen there. We're going to set up a carbon

capture system and capture CO2 directly from the air. We're going to have

greenhouses that are going to be in between our rows of the solar panels so

we can demonstrate the production of food and energy and what that marriage really looks

like. And we're going to demonstrate these technologies right there

where there's an actual need and it's an investable opportunity.

It is secured by a power purchase agreement for selling the energy, and we're

looking for customers to buy food products and do food purchase agreements and

hydrogen purchase agreements. And all these assets will build up to

pulling this project and asset together to be the catalyst project for

all of the others. Lots in there.

I kind of wish we had another hour to go deeper, but it's funny because

I had some questions I was going to ask you about the roadmap. I was

going to ask if you had an ask, and You sort of very nicely bundled

everything into that summary of what's happening in New Mexico. Very

smart to sort of take advantage of that captive audience that's there already,

that is probably at that point in their careers where they've accomplished

what they want to accomplish and they're there for that experience. But also,

there's a portion of them who do think about maybe legacy

and what they want to contribute back. And so it's really exciting that you've been

able to kind of think about all those things ahead of time. and have that

happen, educate them as to what's happening in New Mexico.

And then really maybe something that they might not even be aware of, or just,

you know, it's something that's crossed their mind. But I think being able to paint

the picture of what's possible and how their

investment of time or money or resources can help do something

that's actually for the benefit of the entire planet as well. Yep.

Thanks, Harry. I appreciate that. I mean, it's sort of one of the situations where

it's like, Why wouldn't you help with this if you have the means and

capacity? Like, why not? That's what we've spent the time

trying to figure out and trying to cut up all those arguments. And okay, how

do we address this? Why not? Okay, we'll move on to that next challenge. And

that's, that's the life of an entrepreneur anyways, you know, when you're developing,

designing product that you work through that cycle. I guess, you know,

one other thing that I'll say as well, just as from an ask

perspective, Another key person that would be fantastic at this

point would really be someone that has

raised over $1 billion. What we want

to do is we want to pull together

and finance a large number of the projects from the

concept phase to the bankable project phase. And

we want to work in partnership with other companies that already have

technologies We don't have patents on any of these systems. We are licensing of

technologies and to integrate and deploy these. But what we

want to do is we want to build a portfolio of investable options

and potential projects. And what that takes is that takes a

3 to 7 person team depending on the scale scope of that project.

And it's going to take 2 to 3 years to pull that whole project together

to get that to a fully bankable point where you've got the permits, you've got,

you know, your 3 different levels of FEL studies, you

validated the concept, and your offtake partners de-risked that project

where you can go to a bank and say, you know, give us low-cost capital

to be able to build this project and get construction financing to

build the facility. It's going to take a brilliant

financial mind who has done significant

work and raised significant capital for other purposes, and this is a

great opportunity to now come in and help lead that this

investment vehicle decision. And so that would be my other ask, you

know, if others know of other people, come visit our website

orbital.farm and send us an email. We'd love to hear

from, yeah, some people that this may be inspirational to.

So the best place is for people to go to orbital.farm to learn more?

Yeah, that's our website. And I think, yeah, you can read a little bit more

about some of the activities that we're doing. some of the different initiatives

and work that this takes us into. So there's space law components to this. There's

a little bit more information into, yeah, the activities

and the details. And yeah, that would be great. We'll make sure all those

links that you mentioned are in the show notes. I get

the sense that this is going to be a conversation that's going to get people

excited and wanting to learn more, especially since it's a little bit different

than other companies we've profiled on the podcast. The fact that you're—

the vision seems to be— is bigger. And I think we do

need big thinkers and big visions that I think at a time like this, I

think it's— it really speaks to the importance of what we're trying

to solve. And, you know, as many bright minds as we can get

working on this, I think, um, they'll all be needed. And we'll probably

need others more that we haven't even discovered yet just to kind

of put their brainpower to this because it's a huge problem to solve. And it—

but I think it's, it's It's exciting and promising to see what progress

you've made and how you're thinking about solving it, which is truly inspiring. So

I really appreciate you sharing your story, Scott. Thanks, Ari. I really, really appreciate

that. The only other piece that I don't know if we really

had a chance to really address was more into the actual greenhouse

side and the vertical farming side of things. There's another

really important piece to this story that what we want to be able to

enable It is multiple different types of crops

that can be grown within greenhouses and vertical farming systems. You know,

when you're thinking about how do you build life support systems, how do you build

food production systems for communities and for countries and, and for

eventually space colonies, you've got to grow everything. So

we've got to figure out how to grow bananas in greenhouses. We've got to

figure out how to grow guava and how do you put fruiting trees

into systems. This is amazing research to be done. Can we

do that profitably compared to doing it on the ground? No, not likely.

Not maybe in Antarctica. Yes, that's maybe profitable there.

But the work still needs to be done. We still need to understand what the

lighting recipes are, what the nutrient concentrations are, what is that

specific tailored environment that is perfect for all of these different species of trees.

And before something, you know, something happens and

they become extinct or are— and have the

farming knowledge gets lost. That's a huge fear

that, you know, we've got a huge aging farming population and some of this

knowledge is going to get lost. And as the climate changes and

the ability to grow specific crops in these regions and areas, that farming

knowledge is going to die. It's going to pass away with the farmers that live

there. They're not going to completely migrate up to all the different zones where they're

going to they're going to live. So, you know, how do we preserve that knowledge?

These are, these are really important things that need to be addressed and

why I think this also has an opportunity to be sort of like another

international collaboration project like the International Space Station. That

the ISS has been operating for 21 years and we've

had, you know, nations that were during the Cold War be able to come

together to build this important component and piece of technology

and conduct research that is truly benefited everyone here on Earth significantly.

And we have that same opportunity here with this, and that through

vertical farming systems, through agriculture systems, through controlled

environments, this is that next opportunity for people to

get involved in. And then just lastly, you know, other areas

in the vertical farming space that we're interested in are in plant growth

for how plants can be used to produce plant-based vaccines, for

example. Or other animal proteins, even with plants

themselves. These are really, you know, developing multi-use

capable type of assets and type of vertical farming systems.

That's really what we need to have. You need that optionality to be able to

produce a variety of different foods and crops. And you need a product

that has high enough value. If you want to build a business model that can

actually tackle and address hunger, you need a

high-value product that can support financially the

ability to do that. And as long as you don't have overly greedy

investors that are holding the equity and making the decision not to

take huge dividends out, you can build a business structure that can

actually feed people. And so this really takes us into a whole variety of different

types of products. We're not interested in cannabis, just for the, you know, that

was something we avoided and it's really not part of our mission,

although it is high value. But I think it, it completely distracts

from what our core message is. So. And there's plenty of folks doing

a lot of work in that space. They're going to be perfectly fine.

I'm not, I have no issue. Yeah. Lots of

ideas. Gets the wheels turning. And I feel like this is going to be a

really inspiring episode for folks to listen to and to just think

about ways to connect. So is contact

information on the site as well if people want to connect with the team as

well? Yeah, okay, I think it's [email protected] is

the email that can— you can get at me. And, um, yeah,

reach out and would love to discuss and come back on and

talk a little more later. We'd be happy to continue the discussion. I

appreciate you sharing your story, Scott. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to

Cultivated for being a fantastic sponsor. If you're looking into a vertical

farm and don't know where to start or which technology would suit your needs, make

sure you reach Reach out to them today. The best part about it is that

their service is free, and it's because they work on behalf of their partners.

So head on over to cultivated.com, just leave off the last E.

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those out on future episodes. Until we meet again, here's to your health.

Thanks for listening. To read the full show notes for this episode, which

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transcription, visit verticalfarmingpodcast.com.

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