Episode Summary

Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show co-founders of Babylon MicroFarms, Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith. Alexander and Graham met at the University of Virginia where they first designed a low-cost micro-farm to provide nutritious produce for food-insecure refugees in the Middle East. They were initially inspired by the desire to bring benefits of sustainable hydroponic farming to those who need it the most. In this episode, Harry talks to Alexander and Graham about the genesis of Babylon MicroFarms, why AgTech and vertical farming are critical to the advancement of our society and technological developments that have been made in vertical farming.

Episode Sponsor

Ceres Greenhouse Solutions

Key Takeaways

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• 03:22 – Harry welcomes to the show Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith, co-founders of Babylon, who share their intriguing origin stories
• 
  
• 
  
• 05:41 – Alexander and Graham discuss their initial educational pursuits and what led them to AgTech
• 
  
• 
  
• 11:41 – Where the inspiration came from to start Babylon MicroFarms and challenges and obstacles Alexander and Graham faced along the way
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• 18:46 – How Alexander and Graham decided where to focus their resources in vertical farming
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• 22:38 – Alexander and Graham share how they’ve grown their team and why they chose to set up shop in Virginia
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• 25:17 – The impact COVID-19 has had on Alexander and Graham’s business
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• 27:17 – Alexander and Graham discuss Networking in AgTech
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• 29:09 – Graham talks about his passion for making products that make people happy and Alexander explains why vertical farming is so important in today’s society
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• 38:06 – What excites Alexander and Graham the most about the future of AgTech
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• 41:36 – A tough question Alexander and Graham have had to ask themselves recently and mentors in the AgTech space that they admire
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• 43:48 – Harry thanks Alexander & Graham for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can connect with them
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Tweetable Quotes

“We were just genuinely interested and motivated by the sustainability methods of hydroponics.” (07:53)

“I think pretty early on we saw that for these smaller scale farms to succeed they required a very different set of problems to be solved than that of a large-scale commercial farm.” (17:50)

“We have really benefited from being in a smaller startup ecosystem. Charlottesville and Richmond both have very supportive networks and we’ve benefited from that.” (24:41)

“Food has always been a really important thing to me.” (30:47)

“I really think that there is a global opportunity to grow the majority of highly perishable produce indoors. And wouldn’t it be amazing to be one of the companies doing that?” (33:38)

“I think one of the technology advancements that I’m particularly excited about is using cameras to automate the collection of what we call ‘target variables.’” (38:46)

Links Mentioned

Babylon Micro-Farms Website

Alexander’s LinkedIn

Graham’s LinkedIn

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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,

I'm positive 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. In case you

missed last week's show, we had a great conversation with Melvin Medina. He's

the agricultural officer at FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization

of the United Nations. I learned a lot about FAO that I didn't

know, and Melvin's journey through

various countries, from growing up in El Salvador, my home country as

well, to stints in Jamaica,

All the way to his current home in Rome, with a lot of interesting

stops along the way. I really, really enjoyed that conversation. Make sure you check that

out. This week we have 2 guests on the show, Alexander Olesen and

Graham Smith, co-founders of Babylon Microfarms. Alexander

and Graham met at the University of Virginia, where they first designed a low-cost

microfarm to provide nutritious produce for

food-insecure refugees in the Middle East. They were initially

inspired by the desire to bring benefits of sustainable hydroponic farming

to those who need it the most. In this episode, Alexander and Graham discuss their

initial educational pursuits and what led them to agtech. We find out where the

inspiration came to start Babylon and challenges and obstacles they faced along

the way. We learn how Alexander and Graham decided where to focus their

resources when it came to building up their company, how they've grown their

team, and why they've chosen to set up shop in Virginia. We learn about the

impact of COVID and how important networking is in agtech. We

also get a peek into why Graham has a passion for making products that make

people happy. And Alexander explains why vertical farming is so important in

today's society. This episode is brought to you by Ceres Greenhouse

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to learn more. I really enjoyed the dynamic between these 2

co-founders, and their passion for vertical farming is definitely evident

in this episode. This week we have a new review from Anand Parade. I

hope I'm pronouncing his name right. Thanks, Anand. He says, this

podcast is super educational, informative, and inspiring. It is absolutely amazing to hear the stories

of wonderful people loved it.

Thank you so much. And remember, if you'd like your review read out, be

sure to get that sent in to us at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

Don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter at

verticalfarmingweekly.com, where you'll be notified when

new episodes go live and get a weekly recap of all things

vertical farming. Let's get into this conversation with the co-founders of Babylon

Microfarms. So Alexander Olason and Graham Smith, co-founders

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

Thank you, Harry. Excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. So I'm

interested in always origin stories, and you guys have a

really interesting one given how long you've known each other. So I'm

wondering if we can start by deciding who might have the best version

of how you guys met. Probably Alexander, you can take that one. Yeah,

so I've been introduced to hydroponics

specifically through an open source project, And then Graham and I teamed

up an organization called HackSeville where we were both kind of exploring different

entrepreneurial projects and I think had some previous

projects. And yeah, I was the sort of took this idea and then

teamed up with Graham and we started conceptualizing what it would be like

to kind of feed a person, a family, and sustain a business

and building farms of that scale, which, you know, 4 or 5 years ago is

a pretty novel line of thinking in an industry that is typically geared

towards massive scale production of a handful of

SKUs. So that was kind of the initial insight and we were like, okay, let's

put them in people's houses. You know, how nice would that be? We were blissfully

naive at the time and started ripping down the fence

outside to build our first prototypes. And it was very, very

scrappy. And then we applied for a grant and we won the grant and then

we applied for another one and it just kind of snowballed. I think at the

first grant it was like $6,500, which is a, you know,

20-something-year-old in college was a lot of money and it helped us build, well, it's

like 5 prototypes in It just kind of went from there. And

yeah, that was kind of the beginning and we've been doing it ever since. Graham,

do you remember the first time you met Alexander? Yeah, I think

we were at, you know, this group that Alexander mentioned called

HackSeville. I think we were both at a hack weekend or something like

that. So everyone came with ideas. Mine was about like

flight simulators or something, and his sounded a lot better. So I

abandoned my idea. He was basically, you know, talking about all the

benefits of hydroponics and just at the time was kind of focused on

accessibility because the benefits are very clear, but there's

kind of a lot of reasons that it hasn't permeated our culture and it is

not as widespread as hopefully one day it will be. And so,

you know, we kind of set out together to try to address that.

Graham, when you initially attended University of Virginia,

what was— were you intending to major in and what were your thoughts about what

type of job you've had when you got out? So I studied biomedical engineering.

Okay. Is a bit of software

engineering, a bit of electrical, a bit of mechanical. So they

prepare you a little bit in everything and not well for any particular

job. At the time I was working on a couple IoT

medical devices. Always liked startups because I had an

internship with the Navy a while ago, and that's, I would say, the polar opposite.

Where you sit in a room for days working on a small task.

That's kind of beside the point, but was working on a couple medical devices

and Alexander came by and had this idea. For a while, I was kind of

juggling both. And again, this just kind of started snowballing to the point

where at one point we had the decision, do we make this

a full-time job? And kind of took that leap of faith.

Alexander, I believe you studied social entrepreneurship. Is that

correct? Is— yeah, I'm wondering where that drive

came from. I wouldn't say I had any drive when I was studying per

se, but I certainly had a drive to do things outside of class, things that

I was interested in. I think that was maybe an underlying problem that

lends itself quite well to doing startups. When did

the world of, for lack of a better phrase, indoor

agtech, controlled environment agriculture, like when did that

start to appear on on your respective radars? Yeah,

I think, you know, I'm sure that there are some industry veterans who would disagree

with what I'm about to say, but I'd say in the last 5 years, the

space has gone through like a complete transformation. I

think we were, we caught that wave. And so while there was a

lot of technology and a lot of promise back then, I don't think it was

as widely known about or really like there wasn't an

industry around it per se in the way that there is today. And so I

think we were fortunate to, our, you know, do the research back then just

based on the value of hydroponics itself rather than

any real understanding of the amount of money and investment that was gonna come into

space. And so I think the 2 things aligned, like we

were just genuinely interested and motivated by the

sustainability benefits of hydroponics and accessibility. And then

simultaneously we just kept seeing like big funding round, new

company, and like that whole kind of commercial wave

coming. And so that doesn't answer your question, but I think the 2 things just

coalesced and we were in the crosshairs and it just

happened where we were riding this wave and suddenly building a

company in the midst of all this activity, which kind of has, I think, has

always made our lives a little bit easier because investors are interested in this

space. And so that helped us. Graham, coming from the technical

side, was there something about, you know, indoor agtech or

trying to tackle a problem of this scale that

attracted you from a challenge perspective or something that

you felt it was new technology that you wanted to dig in deeper on? Yeah,

I mean, I've always been really motivated by building

products I feel actually make people happier and actually

improve our lives rather than kind of, you know,

a new cell phone, stuff like that. So in my mind over

the years, that kind of narrowed to things like education,

health, and within health, I would say kind of a subset is

food. So that, that was what got me originally into medical devices.

But I think food has always motivated me. I think we

treat it, you know, I don't think we respect food the way that

it should be. I think we treat it as almost a commodity or,

you know, material thing that comes in packaging by the

thousands on the shelf rather than something that was grown by a

real human and is an input into how

healthy we are, how happy we are, et cetera. So, when it sounded like there

was a potential technology solution that could

make better food more accessible, I think that really drove

me. And the technology back then,

we kind of thought of it pretty differently, but the idea that it

involved software automation, hardware.

It really is a complex product, and I think that that challenge sounded

super exciting. And going back to kind of describe what we learned

in school, I think it builds on a lot of different things

that together make a hopefully really

useful end solution. Were you always drawn

to technology when you were younger? Yeah. I mean, when I was

a little kid, I was like taking stuff apart. My Xbox broke when I was

12 or something, and I figured out how to fix it and ended up— actually,

that was kind of technically my first job, was fixing Xboxes and

PS3s and stuff. I'd buy them by the crate load and turn them around.

And I would say it only got to be a legitimate

thing once I started working on some IoT medical

devices for startups. I guess one was for an outside startup, one was

For myself. But, you know, health stuff has a lot of

barriers to entry. In food, you can get started a

little quicker. So even though it's kind of a complex product,

it's a bit easier to get rolling. Do you remember the

first computer you ever bought? First computer I bought?

No, I don't. I mean, I've built a couple, but I

feel like at our age we had computers around us from like very

young ages. Yeah, digital natives, I think is the term. I

did find a box of old broken iPods that at one point I guess I

planned to fix in my parents' house and they were like, can you please take

all your broken stuff? Well, some of that old tech is valuable

now. I think people are holding onto their BlackBerrys and their Razr flip

phones and stuff. So yeah, we had to, we threw out our

old phone prototypes the other day. We decided they were not quite collector's

items yet. That's pretty sad though. Alexander, when

you start to think about who would make sense to

partner with, you know, when you have an idea? And it seems like the

first project you worked on was Hack Seaville together. Is that

correct? No, it's funny. I wish I could say there was like a

light bulb moment or anything, but I do think in our case,

like, aside from just like getting on really well, and there's definitely like a

yin-yang situation where our skill sets and

work ethics complement each other, I think It's very much a gradual process.

And I feel like Graham, you know, was always like putting in the hours, just

like didn't. And, you know, we, as a student level, we were like trying to

pull in all sorts of random people to help. And like Graham and I are

just kind of the guys pushing it forward and it just happened. So I, you

know, I wish I could say it was like, ah, that was the moment, but

it just kind of materialized. And, you know, I think there are so

many factors in these decisions and the same with the success of the company or

kind of pending success is, you know, lots of things have to go right for

it to succeed. And fortunately, you know, they just seem to always line up for

us or have done so far at least. What was your biggest takeaway?

'Cause it looks like Haxieville, you were working on that for about, about a year,

is that correct? Yeah, I think the—

we spent about 2 years trying to figure out what it meant to

make hydroponics accessible. Like, is microponic feasible?

Is like this appliance category a real thing? And I think, during

that time, there was a lot of trial and error and also trying to fit

it around like class and like real-world problems. Also deciding whether you want to do

this as a full-time job. You know, I think those are all tinkering time, which

I kind of discredit. I think those are just formative years, which

I'm much more focused on the future now. We've got a good direction. Yeah.

But yeah, yeah. So we spent a couple years just figuring stuff out, did some

accelerators, you know, learned a lot, a lot of the fundamentals. You know, we were

building farms, growing stuff, doing what we needed to do to

understand where, what the direction was that we wanted to take this. And

then fortunately we found that. When did the idea for

Babylon come up? You know, and I imagine it was some, somewhere during the

time you were wrapping up Haxieville, but I'm curious just about that,

that origin right there. I think the, the theme,

the underlying theme has always been the same. Yeah. It's accessibility at its core. And

it's also the feasibility of this kind of micro-farming concept,

which is sort of anywhere from a, home to small-scale production, which is

not, it's kind of the opposite of the industry standard today.

And so that stayed the same, but like, what's, that's still very like high level,

you know, now we're in the weeds of trying to commercialize stuff. It's got much

more specific. And I would say through this process, we kept trying to build

hardware and we realized that hardware is not the solution. It's actually around what

we call remote management. So we have a pretty sophisticated software suite

which underpins What we do, and that is transferable

platform to basically run farms, smaller scale farms

through the cloud and provide them with a high level of support. And that

itself, we realized that, you know, now years ago, but I think

that is what has taken us nearly 5 years to this day to build

and deploy. And that platform really addresses a lot of the

user experience and the barriers to entry for

smaller scale farming. And we really think it is the potential to kind

of create this category and allow us to emerge as the kind of

software that can power all these different small-scale farms.

Graham, in that first year, I imagine there were probably

sets of technical challenges that you may not have even been

able to predict. And because there's just new experiences, you

know, technologies you haven't worked with, or understanding what you would

need to do in order to scale at the level that you you were looking

to scale. So I'm wondering if you can talk through, just take us back to

that first year and talk through what some of the things you were

thinking about as you were ramping up. Yeah. I mean, as

far as first challenges, I think the first was just

getting a grasp on what makes plants grow

and be happy. So of course that kind of starts with

textbooks and researching online and stuff like that, but at some point you got

to get out the saw, you know, make a hydroponic table and

see how they do. So the first couple didn't have any

automation or anything. It was just kind of us

throwing some seeds in, seeing if we could get a good feel for

irrigation, air stones, all the kind of inputs

of growing plants. And, you know, and over that year, we got a

good understanding of that and how they respond to the

different ways you can design a system. And we also got really familiar

with the inaccessibilities of running a hydroponic

system. Like, we were there every day on our hands and knees

pipetting nutrients in and hoping we were following the

directions and stuff like that. So we started automating

certain things like lighting schedule, irrigation schedule,

stuff like that, which I had some experience with.

Which was helpful, but not like a whole lot. And then we started going

from kind of those static recipes where we would just have a baseline

schedule for irrigation and lighting and stuff like that, to having those kind of

depend on other inputs like sensors.

So I'd say just sensors in general are a challenge for anyone.

You see them on a website and it looks like a nice plug-and-play

thing, but in general, when you're trying to actually incorporate them, there are

headaches. So I'd say that was, that was kind of the first 2 years, getting

a good feel for plants that I think we carry through to this day, that,

that really informs any design we do. Normally we can

strike off a lot of feature options and stuff like that just

because we know it, it won't work. Um, it won't keep plants happy and

healthy. And then really just the beginnings of

learning how to automate these farms. And we, like, we didn't have

an app or anything at that point. It was all You know, locally

hosted and controlled. Kind of later on, we

moved that kind of stuff to the cloud and gave the user a nice interface,

stuff like that. Yeah, I think pretty early on we

saw that for these smaller-scale farms to succeed, it

requires like a very different set of problems to be solved than that of a

large-scale commercial farm. So like, to some extent,

yes, we have the same semi-automation that any commercial grow-op has now.

So we're not using a pipette or any of the stuff we did at the

beginning, but like it's combining that with the backend

infrastructure that gives to support with supplies and provide customer support

to allow us to like pull up farms and run them through the, like really

run a whole farm through the cloud and like a Stitch Fix or meal

prep box, provide them with the right supplies. Like that is a whole

pretty unique software stack for, to address problems with

these smaller scale farms that you just really, it just has no relevance to a

big farm. I think that we only saw once we started building and

deploying these farms, we were like, oh, wow, this is pretty— there's no

small undertaking. How did you decide

where in the ecosystem you wanted to play? Because obviously with

vertical farming, you could be everything from the Plenties of the world to

the Freight Farms and go the container route to the people who are growing, the

GrowPods who are building appliances for in-home.

And so there's a whole range of spaces where you could play and technical

challenges with each one of those. as you got

started, you know, how you made a decision about where you'd wanted to

play in this space? Yeah, I think we believed in the

power of kind of onsite farming, right? You know, we have

a slightly different value proposition to that of the larger scale farms. And I

think we're addressing supply chain, we're giving, you know,

accessibility, we're also creating experience. And that to us, the platform we're building

is really kind of a category-defining and shaping platform where our

software and the underlying support would work with a grow pod, it would work with

a shipping container, and we don't want to be building the next best widget. We

want to be enabling plenty of other companies to build their own widgets. And

I think there's an underlying belief with us that there is no one-size-fits-all

solution. There will be pretty tailored solutions

for specific applications, whether that's based on market

sector or the crop variety. And that doesn't, you know, there'll still be, there's lots

of opportunities for exciting hardware products like the ones that we have today. But

I think ultimately the, all of these products will live and die in their

ability to be remotely managed. And that's why we focused all of our attention there.

So we had to have a conversation with some of the companies you mentioned about

partnering, but I think over time the value of our software will become pretty apparent

to them. Graham, I'm wondering from the tech side

where you were looking for inspiration, if this is something that was

new, an area that was new to you, technology that was new to you.

How do you know, like, if you're doing something right and what's the best way

to go about tackling some of those challenges? I think we could look for

inspiration for individual components of the

system elsewhere. Because we're such an integrated

system from hardware to software to consumable

shipments to, you know, customer service dashboards

and stuff like that, it's hard to find a really good parallel for all of

that. But for each of those kind of

examples that I just mentioned, we could look to someone else, like for the

horticulture We definitely have looked to the larger players in the

space to kind of see how they do certain things.

We've looked at other IoT companies that are around to see how they

do certain

functions in their tech stack. That, I would say, is equally

as novel as a lot of the stuff that's happening in the agtech

space in general. So it's hard to find a whole lot

of examples. You know, where they actually reveal what they're doing.

As far as like the service, we've looked at, you know, meal prep

boxes, you know, subscription boxes,

stuff like that. We kind of look at a lot of other different

companies with a narrow scope to figure out how we can

pull off one part of this experience. But kind of at the end of

the day, it's, it's up to us to figure out how to

integrate all of those to make that great customer experience. We're pretty careful to make

sure that we are doing good customer research.

That's something that we're really focusing on right now to make sure that we're not

just sitting in a room coming up with ideas. We're trying

to actually, you know, give the customer a metaphorical seat at

the table how we design this.

Alexander, as you're growing the team, it looks like you're at 80+

employees. Like, is that— what's the latest count? That

might be LinkedIn. There's a glitch in LinkedIn where anyone from

Babylon in the Middle East It shows up as well. That's

funny. So we're working on that, but we're at about 25 people now.

Okay. Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, it starts out with,

you know, both of you and being an entrepreneur myself, I'm just

always wondering about the different levels of how you decide, like,

who do you add to the team first? You know, do you focus on doubling

down on growing the team to support Graham, or do you feel like

marketing is going to be a challenge, or, you know, product development, and I'm wondering

how you think about it and who you looked to for inspiration to make those

decisions. Yeah, I think so. Firstly, like, to this

day, I'd say the team is very heavily weighted towards engineering because we

have a pretty sophisticated and complicated product to build, and we're

only just in the early days of deploying it. So, that's

just how things are, and we're really kind of transitioning out of that now. So,

we see a lot of growth in this kind of support and sales areas.

We also have, you know, between me and Graham, we have a great kind of

decision-making relationship. I can't really put my finger on it, but we just seem

to get stuff done and not disagree too much. And then

we have a great COO, Mark Oosterhout. So, shout out to him. He

has run a large manufacturing company before this. And really, kind of,

I'd say between the 3 of us, we have a great dynamic where he has

a lot of experience building and kind of running larger

companies. So, that seems to kind of allow us to make decisions really

effectively. And we've built an amazing team, really. It's a very talented group

of people and I think pretty well balanced as well. So I'm pretty excited

about the future with everyone around us. And was there a

conscious decision to stay in Virginia or, you know, how, I'm wondering what the

ecosystem is like there for to support like your growth. You know, it's

actually very funny. We get asked that question a lot. They're like, why are you

in, well, we were in Charlottesville, we just moved to Richmond and people are like,

what are you doing there? And quite frankly, like it was just kind of where

we were. Like, I, you know, I, I'm not from America. I didn't really have

a network. We had a network through UVA. And your grandma's from Virginia

too. And we just, we got into an accelerator and we just kept building. I

don't think, I think it's kind of testament to the fact you don't need to

be in the Valley, you don't need to be in New York. And while we're

certainly out there and we have invested there and all that kind of stuff, like

you don't need to be in those places. And I think we have really benefited

from being in a smaller startup ecosystem. You

know, Charlottesville and Richmond both have very supportive

networks, which I'd say Probably much less competitive in many

ways than that in other cities. And so we've really benefited from that.

And it would seem that if you make a presence known in the

community, you'd get the support of the business community in, you know, in

Charlottesville, in Richmond, because, you know, there's probably not companies in—

I don't know how many agtech companies there are in Virginia, but I would imagine

you're probably one of the few. One. One other one.

I'm curious, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, like, what the impact

has been from COVID and, you know, talk about what

happened last year, anything that had to shift for you guys and

what's happened since then. Well, I guess broadly speaking, I think controlled

environment agriculture is like probably one of the biggest beneficiaries,

right? Just from a public perception point of view. For us, there are

certainly some challenges, right? We were not able to install farms at a

lot of locations 'cause they were either closed temporarily or not letting people in.

So that certainly made us kind of reevaluate some things.

And ultimately we've seen a lot more demand than we've ever had

before. So I think that is where we're not constrained by demand, but we certainly

were constrained by like the operating conditions and just the

realities of COVID And I think this year, fortunately,

businesses seem to understand what they're dealing with and are

now much more willing to let us come in and install farms and kind of

prepare for reopening. How much thought goes into form

factor? Because I noticed that like a lot of the units are

customer-facing and as opposed to some other solutions

where they're inside the building and people just see the output that

comes there. But for, you know, with a lot of your units, people are interacting

with them. You know, I think one of our underlying beliefs is that you're

still farming, right? You're still growing stuff. And as wishful

thinking as it may be, like that you can never fully automate it, can never

be perfect. And so I do think our units look really good. And that's intentional,

but they are quite industrial, like inside, you know, there's, we're not trying to

make a perfect appliance or a luxury appliance. I think we,

we kind of accept the realities of growing and then, so we have a lot

of software and support features and that's a huge part of our service

that we offer is making our customers get the most out of these farms.

And so, yeah, we try to blend kind of aesthetics with just straight functionality.

I'm wondering what interactions you've had with other

folks in the agtech I don't know if you were going

to conferences before COVID So I wonder if either of you could

talk a little bit about any of the relationships you've built up with other

players in the space and just the general network of people in the

vertical farming agtech space. Yeah, I think, you know, we definitely attended a lot

of them. I'd say, as you know, most of them got canceled or virtually, it's

not quite the same. We, I would say only

towards last year, were people starting to really kind of take

what we were doing seriously. I know at the beginning, the concept, even

shipping container farming, you know, has a pretty bad rep in some circles. And I'd

say Infarm, who we would say is our main, you know, the main

company in this category alongside us, I think it's our competitor to some extent.

They made this, made the public aware of this concept and the

viability of it. So I think that's helped us a lot. And the ripple effect

of that is that we've been able to build some great relationships with

large indoor growers who I think see what we're doing as a potential,

you know, exciting complement to what they're doing. And I think from a

customer awareness, brand awareness point of view, our farms

or farms like ours, like InFarms, can add a lot of value to the large

commercial growers. That's been the kind of foundation of some of the relationships we formed

recently. I noticed something that I don't see on a lot of the other

sites is in addition to the wide variety of greens, there's also edible

flowers as well. And And I'm wondering if that was a conscious

decision or if that's just the nature of the relationships you're building with

restaurants or specific consumers. Yeah, so

I'd say our end goals are slightly different to that of a

large grower. So really having exciting

varieties that are not that commonly available and kind of

curating them in a way that's accessible to consumers, especially some

varieties that are not traditionally available in supermarkets, really

is a huge value add of what we do. So that's the driving factor. And

they grow well, you know, that always helps. Graham, you said something

earlier when you first got started, you were interested in making products that made

people happier. And then when you were talking about the plants, you were talking about

how you were creating an environment to make the plants happy. So I'm

curious if that's where those lessons were taught

or if that's something that was ingrained in you early age. I'm wondering what the

genesis of that thought process is. That's a good question.

I think I should ask myself that because I

don't know if I immediately have a really good answer, but Definitely when I was

younger, I just liked, you know, consumer technology.

And you might notice that I literally use that as an example of what I

am not that interested in anymore. But I, you know, I had

dreams of working for Apple, like designing their

next iPhone or something like that. I actually applied to

Apple when I was 16 or something because I was already actually repairing their

devices. Oh yeah. you know, more black market style than at

the Genius Bar and got denied. And I don't, I don't think that's

why, but I don't know. I've always kind of, I've grown

up around a family that really cares about

food. Someone in my family had kind of a bad experience with,

you know, we used to eat fast food and stuff. It was when I was

really, really young, but ate a lot of fast food. My, someone in my

family had a lot of problems. with that, like serious,

you know, health issues. And so our family as a whole kind of flipped

to using food for

nutrition to stay healthy. So we started going to

farmers markets and just being really conscious about what we eat.

So I mean, food has always been a really important

thing to me. And honestly, I don't know why I started thinking

about products in that way. I'll think about

it and I'll get back to you. Well, it seems like an interesting

mix because food is important, as you said, and then you

have a love for technology. So I can't think of a perfect mix of

putting those 2 interests to use in working with

a company like Babylon now. Yeah. I mean, in hindsight, I think

it's the perfect job for me. I love the

startup culture, working in a small team of scrappy

people to get stuff out quick and innovate

rapidly. I love food and I love being able to

engage other people with their food. You know, going back to

what Alexandra said, I think modular farming and the larger

farms, I think they're— it's not one size fits all. I think they'll all

prosper and I really hope they all prosper. I think one of the values that

we can provide is actually engaging the end customer.

When you see a clamshell of hydroponic great lettuce

on the shelf of the grocery store, it's not— you're not getting the whole picture

when you're comparing that to the stuff that was grown in Salinas Valley and trucked

1,000 miles. But when you see it growing 5 feet

from your plate, and you can scan something in an app, and

it gives you a lot of information about how that was grown and what that

means for your health and the environment, I think that's completely different. And, I

think the benefit to that person is much beyond their

experience with our farm. I think that we can kind of be part of

helping people respect their food a little bit more. So, you can be the

Steve Jobs and Wozniak of vertical farming then. Yeah,

we just need to— don't want to get too ahead of ourselves, but we'll take

it. Alexander, I'm wondering, similar type of question for you, where

did this come from? I mean, obviously, There was

an idea towards that in terms of how you picked your major, but

why is this idea, this concept important for

you? I don't think it's important to me. I think it's important for the world.

I think there is an underlying need and

pressure that I hope everyone's aware of, especially people who listen to this,

that we need to make some significant changes. And I'm a real believer

in the opportunity for technology to solve that and for

people to create the tools. I think that whole teach a man to fish and

you feed him for a lifetime quote has always like kind of resonated with me.

And I think that's where we come in. Like, that is what we're doing ultimately

with everything we're building is around accessibility at

its core. And I think if we do that, we're creating the tools for something

that really could disrupt large swathes of the food supply chain.

And I think for us, like, fine modular vertical farming today is really a stepping

stone towards what this industry means for the

food supply chain. And I really think there is a global

opportunity to grow the majority of highly perishable

produce indoors. And wouldn't it be amazing

to be one of the companies doing that? So that was kind of the, at

the very beginning, I was like, wait, if all this is true, like the world

needs this, that's the ultimate tailwind is in our favor. So as

long as we don't screw it up too much, it should be a fun company

to build. That was kind of like the simple insight at the beginning. And

then just to follow up there, Alexander, so as you think about What are

some of the challenges that you're going to face going forward,

probably in the next 3 to 5 years? What's something, you know,

that you're focused on as a challenge or a problem to tackle?

We could have a couple more episodes on that probably, but,

you know, I think ultimately deploying, deploying products like this

successfully and distribution nationally and internationally

is going to be, you know, a huge undertaking. It's certainly Certainly doable, but

it's really, that's what we're focused on is kind of getting that

critical momentum with our current products. And we have some

promising signs. I think also expanding our product catalog in the nearer

term as well, I think is very exciting, but certainly with

its challenges. Graham, what's something that keeps you up at night?

Something that keeps me up at night. I think maybe tying

into what Hugh was saying, I just said how much I love the startup

culture, but to scale you need to, you know,

professionalize a little bit. And that's actually one of the kind of transitions

we're working on right now, especially because we have so many

moving parts as we scale. That makes SOP, like

standard operating procedures and rules, more

important, which is one of the less fun things. Not— I wouldn't say

that keeps me up at night, like having to do SOPs,

but— Yes, I think as in

they're— I'm normally kept up at night because I'm excited.

It's not like a negative thing. I'm just like super pumped to go in the

next day and like crank out some engineering or whatever.

Yeah, I think there's some underlying research we're doing and I mentioned, you know, we're

solving very different problems, which is great for our products, but scaling that

and combining with some of the National Science Foundation research we're doing, I think

if some of those things line up, it gets really, really exciting

because it is like truly groundbreaking. And we've got some independent pieces of

technology which have applications across the industry,

but they're still in very early stages. So, you know, I think it's just, can

we push through with our current product and implement

these features? And once we start deploying them, it will become pretty

clear whether they're working or not. But, and if they do work, things are gonna

get really exciting for us. Do you see a

partnerships, alliances of any sort in your future? Oh,

absolutely. I'd say we're— I'd like to think we

promote collaboration at every step. I think both with the indoor growers

and like large indoor growers and with small ones, you know, we have solutions from

private labeling our current units to licensing software.

We're really quite an open book, and I think the way we've designed the system

is pretty flexible. So we do actually see a lot of interest from the

industry today around that, and hopefully that will continue to grow.

Have you been approached by anyone in the community about efforts to

use this as an opportunity to educate upcoming

people in even some of these poorer neighborhoods where there's like food

deserts and just teaching people about this new

wave of indoor agriculture? I think I've seen a common

thread in a lot of these conversations that there's a really good

opportunity to just educate just a whole new generation of

people about new careers in this space. Yeah, I think you're spot

on there. I guess to unpack that a little bit, there's like the education

angle and then there is the return on investment among

food deserts and creating affordable produce. I think there are

avenues for us to do both of those things, but I actually, they're not our

focus at the moment just because we haven't, we have to focus on what we're

doing. But I think as we grow, those are the kind of 2 next

logical steps for us is to create probably more of like a

curriculum around what we're doing so it can be used in schools, and then

also develop some lower-cost systems that can supply

much more affordable produce at a small scale for communities and

organizations in food deserts. So it's on our radar for sure, and we want

to do it. It's just not right now. Question for both of you,

Alexander first. Like, so when you think about the convergence

of the, you know, the price dropping with all these technologies, but also the

advancements in the space, Can you think of one or two things that has you

excited in the space itself? Oh yeah. Yeah. I think the opportunity

for subsidies in the space is humongous and I wish people were talking

about it more. 2020 Farm Bill created the Office for Urban Agriculture.

I think there are some like very early, like quite small grants, but

if indoor agriculture was subsidized anywhere like wind or

solar energy, it would be phenomenal. That's what I want people

to talk about and I don't think they are enough. Graham, what comes to mind?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the technology advancements that

I'm particularly excited about is using cameras

to automate the collection of

what we kind of call target variables. So, you know, when you're

controlling a system, you have input variables like your

electrical conductivity, pH, temperature, humidity, stuff like that.

And you can automate them to, or actuate on them

to, you know, get those variables in line with a growth

recipe, which I think is, you know, what most of the industry does.

But I think one of the things that you're starting to hear about at the

fringe, you know, some really forward-looking companies is

using cameras to automate collection of the target variables, which

are plant health, plant shape, plant

growth rates, stuff like that, that you actually should be

manipulating variable, the input variables to

optimize the plant health ultimately, which normally requires

an expert to go around and

tweak those variables to grow better plants. But

you'll see that some companies are actually starting to use cameras to automatically

detect how healthy, how well these

plants are doing. And then the kind of step after that is correlating

that to all of your automation to continuously improve your

growth recipe to get better and better plants. So I think we'll see

more yields, healthier plants, more nutritious plants,

tastier produce, all of which are huge

benefits to the end consumer. That's kind of one of the things

we're working on with our NSF research, and I know there are

at least 3 to 5 other companies with similar goals.

So I hope, you know, I hope that technology ends up

being as successful as it sounds. How far away do

you think that is? Is that what we're talking months, years? I think

a bunch of people, including us, are kind of testing it

now. Our application, again, is kind of

different than at a large-scale grower. They just have different

requirements, different needs. Different price points, but there are companies

starting out with it in larger-scale ag.

From my understanding, it's more of beta testing, and I think

a lot of people are kind of successfully calculating those metrics. And I think another

challenge is actually using those to affect

the growth recipe, or in some cases, give

suggestions to the grower who's actuating on those

variables. I think we will probably deploy something

with that whole feedback loop in about

18 months, but we've been testing it kind

of up to this point. Another question for both of you.

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

Don't have too much of a weighted pause. I know you're recording, but— Well,

the good thing is we can edit out the pause. I

think there are a couple of things. We're under NDA, so we can't talk about

it. Like in general, like something about, typically it's

something, you know, you're thinking differently, you know,

or either a business challenge or personal challenge. I think, you know, there have been

numerous points where we've switched like direction,

you know, as you have to do. I think it's very healthy to do that.

But like, for instance, we, we've ceased all interest

in the consumer product space. That was a huge decision at the time.

And I think I wanted to do it still for a little bit, and I

think we came to the right conclusion. And similarly, we had a

couple of, I think focusing is really where a lot of this comes

down to. I think it's not doing stuff. It's not like, I would say

that's maybe the most diplomatic answer, but it's probably true. It's like

usually deciding not to do stuff is really where the, if there

is any kind of disagreements, usually around that. Yeah.

Which I hope is pretty healthy because it shows we have loads of opportunities. It's

just about choosing the right ones. Yeah. So just, I

think, one more thought as we wrap up. Can you think

of folks in the space whose work you

admire or anyone that falls into the category of maybe mentors or people that you

work with and that you're sort of keeping an eye on as well because

they're doing some interesting work? Yeah, both of those for

different reasons. Second Chance is Ajit George is

phenomenal. And I love, I think that's a very honest mission and a

fantastic business application where profit,

planet, people, purpose, something like that. But they really do tick all the

boxes as a true social enterprise, which I think is close to

what our heart when we started and doing it at scale with this

kind of, it's just very clever the way it's done. I think it's pretty cool.

And Square Roots, I think, yeah, they're pretty pioneering in a lot of ways and

Great team. And then, you know, they've made the most of shipping container farms, which

I think was a challenge segment, and they're showing that it can really work.

Very cool. Well, I want to thank you both for taking the time to share

the story of Babylon. It's been interesting to see the wide variety

of companies that are in this space. And I think what's tying

everyone together is this mission for doing

better for the planet, as Alexander mentioned. So it's exciting

to see what you've been working on, and you don't see a lot of

founders able to partner together as both you have, sometimes

successfully. So I think it's probably a testament to your friendship and your ability to

work together. So I applaud you on that. So where's the best

place for folks to connect with you individually and to learn more about Babylon?

I think LinkedIn is always the way, and then check out our website,

babylonmicrofarms.com. Thanks again for sharing your story. I appreciate

you taking time. Thanks, Harry. Thank you for the time, Harry. Thanks to

Alexander and Graham for sharing their inspiring story. As always,

full show notes are available at verticalfarmingpodcast.com.

It includes a summary, timestamps, links mentioned, and a couple of quotes

for you to share on social. 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 Sam Norton of Heron Farms.

This one's a really fascinating conversation. I absolutely learned something. new

and fascinating about the intricacies of indoor

saltwater farming. I'll just leave it at that and have you tune

in to find out more. And as a reminder, if you're enjoying this show, please

leave us a rating and a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfb.

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 sign up for our email list to be notified when new episodes are

published.

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