Jon Friedman is the COO and co-founder of Freight Farms, an organization that provides agricultural products and services that enable on-site commercial food production anywhere in the world. Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he and Jon discuss the growth of the AgTech industry, the value of marketing and the grant Jon and his team received from NASA to further their work with vertical farming.

Special thanks to our Season 1 Sponsor

IGS – https://intelligentgrowthsolutions.com/

Key Takeaways

• 00:01 – Jon shares his origin story of how he originally became interested in AgTech and the inspiration to start Freight Farms.
• 13:19 – Jon speaks to the importance of educating those looking to enter the industry in order to scale agriculture
• 20:25 – The value of having Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and marketing plans in place
• 25:58 – Jon expounds on Freight Farms’ latest model, The Greenery
• 29:13 – Jon talks about the grant he and his organization received from NASA
• 32:30 – Jon speaks to the trends that excite him about the future of AgTech
• 38:23 – Where listeners can follow and connect with Jon

Tweetables

“Admittedly, I don’t have a green thumb, I would say, but I have a green mind.” (00:52)

“The current food supply chain is not set up to support the entire globe, even though it’s a very centralized global system.” (10:05)

“Our goal as a company is to continually lower the barrier of entry for anybody looking to get in or anybody looking to scale agriculture.” (13:48)

“What a lot of folks in this space look at first is, ‘What’s my ROI? What’s the economics of growing?’ And, if it works at that scale, scaling gets a lot more realistic.” (22:46)

“NASA’s a really interesting organization because you go there and they forget that they’re NASA sometimes. They forget how awesome the scope of work that they have worked on over the years is so they’re very casual about it. We tried to act cool but failed miserably.” (32:14)

Links Mentioned:

Jon’s LinkedIn

Jon’s Website

Jon’s Twitter – @JonFreightFarms

Freight Farms’ Instagram – @freightfarm

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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, welcome back, episode 5. If you are new to the

show, then this is the podcast where we interview fascinating CEOs and

founders of some of the leading vertical farming companies in the world.

In case you missed last week's episode, I had a great conversation with Henry

Gordon-Smith of Agritecture. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend you

check it out, episode 4. This week I have the privilege of speaking with

John Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Freight Farms,

an organization that provides products and services that enable onsite

commercial food production from anywhere in the world. It's one of the first companies

I came across when I was looking at some of the things that were happening

in the world of container farms. And so excited that I got the

opportunity to have a conversation with John. We discussed the growth of

the agtech industry, the value of marketing, and the grant that

John and his team received from NASA to further their work. John has

a great origin story, and we also speak about the importance of educating those

looking to enter the industry now. He gives us a little bit of insight into

the latest model of Freight Farms, the Greenery, and we cover some of

the trends that are exciting him in the world of agtech. If you

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

review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

Okay, let's get into this conversation with John. So John Friedman, thank you so much

for joining us on the Vertical Farming Podcast. Thank you for having

me. It's been a bit of a busy day for

both of us in terms of scheduling, so I appreciate you taking the time. No

problem, excited to talk. So when you— a bit of

background I think would be helpful. I'm sure people who are listening to this podcast

would likely know who you are, but I'm

wondering if you could kick us off by giving us a bit of your background,

how you ended up in agtech and your passion for agtech, where that might've started.

Sure, sure. So I'm one of the co-founders at Freight

Farms, and I take on a lot of the product role,

but mostly operations. And that covers everything from

sales and marketing, how we present the product, to how we support the

product on the backend once they're in the field. But how I got into this

was actually nowhere near farming. I

have a— admittedly, I don't have a green thumb, I would

say, but I have a green mind.

I started in industrial design and systems engineering,

and I really was attracted to how

ecosystems and economies come together. And

early start, I worked a lot with companies like Procter&

Gamble, Unilever, and found my way into a

company called Merck. And Merck, if you're familiar with them,

they are a large pharmaceutical research company.

And they're one of those companies that are so big you can't really tell exactly

what they do, but you know it could be evil or it could be

like saving the planet, one or the other, but definitely

not both. And I got to work on some pretty exciting projects there.

One team that I was on, basically what they do is they build

these large metal vats and inside

they try to create an environment to keep a living organism

alive and that living organism is usually some type of virus. So they're

trying to keep this virus alive for a long period of time so that they

can test the virus against certain things that they're

developing. So they want to keep this living, they call it a bioreactor. Okay.

So they're keeping this bioreactor stable and

the stable environment inside. And what my job was is to

look at how the scientists are interacting with said bioreactor and make sure it's a

safe and sustainable practice. So let's imagine that one of

those viruses is something really deadly. We need to

go to that bioreactor and we need to sample off a

small volume of material. Well, to do that, there

is a lot of risk of exposure to that penetrating the core of this thing,

bringing it into a new vial, transporting that, and then taking smaller

samples off of that. So a lot of risk areas. And the whole time we

need to keep that thing alive. Man, I was so amped by this.

This was like my dream job. It was so sci-fi, so

cool. And a lot of the things that I was working on there

really brought me into the world of workflow, process,

and environmental control. And a lot of the

fundamentals that I learned there on that pharmaceutical scale

and that safety scale was really something that I didn't know then,

but would play a big impact in the things we're doing now. As

you can kind of make the parallel, we have a big metal box and we

have living things growing inside of it. We want to keep that environment exactly what

it wants to be and tune it to the different things that are growing inside.

So that's the most direct work parallel I have. How we got into

this as a business though, me and my co-founder were, we had

previous marketing experience that we knew each other and we were

around this school system that he was working at. And he had

come to me and said, hey, you know, they're looking at doing this rooftop greenhouse.

And we had done things like sound design, stage design for

larger events in our marketing days. And we're like, you know, a greenhouse,

kind of like a stage and like the, like all the electrical and lighting, like

that's like right up our alley, dude. Let's do it. And so we threw our

hat in the ring for it, and it was a school, so they were like,

whoever wants to do it, we'll take it. We'll take the

feasibility study as a start. We went down that road

and we basically at the end came to them and said, don't do it. Here

it is. Our recommendation is do not do this. It's

not going to make sense. The square foot, the infrastructure you're going to have to

put in place just to get something on top of this

1920s building, nevermind how are the

kids getting up and down? Like what volume of production makes sense

for the scale that you're investing? We went through all this and then at the

end we were like, if you're going to do this, do it for show. Don't

do it for production. 'Cause they're not going to get that return that you, in

your mind, makes total sense, but you're not thinking about all these other

practical things. So years later, we come back to

them as Freight Farms and we say, hey, we think we got what you want.

And they became one of our first clients. Where was the idea for

what would become Freight Farms? And I know there was an early iteration of what

is now Greenery, but when did you see— because there's a lot of different

ways, and obviously from all the research I've been doing for the podcast, obviously,

if you think about Dickson's original thought about the skyscrapers, right, that's one

avenue. And I had a nice chat with Henry Gordon-Smith about

different views of what a vertical farm actually is. But I think what you're doing

with Freight Farms and the container farms, was there someone that— or were

there people doing it with containers specifically? Because I know the idea of

repurposing containers is not anything that's new. So when did you sort

of marry that, those 2 pieces together? Yeah, when we started,

we were kind of— even urban agriculture was very young,

that telling people who are into urban agriculture or even calling it agtech

was a little bit laughable to the people we would bring it up to. We'd

be with like, you know, startup accelerator folks and they're like, just don't say that

out loud. That's not like a thing. Sounds like very jargony.

Yeah, it does. But fast forward, agtech is a thriving

genre. So back then, we were, you know, we were looking

at the footprint, the impact, the

production, the yield. And one of the things that just kept on coming

back to is standardization is something

that this industry so desperately needs so that

people who are not experts can get into this field.

We were talking to schools who, they don't want to become engineers,

they don't want to become horticulture experts, they don't want to take their master's, they

want to get people into this experience and see it as

a revenue stream, but also a way that learning can happen at

every stage of the process. So when we were starting out, one of the bigger

things was, how do we take the cost out of a greenhouse?

How do we take it out of a rooftop greenhouse? And so the vertical

rooftop dream really had the biggest limitations of that

structural frame is— there's like

a barrier to entry with cost. So if you are anybody who's

interested in this, don't start until you have $1 million in your pocket. And

that's— to get into agriculture, that should not be the

barrier. And so for us, it was, what can we standardize?

And what can we look at that it's going to be the same here as

it is in the islands, as it is in cold weather and hot

weather? And how can we make something a universal

starting point so that more data can be shared between

this community of growers, right? Because they're all working on the same

platform. So that was a big primer that we had going into this.

And I was already looking at shipping containers for more of

a home aesthetic. And I think around that time,

one of the pillars of containers are cool was

Puma City. It was this traveling pop-up shop that Puma

made for, I think it was a boat race.

There's, yeah, there's this boat race that goes around and they had come to Boston

and it was It was just a thing of beauty. It was,

I think, like 16 containers or something stacked on each other. And it was

really an exercise in, can we do it,

for them. But seeing what they were able to do with taking this and

move it to city to city and just work very quickly because their

framework was fixed really put us in a spot of saying,

okay, what efficiencies can we actually gain by

fixing the size and designing into something where we know we have

a finite amount of space? Actually, how has some benefits to it.

We're thinking about headspace, that space above where

that human's interacting. Anything that's not growing in that space

is just wasting energy. You're heating and cooling. The sun is

a great free resource, but in Boston, at 3

o'clock, it's dark. So, you know, if you want to be at a

production yield level, you need to be at a place where sun is not

creating more heat. sun is not adding like

fluctuations to your light cycle and you are locked in. The second you

lock yourself in with these, these parameters, it's

much easier to find efficiencies and then balance across your systems.

So talk to me about the 1.0 version and then what you learned from that,

and then we can move into the greenery. Sure, sure. So the first, first

iteration of Freight Farms was called the Leafy Green Machine, and

we started out doing a Kickstarter in

2011. We came out and said, hey, we're going to solve all

the world's problems, no big deal. And unfortunately, everybody was

like, oh yeah, prove it. And we're like, okay, we

got to put, uh, put this to work. So, it was really exciting though,

because through that, we started to understand the customers and the

needs that are out there that are outside of urban

agriculture. We really, by, by doing it this way and saying, hey,

we've got this, Crazy idea. We want to know if people

would actually want this, and we want your support if you think it's a good

idea. We started to see that the problem wasn't so much

farm-to-table, everybody wants that, and it just can't get it. It's

really accessibility, and that the

current food supply chain is not set up

to support the entire globe, even though it's a very centralized global

system. So, we really learned a lot about the pockets of the world that this

is this is ideal for. And then along the way, found a lot more

folks that actually were always finding new industries and new

applications. So the original was really just that proof of

concept that we built out of Kickstarter. And then our first production run

was in 2014, and that was the Leafy Green Machine.

And that was essentially what is the cutting-edge indoor growing stuff that

we can integrate with each other at that time, at the price point

that makes sense for a return on investment. And so, you know, there was a

lot of integration that we had to do with certain vendors and find

alternatives to make sure that it was a cohesive system. Fast forward till now,

we have a completely built from the bottom up, everything is an

OEM solution because to get those efficiencies, you can't take 2

off-the-shelf things and just stick them together. You have to think about them in

parallel. So we've come a long way since 2014,

but also a lot of the technology has as well. I think we're

still seeing more efficient indoor lighting

applications as it comes to using power and then limiting heat.

So for us, that's really important. And, you know, just having that software

platform that we've built from 2014 till now growing and finding

all the recipes that we can now give back to the network, that

has really guided what we want to do with the hardware and the software

combination. And that's Farmhand? Yes, Farmhand. Yeah. Okay.

And was the thought initially, When you started and you

had the Leafy Green Machine, was there always in the back of your mind this

idea that it would have to work in parallel with software, like, like a farmhand?

Because the value that you get in this environment is from the

iterations of what works, what's not, how were the

yields. And so I'm sure it feels like a bit cyclical, but you're getting

feedback, which drives the software, which improves the software, which helps

improve the container. Yeah, absolutely. Well, from a

product development side, that's a huge piece for us. I'm a big believer in

just constant feedback. But when we think about the

classic vertical farming and some of the vertical farming applications out there,

they're really moving forward with just the same thing as a field. It's

like, find a big spot and grow as much as you can in that spot,

and then get transit vans and packaging and distribution off of that.

We're looking at a food system that looks more like 3D

printing did for manufacturing, right? A distributed system

that allows people who are earlier stage to get into

manufacturing. So with 3D printing, you're basically saying you don't need to do

bulk orders just to get the price point you want. You don't need to have

a team of engineers just to get that first proof of concept out

the door. And for us, that proof of concept is a specialty crop in a

specialty market where you can prove your market and you can prove

your cost and relationships, and then you can scale up

from there. So for us, the smaller-scale distributed

that was all connected was the way to go to bring

more people who wanted access into the game and then use that

network effect to build a community of growers. I know that part of what

you do is also provide a lot of training for folks who are just getting

started as well, because if you think of a typical farmer tilling the soil,

you know, the concerns that you would have in your overalls and pitchfork in the

past, you almost need a different skill set or at least a willingness to learn

new tools if you want to be a farmer in this day and age, or

at least, you know, participate in this type of tech environment. So how much

or how important is the education aspect of what you guys are doing with

all this? So our goal as a company is to

continually lower the barrier of entry for anybody looking to get in

or anybody looking to scale agriculture. What that means is, you

know, there's a lot of pressure we put on products for this space

that need to match products we see out in the world as consumers. And

it's easy to navigate, the usability is very high. So

that's the path we want to stay on. That being said, farming

is work, and there's so much

we can put into the product and new products as they go, and there's a

real necessity to understand what the fundamentals

of plant development and crop cycles and things

around the life cycle really is.

So we put a lot of, I wouldn't say importance, but a lot

of entry points for people who are looking to learn in

the decision-making process. Besides the Greenery and

Farmhand, we have something called Farm Camp. So Farm Camp is a 2-day intensive

that we'll do here at the Free Farms HQ. We'll be in the

farm, we'll be doing classroom lessons, and we also do on-site

visits for folks who are maybe larger institutions and they've got like a team

of like 10 or 20. Well, actually, some of our team will go there and

set up shop so they can work within your facilities as well. So that's a

really cool thing that we've realized helps get over that.

I've never farmed before. I don't have a green thumb. I'm a little bit

intimidated. And just letting people like feel

themselves in that space and getting through some of the fundamentals that they might not

have needed, but gives them that comfort to really start from

day one at full sprint. We also have something called Farmhand Academy.

So we do have a lot of international clients and clients who just, you know,

they're not going to see flying to Boston or a 2-day

intensive as something that they might not have the budget for. So with Farmhand, we

have the Farmhand Academy module. So that's everything you would learn in

Farm Camp, but broken out into smaller bite-sized lessons

that you can learn as you go. So if you run into something, I've never

seen this before, how many do I seed if I'm seeding lettuce versus kale?

What's the watering cycle for this versus that? If you want to know just the

answer, we have the knowledge base there for you. But if you want to know

the fundamentals behind it, that Academy course is right there for you.

Have you seen a specific profile with folks that are coming in? Is it people

that are looking to change their careers? Is it people that are coming in from

traditional farming? What's that mix look like? Yeah,

yeah. We've had an amazing outreach of folks

from all different walks of life. And at first, we saw a lot of

people who had an existing career. They might be looking to

taper off that career or might be looking to make a full switch to

something that's a lot closer to their community or a lot more

engagement centered. So there are a lot of folks who

are maybe in their thinking about retirement, but they want something that is

steady income and gives them that 15 hours of work or

15 to 20 hours with hands-on and with the

community. We see a lot of folks also who are maybe looking for

a second franchise opportunity where they are used to working

on something that has SOPs and good

frameworks in place and want to build up their brand

as well as support some of their other businesses. So a

lot of folks who are looking to be more of the face of the products,

like the specialty lettuce or a specialty crop that they want to bring to

market, we see a lot of people who have paths into

that. They've got a connection of restaurants or they've got a connection of supermarkets where

they see a critical need in that supply chain and they can fill that in

a matter of weeks. So that's a big lane for us.

We also see a lot of folks who are in areas where food security is

a day-to-day mindset. When you're thinking about any of the island countries, you're

talking about importing food. So they're looking at a high

price for fresh and healthy food. And even though you're thinking, well,

there's a lot of tropical places out there, why would they need this? Humidity is

not always a good friend to crispy, fresh produce. Or

hurricanes. Or hurricanes. You're absolutely right. Yes, you

get it. So hurricanes and bugs and things like that. And

so Well, it's a great environment for fruit. It is not always a

good one for leafy greens, herbs, vegetables. And so there's

a large need and the volume that they're getting imported is always

coming in at a lower quality and higher cost than people want to pay.

So that seems to be a pretty big market for us. And then schools are

a constant opportunity for education, but also

food sourcing on a local level. So I think there's

a big wave of I'd say like the younger generation of

environmentalists are here and they are going to college and

they are looking to hold people accountable and looking to

hold schools accountable, their food service providers accountable

for being the example that things are going in

the right direction. So, not only from a, what's in my cafeteria,

but are you teaching the programs that are going to inspire

and create the agronomists and the biologists of the

future in a very Strong space. I think we see how much

plant-based things are rising when it comes to our

food and materials and things like CRISPR, things

like different development around plant-based meats. There's, there's

a lot of opportunity with plants and we're just starting to unlock them. So we

do need to make sure that we're giving the foundation to the next generation

of career people. It would seem to be top of mind for younger

generations, millennials or whatever, digital natives or whatever the

latest generation is. There seems to be more of a conversation around that.

Obviously, you do You see the plant-based meats getting into McDonald's and Burger King now,

so it's top of mind and there's awareness to be doing good

for not only ourselves but the planet, and this seems to sort of lend itself

to those types of efforts. Yeah, we've seen a lot of

really interesting research along the way. We've seen folks who are

doing this for more materials-based things where they think by

growing a plant that can't grow in the wild, they'll be able to extract some

component that will go into a medicine or a

dye or something like that. And I think what we're seeing just

through our customers is the supply chain is very

reactive to climate change right now. And some of the larger

suppliers who for years have just held up shop in these regions

where the climate was perfect for this one type of crop, and they've decided to

monocrop in that area, just the slight

changes is putting that in jeopardy and they need to rethink how they're handling

supply chain. It's funny you mentioned Unilever. In a past life, I did

consulting work at a business intelligence company and my client was Unilever.

So I spent a lot of time at the Unilever headquarters in New Jersey. So

I met a lot of really interesting folks there. And then the other thing is,

it's not often you get to talk about SOPs or that people know what they

are, but I'm a bit of a systems nerd. So anytime we can

talk about— and for the benefit of the listener, that's standard operating procedures. But yeah,

this idea of like documenting things, having steps, I think to people

who think that way, the fact that you have those outlined Like, these

are all the things you need to do that you've shown can let

you have a successful farm, I think is helpful for people who have that

mindset and who think like that. Yeah. I think SOPs are

kind of a missing thing in this space. There's a lot of tribal knowledge

and generational knowledge that we've lost over the years, just in the

consolidation of these family farms into bigger farms. And,

you know, you think of what a farmer or master farmer is today, it's the

the guy who somehow collected all that knowledge, and don't let that guy go

because your whole greenhouse is going to collapse. And

that puts a barrier on people thinking that this is

a legitimate business avenue for them because it's so volatile when you

have that as a framework. And I think when we think about plant

growth is a very complicated science,

and on the flip side, sunlight, nutrients, water, Like

3 things and environment. So you have these, these 2

very like opposite understandings of how, how our

food works. How do we get to where we are? And I think

building the processes that, that connect those dots are what helps more

people see the easy and see the complicated as something that they're going to be

able to get from point A to point Z. Are you working with the Square

Roots folks as well? Yes, Square Roots were our customers a few years

back. And we helped them launch their Brooklyn campus. And

actually, one of our farm managers became their farm manager the first

year of their cohort. So yeah, familiar with them. And so

it's probably a mix. You would have bigger companies like Square Roots

with a plan for how they want to move into specific locations, but you do,

for lack of a better term, also appeal to a mom-and-pop farmer as well,

would you say? Yeah. I think that's something that we don't ever want to

move away from because getting started is the hardest part. I think

once you what a lot of folks in this space

look at first is, what's my ROI? What's the

economics of growing? And if it works at that

scale, scaling up gets a lot more realistic.

So we always want to make sure that the entry point, or there is an

entry point for folks who, they maybe they've been in the DIY

hydroponic space for a while, maybe they went down to cannabis and they're

like, this field seems saturated, but I love growing. I love being

part of production, how do I take this to the next level?

We want to continue to build that on-ramp for this

industry. And at the same time, we want to make sure that people

have next steps for scaling up. So Square Roots is a good example. There's a

lot of other companies that come to us with a larger plan that need help

getting into that larger plan on a distributed level. So

I think that is, that's definitely the 2 paths that we want to keep on

supporting, but mom-and-pops, it's a very large section of the

world. So people who have done a lot of great things in their career

and want their next career choice to be something that is local,

sustainable, good for the planet, and turns an income that they can live on.

And do you help them think through the marketing aspect of it as well? Because

not only do you have to be a farmer in this day and age, you

need to be an effective marketer and salesperson as well. Yeah,

I think that's something that is easily overlooked when you meet

somebody who has a lot of the passion for growing and passion for

running an operation, that there is some face-to-face time that you can

avoid by getting that done upfront. You know, going into your

market and finding out what are those crops that there's a strong need for.

You can develop, you know, either a single or double stream relationship, so you don't

have to be going all around town. Or, if all around town is your jam,

do you have the consistent output to bring these to different

places? So, where does the produce go afterwards? That

can be as complicated or as streamlined as you want it to be,

but it does rely on some face-to-face relationship building.

And that is something that I think nobody thinks about when they think about farmers.

Farmers are probably the most lean business people

and versatile business people in the world. And

we think of them as just like, oh, alone on the farm, just like ho-hum,

but they are very aware of their economics and they're very aware of their relationships

and resiliency that they need to build in. And is that part of the Academy,

helping them think about marketing, but even things like packaging as well, like how

they're going to— all this sort of stuff that's important in the whole lifecycle?

Yeah, at Farm Camp, we'll go through everything from starting your

farm to selling your produce and whatever that means for

your business. So we'll go through social media marketing, we'll go through selling, different

pricing models, different packaging options to get the best price,

and figuring out what price makes sense for your market and for your offering.

We do a little bit of exercise on branding, but a lot of times people

come to us with a brand in mind or some type of

brand identity that they're looking to move forward with. But our team is always eager

to jump in and tell you some best tips and tricks. So we do have

class modules for almost every step of the

Farmer experience. Can you talk a little bit about the

technology and where you stand in terms of hydroponic versus

aeroponic and where you've landed on At least in the short term, with

Greenery. So Greenery is our latest model, and it took a

lot of the learnings from the LGM and the

Network and applied it to a more kind of

unibody design, something that is built with every system in

mind from the start. One of the things that has come with us is

hydroponic baseline. We do use a drip

hydroponic system, so their roots are still exposed to the open air,

but they are— were classically I would say we're probably more

classically hydroponics because we don't use sprayers. Sprayers are something that we feel

offer a really good value to the plant, but creates a

lot of work for the customers on, or the

operators on, you know, maintenance. I think in

large-scale or in commercial grade, you need to make sure that

none of those are getting clogged up by nutrients. And with the

amount of nutrients that is going through at any given time, the risk versus

reward on something like a sprayer, we feel, It doesn't

build people something that they can rely on and that they can stop thinking about

how the system works. We really want to take that out of the equation. We

don't want you to be going under the hood every 5 seconds to fix something.

We want you to be growing your business. So we feel like hydroponics is the

more reliable of the two at the scale that our customers

need. Do you see a preference for— I know a lot of it is leafy

greens right now in the beginning, but have you, have you seen some movement into

other crops? What have you seen so far? So we

started with the Leafy Green Machine. We called it that because

we wanted to give people a benchmark of

crops that have high turnover, that you could have a consistent

revenue stream from, that almost every market has a need for.

So not painting the picture that this thing can do anything at any

time and everything, but really giving some people an eye level to

look at. What happened was a lot of people grew different things in the Leafy

Green Machine. And so we moved away from that name or anything that

connotated that in the Greenery, because the Greenery grows

even more things and it's built with a much more flexible and versatile design.

So we have a lot more control on the light tuning.

So when we think about growing things for more

canopy or growing things for speed or growing things to

flower, we now have that control in the lights and the temperature.

We also have more adjustable rows, so we can actually physically

adjust the rows to allow for things to grow out a little bit

more, things that we want to trim rather than just harvest. So this, this

is a model that has some of the most insane flexibility that we've seen in

any system. We're really excited about that. Some of the cool things that— right now

we've got a full farm, all flowers. It looks like—

it looks insane. I'll send you a picture. It looks insane. And we've got

folks who are growing kind of an array of things for CSAs.

So So trying to really make it fit inside some of these

more corporate programs that they can say, okay, every week they're going to

get a different crop mix, but it's all growing in the same farm. So

the variety within the same unit has now been greatly

expanded as well. Let me shift gears for a second. You received a grant in

2016 from NASA. Can you talk— I wanted to make sure we talked a little

bit about that and the work you did there, because that sounded— that was really

interesting. Yeah. So highlight of my life is the NASA

STTR that we did. And so We had

gotten word of a group within NASA that was

focused on interplanetary sustainability with the

parentheses of making self-sufficient infrastructure

for Earth. So if you can make it self-sufficient here, you should

be able to make it self-sufficient anywhere, but we shouldn't be focused on expanding

into space before we fix our planet first. So that's their mindset. And so we

were like, I like these guys. What do they got? So

after a little bit of exploration, what we got down to was

a premise that we can create a unit that is self-sustaining and

requires no outside inputs as far as energy and

water. So we can capture the water from the air and we can run

this completely on solar power. So what that premise would allow us to do is

say this could feed a crew over a period of time, no matter

where it is, or in a third world country or after a

disaster, you can put one of these down and you're not limited by access to

water or a sustainable grid. So those are the

things that we set out to solve. And what came out of it was a

growing cycle with inside the unit that we basically used the

leftover plant material to create the grow

medium. We grew certain plants to seed while

we grew certain plants for eating. So we'd always

be able to sustain a crew of 7 because of the amount of plants

that were being harvested, the plants that were turning to seed,

and then the plants that were then being used for nutrient tea and for grow

media. So this was really exciting to us because if that premise

exists, then there's really no reason we need to rely on

natural resources for feeding the planet. So that was

what we did with them. And so you can read all about it. It's called

SSCPU. It's a self-sustaining containerized

production unit. And they published those results. And a lot of

what the output of that turned into was the baseline for the Greenery. So

the Greenery has a lot of the NASA-funded research in it, and that is through

the LEDs and the spectrum that we needed to create something that went to

seed, to harvest, and to grow a bigger mass

of plant matter. How fun was it to work with NASA? Oh my God, so

fun. It's so funny because we

had another thing in common. I moderated a panel at a podcasting conference

for NASA because I met one of the people who run the

podcasting group there. So they have like 4 or 5 different shows, and so I

was able to work them, but obviously because it's NASA, we had like a lot

of meetings. It was only a panel, but we met like a dozen times

just to get everything ready. And the feedback was really good because people were like,

that's one of the best panels I've ever seen run. And just kind of speaks

to like that NASA mindset of like— and I'm sure you probably experienced it working

with them as well. Yeah, cross all the T's. I will

say, you know, NASA is a really interesting organization because you go there

and they forget that they're NASA sometimes. They forget how

awesome the scope of work that they have worked on over the years

is. So they're very casual about it. So we tried to act cool, but failed

miserably. So as we start to wind down, what's got you

excited and what are you finding? I imagine with a dataset like that, I'm thinking

now from my consulting days, data scientist, business intelligence, you know,

you start to collect all these data from all these greeneries and you start to

probably see some trends that'll get— or I don't know if you're at the point

where you're starting to see some interesting data come back. Yeah. So right now we

have the largest network of farmers in the world.

All that data is out there and cross-referencing that and

saying, well, why is this person doing better than that person? And why are you

getting better yields than this person growing the same thing? Those are things that,

early days, you have to do manually and really have to go into the weeds.

Now that we're through the phase of LGM to LGM at

scale, now into the greenery, we have more intellect around the

data that we have, so that structure provides us quicker results to know how

can we help the customer get a better ROI? How can we

help anybody who's operating a farm do it with less energy, but

still get the same results? And then what different crops can we

grow? And what are those recipes for those crops? And so all

that data coming back puts us in a good position to apply some machine learning,

always look for the best, the most efficient head of lettuce. And then

if it looks good to us, we'll say, hey, network, guess what? There's a new

most efficient recipe, download it if you want it. So those are the, those are

the places we see some really exciting opportunities is the network

starts to create this path forward to get efficiencies

that with tribal knowledge or generational knowledge, one person might have and one

person in the middle of nowhere might be the best, but does it really matter

if that person can then pass that to hundreds of other people? And now

on that recipe, they're competing for what is the even better

one. We're going to start to see progress in Plant yield

efficiency, and hopefully some labor efficiencies as well.

Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's

interesting because you said download the recipes, so you would basically

get the components or the settings necessary

where that farmer had success with a specific crop, and you with your own

greenery can say, okay, whatever the settings were that he had in terms of— is

that then timing of like the lights and the water and all that? Is that

the recipe? That's right. So, you know, when we think about

how Farmhand's cloud IoT works,

just like any other IoT system, you're basically saying there's all

these components and how are they working in orchestra to get a

desired result? And so we can do a lot with only sensor data. We don't

need the user to like type in info. We don't need user

data. We don't care if you're on Facebook or what you're doing there.

It's really like, How efficient are these mechanisms? And

what it helps our support team is if somebody's having a problem, we

can see, okay, so you put this on this cycle and put that

on that cycle, those are going to conflict. So they can help you kind of

diagnose a problem from halfway across the world. So with

this technology in place, it also gives people a little bit more

comfort that they're not alone in like, okay, I forgot what settings I put

it on. Like, I— Like, can I just Like, you can go back to default,

but if you have something you like but you just can't figure out why, that

allows our support team to say, hold on, okay, like, what's your farm number? I'll

log in and see what, what you have going on. This way we can create

a different conversation around farming and, and the best practices.

I envision you having some sort of, well, NASA as an example, like panel of

like all the different greeneries in the world. Like, you do have the world map

on your site, which is really cool. Oh man,

someday we're gonna have the NASA I

touched on this a little bit with Henry Gordon Smith of Agriculture, but this idea

of actually creating seeds for these specific

environments as well, because they can only grow or

flourish, like what we saw with the bunch cherry tomatoes, for example, in recent news.

Are you seeing that as well, that the actual cultivation of seeds for

these environments? Yeah. So that news with the cherry tomatoes was

actually us with Cold Spring Harbor. And so Cold Spring Harbor had come to us

and they had said, Listen, we have a lot of seeds that are on the

shelf and we want to take them off the shelf. Like, they didn't work in

traditional field-based, but the premise of them is awesome.

Like, it's basically a smaller plant that kicks off a ton of

produce. So using less energy on the plant and putting that all

into the fruiting. And so we were like, 100%, sign us up, whatever you want

to do. And just to understand the composition

of the environment that we can create is something that can

unlock something hidden in the plant's

DNA is really exciting. To say, we've got these seeds

that could feed the world at a whole different scale or have this

property that we just can't get out with growing it in

California, but if you could take the soil composition of California

with the air quality of New Jersey, say, and the

volcanic vibe of Hawaii, you mash them all together,

you could pull out this naturally occurring thing on the seed. Wow,

that's super exciting. And so for us to have,

not even knowing that this is like a premise that they're on, have built

this infrastructure to enable these seeds who

I guess what you'd call dormant to come out and, and really celebrate

these functions of their genetics, I think that

is— there's a huge place for research and development there

on the food side, but also just understanding what more we can do with

plants. Well, a lot of exciting things on the

horizon. So I want to thank you for taking the time to share with us

everything that's happening. I'll probably follow up if you've got some ideas of where I'd

see a good place for a farm, a greenery. My brother lives in New

Orleans, and I saw that there was a— there's nothing in Louisiana right now. No,

we got to get one down there. Yeah, we got to get one down there.

So Where's the best place for folks to connect with you online and to learn

more? Everyone can always go to freightfarms.com. There's lots

of case studies and info about products and different

classes that we offer. But if that's too much for you to hop onto a

website, you can always catch us at Freight Farms on Instagram. Well, John, I want

to thank you for giving us the update on what's happening. Lots of exciting things

happening in this space, certainly. So I appreciate you taking the time. Awesome.

Thanks a lot, Harry. So thanks again to John for sharing his insights

about everything that's happening within Freight Farms and his

excitement And for the agtech industry. Remember, if you enjoyed this

episode or past episodes, please leave us a rating and review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

As always, special thanks to our season 1 sponsor, Intelligent Growth

Solutions. Podcast production and marketing provided by Fullcast. If your company

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a free call at fullcast.co/chat15.

Make sure you tune in next week for my engaging conversation with

Dave Riddle of Clawson Greens. Thanks for joining us on this

episode of the Vertical Farming Podcast. Here's to your health.

Thanks for listening. To hear all past episodes and read the episode

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