Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show co-founder and CEO of Square Roots, Tobias Peggs. Square Roots is an indoor urban farming company that connects people in cities to local, real food. In this episode, Harry and Tobias discuss the growing demand for a more efficient global food system. Tobias speaks to the importance his organization places on transparency and visionary thinking as well as future initiatives he and his team are currently planning. 

Special thanks to our Season 2 Sponsor

Ceres Greenhouse Solutions

Key Takeaways

01:34 – Harry welcomes Tobias Peggs to the show to share his background as a data scientist, the genesis of his company Square Roots, and the impact Covid-19 has had on the industry

08:17 – Tobias recalls the vertical farming landscape back in 2016 when he initially launched Square Roots and how his past experience helped him to scale his business

16:24 – The value Tobias and Square Roots place on transparency and forward-thinking

22:21 – Trends Tobias has observed from the overall AgTech industry, including collaboration between organizations and the role of technology and software

32:18 – The evolution of Square Roots’ Farmer Training program

36:52 – How Tobias has grown personally and professionally during his tenure at Square Roots and mentors who have influenced him throughout his career

43:38 – Tobias speaks to the differences in how Americans and Europeans receive and consume their food

47:27 – What is something Tobias has changed his mind about recently and a tough question Tobias has had to ask himself recently

50:33 – What excites Tobias most about the future of vertical farming and where listeners can learn more about Square Roots 

Tweetables:

“It became very obvious quite early that the world really needs this [vertical farming]. And that has acted as a very galvanizing and energizing focus through what, to your point, has been the craziest year any of us could ever possibly imagine.” (03:43) 

“Plants are not just widgets; they don’t just grow on demand. You need a person in there willing these plants to come to life.” (06:58)

“The average age of a farmer in the U.S. is fifty-eight. The average age of a farmer in countries like Japan is sixty-eight. You’ve got this demographic time bomb that is about to detonate on the food system. We need to find pathways for young people to enter the agriculture industry and that’s what we decided to tackle first at Square Roots.” (07:26)

“The wonderful thing is when you’re stressed in the software company, you stay stressed. When you’re stressed in the farming company, you just go wander around the farm for a half an hour.” (13:07)

“There are probably lots of parallels with the sort of green or alternative energy industry. We are all in it to solve a massive problem for the planet.” (23:14)

“Some days I do have to kind of stop myself because we are running at 150 miles per hour figuring all this stuff out.” (33:58)

“You don’t have to be a bloody nutritionist to figure this shit out. If it smells great, and it tastes great and it looks great, it’s gonna be good for you.” (46:39)

“There is a desperate need to figure out a more resilient food system where people are eating healthier food and doing it all year round. And indoor farming can be a big part of that solution.” (51:06)

Links Mentioned:

Tobias’ Website

Tobias’ LinkedIn

Square Roots Twitter

Square Roots Instagram

Ceres Greenhouse Solutions

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Mentioned in this episode:

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igrownews.com/precision. The average age of

a farmer in the US is 58. The average age of a farmer in

countries like Japan is 68. You've got this demographic time

bomb that is about to detonate on the food system, which is,

you know, when these people retire, like, who the hell is going to grow all

the food, right? We need to find pathways for young

people to enter the agriculture industry. And that was

what we decided to kind of tackle

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, How are you doing?

Vertical Farming Podcast, welcome back. Season 2, episode 1.

If you are new to the show, I highly recommend checking out all the season

1 episodes. We've had some great conversations with fantastic

founders and CEOs. And now for season 2, we

are taking this to the next level. I didn't think it could get any better,

but it did, and it will. As a bit of a sneak peek, we have

conversations coming up with leaders from Bowery Farms, Plenty, Unfold,

and much more. I couldn't be more excited to announce

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greenhouse-solutions.com, and get started today on your

greenhouse goals. To kick things off in grand style, this week's

conversation is with none other than Tobias Pegg,

CEO of Square Roots. For those unfamiliar with

Square Roots, it's an indoor urban farming company that connects people in

cities to local, real food. And in this episode,

Tobias and I discuss the growing demand for a more efficient global food system,

and he speaks to the importance his organization places on transparency and

visionary thinking, as well as future initiatives he and his team are currently

planning. Tobias takes us back to the vertical farming landscape in

2016 when he initially launched Square Roots and

talks about how his past experience has helped him scale this one. We learn

about the value Tobias and the team place on transparency and forward

thinking and the trends he's observed from the overall agtech industry, as

well as the collaboration between organizations and the role of

technology and software. We learn about Square Roots farmer training

program and how Tobias has grown personally and professionally during his

tenure at Square Roots. Couldn't think of a better way to kick off season

2. I'm so excited to share this episode with you guys. If you have

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

a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

That's VFP for Vertical Farming Podcast. I'll make sure to read out those

reviews on future episodes. So let's kick off season 2 with

Tobias. So Tobias Pegge, co-founder and CEO of Square Roots, thank you

for joining us on the Vertical Farming Podcast.

Super happy to be here, thank you. So Tobias, just to date stamp where we're

at, it's first week of October 2020, what many people

would probably say is one of the strangest years on record

so far. And just when you think things can't get any

crazier, all you have to do is check your newsfeed. So I'm just wondering

how the year's been for you, if there's a couple of words you could use

to summarize what you've what you've been experiencing as a business

owner and personally, what comes to mind?

Intense. But also I think

at the beginning of COVID

if you look at it purely from the perspective of vertical farming or

indoor farming or food systems, right at

the beginning of COVID there was a very

big affirmation that what we're doing, what everybody in the industry is

doing is the right thing. On the one hand, we had

supermarket shelves that were just empty. You couldn't even find

staples to eat. And on the other hand,

you just read stories every day of mountains

of food being left in industrial fields to rot because those farmers

couldn't get farmers safely to those fields to get the food out. I

mean, it just really shone a spotlight on how fragile

that industrial food system is. Not only is it terrible for the planet,

in terms of pesticides and runoff and the impact of

transport and the litany of issues

goes on and on and on, greenhouse gases and all that stuff. But at the

end of the day, it also turns out it's not a particularly resilient

system. It's not guaranteed to get food on your plate in

instances like this. And

so I think what we're all doing here, building the

infrastructure and the business models and the teams to enable

a distributed farming solution that is

able to provide quality local grown food,

you know, very consistently in a very resilient way.

Like, it became very obvious quite early that the

world really needs this, and that has acted as

a very kind of galvanizing and

energizing focus through

what, to your point, has been the

craziest year any of us could ever

possibly imagine. When did this vertical

farming, indoor agtech, this idea of getting the

food sourced locally to where people need

it, when did these ideas appear on your radar,

if you can think back? On my personal radar? Yeah. On your personal radar.

Yeah. So I had an

early social media analytics company. My

background's tech. I'm an AI PhD and I sort of spent

a bunch of my early career in Silicon Valley and had this early

social media analytics company that was acquired by Walmart, of all people.

And as part of those deal terms,

I went to work at Walmart for 12 months. And to cut a long

story short, while I was inside Walmart, I studied—

one of the projects that I did was to study global grocery buying behaviors.

And I sort of came at it from a data science perspective, which is my

background. But really what I ended up seeing was this map of

the global food system with millions of people

around the world buying food from around the world, which then

required a lot of shipping. And I just saw a map of

like food flying all over the planet. And I thought, this is insane. There's got

to be a better way to do this. And you dig in and as I

said, the impact of that transport is horrific, but also

the quality of the food at the end of that chain. If the food has

been traveling for a number of weeks, then the nutrients are breaking down and the

quality of food isn't so good at the end of it. So there are a

bunch of problems there. And I started looking at it and thinking, okay, well,

everyone's got to be eating locally grown seasonal food. And then It's like,

well, okay, it's hard to change that

mass consumer behavior. People want food from all over the

world all year round. So is there a better way to do that?

And instead of shipping food from one part of the world

to the other, can you ship climate data from one part of the

world to the other and basically recreate climates from all around the

world, but do that local to the end consumer? And then you can

grow food from all around the world, but now you're doing it in the same

zip code as where they live, right? And now all of a sudden, you can

take out the impact of transport, you can get food to the end consumer the

same day of harvest rather than 2 or 3 weeks after it's harvested.

So the quality of food is better. And that was kind of the aha moment

for me. I had been working with a guy called Kimbal

Musk on some technology projects up until that

point in parallel. He had also gone very deep in the food world.

And I picked up the phone to him and started talking about this idea.

And he was like, well, okay, there's a missing element in what you're saying

here, which is who's going to grow the food? Mm-hmm. They're like, food is—

plants are not just widgets, right? They don't just grow on demand. You need a

person in there willing these plants to come to life. And he was sort of

explaining to me that it's the farmer that's at the center of the system that

gives the love to the food that makes it taste so good.

And you start thinking then about, okay, well, eventually with a

company like Square Roots, we'll need millions of farmers. How do we hire those people?

And then you find out they don't exist. The

average age of a farmer in the US is 58. The average age of

a farmer in countries like Japan is 68.

You've got this demographic time bomb that is about to detonate on

the food system, which is When these people retire,

who the hell is going to grow all the food? We need to find

pathways for young people to enter the

agriculture industry. And that was what we decided to

tackle first at Square Roots. How do we create a pathway,

create a program that makes it really exciting and

compelling for a young person to say, you know what, I'm actually going to grow

up and be a farmer. This is going to be awesome. And, uh,

that was, that was kind of the genesis of Square Roots.

So as you started entering the space, you know, this is— we're talking now

about 2016. What did— if you could paint a

picture for folks, because I think people that are just getting into vertical farming, indoor

agtech, you know, they see, they just see the, the, the money coming in,

the investments, how the industry is growing. But can you

wind the clock back a little bit and talk about what What was the landscape

like in 2016 as you were getting off the ground? Yeah, that's

a really good question, actually. So I remember putting the

first pitch deck together and talking to an investor.

And Square Roots, for those people who don't know, we have a modular

architecture system. So we've got farms that are built inside refurbished

shipping containers. People will be somewhat familiar with that model. But

I remember saying to an investor, okay, we're going to take a young person with

no experience of growing plants, and put them in a metal box right in

the middle of Brooklyn, and they're going to grow the best food you've ever tasted.

And people thought we were absolutely insane.

Absolutely insane. And I probably talked

to like 200 people to pull the seed round together.

Wow. And we got it off the ground, right? And the first thing that we

had to prove was that we can actually take a young person with no

experience and get them up to speed very quickly to grow food.

You know, we figured that out. Once we had done that, we sort of started

investing in a bunch of, you know, technology,

hardware, software, et cetera, to really sort of, you know, scale

things up, commercialize it, figure out different business models.

You know, how would we sell this food at, you know, the right price

to what customer? That led us to do deals with companies like

Gordon Foodservice, who are the 4th or 5th biggest food distributor

in the country. We now sell to grocery retail stores like

Whole Foods and in the Midwest, Spartan Nash and Meijer and Fresh Thyme, you know,

big, big regional chains, you know, but sort of every

step along the way, there's been a different, a different challenge, right? But

to answer your question right at the beginning, the challenge

was trying to convince people that we weren't crazy.

And so as you start as the CEO, As you start

to think about how— what's the right team that can

move this vision forward? What's the right team? How fast do you scale?

What experience, or how did your past experience that, you know, you've done some work

in AI, you've worked at Adobe, you were CEO at Aviary—

did some of those experiences in terms of how you build a team and how

quickly you build a team color your thought process, you know, as you're starting to

scale? Yeah, it's a good question, actually.

So I think most of the stuff I did before Square Roots was software,

where you can scale very quickly. There's

incremental cost to scale. And that's the beauty of software

from an investor perspective. And sort of dropping into the

food world was to rewire my brain

completely. In software, you can have an idea

in the morning and it's in the market in the afternoon being used by millions

of people. Yeah. In indoor farming, you can have an

idea, what if I change the climate? What will happen? Well, sit around for

6 weeks and you might find out. It's like a completely

different timescale here. And

then of course, just delivering a software

service to a consumer is an entirely different

universe with entirely different unit economics

than getting a physical good from seed

to shelf. Oh, and by the way, that's perishable. So if you don't look after

it at every single step of the way, it's destroyed.

Massively different. So I think there are certain things that I think have been

an advantage, the Silicon Valley cliché of

move fast and break things. And we have pushed and pushed

and pushed at a hell of a pace at Square Roots, and I'm extremely

proud of the way we've done that, got

to a really good place in a very short period of time. But frankly, I

think there were probably disadvantages in the way my brain was wired as a

software guy, and I just didn't know what I should have known

about food. So I probably had to get educated

on the job, which might not have been ideal.

Kimbal running a restaurant company,

he knows, right? Unless there's a good GM, and a fantastic

chef, you don't have a restaurant company, right? So we were

able to make sure that we hired, you know, great operators and fantastic

farmers on day one, right? There's the analogy. So, um, Yeah.

You know, when I didn't know what I was doing,

I have people around, you know, me who did,

mercifully. Uh, yeah, I mean, it's been fun. It's easily been

the most fun I've I've ever had. Easily the most fun

product. You know, the other wonderful thing is when you're stressed in a software company,

you stay stressed. When you're stressed in a farming company, you just go wander around

the farm for half an hour and look at some flowers. You go pick the

lettuce. Oh, it's so nice. Yeah. You can see

the fruits, the literal fruits of your labor and the fruits. It's so—

it's the fact that you can touch it is something probably different

than to your point, speaking from software as well. Yeah, I think that's right. I

think the other thing as well, you know, this is probably unique to our model.

You know, we think about ourselves as growing food, but like growing people, right? Growing

the next generation of leaders in the industry, you know, and you see,

you know, a young person coming with no experience, you know,

maybe in a, you know, not such a privileged background,

you know, and they want to change the food system, right? They share

that mission with you and they got that passion and they lean

in and learn and they work hard. And then

2, 3 years later, they're the farm manager at the

new farm that you're opening on the other side of the country. That is

amazing. I love seeing that. So yeah, I feel

very, very fortunate to be in my current position for sure.

How did it feel the moment you stepped into

your first fully functional unit There's something

where someone can paint a vision of this is what it's like, this is what

we want it to be, this is the experience you want it to have, this

is the look and feel. And that's different than when you're actually in one,

you're seeing it functioning, you're seeing it producing a harvest.

Well, and you're smelling. What is that like? And you're smelling. You walk

into a beautifully farmed zone with, again, this farmer

that's put all the love in it. Oh my God, it smells amazing.

Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. Um, you know, on the—

you know, we have a really, you know,

fantastic, efficient sales and marketing

team right now. And, um, you know, one of the things that I—

you know, they're running rings around me now. In the early days when I was

trying to bring them up to speed with this new thing, I was saying, listen,

Square Roots is a business where you show, don't tell. Right.

You can get on the phone and talk until the cows come home about what

we're doing, right? But bring someone to the farm, have them look

at what we're doing, have them talk to a farmer, have them

feel that energy and that love and then taste that food and

the sell is done. Yeah, it's a very

tangible experience that we're producing here for sure.

And then we play that further forward, right? Yeah. sort

of more regular marketing events that we do is a

very community-focused farm tour event, right, where we

literally throw open the doors every 2 weeks. Yeah. This is

pre-COVID. When we built the farms, we put floor-to-ceiling

windows in them, right? So we kind of like, you know, open the door and

then you can like look through the window and,

um, you know, see, see what's going on,

right? And, and I love doing those farm tours both in

Brooklyn and in Grand Rapids where we've got another farm. And, you know, that

minute where you kind of swing the doors open on the farm and people see

the pink lights and the magic, and, you know, it's a, it's a really

wonderful experience. That's a beautiful segue. Uh,

when you talk about the, uh, the floor-to-ceiling windows, it's this idea of

transparency, right? And one of the things that's touted on the site is the

obviously high standards with everything you do and, you know, educating

people that vertical farms, free of pesticides, free of GMOs, but

also the important thing that's, and it's something that you make a point highlighting Is

this idea of tracking the food from seed

to store. And why is that important? Yeah. I

mean, I think we're the only company out there that can offer

every consumer on every single package a complete

story of where that food has come from, from seed to shelf. Every

step in the process, every farmer that touched it along the way,

photos of what the food looked like when it was being harvested yesterday, even down

to which of our battery-powered tricycles took this

to the store that you're in right now. We've got the whole thing, and

you were able to get that data thanks to the operating system

that we built at Square Roots, the software system, the Square Roots Farmer Tool Belt.

Yeah. Which is, you know, I guess you were talking earlier about where some of

my software, you know, my background, how has that helped with Square Roots, right? I

think we have got a world-class software team here, and that is

incredible. Yeah, this idea, you nailed it, right? The whole idea was

The consumer wants transparency in the food system. Where does my

food come from? Who grew it? You know, what techniques are being used?

And so, yeah, like the original idea was to have a completely

see-through farm, right? So that anybody could, you know, anyone

walking through the neighborhood could have that question answered for them, like

immediately. And that also sort of influences where we put the

farms as well, right? So we put the farms right in the middle of the

city. It's not the cheapest rent. Yeah. But in

New York, for example, again, pre-COVID, like 8 million people

could just jump on the subway and come see the farm. The

idea is to be completely transparent. And if you

can't get to the farm, then at least at the retail shelf, you can scan

the package with your mobile phone, and that pops

open a mobile webpage with all of that information from seed to shelf.

So it gives that retail consumer this connection with

the people that were involved in growing that food and getting it to the store.

One of the things that's apparent to me when I'm in a

supermarket or when I'm in a grocery store is the amount of plastic

that's used in the delivery of leafy greens, for

example. And I'm wondering how you think about that. There's

certain challenges of where the market is now, but are you

forward-thinking in terms of how much you know, companies like Square

Roots can actually help come up with a solution that could be

better for the environment? Yeah, it is a great question. Right.

So some days I come to work and I'm like, my, we've done so

much in a short period of time. This is awesome. And then some days I

come to work and think, oh, we've still got so much to do. And, you

know, one of the things that will make me think like that is when I

look at plastic packaging, right? It's like, come on. Yeah. Can we

not solve this? But, you know, to your point, very, very, very

difficult and expensive challenge.

I'm pretty excited actually by some of the stuff I'm seeing in

the paper industry, you know, where you're getting paper

coated with, you know, sort of

molecular level vegetable extract, right, which then

turns that paper see-through, but it's also impermeable to oxygen. And there's

like potential there to use that as packaging in a way that, you know, we'll

make sure there's still a barrier so the food remains fresh,

which again is important because, you know, if you solve

plastic packaging by not using it, but massively increase food

waste because you've got no way to, you know, keep that food fresh for a

couple of weeks, you know, you're kind of robbing Peter to

pay Paul there. That might be an English expression. I don't know what the American

translation would be, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. We use that. We use that as well.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a very, very

difficult problem to solve. And then frankly, I

think it gets solved with purchasing power.

And so you look at a company, I'm very, very, very proud of everything that

we're doing at Square Roots. And we're 60 people now up from 15,

12 months ago. And this is great. We're tiny as far as the

wider food system is concerned. And you had the experience

of working at Walmart to have the

Both sides of the spectrum in terms of what you can do at scale.

Well, totally. And so that's kind of where I was going. I saw at

scale when Walmart said, okay, we're going to get

serious about sustainability. How can we do that at

scale? And as an employee in the company,

there are no trash bins in the offices. You take your trash home.

That's the way that it gets recycled. When you print something

out, on a piece of paper, it's always double-sided, you know, and these

things might seem really small, right? But when you've got 2 million

employees doing this stuff, like, it adds up, not to mention everyone on their

supply chain. Yeah. Who's held to those same standards, right? So yeah, I've

seen how you can impact, you know, positively impact things at

huge scale. You know, I kind of won't reveal too much there, right?

But that's one of the many advantages that I think

we've got with this you know, very deep relationship with Gordon

Foodservice, you know, is that they are a, you know,

multi-billion-dollar food company. They're a big player

and they can have different types of conversations than we can,

right? Yeah. So yeah, you know, I feel like I'm answering this rather like

a presidential candidate or a VP candidate by not

really answering the question in a debate. But yeah, I mean, we've got to figure

it out. It'll be an industry-wide thing. I'm seeing some really

cool technology emerging. And, you know, have

faith, I guess, right? Yeah, so that's interesting. You mentioned the industry

on a whole. How have you seen

all the players in the space? And you have folks that you would consider

competitors or doing something similar to what Square Roots is doing.

And then people focusing on lighting. And we had a couple of great

conversations with David Farquhar of IGS in terms of all the different moving

parts and what you're able to control within this environment.

There's so many people doing so many interesting things. What have you seen

from an ecosystem as all these players

start to talk to each other? You know, I would imagine you run into each

other at conferences when there were those as well. What's the

relationship between, you know, these companies, and do you find that you

look for opportunities to engage or partner or collaborate at

some level? Yeah, mostly it's really good. And

there are probably lots of parallels with the sort of green energy

or alternative energy industry. We are all in it to

solve a massive problem for the planet and for people. Everyone

who's in it is kind of mission-driven to a certain extent.

Values tend to be somewhat aligned and that really helps.

I think everyone also recognizes we're in very early innings here, right?

You know, I started my career in the mid-'90s building,

you know, websites, internet stuff, you know, Internet 1.0.

And, you know, I remember kind of the meetups that used to happen there. I

was in London. You'd go to like the First Tuesday Club or whatever it was

where, you know, all the internet entrepreneurs were there. Yeah. And,

you know, everybody knew that this thing was

inevitable, but no one could quite yet

articulate what shape it would take. You know, Facebook was still 10 years

away. Twitter was still 10 years away. You know, yeah. And as a consequence, everyone

just wanted to make it work and bring it to as many people as possible,

right? And there was lots of sharing of ideas and people offering to

help each other out. It was really, really beautiful. I'll use that word. And, and

I think indoor farming right now feels quite like that, actually.

It feels like the mid-'90s internet, right? Again,

it's, you know, it's inevitable, and COVID has probably accelerated

that. Yeah. You know, what's the— you know, there are certain kind of

formats emerging now, are kind of, you know, very scalable, capital-efficient models.

modular approach. Obviously there's a lot of great work going on with the plant

factory formats, Bowery and, you know, those guys.

You know, frankly, some greenhouse growers are just like execution machines right

now. Like, I'm watching Gotham Greens march across the country, like, hats off to those

guys. Oh yeah. You know, but as an, as an example of that,

you know, like Irvin at Bowery, you know, there's a guy I can pick up

the phone to and we talk about what's going on, right? Uh, Viraj at Gotham

Greens, was so helpful to

us in the early days and so generous

with his time. And, you know, I've always been very inspired

by their story and their brand and, you know, the whole thing. And I think,

you know, it's very illustrative of quite a

collaborative environment. Of course, you know,

there are a couple of players who, you know, protective of their IP or

whatever and don't want to play nice, but In the main, yeah, it's a

really— oh, nice is a word that I tend

to steer away from, but I would say this is a really nice space

to be in, actually. Collegial, maybe. Yeah, that's a much better

word. Well, it's interesting, your background coming from software,

because what's worked there is this idea of

open source Linux, these projects where everyone— there's a

collaborative effort for people getting together for the greater good. And

you alluded to it a little bit, but I don't know if there's something like

that that exists now within indoor agtech vertical farming, or if that's probably

still a ways off, but I think there's some benefit from that sort

of open source. Yeah, to my knowledge, I don't think it's

as formalized as that. I

think the kind of Open Ag thing at MIT,

they were talking about that, right? It never happened. And then obviously

that whole program was discredited anyway. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of

collaboration. If I think about universities, right, which is, you

know, sometimes where some of that effort springs from, you know,

we talk, you know, as much with

Cornell and sort of what's going on in Michigan as we do with

Wageningen in Holland. So yeah,

I mean, I would say there is a lot of informal

sharing right now. Yeah, maybe, you know, maybe someone

does need to kind of formalize you know, an

open indoor ag initiative. I, I don't know.

Being a child of the '80s myself, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you

what your first computer was. A

ZX Spectrum 128K. I don't know

if that was a US thing, uh,

the inventor of that, Sir Clive Sinclair, very British guy.

Okay. It was about kind of 8 inches wide, nice

rubber keys. Yeah, I learned to program BASIC on that

thing. Yep. I had a Texas Instruments

with a cassette deck as the— Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's, that's the only way you

capture information. Yeah, and then when the cassette kind of warped, it wouldn't load the

software properly. And, you know, on a hot day, you might, you might

struggle to load whatever, you know, game you wanted to play or whatever.

Yeah, those are the days. We've come a ways since then.

But I think on our hardware team, the sort of brains

of the farm, we actually call it the farm brain, sort of where everything plugs

into. And I'm looking at that, it's like a supercomputer, right?

Versus my little ZX Spectrum. It's remarkable.

Well, to that point, one of the benefits of as you

bring more of these online is the fact that they're all cloud connected. And I'm

wondering what you're able to see and learn learn

and improve on as a result of having this

information in the cloud? You mentioned working with data scientists, and that becomes a

very important job function when you need to crunch this much data.

Yeah, completely. So again, at the software layer that we've built, the

operating system for the company, the Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt, we call it,

and there are kind of 3 elements to it, right? The first is instruction. So

if you're a farmer, you might open the app,

version of the farmer tool belt. And, you know, the app is going to be

context aware, right? It's going to— okay, you're Farmer Harry, you're on farm number 3

in Brooklyn, today is basil harvest day, here are the 10 things that you've got

to do. And it will kind of guide you through that and then prompt

you to capture data as you're going through that workflow, right? In

parallel to that, data is being captured ambiently through that workflow and that

process, right? Well, how long did that process take, right? What happened here?

The second part of it then is, you know, is that

sort of additional data capture. So,

you know, ambiently, we're capturing climate data, you know, nutrient

data, light, you know, spectrum intensity, you know, the

million and one different sort of environmental things that are there.

And then at the end of every harvest, the system is then able to say,

okay, well, what happened in the climate? Mm-hmm. and

what happened in terms of farmer workflow and how long did

things change for this particular harvest and what happened in this harvest? Was the

yield above what we thought or below what we thought or, you know, et

cetera, et cetera? And so the system then is able to, you

know, determine insights, which we're then able to push back out across

the network so that everybody gets to benefit from it, right? And that

might be, oh, it turns out If the temperature is

0.001 degrees warmer than what you're doing,

that actually helps. Or it could be, huh,

Farmer Harry's actually developed a completely new way to

get the basil off the rack. And here are the photos of Farmer Harry doing

it. And oh my God, it used to take 20 minutes and now it takes

18. And if everybody is following that instruction,

boom, that adds up, right? So the whole system is kind of learning very, very

rapidly. Interesting. Whether it's workflow, or

environment, climate. So yeah, there's

lots of rapid learning cycles going on, actually.

Yeah, as the AI guy, I get super geeked out about that for sure.

And is there a community that you've built in, not necessarily Facebook, maybe

like a farm book? Is there something where everyone's sort of

sharing best secrets with clients?

Yeah, I mean, not outside of our company, right? So the way

our company works, we own and

So we build them, then we have a farm team and they farm, and then

we pack and distribute and we kind of go seed to shell. So

we've probably got 30

farmers, I would say, right now, and maybe sort of

10 folks in engineering and continuous improvement,

software, hardware. And so that as a community—

Yeah. Is extremely active. either

asynchronously on Slack throughout the day

or in regular kind of

cross-farm sort of collaborations. And the continuous

improvement team works across all of those functions, right? Hardware, software,

farming, kind of stitches it all together and is constantly looking for the

next improvement. So yeah, that's a pretty high-powered

setup, actually. That's fun, right? When you watch that team in

full flow and the insights that they're coming up with. And then like how quickly

they're implementing them and rolling that out, that is,

yeah, that's something to really behold actually. And one of the things you

highlight, that's highlighted on the website is the farmer training. And given what you

just said, like how does that continue to evolve? Because I imagine,

you know, a couple years ago you would do some of the farmer training, probably

looks a little different now than it did back then. Yeah, it kind of

changed in March. Yeah, I mean, you know, we did, we used to sort

of bring in what we would call cohorts of farmers.

several people would go in a class together, right? And, you know,

on day 1, they're in the farm sort of learning how to do it hands-on,

but there was a lot of kind of classroom time,

you know, and that stuff is obviously

difficult today, right? And so we've done a lot of

work very, very quickly this summer to get

a lot of the training content to be able to be delivered

digitally through a learning management system. Yeah.

The software team, you know,

thought very rapidly in April

about how do we give our farmers more eyes in the farm.

It's sort of, you know, I'm saying that quote unquote, right? How do we give

a person more eyes in the farm, even if they can't

physically be there with another person all the time, right? So what extra

sensors, what extra data, how do we present that

in kind of actionable ways that would allow a farm manager

to, you know, manage farmers across a, you know, a

system without, or in a way that they're able to respect

social distancing and not get too close. So yeah, I mean,

you know, as I'm hearing myself explaining that, it doesn't sound particularly

coherent. And some days I do have to kind

of stop myself because we are running at 150 miles an

hour, like figuring all this stuff out right now. Yeah. But I think that's the

whole point of it because a lot of this has caused

CEOs and leaders to really rethink

the way, what you call business as usual.

Yeah. And the folks, we've seen a lot of restaurants are

closing left and right and

people's access to food is as bad as it was before. It's almost

even worse now in the interim. So people have to Rapidly iterate. And

I think, you know, to your point, seeing what you thought was

needed to meet the needs pre-COVID has changed now.

And I think all these things that you're doing that you've put into place where

you've had to adjust, given more eyes into what's happening,

I would imagine now are actually going to play out in the long term

being even more beneficial because they forced you to think about

things that maybe hadn't even been on your roadmap. No doubt. Yeah, no,

I think that's right. And there's another angle to this as well,

frankly, which is we're in

and will be for a while a horrific recession

with millions of people unemployed. And that

is going to change what consumers want to

buy. And so we've had to adapt to that very rapidly as

well. Bigger pack sizes, kind of more sort of

broader appeal, products. We've

done a fantastic job there. It's also going to impact how investors think

about what companies to back in the future. Maybe

2 years ago, we could stand in front of the pink lights and wave our

hands around and tell people how awesome it was going to be.

Today, people want to look at the ROI. Yeah.

And so our

team has put a incredible focus

on bringing to life all the ideas and

concepts that we had around driving efficiency that, you know, like,

yeah, we'll get to that, we'll get to that, right? There's still a lot more

cool stuff that we want to do. All of a sudden, those ideas

became the priority. And we've

become this like super well-functioning

machine. And so yeah, I think you're right.

Would I have chosen to go through a

global pandemic to get the company to be

this super efficient? Probably not.

But does it set us up to be much

more resilient and a

much stronger operation? Frankly,

stronger investment opportunity for the future, like 1

million percent. 1 million percent.

Naturally, every company that you've run

has had its separate challenges given the industry that you were in.

In the years that you've been CEO of Square Roots, how have you

grown as a leader? Yeah, I mean, I'm probably the

wrong person to ask, I guess.

I guess the question is, what's the personal journey been like for you?

Yeah. I mean, for me, it's certainly very humbling.

That is for sure. I think for me,

having been CEO 3 times previous

to Square Roots, I'd like to

think I've probably just— I'm continuing on the pathway

where things I have done previously

that coworkers have said, this is good, please do more

of that. I've tried to do more of that. And things I've done previously where

people said, that sucks and you make life miserable when you do that, I've tried

to do less of that, right? So I guess that would be the way that

I would try and answer that question, I think.

I mean, listen, one thing that I will say is, you know, that the sort

of team, the executive team that we've got here running the company,

when COVID hit, I tend to be quite, you know, like a sort of

body language manager. Like I get a lot of cues just by,

you know, observing people and seeing the vibe. and, you know, kind of almost that

sixth sense of what's going on. And, you know, over 20

years of running companies, you sort of hone those skills and like that

suddenly went. Yeah. Right. I'm now talking to everybody through a

Zoom call. And so, you know, there are certain things

that, you know, I started to have to do. Okay, how do you kind of

replicate the, or sort of, you know,

kind of provide a facsimile for, you know, the chat over coffee,

you know, the random bump into you in the corridor.

Exactly. Come walk with me down the hallway. Yeah, how do you

do that in this world? So yeah, it's been really interesting actually, sort of

figuring out just new techniques to try and, you know, catch the

vibe. And, and it's important, right, because the,

the folks that you're working with, you know, they're busting their ass as well, and

they're also under extreme pressure from the

anxiety that this whole situation has put on them, right? Oh yeah. So

you, of course, like, you want everyone to develop in terms

of career and learn skills and all this, but like you love them as humans

and you just have to like look after each other. And

so maybe through all of this, I've become a more empathetic leader. I

don't know. I guess that would be a nice upside. Yeah. Is there anyone that

comes to mind that was helpful for you as you

were, you know, learning the ropes as a CEO, a mentor come to mind?

Yeah, I think there've been a number of people actually. I mean, I'll say

my mom first of all, right? She, you know, was a sort of small

business entrepreneur when I was growing up in England. She ran a chain of retail

optical shops and— Okay. You know, I used to go work there during the school

holidays and learned a lot about, you know,

operations and teamwork and, you know,

culture building and sort of got the bug there, I think. You know, I

remember the first technology company that I worked for in London, in England,

I was, you know, project manager building websites and the guy that founded the company

tapped me on the shoulder one day and said, hey, we want you to move

to India. In 2 weeks from now. Wow. And set up

a software development center and go hire 500 people and like figure it out.

And I was like, what? Wow. And he was like, listen, we believe you can

do it. You will fall on your face and make big mistakes,

but, you know, pick up the phone and we'll support you through it.

Right. And that sort of confidence, right, that someone has

in you makes you feel 100 foot tall. And, you know, by the

way, makes you the most loyal person ever. Right. Because you do not want to

let that person down. So, you know, that was interesting. And then moving to the

States, obviously being around Kimbal Musk is phenomenal.

Yeah. You've got a guy there who is amazingly successful in

his own right, has done that by putting

values and impact alongside

scale at the center of every single business he's been involved

with. He has got the ability to

operate at 30,000 feet where we're talking about what the company's going to look like

in 2030, And then at the next minute, boom, we're

talking about how to increase the yield by 3 panes in farm number

4 in Brooklyn. Wow. Sometimes your job is just trying to keep up

with him as he's oscillating through these levels. And you can't

help but be informed and sort of

frankly want to push yourself to be better when you're in that environment. So

yeah, I feel very, very, very fortunate with the

people that I work with. For sure. I've certainly worked for a couple of,

you know, people that weren't as good as that and lasted about 4

months and then left. Yeah, you learn from those

folks as well. Yeah. It reminds me of the Jim Rohn quote, you are

the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Right. And

I imagine what's the short version of

the story when you and Kimbal met for the first time?

Uh, how did that happen? Actually, you

know what, it's funny. So I was, uh, in the US selling,

um, speech recognition software by a British company,

and this would have been 12, 13 years ago or something, right? So I mean,

everyone knows how terrible Siri is today. You can't— she doesn't understand anything.

Yeah, well, imagine how bad that technology was 12 years ago,

and then imagine how difficult it was trying to sell that with an

English accent talking to this, you know, American system.

Forget it. And then someone introduced me to Kimbal and I was like, okay,

he's done some really cool stuff. The company he was setting up was in Boulder,

Colorado. I'm a big snowboarder. I was like, well, that sounds good. Very

compelling guy. And the week later, I moved out of New York and I was

living in Colorado. There wasn't too much thinking about it.

Where's home for you now? New York City is

home. I find myself temporarily right now in

Florida. Okay. You know, one of the million pandemic

stories. Yeah. You know, different family things and people get displaced.

And my wife and I are here in Florida for a couple of months looking

after her parents. For the benefit of the listener, we're on camera and I

can see a reflection of a palm tree. And I said, well, I thought he

was in New York. And I'm like thinking, where in New York is that palm

tree? Not too many palm trees in Brooklyn, that is for sure. Oh, actually the

botanical garden, That's true, yeah. Yeah.

And I grew up in Yonkers, New York, just outside. Ah, okay, great. Yeah. So

I've— I've cycled up there many times. Yeah. So growing up in

London and then living in, in the States, is there anything that

you can think of in terms of the relationships that people have

to like their food, having it available local,

you know, access to farmers? Did that change or just were you going just from

city to city, you know, London to New York, so there wasn't much of a

No, I mean, it's quite remarkable actually, right?

So when I left the UK 20 years ago, a lot of the

food that we ate was local, right? And just the geography of the country,

it takes you 6 hours to drive from one end of the country to the

other, right? So everything you eat, broadly speaking, is local.

Yeah. And then when I came to the US, I remember this very clearly, went

into a supermarket, I saw this row of

watermelons all the way down the supermarket. It felt like it was like 10

miles long. And all these watermelons were huge, these

massive bowling balls that were perfectly round and shiny. I was

like, wow, America is amazing. And then I took

one home and it didn't taste of anything. And then I was like, hold on,

what season is this? Like, where the hell have these things come from? You know,

and then you eat strawberries that are ginormous but just taste like

water. Yeah. And then, you know, oh my God, you know, and you kind of

dig in and look at the industrial food system that we've got and it is

horrific. Yeah. So yeah, lots of differences actually.

That being said, and I think it's what the consistent thread as I've had

conversations with folks on the podcast is what people don't

understand, consumers don't understand how fresh or what a

strawberry is supposed to taste like, or to your point, or what really fresh greens

that were just picked the day before. And then even varieties

and all the different varieties of basil, for example. I think I'm wondering if you

saw that as well, just the education Of, or sort

of re-energizing or re-educating your palate. Yeah, it's

hard. Or retraining your palate. I'm not going to name the

person or the retailer, but I was in conversations with a

big retailer, big grocery retailer about Square Roots

produce. And he was like, hey, Tobias, all you indoor farmer guys, you all talk

about taste and develop taste, but my customers don't care about

taste because you know, they just douse their

salad in salad dressing anyway, which again, by the way,

I'd never even seen salad dressing until I moved to the US.

And he was like, you know, my customers equate

freshness with like crunch. You know, I don't care about

taste, I care about texture, right? Give me something crunchy because

that's what my customer thinks is fresh food.

Very Very interesting, right? And then again, then it illustrates, well, okay,

well, hang on. Taste equates to

nutrient value, right? Broadly speaking, right? The tastier it is,

the better. It's like, how, how have we moved so far away

from that that people aren't actively seeking the

tasty food? Because that is the quickest way to eat

healthy food. You don't have to be a bloody nutritionist to figure this

shit out, right? If it smells great and it tastes great and it looks great,

it's It's going to be good for you. It's not a

huge amount of education that we need to sort of get that message out,

but apparently it is, right? Yeah, it still kind of blows my

mind a little bit, right? But again, that just brings you back to, okay,

well, what we're doing is kind of important. And more to the point,

it's not just going to be Square Roots that sort of fixes this, quote unquote,

right? It is going to take thousands of companies like Square Roots

and That's back to the collaboration then, right? I think that the

sort of problem here is ginormous. You can translate that to the market

opportunity here is ginormous. There will be way more than one

winner. And we can all kind of afford to help each other out a

little bit. Couple questions as we wrap up. What's something you've

changed your mind about recently? That's a really good question.

I mean, listen, I'm going to change my mind on stuff every

single day, right? What I can't What's the line? Like,

have strong convictions, but hold them loosely, right?

Yes. If you have an idea, make sure you're running at it 100 miles an

hour, but always be prepared to switch tack, right?

And one of the sort of lines some of my

coworkers will get sick of me saying is, I don't care about what

I care about. I care about the data.

Meaning, our opinions and, you know, the sort of positions that we

hold, like, they have to be loose. Like, if the data is telling us to

do something, do it. Yeah. So yeah, I'll probably change my mind 5

times a day. No, actually 6.

What's, um, what's a tough question you've had to ask recently?

A tough question I've had to ask? Yeah. On a personal

level, how are you doing today? We had, unfortunately,

You know, in our immediate family, we've had a death, which is

the first time I've been through that. And that, you know, seeing people that you

love around you just broken is tough

and you have to show up every day and ask that question, you know, and

then translating that back to the, you know, the company, right? As I was

saying, people, you know, the environment we're in is fucking nuts.

Yeah. And, you know, if I'm having a one-on-one with

people, you know, I might go in thinking, okay, we're gonna talk about KPIs or

this week's sales target. or whatever, but I will frequently look

at the person and go, hey buddy, are you okay? Like, yeah, do we, do

we just need to talk? Really important. Really

important. Yeah, I, I think so. And I, I don't know

what the long-term impact here is. Nobody does. All right,

we can all kind of deal with it in the moment, and you know, we're

probably all running on adrenaline and trying to hold it together now, but you

know, there is going to be a big emotional crash at some point in the

future, and, uh, Yeah,

it's almost like adrenal fatigue is how I've, you know, made the

analogy. Cabin fever and just stressed. I lost a

best friend from high school to COVID. He's my age. Oh, I'm so sorry.

We had drifted apart, but to have someone that's your age,

you know, go through that and you think he's gonna pull, pull out of it,

that's when it hits home. And then it's that times, you know, here in the

States, it's not just the 210 10,000 deaths,

apparently someone did an analysis and every death impacts like 7

lives. So now we're talking like 1.5 million people

affected mentally by what's happening. Yeah. And I think people are not

understanding, to your point, asking that question, because at the end of the day,

we're all human beings trying to get through the day.

And you can't see some of that now since we're all remote now. And

before you'd be able to pick up on body language or or something like that.

So now you have to actually work harder as a leader to make sure that

the team is mentally holding it together as

well. Yeah, completely agree. So as we wrap

up, Tobias, what has you excited about the

industry and what are you looking forward to?

So I think pre-COVID, everyone in the industry knew,

right? We all had the sort of similar thought that we've gotta have this distributed,

resilient food system where we're bringing local food to people and technology can enable that.

cost-effectively year-round. Hundreds of people

probably understood that narrative. And then COVID happened

and all of a sudden millions of people understand that narrative,

right? There is a desperate need

to figure out a more resilient food system where people are

eating healthier food and doing that all year round. And indoor

farming can be a big part of that solution, right? So

I've always been excited by what we're trying to do. I think I'm even more

excited now, right? It's kind of a horrible way to have that

kind of accelerated. Yeah. But this is what we're living through, right?

And there's not just a sort of opportunity,

that sounds a bit crass, right? I feel like there's an obligation and a

responsibility here to give it 110%

every single day and make this happen. Yeah. Let's do something good for

the world. Well, yeah, that's

one of the best ways I can think of to wrap up this conversation, to

end on a high note, to demonstrate and

have people believe what we can collectively do,

humanity, to kind of lift ourselves up. Rising tide lifts all boats and all.

And I think what you're doing at Square Roots and what the team is doing

is doing your part and leading the way and showing

that there is an alternative future for us.

And I think it's important, like, the more stories we have

that are feel-good stories, to be quite honest, and we need more of those,

I think, in this day and age. So, I just want to congratulate you on

the success of the company so far. And I see, from

where we're standing, we see a lot of good things happening, just the industry as

a whole. Thank you. And the energy and the enthusiasm.

behind what you're doing is obvious in the industry as well. So I want to

applaud you on that and thank you for all the work you've done so far.

Thank you very much. And thanks for what you're doing, providing a platform where, you

know, more of us can tell this story. It's really fantastic what you're doing. Thank

you. And so is there any initiatives coming up or best place for folks

to learn more about Square Roots? Yeah, we're super

active on social media, especially Instagram and Twitter. You can find us

@squarerootsgrow. We got new farms opening in New York

and in Michigan and a couple of others that I probably can't talk about

right now. Okay. We are hiring farmers right now. Okay. And

all of that information will be on those social channels at Square

Roots Grow. Okay. And we'll make sure we have all those links, uh, in the

show notes as well. So thanks again, Tobias. I really appreciate your time and telling—

you're sharing your story as well. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening.

To read the full show notes for this episode, which include a summary, timestamps, and

any links mentioned in this episode, Please visit

verticalfarmingpodcast.com. There you'll find the information

from this episode and any past episodes. Special thanks to this

week's sponsor, Ceres Greenhouse Solutions. Ceres is

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to build sustainable grow environments for year-round production. Be sure to

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week, here's to your health. Thanks for

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