Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show serial entrepreneur and CEO of Intelligent Growth Solutions, David Farquhar. In this episode, Harry and David break down the emergence of vertical farming technologies, opportunities that have been created due to the current global pandemic, and projects that David and his team have been working on within his organization.

Special thanks to our Season 1 Sponsor

IGS – https://intelligentgrowthsolutions.com/

Key Takeaways

• 01:36 – David and Harry discuss the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the importance of leadership during this difficult time
• 07:48 – Opportunities David sees in the marketplace for his organization, Intelligent Growth Solutions
• 12:53 – David’s background in business and technology
• 22:16 – How the emergence of global technologies like vertical farming can impact the future of our society
• 29:50 – David expounds on the direct impact that weather, handling and ventilation have on vertical farming
• 41:54 – What is something David has changed his mind about recently
• 43:46 – Where listeners can follow David and IGS

Tweetable Quotes

• “What we’ve tried to do is be clear, be concise and be decisive. I think, at times, that is exactly what you need.” (05:42) - David Farquhar
• “We think we can contribute. We want to do it in a non-cynical way. And we’re working with quite a lot of governments now on thinking about how this might happen.” (07:39) - David Farquhar
• “I think we may see a shift in some habits. Things like how we get to work, where we work, what we choose to work on, how we shop, the reduction of waste, our diet, all kinds of different things.” (22:53) - David Farquhar
• “Particularly with vertical farming, we are right at the start gate. This is the beginning of a marathon. And anyone who tells you otherwise, frankly, is lying.” (23:39) - David Farquhar
• “So, I would say urban farming, governments, and the retail wholesale food production end of the consumer-facing piece, that’s where we’re seeing most of our activity at the moment.” (32:08) - David Farquhar
• “The first really crucial thing is to have total control of that climate. And, if you’re growing vine tomatoes and basil, then you had better be able to replicate real weather in Tuscany between May and July.” (35:00) - David Farquhar
• “When it comes to things like climate, you also have to think not just about the diurnal pattern from night to day, but you also have to think about seasons and you also have to think about geography.” (41:01) - David Farquhar

Links Mentioned

• David Farquhar on LinkedIn
• CIAT Website

Intelligent Growth Solutions

Website | Twitter | YouTube

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Mentioned in this episode:

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We are right at the start gate. This is the beginning of a marathon,

and anyone who tells you otherwise, frankly, is

lying.

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,

Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast, our inaugural episode.

For episode 1, we decided to do something a little special

and have on David Farhar. David is the CEO of Intelligent Growth

Solutions, a company that makes platforms which deliver ideal climates for

plants and people based on a culture of continuous innovation,

simple design, and a refusal to accept conventional technical thinking.

Interestingly enough, David's interview was the first I had scheduled

following the COVID-19 shutdown. So I thought it made

sense to juggle the interview schedule a bit, and given the timely nature of

our conversation, have him kick off the podcast series.

So David Farquhar of Intelligent Growth Solutions,

thank you for joining us on the Vertical Farming Podcast. It's a

pleasure. Good to hear from you. So David, just to add some historical

context, I think, which is important, I'd be remiss if I

didn't talk about the current environment. we find ourselves in. As of this

recording, it's March 26th, 2020,

and the whole world is experiencing

the effects of COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic.

So I just wanted to mention that and just start off with that and ask

how you and your family are doing, and then what's

the last couple of weeks been like in your world? Yeah,

it's a very tough time for everybody around the world.

It's probably been a couple of weeks for you guys. We've been living

with it for more like a month or so, and of course

our friends over in places like Singapore have been

living with it for several months. So it's a movable feast.

We as a family are fine, thank you. My daughter's university has been

closed till September, so we have her back, probably

going slightly stir-crazy, poor soul. My son and

his partner live in the south of Scotland, so they are isolated

down there, and we are able to

get out once a day either for exercise or food

shopping, and that really, apart from going to say a

pharmacy, that is really pretty much what we're allowed to do.

So it's quite limiting. Can you

remember any time previously in your

lifetime that you've experienced something similar? I was in New

York for 9/11 and also during hurricane there. So

there's been traces of that, but this is the first time it's appeared to be—

it's something that's affected the entire globe as well. So I'm

wondering if there's been anything that's been a point of reference for you.

Not in reality. I mean, the nearest that I can ever remember

to anything like this, I was an officer, I was a captain in the

British Army during the 1980s. And of

course, we trained up for you know, World War

III. And so I was stationed in Germany, and we

regularly did exercises trying to imagine what chemical

and biological warfare would be like and how to survive through that.

And some of them were pretty realistic. They were pretty debilitating. Hmm.

This is debilitating in a slightly different way, but, you know, no less

scary. And I think, you know, you read about these kind of

things in sci-fi books and all that, sort of stuff, you never imagine it's really

going to happen to you. And it's not until you go out in

your car to do some shopping and the streets are empty

and places are just like ghost towns. How

have you thought about this in terms of as the leader

for your company? And I imagine there's a lot of people looking to

you for guidance and for leadership. How have you thought about anything

different in terms of the message you're communicating to the people that you manage?

Well, I guess we have a number of different audiences. There is

the crew of IGS, our fabulous employees and

our contractors. We have our investors.

We just had a board meeting yesterday. So we have our board of directors

and our investors. We have our customers and we have our

partners. So we've got multiple audiences, as would any business

have. Yes. We've tried to communicate very clearly,

very succinctly, and to act quickly. when anything

has happened. We've relied upon official government advice.

We're a small business, we're not a big corporation, so, you know, we have to

rely upon things like the government. We do, however, have a

very good network of friends and family in our

business around the world, and we've managed to track

what's coming out of Japan with our partners there, what's coming out

of Singapore, what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening elsewhere

in Europe. And all of our institutional

VC investors are American. So we've managed to

track through there as well. What we've tried to do

is be clear, be concise, and be decisive. I think at times like

this, that is what you need. We have sent all of our

office-based people home. For us, that's not been a hardship

because we already had a way of working where people could

work when they wanted and where they wanted. Yeah. Sometimes they choose to

come into the office to be more social. Sometimes they prefer to work at home.

And so from our point of view, that's not been

too much of a hardship. Some of the guys

who are single and live on their own and may have moved

up to Scotland to work here, that's been a little tougher on them,

I have to say. Yeah. They maybe have their

family maybe either down south in England or maybe overseas

somewhere. So we're trying really hard to look after them.

We've got a virtual pub tomorrow night at 5 o'clock where we'll all

share a beer and jump on a screen together.

Given that all the hairdressers and barbers are closed,

we've got a bad hair competition going to

see whose mop top gets ugly first. Yeah.

So you just try and do that kind of thing to lift spirits. But our

customers are being incredibly patient with us. And actually,

ironically, if you think about what we do, we're all about

providing providing sustainable food security. And so

without wishing to be overly opportunistic,

we do think there are things we can do to help. So from our

vertical farming point of view, being able to help to provide

people with a means of feeding themselves through something like this, that's

something we're keen to do. And then again, our

intelligent grid product for building lighting and

sensors and things, can also be used for tracking people,

maybe even using special types of light to work on

pathogens and things like that. So we think we can contribute.

We want to do it in a non-cynical way. And we're working with quite a

lot of governments now on thinking about how this might happen.

Yeah, that's really fascinating. And I've been thinking about that leading up

to this conversation because things changed dramatically in the time that

we coordinated the call and everything that has happened since then. And obviously the

nature of the promise of vertical farming

thinks about just these types of scenarios and how food

supplies can be disrupted overnight.

And I'm sure that's top of mind for you as well. So I'm wondering if

you've noticed or if you've thought about some of the solutions that

IGS provides and how they may be repurposed. And I know you

alluded to it a little bit, but I wonder if there's other ideas. What happens

during these times is businesses are thriving.

Obviously, there are businesses that are closing down and

suffering, but there's also opportunities during times like

this. And I guess, you know, without being opportunistic, but also seeing

how the skill set that the team has,

if you've thought about other ways to use those types of services for

what looks like it's going to be the new norm. Yeah, I mean, you know,

I think we probably all now would be sensible to

set our expectations that this might not be the last time something like this

happens. Viruses and pathogens, they will mutate.

There will be further waves of them and so on.

IGS is never going to replace traditional farming.

We just don't see ourselves having vertical banana

groves or fields of wheat and stuff like that. Yeah.

So it's important to be realistic about what we can

actually provide. Now, there is an increasing range of

crops that we can grow economically. Those economics

again vary enormously around the world. If I look at the

Far East again, 2 states adjacent to one another,

Indonesia and Singapore, the prices are quite radically

different in the supermarkets between those 2. So a range of

crops that is economically viable in Singapore is

going to be broader than a range of crops that's economically viable in

Indonesia. But nonetheless, Yeah. We have the ability to

grow the normal range of leafy greens

and relatively high nutrition brassicas,

kale, all that kind of stuff. But we've also grown

a number of root crops. We've grown things like radish and

turnip and things like that. We've grown potatoes. We are currently

growing chilies and lemongrass, Thai sweet basil,

pak choi, a number of things for that Asian market.

We've grown some soft fruit, at least to first fruiting stage,

and so on. As we continue with our

partners at the Scottish Crop Research Institute,

the James Hutton Institute, as we continue with them to

experiment on an increasingly wide range of crops,

we believe we can make a fairly significant

contribution to food safety or food security

across a widening range of crop types. So

somebody will make money out of bandages, somebody will make money out of drugs,

somebody will make money out of services, health

services and so on, and pharmaceuticals. That is

the way of life. We may make money out

of building, supplying, assembling, and supporting

vertical farms to different jurisdictions around the world.

I don't apologize for that. Because it's that sort of

innovation that can help communities and countries

overcome hard times like this. So we

don't want to be exploitative, but we do want to be helpful.

Yeah. In an earlier discussion I had with Louisa Burwood-Taylor

of AgFunder, she was mentioning the amount of investment that

was coming into the industry, the indoor

agtech. And I'm wondering if you've seen signs that that may be

either slowing down or picking up. given the current climate?

I think the general feeling is that most investors

are going, first of all, to look at their portfolio. They're going to do

some sort of an ABC analysis on their portfolio, and they're

going to look at the companies that are coming under the most

stress at a time like this and consider

where those companies are in their development, in their lifecycle, and

make decisions about whether they require additional capital.

At the other end of the scale, there will be other companies who

can help in a pandemic like this, and therefore

enabling them to ramp up quicker and to

provide resources and services and supplies

may be a completely different reason for putting further

investment in. So I think before we see a lot of

new and original investment, I think we will see

investors analyzing their portfolios and looking where they should

deploy capital Thank

you for that insight. Just maybe to take a step back, I know we jumped

into the conversation given, you know, where we are

currently, but I thought it'd be helpful for you to give a little bit of

background as to how you ended up

in this industry. I know that you come from a background of

innovating with your previous companies, but I thought it'd be helpful to provide some

context about a little bit of your backstory. Sure.

I fell into the tech sector completely by accident in

1992. I've never written a line of code in my

life, but I was taught leadership and

discovered that an awful lot of the lessons that I had applied

previously could be applied successfully if you were imaginative

and creative to building and leading teams, building

then great companies in the tech sector. So since about '92,

I have built and sold around about a dozen companies. I've

had a couple of failures as well, I have to say, and did an awful

lot of my learning during those lean times. But I

had got to a point where in 2016, I

had sold a company that was private equity backed over here

to business in the United States. And it was a great

transaction for all of us. So I was able to retire on the back of

that. And oddly enough, about 18 months

later, the son of the founder of

IGS phoned me up, and he in fact had been

one of the partners in the private equity house that had backed my previous business

that we'd sold, and said to me, was I interested in

looking at something else? After 2 or 3 attempts to say no, I

finally gave up because he said it was a thing called agritech, which I'd

never heard of, in a little town called Invergowrie, which

I'd never heard of, in the northeast of Scotland. And I

thought, oh, come on then, let's go and have a look. I'm not doing anything

better today. So I went up to have a look at this thing and was

just completely blown away. 2 aspects of what

IGS does that excite me. I actually trained as a chef

originally, although I never really practiced properly, and my wife is a

chef. She did practice for a long time. So, we have a love of

food in our family, but also I'm a mountaineer by

habit, and so the environment means an enormous amount to me.

And I have a daughter studying just such stuff at university, so it

runs in our family. So, something that could produce amazing

quality food but do so sustainably really piqued

my interest. It was further piqued by the fact that this

business was founded by a real farmer. So a chap called Sir Henry

Aycroft was a farmer up in Aberdeenshire, which actually is

where I come from originally, in the far northeast of Scotland. Henry had

pioneered the growing of baby vegetables, and

he was growing them for 2 markets: for Michelin-star

restaurants down in London, but he was also growing them for

the high-end ranges of the main supermarkets.

And so, you know, you would have little zucchini, maybe about 3

inches long, very packed with flavour, all looking exactly the

same and to order. So Henry's business was going very well, to the

extent that he wanted to try and do this 12 months of the year. In

the north of Scotland in the summer we get 18 hours

of sunlight, but in the winter of course we get almost no

light. So Henry needed a new source of light to do this and grow this

stuff inside glasshouses and polytunnels. He

contacted an American professor at the University of St

Andrews, and this chap John Allen, who sadly has passed

away, he and his team produced the first commercially

viable LED lights. And Henry

got together with him, and on something the size of your dinner

table, proved that yes, in fact, you could replicate sunlight

even back in those days. This is like 2013 kind of time, and

you could grow things successfully at that scale. But then

you're never going to make money growing things at that scale. So the challenge then

became, how do we really, really ramp this thing up?

And how do we perhaps even move away from glasshouses

and into another paradigm? NASA had

created, I think, the first ever model of a vertical

farm with a view to trying to feed people on places

like the moon and Mars. They had done that, and Henry said,

well, we can now do supplementary lighting in a glasshouse or a greenhouse, and

that is a product that IGS has today. But could we

reduce the energy levels, manage other aspects of the

climate other than just light, and could we remove

the need for quite a lot of the labor, which in certain parts of the

world, of course, is a big expense in agriculture? So the vertical

farming thing was what he then sought out to tackle, and he was

introduced to an amazing young man in Edinburgh

who has skills in mechanical engineering, electrical

engineering, electronics, and communications, and so on.

His name is Dave Scott. He is the co-founder of IGS, and he's our

CTO. So for the next 4 or 5 years or

so, Dave and Henry and a growing small

bunch of extremely bright people started working on the vertical

farm concept. They built 2 prototypes near St Andrews

before moving up to Invergowrie, which is just outside

the city of Dundee in northeast Scotland, and co-located themselves

very smartly, I have to say, with this James Hutton

Institute. So we had all of our engineering capability, our

R&D, and we had crop science all in the one place.

I met them in autumn of 2017, by which time

they'd gone through a series of friends and family or seed rounds

of investment. And I came on board basically to turn

what was largely an R&D project into a

viable commercial business. So I began to

recruit a team of people from my past. When you've run a whole

bunch of different companies, you have the great privilege of working

with some extremely clever people who have skills

that you don't have. And if you're a wise person, you will

recognize your limitations above all else. And so

I was able to pull together a really fantastic team of people,

probably actually a team of people that a startup like this doesn't

really deserve to have. And then we went out to the market to

try and raise an institutional round, a Series A round. And

we did that in 2018. So we had a business

plan together, began engaging the market about April

of 2018. We kissed a whole load of frogs, but eventually

we met the guys at STG, Seed to Growth Ventures

in Chicago. Sanjeev Krishnan, Matt Walker, and their

partners. We met up with them in the summer at an event in

New York, got on with them extremely well. It was clear

that they understood this market really well. So we started working

with them on a deal, on a term sheet, and so on. I then was

asked to do an interview with AgFunder for their

newsfeed on their website. Yeah. At the end of the interview, Louisa

asked me if I was aware that they were an investor. I wasn't, but I

was delighted to hear it. So we met Michael Dean, the founder of

AgFunder, got on really well with Michael. He's a lovely, lovely guy,

incredibly well-networked, incredibly hardworking and dedicated.

And so we put a little consortium together of

SDG, AgFunder, and then

the Scottish Investment Bank. So that is the investment bank of

Scottish Enterprise, which is the main economic development agency

in our country. So the 3 of them came together and it took us till

the spring of 2019, but we

managed to put together a £5.5 million Series A,

at which point we also met the guy from Osprey in New York. They're

a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. They've now created a vehicle

called Osprey Ag Science, and they came and topped our round

up to £7 million sterling. So all the time in the

background, the guys were continuing with the R&D. We were

beginning to do really serious business and market development,

bringing in channel partners as well as putting in together

a direct sales team until we got to the place where we are today.

We have a fully functioning technology company which

outsources its manufacture and assembly to third

parties, but then manages that value chain to deliver vertical

farms or supplementary lighting systems in a

box to any place in the world. So it's been a

fairly amazing 2.5-year journey so far.

That's a fantastic story. Thank you for providing that historical

context. And I think it's important for people who are new to the

industry to understand all the opportunities that exist, but

also to get a feel for someone like you who's had

so many success with business prior,

deciding that you saw enough and your interest was

piqued enough to engage in a brand new

opportunity. And to your point, in an industry that you had not heard a

lot about or read a lot about. And I'm interested in

what a little bit— you've touched it in a little bit, but your thought process

in terms of seeing what the potential was for

change on a global scale with these types of technologies that

we now have access to. Yeah, it's a great

question. And particularly now,

isn't it? Because if you think about it, we talked earlier about

empty streets. Yeah. I think people are going to reflect on how

they used to live, how they've had to live for what may be a

period of weeks or months now, what actually feels

better, what frustrates them. And I think we may see a

shift in some habits, things like how we get to

work, where we work, what we choose to work on. How

we shop, the reduction of waste, our diet,

all kinds of different things. It's going to be fascinating to

analyze what change lasts on the

back of this pandemic and to the degree to

which we're willing to invest to make ourselves prepared to

survive potentially another one. So, I

would say that the opportunities here are Huge, but

we also need to be super realistic. Vertical

farming and indoor ag in general is

nascent. You know, we are right in, particularly with vertical farming,

we are right at the start gate. This is the beginning of a marathon.

And anyone who tells you otherwise, frankly, is lying.

I've said to the press many times in the last 2 and a half

years, After about 3 decades in the tech sector,

I have never come across anything that has attracted as

much interest and BS, if I'm allowed to say

that, in equal measure. Yes. There are a lot of people

telling a lot of lies in this industry about what

they are capable of, what is economically possible, what is

environmentally achieved so far, and so on. And

my big fear for this industry is that we have some

large failures. There have already been numerous failures in the

Middle East. I fear that there may be failures in North

America, and that does not make me happy. It doesn't make me

wring my hands with glee at the thought of another company going under,

because all that is going to do is make people scratch their

heads and ask themselves, is this ever going to get real? Is this ever going

to be a grown-up industry? Are reliable in industry. Because

if we're talking about sustainable food security, think about the word

sustainable, think about the word security. That is not

about being flash. It's about being reliable,

producing a quality product day in, day out

at the right price, at the right quality. So I think

that the industry needs to take a hard look at itself

and do a bit of growing up. And I read and hear and talk

with an increasing number of commentators and participants in this

industry who feel exactly the same as I do.

So we're going to be— one of the things we're going to be doing is

openly publishing our data across a range of crops.

What's the energy consumption? What's the water consumption? What

nutrients are we using? But we have already achieved a

few things I'm extremely proud of. We had a visit from the Scottish

Environmental Protection Agency not that long ago. And the

comment that the chief exec made was, Well, our job is to

license industries to allow them to carry on their

business, but to limit the amount that they pollute or discharge

or whatever within the law. He said, you are

venting nothing to the air. You are putting nothing into the ground.

You're putting nothing into the watercourse. We don't have a job to do

here. You know, this is a completely closed-loop system that you've

designed. Wow. And so it is a zero polluter.

And if you're using renewable energies, you're not using any hydrocarbons

either. And then you have to think, well, where can we put these

things? So one of our vertical farms simply requires

a small square of flat ground. It can be

concrete, it could be tarmac, it could be waste ground. It really

doesn't matter. But it should never be, in my opinion, arable

land. The arable land should be left for the real farmers to be

going out there and growing our staple crops. So what we should be

doing is locating our vertical farms approximate to

points of consumption or points of production. Whether we're

producing food for end users, for retail wholesale,

for food manufacture, we should be

collapsing that food chain. So as we then reflect

upon the fact that the bridge between Singapore and Malaysia is now

closed, and Singapore is now going to struggle to bring in fresh

produce, if Singapore had a bunch of vertical farms

in its port area or next to Changi Airport or wherever,

then it would be possible for them to grow at home a

significant amount of the produce. Indeed, that's their strategy. They want to

grow 30% of their produce by 2030,

but they need the right technology to be able to do that. So I think

that getting a really high-quality supply of crop

on a reliable basis and co-locating things as

close as you can to shorten the food miles, these are

massive opportunities for this industry. It's so fascinating and so

relevant given everything that's happening. And I imagine your

phone probably has not stopped ringing with people

accelerating any plans that they might have originally had that were

maybe 2 or 3 years down the line and understanding

that what we've been going through now is all the more reason to start thinking

about this as a sooner rather than later discussion.

Is that some of what you're seeing as well? Yes, we're working with

groups, some of them commercial, some of them

governmental at the moment, ranging from

places like Jakarta in Indonesia,

Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, all the

way through the Middle East. So I would say that

Southeast Asia and Australasia are reasonably

hot. I would say that there is some interest

from Japan. I would then say that the

Middle East and India, we both have some fairly

significant inquiries from and are designing

projects with. We have a range of them across Europe. We

have a couple in the Caribbean. And then we

are talking with some people in North America. But

I think what's hit your country, particularly in the USA and to an

extent Canada, More recently, actually, I would say that

Canada for us is more lively than the USA. I think the

USA, from what I see, is reeling a little bit at the

moment, and I think is looking for clear and honest

leadership as to what the real status is and what should be

done next. So I think the level of interest we've got is

following the pandemic, if that makes sense. It's a kind of a wave behind the

wave as people put their heads back above the parapet,

they're kind of going, hell, what are we going to do

about this? And of course they have all kinds of things to deal with,

not just food. And so governments are having to deal with multiple

different things like healthcare, like transport and so on and so on.

Given the customer types that you're working with,

they essentially break down into the 4 of the existing

indoor Farmers who want to add the technology to their current

operations, those that are looking to actually break into

urban farming, and then you have the supply chain businesses,

the wholesalers and retailers who want to control their supply of food, and then obviously

governments looking to improve their food security. I'm wondering

if across those range of customer types, you've seen

an opportunity where accelerating the development

could get some of those movements happening faster. Yes, I

would say that we have seen

more interest from governments. So yes, if

we balance those 4 out, governments were probably the least

active, say, 2 months ago. They're now becoming one of the more

active. I think at the moment, so if you

break consumer-facing businesses into

retailers and wholesalers who supply the retailers on one

hand, along with food producers,

they are both absolutely thriving at the moment because

everyone needs to eat. The place that has gone totally

dead is a combination of what we'd call contract catering. I

think you call it food service. Is that right? Yes.

And then hotels, restaurants, pubs, cafes,

they're just shut over here at least. So that

side of things has gone obviously totally quiet.

The real farmers, the guys who work the fields, who were looking

to diversify, I would say that they are

probably a little quieter at the moment

because I think what they're doing is concentrating on

their own production. We're just coming into spring here. So it's

a really important time. I live in a rural, I live in a farming community.

All the farmers around where I live are having their lambs.

The dairy farmers are obviously doing their thing. The cereal

producers are looking forward to spring, you know, and then the shoots

beginning to grow. So those guys are probably thinking somewhere else. The

urban farmers definitely see an opportunity. So

I would say urban farming, governments, and

the retail wholesale food production end

of the consumer-facing piece That's where we're seeing most of our

activity at the moment. And I would say that I would

expect that to morph again once we're at the other

end of this in maybe another 6 months' time. How

fast do you see the changes happening when it

comes to the technology as well? Because I know that a

lot of what IGS provides, the benefit of it is that it is

modular and it can be adapted to a wide range of

environments. So Do you see also a push from the

technology side in terms of, obviously you mentioned the efficiency

of LEDs, but anything else that comes to mind in terms of even

robotics? I know there's, I've seen some information about new

arms made for picking even more sensitive

types of foods and what you're seeing from your end.

Yeah. So let's break it down into 2

or 3 areas, if that would be helpful. There is the— Yes.

Right. So first of all, let's talk about the weather and the climates that

we create. The best way to think about weather is as a

3-dimensional object, the 3 dimensions being the wind, the

sun, and the rain. So we have a ventilation system for the wind,

we have lighting system obviously for the sun, we have

an irrigation system for the rain, which also

actually doubles up as the supply of nutrient

in part because we don't want to be spraying our crop with

unnatural stuff. And there is no— we're not getting the

same kind of nutrients as you would probably be putting into soil. So

sun, the wind, and the rain, each one of them has multiple

factors, maybe 8 to 10 important factors.

Each one of those factors, and if we take light as an example, you

have the intensity of light, you have the brightness, you have the

spectrum, you have the photonics, You

have the length of the light, you have the various

other aspects. Each one of those factors can have an

almost infinite number of values. So the

mathematics to calculate, if I am looking

at 2-month-old strawberry plants that are

just fruiting, what is the absolute optimal light

that that crop needs on that day? That is big, big

mathematics because you're then adding in the ventilation. In where you're

thinking about the volume of air, the flow of air, the temperature, the

gas mix, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you're thinking about the

irrigation, how much water, at what temperature, any

salinity, pH values, what nutrients are going into it.

You're multiplying all these things together. So the first really crucial thing

is to have total control of that climate.

And if you are growing vine tomatoes and basil, then

you had better be able to replicate real weather in Tuscany

between May and July. And if you can't do that,

then you're not going to be able to optimize and you're going to be using

far too much energy and all that kind of stuff. So that's the

first main thing. Within that weather system,

I think, I mean, the LEDs are now what, 60%, 70%

efficient? We use— Yeah. 5 different colors. We

use a red, a far red, a green, a blue, and a white. And with

that lot, we can mix and change the brightness as we need to. So we

can make nighttime that's not black. It is nighttime, which is

ambient light. We can make sunrise. We can make 18 hours of

perfect Tuscan sunshine, and we can make a sunset. And

the only reason we could do that is because of a fundamental piece of physics

we have, which gives us a level of control that no other system in the

world has. And we've patented that. But the one that

people overlook because it's just really hard, is

ventilation. So I told you earlier that we vent nothing

to the air, but we bring air in at the beginning

of the process of growing crops. So once we've— let's say we built

a farm in the Arizona desert, we'd bring air in at probably 50 degrees

Celsius, and we'd then cool that down to

about around about 20 degrees, and we'd maintain

that air between roughly 16 to maybe 25 degrees.

Throughout its life. That air starts with a

certain humidity, a certain mix of gases, and a certain

temperature. We have to then create a really even flow

across the top of our crop. We have to then manage the gases. We

have to manage the humidity. We have to manage the temperature.

And I would argue that from the work I've seen our team do,

that designing HVAC and designing the ventilation system

presents some of the biggest challenges in indoor farming,

especially if you're going to be closed-loop, environmentally sound, and

minimize your energy use. So that for me is a massive one.

So that's the weather. The next one we need to think about

really is the handling. So we use a racking system.

One of Dave Scott's real specialties is these racking systems

for very large warehouses. And in our racking

system, we hold our trays at about

roughly 1 foot apart or so, and

30 centimeters, 12 inches kind of thing. Because of the control

we have, we can actually have a microclimate on each

tray. And a tray is about 6.25 square

meters. It's about the size of a professional snooker table, maybe double the size

of a pool table. Okay. Each tray can be 6

degrees Celsius separate from the tray above it and the tray

below it. So even though they're stacked so close together, each

one really does behave as a microclimate. And in fact, we can

grow 6 or 8 different crop varieties on a single tray

if that is what is required. Wow. And that's not something you see. You

look at the photos of most systems that you will see, and they're

monocultures. They're growing one thing. They're growing kale, or they're growing lettuce, or they're

growing a herb or something. So that

physical control is extremely important. The handling of the

trays, how you move the trays up and down,

how you stack them. Once you have seeded the trays, the

automated handling of putting them away into the system. And

then when they are ready for harvest, how you extract them from

the system, how you pick them. and how you bring them out through the

airlock. And that's another thing. When you look at a lot of these,

the photos on people's websites, they think it's really smart to

show people wearing lab coats or white boiler suits with

hairnets and masks. Yeah. And the sunglasses, right?

Of course. Of course. So we think it's actually a bit smarter not to have

humans anywhere near the dam crop at all, because guess how

pests get in? You know, they're carried in by us.

So, let's have the robots do the work. Let's not put the humans in.

You know, occasionally we might have a maintenance event where you do need to

empty one of the towers and, you know, do some maintenance work.

But, you know, given the monitoring we've got through our software,

that's all completely predictable. So, having that ability

to mechanically handle and take the human beings out of

the the actual growing space itself, we think is

enormously beneficial. It means that we can operate with

zero pesticides and not have any rates of

infection at all either. That in turn means that

you don't need to wash the crop. So all the lettuce that you eat, you

buy in the supermarket, has been washed in chlorinated water. We don't need to do

that. And the supermarkets over here in the UK, the big food

retailers have estimated that that is going to double the shelf life of

most crops. Wow. There's

so much fascinating information there. And I think the more you dig

into the benefits of everything you outlined, I know a lot of

people do think about the replication of the sun and the rain, but I think

this aspect of the wind as you outlined it and as that relates

to ventilation is something that not a lot of people think about.

When it comes to environmental impacts and how

when people think of lighting, they simply think of replicating daytime.

But what you just outlined there about the differences

in the type of light that exists at nighttime and at

sunset and how that actually affects the cycles that a

crop would go through in an outdoor environment, all of

that is just incredibly fascinating. And it's It seems like

you're so much more ahead of the curve in terms of thinking about these things.

Well, and when it comes to things like climate, you also have to think not

just about the diurnal pattern from night to day and so

on, but you also have to think about seasons and you have to think

about geography. Are you in a temperate zone? Are

you in a tropical zone? Are you next to an ocean?

Are you continental and far inland? Therefore much drier.

You know, different crops grow in very different environments.

And, you know, people say variety is the spice of life. Well,

you know, it really is. And, you know, all the things that grow naturally

probably can't grow somewhere else because they're not going to get the climate that they

need. So if we're going to grow a serious variety of crops,

not just leafy greens, we have to be able to replicate multiple

different climate types. Yeah, this is incredibly,

incredibly fascinating. And I want to be respectful of the time too.

So as we wrap up, David, I'm wondering if I

could just ask a slightly different question just to get some thoughts

going around your head. As it relates to this industry, what's something

you've changed your mind about recently? I do not think there is

such a thing as a global food

market. I do think that we

move 72%, or I know that we

move 72% of everything we eat

transcontinentally all the time. It's amazing. It's

like it's a hidden industry flying or shipping

food around the world. There's a brilliant website, an

organization called the CIAT, which has

some absolutely wonderful graphics about this. So that

aspect of it is global because we're growing things out of

season in Peru for consumption in

Scotland. Blueberries, for example. Yeah. Should we be eating blueberries

in the winter? But I do not believe

that there is a global consumption market. I

increasingly believe that there are regional and

local markets. I think that the economics varies

enormously, the diet, the choice of food.

And therefore, if you are going to produce a

technology solution to growing food, which

can be applied everywhere around the world, it had

better be highly flexible. It had better be

modular to fit in different sizes of space. But it had

better be flexible enough to grow everything

from a pea shoot to a chili to

a turnip to a strawberry. Otherwise, I think you're going to

be irrelevant. So that is my firm opinion. Well,

David, I want to thank you for educating my audience on

what's currently happening and how it's so relevant, what

it is that you're doing at IGS is for the current environment that we find

ourselves in. And I find it incredibly inspiring what it is

that you're doing and what the team is doing. And I think there's a

huge potential to make a dramatic shift in how we think about

how we deliver food and how we provide food in areas,

especially speaking to everything you've covered around the factors that go

into raising these types of crops, that this can

exist in almost any environment given the right planning. And I think

The potential for what that holds is really promising.

So I appreciate you sharing that with us. You're very welcome. I've

thoroughly enjoyed this. They've been great questions. I believe this is

important stuff. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And so we'll

provide all the links that you mentioned in the show notes. Is there any

place that you're active online or if people wanted more information on

IGS and to follow along the journey? So

there's igs.farm, our main website, but we

post a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. We have a Twitter feed

and so on. It's fairly easy to find us, or at least I'm now

talking to my marketing department. I hope it's really easy to find us.

So yeah, and we're posting stuff every

couple of days as things develop. So I just want to thank you again for

coming on. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this,

especially in light of everything that's happening in our world now. Well,

Harry, it's been great. Good to talk to you. And I hope this is useful

as you build your business. Once again, thanks to our

sponsor IGS. To learn more, please visit

intelligentgrowthsolutions.com. Thanks for listening. To

read the full show notes for this episode, which includes any links

mentioned in the episode, as well as a full show transcription, visit

verticalfarmingpodcast.com. There you can sign

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