In this episode, I speak with David Flynn, Vice President of Business Development at AmplifiedAg, and what a journey it's been! David shares his transition from military service to the world of vertical farming, and it's a testament to the power of mission-driven work. His experiences in Afghanistan, witnessing firsthand the struggles and triumphs of local agriculture, have fueled his passion for bringing fresh food to those in need. It's not every day you meet someone who's as dedicated to making a difference as David is.

We dive into the nitty-gritty of AmplifiedAg's technology, from their propagation containers to their high-yield production units. David's insights into the challenges of energy costs and the need for industry-wide collaboration are eye-opening. It's clear that this isn't just about growing lettuce; it's about community, sustainability, and tackling food insecurity head-on. If you're curious about the future of controlled environment agriculture and the people who are pushing its boundaries, you won't want to miss this conversation. David's story is a reminder that with the right technology and a lot of heart, we can make a real impact, one container farm at a time.

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Key Takeaways

00:03:55: Transition from Military to Agriculture Technology

00:06:02: The Evolution of AmplifiedAg and Vertical Roots

00:10:53: Impact of COVID-19 on Business Operations

00:16:23: Observations on the Growth of the C EA Industry

00:21:20: AmplifiedAg's Current Size and Product Offerings

00:34:51: The Importance of Industry Transparency and Collaboration

Tweetable Quotes

"I don't believe in coincidences, per se. When I moved to Charleston, I met Don Taylor, who's the founder of our company, AmplifiedAg. He painted a vision of marrying technology with agriculture, trying to do good things with technology and agriculture, promoting businesses, job development, and providing fresh food to people in need."

"The biggest conversion we made was from an Aeroponics system to a Nutrient Film Technique system using crop king gutters in a stacked formation inside of our containers. That really was a game changer for us."

"The core mission of the company was to provide safe access to fresh food globally. We're working with foundations across the country, non-governmental organizations trying to solve food insecurity. We're driven right now to look for opportunities to be a system integrator, to bring food security, help leverage food security for people in need."

Resources Mentioned

Website - https://amplifiedaginc.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/amplifiedaginc/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/amplifiedaginc

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplifiedag

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@amplifiedag

Connect With Us

VFP - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/verticalfarmingpodcast

VFP Twitter - https://twitter.com/VerticalFarmPod

VFP Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/direct/inbox/

VFP Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/VerticalFarmPod

Vertical Farming Jobs - http://verticalfarmingjobs.com

Vertical Farming Weekly - www.getrevue.co/profile/verticalfarmingpodcast

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Harry Duran 0:00 - 0:05

So, David Flynn, vice president of business development at Amplified AG, thank you so much for joining me on the vertical farming podcast.

David Flynn 0:06 - 0:09

That's great. Thanks for having me, Harry. Really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.

Harry Duran 0:10 - 0:26

David Flynn 0:26 - 0:27

Yeah.

Harry Duran 0:27 - 0:28

Where are you calling in from?

David Flynn 0:28 - 0:30

I'm located in Charleston, South Carolina.

Harry Duran 0:30 - 0:32

Okay. And is that home for you? Is that where you grew up?

David Flynn 0:32 - 1:06

No, I actually grew up outside of Boston. I'm called Norwood, Massachusetts. And funny story is, I went to school at Clemson University here in South Carolina. Back then, not a whole lot of Yankees, per se were at Clemson. And in the spring weekends, my roommates would take me down to Charleston, to James island and John's island. And I fell in love with Charleston as a young man way back in the day. And so I always said, if I ever get the chance to live in Charleston, I'm going to do that. So when I say I'm living the dream, I truly am living the dream here in my dream city.

Harry Duran 1:06 - 1:11

And I noticed that you spent some time in the US army, and thank you for your service, and.

David Flynn 1:11 - 1:11

Oh, yeah, thank you.

Harry Duran 1:11 - 1:24

I'm curious how that a lot of, I've heard from other folks who have spent time in the armed forces that have actually been on the show as well. And so I'm curious what you can think about from your time there and how it may have even prepared you for some of the things you're working on now.

David Flynn 1:24 - 3:55

Harry Duran 3:55 - 4:40

That's a great story. Thank you for sharing that. It's interesting to think about those experiences, and at the time, you may not understand the impact it could have. You saw, obviously, the impact that it had on the region there, but obviously, that story stayed with you. And it's a lot of the challenges. You know, you see local farmers face, and you see farmers facing that here in this country as well. Just this idea of how we get food, it's not a challenge sometimes with how we grow the food, but it's also how we get food delivered, how we keep food fresh, how we get in the hands of the people that need it the most. And a lot of times, it ends up being a distribution issue, not necessarily a production issue. And so I'm curious, when you first started having those conversations with Don, how much were you aware of what was happening in this controlled environment space different than what traditional ag may have looked like to you?

David Flynn 4:40 - 6:02

Harry Duran 6:02 - 6:10

So I saw that previous to amplified AG, was it just a change in the company? Cause I said it was referred to as Boxcar and Tiger corn Farms as well. Tiger Corner.

David Flynn 6:10 - 8:57

Harry Duran 8:57 - 9:14

That's a long time to be testing something and not be able to bring something to market. So I'm sure as the years went by, the team was probably wondering if and when this was going to happen. What were some of the things you were discovering early on through your testing, through the different models and I'm sure, different systems that ran through there?

Yeah, the biggest conversion we made was we started out with an aeroponics system. So it was aeroponic, it was walls, you've seen them, where we would have pressurized misting system that would deliver nutrient water that would be aerosol into the root system of these plants that were hanging on either side of the wall. And what we found growing that way is we didn't get the weight that was needed. Plants would either grow flat back up against the wall, or they would reach for the lights and they would curve and they would have sort of an unnatural shape to them. So we, at that point in time, I think we had eight containers of aeroponic walls, and we had a lot of internal debate on what's the right next step. And it turned out that matt, again, driving force, said, we need to simplify. We need to go to a tried and true easier method with less maintenance points in the system. And then we went to a NFT nutrient film technique system using crop king gutters and then put them in a stacked formation inside of our containers. And that really was a game changer for us. So that enabled us to then produce a lot hundreds of these containers. So we built over 250 containers, most of which were for vertical routes. And then in the last twelve months, we've put 55 containers across North America, from Alaska down to Miami, Boston, and points in between. And so our containers have seen every climate North America can offer, except for desert. So we're looking for opportunity again in the desert, but they've done well in every other type of climate.

Yeah, sounds like the time that you took to do that research. And rather than rush something to the market, it seems like it paid off in the end because you keep testing the solutions, was really the right approach to make sure you had something you were confident about putting into the market.

Yeah, 100%. And there were some rocky roads, of course, like anything else, the farm team was tired on the technology team and really made us better through that process.

So obviously, because of the timeframe, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask what the challenges were like during 2020. With. It's when I started the show, as I had mentioned to you and in our pre chat, and companies came and went as a result of what happened during those couple of years. And obviously, you guys have made it through that. And I'm curious if you can just kind of go back in time to that point of time. There's a lot of things happening across the world, and obviously for business owners, a lot of challenges. And then specifically for people who are in the food distribution business, I mean, there's a lot of lessons learned and maybe things that were unexpected. So I'm curious if you can kind of paint a picture about what the team was going through back then.

Yeah, let's think back to April of 2020. March, April timeframe. All of us were kind of in the same boat, right? You, me, and the rest of the world trying to figure out what's going on. And at that point, we were still in the early days of vertical roots. And if you would have looked at us back in 2020, you would have called us a farm company and not a technology company, because the reality was, in that day, that was the majority of our business was actually the farm side of things, still proof of concept, proving things out. And I think this is not unique to others in our space, but what we found is because the restaurants were closing, that the wholesale dried up. Right. Wholesale lettuce sales dried up because restaurants weren't open. Food service was kind of taking a dip. But then the other side of the coin is retail went exploded. Everybody, I guess, wanted to buy lettuce during COVID They wanted toilet paper and they wanted lettuce. So we started increasing the production. We stole a ton of containers, sort of chasing that demand. And that's where we really exploded as a company, based on the demand that was presented through the retail space. And that's where we kind of grew the business a little bit.

When you think about the conversations you had with Don early on and him convincing you that this was a unique opportunity for you, and obviously you've seen a lot of growth since that company is where it is now. How have you changed in terms of, like, your. Anything along the lines of your leadership direction or just in terms of managing teams? Have you taken the time? I know when you're in the thick of it, it's hard to look back and see any personal growth that's happened. But if you look back and think about from the time you were hired to everything that's happened in the company since then, how do you see that in terms of your personal growth?

Yeah. Wow, that's interesting. I haven't really thought about that. I've done everything in the company. That's what you would expect in a startup. Back when you're five or six guys, me and Don were laying floors and containers. We were wiring boxes, we were pulling wire, we were designing software. I didn't have any software experience, so I was effectively doing product management with kind of designing UI structures and conveying that to the software engineers. And I never, thinking back to my first career, I never could have envisioned that I'd be doing these type of things. And so in the early days, I was leading the software team, then I was helping build containers, and then I moved over to lead the manufacturing team. So we hired a bunch of engineers and builders. So then I was overseeing the manufacturing of the containers. And then over the years, as when we had pits, valleys, so to speak, we had a situation where our pack room, we were packing 40,000 pounds of produce per week. And we had labor shortage, we had a labor problem. And so I spent. I moved to Columbia, South Carolina for five months and I led and reorganized the pack operations, the pack house, to get us trough that we were in. So I spent five months in the cold inside a cooler, leading the team. And then as we sort of scaled back the farm operation and pivoted to technology, I was a natural choice in the business to kind of do the business development piece because at that point I had understood the software side of things. I understood what it took to build the containers. I had seen the marketplace. I knew about produce sales, I knew about packaging. I understood shipping. I understood market unit economics on both farm operations. And so I was able in my current role now, to be able to pass those lessons learned and pass that knowledge onto our clients that come in and want to get into the space. We can point them in the right direction and share as an open book just to make sure that this industry, I believe in this industry and we're trying to help others thrive.

Yeah, so you mentioned the industry. So when did you start to notice that it was picking up steam? Because you're considered pioneers or early innovators in this space, especially if you go back to the time that Don was working with containers themselves. And then obviously I started in 2020 and I was noticing a trend. We've seen it from the investment money that's coming in good and bad, because obviously some of these didn't pan out. And so just watching from the sidelines, what's been your perspective on the interest and resurgence of people's awareness of vertical farming? All these conferences that are popping up, I can't even keep track with all these emails I'm getting from all these conferences, not only here, but like, in all these countries that are waking up, like UAE. Right. You know, they get 95% of their food imported, so it's top of mind for them. And I'm curious what your perspective has been in terms of the overall industry.

Yeah, I think in terms of the industry, I think it's learned a lot since I've been in it now, eight years, like I say. And we saw big investments that didn't pan out and then we've seen others that kind of stayed lean. I would count us in the group that sort of stayed lean and really started honing in on the unit economics of it. And based on my experience, what I think others are seeing is that CEA, from my perspective, is really designed to be hyperlocal. I think that's where it really succeeds. You know, our farm in Atlanta, for example, is co located at a distribution center with Collins Brothers distribution at the state Farmers market where we harvest 12ft outside the building. We walk it into the distribution center. We're saving on all the upfront shipping that goes in there, fresher production, and off the other side where we hand it off, we do the transaction in that building so we don't have to deal with the shipping end of things, which we saw, and I think others have seen this as well, is, you know, when you have such a large operation and when your operation exceeds the demand of the local community, and then you have to start loading trucks, 53 foot trailers of 26 pallets that have to go multi states, that's where you start to see the margins erode when you have to get into that shipping aspect of things, because now you bear the burden of shipping. If something goes wrong with the shipping, if you have a contract shipper, they get to the distribution center and they stuck there for 6 hours or so because it's so busy, then you got to pay detention fees. And so I think that was a lot of these large scale operations. I think some of them are still doing well. But from my perspective, if I have to ship 14 states away, that's California's job, that's what they do. So our job as CEA folks should be to really put the freshest produce in the community as we can.

Yeah, I love this continued use of the term hyperlocal because people, especially within these industries and these terms get locked in like organic and even local. As I started to have these conversations, found out that means different things to different people. And I think in some places local can be. I think it's 40 miles or 100 miles. I don't know what it was, but it was just some number that would make you as a consumer think it's like next door or like a couple miles away. But you get this wide berth of like, what's allowed in that label. And I think now we're seeing the use of hyperlocal to indicate that we're measuring stuff in feet now, you know, and it's really interesting when you can get that, eliminate the need for the transport and get it delivered to people. You really can't get any fresher than having it 12ft away, like you said. So I think it's interesting, but it's also an education process, educating the consumer, because they may not be able to tell the difference when they're in the supermarket aisle. And I've been making more of a conscious effort when I'm in there to look at, it's a little bit more expensive, but you look at the stuff from greenhouses and vertical farms, revel farms here in the case of Minnesota, where I'm at. But how much of it do you think, when you put your consumer hat on is needed from an education perspective in terms of educating people as to where their food comes from? You mentioned Salinas. I had this conversation with my dad about, like, the benefits of vertical farming. And he's like, well, everything seems to be working. So he didn't seem to have an issue with it coming like in a bag 3000 miles away. And, you know, it's. Even me in the industry has a challenge with that sometimes.

Yeah. I mean, a number of directions I could go there is you brought the bag up. I've had the fortune of being in some large scale packaging facilities where that lettuce comes from, salinas, and then it goes into a wash process. So it'll come in, it'll go through a chlorine bath. It'll come out of the chlorine bath, it'll go through a tumbler to dry the lettuce. Then it goes onto a conveyor and all the way up through gets weighed and put into a bag and then into a box and out to the consumer. That didn't really excite me in terms of wanting to eat that lettuce after seeing the process that it goes through. And so, you know, I think the restaurant scene in particular in Charleston, very excited to buy from a local farmer. When they can talk to the farmer, they know who he is, they want to support, they want to buy locally. You get other organizations that are promoting the local economy. And so it kind of gives you a leg up when you go in there. And then they're able to put your name on the menu so that when clients come in, they're getting educated where their food came from because they can see it on the menu. They say, hey, this is from local farm x. And that kind of gives people a good feeling knowing that they have produce right from their neighborhood. And then it's kind of like you want, when you go get seafood, you're excited to be in a seaside town. Not that air travel. Air travel maybe have eliminated that somewhat, but it's kind of nice to be when you go to the beach, you want to eat seafood kind of thing.

Yeah, I can totally relate to that, being in the midwest and having sushi over here. Yeah. So I'm curious, for those not familiar with amplified AG, like, how big is the company now? And maybe talk a little bit about the current product offerings.

Yeah. So right now the company is exclusively technology with a small farm operation in Atlanta, as I described, we're a small business now. We're under 20 employees. All of our employees are technology folks. So everything from mechanical engineers, software engineers, customer support, and our offering is the technology, a range of operations. So everything from a propagation container, which is, I think, one of our most adaptable containers, in that we have 81,000 transplants that will fit. So imagine a room where you had 16 racks with five shelves on each one of these racks, and then you could fit 410 20 trays in each one of those shelves. And now, before you know it, you have 81,000 transplants. And that could feed up to 20 container farms in our side of the business, or what we're finding and talking to greenhouse operators, it's really a nice compliment to a greenhouse that does propagation on site, not a nursery, but they generate their own transplants. So if you take that propagation container and you insert it into a greenhouse, now you've got the best germination propagation, 100% that could be utilized for transplanting into the greenhouse and then saving bench space. So each one of those containers would have 900 sqft equivalent of growing space. That is pretty valuable real estate inside of a greenhouse. So now you, you're saving that space in the greenhouse and you're getting a more consistent transplant. And then we've got our production containers. Our production containers are 3600 count and they get the highest yields in the industry, 20 pounds per foot annually, which is a good greenhouse benchmark in terms of production lettuce, and that's 1000 pounds every three weeks. So we operate on a 21 day growth cycle, and that's a total growth cycle of 38 to 42 days. But we're segmenting out the early stage growth and then transplanting to get that week in, week out consistency. And then, as we thought about over the past, really the original core mission of the company was to provide safe access to fresh food globally. And so we started looking into food insecurity and food security challenges that across, not only obviously, the globe, we can see those issues. But, you know, we're working with foundations across the country, New York City being one of them, that's businesses and foundations, non governmental organizations trying to solve food insecurity. And then I could take that all the way back to South Carolina. We're working with the governor's school for agriculture is in McCormick County, South Carolina. McCormick county is the, if it's not the lowest populated county in the state, it's the second. And people there, it's a food desert. And so there's folks there that you wouldn't imagine are challenged as much or you wouldn't think about that as a food desert, but it's a reality. And so we're trying to be a system integrator of bringing like minded individuals together where we've got this governor school identified a problem in their community. They want to help solve that problem. They could use our technology. We know other places to help get funding, bring funding in, bring a distributor in and get the team together, and then find operators to get onto that equipment. And ideally, that's all happening to the betterment of the community and getting folks locally engaged. You know, we had a conversation with David Beasley. He's a former governor of South Carolina. He leads the World food program now out in Rome. A couple years ago, I met with him and he talked about the millions of people that are starving across our planet. We had a conversation with him about how can we leverage our technology to help with that problem. And of course, he looked at me, so we don't need lettuce. I said, well, I know you don't need lettuce. Tell me what you do need. Let me work with your team and figure out if there's other products that would be more sustainable, more nutritious, more fulfilling to get into these places in need. And so we were able to work with the USDA Ag research service here in Charleston. They've got the vegetable research lab. We've done three contracts with them where they've got 16 of our containers. And we custom built these containers with the explicit purpose of trying to figure out, beyond leafy greens, what can we grow in this environment that would be of substance for somebody that's in need. We're really optimistic about other possibilities with this. We've done another research lab down in Florida that's doing a root vegetable study. So they're studying carrots. We're talking to others about growing potatoes, where we're not just talking hydroponics, we're taking pots, a twelve inch pot filled with soil and irrigating those pots automatically and then putting all the other technology in the container just to see. Let's try and figure out where this could go. You know, we're working with the United States Marine Corps. They have a food security research project that they're doing out on the west coast. And we're working alongside them to see can we get a container deployed into a contingency area, remote, austere environment where you could provide fresh food. And then you start thinking about sub saharan Africa or other places where water is a problem. And these containers generate 40 gallons of condensate per day based on the transpiration rates of the lettuce that's inside, and what that dehumidification process is creating externally. And how do we repurpose that water, in addition precious commodity, in addition to the other goodness that grows inside these containers? And so we're really driven right now to look for opportunities to be a system integrator, to bring food security, help leverage food security for people in need.

That's fantastic to hear. I mean, it's one of those things that people sort of write off when they think about vertical farming, that they just keep bringing back this idea that we're just growing lettuce. And I think pushing the limits of what's capable in your systems. And just the fact that you're trying carrots and potatoes. There's companies that are doing tree saplings. There's so many. I think when you get the right minds working on these projects, and you're not limited by thinking solely on what it's produced so far, but what the combination of technology can do, and maybe just some, also some ingenuity and just macgyvering some stuff together sometimes just to kind of see what works, because you're probably surprising yourself sometimes in some of these experiments, you've seen stuff grow that you may not have previously thought was possible.

Right. Eight years ago, I didn't know much, but I've at least learned over eight years that if you give a plant light, nutrient, water, and control the environment, it's going to grow, and that'd be operational problem to solve. And then the unit economics that would fall behind that.

Yeah. You mentioned having installations across the United States in a variety of different climates and states. I'm wondering if just by virtue of having been in all these different places, was there any specific location that maybe kind of surprised you in terms of logistically challenged situations or anything where you may have had to adjust what you previously thought might work there.

Yeah. The longest distance job we did was in Ketchikan, Alaska. So there's a nonprofit in Ketchikan, Alaska, who's like minded as we are, and he's trying to solve food insecurity throughout the state. And for us to get a container to Alaska, it traveled by truck to Seattle. It got on a barge in Seattle. It went up to Ketchikan got offloaded at the port of Ketchikan, put on another truck, and then sent down the road to where it got set up. And we didn't think that area got much snow. Historically, it was more rain because it's right on the water. And then sure enough, they got a snowstorm where the owner sent us a picture of the container covered in snow. And then he took a picture of the inside, and it's 75 and sunny inside, regardless of the blanket of snow. And. And actually, it's a fun picture to look at, but it's actually just provided insulation for that container. Snow was a good insulator. So that was probably the most logistically challenging job that we did. We haven't done any international deals yet. We've got some irons in that fire. But yeah, we cracked the code up there in the great Northwest.

I mean, that's the ideal, right? To see in these extreme environments what's possible. And just to think about having that picture of that 75 degree environment in the middle of that snowstorm, to know that they can have access to fresh produce is pretty wild to think about. And I'm sure they're reaping the benefits of that, and they're pretty happy up there.

Yep.

And so when you think about how much you've learned over the years and the challenges that you encounter on a daily basis, what's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently?

Oh, boy. Tough question I had to ask myself is the cost of power. Can this industry survive on the existing power structure and cost? You know, if I look up to New York City, I've got a client that's paying thirty cents a kilowatt hour. Now, he's not using our containers. He's in a indoor warehouse where he's put in grow racks. And he's implemented our control system, our fertigation system, and our software. But when I look at the cost of power, that's prohibitively expensive. In South Carolina, we have some of the cheapest rates in the nation. You know, when we were producing at significant, you know, using a lot of power, we were down at. If you're at, that's a good place to be, 13 is not bad. You can make it work. But when you get up to 25 and $0.30, it's. The math doesn't add up. So we're working with solar providers and we're working with others. To your point about smart people getting together and trying to figure out how to get these numbers more manageable from a cost perspective, I think we've got to keep pushing the envelope on other, either renewable or geothermal or some other complement of energy that's going to get that number down to where the CEA farmer can make it work. Because let's face the facts, there's not going to be enough land on this earth in 25 years for outdoor agriculture to provide it all. The CEA space, in my opinion, is obviously it's not going to supplant traditional agriculture, but it's going to complement it. And we're going to need CEA farmers to thrive into the future. We can't wait 25 years to realize we have a problem. We see it now. This is where we need help from local and national government. I went to the USDA outlook forum up there in Washington, DC last month. Fascinating event. Heard the secretary speak and another number of other distinguished speakers. And when it comes down to it, with a farm bill, and all this legislation that was written was designed to help traditional Ag. And we really need help getting CEA recognized as part of the AG system and open the opportunity up for them to be on an equal footing with traditional agility for programs that would help them be successful. Because again, it's going to be, it's needed to put the whole system ecosystem in place.

Have you seen any traction there? Because that's a subject that came up. I've heard it mentioned a couple times. I was just at indoor AgCon in Las Vegas last week, and so some of that was mentioned as well. So are you seeing movement there in terms of parity with the support that's being given to a traditional ag?

There's a number of grant programs out there right now that are favorable towards CEA, which is a nice thing I've seen. Now, I've got a friend that works and the Senate ag committee, and they asked us to provide input to the farm bill, which was nice. So we're able to at least express our challenges and problems and see where, when they write the new farm bill, let's have some more favorability towards CEA people that are out there?

Yeah, I think there's more work to be done there, but I think these conversations help. And I think when they see that it is, you know, it's obviously minuscule right now when you compare it to what's being provided by traditional ag. But I think to the extent that it's being, providing food especially, and the work that's being done in some of these communities, these food deserts, I think connections and just a lot of it may just be education. Right. Educating people in government that this is something that's viable now and that's helping to provide more solutions for this. I think it'll be probably not as fast as everyone in CA would like, but I think the fact that those are happening and the fact that you mentioned this is a step in the right direction.

Yeah, 100%.

So as we get closer to wrapping up what I like to do because of these conversations and they're listened to by folks in the industry, I like to leave some space at the end of these conversations for any feedback or comments you have for your peers and colleagues in the vertical farming CEA space. And, you know, based on. I love to hear your perspective, given how much experience you've had in the industry, but I'm wondering, is there any message that you have for your colleagues in this space as you think about what we've been up to up until this point?

I've seen a change in the past eight years. You know, when I first joined the industry, everything was sort of a secret. And, you know, when you look at a bunch of folks out there who are innovators, you get innovators, early adopters, there wasn't a whole lot of sharing that was going on. Everything was sort of close to the vest. And then I think there was a silver lining of some of the failures that happened in the industry. I think that loosened people up a little bit to where now we need each other to survive.

Right.

So we're going to need to. We need to be transparent with one another. We're going to need to join together to try to get the right legislation in place, join together to try to figure out how to solve the power challenges that I described, get assistance with, even for shipping container farms. And I think greenhouse operators somewhat see the same thing with permitting challenges. You know, as we go into different communities, building officials don't know what to make of a shipping container farm. And I think it's a building. They think it's all this and that and the other, and we're like a piece of farm equipment. And it's there to go into the community to create jobs. It's here to provide local produce. It's here for good breeding, goodness. So I would just say the. That's my biggest takeaway from the industry over the years is just, I think it's coming together better now than it has at any point that I've seen it.

Yeah, that's really helpful. And then just in closing, when you think about what is on the roadmap for amplified ag, what has you most excited? You look out. A lot can change, obviously, in six to twelve months, as we've seen. But what has you excited as a company for upcoming projects?

I mean, we're super excited about the food security. I mean, when I talked about how I got into this industry to begin with, don is it was, we want to help people. And now that I see that, we've started to reach out a little bit more. It's an amazing number of organizations that are trying to solve problems, trying to solve that hunger issue, trying to solve nutritional issues, doing it in underserved communities, doing it in food deserts, doing it overseas, domestically. And I'm really encouraged by what I see on that side of things because that all ties back to hyper local right, that we're ideally suited for that type of situation because we're on the ground, we're in the community, and we're part of the community when these things happen. So that's really got me more excited than at any point since I've been in this.

Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to come on, and I'm sure you've got a lot on your plate. It sounds like with all the projects that are in motion, I appreciate Emily coordinating this. And so we'll get folks to the website, amplifiedaginc.com dot, anywhere else you want to send folks to connect with you or to learn more about what you're working on?

No, I think that's good. Send them to the website and they can find us from there. And happy to have a chat.

Yeah, likewise. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, because it's helpful to see people who've been doing this for a while, who've been through the ups and downs, who understand how important it is. And it's interesting to see how your life's journey, you know, just from the work you've done through your service, to understand that this is a worldwide problem and there's a lot we can do. And I think it's been interesting to see how the industry has matured and so appreciate everything you've done for sharing your story, because I know it's gonna be inspirational to our listeners. That's awesome.

Harry, thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity. It's been nice to meet you and really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.

Likewise. Thank you.