S2E21: Ed Harwood - Aeroponics, SOPs & Serendipity

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igrownews.com/precision. Serendipity,

if you're ready for it, will really help you out.

So serendipity got me Travis Martin.

Serendipity got me cloth that worked. Serendipity

is important. The other one is curiosity. If you're

curious, and a little bit of it is you have to be persistently

curious, curiosity can really take you a long

way. So if you want to start a new business, Stay curious,

be ready for serendipity.

Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast, weekly conversations with

fascinating CEOs, founders, and agtech visionaries.

Join us every week as we dive deep into the world of vertical

farming with your host, Harry Duran.

Vertical Farming Podcast, Season 2. Welcome back. I'm your

host, Harry Duran. If this is your first time listening, I'm

sure you're in the right place. This is the show where we interview fascinating

CEOs and founders of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world. In

case you missed last week's episode, it was a really fascinating conversation

with inventor and founder of Ceres Greenhouse Solutions, Mark Blinky.

If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend you check it out. This week

I get to speak to Ed Harwood. He's the Chief Science Officer at

AeroFarms. AeroFarms' mission is to grow the best plants possible for the

betterment of humanity. With over 40 years of agricultural and

engineering experience, Ed founded Great Veggies before transitioning to

AeroFarms. And in this episode, we cover a wide range of

topics. We start off with Ed sharing some new hobbies he's picked up during the

pandemic, the benefits of living in Ithaca, and his affinity for poker

and reading. We learn what sparked Ed's interest in biology, agriculture, and agtech,

and lessons he learned from founding Great Veggies and the path that led him to

AeroFarms. We dig a bit into the operations and learn the importance of

the SOPs he's put in place and obstacles he's encountered as he

transitioned into the role of CSO. He covers the difference between aeroponics

and hydroponics and the pros and cons to both, and advances in

aeroponics technology that he's witnessed throughout his years at

AeroFarms. We learn also why AeroFarms places such an

importance on taste. Lastly, we learn about the work Ed's doing with

schools in New York and New Jersey to combat food deserts and to improve

access to food ed, touching upon the Lettuce Project

initiatives. This episode is brought to you by Ceres Greenhouse Solutions.

Ceres combines smart greenhouse design with customized climate control

technology to build sustainable grow environments for year-round production.

They work with their customers and clients every step of the way, from helping to

secure funding to providing growing data. Whether you're a commercial

entrepreneur, an educator, or someone looking for a rewarding hobby,

visit ceresgreenhousesolutions.com. That's

ceresgreenhousesolutions.com

to get started on your greenhouse goals. So much to cover here. Let's

get into it. So Ed Harwood, Chief Science Officer at

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

Hi, you're welcome. So Ed, one of the things I'm always curious about,

given where we are date stamping this, December 2020, a

year many people will say is a year to remember.

I'm wondering if you've picked up any new hobbies during

all this time we've had to be at home. Actually, it's interesting.

I've experimented with moving to 3 days a week,

and the idea was is that I could maybe explore

some other things that would show up in retirement.

But my role in the company is so

exciting. I haven't been able to let go. I just,

I was supposed to work 3 days a week, but I find

myself, I'm cutting back a little. Okay. But for

the most part, I love it. So, yeah.

And so, where's home for you now? Ithaca, New York.

I'm not too far from Cornell. Okay. And did you grow

up there? No, I actually grew up in

Massachusetts, went to school in Colorado and

Wisconsin, and then ended up here

working for Cornell University for almost a decade.

And of the places you've traveled to across this country,

do any of them stand out? Or do you have fond memories of places you've

lived in? The best place in the whole world is Ithaca, New

York. No one will ever beat Ithaca.

What is it about it? Because I think for many people that are not familiar

with Ithaca, I grew up in Yonkers, which is just outside New York

City, and I've lived in Los Angeles. So I've always been a fan of big

cities. I love— I actually love hustle and bustle. And a lot of

people, you know, don't like crowds. I like riding subways. We were

chatting briefly in the pre-chat that we both attended Syracuse for a little

bit as well. So I'm very familiar with college towns and small towns, and

I now live in Minneapolis. So for you, what is the draw

to living in someplace like Ithaca? There's a number of them.

First of all, Cornell is here, so there is a

good academic community, which helps both with work and

with, you know, I have lots of friends, poker buddies, et

cetera. Okay. And it's fun to share stories.

And then the library at Cornell is fantastic.

Mann Library is one of the agricultural sinks, I

guess, is the term that they use. I don't know if it's still being used.

And then, it's a very cosmopolitan town.

At one point, we were setting records in the number of restaurants we had.

We're not doing that now, obviously. No.

But, so, there's all kinds of food here, food

trucks too. So, it's not quite

like being in New York City. I mean, I've been there many times, but

it's a small version of a very cosmopolitan

place with Lots of arts and just lots of things

to do. I can't resist going down this rabbit hole because you mentioned

poker, because I was caught up in the wave and I

think it was around 2003, the World Series of Poker, and everyone started

playing Hold'em. So do you have a personal preference for a specific game?

I came up with a game that my poker buddies and I,

we really like to play. The only thing is I

have to be with them because they remember how to play it and I don't.

What's the name of it? We don't have a name for

it. It's a variation on, I

guess, sort of like 7-card stud, but done with different

rules. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend, a group of friends

back home on the East Coast, and we would get together and

we would do dealer's choice. So every time you'd go around and we, yeah, there

were some names of games like Badugi and like all these weird

names of poker games that I've never even heard of. And, and like, To your

point, I have to be there with them because they're like, okay, we're going to

play this, this game. And I'm like, okay, remind me again what the rules are

because like, I don't know what they are. But those are a lot of fun,

especially when you're playing them with friends. Yeah. When we first started

out, one of us had a book on poker, types of

poker. And so he expanded our horizons a lot.

Yeah. Sort of like what you're saying. Yeah.

It's an interesting way. It was a big wave for a while. And I think

I was actually watching the World Series of Poker on TV and

fascinated by it. What I think what I love about it the

most is how you can continue to just get better and better at it.

And I love the ability to play against another human being.

And so I love that, you know, I don't get the same effect, you know,

doing a slot machine or roulette or anything like that when I go to casinos.

I have to be playing against another human being, which I love. We actually

had one of our get-togethers, virtually speaking,

last night. We've not been able to find a way to play poker

virtually. The ones that are advertised are horrid and too

difficult. So we got to discussing, you know,

what have we learned and is this good?

And we reflected on before COVID we used to

spend 45 minutes, you know, just comparing notes,

everything but the organ recital. We passed the rule, no organ

recitals. Okay. Yeah, so it was—

it's good. We continue. Yeah, I think we did something

similar. We connected via Zoom so we could see each other's face, and then we

used PokerStars, or one of the— they had a way to create a private room,

and then we would all be able to log into the private room. It's so

funny because it would seem like the one software or tool or app that's, that's

a killer app that would need to be created around this time. I did

hear a couple of people from the startup community Someone, one of these

guys who had a successful exit from his company, he bought the

Oculus Rift VR sets, and apparently

he sent them to 10 of his friends, and they're all— so they all have

this VR set on and they're playing poker, and apparently

in the room you can like feel like you're in the room with the person,

and when you like throw the chips in, you can see your hand move and

you can like light your friend's cigar, and it's pretty wild what he was

describing. I may have to look into that.

That's coming next. Yeah. The other thing you mentioned was the

library as well. Are you a voracious reader?

Yeah. If I were to show you this room, more than half the wall in

this room is covered with shelves and books, and I've been throwing

them away or recycling them or whatever now for

months. Okay. That was one of the jobs. And the reason is

because my floor is about an inch or so lower than it was

before, so I had to have somebody come in and tell me what was going

on. And he said, get rid of the desk and get rid of the books

or you're going to end up in the garage. That's a good tip.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mostly read journals and

magazines now. It's not so much the books.

And I don't have a recreational book. I like historic novels,

but I haven't— there's just not time. Spending it all

on biology. Anything you've read

recently that you liked? I read

regularly the American Scientist. Okay.

I also read Scientific American and

the Sigma Xi one. I guess that's the American Scientist, their

publication, but really nice publication.

Yeah. I had a subscription to Scientific American

because every time I would travel, I would see it in the airport and I'm

like, And I would say, oh, that'd be a great magazine to read on an

airplane. I should just get the subscription. And then now that I

have it, like, I never look at it. So I had to recently

just pause it because it's just, it's a lot. There's no shortage of

things to read. And I think at some point you just have to come to

grips with the fact that you'll never be able to read everything that there

is to read and just be okay with that.

I got them for my kids. They really like them. And it appears that they

read them based on the discussion topics we have. So

yeah. Okay. So when did this interest in

biology, agriculture, everything that started to

lead to where you're currently at in AeroFarms, do you remember when

that interest first started for you? Yeah, I do. I worked for

Cornell. I was the associate director

for Cornell Cooperative Extension. And

in that role, I supervised the agricultural extension

educators throughout the state of New York. And

so I traveled around a lot. I got to see a lot of the

offices and I had a lot of time in the car to think.

So, but what kind of triggered it was to see on

the top of the, in New York City, on top of the police

academy building, they had a hydroponic system. I

can't tell you why it was there or whatever. Okay. But they must have offered

the space or something. Yeah. And I was just

intrigued because in my background was a lot of dairy

science, dairy equipment, you know, plumbing and moving

fluids around and doing all that kind of stuff was,

it was very familiar to me. So now I see it growing

plants. And although, you know, I have a PhD in dairy science,

I'm a long ways away. I mean, cows eat

plants, right? But I didn't know much about plants

at all. So I had a lot of learning to do. So I spent, I

spent time learning about that. Also driving along the

interstate, Noticed all these vacant buildings

and I wondered, okay, why should pigeons be paying the

rent? Why couldn't I be growing plants?

And there's some good reasons why it didn't end up that way, but

those kind of thoughts all kind of coalesced

into, okay, I got to know more about this.

What were you finding in those early days about the industry? Because I

think people are getting more and more awareness about vertical farms, but

AeroFarms itself has been around, I think almost close to 12 years now. And

there have been other companies that have come and gone. And so what were you

seeing that was intriguing you and

pulling you in further into the industry? Yeah. So

in 2003, federal

funding ended my role at Cornell. And so I

had all the time in the world. I also had a

retirement fund, et cetera, all those kinds of

things. And I ran into Via youth soccer,

I ran into an engineer. And so I

hired him and started actually exploring

the, you know, doing it, actually creating it.

And we— there, I'm not sure I can

give you a quote. I mean, this is a long time ago. This is 2003.

Yeah, yeah. But we started playing around with different ways to

grow. And it's really helpful to know nothing, okay?

Because then you try, you can try anything and you don't have much

fear about what's going to happen. So the

end of, I don't know, maybe about a year or so,

we had a concept for the equipment. We

had cloth as our media. We

patented or applied for the patent during that period of

time for growing in cloth. It was a

pretty exciting time and In Marathon, New

York, which is about halfway between Ithaca

and Binghamton, I rented the basement

of an old canoe factory.

And actually, it was Grumman canoes that were the aluminum ones that were

made there. Oh yeah. And so we would find aluminum

rivets almost anytime, anywhere, but that was a

great place. Inexpensive rent, reasonably

high ceilings. It allowed us then to

fabricate some machines. So that became the

pilot facility. So that started in 2004.

And there were 3

machines, 2 high, 100 feet

long, 5 feet wide. And we'd sprinkle

seeds on, on the cloth. Mm-hmm. and pull the cloth down the

100 feet and harvest it. I

harvested with a hedge trimmer, package it

in Ziploc baggies, and then started working on

developing customers. And people were really

excited about it because it tasted so much

better. And also it lasted longer. Yeah.

So people would find it in the back of their

refrigerator drawer, right? And they'd take it out and they'd

eat it. And then they'd look at the date that was on it and it

was like 3, sometimes 4 weeks old and saying,

how can that possibly be? Wow. So

yeah, it was a good time. And this is the work you

were doing with Travis Martin at Great Veggies? Yes. And

lucky for me, Travis was a very methodical,

very disciplined note-taker. He was the right engineer

at the time because there's lots of different kinds of engineers.

But yeah, he was fantastic. And it looks like you were doing

that for about 4 years. And then can you tell the

story of how, you know, how that wrapped up and then how that started to—

and how you moved into your work with AeroFarms? Sure. So

that lasted pretty much until my retirement was gone.

And although I was selling and I was selling

all that I grew, it wasn't enough to pay the

bills totally and for both the business and

at home. And so I went looking for money money.

And I was unsuccessful at doing that. People said,

this will never work. How can plants grow in cloth?

I would say, come see it, et cetera. But there

wasn't enough credibility. And as you were alluding to

before, there was really no one

doing much of it, especially aeroponically.

So this was new. Yeah. And growing without the sunshine, they would

say, The sunshine is free. So I'd write an— I wrote an

article about the sunshine isn't free. Okay. But

none of that worked real well. So that's when I went to Syracuse

University, as we were speaking before. So I had this

hiatus of a year and a half to 2 years in which

I just did other things in order to pay the bills, close

down the factory, did all of, all that kind of stuff, took all the machines

apart. That was a really— that was second saddest to

letting the couple of people who helped me do that, letting them

go. There's nothing sadder than having to say goodbye

to really good people. So I had

a question on that. Like, what do you think? And obviously sometimes

hindsight is 20/20. So what would you say was

one of the biggest lessons you learned from

running Great Veggies in retrospect? There

are 2 things that I think are extremely

important lessons, and I share them freely.

The first one is serendipity, if you're ready for it,

will really help you out. So

serendipity got me Travis Martin. Serendipity

got me cloth that worked. Serendipity, you know, there was

just a lot of things that fell in place that now I look back and

say there was absolutely no reason for that to You know, I mean,

how could I be that lucky? So serendipity is

important. The other one is curiosity. If you're

curious, and a little bit of it is you have to be persistently

curious, curiosity can really take you a long

way. So if you want to start a new business, stay curious,

be ready for serendipity. I'm sure there's more lessons. All

right. But those two, those two are very important. And

the other thing you mentioned is the article you wrote about Sunshine Is

Not Free. And maybe after the fact we can get a link to it, but

can you recap what the premise of that was?

Sure. People who have greenhouses, okay, the climate

shifts all over the place. They're not fully

protected from the climate, so they have to put in

modifications. So they put in furnaces, they put in big fans

to cool it off, that kind of— So they have

an additional equipment cost that the sun

is really imposing, additional heat, the rest of

the weather that comes. And then guess what? The lights go off when you

don't— they come on, they go off, they come partially, they come—

if you look at a graph of that, it doesn't— so

what are people doing now? They're buying supplemental lighting

for their greenhouses to get the same DLI

every single day. I figure, shucks,

if I'm going to make the CapEx investment and the OpEx, I

might just as well give up on the sun because all those other things are

just— they're not helpful. So

sad day, you're packing up the equipment, having to let the team go.

And as any founder, I'm sure can relate, it's not a good feeling.

But having founded a company, that entrepreneurial

Spirit, you know, doesn't go away. No, no,

it doesn't. And so, like, after a while, those feelings start to

fade and you start to think about, well, what's next? And so can you talk

a little bit about how that started to come together for Aeroforms?

Yeah, so after that little hiatus of school and

some other things that I, that I did to get through that span of time

in which I couldn't raise the funds and whatever,

And while I was at Syracuse, a fellow

persistently called and he said, please don't hang

up. He said, I am a venture capitalist. I think

you're the future of agriculture. That was like the

first— Wow. First part of the conversation. So

he had my attention 100%. Had you had

experience working with VCs at that point a lot?

No, never before. No. And actually, he was probably right

to tell me not to hang up, but remember, I'm about curiosity

and serendipity, so I probably wasn't going to anyway. But

no. And, but they had sort of this not so good

image, right? They were sort of like the ones that come in and steal your

business. Yeah. Okay. But this guy was, this guy was not

that way at all. It was David Anthony was one of the

nicest wonderful. He was just a wonderful person.

And did you feel like that was a good partnership

and the right person to build what

you had? You— because I imagine there was so many, so many lessons that you

learned, technologies that you tried, you know, the, the aeroponics that were

working. So you got to test and iterate a lot when, you

know, in the previous work you were doing at Great Veggies. So

were you ready to really now put all those lessons to use and

try something new and excited about the possibilities of what you could create?

Yeah, I think we connected at the right time. His

specification for me is if he was going to fund me,

I would have to sell the equipment. And I was

not afraid of taking that on because when I worked in the dairy

equipment industry, I had a number of roles, but I became

very familiar with dealerships, regional sales

management, all the marketing, sales, engineering, all

of that, because I was a product manager and had a product line. So

you kind of have to touch all the pieces. So I was not afraid of

taking on that role. So we set things up

to do that. I went back into the Marathon

facility, but this time without those other machines. Now I

had to come up with machines and people, hire people to

fabricate machines. And the idea then,

I think this was pretty cool. The idea was

to build 10-foot sections of the machine,

lease them to prospects, teach them

to use that machine to grow leafy greens,

and that would give them product to show to investors.

It would teach them how to operate things and make

plants grow. And so They would come

away after, I think we allowed them 2 months.

2 months was the limit of the lease, and then the machine

had to go to somebody else. Okay, the next stop. But in

that 2 months, they were pretty well equipped to buy a whole

farm from us and all that. Uh-huh.

The only difficulty was, is as my board at that time

said, Ed, you made it too easy for them. Because most of them

said, Ed, we're not going to buy this from you. This is too easy.

We're going to build our own and we're going to use your methods

and your SOPs and all the rest of that. And that was for me,

especially in one case, was just, wow, how can you do that? It's

like you get the rug— people talk about the rug being pulled out from underneath

you. You know, I think I split my head when I hit the floor. I

thought it was bad. So after a few of those

cases, the board advised me to go find

the rest of the C-team because the other issue that we had was

who keeps the books? Ed does.

Who does the management? Ed does. Yeah.

Who's— everything they asked, for the most part, Ed had to raise his hand. And

they said, capital does not like to

invest in something that only has one guy

who's— if he gets run over by a truck tomorrow, the company's pretty much

dead in the water. Except for I had all those disciples out there. Yeah.

Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. The idea of a single point of failure,

right? Yeah. Yes. So, they

indicated that I should find some additional

C-team members. Fortunately for me, again, a

little serendipity, one of the prospects I had

asked the best questions. And when you've

been selling for a long time, you kind of get a feel for what's going

on. Even if you haven't met somebody, get a feel over the phone for,

for kind of what's going on. And they were definitely the best, best

questions, kept doing follow-up, et cetera. And

so, the— I think there were 3 of them at

that time. The leader of the group, which is

David Rosenberg, the current CEO, called me up and invited me

down. And the conversation very quickly went to, where

are you at? What are you looking for, et cetera? And we decided to

merge. And so, that's what became Just Greens,

which used the AeroFarms. AeroFarms was

a registered trademark previously. So,

but, and it has stayed, it has made

it in the test of time. Yeah. Right. It's still here and

it's well known. So that was a happy stance. So I got

my seed team and they've done, I mean, David's

done amazing. and raising funds, Mark getting

us known and getting lots and lots of awards.

So it was the right pick. What were some of the challenges

in those early days as you were building out the C-team and

having a need to very quickly scale up? And

not only the C-team, but also the supporting infrastructure and the supporting

other team members that you would need to really fulfill at the scale

that you were looking for? Yeah, so when we put the C-team

together, I obviously do the technology,

so I became the CTO, the Chief Technology

Officer, and David the Chief

Executive Officer, and Mark the Chief Marketing

Officer. So the 3 of us, that was pretty good

coverage for a company. I mean, we have a lot more people on the C-team

now, but that was good basic coverage for the things that we

needed to do at the time. So I pretty much

worked on improvements,

supporting when we went to meet with

funders. I supported the science and the

technology aspect of things. And

David just managed and

executed on all of that. And so the

challenges, I didn't really see the challenges.

I mean, it just, it all just seemed to happen.

Yeah. And some of People will tell you it

wasn't made up. I mean, it

wasn't as orchestrated as you might think.

The concept has sold itself, I guess, is

another way to think about it. And some of the work in your role

as CTO was working on automating the

prototypes for harvesting, cleaning, and improving just the

methods in which you did the work within

the buildings, did you feel that because you had a lot of these other

management-type tasks off your plate

that you sort of had now the headspace to get your thinking cap back on

and solve some of these challenges? So

that's a bit of a loaded question in the following way, okay?

It's really hard when you've been that one person who has all

the answers and whatever you say is what happens, okay? It's

hard to begin to share that, right? So I had to

keep telling myself, David's the CEO, he's responsible for

this. Mark is doing this, and I need

to do what you're saying. I needed to focus on improving

the equipment, improving the processes, writing the

SOPs, you know, just kind of populating

the growing processes, the harvesting

processes, the safety protocols,

all that kind of thing. So That was— I

didn't— after a while, after you write 100 SOPs, okay,

you're in it. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because

that's actually something that's near and dear to my heart. And for the listener, an

SOP is a standard operating procedure. And it's something— there's a book by Sam

Carpenter, Work the System, and that's where I learned the concept.

Did you learn that at Cornell or where did you pick up that

the importance of writing standard operating procedures, which ensures

really that repeatable processes get done the same way every single time.

Right, yes, and because the whole idea here is

to do something consistently so that the customer gets the

same product over and over and over again no matter what time of the year,

and by the way, that's harder to do under the sun. But so

I'm not sure exactly how I learned How to

do SOPs. It kind of comes

with doing a lot of writing anyway. So when I was a product manager,

I had to write a lot of things. I don't remember many of them being

SOP-ish, but you have to write a lot of stuff. So I

think just writing, and it seems natural to,

like you're saying, to control things properly, you

need to have written instructions. Yeah. I think it's something that

entrepreneurs don't think about a lot. And sometimes when they're solopreneurs,

they think, well, why am I writing it down if I'm the only one doing

it? But if you ever have visions of growing your team,

you're going to be thankful that you did put in that work. And it's really

a test the moment you hand over an SOP to someone to do for the

first time. And then you just sit back and see, did it work? And

how much of it got done to the specifications? And I have a

couple of VAs in the Philippines and I always say that if they get something

wrong, it's my fault, not theirs. theirs because I obviously didn't make the instructions

clear enough. So I think that's helpful to know.

Yeah. And when it's written down, you can edit it. It becomes a more

dynamic thing. Whereas if it's just in your head and you're telling

it, it's dynamic every time.

Yeah. As you transitioned in 2013 from

the technology to more of the science, what were some of

the newer— the new set of challenges that you were tackling as

Chief Science Officer? Okay. So my PhD is in dairy

science, so I couldn't call up— I mean, a lot of the people

that work for me had PhDs in

biology or PhDs in horticulture or

PhDs in things that were much more relevant. Okay.

So that was a bit of— I had to learn it.

Okay. And I like books. We talked about that.

So I have one section of the bookcase.

And I read most of those texts, became familiar with,

first of all, who are the people in academia who are doing most

of the work? And that's been a very important addition to things.

Mm-hmm. So CTO doesn't necessarily think about that, but a

CSO does. I want to know all the people in the United States

or internationally who are working in this

area, doing research in this area.

So the biggest challenge really was to truly become

the science part of it as opposed to the technology part

of it. Although one would think they'd be

integrated and should be integrated, but they're different.

It's, it's a different mindset. So now I

happily bathe myself in papers and journal

articles. It's a good thing you like reading.

Can you talk a little bit for the listener who may not understand the

specific difference of aeroponics and the

technology versus traditional, the plants sitting on top of the

water technology, hydroponics, and explain

a little bit of the pros and cons? Sure. So

hydroponics is work with

water, hydro and ponics, and

that kind of boxes things in. So as opposed to growing in

soil, you now move to soilless culture. And

I think of it as being broken up into 3 different parts.

So hydroponics includes aeroponics in which

the roots are sprayed. There's— it also

includes ebb and flow. People— there's other names

for it, but that's really where you flush some water down.

Most of the ones you see now are tubing. Yeah. And that wets the

roots. And then you can't do that constantly. to the

reason for that in a moment. And then there's another kind in which you

float rafts on ponds of water. So

in all cases, if you don't have sufficient

oxygen with the water, the

plants will die. Hmm. And so

for the deep water ones, you've got to oxygenate

that water and keep that oxygen level at a, at a certain amount.

Or a certain concentration. In the ebb and flow, you have to determine

how much time you're going to leave the roots without being bathed

in water, and then how much water do you have to run by in order

to get them wet enough to make it through that period of time

when there's no water there. But with aeroponics, you're spraying

and you're getting the optimal amount of air all the time and the

little droplets onto things. And that was how

it was explained to me. That's the Cadillac. And I I said, that's the one

I want. So that's how I ended up with

aeroponics and how I think about the various

divisions. Do you remember when you first heard about aeroponics?

Good question. Probably was in that

2003, 2004 timeframe.

Okay. And what— I'm curious how improvements happen

with all these types of technologies. There's the improvements now with LED

lighting and efficiency. I'm wondering, What you've seen

either as CTO or even CSO or just watching the industry,

how have you seen specifically related to aeroponics the

industry evolve? Yeah. The

biggest evolution for me was in lighting and the

biggest ahas came from lighting. Most of

the rest of the mechanism along those 3

lines of, let's say, hydroponics was fairly well developed.

People have— hydroponics has really been around since Babylonian

times is sort of the way they talk about it. Yeah. Okay. Not

maybe as industrial as we're currently

doing it. So in lighting

though, people didn't— I don't think people

thought about what the spectrum had

as an influence on plants or the intensity.

what impact did it have on plants. And so if you look at

the sun, the sun gives us a different light in the morning, different

light at night. This is another one of those reasons why the sun is so

uncooperative. So you, if you

understand what the spectral needs of

the plant are to give you the

chemistry that you want, then you

can manipulate the plants to become little

factories of stuff that's valuable.

If you understand the intensity of that

lighting, you can avoid some of the anomalies that

people run into when they have a hydroponic system.

So those 2 things, and that was another

learning curve for me. I mean, that's even foreign to, you

know, people with PhD in horticulture. I'm

sure they do now, but don't spend a lot of time in the lighting

aspect of stuff. And we have not learned all

of it yet. It'll be another several decades before we

have that aspect of things sorted out. Interesting.

One of the things that AeroFarms talks about a lot is

the focus on taste. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit

of you know, why obviously that's important for anyone growing

produce, but, you know, what AeroFarms' perspective is and

why that's important. Sure. Taste is

almost everything. It's the reason the customer comes back.

If you can impress a person's palate, they'll,

they'll keep coming to find you. And that's

difficult to do if you don't understand what

promotes that great taste. So there's, I think

of it as the organoleptic properties of the

plant. So it's the visual, it's

the sound, and the sound is the

crunch. So we like our veggies to be crunchy.

We don't want them to be slabby.

So especially in leafy greens. Yeah. And so that's the

own part of it. And then there's the taste, the chemistry that goes

along with it, and a part of that is also the

smell of it. So all the organoleptic

properties are important. They can all

be manipulated and they all

are pretty much chemistry or plant chemistry

oriented. So if you play around with a plant

Give it what it needs or what you want to give it to

end up with a certain property of it, then you can

create something that tastes great and people

will keep coming back. The other part is, is if you

understand what causes arugula to be peppery,

then you can make it really peppery so that some people

gag on it. Or you can make medium

peppery or maybe not so peppery. So you can begin

to govern things and give people

sort of the flavor and taste that they want. That's definitely

a 10-cent word, organoleptic. I'm going to try

to pepper that into my conversations now.

And it's important because I think at the end of the day, when it arrives

on people's plates, they want to have a good experience with it. And

all those senses need to be firing because

it almost creates a, a memory for you. Like,

I had someone ask me one time, what, what's your earliest smell

that you remember, like, ever? You know, and then I had to, I had to

think about, like, what it was, and it was— I think Play-Doh came to mind,

I think, for some reason. Because— But if you think about it, there's

certain smells that will immediately transport you

to, like, your childhood, and it's— there's, there's no, you know,

way around it. Because— and I think there's that sensory connection

that we've always had from the moment we were born with

food. And I think it's important that you talk about that as

important in the work you guys are doing. Yeah. And Mark,

the CMO that I was speaking about before, he's very

knowledgeable about all of that. And obviously, let's

say supporting and encouraging the consumer's

view of that. Why do you need better tasting,

you know, just so people— so that you have words to

resonate with all of it. Yeah. So someday maybe we'll have a

sommelier of leafy greens. My high

bar back probably better than 10 years ago for the

company was to have people come

into the restaurant and when it comes time to order your

salad, you order it by specifying the greens, that

you want, not the salad dressing. Yeah. And

you don't order salad dressing. Yeah.

Any, any, any food connoisseur or salad connoisseur

will tell you that, that, that's just how you mask and completely destroy

the actual flavor when you're trying to hide the fact that it's not quality

leafy greens. Yeah. Has to be that they're covering

something up, right? Because if you have good tasting

leafy greens and a variety of them, it's incredible. The

whole taste aspect of it. Yeah. I wanted to go back a

little bit. And one of the things that was important for you

was the work you did in— you worked with schools in Newark, New Jersey.

Yeah. And can you talk a little bit about that and why that initiative was

important for you? Sure. So I had some other

prospects besides David and Mark, and these

were fellows who during the economic downturn

ended up leaving Wall Street and they And it was pretty amazing at that

time how many people were running around with money looking for a place to put

it. Yeah. And so they came to me and

they wanted to do something in the school that would give children

a better sense of agriculture, a little bit better

sense of food. And as it turns out, at

that time it was called St. Philip's Academy on

Central Avenue in Newark. and their

focus was really healthy

children. So they spent a lot of time in almost every

subject had something about food and

diet and the rest of it in it. And

so they wanted to rent a unit to put in the

school to accomplish this. And so we went down

and installed it. We had to take an elevator the 4th floor. That

brought back some design considerations in terms of

building something that we could pull that off. But we did. We built

it in the science room on the 4th floor. And the

science room also had a kitchen, a lot like a teaching

kitchen. And that all worked out really well. And

I was, you know, I thought this was great. Okay.

Again, I liked kids. I thought this was very appropriate.

And I liked the lessons that could be learned. The

actual unit that we put in back in

2009 or '10, okay, is still there. So

it's a decade old and the students are

still operating it and growing

leafy greens that go into their salad bar. That's sweet.

Now it's now moved down into the cafeteria because they thought everybody in the

school ought to have a view of this. And so

the harvest, the students run it and harvesting,

that what they harvest goes into the salad bar. So there's

only about 30 feet difference, okay, between,

or distance between the farm, if you will,

and the salad bar. So I have the closest farm to a salad

bar as anywhere in the world. Now other people are

doing that same kind of thing. I've talked to people who have growing

units inside of a restaurant and they say that's a real

great attraction to have. But having it in the school

is cool. They've done some really kind of off-the-wall— see,

they, they don't know a whole lot about plants either, just like, like I

did. So they're free to explore whatever they want. So some of their

experiments have been And what I like, like about

that is this education that I think is

going to be needed on a really large scale, because I think

for so long there's been a disconnect between

people's understanding of where their food comes from. And that happens, you know, both with

vegetables and produce, but also obviously with, with meat. And,

and I think what's happened with the, with the pandemic is an

awareness of, you know, being— having a presence in

food deserts or having close access,

local access to fresh food. And in the conversations that I've been having on this

show, I think it's, it's clear that everyone sees that as

important and a growing need. And I think it's—

there's— I've had a couple conversations where they're saying the more companies that are

working on this problem, the better, because it's almost like an all hands on

deck moment with the need that we're having. And I'm wondering

what your thoughts are Because I know there's some work that AeroFarms has done,

partnered in Jersey City. I think you're doing some work addressing

specifically food deserts and access to food. Yeah.

So AeroFarms is definitely

interested in doing that. It has a lot of value,

even direct value to the company in terms of

how people view our company. And so it has

value there. I think that it's important to

restore something. I think it's well accepted

that around 4th grade, parents and teachers

have pretty well beat curiosity out of the students.

So, and when I was at Syracuse doing that, I

did some teaching and some experimentation with students,

and I would ask them, so what did you see on the way to school?

And they had no answer. I said, you didn't see

leaves changing color? You didn't see squirrels

picking up nuts and chipmunks and whatever? You saw no

wildlife even though most of them walked to school. Okay. Yeah.

So curiosity is, I think,

an opportunity here. You're given something and you

can voice your curiosity. You know, will

wooden blocks stop the algae from growing in the

machine? Who knows? Okay. Turns out it didn't do too

bad. So, you know, you don't necessarily have to have

successes because you can learn as much from a failure as

you can from a success. So, PAX,

Phillips Academy Charter School, which is the name now,

has done a wonderful job at, you know,

instilling curiosity, instilling

the idea that you need to take care of yourself. And

providing opportunities to learn about nature

and growing and all that type of things.

And I agree, I'm not sure you need to know it in

as much detail as perhaps I do, but you

shouldn't think that your food comes from those double doors at the

back of the supermarket. That's true. Yeah. And you should

be able to say, oh my, when the whole Midwest is flooded,

What's happening to the plants and what does that mean?

And so if you become a commodity trader, you know, you're going

to be in shock. If you're concerned about

the environment and what's changing in it, there's some

signals that are built into that. And I find

that a lot of young people are interested in this thing we call

climate change. One of the other initiatives that

AeroFarms is partnering on is the Lettuce Project. Can you talk a little bit about

that as well? The Lettuce Project? Yeah, I

think it's the— I saw there was a— the

Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research had provided a grant. Oh yes. Okay.

Sorry. Yeah. So with FAR, we have done a number of

things and the first one was really exciting.

It was to match up what the—

well, how do you grow the plants? Yeah. What environment do

you put them in? What spectral properties

are present in that as an important part of it? So

how do we grow the plants? What environment do we put them in?

And then what chemistry is then

promoted within the plant? So how does it change what

chemicals the plant has? And then

then how do those chemicals translate into—

excuse me— what people like? So

the taste comes back. So now you match up. Here's the

recipe to grow your radishes. Here's the

recipe of chemicals that that creates.

And here's the recipe of those chemicals that

taste good or taste bad. Yeah. So get rid of the

bad, keep the good. And But we're finishing

it up. COVID has not been good to sort of

academic exercises, but yeah. So

exciting project, a lot of learning, shows sort of what

the future of food could be. You can really begin

to parse out all those pieces that you and I have been talking about.

A couple of questions as we wrap up. Speaking of the future, when you think

about where things are going to be and And think about the projects that you're

working on right now, what has you most excited

for what this could look like 5 to 10 years from now? Little plant

factories. Figuring out how to make a plant

do those kind of things that we want it to do,

because in most cases it can do it better if we

do our job right than other, let's say, more

synthetic ways. And so that resonates also better with people.

If that particular chemical that we're coming up with is

naturally grown, I'm sure there'll be somebody who will say that's

not natural. But I think plants

as little tiny factories is like, that'll

drive a lot of stuff and is.

I get the sense from the way you describe it, it's almost like it's sort

of like undiscovered territory. When people talk about space

exploration and sea exploration and how there's

so much we don't know about our planet. It seems like

there's so much we don't know about how plants grow and things we

can do to optimize them for our benefit. Yeah,

definitely. Yeah, that's interesting and fascinating. What's

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

Do I know enough to go into that future?

So all of us have You can't count on

what you learned in high school to get you through the next 60 years of

employment. It's not gonna help. No, no.

So, and I'm pretty good at learning new things. If

you look at my career path, okay, I've switched it up

a bunch of times. So, but it still worries me.

It's getting, it's much more technical. Yeah.

You know, the genetics, the phenotypic aspect of things,

people are using a whole language. don't understand. And that's

the first thing when you, when you want to learn about a new science, you

got to learn all the vocabulary that goes along with it, or you can't read

the papers, you can't understand the philosophies, or the—

and you can't read the SOPs. So,

so it's, yeah, I see that as the tough question.

Am I up to that? Yeah. And maybe, do I want to

do it? That's true. At a certain point, you may not want to keep

going. As with every industry, there'll always be a fresh crop of

new recruits and new people who are learning these new technologies,

you know, in their teens and are very comfortable in the same way with, you

know, startups. There's people who learn to program when they're young and they're just

whizzes at this, and, and there's some people that just gravitate towards this, this

science and, and know it like the back of their hand. And, and I think,

you know, a lot of the companies I speak to when they talk about hiring,

they talk about data scientists and artificial intelligence and all

these things that you, you probably weren't thinking about when you were were starting your

first company. Yeah. And AeroFarms has been

exceedingly lucky because we have

thousands and thousands of applications for

every role that we push out. And I think a lot

of that is because we're using those

sciences that you talked about. We're using them on

a daily basis for the good, for the betterment of

mankind. So they buy into the mission.

They like the fact that we're using technology and that we're

doing it at a high level. So they're, they're going to be

challenged. I think all of us like to go to work if we're, if we're

going to be challenged, right? Yeah. Yeah. One last question

based on some of the research I was doing, and you've probably heard this

before, but you were mentioned in an article in The New Yorker. The author, Ian

Fraser, talked— he likened your inventions to the Wright brothers. I

don't know if you remember that and what you thought of that when you read

that. Yeah, I like to be more

modest than that. I think a lot of us

have some difficulty. Yeah, Ian

Fraser was fun. If you ever get a chance to be

interviewed by him, he's fun. Okay?

He's a great guy. One of the things that's interesting about him,

he's also an inventor. And he invented

something to pick the plastic bags out of

trees in New York City. Oh, wow. Wow. Okay.

And so it's, it, you almost immediately know

if you're talking to a character, right? Yeah. And Ian's one

of those. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, Ed, I wanna thank you for

taking the time. I've really enjoyed learning a little bit about your journey and your

story, and I can tell that you really are an inventor

and a creator at heart, and it I can see the passion that you

have for this industry and the ability to just

continue to learn. And I really am excited about what I've seen

AeroFarms is doing. And I want to thank you for your contribution to

just helping us have more access to fresh food. So I

think the more companies we have like AeroFarms, I think that the

world will be a better place for it. So I thank you for your time.

Well, thank you for letting me share. Yeah, I enjoyed

Thank you, and, uh, good luck in your next poker game. Okay,

thank you. Yes, and if you come up with an

online version of that, yes, please share. Okay,

one that's not complicated, you know, guys mostly in their

70s and 80s can do it, etc. I agree.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks again to Ed for sharing his fascinating

story. So much life experience that led him to where he is now.

I really enjoyed that conversation. Special thanks to our episode sponsor, Ceres

Greenhouse Solutions. Ceres is creating sustainable growing

environments by combining smart design, innovative technology, and

dynamic partnerships. Learn more at

ceresgs.com. That's

C-E-R-E-S-G-S dot com. If you

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

a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

We'll be sure to read them out on future episodes. Until we meet again

next week, here's to your health. Thanks for listening. To

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

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

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