IoT-Connected Farms – Rick Vanzura, Freight Farms,

This is texturing TV. I'm Bonnie Schneider for Tech strong TV and joining me now is Rick Vanzura who is the CEO of freight farms and ricam so glad that you're joining me today. Can you tell me a little bit about Freight Farms what it is and how you get started.

Sure. So Freight Farms started in the journey started in 2010 where our co-founders John Friedman and Brad McNamara wanted to address food deserts here in Boston. They started with the concept of doing it with rooftop gardens and realized pretty quickly that wasn't scalable.

And so sometime around 2012 wandering around they saw all of the shipping containers that were just sitting unused and and I think it was really John who got this aha moment that she could LED lights and some air flow inside those containers and grow plants and that would be a good way to address Urban food desert So based on that initial idea, we've now raised 45 million dollars and VC funding through several rounds. We've gone through 10 different iterations of the farm where we've now gone from using you shipping containers, totally custom built new containers and And or at the point now where through those standard 8 by 40 foot shipping containers using our software and our consumables. You can grow about two and a half acres worth of produce in in that footprint and you can do it in temperatures raining ranging from minus 40 to plus a hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit with a constant climate managed by the software at 365 days a year.

So you can be growing very precise plants anytime of the Year, totally consistently hyper local sustainable with minimal land minimal water and minimal Transportation miles. So based on that we've now grown to where we're in just about every US state and 40 countries and and now we are able to share the collective experience of all those Farmers to keep making the solutions better and better that's really an interesting Journey that you've been on. Can you explain For people that aren't familiar with modular farming kind of taking a step back.

And and what is it? How does it work? Sure.

So again, we use the same shipping container size that you would see if you watched Train Roll by with a bunch of shipping containers on it or you saw a large cargo ship. So in that standard eight by forty foot container, we've now developed a lot of proprietary technology that provides for controlled airflow controlled climate controlled nutrients. It's a hydroponic environment where just through recirculating water and then LED lights that provide the lighting which really supports the plant growth you're able to go from seedling all the way through cultivating generally lettuces leafy greens microgreens small intercropping root vegetables, and you're able to grow those Is very productively through vertical towers that are in in the shipping container.

So the advantage of doing it in in these vertical Towers is you can be very dense with your production and also by having the standard shipping container size. You can place these anywhere where you can find a 10 by 50 foot piece of land and you can transport it on anything which can transport these shipping containers, which is standard Trucking Vehicles. They are standard to go on on ships.

So it really allows you to put this form anywhere in the world where you can find at 10 by 50 foot plot of land where you have access to water and power that is really fascinating. You mentioned the software that's involved. Can we take a deeper dive into that and maybe explain how that works and what are the processes that go into?

Terms of turning out this modular farming unit where you're producing all these different types of greens as you mentioned sure. So the software is actually had as much work go into it as the hardware and what it allows you to do is through the software. You can control the lighting in the farm environmental conditions, like temperature and humidity and nutrient delivery.

So through the experience of now thousands of farmer years, we've developed ideal recipes for different plants and the software allows you to just set it to a specific recipe and then the software will manage all of the variables of when the lights are turned on and off how nutrients get delivered the climactic conditions to to manage that plant growth. And then it also has a number of other features like task tracking specific control of specific. Tables if you want a deviate from the recipe different permission settings, so you can manage who's able to do what in the farm at any given time and then there's a bunch of online training materials and different resources to help you with different types of plants.

You want to grow. So the software really takes just about all of the guesswork of the farm out of it. So who are your clients?

Where what would you say the type of people that are interested in doing something like this? So historically it's really split between small business and small business Farmers which are husband and wife two person team. That would be the kind of folks who might be interested in the Subway franchise where they just want sort of a solid income something where a lot of to guess work again is taking out from them and and that feeling of ownership over what they do but also feel a deep sense of mission that we have democratizing access to food and sustainability and their Journey generally starts with buying one farm and then growing to three because you can manage that comfortably with two people and have a very nice income and that's about about 70% of our customers historically and then about 30% or not for profit.

We have more commercial farms and Academia than anyone in the world or dozens of colleges and universities and they use us from direct integration into their agricultural program to research To supplying the cafeterias with fresh food to just driving donor and student engagement. And then we have Community Based organizations like Boys and Girls Clubs that use us to engage a specific population have stem training be able to distribute food into the community. What's now shifting is as our Solutions gotten more advanced yields have gotten better.

The range of crops is expanded and we've all had these Global issues with supply chain disruptions and having a constant source of Supply. We've seen a lot more institutional interest and a lot more interest in larger scale farm projects over the last year. So we think that will be a larger and larger piece of what we do.

It's interesting. You mentioned the supply chain disruptions because that's one of the hazards that we face with the food supply that we certainly seen recently but you also have the issue of climate change itself and how we're getting more and more extreme weather events. They are hitting places where they didn't normally some of these events are more extreme in terms of the frequency and intensity and duration.

So that's disruptive as well. How do these modular units for Freight Farms battle that I mean is everything completely contained where the weather and the conditions outside just don't affect it. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's one of the major value propositions and a big part of why we came into being within each of these containers is everything you need to do need to control to be able to grow produce. Again, if you have access to to fairly minimal Water and Power you can be growing two and a half acres out of that out of that individual farm. So it allows you to take any of the issues around Long Transportation chains out of it.

You're producing right at the point of consumption. So if there's any travel disruptions or anything else along with all of the other environmental impacts Etc with travel you take that out of it. But also these are obviously very durable sturdy containers so and highly climate-controlled so you can deal with extreme climates as I mentioned minus 40 to plus a hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit.

You can be operating with the constant climate inside but also in tough conditions, whether it's hurricanes or other strong environmental forces. These are very sturdy containers that are meant to withstand the elements. So it takes a lot of those issues out of out of play and it provides that hyperlocal secure source of food when you when you're putting this all together and developing the technology for it.

Did you have any challenges that you had to work around? Yeah, so, um, you know a number of challenges that we've dealt with over time with with the early technology that dealt with used storage containers, which there's still a number in the industry who use that model. We realized in 2019 that we had sort of pushed the limits of that technology and it just wasn't as productive as it needed to be in terms of plant yields and it wasn't as consistent and and repeatable as we wanted it to be because no two containers were exactly alike because they were repurposed they were used.

So that's where we made the transition to our current line The Greenery line where we went to purpose-built New containers, which included a lot of proprietary technology to allow for, you know, driving up yields and and the range of plants we can grow the other issue is just you know the ease of use with the farm over time, where when A lot of that recipe work wasn't included in the software. There was a lot more guesswork around how to set the variables for the farm how you would grow inside the farm. So again over time we've learned from that we've learned from the collective experience of Farmers on what is an optimal recipe and we found a way to to program it that and we've also dealt with our own consumables line and optimizing that to to continue to improve it.

The final thing is energy use. We are extremely sustainable in terms of land conservation Soil Conservation water conservation eliminating Transportation miles. So energy for the whole industry has been a real focal point because it does take power for the LEDs.

So we've done a lot of work on improving the Energy Efficiency of the Farms. There's been a lot of industry-wide progress particularly and very efficient inter LED lights. And also a lot of focus on renewable energy where in the US we have an agreement with Arcadia where the partnership where they can provide clean energy to any Farmer in the US to solve for some of the environmental impacts and we continue to work with renewable sources to make that more efficient.

So essentially every aspect of the farm can continue to get better has gotten a lot better. And so we're focusing on every aspect of the solution. That's great.

And and it is it is a very important solution to the issue of climate technology that can actually make a difference because as you mentioned we've seen what happens when the food supply gets disrupted. It's going forward when we're looking towards the future for Freight Farms. What is the technology that you would like to see be implemented that might help you expand this even further?

Yeah, well we continue to to focus on all aspects of what we do continued technological advancements in in the farm whether it's air flow HVAC capacity. We continue to work on consumables software capability Etc. And and we'll we'll work on different configurations and form factors for the farm to meet different in uses.

So there's a lot we can control I would say from a broad perspective. I really hope that not only our industry but the world continues to put a huge focus on renewable energy because by definition in the long run Renewables got to be a lot less expensive and more plentiful than non-renewable. And you know, one of my favorite quotes that I share all the time.

It's a Native American proverb. That's we don't Inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children and I feel like we've accumulated a massive debt with climate change and you know, there was recently the announcement that the ozone layer is now virtually fixed because that's a good example of where a human-made problem.

We actually came up with an effective human-made solution for it by eliminating CFCs. So in that same way, I hope all of us really focus on Renewables because that will as we've seen with the issues associated with the Ukraine war and a number of other things being able to eliminate our Reliance on fossil fuels in the long run will beat all of our benefit including obviously our technology. Zora from Freight Farms.

That was a pleasure to speak with you and learn about your innovations that you're working on and see more of modular farming as we move forward into the future. Thank you so much Rick. Appreciate it.

Thank you. I appreciate the time. All right.

Well stay with us. We're gonna have a lot more when we come back.