Barn Talk - Farming Cows, Crickets and Lettuce w/ Huey B Cool

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Welcome to BarnTalk!  Get your greens edition. Today we’re going to pull some teats and grow some leeks! We’ve got a monster TikTok’er with a very diversified background! From dairy farmer to vertical farmer. With dreams of starting his very own cricket farm. Please welcome Huey B Cool! Go Follow Huey! Website: https://www.nebullam.com/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hueybcool?lang=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG6yXFTHygs Barn Talk Merch! 👇🏻 https://www.thislldo.co/ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c SUBSCRIBE TO BARN TALK CLIPS ➱ https://bit.ly/3BlZnqq LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY ITUNES ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 Follow Behind The Scenes👇🏻 ● This’ll Do Farm Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/30KPBNk ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4 ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS ------------------------------- ***PLEASE NOTE*** Barn Talk is a significant break from the typical content viewers have come to expect from This’ll Do Farm. Please be advised that we will be exploring a wide variety of topics (some adult-themed) and our younger viewers (and their parents) should be advised that some topics will be for mature audiences only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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presents Laura versus fruit flies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen. These little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo, chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Every Day with Amazon. And you got this insect farm idea. Yeah, yep. Yep. So I was growing crickets in my apartment and making cricket brownies and stuff.

Wow. Making everybody trying to eat crickets. The guy across the hall was, he was growing something else's apartment and making different kind of brownies. Did you guys switch? Was there ever people that were eating your brownies and be like, I don't feel anything? People were like, oh, I want different brownies. Yeah.

This doesn't seem to be doing anything for me. It's like one of the most things that people, most common things to be able to say, like, I wish, I wish this is different. You could put in those brownies. Well, that's college life for you. You got to have, you got to have those people that make it colorful. All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk.

Get your greens edition. Today we're going to pull some teets and grow some leaks. I wrote that myself, isn't that? Oh, that's just amazing. For those of you that don't know what a leak is, it's, I've never, I don't think that I've ever had them, but there's some kind of a vegetable of some kind that. Oh, I thought you're going to talk, you know, say like a nipple leak, like at a hog bar or something. Like, it's like a, I don't know, it's something that people put in fancy dishes that I don't ever eat.

But anyway, anyway, I digress. We've got a monster TikToker on here today with a very diversified background. and before we get into that, though, we're going to ask you to pay the fee. So we don't really advertise much on here other than our fancy merchandise. So, you know, spring's coming, so it's time for a wardrobe chain,

so you're probably going to need a T-shirt or whatever. And so buy some merch, support the channel. Share it out with your friends, family, co-workers, if you guys get any value. That's the fee. It's a kind of exchange of value. So, like, if you guys get anything, share it out, and that's all we ask from you.

And leave a review, Spotify, Apple. Anything helps us. We're trying to grow this thing. Apparently, I wasn't doing a good enough job in the intro. I don't think you were explaining the fee all the way. Just share the show, guys. That's what helps us. That's what the fee is for you.

Usually Sawyer does the intro, and he wanted me to do the intro, but then as soon as I started talking, I could see him be like, hey, that's not how you do that. It'd be to say, well, here's the other thing. Dad always introduces the guest, so it's going to be flipped. And it's flipped today. So he'll probably look at me at the same way I just looked at him, and he'll probably just go mumble something under his breath. I'll just turn my back so that when I cross my arms and disgust, you don't see it. Yeah.

Okay. Usually that's not the case. I do see it. But, yeah, it's a little different today. We're going to try to make this concise. We got a lot to talk about. This guy is really interesting. I think you guys will get a lot of value.

out of it. And the markets, there's no use talking about the markets because the quantity markets, they just keep on trucking. And so no market update today. We'll get back to that next time, if there's a change. So we're going to forego all that. Today we are joined by a famous TikToker you might know with 1.9 million followers, to be exact, a farm great kid who immigrated from the Netherlands with his family to the great state of Iowa to start a dairy farm. He also has built a brand around his passion for dairy farming by sharing great content and educating millions on agriculture. He also is the head of production of a company called Nebula. Nailed it. I was really afraid I was going to just not get that company name right, but I got it.

I owe him five bucks because I bet him that you'd screw it up. Yep, pay up. An indoor produce farm delivering fresh produce to the great communities of Iowa. It is our pleasure to welcome Huey Be Cool. Hewie, welcome to Barn Talk. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for taking the time and coming down and you're from you live in Ames or do you live in in Brooklyn? Live in Ames.

So it's about a two hour drive. Offly windy today. Well, it's a little shorter coming this way. It'll be a little slower going back. Probably got a forearm pump because he had to probably do this the whole time because it's pretty windy out today. You got about a 40 mile an hour tail wind. Yeah.

Spring wouldn't be so bad if the wind wasn't just terrible. You know, the weather tends to be all right. 50 degrees, I can do that. But when you get 40 mile an hour winds, I mean, it just doesn't cut the cheddar. It's terrible because last weekend, we had beautiful. It was 70 degrees, beautiful weather. Perfect. Took the top off the Jeep, took the doors off, except for Trish's door.

She didn't want her door off because she's afraid that I was going to, like, shove her barrel. It looked a little weird. It looked a little weird because the back doors were off, but the front doors were wrong. Yeah, I was going to, I did look at it and I was a little. But, hey, you got to do what you got to do. You got to do what you got to do for the wife. Then it turned and it's been a crap ever since. That happens every spring.

The problem is... I get soft. It makes you soft. Yeah. Summer's coming though. He'll be nice and hot. Anyway. You can have your shirt off and show all the...

You show your amazing physique to everybody. Welcome to the gun show. Yeah. All right, Hewley. Let's give a little bit of background. Enough about our rambling and our dumb... I don't know what he call it. What do you call it?

Commentary. Commentary, yeah. Let's get a little background. Let's start with the story of you. you guys leaving the Netherlands to come to the state. Where do you want to start? Yeah, where do you want to start? So yeah, give us the background because it's a pretty interesting journey that you, you and your family took to get over here. Interesting and quick and long journey at the same time. Right. So in the fall of 2008, we actually came over the, so I'm a sibling out of five,

and we have so seven in our family and five of us came over to three oldest on the middle and so two above two underneath me and we came over in the fall of 2008 to visit Iowa and Iowa farms

and Dutch dairy farmers in Iowa and so we visited farms and we're like okay so you know how's it going over here what do you guys think what's it like and people are like well it's you know we like it and you know, we got a really good impression and, um, kind of showed around and, you know, showed the good parts of it, of course. Right. God's country. Yeah. And we're like,

wow, people are, people are really nice here and, um, kind of down to earth people. And, yeah, that's one of the reasons we picked Brooklyn, uh, Brooklyn, Iowa. There's very good people. It's a very good community. Um, so, and there was a, a dairy farm there that was, uh, not doing so well at the time. So the dairy farm that we bought, we bought an existing dairy farm. It had capacity for about 400 cows. There was about 250 at the time. Not doing well. Not doing well. And so took over the farm immediately in, we bought the farm in. So we visited in the fall and we were like, okay, you know, do we want to do this? So we pull, so yeah, yep, we want to do this and pulled the trigger because our parents,

they basically asked us the three oldest kids, like, you know, if you're gonna, you're gonna, you are gonna live here for the most of your life right now. Right. So like, this isn't just our thing. This is a family thing. Yeah, so they kind of brought us into it.

And of course, we're like, hell yeah. Sure, sounds good. So, yep, and then we decided, okay, so let's go ahead with it and bought that farm in June of 2009. so June of 2009 my dad went over with my brother and grandpa for about a month and then um just to because we took ownership of it in June first and then just to kind of set things up and get started and then um he came back uh they all came back for uh we had our it was a the day Michael Jackson

died oh he came back he was because he was in the airport and it was just like you know everywhere breaking news, you know, just the whole world shocked. And it was the day that he was coming back from the farm and because we had our going away party. Yep. And going away party. And, you know, we had everything packed up and in containers and basically just sold a bunch of our equipment, sold cows, sold equipment for a couple months, basically. Just got rid of all the stuff that you couldn't take with you. Yeah. So you sold. You sold. So you grew up on a dairy farm in the Netherlands. And when you made this decision, you sold out.

Besides all the stuff you could take with you, though, obviously. Yeah. So we took, we took, we actually have a lot of equipment from the Netherlands because it's a lot cheaper to buy stuff over there and ship it over here. Yep. It's just like thousands and tens of thousands of dollars a difference. Like you can't even justify it and buying it here. And the service lacks a lot of times.

We've had mechanics. from the Netherlands fly over to come fix off. Like service is top notch. Maybe we should get that guy's car. Yeah, that'd be a good idea. Well, it was for, we had, you know, you guys know, Bakelm, the feed wagons. It's P-E-E-C-O-N. And we had one of those.

It was from, that one was actually, I think, they had one sitting in California or something like that. So, but anyways, they had it shipped over at the farm, and it's, it was too tall for our. John Deere loaded. Because those things are, they weigh like 45 tons when they're empty. Wow. Heavy machines and super tall.

You couldn't fill it. Nope. So we needed a special bucket. It was a high tilt bucket. And this company that we worked with in the Netherlands, they never made one of those before. And they made one specially for us.

And then something went wrong. So they flew out a mechanic to fix it. And he spent like a week with us on the farm. That's pretty cool. So anyways. Yeah. So we got, everything moved over. Like, we had, I think, two or three maybe shipping containers, full stuff.

Like a 1970s Volvo tractor came over as well. But just a bunch of stuff. And then, yeah, I went to high school. Yeah, what age were you when you did make 12? 12, 12 when we moved over. So you pretty much got to live. You got to remember what the Netherlands was like. and then you come over and you're like going into the teenager stage and then you got to re it was it

kind of a culture shock at first or was it pretty easy to adapt at first at first yeah it was for sure yeah um so you know spent so july uh july 3rd we got we actually that was landing day for me is july july 3rd 2009 that's my anniversary yep so actually last two days of celebrating then So last year was actually the 12-year anniversary. So now I've lived here longer than I've lived over there, which I'm pretty proud of. So July 3rd was landing day. And you go to school like August or something.

Yeah, right. You know, third week of August. And so that little bit of time just spent on the farm speaking Dutch. Dutch, I grew up with Dutch. English is my second language. and just so just grew up speaking Dutch and just didn't I didn't really want to speak Dutch or I didn't really want to speak English just because I didn't really know right right yeah why would you and I was like I had a couple classes over there um like they start English pretty young

but it was it was basic right stuff so I like I had the like the footing yeah as you'd say for English but just the very basics. And then we were over here for a little bit in school. In school, I didn't really want to speak English. You only wanted to read Dutch books. So it was tough for like the first couple weeks. And then we had to go back to the Netherlands for a brief stint. And then I had some trouble getting back.

So we had to go back to the Netherlands for longer. And then coming back from that stent, I just remember it. English just like clicking, I guess. Like it for for some reason like I don't remember being like, oh, okay, this week I know these words and this word and just kind of happened. It just just clicked. Yeah, which is interesting. I don't know how that happens. I think it's just because I was just immersed into it. Right. So it's like all right, just go speak English. Yep. Yeah. I don't know. It was weird. So why did you guys want to leave the Netherlands? What what made you guys want to move to the states? Was there

any particular reason? Yeah, that's a good question. So the Netherlands, they're like in Europe and the Netherlands a lot more than other countries in Europe, but they have been trying to push out farmers because of emissions. So fertilizer use and nitrogen and methane and stuff. Yep. Cow farch. Yep. So they have been paying farmers to buy their land and basically just buy them out. And so our, our land right now is like a, is a fish trap.

Really? So it's just, it's a nature. Because you're a nature. You guys went back and visited and saw. Yeah. Yeah. Does it,

does it anger? Does that anger? Did you throw a match? Like your, your dad and your grandpa, is that, how do they feel about that? So my,

uh, well, my grandpa always had the saying, you know, that's called making, making bad land. from good land. Yep.

But he's, I actually have, I don't have much memory of him. Yeah, he passed away in 99. Okay. So when I was like three. So I don't have too many memories of him, but I'm sure he would not approve. Yeah. No. Yeah.

But, and yeah, my dad, I mean, my dad's focused on what's here now. Farming here. Yeah. So you kind of, you guys kind of saw the handwriting on the wall and thought, if we're going to be in the dairy business long term it's not going to be here we um it's basically in the united states you have you have way more room obviously you have more room to expand and yeah and you know we we saw we saw some some opportunity with the farm that was already there you know it was on a hill there was more room to build on the hill yeah and now the hill's pretty much maxed out when you first

came over to visit and you come to iowa um you know what did you think about just the scale, like just the saw, when you're driving around? Because I think a lot of people don't realize. It's huge. People think about Europe and they look about, they hear all these countries. And when they think of a country, they think they're all pretty good size. But I don't think people grasp how small things are, how tight things are. and, you know, going from where you were and the size of your fields and how close you were to neighbors and all that,

when you came over here, what did you think? Massive, massive fields. Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest fields that, like, left, like, a really big impression on me as a childhood, like, driving by to get some hay with my dad, like, with a tractor and stuff. So over, like, a dyke, like, looking down upon this field just, I thought it was just massive. massive, massive field. I think it's like maybe five acres.

Sure. It's like maybe 10 acres, 10 or 5 or 10 acres or something. Right. And I just thought that was the most, just a massive, just a giant field. But yeah, it's crazy to scale of how big Iowa is

and how many millions of, like, it's crazy, how many miles there is. It's a total. A lot of farm acres. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a shift when you, you know, when you come here when you're not used to that.

And we take so much for granted the space we have and, you know. The other thing is the regulation. You know, we feel like today we've got more regulation than we've ever had, but we don't really know what regulation is compared to most of the world. Do you feel like that's kind of picking up here? Do you feel like it's going to happen here?

Or like, you know, what are your parents? I mean, you said they're pretty focused on farming, but do they kind of keep an eye on, like, like, okay, if things start looking like they did back in the Netherlands, is that trying to, is that kind of creeping up in America, you think? No, I don't, I don't think so as much here. To get a munur permit, you go to the local county. Right.

You have the lady that complains about the gravel roads being too dusty. Like, that's the only thing. Right. Right. You know, and it's like, okay, ready to go. Yeah, it's fine. But it's, it's super easy here to expand. It seems like it's good.

Right. It's good for business. Right. I definitely encourage that and stuff. Yeah, the Netherlands, like, for example, there's a lot of regulations over there, and government has a huge, huge play in dairy farmers, just in farmers' daily lives. Yep. So, for example, a couple years ago, the government put out something.

It was a plan to cut down on emissions, and they said, turn it. 10% of your herd. Wow. Cole, 10% of your herd. How the heck does that work? Didn't care, just said, yep, you got to follow instructions. So cut your income by 10% too. See how you cut your income by more than that.

If you're cutting your herd by 10%. And it was, so people had to sell off just basically at market rates, whatever that was at the time. I think it was a couple years ago. And they just had something, I saw it a couple months ago again, where they were trying to do something again. so another 10% what do you always say about government

dad when they try to regulate things they don't really they don't see that it hurts you in consumer give them a thumb take an arm well the road to hell is paved with good intentions I mean that's government you know they react to one they have one issue that they react to and they want to fix that issue

but the problem is that they don't understand that what they're dealing with is like an eco- system and it all it all trickles down if you're if you're messing with if you're messing with the economics of producing any product the ultimate loser in that is the person that has to buy the finished product and and we're seeing that i mean you're seeing it and everything we talked about you know we talked about prop 12 and you know you you put more regulations on something that makes that product cost more who's that hurt It hurts the person that's buying that product that can least afford the product because...

It's always a consumer. Yeah, it is. Every scenario it works out. Yeah. It's just... Yeah. And it doesn't change. You know, every group of politicians as they come up, they think, well, you know, we're going to get it right this time.

You know, however many times we tried it before and it didn't work, well, we're going to get it this time. And it doesn't. It never changes because at the end of the day, it's basic economics. And is that just... Is that just people trying to do good? but they have genuinely a lack of understanding of economics? Or is that people trying to be bad actors? Oh, I think that's a little bit of both.

There's both. For sure. We went to see Jordan Peterson in Cedar Rapids here just a few days ago. Yeah, we saw Dan the man. Iowa dairy farmer was there. Shout out to Iowa dairy farmer. We got a bite to eat right before the show, and he was in there with Jamie, and they were eating a bite.

Then we tried to leave because we just assumed that he picked up our ticket. And they got kind of pissy with us. And they're like, I'm like, what? Didn't Dan? I thought Dan got that. Because these dairy farmers, they got all kinds of money. I figured, I was like, what do you mean he didn't pay? Anyway.

That's something you always said. It must have been an oversight on his fault, on his part. Jordan Peterson is a lot to try to, you have to, for me, you have to take his stuff. Very intelligent. In very small bites. But one of his points was that, you know. There's something else here now. Something new.

From exclusively. on Paramount Plus. It's the series Stephen King calls scary as hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules.

Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Government. Communism is a great example. it's been tried so many times. And the idea, the basic idea is a good idea. People that are deeply caring, they don't want there to be people left out. They want everybody to have a place of the table. They want, they want everybody to be the same level. The problem is, they want no suffering.

They want no, right, you know, bottom class. They want it to be. I mean, that's the fundamental thing of economics, right? You can only have, if it's, it's only a net gain if nobody is worse off. Right. The problem that get into is you cannot legislate productivity in people. And there's always people that it's, you know, I always equate this back to pigs and we could go off on a long ways. But it's no different than, I mean, it is.

I'm oversimplifying it, but it's no different than pigs. You know, we get pigs and they're all the same, they're all the same genetics and they're basically all the same age and we put them in the nicest building we can and we feed them all the same diet and we do everything the same and guess what happens 10% of them do better than all the rest 10% do poorer than all the rest 5% of them don't even make it they end up dying for whatever reason and the rest of them are all somewhere in between and you can't you scratch your head and you're like well why is this why is it like this because you know it's they're all you know they should they should all be like right here they're not and people are even more so within any system you give them

there's people that are going to overachieve because they're going to stay up late and they're going to figure out a way to work that system or they're going to put in an extra an hour or they're going to work an extra day or they're going to do whatever. And then there's people that are going to figure out, well, I can do nothing, collect a check and I'm still going to get taken care of. So I'm just going to do nothing. And you cannot legislate that. You cannot fix that. You cannot fix that. That is human nature. And we have, we have, forever we will have people, that for whatever reason, they are more productive than everybody else,

and we'll have a group that is less productive than everybody else. And I just don't know. The capitalism to me is the best way to try to navigate that in the fact that the people that are most productive create more wealth that goes to everybody, and everybody's costs goes down because of the efficiency. But government... Yeah, and human, I mean, it involves civilization.

Think about all, if you didn't incentivize, if Elon Musk wasn't incentivized by making more money, he wouldn't be able to do amazing things. Right. Or, you know, name anybody. Bill Gates. Right. We don't really like Bill Gates, but Microsoft would have never came out. Steve Jobs would never came out with Apple.

If there was no money, right. He couldn't make money and do it, you know. But the other side of that is then you have people in government that realize, and those are the bad actors. The bad actors realize that if we make people that are independent-minded, that want to make their own way in the world, that are dependent. on no one. It's very hard to control them. And we like to have control. So we like people that want to get a check in the mail. We like people that are dependent upon us because they'll vote our

way. And that is a bad actor. And the world is full of those people. And our future, we every, how many times we said that? Every civilization's ever been on this planet thinks they're the smartest son of a bitch is on the face of the earth. We all do. We think, man, America, you get all these politicians, Joe Biden just said it the other day, you know, we're America. You know, by God, we're, you know, we're whatever. Well, really, we're smarter than everybody. We got this figured out. We can print money to Kingdom Come.

We can, we can be soft on everything. And we're going to be all right. Well, guess what? You're not going to be any better than the Robins, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Aztecs, the, what? You can go back whatever you want. Every one of them, civilizations thought they were smarter than the last one. and they all screwed up. They all screwed up.

And we're not above that. Anyway, we'll have to edit that down because I talk too much. You went on a little tangent there. I did. It's about the long-term. That's right, yeah. That's right.

But anyway, you found yourself in Brooklyn, Iowa. And you learned English. Thank the good Lord for that. Were you happy that you moved? Are you ultimately happy with the decision of coming to America? Yes. Yes.

Yeah. No regrets. No. Good. No. No, not at all. America is, I think, one of the best places to be. Even after your rant there, Nad, it's still one of the best places.

Well, it's like... There are certain things that you want in life, and there are certain steps that you have to take to get to what you want in life. Right. And if you're taking those steps, then you realize that you're on a journey of taking a bunch of steps, right? You're going to, then that's... America is a good place to be.

If you don't have a goal, if you don't have ambition, America is not a good place to be. Right. Right. That's true. Yeah. So, no, I think it's a good place to be for sure. Good. Well, that's good. We're glad that you're here. I heard you have a very complicated Dutch birth name. That's really hard to pronounce. So could we hear your birth name and then tell us why you're, you go by Huey? So my name is Gerardes, Hendrikas, Johannes, Maria, Boulen. God, that's badass. Okay, that's like John Wickshed. That is. Walk into a, you could be an assassin with that name.

For sure. So is that a family? Is that like a family name? So a lot of people in the Netherlands will have multiple birth names. Right. So you're like on your birth certificate or whatever, on your passport, it'll say all those names. and then you have a calling name. So it gets even more complicated.

So my calling name is Heat, which is G-E-E-R-T, G-E-E-R-T. And that's basically what I've, like, heard my entire, like, that's what I just get called my entire life. Yeah, calling name, literally. So, yeah, and so there's two, like, there's the birth names, the calling names. and then Huey came out of when I first moved here.

It was in PE class. And there's, well, everybody lined up and like, oh, I'm whatever. I'm here. And then the next person next to me, oh, I'm Tommy or whatever. And it's like, oh, well, how do you say your name? Wait, what? And everybody just, you know, I said hit and everybody just pauses. They're like, I don't know if I can say that.

never be able to repeat. Yeah, I don't know if I could say that. Yeah. So she's like, oh, you, there's this a girl in my class and she's like, oh, you need a nickname. How about Huey? I said, all right, sounds good. Sounds good. Let's go with it. And then people started to, kind of, as I got, you know, more known throughout the high school and, you know, people started to kind of know how to say my name. They actually started to try to say my name. Most people still butchered it. It's like he and and yogurt and yogurt. And you're just like, you know what? Just call me Huey.

Yeah, just call me. Just call me healing. So then I went to community college, and I ran cross-country and track at Southwestern Community College in Creston. Basically straight west here, right? Yeah. Yep.

And first day of practice, everybody, like, introduced themselves and he hit. And someone's like, oh, never going to be able to say that. You need a nickname. And then just another teammate of mine's like, how about Huey? Sounds familiar. You didn't even tell them before that that was your nickname.

They just came up with that. That's awesome. So two people randomly came up with it and two just totally random times in my life. That's when you just knew this is the name for me. I'll stick with it. So you went to community college. And you went to Iowa State too, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your college journey and what degree you got and all that stuff. Well, what made you decide that that's what you wanted to do? Yeah. That you even wanted to go to college. Like, was it an option that did they say you could just, all right, you just want to work on the dairy farm? Or were you, did your parents be like, you probably better go, do something else? No, so I first just talking to the vets that came out at the dairy farm. You know, where did you go to school? Iowa State. Where'd you go to school? Iowa State. Like, okay. All right. So, and then I originally wanted to be a vet. And then took a couple anatomy classes and realized, thank God you didn't do that.

Boy, this is a lot to remember. Hey. Oh, man. I just wasn't ready for that, for that schooling. Do you know what the difference between a chiropractor and a veterinarian is? A couple hundred thousand dollars and some years of school. chiropractor is a real doctor. Oh God, you're going to get destroyed. Shout out to you, Ethan Spronk. So one of the former vets for the company I used to work for, he came to work for them right out of college,

right out of vet school. And it was during a part where the company was kind of growing. So they didn't have enough offices. They were building a new office building. And so three of us all got hired. the same time. And we all got put in this like conference room and that was our office. And anyway, I, I just would bug him unmercfully about being a vet. Now, I think that was like the first, first or second day that we were together. I'm like, hey, Spronk, you know what,

the difference between a chiropractor and a vet is? And he just looked at me and I could tell he was like, yep, not going to be friends with him. But we turned out to be good friends. So shout out to you, Spron. Yeah, I was going to say, you got some explaining. do after telling that. That's good. They're good for it. They paid enough for that. They paid enough for those letters behind their name. So it's all in fun. Yeah. Go ahead and continue. Just I realized I didn't want to really go on the veterinarian path anymore. Still, I liked, but then I wanted to become a commodity guy. Yeah. Commodity trader of some sorts. I knew I liked ag and I knew I liked money.

business. So I went to, and then at first, I was, I probably thought I was better than I actually was at like track and stuff. So I got a scholarship, got a scholarship to run at community college. So that's, I basically just went where the money was. Right. Distance or sprint or worth? Distance.

Yeah. Well, in my senior year, I did, I was, went to state for the, the 400. There you go. 400, the mile and the two mile. You look like you got a long stride. Yeah. You probably could.

Yeah. So, so went to community college for a year. I did. I took some classes in high school, some college classes in high school. So I took, I racked up like 26 credits. I just took full advantage of the opportunity to take, take some credits in high school. Because that gave me a chance to graduate community college in a year. Again, when I was at community college, I just racked up all the credits.

I'm like, I'm just kind of get out of here in a year. You know, I actually, the reason being because I signed my letter of intent, which I actually found the other day I actually didn't sign it. I only took the picture and pretend to sign it, so it's not signed. But I signed a letter of intent with a different coach than I actually ran, and ended up running with. And this one coach that I signed with, I was told, you know, this great coach, amazing coach, just the best person ever, signed with him, and he leaves.

Like in between when I signed and when I was going to join the team, other guy comes in. Huge disaster. And I did not enjoy running anymore at all. So then I was like, you know, basically I tried to set myself up to that. If I wanted to, I could do two years or a year and a half of community college. Yeah. So I could run a second season. if I liked it.

Yeah. But then mid-season, I'm like, no, I'm not doing this. I'm loading up on credits second semester so I can get out of here. So it graduated after doing a little bit of track too. And then I went on to Iowa State in fall of 2016. And that's when I started, I started in ag business. And then I, let's see, in the spring, no, let's see, yeah, spring of 2018. I took a semester off to travel.

I spent about 10 weeks in Hawaii on the big island of Hawaii, working on a permaculture farm. So this farm was growing about 200 different fruits, vegetables, mac nuts, papayas, bananas at like lemons, oranges, limes, limes, like everything you could possibly think of. Coconuts, pineapples. Yeah, it was amazing. and then visited Australia and visited an insect farmer there,

which I was already heavily involved in researching insect farming at that time. It was like 2017, fall of 2017. I was in an entrepreneurship class, had to come up with a couple of business concepts, and one of the three business concepts that I came up with was insect farming. And after listening to a podcast about it, about cricket farming. And I was like, okay, that sounds interesting. So I went ahead with that in the class.

And I won like a pitch for it, won like 100 bucks for it or something. I'm like, all right. I might have something here. Maybe, maybe. Didn't end up winning like the big, big, big prize in the class or whatever. But anyways, whatever. I kept that idea. Just kind of sat on it for a while.

So traveled for three months, went to Hawaii, Australia, China, which China, crazy place. Yep. This crazy place. And I was only there for about a lot of a week. Least favorite. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life.

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Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. One of the days we couldn't go outside, because the air was too bad. Oh, geez. In Beijing. Oh, geez. Yeah, in Beijing, there's a couple, like, trillion dollars worth of industry around.

Like, I think a lot of the smog comes from their coal. Yeah. That they burn out there. Coal power plants. Yep. And one of the days that the air got so bad that they, so what they do is still just government will just come in and say, hey, air is too bad, you know, shut up.

it down. And they'll just shut everything down, wait for everything to clear out, and then fire everything back up again. Jeez. I had a guy when I was selling an equipment company that we worked with, there was a guy that worked for them, and he lived in China for 10 years. Him and his wife moved over there. And, you know, when he comes to the show, everybody asks, you know, what's that like? What's that like? And we were sitting one night having drinks. and he said I pretty much got it down that when people ask me that I just tell them I tell him you know how when you go to the when you go like for a walk in the timber and you're walking in the timber and there's all these trees but it's Iowa and you know that if you just walk one direction far enough you're just going to walk out of the trees and then there aren't going to be any he goes in China when you're walking and there's all those people he goes you could walk you could walk you could walk you could

walk for days and you'll never you'll never run out of people he goes that's what it's like i thought that was a pretty powerful there's so many people there yeah and like Beijing like you know they're like a small city of for example covid small city of wohan it's kind of like i think it has like 12 million people or something like yeah that's a massive massive city yeah that's crazy small yeah um yeah it's it's it's really it was interesting being over there and um I had to talk to, so I went with my sister to, so I went the first 10 weeks I spent in Hawaii by myself and then my sister joined for like last, last week in Hawaii. And then for all the other trips, we met her old track teammate that she ran with in college in Australia and then another

classmate in China and then went back to the Netherlands to visit our family. But then when we were in China, we were basically talking through this translator app or whatever the whole time. So, yeah, it was interesting. First thing I did there was actually go get a mask, which is really funny. First thing I went and I just got the N95 mask or whatever. And this is in 2018 before. Yeah, I was going to say, a good thing you went. Even a thing.

Good thing you went to these places when you did. Yeah. And not now. Like, it was basically. like, you know, your mouth would just get dry, just walking around if you didn't have a mask on. Like you, in, in that, there's a car just parked across the hotel and you could see it. Parked there at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day, you could run your finger along it and just, your finger would just be black. So, like everything is just gray and could not pay me enough money to live in one of those places.

Yeah, it was, it was interesting. Made you never want to live in a city. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Just like the quality of air. Yeah. It's not good. Yeah.

That's another nice thing about Iowa. Like I was on the dairy farm during the pandemic when that really took off or whatever. And it was like, well, you know, the population density here is like three people per square a mile or something. So like, this is statistically the best place in the world to be. I could possibly be. You know, it's like you're not going to run into anybody. So you come back from me. that. So what did what was your takeaway? Like did that kind of change your trajectory of what you thought

you wanted to do or what you wanted to explore? Yeah. So I was really into entrepreneurship, really because of that, that one class really expired me by Kevin Kimley and Dave Kroeg at Iowa State. That really, really inspired me to just look at the world differently. And, you know, they, they laid things out. Like, you know, there was. going to be an extra billion people out of Africa in the next so many years and there's going to be this much more food needed here and it was like oh shit like and and and and a lot of opportunity the professor that uh kimley given him some credit too he he basically looked said he was in this class he's like you know the way the the way that i felt is like you guys could be the next year generation

that can solve these issues right like here's the stats you guys got to fix go you know basically which it's not it's not like it was like oh you need to do this you know there's pressure on you whatever it was just like a motivator i felt like it was kind of a nudge um yeah so that was that was cool so i added a minor of entrepreneurship as well so ag biz and entrepreneurship yep um you got this insect farm idea yeah yep yep so i was uh growing crickets in my apartment and uh making cricket brownies and stuff uh wow Making everybody trying to eat crickets. The guy across the hall was, he was growing something else's apartment and making different kind of brownies.

Did you guys switch? Was there ever people that were eating your brownies and be like, I don't feel anything. People are like, oh, I want different brownies. Yeah. This doesn't seem to be doing anything for me. It's like one of the most things that people, most common things to be able to say, like, I wish, I wish there's different. You know what else you could put in those brownies? Yeah. Well, that's college life for you.

You got to have those people that make it colorful. Yeah, it's funny. My roommate, one of my roommates, too, he woke up with a couple crickets in his pillow one day. Oh, man. Yeah, like, I had a tent, and it wasn't completely, it had a hole in it, and things got out. And, you know, when you get crickets to raise, depending on what size you get them, they can be, like, you know, as big as a pinhead. Right. As big as a pen.

They can get through. So, you know, yeah, they can get through. anything almost. Little bastards. But yeah. Starting this cricket deal. Yeah. Same time you're going to school.

Where does it all go? Where do you end up? So, 2018, there's this program at Iowa State called the Startup Factory. It basically brings startups that, you know,

it gives them a network to talk to investors and gives them a little bit of, gives them a little bit of education, advice on business, and basically how to run a business, how to start a business, how to raise money, all that stuff.

So after coming back from Hawaii, I was working on the company, and then we joined that program. And then through the summer, let's see, yeah, through the, I can't remember if it was the fall.

I think it was fall of 2018. We're in that program And that's it's a year long program basically Get free office space which is cool So also raising crickets in there And then we started to You know Basically so the industry is super young yet

It's a there is like a dozen Companies maybe 20 There's probably more than 20 now that I don't know about But I'd say 20 prominent companies that are in the space right now And when I first heard about it in 2016, which when I heard, when I really started listening to podcasts was in 2016, and now I mostly listen to podcasts. But I started listening to podcasts and I heard How StuffWorks, how stuff works.com, cricket farming. And then in that episode, they were like, oh, there's about

a dozen players in the industry. And, you know, it could be the potential, the potential future of, you know, another alternative protein source. or, you know, that could be, that's where the future could go. And I'm like, well, anything that only has a dozen companies in it and could be an alternative way to feed people sustainably is crazy. Like, I have to look into this. So looked into it and then the class and then formed a company, started it, and then went to a couple different conferences, like insect eating,

Insect Eating Conference is crazy, had like a dozen insects. like spiders, wasps, ants, crickets, bamboo, worms, like grasshoppers, you name it. I've had a lot of different scorpions. What's your favorite insect to eat? What was the tastiest? Scorpion tastes a lot like bacon. Oh, wow.

Very crunchy bacon. Yeah. Huh. Like if you, like if you didn't have any, say you just eat it, just don't even just close your up eyes. eat it once and then don't even think about that it's a scorpion. I bet you'd like it. I bet you'd like it and then just like throw it on your salad.

So do you flavor it, do you like cook it and then like flavor it and like smoke it? Or like how do you? I think these were, so one of the common ways is to just, so whenever you, the way to farm. So farming insects, so crickets, for example, you could start off. It's pretty simple. They can just be grain fed. just like a chicken feed diet. That's what a lot of cricket farmers, commercial cricket farmers will feed them,

just a chicken feed diet because it's very, it's already a solution. It's already formulated. It's already formulated. It's perfectly dialed in. And then there's also, there's actually specialized cricket feed. But basically just a water source, some feed, and then a place friend to hang out on, which is a lot of times egg cartons. because they like hanging out on egg cartons for some reason.

And then some soil for them to breed in the last, like, two or three weeks of their lifespan. So crickets, they only live eight to ten weeks. And from egg, from hatch to harvest, is seven weeks. Okay. So it's a super quick turn over. Yeah. And every, each female cricket lays about 100, 100 to 200 eggs. So if you raise them right, if you do your eggs right, you can multiply exponentially.

So how, but how does that work? So you would, basically, when they lay their eggs, then that's the time that you want to harvest them before the next generation is hatched. So there's like a, there's a window whenever they start chirping, basically. That's when they're ready to mate. so at that time you put out your soil further crickets and then there's a there's like a seven to eight to seven to ten day window roughly that they'll lay their eggs in you can tell when the egg laying is kind of slowed down so if you like change out your soil they can lay new eggs it's like it's literally like the size of grain rice they're one of their eggs so it's super small or probably even smaller smaller in grain of rice but so whenever they stop laying eggs about another week after that like that's your window

that's when you harvest them yeah and to harvest them you basically so they're cold-blooded they prefer about 65 to 70 degrees temperature or they could go now let's see that's a different insect I think then go a little bit higher no they prefer warmer it's like 85 I think but whenever you raise the or lower the temperature, they'll go into hibernation and then you take your bins or whatever you're growing them in and you can put them in the freezer. So collect, you know, collect your crickets and then put them in the freezer and that's how you kill them. So they basically go to sleep. So it's an ethical way to go for them. Yeah, look at you. God, humane, baby. So, but what's that look like at scale? Like, how are they doing that at scale?

Massive facilities would just... I mean, it are. people doing it at scale? Yeah, there's a couple there's one facility in Austin, Texas that's about over 100,000 square feet. There's a couple in Ontario that are like 60,000 square feet

and there's actually free range cricket barns. Oh man. So literally what they do is they just have these, they're called cricket condos is what they're called. So they're just like patent pending. So they're basically like flats of

cartons that you can like you can groove into each other and set up and then you can easily whenever the crickets are they hang out on that and like crawl around and that and stuff and that's what they prefer to hang out on they put the food on top of that so they can climb on that so what they do is when they harvest these guys they will just um take the food or have everyone go to one specific place i would guess is take the food out and then lower to temperature sweep everything up. And then there it goes. So yeah, what's the, what's, so do you put this, do you grind these crickets up and put them in food?

Or is it more of like a peanut where you, you smoke them, you make them flavorful, and you just pop them in your mouth and eat them? You can do both. Yeah. Yeah, we actually started selling the flavored crickets. So it's, we had just simply salt, and this is some of the flavor names, simply salted. barbecue. Lemon and garlic, like hot chili or something like that. We had a couple different flavors that we were selling.

So are you exporting them? Are you selling those in the United States market? We were selling them locally. What are the biggest companies in the space doing? Are they really trying, is that what they're doing? Like the biggest companies that are doing this insect farming? Are they doing the packaged, you know, insect in the grocery store? Or are they making ingredients?

Yeah, some are. What's the biggest market? Like what who's the best, like what's the best person doing? I guess you'd say. So in my opinion, it's the most adaptable and the most, where you're going to get your higher adoption rate is the protein powders. Because you can just grind it up and you won't even taste it. Grind it up and it's a protein powder.

It's, you can make cricket flour. So it's basically flour and cricket powder mixed in up to a one-to-one rate. ratio. And that's how you get your, it's like a protein powder. Protein flour, basically. For protein pancakes. Exactly. Something like that. I mean, so. And then it has like crickets, it has about 65 to 70% protein. And then compared to beef, I think it's like 43, something like that. Chickens is like 30, I think. So, and it has more ironed and spinach, more calcium than milk. There's a thing in the, if you grind them up, there's a thing in the shell. It's called chitin, which is a prebiotic. So it feeds healthy gut in your, or healthy bacteria in your gut. So like feeds

probiotics. And it's called, it's called chitin, which is the same thing that's in the shrimp, the shells of shrimp, because shrimp and crickets are closely related. So if you have a shellfish allergy. You might have an allergy to crickets. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. So that's like, the only thing that's like, be careful, watch out is like, if you have a shellfish allergy. So you're telling me the monkeys

had it right this whole time. They were just eating bugs out of each other's hair and they knew something we didn't. A lot of protein there. What's your family think when you friends, family, everybody, you're like, I'm going to do this. I think this cricket farming, this is the ticket.

A lot of people have called me crazy. I hope. Okay. A lot of people have called me crazy. Yeah. Well, that's all right. That means you're on track. Yeah.

Our good friend Bobby, he's our barber. He says if they don't, if they aren't calling you crazy, then you're not doing something right. Yeah. Because most people call you're not going hard enough. You're kind of got a long storyline here in this in college.

You're, you are tackling a bunch of stuff. You're tackling a bunch of stuff now, but you are tackling a bunch of stuff then too. Yeah. So you are starting a cricket insect company. Yeah. Yep. Same time you're in college at Iowa State doing entrepreneurship and ag biz.

Yep. So you're doing all this. Where do you end up at the end of the college? Are you still doing the insect farming company? What is it, what's it all looking like? Yeah, we, so I graduated in May of 2019. And right after graduation, there's this summer program. It's called Sci starters. And they give you, they give you a bunch of money. to basically work on your business over the summer. So that's what I did for a couple months. Try to go after some funding.

Didn't work. Didn't get the funding that we wanted. Then we were basically like, well, we're at a crossroads. You know, the lease for the college department was up. It's up at, you know, the beginning of July. The cricket farm is in peril. Yeah. It's like we got to make a decision here.

So went back on the, went back to the dairy. farm to the original plan was to have something out there have a little building out there or something but just got super busy with working on the dairy farm and um working uh meeting with grant every day over lunch shout out grant hilbert he uh basically encouraged me to start a youtube channel um the the winter break before graduation and um i mean he he told me every day you know he's like you know you need to get on youtube there's no dairy farmers you need to need to get on YouTube. You need to do it. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. And then during winter break, I shot a bunch of videos and I'm just, I'm like, ah, this, this editing, the editing.

Oh, yep, yep, I feel that. Yeah, you guys know, it's just so much time to edit stuff. And it was just, it was just killing me. And I'm like, I can't do this. This isn't for you. Can't, can't do it. It's not fun. I don't want to do this. And then, um, end of 2019, worked on the dairy farm for a couple of months. And then in October of 2019, we actually, Annie, my wife and I, we went to visit a bunch of other cricket farmers around the world. So we got sponsored by Iowa State. Again, shout out to Iowa State and the Ag Entrepreneurship Initiative.

We got sponsored by them to go to a bunch of different insect farms around the world. So you took a little break on the insect farming for just a short amount of time, but you didn't leave the back. I didn't really take a break from it. I mean, I still was like trying to make things work. You know, it was like, okay, we got some space here. We could maybe make something work here, you know. It's really a time thing more than anything else. Yeah, it's just time. Right. Time take, it just takes so much time. So the dream wasn't dead yet. You were like, I'm doing this thing. I just need more time. Yeah, no, it just didn't pack up quite yet.

Right. But then we visited all these farms and stuff around the world, visited farms in, we visited a cricket farm in Hawaii. I went back and visited the same mealworm slash black soldier fly larvae company in Australia called Go Terra. They take food waste. And this was actually my original idea was to take waste from restaurants. It's a restaurant food waste. You know, you go to your Mexican restaurant or whatever, they throw out half a burrito and half three cassidias and whatever, all that stuff.

Take that stuff, somehow turn it into feed for crickets, have crickets eat that and then sell the crickets as like a protein additive or just a high protein source for farmers or just whatever, livestock, pigs, or fish meal. Yep. I don't know if you guys know too much about aquaculture. Right. But a lot of fish, a lot of fish meal is made from dead fish parts. So it's a very unsustainable cycle. So a lot of opportunity that you could have done with that. A lot, yeah. So crickets, I mean, if the protein aspect is there,

because that's really all people look at is what's the protein? Yeah. What's the benefit of eating a cricket? What's the numbers? You're just basically making it into an ingredient for, you know, a food ingredient to fit the, to fit the, the nutritional bill that they're building. Originally,

I was just wanting to have it be as a food source for people again. So just turn it right back to humans. But I think there's something with the FDA. You have to have it go through like two biologicals or something. More complicated. Yeah, it was something that

you couldn't quite feed it back right to people. So like it'd have to go through a like waste would have to go through a cricket and then a cow and then back as stick. Then to people. Or milk or whatever. Like you can't have a cricket. You can't have Mexican cricket. Food.

You can't have Mexican crickets going directly to people. Exactly. So you go on this trip and you are going all these insect farms again across the world with your wife. Yep. And so the one company in Australia, they really inspired me as well to like, you know, I'm not. I'm not crazy. I have an idea that it would work. Yeah.

And she's basically, she doesn't look at herself as like a protein company or all. alternative of protein. She looks at the company as a waste management company. So they have, sure, they built these shipping containers that about five tons of waste a day gets converted into protein. So it's basically a turnkey solution that waste, food waste goes in like McDonald's coffee grounds or, you know, food, fast food restaurants or whatever. And she actually gets paid to take their waste because you have to pay someone to come pick up your garbage. Right. So she's like, okay, I'll just pay a little bit less than the guy before me. Right. And there we go. So she gets paid to take the inputs for her insects, for her insects,

and then turns around and she sells the protein to livestock farmers. Yeah, that's pretty sharp. Pretty smart. Yeah. So that's, uh, I thought that was a really neat idea. And, um, yeah, so that was Australia. Then I went to Thailand as well, uh, ate a bunch of insects just in the street just on in carts and stuff and uh yeah because there's a lot of Thailand a lot of people eat insects there and it's it's very common there um so and then went to the netherlands we realized there was a couple companies in my home country that were working on insects as well uh so visited a couple of those and then a couple people uh in london which now in the uk insects last i heard insects were banned as a feed

Food source? Food or feed source? I can't remember which one it was, but it was big. I don't know why. Yeah. They're just, that's odd. Maybe it's something, maybe I don't know.

I haven't read into it too much, but maybe they're coming at it from like a food safety perspective or something. And they're like, oh, you're doing something wrong here. So we've got to shut this down until we look into it. I don't know what happened, but it's, it's a weird thing I thought for someone to just shut down a potential very viable protein source. So you get back from this, all this knowledge, all this motivation, inspiration, you're just like, what do you do then? Yeah, yeah, let's go. So got back in November of 2019 from that trip.

And I downloaded TikTok, I think, in like September of 2019. And I was just like, ah, whatever, doesn't mean anything. Posted a couple of videos, got a couple hundred views. And then I came- Working on your dairy farm, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I just shoot some stuff.

Random stuff. I don't even know. You know, just the typical first TikToks. Right. I mean, you just have no idea what you're doing. Right. And so posts a couple TikToks, whatever, and then came back from all that traveling. And then I was working to night shift.

And there was this cow that had a calf. And she was eating afterbirth. And I'm like, and I made a TikTok about it. Oh, boy. TikTok went viral. Yeah. So that was my. first final tic-tok yeah um so yeah that was um and that's basically it was like four or five

days after uh got back from that trip so that was an eye opener you were like whoa this is crazy there's a market here yeah it was crazy yeah and it was just like okay you know what what happened here why why did this go or what happened why did this go viral or whatever and uh the reason that i was using ticot was because it was there was no editing right easy views. It's just, it's super easy to use. A 15 second video takes you 25 to 30 seconds to make. Yep. It doesn't take anything. And so that was, I really, you know, kind of put my mind, you know, made, made that, made a mental note of that. Like, oh, it's pretty easy to do TikToks. So then decided to really start to go ham on it. After that, you know, the first viral video, you kind of, yeah, get a little rush and it's like, oh, that's kind of fun. that's cool. Yeah, right. It's like, oh, see if I can do that again. Right. And then,

so I just started posting a bunch of videos and going hard on TikTok. Yeah, now like 3,700 videos later or something. One point nine million followers. So at the crazy videos. So did you kind of put, so are you still doing the insect farming now? Are you still pursuing that dream? Is that still a business? Is that still in the works? I, or did you kind of put it on the back burner for this TikTok thing and the dairy farm and everything else you're doing. So it was put on the back burner. Yeah. And then, which I'm not.

100% set on that forever. I mean, I want to do that. I want to do that eventually. That it will be part of my life eventually. Yep. I will be an insect farmer. Okay. Hell yeah.

Yeah. So, but basically, so right now, working at the indoor farm, trying to get this company scaled and trying to get that sold. So I'm just focusing my time right now on that basically. Right. So I'm just trying to take that, take that and focus on that. And then after probably after a couple of years or something, I'll get into it. Because I've been watching the industry and it's just been kind of steady.

So it's not like I'm missing a huge, huge hockey stick. It's just waiting for your innovation to push it over there. Just waiting for you, Huey. I guess it's just sitting there. So you're doing that and you're working on the dairy farm. How do you end up working in vertical farming? So I was working at the dairy farm for almost two years and, you know, full time or whatever. So a lot of hours.

And just realized, you know, I wanted to have kind of a bigger impact than doing day-to-day things. Yep. Like not saying that dairy farming, dairy farming has a huge impact, obviously on all of us. that eat food and drink milk and everything. But from what I was doing in my daily work, I didn't think I was having the impacts that I could have in this world. Right.

So I decided to look for other opportunities and that one of them came up and that was the indoor farm in Ames. So how did you find out about that? So through my entrepreneurial ventures at Iowa State, I was part of this program, called the Ag-E-I student incubator. And that's where I met Mitchell, too,

which is funny that he's from here. Met Mitchell there and a couple other companies or other people that have also since sold companies. So that was a really good crowd that I found myself in. That group was led by my now boss, Clayton Mooney, the founder of Nebula. him. So he was, he was the entrepreneur in residence and that which, he led the group that all these people were in. And we basically, reconnected. Yeah, just, you know, we've kept in

contact and stuff. And I, I'll talk to him occasionally, or I talk to him occasionally about advice or whatever, because he's, uh, just, I think he's just 30 or just, he's super young. Yeah. Good resource. A couple years ahead of me. Yep. Um, so kept in contact. And then I just asked him, you know, do you know any, do you know any startups? Because I knew I wanted to work for a startup. Yeah. Um, because high risk, high reward. Right. Why not? Um, because like, uh, I knew, so I knew I wanted to do high risk, high reward for a startup. And then, uh, he was like, okay, you know, what are you looking for? Blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, just, you know, I'll take more, more sweat equity over. And for people

don't know sweat equity, it's basically, um, you get a piece of the company for your time instead of getting money. Um, so instead of, you know, a salary, I'd rather take some sweat equity and yeah, have something bigger in the end if it works. Exactly. Yep. You don't have the money to invest, but you have the time and invest. So you're, if it pays off, you're rewarded for that time. Yeah. And, and, and luckily, I was able to, you know, I had a little money already from working on the dairy farm. I made good money. Yeah. You make good money working on the dairy farm, but it's just a lot of hours.

So, yeah, you can make really good money. But, yeah, he basically reached out and said, you know, we actually have two oppositions, or two positions that I think you would be pretty good in. and one of them was kind of, you know, he was looking at building in public. So that's the big thing. With some companies now, they want to build in public. So they show their metrics, show their, like, not their revenue, but like their subscribers and how many people are signing up and how many people are leaving and all that stuff.

And like how much production and stuff they're doing. So that was a big thing that he wanted to push and he saw my TikTok. And he's like, you know, He's like, you, you know how to build in public because you've, you've basically shown everybody a little peek behind a curtain of what goes on in dairy farming. Right. With your TikTok. So do the same thing here. Yeah.

So like if you, you know, if you wanted to, you could do the same thing here. And then, you know, I still wanted to farm, of course, because I love farming. Right. So I wanted to do. Who doesn't? Right. I mean, who doesn't love farming? Still wanted to farm.

So then there was a production position available as well. So then started working with someone there. And then after a couple months came production lead at this company. So now I basically am at charge of from whenever the seeds come into the farm to whenever the lettuce gets delivered to someone's doorstep. You're the lead guy of that whole deal. So you are doing social media still promoting the company you work at. Yep.

And do you still work on the dairy farm? No. Done with that. Yep. So TikTok that. And everything you're doing is for the ultimate goal to start your insect farm. Is that your why right now? Is that like everything that you're trying to do right now is for that end goal?

Yeah. So there's like there's people, you know, you hear like things that people abroad, you know, they're poor and they can't afford food and like third world countries and stuff. But there's a lot of people in this country. Right. can't afford food. There's a lot of kids in high school lunch lines that, you know, they have to go, they have to wait for the smaller portion of food. And that's, that's something that's not good. So that's kind of, that is more your why an overarching goal. Because like I, I, I, I do want to do

stuff abroad and, you know, have a bigger, like a world, world impact eventually. But there's There's a lot of things that can be done here as well. Right. I think. So, and I think insects can be a great part of supplementing people's needs for protein, just protein, just food. I kind of get the feeling you're just like, as long as I'm learning something, as long as I'm growing, you're just honing your skills until the right opportunity comes along. Yeah, yeah. The business that you're with now, what is their model as far as are they direct to consumer?

Are they wholesaling their product? What is there? So I guess give us some background, like how big is this operation? What all are they growing? And what's their model? Yeah. So the model for the business is we're basically, we're vertically integrated from, like I said earlier, from when the seed comes into the farm.

from that process on we do everything we do the seeding the transplanting and then we do the harvesting and then we also bag up the lettuce and i'll tell you which products we'll bag up the the greens and then delivered them to people's doors so annie my wife she actually does the deliveries in her SUV yeah so it's yeah uh which right now it's uh that's it's one of the reasons it's a scalable model. You know, we don't need a truck. Right. You don't need a semi, a straight truck or a semi or, you know, you don't need to hire

an Uber Eats driver that expects this, everything to be good at this time and this and this. If you have someone in-house to do that stuff, so to be vertically integrated again, you have, you have that last step. And then you also have a better customer interaction. So that's another reason why. Yeah, she's the face. She delivers with a smile. So you both are in the company, working in the company.

company together. Yeah, yeah, we both are. That's cool. So your consumer, your customer, is it individuals, is it restaurants, is it both? It's, it's, so we're mostly direct to consumer company. So we deliver lettuce, microgreens, and like Swiss chard to consumers directly to their house. Okay. We offer free delivery. Yep. And actually, we're in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids now, too. Wow. So we have, we offer free delivery to Ames, Ames area, Des Moines. area and Cedar Rapids and Iowa City area. Wow. So every other week we have Friday, we have Cedar Rapids and the Iowa City run.

So we just did one yesterday, today's Saturday. Yeah, yesterday we went to Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. But we do have a couple restaurants that we sign on. But with our model, the way that with indoor farming in general, like a lot of indoor farms, they want to go wholesale. But wholesale, then you're just a commodity. Yes. Right.

There's no connection. There's no... It's the same exact thing as hog farmer going direct-to-consumer. Because otherwise, you're just producing every... Pigs, my pigs are the same as somebody else's pigs. Yep. And what makes you different? Once they're air tags out or whatever it's...

It all looks the same thing. So you guys want to kind of keep that direct-to-consumer model first. Like, that's kind of the mission to keep that connection. Yeah. Is it a subscription? Yep. So people can sign up online for a subscription at eatletus.com. I love it. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Right on your water bottle there. Eatletus.com. Everybody go check it out. Yep. So people sign up for a subscription either weekly every other week or every month. And then they can choose between half pounds, a pound of butterhead. So the products are red butterhead, red fire oak leaf. and then we have Swiss chard, the bright light Swiss chard.

I don't know if you've ever seen Swiss chard. It's, yeah, there is, I harvested a one and a half pound Swiss chard head. Wow. One seed, one and a half pound chard. This is kind of scaring me because if, if it was that easy to get good greens like that, Trish would have me on a, she'd have me slim down because she loves that butterhead. Is it what we call, is it called? Butterhead.

Butterhead. She loves that. Yeah. Every time that we can get that. she's like isn't this just the best lettuce i could just eat a salad every day that just three different types of lettuce uh so the the red butterhead is lettuce the red fire is lettuce and then the swiss chard is a leafy wood okay swiss chard it's a leafy green but it's it's not like lettuce it has like a like a long stock like celery i think i saw a tip yeah yeah yeah and those are

the three main those are the three products you guys grow those those those And then we also have microgreens, which are basically sprouts of other greens. So like we have micro-radish, which is just the tiny version of a radish bulb. So you get the nutrients are a lot more concentrated. So same thing with broccoli sprouts. So we have broccoli sprouts, and then we have pea shoots, which pea shoots. It says on the bag, it's a cover crop. But we are growing pea shoots.

and they get about this, about this tall. Holy cap. And so the tray, the trays, you know, it's a 10 by 20 inch tray, and they'll just like be like, you know, just a bush, basically. So that's one of the really good product as well. But, yeah, so three microgreens, and then we have three of the leafies, and then we have tomatoes as well.

So small production of tomatoes. We have a lot of people on the wait list for a tomatoes. Yeah. So what's the most popular and then what's the most profitable, if you don't mind me asking? The most popular is, so I think it's a little skewed because we started off with only offering a pound of butterhead to everybody, a pound or a pound weekly or a pound every other week or a pound and microgreens. So we have just recently, in the last like three months, now started offering half pounds and half pounds of the other variety of lettuce. Because we just had one, the butterhead, and then the red fire,

we were just selling that to restaurants. Just one restaurant in Des Moines, Hawk, so they're a pretty good place to. And then we switched over that. everybody could switch up their subscription or whatever. Get a variety. Yeah. So now we've seen a lot, it's kind of balanced out. But a lot of the, a lot of people like the oak leaf lettuce.

So it's really good. And then the micro greens as well, they're pretty popular. You can use them on a little garnish or whatever. Yeah, so just, I was going to ask, is that for more for, like, garnishing your dishes and stuff? Yeah, or you can just put them on a salad. Okay, your customer, what draws them to what you're doing? So some of our value propositions are the shelf life. So we have about four times longer shelf life.

Because they're getting it so fresh. Yeah. It hasn't been bagged from wherever they're getting it and brought to a warehouse and then distributed. And by the time it gets to the store, it's already been in the bag for 10 days. Yeah. On average, it's about 10 days. So most lettuce comes from Arizona or California in the winter especially. So we have year-round weekly production.

so we stagger all the production. So we have, so the lettuce is in the units for about four weeks. So we have every week, we basically harvest one quarter of the farm. Yeah, you've got it staggered so that you've got fresh stuff every week. The shelf life. The shelf life's a big one because it takes, you know, like 10 or 11 days to get to the grocery store. And then you have about three, four, five, six days to left until it's mush. Yeah.

So that's really a big one, it's a shelf life. And then another thing we like to point out whenever we talk about shelf life is lettuce, it loses about a third of its nutrients in the first three days of its shelf life. So as soon as you harvest it, the clock starts ticking. And then you lose nutrients every day. Yeah, the longer it sits. Yeah, because it just degrades. So that's a big thing.

It's a little more nutritious because it's fresh too. And then the free delivery is a big one. And then using, we're using hydroponics. So you can save a lot of water by using hydroponics. So the water savings. Because you're recycling that water. Like it's just, yeah. Yeah, it's turning over.

Yep. So basically what hydroponics is, is basically the plants are in no soil and only water. Yep. So it runs the water, the nutrients. The water has everything that the plants. need, the nutrients is in the water, and then there's artificial lighting. So LED lights, the costs have come down a lot recently from, or, you know, the past like five or six years with LED lighting and stuff, so they've gotten a lot better. Yeah, and I, I would think that

maybe you know this. What's the, obviously you're, from a, you know, from a carbon footprint or from an environmental standpoint, you're eliminating a heck of a lot of transportation costs from how it's distributed. Food miles. Food miles. But there's a cost there because I'm assuming that even with LEDs, the pumps and everything, there's a cost for what it, the amount of power and the amount of utilities it takes. Like how does that, do you have any idea what the comparison is for the way you're growing, that lettuce versus Arizona and Arizona and trucking it. How's that

how's that drive? I don't know like the exact numbers and stuff of the like how much it costs exactly for like per yeah I'm just thinking comparison. But so for like production wise I know we can produce about 20 pounds per square foot

per year which is outdoor lettuce is about one. Okay. So it's way more productive way more productive per square foot and so land use yeah so in about a thousand square feet you can grow about 15 to 20 000 pounds per year yeah in a thousand square feet wow that's pretty impressive so do you think so do you feel like this industry is young just like the insect industry is do you feel like there's it's just kind of getting getting its feet under itself.

Yeah, I think it's about the same, the same, it's a little more mature than the, not a little more, it's a lot more mature. Like there's, you know, there's a couple big players,

like plenty foods, um, Bowery farms, Gotham Greens, Arrow Farms is another big one. Um, so there, there's a couple,

couple big players like, you know, that have gotten investment from behemoths like Amazon and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Um, so there's,

there's, there's money flowing and stuff and yeah there's there's things happening but i think a lot of companies they spend a lot of time just in the lab you know they're like oh we're going to work on growing the perfect strawberry and it's like strawberries are great but yeah they're pretty much perfect the way they are just get them growing yeah is that the most effective thing that you want to be focusing on you know because it takes two years to get there you know instead of throwing seeds in uh some rock wool cubes and just get it going trying it yeah you're yeah you seem like you're kind of go with the flow

like you're just you're living life right now you're getting taking the opportunities that are coming at you and you know that you want to start your thing your own maybe do your own thing in the future but has this kind of shifted to your mind maybe that well maybe someday i kind of want to do maybe my own indoor produce farm or do you still kind of want to like are you just set on the insect farm like i i feel like it'd be hard to be so invested into something so cool and new and learning all this stuff and then not having maybe an interest to maybe go out on your own and do something. One of the first things I'm going to do when I have kind of a bigger place of my own and kind of a sizable place is set up an indoor farm. So I can grow my own food, you know.

I'm just going to start because I'm all the knowledge I've gained from just like the past, you know, it's in a couple of weeks it'll be a year that I've been at this company and I've learned so much. and I've been amazed at how easy it really is to grow things indoors. So that's one, at least that I'll take away from it, you know. Just growing your own produce yourself, you and your wife. Does she know the process too a little bit? Yeah, that's cool. My question about this is, and this goes back to when talking to Magnus about Bitcoin,

one of the things that made them want to invest and build a Bitcoin mine in Iowa was because we've got cheap power compared to everybody else. So do you think that the indoor farming, do you think that lends itself to places like Iowa that have cheap power and we have plentiful water? I mean, right now we still have plentiful water. Because I know that's one of the big issues when you go out west is, you know, a lot of these farms that are farming in the dirt, say in the California, what is that, the San Fernando Valley, that were so big on agriculture.

Well, now then they're fighting because water is such a huge deal. Let's see how to answer that. And I know that's kind of an out. I just kind of thought that as I was sitting here. So tell me what you think. So that's actually, my first thing that came to mind was that was a thing in my pit. about insect farming. You know, it's, it's cheap in Iowa.

Yeah. We're in Iowa. Energy is cheap. I think we're the 10th, 10th cheapest state in the country. Yeah. For energy, for kilowatt hours. Yeah. Which, I mean, it makes sense why Amazon moves here.

Yep. Microsoft. Microsoft. Apple, like, Apple had their, you know, they had the thing. Yeah. Apple, Facebook. They've been there for years in Altoona. Yeah.

And, But Des Moines Ames is a very unique location because you have 80 and 35, which connects the country from corner to corner. Yep. I mean, up, up, up and down. North, south, east and west. So I think Iowa is a great place to do big business. Especially for food. Well, yeah, especially for food production.

Again, because you have your cattle right there. and you have, if you decide to go with a grain-based diet, you have your grain right there. Yep. And another thing that I was thinking about housing is using old grain bin sites because they already have power and they already have a structure there that's massive and strong. Yeah.

For insects or for either insects. Or you could do indoor farming in a grain bin if you wanted to. Do you ever think, because like it feels like these massive, you know, these big companies in the, vertical farming space, they kind of do everything in-house themselves. Do you think it'll ever get to the point where they hire out contract growers? Like they teach, let's say dad and I to build a small facility here on our farm and they teach us and we just grow the product for them and then they sell it and market it however they want. Kind of like what we do with our with hogs now. Yeah. So that's,

that's actually a great way to scale. That's that's probably how it's going to look. My guess is there's going to be, you know, just a couple, or not a couple, but more than a couple farmers out there that are doing, you know, that want to diversify, beyond just crops and pigs and, you know, maybe they have a couple of cows too, whatever, or YouTubeing. I mean, yeah.

You got to diversify however you can. I'll be honest. Like, that's why I asked the question, because we're here and, And we're, we're, we're, we're, I'm interested in this space and it's something that I think the world is moving more towards. Yeah. It's a hedge event. It's a hedge against, you know, let's be honest, plant-based diets are becoming more and more popular. And it's just a hedge against that.

And it's an opportunity. And so I don't want to be the guy that is running, you know, nebulum or, you know, you know, anything like that. But I think it'd be cool to have my own little farm that I could grow some, grow some produce in. and, you know, get paid a dollar amount for however much that I produce. And that's something that I like. I think that where we're at, this is, we went, I looked at this years ago when the, the aquaponics, there were some guys up in northern Iowa that converted, they actually converted to a hog barn.

Yeah, and they were grown up. I know about these guys. But my only deal with it was, I love the idea of doing it, but I, I love the idea of doing it, but I don't want to have to market it. I don't want to have to sell it. I would like to be able to, you know, build the facility, do a really good job of producing the product, and partner with somebody who's really good at marketing it

and them handle that. Because I don't want that headache. And that's why, because I feel like, you know, here you've got the, when it comes to power, we're using solar today on our hog buildings, and I love it. It's one of the best things I ever did, because since I put that system in, my power has gotten more expensive every year,

but my power bill stays the same. Nice. And if I was to build aquaponics or I was to build a vertical farm, I would do solar. I just know I would. I have the water. I have the land. I just don't want to have to worry about the distribution. I think there's probably a lot of people like that.

Well, I was going to say the marketing for us now is a little bit different than when you were thinking about doing that before, because now we have a brand and doing that would be you could add i mean i just say we don't have to do the distribution for sure i get what you're saying i feel like our time is best spent i think a lot of people are this if you're a farmer most farmers want a farm they want a farm it's the it's the um it's a process of taking of growing something whether that be growing a pig a cow you know producing milk or growing it's very satisfying you Yeah, that's satisfying. It's very satisfying to see a calf grow up to have its own calf.

Right. It is. So I was talking about, when earlier I was talking about insect farming, that would be the way to like contract growers and stuff. For the lettuce, what we're thinking is to have, so like to have this farm that we're building in Ames, to have that basically be the playbook for other smaller, like multiples of a 1,000. thousand square foot locations, other in other places. So like, yeah, so you can cover. So you can, because the distribution is the hard part because like you said, you want to get it to people fresh.

Quick. Yeah. Because. Our average distance from the farm is about five miles in Ames. Yeah. And it's like 37 miles in Des Moines, which Ames is just like 20 or it's like 30 miles from Des Moines. So it's like, right.

It's just the distance that it's away from the, from Ames. But yeah, the food miles. That's another, another big thing that we, talk to people about or try to push because it's instead of, you know, our average is, our average is 18 miles for, for everything. Yeah. So instead of 1,800 miles to Arizona or California. Do you, do you feel like right now it's too complex of a system to just hand over? I'm obviously not handover, but let's say dad and I wanted to build a vertical farm here for somebody if you did the contract growing. Do you think it's evolved enough?

where you could teach us and us too could run it. Or do you feel like you have to have a facility like Nebula has where they have these, got to have multiple workers there to run everything. I can teach you how to run it. Be careful what you're talking about Sawyer. Be careful what you're agreeing to. He's not agreeing to anything, but you are getting my,

I think you are getting my wheels turning a little bit. I think you can teach me. I don't know. I mean, it is something that I thought about definitely. I mean, I had no, I didn't really have any experience growing indoors or growing vegetables. Not too much. I had some experience growing vegetable outside in Hawaii when I was there for like,

you know, the stint that I was there. But I didn't have much experience growing vegetables indoors, which that I, it's just about the, once you get things figured out, it's, you just figure it out.

Right. Right. When, when things go wrong, it's like, oh, well, what happened?

First thing you go to is Google or YouTube. Right. There's probably someone who's had, had that same problem before. And if there isn't, that might even be better because then you can figure it out and then you can make a YouTube video on it. Exactly. Exactly. Because there's, there's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a big gap to fill too is teaching more things on YouTube. So today, you're, you're, you're probably about the most stable that you've been in a while and the fact that you've kind of gotten into a, a rhythm of working where you're working and doing

what you're doing but what is so where's the social media go versus your your current job versus what do you want to do like how do you balance that well and you're married i didn't realize that you're married so how do you balance this juggernaut long sometimes long days yeah yeah which that's okay um yeah it which it it's and you have to do things that people don't want to do if you live a lifestyle or live a life that people want to live. That's what I always say. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not too bad right now. Like the indoor farm, that really cut down to my hours on working, basically. So I had a little more time to, you know, work with social media and stuff and like go to TikTok meetups and stuff and do that stuff. which is more fun than anything, you know, and more fun than work, really. So it doesn't really feel like work either. No, right. That's, I guess that's probably the key to it is it doesn't really feel like work.

Like working at the indoor farm, it's, you know, compared to doing pigs or doing dairy farm, it's, it's, it's pretty easy, you know, I don't have to walk around and shit all day. Yeah, right. You know, and like there's sometimes where, you know, things will, things will break and, You know, there's a pump that malfunctions and, you know, you get, you get a wet shirt from laying on the floor or something sometimes, but like, yeah, it's still just water. Yeah, right. That's right. On average, how long do you have to be in the farm actually, like, working in there?

Or is it pretty much automated if you just make sure everything's good? So the harvesting is still, like the harvesting, transplanting, cleaning, that's still some of the, some manual processes. but I spend probably probably about 40 hours a week doing farm work and then another a little portion of my time doing working on the business like improving processes like for example one thing I'm working on right now is a system where basically you have QR codes at every level that you can harvest. so in every level that you can heart so we have different levels of lettuce so like each stack of nfts which is not non fungible token it's nutrient film technique okay nfti got me all excited right

there sound bite nfts um so the uh so i wanted to have something where you can have every level you have something that's an identifiable code basically where it's like okay we harvested this many pounds from this level at this time. So basically all your production becomes time stamped. And then you can work with that data to improve harvesting times, improve, and just improve processes. Because you know what. Yeah.

When you measure things, you know things. Measuring is knowing. So that's something I'm working on kind of in the background and stuff. And then we have like our label. for example that people have just put on something there where every time we they get a customer gets an order their number of gallons of water that they've saved increases correlationally the in correlation to how many orders they've had got you so like a customer profile and it gets to see what they're doing basically that it's a smart that's very smart yeah so it's like makes them feel

good about their purchase yeah it kind of gamifies it a little bit it. And I think we'll be able to do some cooler things in the future. That's genius. Like, you know, oh, you're, you're at 12 or like, you know, you're 13 deliveries, two more deliveries, you get a free piece shoe or something like that, you know. So anyway, it's just like fun little things I work on that in the background. Yeah, that's smart. Yeah. So things to improve processes. You're the only, the second person that I've ever used the that I've heard used the frame. It kind of gamifies it because that is Sawyers. Your generation, that's something like to us.

I don't think about it. But your generation that like clicks because Sawyer's like, oh, yeah, you kind of do this. People like a little game. They want to, they want to be. It's like, it's like finding the prize at the end of the stadium of the cereal. People like that. Well, you've been, you guys grew up on the idea of progressing, progressing through, leveling up and getting reward for it.

And that's, and that's kind of, that's kind of been something that's, I've seen too, like coming from the Netherlands where there's no, not room, no room to grow. Right. Like it's, it's capped. Yep. You can't grow. Yep. That's right. And you come, you're coming, and then coming over here, you know, it's like, it's your oyster. You can do whatever you want if you just want to go for it. Opportunities are endless. Yeah. And like the country, the Netherlands is only a third, a third the size of Iowa. Yeah. Which, you know, crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. How big, how big. How big. Iowa is and Iowa is nothing compared to Texas. Right. Yeah, exactly. I've done some research on vertical farming and one of the things that

people say is a struggle right now is with all the utilities and it's a startup, I understand that. But with all how much it costs to produce all these products, it's not as profitable as it could be if you got the cost down a little bit more. So is it profitable right now? Are you guys making money? I know it's kind of personal or like is it a profitable business that if someone wanted to start it, they could make money. So it takes about $150,000 to deploy a farm. And one farm, when it's fully up and going, it can produce about $300,000 in annual reoccurring revenue. So your ARR is $300,000 and costs to run it are, I don't know the exact number of the costs to run it, but to set it up, it's like $150,000. And that's with, you know, with current pricing where we're basically buying retail for input. We're buying retail lights.

You know, we're buying things that. You're not buying on volume to where you're getting at a wholesale price. We're not buying, you know, for 12 farms at a time. So we're getting, you know, 25% discount or something. So that's, that's with retail prices. So we're hoping to even bring that down, bring that cost down even more when we we expand, deploy other farms. But the profitability.

is when you get multiple farms. So like multiple farms that scale with a couple employees doing like so one person does the deliveries, one person does like a lot of the PR, local PR, preferably it's someone who is from that area and already knows 20 people that would chomp at the bits to sign up. I mean that that would be the ideal scenario. But, you know, like when we launched in Cedar Rapids, we had. our threshold, we said we want to have at least 20 deliveries, and we'll start delivering every other week to Cedar Rapids.

And we just open it up and just through our network, we had 25 in like 48 hours. So do you have to cut it off? Like, are you production constrained as far as, do you have more demand than what you can deliver today? Right now, yes. So there's a wait list? Yes.

There's a wait list for a few things, which that's my job. Yeah, right, right. Get rid of that wait list. Right. So the last couple weeks now we've been, I mean, we, ever since we've started, the company's had about 500% growth in 2021. Wow.

So we were at 60 subscribers at the beginning of 2021 and we ended the year with 300. Wow. We just, just be, yeah, massive, ballooned. I got a backtrack a minute. So, like the lettuces that you grow, what's the cycle on that? How much time from seven weeks? Seven weeks from seeding. So you're seeding every week in each thing that you're doing so that you're every week

you're harvesting to fill those orders. Yeah, so I have, right now I have seven generations of lettuce. Right. And so as you see your market grow, the facility that you're in today, like how much scalability do you have in that? Whereas, you know, okay, today I've got to, right now, every week I got to do four trays of this.

How, you know, when you see that growth, okay, well, now I need to do six trays. Going forward, we need six. How far can you take the facility that you're in? How much growth can you do before you need another facility? So we can deploy a couple more. units and we can supply up to about, I think, five, five or six hundred subscribers. And we're at 350 right now. That gives you an idea of how big that market is. It's pretty big. And that's,

I mean, that's just for right now what we're doing is just Ames, Des Moines, and then Cedar Rapids in Iowa City. We have less people. But like, it's just, Ames is just 60,000 people with Iowa State students. We don't have a lot of students that sign up for them. Right. Because they just have dad's money and tacos and yeah. Yeah, they want the junk food. Right. Exactly. But blaze pizza. Yeah, I mean, you can't fault them. Yeah. It is good. Yeah, there, which, yeah, there, there, there's definitely a market for it. And just people knowing where their food comes from. Right. Huge. Which, which, which that's another big thing about the building in public. You know, we, I, I have many videos of the farm, the inside of the farm. And there's a lot of

companies, you will never see the inside of their farm. Right. Because R&D and we're doing this and we can't open those curtains, you know? Right. But we just, you know, okay, here's our seating process, here's the transplant. Transparency. I explain everything.

People love that shit. Yeah, because at the end of day, and I think that's something so many companies are finding out late is your secrets aren't your asset. Your connection to your consumer is your asset. Yep. And so at the end of the day, what you have, that audience that

you have, that transparency you have, and the relationship you have with your customer, it's worth way more than... I mean, I get... That's a big growing technology. Yeah, I mean, I get that side of it. Like, they don't want to get it out because they don't want all the other companies to pick up on what their new research is. But if they can't connect with their consumer... But I mean, that's just one part of their business. It's not like their whole farm is a research lab. Like, go show all everything else that you're doing that's mainstream. Yeah, so like that was another big thing during the pandemic. When the pandemic started, um, all this, the supply chain was just crazy. Terrible. You couldn't,

you couldn't buy 80, 20. Right. To build out these systems. The, the lead time went from six weeks to 16 weeks. Yeah. And as a startup, you can't scale based on a 16 week week timeline. Yeah. You can't do that. Um, so we had to go back and basically, we're like, okay, what do we do as a company? we grow lettuce, we sell lettuce, and then we deliver that lettuce. So we basically just went back to systems that, because we were trying to build some systems with some R&D and trying to reinvent the wheel. And we increased production from like 10 pounds per square foot to 12 to 15 pounds per square foot

with those units that the company was building. But then with what we're doing right now, it's like 20 pounds per square foot and we're like okay this unit produces really well this unit does not produce very well we need more lettuce let's make more of those units yeah and it just you just went back to the basics and it's like what are we doing we grow sell and deliver lettuce so let's just grow sell and deliver lettuce you know right maximize what we need to maximize keep the simple stupid that's exactly yeah and that's that's the beauty of the scalability too it's it's it's It's something that you can...

It's repeatable. Yeah. It's scalable, repeatable. You could teach people it to work. Exactly. Yeah. And then like a lot of the, like say we have another farm in Minneapolis or something or, you know, wherever, Chicago or wherever, you know, the Ames farm would take care of, you know, the software, the website, like all the thought, the hard stuff. You know, the only thing that farm has to worry about is growing.

Growing lettuce. So the home base will be aimed. Yeah. You'll eventually when you get more of these locations scaled out, farms scaled out, Ames will be kind of become the hub. Yeah. And then the rest will take over as just growing that. Multiplication.

Yeah. And the way we want to do too is we want to leapfrog. So, you know, we want to go from an Ames farm to, you know, a reachable market within Ames. It doesn't sound like it is for some people, but Minneapolis is only three hours away. Right. Mm-hmm. And Kansas City. for example, too, it's right in the middle.

You're only three hours away from both those places. So one farm could supply that market. You know, you get a certain to start off, you know, to either, it's called soft launch. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's a soft launch into a new market where you don't have to spend any resources. You're just delivering from the Ames Farm or, say, we launch a farm in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. You know, then you can go to Davenport. you go to Maline.

Right. That you just, and then you set up a farm, Maline, go to Chicago or whatever. Right. Yeah. So it's, yeah. So you basically build upon your existing customer base. Yep.

And then branch out from that base. One location. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good, it's an effective way to do it. And it's not, you know,

over leverage yourself. You know, you keep it pretty simple and safe. So you don't. People are kind of close, you know, if something, shit hits the fan.

You can drive up. You can. Right. Fix something. Yep. Yeah, spend a day or whatever. Yeah, it's not like it's, you know, some of the investors were like, we should go to California.

Right, right. Because that's where a lot of... Such a huge market. Because, well, it is. You can charge a lot for your lettuce there, but rent would be crazy. If something's wrong, you can't just drive an hour and be there. From there out, where do you go? Yep.

You know, it's like, that's like, that's kind of overstepping, like overleaping, like, overleaping, in my opinion. So it's like, okay, let's walk before you. Yeah. Yeah, walk before you run. Yeah, for sure. So Nebula is trying to go nationwide with this thing. You're trying to go across the whole United States. Yes.

That's the mission. Eventually, the mission is to have the company acquired. Yes, that's what, that's what it sounds like. Is there much competition here in Iowa as far as vertical farming? Are you guys really? I think we're the only vertical farm in Iowa. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a couple other indoor farms that, you know, they'll sell, but they sell mostly to restaurants. Yep. They're doing the wholesale model. They're doing the wholesale. You know, they don't stack their lettuce. They don't stack their lettuce, so they're not using their full space. So you guys feel like you're really ahead of everybody here. Yeah.

Yeah. I think. You're doing the best you can. Yeah, I think the way that this is set up is, it makes the most sense. So do you, you just think, like, when you go build these new locations, like we talked about the contract growing thing, do you feel like that's going to be the model, or do you feel like we're going to hire employees for this specific farm, and they're just going to focus on growing the lettuce?

You're going to own the facilities. You're going to, yeah. I think we'll rent the facilities. So you'll rent space and then build it out as you want it. Yeah, so, like, ideally it'd be a place that's just kind of an underscili. served space or underutilized space rather not underserved but underutilized space so uh the space that we have uh our aims farm in was just uh an old lab so there was just like okay it was hooked up with utilities and you know just a big open space so let's use it and it was just sitting empty for a while

um so started using that space and then you know that's another thing is to find space that is not used to that it could potentially be cheaper so when you when you sit down and you think about the long term, like what's next for you? What are you see yourself, you know, five or ten years down the road? So at first I want to focus my time on this company and getting,

helping this company scale and basically going to go either up in flames or kind of ride it till it, yeah, just ride it till the wheels fall off. So do that until things either happen or don't happen. And then we'll see what happens. But I want to get back into insect farming eventually, for sure. And then I just hope to be surrounded by people that are smarter than myself. Yep.

Which is I try to do that a lot of times. And it's worked out well so far. So you can't beat that. You don't want to be, yeah, they always say you want to hang out with people that are higher level than you are. and it brings you up. A little bit smarter than you are. Definitely. For sure.

That's harder for you than it is for me. I can find smart people really easy. Anyway, we really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with this. You know, these are the kind of conversations that I think people enjoy because it kind of opens your eyes. There's so much out there that's going on that you don't even know about. Well, eventually you do. Eventually you hear about, you know, something like that.

They're like, oh, well, how, you know, how does it? that starter, where did that come from? And there's just a lot of innovation out there. There's a lot of people trying to solve the problems that we got. And, you know, a lot of pioneers. Yeah. A lot of industries, a lot of places. There's just a lot of opportunity, just like your professor showed you. Yeah. I think that's super cool that he did that, showing you the stats and just like, what are you guys going to do about it? Yeah, it just kind of opened our eyes. And yeah, there is money to be made everywhere. and just think of if you want to think of a business idea,

just think of a problem that you have in your life and then think of a solution of that problem. And there's probably, you're probably not the only one who's dealing with that problem. But you don't have to be the only one to make a living at it. That's the thing that people I think get caught up on.

Well, there's this out here. You know, there's this thing and this thing. There's this company out there so I can't. Not everybody is trying to solve that problem is the best at it. And not all those people be successful long term. Where can people find you? Where can people find you? Where do you want them to go so they can follow you and learn more? See this journey and learn more.

So for the lettuce subscriptions, you can sign up at eat lettuce.com. If you're in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City or Ames or Des Moines, of course. And then it's Huey Be Cool on TikTok and Huey Boulin. So it's H-U-E-Y-B-O-E-L-E-N on YouTube. And then that, That's actually my same, that's actually the name on my YouTube, Instagram, Instagram, and Twitter. Yep. Which I don't do too much on Instagram or on Twitter or Instagram, really, but I've been posting a little bit more on YouTube. A lot of my TikToks and stuff I'm posting on YouTube and might as well get some traction on there too. You heard the man. Go follow them. We really appreciate coming on the show, Huey.

Thank you very much. And we'll see you guys back here next Friday for an awesome episode.